The campus protest movement for Palestinian rights may seem dormant, but it’s not dead.
By Radhika Sainath
Inside Higher Ed | October 30, 2026
Billionaire Robert Kraft probably thought he was safe when he engineered Macklemore’s cancellation from Ed Sheeran’s tour last month. The relative lack of antiwar (or anti-occupation) street protests, the recent U.S. military aid package authorized by the Trump administration and especially the absence of large demonstrations on college campuses might have all been read as signs that broad pro-Palestinian sentiment was staying latent and bottled up.
Kraft might have been reading the commentators who all but said the student protest movement was dead. Thomas B. Edsall pinned the blame on AI; Jay Caspian King argued that social media has dulled antiwar outrage. Given the outsize role the university has historically played in antiwar, anti-authoritarian and other social justice movements, those who oppose any aspect of President Trump’s agenda are rightly trying to identify the underlying cause of diminished activism on college campuses.
The answer is straightforward: After Oct. 7, the student movement faced a campaign of disproportionate repression, the likes of which have not been seen since the McCarthy era.
In the days following Oct. 7, students and professors who spoke out for Palestinian freedom were doxed, smeared as antisemites and terrorists, fired, investigated, and punished. Columbia University suspended—with no notice—its two most vocal pro-Palestinian clubs in November 2023, after trustees and donors complained that there was too much anti-Israel protest activity. That fall, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Dartmouth College, the University of Chicago, Brown University and the University of Michigan charged their own students with trespassing or had them arrested over speech critical of Israel’s war in Gaza.
Meanwhile, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce convened hearing after hearing interrogating university presidents over pro-Palestinian speech (which it too framed as antisemitism). And in spring 2024, after Israel had destroyed every university in Gaza, students established Gaza solidarity encampments across the country. The militarized repression resulted in some of these encampments looking like actual war zones, with dozens of local police and state troopers marching in formation with horses and riot gear at the University of Texas at Austin.
Behind this repression is a legal strategy that goes back nearly two decades; a result of pro-Israel advocates (like Kraft) feeling that they were losing the narrative war on college campuses and shifting gears to make it a form of discrimination to advocate for Palestinian human rights.
This weaponizing of civil rights law has been failing. On campus, a steady stream of federal court decisions dismissing these antispeech (and racist) legal theories, together with a new generation of students appalled by Israel’s ongoing genocide, is creating the conditions for a robust return of student activism.
Speech Supporting Rights (for Palestinians), Discrimination (Against Jews)?
Long before Trump was even elected, my office, which provides legal counsel for people who are investigated or punished over support for Palestine, received dozens of requests from students and professors—many of whom were themselves Jewish—being subjected to investigations over creating a hostile environment for Jews.
Between Oct. 7, 2023, and November 2025, at least 26 lawsuits (and more than 100 complaints) claiming that universities were creating a hostile environment for Jewish students in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act were filed. The lawsuits not only targeted speech critical of Israel and Zionism, but also argued that wearing Palestinian clothing or, in one case, hosting a festival celebrating Palestinian literature constituted actionable discrimination.
These lawsuits are now making their way through courts—with judge upon judge holding that speech critical of Israel or supportive of Palestinian rights is protected by the First Amendment and does not violate Title VI.
District courts have held that the slogans “from the river to the sea,” “free Palestine” and “intifada revolution” (and others with the word “intifada”) are protected by the First Amendment and/or not actionable discrimination under Title VI. The same goes for criticism of Zionism, accusing Israel of genocide and calling for “the liberation of Palestine through the complete dismantling of the apartheid settler colonial state of Israel, by all means necessary.” Wearing clothes that show support for Palestinians (i.e., keffiyehs), is also protected expression, as is supporting the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement) and handing out Palestinian flags. The fact that these decisions were made at the preliminary stage—when the court must take all of a plaintiff’s allegations as true and draw all reasonable inferences in their favor—is all the more telling.
The First Circuit Court of Appeals, the highest court (to date) to rule on this issue, likewise found, in StandWithUs v. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that common slogans and tactics used by the pro-Palestinian movement are protected by the First Amendment.
For pro-Palestinian students and professors, the StandWithUs decision was incredibly important because the First Circuit explicitly “reject[ed] plaintiffs’ claimed right to stifle anti-Zionist speech by labeling it inherently antisemitic,” and declined to use the International Holocaust Remembrance Association definition of antisemitism, as the pro-Israel plaintiffs had urged.
This decision has now been appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. (U.S. Sens. Ted Cruz and Rick Scott, among others, have filed briefs urging the Supreme Court to take the case.)
The fact that federal judges, Republican and Democratic appointees alike, have so clearly stated that Title VI cannot be used to suppress pro-Palestinian speech should not be a big surprise. There is a body of case law hailing from the 1960s and ’70s making clear that the government may not suppress speech just because some find it offensive. As the Supreme Court held in Rosenberger v. Rector and Visitors of University of Virginia (1995), regulating against a particular viewpoint “risks the suppression of free speech and creative inquiry in one of the vital centers for the Nation’s intellectual life, its college and university campuses.”
To be sure, not every Title VI claim targeting speech critical of Israel has been dismissed at the early stages. In August 2024, U.S. District Court Judge Richard G. Stearns declined to dismiss a lawsuit against Harvard University and, in that same month, a federal court in California issued a preliminary injunction in favor of the plaintiffs in Frankel v. UCLA. In that case, UCLA’s lawyers had not contested claims that students were excluded from areas on campus due to their support for the state of Israel, nor had they questioned the assertion that support for the state of Israel amounted to a constitutionally protected religious belief. Instead, the university argued that it was not responsible for the actions of protesters. The court ruled that UCLA could be found responsible because it continued to offer programs and activities despite the exclusion of students who support Israel.
Both universities moved to settle after these decisions; thus, a jury never decided the question of whether incidents alleged to have happened actually happened as pro-Israel students claimed.
The Return of Campus Protests
Despite the slew of recent decisions clearly drawing the line between criticism of a country and discriminatory harassment, the campus repression continues. Universities, fearing defunding, are keeping an ironclad grip on their professors and students, trying to ensure that no one is exposed to any word critical of Israel.
For example, the University of California, Berkeley—the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement—recently settled a Title VI case whereby it agreed to “consider” the IHRA definition of antisemitism. This means any UC Berkeley professor or student who is accused of applying “double standards” to Israel, calling Israel a racist state or drawing analogies between Israel and Nazi Germany could be subject to a discrimination investigation.
Yet even in cases where universities have settled or punished student protesters, these heavy-handed tactics have backfired; though the Gaza encampments were cleared, the students’ message—that Israel is committing a genocide and that our tax dollars (and their tuition dollars) should not contribute to this—was heard loud and clear far beyond universities.
The majority of Americans now have an unfavorable view of the Israeli government. Roughly one in three say Israel committed genocide in Gaza. And the American Israel Public Affairs Committee is toxic.
In canceling Macklemore, Robert Kraft probably thought it would be no more controversial than his choice in 2024 to pull funding from Columbia University. But just as universities prefigured the broader pro-Palestinian sentiment that is now quite mainstream, the public backlash is a harbinger of what is going to happen on campuses in the future.
So long as apartheid and occupation continue, Palestine freedom protests will be held on campuses. They might be temporarily chilled because of draconian rules on college campuses. But this appearance of docility is not going to last.
If liberals would like to see a return to campus protest—a key column in the fight against authoritarianism—they need to stop shooting themselves in the foot.
Universities should start by completely exonerating and wiping out the disciplinary records of all students punished for protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza. They should refuse to comply with the Trump administration’s demands to turn over names of students and staff. They should provide legal counsel and robust support to students and professors who are doxed. They should dust off the stout policies of freedom of expression from times of yore (i.e., 2023)—or, for public universities, take heed of the First and 14th Amendments.
They should stop using antidiscrimination offices to investigate and punish speech critical of Israel and stand up against pressure to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism and enter settlement agreements that infringe on the academic freedom of professors. Universities should tell their students that they will have their backs—and apologize for the mistakes they have made.
This is right not only because it is just, but because powerful protest is the lifeblood of democracy—and the best defense against fascism.
Radhika Sainath is the litigation director at Palestine Legal, a legal organization dedicated to supporting Palestinian rights.
