US universities suspending students, professors who speak out against Israel soldiers on campus

Universities in the United States have been suspending students and professors who speak out against accommodating Israeli soldiers who have fought in the besieged Gaza Strip, amid an ongoing and increasing crackdown on freedom of speech within American higher education institutions.

An article published by the Guardian newspaper detailed the case of 28-year-old Umaymah Mohammad, a Palestinian-American medical student who had been studying at Emory University in Atlanta to attain both her medical degree and a PhD in sociology.

She became active in organising pro-Palestine protests on Emory’s campus after Israel launched its bombing campaign in Gaza in October 2023, condemning the university and her faculty in an email in January 2024 for being “silent about the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians”.

Mohammad then revealed in an interview with the news outlet Democracy Now! that a medical school professor in the university had recently returned from volunteering as a medic in the Israeli occupation military, stating that he had “participated in aiding and abetting a genocide, in aiding and abetting the destruction of the healthcare system in Gaza and the murder of over 400 healthcare workers, and is now back at Emory so-called ‘teaching’ medical students and residents how to take care of patients.”

After that professor reported her for allegedly exposing him and his family to harassment, she was investigated by the medical school administrators, who ruled that she violated the school’s code of conduct with regards to “professionalism” and “mutual respect” by singling out and disparaging an individual, despite having not named him in the interview.

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That was then countered by Emory’s committee for open expression, which stated in a report that its own investigation found that the content of Mohammad’s interview was protected by the university’s policy on free expression, and that the school of medicine had violated university policy.

Despite that, a hearing in November last year ruled that she was suspended from the medical school for one academic year, and would then be on probation from the time she returned until she graduated. The university has since upheld that suspension, denying her appeal.

According to the article, the trend of suspension over criticising the presence of former Israeli military personnel in university positions has even reportedly applied to professors themselves, with at least two professors at US universities having been subject to such measures.

One of those is Katherine Franke, a Columbia University law professor who was forced out of the school in January after raising the issue of Israeli students “right out of their military service… known to harass Palestinian and other students on our campus.”

The second is Dr Rupa Marya, a professor of medicine and a physician who was banned from the San Francisco campus at the University of California for posting on X about the presence of former Israeli soldiers at medical schools. “How do we integrate [Israeli] reservists into the medical community – with [Palestinian] students who have lost 50 or 60 family members? What is the moral obligation of medicine?” she asked in a previous interview with the Guardian.

READ: Columbia University submits to US gov’t demands to crack down on pro-Palestine protest, in return for $400m