Dezionizing the University of California

Sean L. Malloy, Department of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES), UC Merced.*

Sean Malloy and Ethnic Studies Council at UC

In September 2025, I wrote a guest post for Chris Newfield’s blog that highlighted the complicity of UC leadership and the Academic Senate in federal attacks on the university under the guise of combating antisemitism. In a follow-up guest post in May 2026, I identified Zionism as the driving force behind many of the external and internal threats to the UC and its faculty, staff, and students. Building on those earlier writings, I want to explore at some length what it would mean to “dezionize” the University of California. Anti-Zionism is not new and has existed since the creation of the Zionist political movement. Given the stakes of the current moment, however, it is not enough to be simply anti-Zionist in orientation. It is past time that we consider the real, material steps that we must take to both sever the UC’s connections to Zionism and address the current and past harms created by those connections.

Dezionization entails not only ending the UC’s complicity in the genocidal actions of the Israeli state (which would include divestment and the end of formal research and teaching collaborations with Israeli-linked entities), but also confronting the role of Zionist organizations, donors, Regents, and administrators in repression targeted at members of the university community. Since 2023, students, faculty, and staff have been the subject of individual discipline and surveillance while entire university policies have been written or re-written to institutionalize compulsory Zionism and stifle those who would speak out on behalf of Palestinian life. Confronting and redressing these individual and structural harms is a crucial element of any meaningful dezionization effort. And while addressing the issues of post-10/7 complicity and repression are important immediate goals, dezionization also requires an honest accounting of the historical role of Zionism at the UC. Building on the flawed but necessary efforts of universities to acknowledge their historical connections to slavery and indigenous genocide and disposession, dezionization must also involve acknowledging and at least attempting to redress past harms resulting from the UC’s long entanglement with Zionism.

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Dezionization does not require that individual staff, faculty, or students renounce their own personal beliefs. It does insist that the UC as an institution should neither advance nor be beholden to a political project that has fueled genocide in historic Palestine and repression on our own campuses.

Dezionization is neither an easy task nor will it solve all of the problems currently confronting the UC. Ultimately, however, the current status quo is both immoral and untenable and those who care about the university’s future are going to need to commit to a series of radical changes which include, but are not limited to, confronting the corrosive effects of Zionism. If pursued correctly, the process of dezionization will itself contribute to making the university more democratic, anti-racist, and accountable to all. And while I have focused on the UC in this essay because it is where I have worked and organized for 21 years, my goal in writing this is to spark conversation about how we might move forward with dezionization in all the institutions in which we are entangled, wherever those might be.

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Before considering what dezionization might look like in practice, it is important to directly confront the question of what Zionism is — and what it is not. Contemporary defenders of Israel have mounted an aggressive campaign asserting that Zionism is an integral part of Jewish religious andethnic identity. In a 2022 complaint filed against the UC Berkeley law school with the Department of Education targeting several student organizations who refused to platform Zionist speakers, attorneys Gabriel Groisman and Arsen Ostrovsky asserted that “A rejection of Zionism. . . is an act of antisemitism and direct assault upon the very core ethnic and racial identity of Jewish students.” Kenneth Marcus, a former George W. Bush and Donald Trump political appointee who directs the Zionist lawfare institution (the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law) that subsequently brought suit against UCB, claimed that the student groups who refused to platform Zionist speakers had created “Jewish-free zones” on campus that were equivalent to “the Nazis’ infamous call, judenfrei. Jewish-free.”

Countless pages have been written by scholars of Zionism on its origins and development and, like any ideology, it is rife with complexity and nuance. The basic facts, however, are clearly established: Judaism is a religion dating back over 3,000 years while Zionism as a political project originated in late nineteenth century Europe. Planning for an exclusive Jewish ethnostate dates to the publication of The Jewish State (Der Judenstaat) by the Hungarian-born journalist and intellectual Theodor Herzl in 1896. The notion that a distant connection between some Jewish people whose ancestors had once, thousands of years earlier, inhabited historic Palestine justified the creation of an exclusive Jewish state at the expense of its indigenous inhabitants was born in a period of both rising nationalism and intense European colonialism. Zionism from its creation was both secular and unabashed in its racialized colonialist ambitions. Declaring Jews to be “a people – One people” who “are now, and shall henceforth remain, a historic group with unmistakable characteristics common to us all,” Herzl sought to “take possession of the new Jewish country by means of every modern expedient,” including cooperation with European colonial powers, and predicted that, “We should there form a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.”

Though contemporary Zionists often refer to Zionism as simply a form of Jewish self-determination while eliding or ignoring Palestine’s indigenous inhabitants, its most fervent proponents, such as Revisionist Zionism founder Ze’ev Jabotinsky, forthrightly acknowledged the colonial and coercive nature of their program. In a seminal 1923 essay “About the Iron Wall,” the Russian-born Jabotinsky forthrightly acknowledged that:

Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of “Palestine” into the “Land of Israel.”

Palestinians, he conceded, “feel at least the same instinctive jealous love of Palestine, as the old Aztecs felt for ancient Mexico, and the Sioux for their rolling Prairies.” This acknowledgment, however, gave him no pause when it came to implementing the Zionist program in Palestine. “We hold,” he declared, “that Zionism is moral and just. And since it is moral and just, justice must be done, no matter whether Joseph or Simon or Ivan or Achmet agree with it or not. There is no other morality.” Any accommodation with Palestine’s indigenous inhabitants could only take place from a place of Jewish supremacy, at which point Jabotinsky was willing to concede some form of civil and political rights to the Palestinians within the framework of a Jewish state.

To carry out the colonization of Palestine in the face of entrenched indigenous resistance required the sustained application of military force. Jabotinsky was also forthright about this, declaring that:

Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population – behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.

When Jabotinsky wrote these words in 1923, the Jewish community living in Palestine numbered approximately 84,000 people (about 11% of the population) while the Arab inhabitants numbered some 600,000. In light of these numbers, the “iron wall” would have to be provided by external powers sympathetic to Zionism, in this case Great Britain, which maintained mandatory control over the region following World War I.

Jabotinsky’s 1923 essay was written in response to a contemporary set of political, military, and demographic challenges and represented a particular wing, Revisionist Zionism, within the larger movement. But Jabotinsky’s conclusion that the creation and maintenance of a Jewish ethnostate in historic Palestine would require the indefinite use of force against the indigenous population (whether provided by another power or by Zionists themselves) ultimately became central to what would become the state of Israel. The current Likud government in Israel under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are the direct inheritors of Jabotinsky’s ideas. As recently as July 2026, Netanyahu proclaimed that, “I grew up with Jabotinsky . . . I remember the dear Jabotinsky family. I read his writings and his words as a youth, and later as an adult. I cherish him as one of the founding fathers of Zionism, a man without whose teachings it is doubtful we would be standing here today.”

And while Labor Zionists were less hawkish than Jabotinsky and the Revisionists in their rhetoric, Israeli historian Avi Shlaim concludes that “in the final analysis the gap was not all that great: Labor leaders, too, came to rely increasingly on the strategy of the iron wall.” Thus while Zionism is rife with complicated and often contradictory formulations that range from Marxist to liberal to fascist, all eventually converged on a nationalist project that required the consistent application of coercive power to kill, expel, or contain the indigenous people of Palestine. As Netanyahu declared at a state memorial for Jabotinsky held on Mt. Herzl in Jerusalem in July 2023:

One hundred years after the “iron wall” was stamped in Jabotinsky’s writings we are continuing to successfully implement these principles. I say “continuing” because the need to stand as a powerful iron wall against our enemies has been adopted by every Government of Israel, from the right and the left.

In short, Zionism is not an inherent ethnic or religious trait but a political project, one now tied to a specific nation state that is divisive even among Jewish people. Anti-zionism, and by extension dezionization, is not targeting Judaism or Jews but rather a political ideology born in the late nineteenth century in much the same way that Post-World War II denazification was not targeting Germans as a nationality or ethnic group but rather the architects and proponents of the Nazi regime.

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Having clarified the definition of Zionism, the next task is to consider what it means in practice to dezionize the UC. Much of the organizing around Palestine in US universities in recent years has focused on their direct and material connections to the Israeli state and the ongoing genocide in Gaza. This has most often taken the form of calls for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS), a campaign dating from the early 2000s which, in the case of universities, has generally focused on ending investments in Israel and Israeli-linked companies as well as formal research and teaching collaborations with Israeli universities. These goals remain important as part of any effort to dezionize the University of California and represent the floor of any attempt to wrestle with the ongoing complicity of the UC in the genocide in Gaza. This would entail, at minimum, full divestment of UCRP (UC’s retirement plan) and other UC financial holdings in companies with ties to the Israeli government (modeled on the Regents’ 2006 divestment from Sudan) and ending all systemwide or campus-level arrangements with Israeli universities (including the Education Abroad Program). In addition, the UC can and should implement a policy for individual faculty conducting research with Israeli-linked entities similar to the existing Regents Policy 2309, which created a special category of approvals for faculty conducting research in cooperating with tobacco companies. This policy, approved by the Regents 2007, creates a template that balances academic freedom with the responsibility of the university to uphold the value of human life.

Ending the UC’s ties to the genocidal Israeli state and its affiliated entities is a necessary and important step but it is not by itself sufficient. As chronicled extensively in my post on Chris Newfield’s blog, and widely visible nationwide since 2023, Israel and its defenders in the United States have unleashed a far-reaching campaign of repression on American college campuses that has included not only targeting individual faculty, students, and staff for police violence and university discipline, but also fundamental changes to rules and procedures designed to snuff out or discourage activism on behalf of Palestine. In addition to the targeting of pro-Palestine students, faculty, and staff, we have also witnessed escalating legal, political, and administrative effort to enshrine compulsory Zionism within the university in way that has not only warped its intellectual mission, but also actively harmed the many Jewish faculty, students, and staff who do not identify as Zionist. Dezionizing the UC thus requires not only cutting its external ties to Israel, but also undoing this pattern of internal repression and cooptation in support of the Zionist project.

A simple first step would be for the UC to formally reject the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which, as I discussed in a previous piece and covered extensively elsewhere, is nearly exclusively used as a tool to silence dissent against Israel by conflating attacks on a foreign nation with antisemitism. UC Berkeley agreed to “consider” this definition as part of its 2026 settlement with a Zionist lawfare group and a systemwide agreement to reject IHRA would be an important first step on the longer road to dezionization.

Deeper institutional changes would ultimately be required to address the damage that Zionism has done to the educational mission of the UC as well as to its community members. This would include, at minimum, cutting official ties between the UC and external groups that have the promotion of Zionism and the state of Israel as part of their core mission. Groups such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Academic Engagement Network (AEN, cofounded by former UC President Mark G. Yudof), and the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law often describe their campus efforts as aimed at protecting Jewish students. In fact, these organizations have proven quite willing to attack anti-Zionist Jews. Despite claiming that they support Jewish students, in practice they only support Zionists and champion lawsuits and federal investigations targeting the UC and other universities. There is no reason why the UC should engage in any formal relationship – whether it is for trainings, trips, or seminars – with groups that have a long history of targeting our students, faculty, and staff both individually and collectively. Members of the university community retain their individual freedom of association and may work with or promote these organizations as they please, but there is no reason why the UC as an institution should be entering into formal arrangements with groups that have repeatedly brought harm onto the university community.

A similar logic applies to student-centered outside groups, most notably Hillel International and its various campus chapters. Although Hillel often advertises itself as a Jewish cultural and religious space, it has received funding from an arm of the Israeli government and its own published “Israel Guidelines” make it clear that the promotion of Zionism and defense of the state of Israel are central to its mission on campus. Hillel, in its own words, “views Israel as a core element of Jewish life and a gateway to Jewish identification for students” and “seeks to provide every Jewish student with the opportunity to explore and build an enduring relationship with Israel.” Unwilling to tolerate even a weak “both sides” approach, “Hillel will not partner with, house, or host organizations, groups, or speakers that as a matter of policy or practice that. . . [s]upport boycott of, divestment from, or sanctions against the State of Israel.” Hillel is a Zionist political organization that is somehow exempt from university codes of conduct and anti-discrimination policies but nonetheless commands the ear of campus leaders and has direct access to student life, giving it a unique position that no outside other organization can match.

As with other organizations, Zionist or otherwise, students, faculty, and staff at the UC may associate with Hillel or any other group they choose. However, Hillel, a 501(3)c that is not accountable to the university, enjoys special privileges on many UC campuses that allow it to serve as a Registered Campus Organization (RCO). No UC resources or privileges should be extended to an unaccountable external organization that has a core mission the support of a genocidal Israeli state or an ideology – Zionism – that is antithetical to the pluralist values that supposedly animate the University of California.

The case of fully-autonomous student (or staff or faculty) pro-Israel organizations that, unlike Hillel, do not rely primarily on outside funding is somewhat more complicated. Campuses have traditionally employed (with varying degrees of fidelity), a “content-neutral” approach to RCOs in the interest of allowing students the opportunity to self-organize without administrators policing the content of their beliefs. Whether such an approach makes sense or whether there should be limitations on groups that violate core university values is a larger discussion that goes beyond the scope of this essay, but at the very minimum such groups should be placed on a level playing field and not benefit from disproportionate outside funding or special treatment from campus leadership.

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Dezionizing the UC would entail not only cutting ties with outside Zionist organizations, but also refusing to accept donations from individuals and foundations with a direct connection to the Israeli state or a history of conditioning their contributions on pro-Zionist ideological shifts in university policy, hiring, and curriculum. One notable example is the Helen Diller Foundation, which has donated millions of dollars to the UC for student housing, hospitals, and Jewish Studies but has also funded Canary Mission, a Zionist doxxing website that targets UC community members, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, an anti-Muslim group run by notorious bigot and Islamophobe Pamela Geller, as well as, according the San Francisco Standard, “an Israeli group that files lawsuits to stop Palestinians from building homes in the West Bank, and to Reservists on Duty, a group that pays for Israeli soldiers to travel to U.S. colleges and speak out against the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement” and has been accused of harrassing pro-Palestine students on campuses. The Diller Foundation has also funded the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, a key hub in the Israeli military-industrial-academic complex directly implicated in the genocide in Gaza and the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), a neoconservative lobbying group that has pushed for “total war” in the Middle East . Other examples include the Koret Foundation, a major donor to the UC whose self-proclaimed mission includes working “to strengthen the U.S.-Israel relationship in diverse ways” and which has funded, among other projects, the Israel on Campus Coalition with the aim of combatting “anti-Israel sentiments” and the Stuart and Lynda Resnick Foundation, which in addition to its substantial UC donations has also given to Technion as well as the Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces. Why should the University of California accept money from, and thus grant legitimacy to, the very people who are trying to endanger our students, faculty, staff, and institutional accreditation while supporting a genocidal foreign state?

The examples cited above (as well as others documented as far back as 2015) seem to be obvious cases where the UC should refuse to accept donations, gifts, or sponsored programing for ethical reasons as well as to avoid the kind of donor pressure that has played a well-documented role in warping the teaching, research, and service mission of the UC. A recent gift agreement from the Koret Foundation to UC Davis, for example, included language that “Koret does not support any organization that promotes or engages in activities that question Israel’s right to exist, engage in boycott, sanctions and divestment campaigns against the State of Israel” and that “By countersigning this Gift Agreement, you acknowledge that activities Koret deems inconsistent with these values could result in termination of this Agreement. . . .” Harvard, Columbia, Penn, and case of Steven Salita at UIUC have provided ample evidence of the corrosive impact of Zionist donor pressure and a recent disciplinary investigation at UC Davis explicitly cited “the impact. . . on donations to the University” as “relevant in terms of potential impact to the campus” in finding against a UC faculty member.

While the Koret Foundation, the Dillers, and the Resnicks are obvious examples of donors a dezionized UC should refuse to engage with, there are important questions about where to draw the line, particularly for smaller individual donors or for larger foundations that might have changed their policies over time. Critics might also point out that targeting only Zionist donors raises issues of fairness and equity. These are important points and should be addressed by the creation of an independent body with representatives from across the university community to create consistent guidelines used to vet large donations as well as the UC’s investments to ensure they are in keeping with the university’s stated values. Such a body would serve as an example of how dezionizing the UC could be part of a larger effort to make the university more democratic and responsive to the people of California.

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All of the measures suggested above are aimed at extricating the UC from current and future entanglements with both the state of Israel and Zionist organizations complicit in genocide in historic Palestine as well as oppressive policies here in the United States. Dezioniation, however, must also account for the UC’s past complicity and the individual and structural consequences of that relationship. In response to Zionist pressure since 10/7, UC has implemented a slew of repressive measures that include limiting faculty speech on departmental websites, revising campus “time, place, and manner” (TPM) policies, overhauling faculty and student discipline processes, and forbidding student organizations from engaging in boycotts. Reversing these policy changes is a minimum step towards dezionization of the UC.

In addition, the university has an obligation to redress the harm it has done to individual students, faculty, and staff who were disciplined for standing up against Zionism and for Palestinian life. As chronicled in my previous entry, UC community members have been investigated, fired, brutalized by police, suspended, fined, and received letters of censure amidst the wave of Zionist repression following 10/7. Some have had their lives irrevocably altered or accrued substantial legal debts as part of the process of defending themselves while their disciplinary records can affect their ability to graduate or find post-graduation employment.. While each case is in some ways unique and some of these harms can never be truly redressed, as part of a larger dezionization effort the UC must engage in a systemwide and campus-level process of restorative justice to both acknowledge and at least partially mitigate the harms caused by Zionist repression. This would also include restoring the status and funding of groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) that were targeted for suspension on multiple UC campuses. It should also include funding and support for Palestine studies programs such as that led by Ussama Makdisi at UC Berkeley.

Addressing the immediate structural and individual harms enacted in defense of Israel at the UC since 10/7 will be a challenging but necessary aspect of dezionization. The question becomes even more difficult when going back to consider the longer history of UC’s complicity with both the Israeli state and in the repression of students, faculty, and staff who have protested this relationship. Informal student and faculty efforts since the early 2000s have managed to uncover aspects of UC complicity but the full historical depth and breadth remains largely unexplored.

A related question is what should be done to address these historical injustices once they have been more robustly documented? How might a dezionized UC go about accounting for and redressing its past complicity, both to the people of Palestine and to university community members whom it disciplined in response to Zionist pressure over a course of many decades? This is already a challenging question when it comes to redressing injuries to current faculty, students, and staff, much less taking into account those such as the Irvine 11, all of whom have long since left the university. More broadly, what does the UC owe to the people of Palestine in light of the university’s long history of collaboration with a state that has systematically ethnically cleansed and murdered them?

Related to these questions is the issue of accountability for Regents, senior administrators, and others within the UC system whose active collaboration with Zionism has indirectly facilitated the genocide in Gaza and directly contributed to the repression of students, staff, and faculty here at the UC. In general, dezionization is probably best served by targeting institutional and structural connections rather than individuals. On the other hand, it seems both immoral and impractical to allow the same individuals who presided over the university’s complicity with Zionism and the accompanying repression of students, staff, and faculty to rule over a dezionized UC. Historically, there have been a wide variety of approaches to this question, ranging from the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials after World War II to the Reconstruction of the American South after the Civil War and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) established in post-Apartheid South Africa. None of these models are exact fits for dezionization at the UC and while historians have debated them extensively, none can really be viewed as truly successful in achieving their stated aims.

The tradition of People’s Tribunals perhaps provides a better path forward. As with the investments and donations, all these difficult questions would probably be best accomplished by convening a university-wide group of students, staff, and faculty. The task of this group, which let us call the University Committee on Dezionization (UCDZ), would be to extensively document the University’s past complicity with the crimes of the Israeli state as well as its internal repression of anti-Zionist dissidents and then to formulate appropriate remedies and forms of accountability. In doing so, it should consult directly and meaningfully with those most affected, including those in Palestine. One possibility would be to include representatives from Palestinian universities who could provide recommendations on how UC might at least partially atone for its past complicity with the destruction of those universities and the murder of their students, faculty, and staff.

Veterans of struggles for social justice within the university will immediately point out – with much justification – that task forces and committees are usually where change goes to die, serving as palliative or performative bodies that shield an oppressive status quo from real accountability. But the fact is that there is not – nor should there be – a figure within the UC that would enjoy that kind of sweeping power to implement dezionization akin to those exercised by General MacArthur in postwar Japan or by the victorious Allies after the defeat of Nazi Germany. Change of this magnitude must be the process of genuine collective thought and discussion. The key is that UCDZ or its equivalent must be fully independent of the current UC administration (including the Regents) and be empowered to actually implement change rather than to simply make loose recommendations. If this sounds like it would require a major overhaul of the governance of the UC system that is, in fact, part of the point. As I suggested at the outset, while dezionization would not address all of the ills facing the UC, the process of formulating and implementing it would by necessity require structural changes that would make the university more democratic and responsive to its community.

Even if Zionism is a relatively recent movement when compared to Judaism and one increasingly being rejected by American Jews, might not some students, faculty, and staff feel uncomfortable in a dezionized University of California? Perhaps they might in the same way that some might feel uncomfortable in a university that prominently and publicly identifies itself with the values of diversity and scientific inquiry as opposed to white supremacy and religious doctrine. Movements for freedom, whether it be anti-racism, anti-sexism, or queer and trans liberation, often make some people feel uncomfortable. The mission of a university, however, is not to make people feel comfortable. Zionists, like any other members of the university community, remain free to believe what they wish and act accordingly in their daily life but they cannot insist that the institution mirror those values, particularly when those values actively harm other community members and are linked to racism, genocide, and oppression.

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If you have made it to this part of the essay and are not reading it simply for the purpose of writing an angry comment or inappropriately using Regental letterhead to chastise me, you are probably thinking something along the lines of “this sounds great but how are we ever going to make this happen?” Even at the height of the encampment struggle, the UC never came close to meeting the more modest demands of divestment and a public statement denouncing the genocide in Gaza. And even had campus leaders been more willing to accept student demands, pressure from the Regents, UCOP, the state legislature, and the governor would have almost certainly prevented them from being implemented. Post-encampment, the UC leadership at both the campus and systemwide level have doubled down on structural and individual repression that is now being reinforced by federal pressure from the Trump administration. And while UC students, faculty, and staff have continued to speak and organize in the face of this pressure, any member of these various groups can attest to the toll that repression and the stresses of organizing have taken on the movement and those involved.

While growing public rejection of Israel and Zionism will increase pressure on the UC, no conquering army is likely to march on 1111 Franklin Street in Oakland and any truly meaningful dezionization (and democratization) of the UC must be rooted in community-connected internal organizing. That is in some ways a daunting task given the state of the movement at this moment when compared to that of those with a vested interest in defending Zionism both inside and outside the UC. Thinking of it this way also provides a clear roadmap for organizing that can begin with smaller and more achievable goals and encompasses work that some individuals and organizations have already been pursuing for decades. Pushing for BDS, demanding an end to study abroad programs in Israel, educating people about Zionism, racism, settler colonialsm, and genocide, defending faculty, students, and staff from Zionist attacks, pushing back against the imposition of IHRA and UC concession to Zionist lawfare are all worthy goals in their own right but can also be seen as steps on the way to the larger project of dezionization.

Moving beyond the current efforts, which are valiant but inarguably overmatched, will require building greater organizing capacity committed to dezionization. Faculty, in particular, are more accustomed to working individually and contributing in the form of essays, talks, webinars, or the occasional social media post. The kind of structural change required for dezionization, however, calls for more collective and maybe less glamorous work inside the trenches of larger organizations. This collective work can take place simultaneously within existing orgs (such as SJP, FSJP, UC Divest, unions, and faculty, staff, or student groups) or within newly created ones. There is no group or even set of groups that has the monopoly on “correct” organizing tactics or strategy at this moment. As with the larger task, that is both daunting and also freeing: you don’t need to find the perfect org or group in order to work towards dezionization, just find one that works for you and do your work there.

There is one caveat to this open-ended and capacious strategy towards pursuing dezionization: any group that is going to work meaningfully towards this goal is going to have to explicitly commit to anti-Zionism as a core principle. Anti-Zionism can and should be a litmus test in this respect. The reasoning is not only moral but practical: it is difficult to combat the effects of Zionism, much less work towards a post-Zionist UC, if you are unable to even name the problem you are confronting. That does not mean that those pursuing this goal should only work with and within organizations that have already fully committed to dezionization. Organizations can change and adapt in response to member pressure and while not all of these internal struggles succeed there is often value for those willing to make the effort to try. That said, at this current moment, with a live-streamed genocide in Gaza and the oppressive effects of Zionism in the US university on full display, organizations that steadfastly refuse for whatever reason to directly confront it may need to be abandoned or supplanted by alternatives.

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It is in this context that I want to specifically address UCFA (formerly CUCFA) and the campus Faculty Associations (FAs). In last piece published on Chris Newfield’s blog, which largely focused on the complicity of the UC administration and Academic Senate, I expressed admiration for UCFA’s energetic efforts to defend faculty rights from Zionist and fascist attacks but also my profound disappointment with its failure to take a public position on either the genocide in Gaza or the oppressive effects of Zionism within the UC. I received pushback from UCFA leadership and FA members in the aftermath questioning both my understanding of the organization and the utility of calling it out in such a public way. This piece is already too long and I don’t want to center one particular organization for either praise or damnation given the larger stakes, but I have some very good comrades in the trenches of the FAs and one of my motivations in making those statements publicly was to spark discussions about the stakes of this question so I want to at least briefly respond to some of these critiques.

My basic position, as stated in my previous piece, remains unchanged:

In my view, no organization that owes its existence to compromise with genocide is one with the moral credibility to lead the University of California or any other institution. And yet even those who wish to close their eyes to events that they perceive as taking place “over there” or believe addressing the genocide would hinder their efforts to build power internally cannot ignore the ongoing repressive effects of Zionism here at the UC if they care at all about the future of the institution and its members.

I stand corrected to the extent that UCFA messages from 2023, 2024, and 2025 did explicitly name the genocide in Gaza and perhaps there are others I missed. I was unable to find a single statement from UCFA or any of the individual chapters, however, naming Zionism for its role in Israel’s genocide in Gaza or as a factor in administrative and police repression at the UC. If UCFA or any of the campus FAs has made such a statement naming Zionism, I would be happy to be corrected. This is not simply about playing a game of “gotcha” about statements: as I tried to make clear in the last piece, “failing to name and address the root cause of the problem ensures an ongoing state of crisis which will continue to get worse over time if not directly confronted. How many examples of Zionist pressure and UC collaboration resulting in structural and individual repression do we need before faculty bodies are willing to name and confront it?” Moreover, if it is the position of UCFA that there is an ongoing genocide in Gaza in which our own employer is undeniably complicit, is it not the moral and practical duty of its leadership to center this issue for organizing rather than simply mentioning it in a sentence or two in statements related to academic freedom and faculty rights?

I understand and fully support the goal of moving UCFA (and the campus FAs) from a debating society that issues occasional statements towards a group that has real, organized power that can be applied on behalf of faculty. Ultimately, though, it does not matter what kind of organization you are if that organization is unwilling to directly and forthrightly confront its own employers’s complicity in the ultimate crime of genocide and the role of Zionism in fueling both that complicity and the repression of its faculty, staff, and students. Building power without a grounding in core principles (which must include opposition to genocide) and a clear-eyed analysis of the threats to the UC (which clearly includes Zionism) does not inspire confidence. While they have yet to fully confront Zionism, UC-AFT and UAW 4811 pointed the way in this regard when they conducted a standup strike in June 2024 that included, among other demands, divestment from “weapons manufacturers, military contractors, and companies profiting from Israel’s war on Gaza” as well as centralized funding that would allow UC workers to “opt out from funding sources tied to the military or oppression of Palestinians.” To offer another example, The Committee of Interns and Residents (CIR-SEIU) passed resolutions in 2024 explicitly condeming Israeli apartheid and genocide.

I also understand that there are difficult tradeoffs between creating litmus tests and the ability to attract a mass base that would allow the FAs (or any group) to exercise meaningful power. But as I noted above, my strongly held belief is for both moral and practical reasons anti-Zionism must be the sina qua non of organizing to transform the UC in any meaningful way. The history of American labor organizing is rife with examples of unions that downplayed or explicitly embraced the wrong side of controversial political issues, particularly around foreign policy, in order to focus on the kind of bread-and-butter concerns that might allow them to build a bigger membership base while avoiding hostile external scrutiny. But those conversant with the historical literature on the American labor movement (as I suspect many in UCFA’s leadership are) will also know that this strategy seldom results in unions that then transition or pivot to become more progressive on these issues once they succeed in building power.

I am under no illusions that these arguments will convince the current UCFA leadership, which has clearly and consciously chosen their current organizing strategy, or that they will or should lose sleep over the dissent of an individual faculty member. I would be absolutely delighted to be proven wrong and see UCFA and/or individual FAs pivot to center the genocide and embrace dezionization as core principles as they seek to build power. My words here are not meant to discourage those within the FAs fighting for those goals. I write this section and have included it in the larger piece in part because I wanted to model the kind of sharp but necessary conversations around anti-Zionism that are going to be required not simply in UCFA and the FAs, but in every single organization at the UC and beyond if we are ever going to move towards the necessary goal of dezionization.

***

Following my last post on Chris Newfield’s blog, a certain UC Regent (one well known for sharing the platform with high-profile Islamophobes, homophobes, and racists) offered me the following response by email:

Having finally recovered from this extremely sick burn, I have to admit that J might have a point: in the current environment much of what I have written here certainly does sound like fiction. For the hardworking but beleaguered folks organizing for Palestine and against Zionism, not just at the UC, but all over the world, these have been difficult times and for all our good intentions any honest assessment would have to conclude that we have failed to make a meaningful impact on the genocide (which continues to claim lives as I write this) or even our own institutions, which have only become more repressive in recent years. But this assessment does not dissuade me from believing that while we should always be open to exploring new organizing tactics and strategies, dezionization is a worthy and important goal that we must pursue for both moral and practical reasons.

Even if dezionization is not practical in the near future, the work towards that goal is important and necessary. Struggles for justice are often by necessity generational and we will never be in a position to know exactly when, or even if, our efforts in the present will bear fruit. The best we can do is commit ourselves to the struggle and, most importantly, work collectively with those who share this set of commitments. But as dark as things may look right now, anybody who has read this far will be aware of the recent polling, primary results, and larger, for lack of a better word, vibe shift around the issue of Palestine within the United States. Zionists are certainly aware of these developments and it appears to be causing them significant anxiety. This essay is already far too long and I’m not going to lengthen it further with speculation about the immediate future political environment. But suffice to say that while some struggles take generations, some end unexpectedly suddenly and victoriously when the seemingly invincible forces of repression have been exhausted and hollowed out as a result of internal and external pressures. And if there is one thing that I do know it is this:

From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.

*Note: Title for identification purposes only; my views do not represent those of the University of California. Also, while my name appears here on the byline, this entire series is the result of deep discussions with trusted comrades and fellow organizers over many years. I will not thank anybody by name both for reasons of length and to avoid associating anybody with something that they may not fully endorse, but you know who you are and you have my profound and ongoing thanks.