Of all of the crazy policies enacted by Donald Trump in the three months since he resumed the presidency, the arrest of foreign students for their views critical of Israel is among the most shocking. As an immigrant to Israel who has both American and Israeli citizenship, I am outraged by the prospect that an American administration would arrest and seek to deport foreign nationals simply for expressing criticism of Israel.
Freedom of speech is indivisible. Today the government is taking aim at critics of Israel. Tomorrow it will be something else that further undermines freedom of expression (along with the slashing of federal funding on irrelevant ideological grounds). Is Israel’s case so weak that the only way to address criticism of Israeli policy is to expel foreigners in the U.S. who criticize it? I think not.
I’m not coming to the defense of anti-Israeli or antisemitic campus activists who incite violence, but it seems obvious that the U.S. government is seeking to expel people simply for their beliefs. Take the case of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University in Massachusetts who was abducted by immigration agents in March. The Washington Post reported that days before, “the State Department determined that the Trump administration had not produced any evidence showing that she engaged in antisemitic activities or made public statements supporting a terrorist organization, as the government has alleged.”
Another variation on efforts to stifle critical views of Israel came in an attempt in March by the Jewish mayor of Miami Beach, Fla., Steven Meiner, to evict and defund an independent theater, Cinema O, which rents space from the city. The move came after Cinema O showed “No Other Land,” a film directed by an Israeli and two Palestinians that won this year’s Oscar for best feature documentary.
It consists of actual footage from the Israeli army’s attempt to evict Palestinians from the Masafer Yatta area of the West Bank. Critics of the movie claim that it distorts the real story of Masafer Yatta, whose residents lost a 20-year legal battle in 2022 against their eviction from an area that the Israeli army declared a firing zone used for weapons training.
The film is available online for free in Israel and the Palestinian territories and I watched it. Space doesn’t permit a full discussion of the case and there may be compelling legal arguments against the Palestinian residents of Masafer Yatta, but the film highlighted the compelling interest that Israel has to separate from the Palestinians and give them their own demilitarized state.
As I watched the footage of home and school demolitions and even Jewish settler violence, all I could think of was the futility of the Israeli policy, which will just produce another generation that hates Israel. We need security guarantees, but we need to leave most of the West Bank.
The film was difficult to watch. Its Israeli director, Yuval Abraham, made a comment on camera that resonated with me. “These things are happening in my name,” he said. They’re happening in my name, too.
In the Miami Beach case, city government shouldn’t be in the business of censoring freedom of speech. The antidote to a film that shows only part of the story is more speech not less. In the end, the mayor withdrew his threat to evict Cinema O in favor of a resolution urging the theater to show films that “highlight a fair and balanced viewpoint.”
I object to censorship of anti-Israel rhetoric in the U.S., which is purportedly being done to support Israel and combat antisemitism. The Israeli case needs to be defended on its merits, not by silencing Israel’s critics.
Cliff Savren is a former Clevelander who covers the Middle East from Ra’anana, Israel. He is an editor at the English edition of Haaretz.