Are Pro-Israel Groups Squelching Free Speech on Campus?

Image by David McCleary
A Jewish pro-Palestinian group has issued a report claiming that Israel advocates are using “false charges” to silence criticism of Israel on U.S. campuses.
The Jewish Voice for Peace report was released on Wednesday, the same day that Palestine Legal and the Center for Constitutional Rights issued a separate report making similar arguments.
Called “Stifling Dissent,” the JVP report accuses numerous Jewish organizations of seeking “to muzzle political criticism of Israeli policies” on campus, putting “constitutionally protected speech and academic freedom” under “increasing threat.”
BREAKING NEWS Palestinian flag raised at UN headquarters for first time Hermann Goering’s catalog detailing plundered art is published Arab-Israeli lawmaker summoned by police over Temple Mount outburst The Palestine Legal-CCR report, called “The Palestine Exception to Free Speech: A Movement Under Attack in the US” documents “the widespread and growing suppression of Palestinian human rights advocacy in the United States,” according to a news release issued jointly by Palestine Legal and CCR.
Both reports claim that activists for Israel have made false accusations of anti-Semitism and argue that off-campus pro-Israel groups are seeking to exert influence over grass-roots student activism.
StandWithUs, a pro-Israel group that is criticized in both reports, issued a statement in response, describing the reports as “shockingly hypocritical.”
The reports “cry ‘victim’ by perpetrators of harassment against the pro-Israel community,” the StandWithUs statement said, adding that campaigns promoting Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, or BDS, against Israel are anti-Semitic “because they single out Israel and apply double standards to it, because they demonize Israel and its supporters, and because they delegitimize the one Jewish country in the world.”
While the two reports accuse off-campus pro-Israel groups of seeking to influence student activism, the StandWithUs statement makes similar claims about off-campus pro-Palestinian groups.
According to a news release issued by JVP, which backs the BDS movement, its report “documents how Israel advocacy organizations bully and intimidate Jewish students who do not pass their political litmus test on Israel …”
The JVP report recommends that campus administrators avoid “policies that conflate the state of Israel with Judaism or the Jewish people.”
In its response, StandWithUs claimed that neither report was “written to protect freedom of speech or academic inquiry,” noting that JVP and Palestine Legal are “at the forefront of academic boycotts against Israelis, which have been widely denounced as violations of free expression and academic freedom.”
The StandWithUs response also noted that recent surveys indicate that the majority of American Jewish students “see opposing Israel’s right to exist as anti-Semitic.”
“These Jews who disagree have every right to voice their opinions, but they are not entitled to veto power over how the organized Jewish community chooses to define anti-Semitism,” the statement adds.
While StandWithUs said it does not view all “criticism of Israel as inherently anti-Semitic,” it believes that “demonizing, delegitimizing, and holding double standards against the world’s only Jewish State is a form of bigotry.”
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
2X match on all Passover gifts!
Most Popular
- 1
News A Jewish Republican and Muslim Democrat are suddenly in a tight race for a special seat in Congress
- 2
Fast Forward The NCAA men’s Final Four has 3 Jewish coaches
- 3
Film & TV What Gal Gadot has said about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
- 4
Fast Forward Cory Booker proclaims, ‘Hineni’ — I am here — 19 hours into anti-Trump Senate speech
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward Jerusalem Post editor Zvika Klein, arrested in ‘Qatar-gate,’ says he’s being unfairly prosecuted for his reporting
-
Fast Forward Trump fires national security officials, reportedly at urging of Laura Loomer, far-right Jewish ‘Islamophobe’
-
Fast Forward Display honoring Jewish women graduates of naval academy removed ahead of Hegseth visit
-
Yiddish טשיקאַוועסן: מיידעלע געפֿינט 3,800־יאָריקע קמיע לעבן בית־שמש, ישׂראלTIDBITS: Little girl finds 3,800-year old amulet near Beit Shemesh, Israel
אַן עקספּערט פֿון פֿאַרצײַטיקע קמיעות האָט באַשטעטיקט אַז די קמיע איז געלעגן אויפֿן אָרט פֿונעם אַמאָליקן לאַנד כּנען.
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
Republish This Story
Please read before republishing
We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag in Google search
See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.
To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.