Universities fire dozens amid pressure from Zionist billionaires

Ali Abunimah Rights and Accountability 14 October 2026

Universities in the United States and Canada have fired, suspended and harassed employees for speaking out against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, often using ostensibly neutral disciplinary procedures to conceal politically motivated retaliation.

That is the finding of a new report from the Academic Freedom Initiative, a project of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA).

“Lessons in Repression: Silencing Campus Workers on Palestine Since October 7, 2023” is the first systematic study of retaliation against university employees for their Palestine-related speech and activism in the two countries.

The report draws on a database of 196 incidents recorded through 20 August 2026 and in-depth interviews with 31 targeted employees.

Of those incidents, 76 – nearly 40 percent – resulted in termination, while 59 involved suspension or campus bans.

Both tenured professors and precariously employed instructors and staff have been targeted. Of 134 cases in which racial or ethnic identity was known, nearly two-thirds involved people of color. Some 16.5 percent of those targeted identified as Jewish.

Most retaliation had nothing to do with classroom teaching. More than half the incidents stemmed from other on-campus activities, including protests, while only 11 percent concerned alleged classroom interactions.

Another 16 percent of cases arose from off-campus speech and 12 percent from social media posts, “suggesting that teaching is a relatively less common context provoking punishment.”

Appeasing donors and politicians

Major drivers of the repression include pressure from wealthy pro-Israel donors, government interference and the political loyalties of university administrators and trustees, the report says.

Growing financial dependence of universities on wealthy benefactors, alongside austerity and the widespread use of precariously employed workers, also makes institutions more vulnerable to political pressure.

At the University of Pennsylvania, for example, trustee Cheryl Peisach is married to the treasurer of a family foundation that donated $100,000 to Canary Mission in 2023.

The notorious pro-Israel blacklisting website publishes dossiers attacking students and academics who support Palestinian rights.

US immigration authorities have admitted to using its dossiers to target Palestine activists.

In another case at Penn, a tenured professor faced a vicious online harassment campaign over her support for Palestine, including hundreds of messages containing rape and death threats.

The donor funding her endowed chair withdrew support. According to the professor, a dean told her that donor pressure had led the university to encourage her retirement. She retired in June 2026.

Billionaire Bill Ackman demanded a blacklist of Harvard students who disagreed with his views, while billionaire Leon Cooperman threatened to stop donating to Columbia University following a Palestine solidarity walkout.

Pressure from the Trump administration has reinforced the crackdown.

During the last two months of 2023, the US government opened more federal “anti-Semitism” investigations against universities than in all previous years combined.

Dozens of institutions agreed to government monitoring, including sharing the names of students and employees accused of anti-Semitism, to close investigations.

Harvard provided a notable example of such cowardice. Even as it fought a Trump administration lawsuit falsely portraying Gaza solidarity protests as anti-Jewish terror, the university boasted of its own crackdown on alleged anti-Semitism rather than defend its students’ right to protest Israel’s genocide.

A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit in August, finding that the government had failed to plausibly allege any ongoing violation of civil rights law.

Six congressional hearings between December 2023 and July 2025 subjected university leaders to McCarthyite interrogations over alleged failures to combat anti-Semitism.

In Illinois, Northwestern University journalism professor Steven Thrasher was suspended shortly after being singled out during one of these hearings and was later denied tenure and terminated. He is currently suing the university for discrimination and violations of his First Amendment rights.

The repression has also affected Canada, where provincial ministers have publicly accused academic staff and students of anti-Semitism, attacked discussions of Palestine and genocide, and demanded the removal of pro-Palestinian statements from university websites.

Punishment by bureaucracy

The crackdown has often been brutally overt.

More than 3,000 anti-genocide protesters, mostly students, were arrested or detained on US campuses by July 2024. Faculty and staff were affected by police violence.

At Indiana University, seven faculty members were arrested while trying to protect protesting students from government forces.

One professor recalled stepping between students and state troopers armed with assault rifles.

“I was arrested trying to preserve the safety of those students,” he said. He was banned from campus for a year and has received death threats.

The university itself pushed for criminal charges against the arrested faculty, but, according to the report, the county prosecutor “refused to press any charges, believing the constitutionality of the arrests was dubious at best.”

In January 2026, a federal court ruled that Indiana University had violated the First Amendment rights of Palestine solidarity protesters it banned from campus in 2024, including students and faculty.

The court also found the university’s ban on overnight expressive activity unconstitutional and ordered related disciplinary reprimands expunged from their records.

But MESA finds that much of the repression has taken less visible forms.

University administrators have relied on lengthy investigations, vague allegations, fabricated policy violations, non-renewal of contracts and non-disclosure agreements to punish employees while concealing their political motivations.

In many cases, the investigation itself is a form of repression.

“The complaints themselves have been the punishment, have been the intimidation and were designed to be,” Judith Norman, a professor at Trinity University in Texas, said of the repeated, baseless anti-Semitism accusations she faced.

Some allegations were astoundingly petty.

One professor was summoned to an anti-discrimination office after two students complained that the professor’s use of the term “state of Israel,” rather than simply “Israel,” supposedly made them feel alienated from the learning process.

In another case, a professor had to attend a meeting to face questions about a class he had taught two years earlier. The “accusations” included his use of the term “Jewish settlers” to refer to Israeli settlers, who, as the report notes, “due to Israel’s discriminatory laws, are by definition nearly always Jews.”

Investigations frequently drag on for months or years, with employees denied basic information about the accusations against them or meaningful opportunities to defend themselves.

Some investigators displayed open hostility or political bias, conflating criticism of Israel with hatred of Jews, or themselves expressing pro-Israel, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim views.

“Networked harassment”

Universities have also increasingly subjected teaching materials to political surveillance.

By August 2026, seven US states had mandated public access to course syllabi, exposing instructors to scrutiny and complaints from political activists with no connection to their classrooms.

Another prominent tactic is what the report calls “networked harassment.”

Pro-Israel social media accounts and activists generate outrage against academics, sometimes unleashing torrents of racist abuse, doxxing and violent threats.

In one striking case at the University of Pennsylvania, a tenured professor faced a vicious campaign of online harassment after declining to participate in a documentary produced by a Zionist student activist.

Targeted over her personal social media posts about Palestine, she received hundreds of hate emails, most demanding that she be raped, along with death threats and other abuse.

“Because if somebody says, ‘you should be raped’ enough, you do watch your back a little bit,” she told MESA.

The harassment was followed by demands from donors, university trustees, alumni and outside groups that she be fired.

Rather than defend their employees, university administrators often capitulate to the harassers’ demands, even amplifying the attacks themselves.

None of MESA’s interviewees reported that their universities took action to protect them from online incitement.

Fear, isolation and self-censorship

The personal consequences have been devastating.

Nearly half of the documented incidents involved financial harm. Employees lost jobs, health insurance, housing and career prospects, while accusations of anti-Semitism inflicted lasting damage on reputations.

Amid intensified kidnappings and deportations by ICE, the US immigration agency, the risks for international scholars are even greater.

A tenure-track professor facing retaliation feared that losing her job would also mean losing her immigration status.

“Without my work visa, then I don’t have a status in the country. I have two kids here and a [non-citizen] husband,” she explained.

A professor who had been arrested and suspended described the continuing fear he experienced simply going to work.

“Every morning I come to my office, and I put my key in the door. I wonder if it’s going to work. Did they change the lock? Did they fire me and not tell me?”

“I don’t feel safe at this university,” he said, opining that if the institution’s president decided he had to go, “I don’t feel that there is even one level or layer that would try to stop them from firing me.”

The damage extended far beyond those directly punished.

The report documents pervasive self-censorship, with academics increasingly reluctant to discuss Palestine or criticize Israel – effectively fulfilling a key goal of the repression campaign.

Targeted employees also described profound disappointment with colleagues who refused to defend them.

Some condemned the “abject cowardice” of tenured professors who were the least likely to speak out, or provide moral and material support.

Interviewees also criticized faculty and administrators who privately expressed sympathy but remained publicly silent.

“Notably, pre-tenure faculty and students were more likely to provide support, despite being in a more precarious position than their tenured colleagues,” the report states.

Room for resistance

Yet the report also offers lessons for resisting repression.

MESA urges workers to document everything, understand their rights, build alliances and join unions and professional associations. It calls on university administrators to defend academic freedom rather than merely proclaim their commitment to it.

It also recommends that institutions reject the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s so-called definition of anti-Semitism, which conflates criticism of Israel and its Zionist state ideology with anti-Jewish bigotry.

Far from impartial, the IHRA is a self-selected group of countries including Israel, the United States and other Western states that are Israel’s principal allies and arms suppliers.

Israel’s lobby has aggressively pushed for widespread adoption of the IHRA definition as a way to muzzle and smear supporters of Palestinian rights.

One significant victory came at the City University of New York, where a coordinated campaign involving unions and Palestine solidarity activists secured the rehiring of three of four contingent instructors dismissed after participating in a pro-Palestine demonstration.

The experience highlighted the importance of openly confronting the pro-Israel motivations behind the repression rather than treating it solely as a matter of employment rights.

As one professor involved in the organizing explained, “the more direct the political message about Palestine was, the more powerful the movement became.”