What a Federal Court Taught Us and What Universities Must Learn About Anti-Zionism vs. Antisemitism

“Anti-Israeli sentiment is not, without more, antisemitic messaging.”

That sentence—quoted by U.S. District Judge Richard G. Stearns in Boston—is at the core of his January 5, 2026, court order dismissing federal claims against me in the Sussman v. MIT lawsuit. The plaintiffs alleged that my teaching and pro-Palestinian advocacy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) constituted antisemitism, harassment, defamation and retaliation against Jewish and Israeli students and employees and that MIT unlawfully tolerated it.

Judge Stearns’ ruling matters precisely because of what it did and what it did not do. At the motion-to-dismiss stage, a court simply assumes the allegations, even when libelous, for argument’s sake and decides only whether they state a legally plausible claim—without fact-finding or credibility determinations. So references in the order to “harassment,” “deeply troubling” and “ugly” behavior reflect, at best, that procedural posture about allegations or, at worst, implicit biases—not a judicial determination that the allegations are true.

Even on such a plaintiff-friendly assumption, the court concluded that the federal claims did not meet legal standards. In reaching that result, it relied on controlling First Circuit precedent in Stand With Us v. MIT, which rejected the idea that political opposition to Israel is automatically antisemitism.

That distinction should be obvious, yet it has been eroding in higher education and in public life. Increasingly, “antisemitism” is emptied of meaning as it’s being invoked as a catch-all label for speech critical of Israel—sometimes through expansive definitions that blur a racist political ideology with a religious identity, as in the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s “working definition of antisemitism.” Scholars like Sahara Aziz warn that the IHRA definition’s goal is to silence First Amendment-protected speech about Israel and Palestine. Israeli Jewish philosopher Adi Ophir has described this kind of self-serving definitional framing as Israel’s “discursive Iron dome.”

Under intense pro-Israel pressure, including a lawsuit by the same Brandeis Center that’s one of the Plaintiffs in Sussman v. MIT, Harvard has adopted the IHRA definition, prompting criticism from figures such as Kenneth Roth. Once these definitions travel through doxxing and blacklist infrastructures like Canary Mission, the result is predictable: political critique is treated as identity-based hate.

The effects of this “discursive Iron Dome” include fear-driven silence and (self-)censorship, even at institutions at MIT where my proposal for a Fall  2024 Seminar on “Language and linguistics for decolonization and liberation in Haiti, Palestine and Israel” was rejected by MIT Linguistics even though MIT’s mission includes “advancing knowledge.”  Even MIT OpenCourseWare, whose motto is “Unlocking Knowledge,” engages in locking knowledge when it comes to Palestine, as in the case of the videos of the Fall  2024 Speaker Series that emerged out of the seminar that was rejected by MIT Linguistics.

This system of repression leverages the threat of academic discipline (like suspension or expulsion), deportation, and even lawsuits—some based on demonstrably false accusations—in order to operate. Allegations circulate as if they were facts, even in Congress. Reputations are damaged and visas are revoked before evidence is tested. Witness the Trump administration’s mis-use of pro-Israel doxxing sites such as Canary Mission, trampling on our First Amendment rights.  Thus the silence of passive bystanders, including complicit or cowardly “progressive” colleagues who observe Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza without objection. These are the “Progressives Except for Palestine” — or “PEPs,” a label from Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian’s book Notes on Resistance.

The judge’s order does not deny that antisemitism exists or that it must be confronted. It rejects something else: the increasingly common practice of treating criticism of Israel as presumptively antisemitic—an accusation that can be leveraged to trigger investigations, discipline-and-punish processes, lawsuits and public vilification. That definitional slippage has become a tool for constricting debate about Israel’s genocide in Palestine—often under the banner of combating hate. The result is a narrowed campus conversation in which certain viewpoints are treated a priori as uniquely suspect.

My own view is straightforward: Zionism is a modern political project; Judaism and Jewishness are a millenia-old religion and a richly diverse array of identities. Treating them as interchangeable erases anti-Zionist Jews and invites the bad-faith claim that Palestinian demands for equal rights automatically double as hatred and attacks against Jews and Jewish identity. It also obscures the role of Christian Zionism and other non-Jewish Zionist currents. We can—and must—combat antisemitism without turning that fight into a pretext to police political speech. (I’ve argued this at greater length in an essay for The Tech, MIT’s student newspaper: “A call for courage in the face of rising fascism, antisemitism and anti‑Palestinian racism and genocide”.)

What does all of this mean for students, staff and faculty?

Consider Prahlad Iyengar, a PhD student whom MIT expelled in October 2025 after a pro-Israel pressure campaign, launched one year earlier by the President of the MIT Israel Alliance and the President of Grad Hillel, targeting his scholarly essay, “On Pacifism” published in Written Revolution, a student zine. The campaign escalated from online alarmism to internal disciplinary processes initiated by none other than the then Vice President of Hillel acting as Dean of Student Life. The sanction against Mr. Iyengar, as of October 2025, was expulsion, the harshest possible sanction at MIT, despite letters urging restraint and due process from FIRE, MIT’s AAUP chapter, the MIT Council on Academic Freedom and the Middle East Studies Association.

Whether one agrees with Iyengar’s argument or not, expulsion for publishing a scholarly essay amounts to a violation of the First Amendment and it exemplifies what Palestine Legal has documented as the “Palestine exception” to free expression: pro-Palestine advocacy treated as outside the limits of free speech.

Iyengar’s expulsion by MIT further exposes most troubling institutional double standards. In Stand With Us v. MITand  Sussman v. MIT, MIT has invoked the First Amendment for his defense—and has done so successfully in the Stand With Us case in 2025. More recently, on January 25, 2026, in its “Fifteenth Defense” in the Sussman v. MITcase, MIT stated that Plaintiff John Doe’s “claims are barred to the extent they seek to invoke federal or state law to require MIT to prohibit or discipline the exercise of First Amendment-protected speech.” But such “protected speech” is exactly what MIT un-protected on October 8, 2025, when it expelled PhD student Iyengar for publishing his essay “On Pacifism.” Worse yet, Professor “Roe” (a pseudonym) against whom the “John Doe” Plaintiff has alleged antisemitism was in a position of power over Doe as a post-doctoral associate in Roe’s research lab. In contrast, PhD student Iyengar was expelled after the President of Grad Hillel and the President of the MIT Israel Alliance accused him of being a “domestic terrorist” for exercising his First Amendment rights.

In this legal contortion and two-facedness, MIT aims, on the one hand, at protecting Prof. Roe’s First Amendment rights while, on the other hand, maximally punishing a PhD student, with much less institutional power than Prof. Roe, for exercising the same rights. MIT also discriminated against me then it violated my right to protest against racial and associational discrimination (these rights are protected by Massachusetts Law) when it censored my teaching on Palestine, then cut my salary and removed me from MIT Linguistics. (See my Mondoweiss article “I faced censorship and attacks at MIT for trying to teach about Palestine. This reflects the rising fascism in higher education.”)

Selective enforcement turns “combating antisemitism” into a pretext for repressing Palestine-related speech.

There’s yet another problematic aspect of MIT’s disciplinary process that creates a tension with Judge Stearns’ statement about anti-Israel sentiment as distinct from antisemitism. MIT has allowed the leadership of Hillel, an explicitly Zionist organization, to play a central role in the disciplining of pro-Palestine students protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Such conflict of interest bakes anti-Palestinian racism right at the core of the structure of MIT’s repression machine violating students’ First Amendment rights. Take, say, the disciplinary process that ultimately led to Iyengar’s expulsion. It was initiated by Will Sussman, who was then President of Grad Hillel. Sussman has a pattern of conflating anti-Israel sentiment with antisemitism, as is evident on his social media and in the lawsuit he has filed against both me and MIT.

In the recent announcement of his campaign for New York Assembly, Sussman promises to say “no” to Zohran Mamdani and to antisemitism. The Algemeiner article that approvingly reports on Sussman’s campaign considers as “antisemitic” Mamdami’s opposition to the IHRA definition of antisemitism and his support of the Boycott, Divest & Sanction (BDS) movement for Palestine liberation.  Sussman himself views Mamdani as a “threat[… to] the Jewish community.” Is it accidental that Tim Walberg, Sussman’s ally in Congress, also condemns BDS as “antisemitic” in his December 2025 letter to MIT, railing against an MIT professor’s withdrawal from collaboration with Israel’s Ministry of Defense?

Courts cannot, by themselves, counter this broad campaign against our First Amendment rights and against BDS under the cover of “combating antisemitism” as in the Sussman v. MIT lawsuit and in the Congress letters from the House Committee on Education and Workforce, to MIT.  But judicial clarity can help universities recalibrate. Judge Stearns’order—and the First Circuit precedent it invokes—underscores three principles that institutions should treat as non-negotiable: allegations are not facts; political critique of Israel is not, by itself, antisemitism; First Amendment rights take priority over bogus Title VI accusations. MIT and other institutions must apply these principles consistently, with meaningful due process. Meanwhile even U.N. special rapporteurs have written to MIT’s president warning about violations of MIT students’ free-speech rights.

​​The “Palestine Exception” pressures are not confined to campus. I’ve already mentioned Will Sussman’s political alliance with Representative Tim Walberg, Chairman of the House Committee on Education & Workforce (HCEW).  These political actors have tried to define “antisemitic incidents” so broadly that they sweep in opposition to Israel, to Zionism and to Zionists as “antisemitic”—a move that contradicts the court’s insistence on distinguishing “anti-Israel sentiment” from “antisemitic messaging.” The afore-mentioned Congressional letters to MIT in March 2024 andDecember 2025 exemplify how this conflation can be sponsored and amplified by the State itself, placing MIT students and co-workers in harm’s way by treating pro-Palestine advocacy as hate speech.

When accusations of antisemitism are weaponized, everyone loses. Jewish students deserve safety from genuine antisemitism, not from anti-genocide protests—some of which are led by anti-Zionist Jewish students such as MIT Jews for Collective Liberation. Palestinian students and their allies, including myself, protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza deserve protection from genuine anti-Palestinian racism and associational discrimination, some of which threatens our careers and our and our families’ wellbeing, as in my own case. Black and Brown and LGBTQ+ students and other racialized and minoritized groups deserve protection from racism of every kind. Those commitments are compatible with robust free speech—indeed, they depend on it—because universities cannot diagnose or dismantle hatred if they first silence inquiry and dissent. Indeed, “hatred” does not come with labels on its sleeve. It’s only through inquiry and debate that we get to identify who hates whom, and to what ends. Such is the topic of courses that I’ve been teaching at MIT for decades now on “Black Matters” and “Creole languages and Caribbean identities” in the context of anti-Black racism in the U.S. and the Caribbean.

Judge Stearns’ ruling in Sussman v. MIT, by affirming a critical distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, provides a crucial, positive precedent: a legal shield that students and faculty at every U.S. university can now cite to defend legitimate political speech from baseless accusations of antisemitism.

What lessons should MIT and other academic institutions nation-wide take from Judge Stearns’ order?

First, precision: As modeled by the court, universities must stop turning contested political critique into identity-based guilt by definition. The Sussman v. MIT lawsuit is a spectacular case-study of this conflation in the arsenal of lawfare. It clearly suggests that the goal is to intimidate and silence. My victory in court shows that we can resist, with faith in the Haitian proverbs that tell us “Twou manti pa fon” (“The holes where lies hide are not deep” or “No lie can live forever” in Martin Luther King’s words) and “Verite se kon lwil nan dlo “ (“Truth is like oil in water”—it always rises, eventually).

Second, process: Discipline must be evidence-based and driven by ethical considerations, not by online mobs, blacklists, political pressure or conflicts of interest. So MIT needs to modulate its policing of students’ speech: stop treating dissent as a threat, stop repressing the truth, and eliminate conflicts of interest that, from the get-go, condemn pro-Palestine students due to illicit influence from external agents promoting Israel’s anti-Palestinian agenda..

Third, accountability: MIT already has robust internal safeguards—its “red lights” and its elevated‑risk review processoffering strict guidance about which entities can provide funding to MIT and its faculty for research collaboration. These safeguards are meant to preempt reputational and human-rights risks, and they should be applied to immediately halt collaboration with Israel’s Ministry of Defense. This is exactly the sort of collaboration that Prahlad Iyengar and other students in MIT’s Coalition for Palestine have protested against. As it turns out, MIT’s “red lights” and “elevated risk” framework was created specifically as safeguards to preempt aiding and abetting crimes such as those of convicted child rapist Jeffrey Epstein. Now it’s time, since yesterday, to apply these “red lights” in the context of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians—their lives too do matter, like those of Epstein’s victims.

I hope this ruling—together with the First Circuit’s earlier decision—helps MIT and all other institutions return to principled standards vis-à-vis academic freedom and free speech. Indeed they must oppose antisemitism and all sorts of hate without turning such opposition into a pretext for silencing protest against genocide which is the worst possible expression of hate. Universities should be places where hard truths about global challenges can be debated and spoken about, not litigated into silence.

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