Dezionization and De-Jewdification: The Danger of an Ideology Without Boundaries
He calls this process “dezionization,” meant to evoke “denazification” after World War II.
Over the past thirteen months, Malloy, a professor of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UC Merced, has developed his case across three essays. The first, published in September 2025, blamed Zionist influence for the university’s response to pro-Palestinian protests. The second, in May 2026, expanded the argument to accuse Zionist organizations of systematically undermining academic freedom. The third, published October 19, lays out an institutional program for eliminating Zionism’s influence from the UC system.
These essays go way beyond mere hostility to Zionism. There is nothing wrong with professors opposing political movements, even passionately.
What makes these essays extraordinary is the intellectual structure of Malloy’s argument. He begins with a definition of Zionism that would not be recognizable by any Zionist I am aware of, treating that definition as established fact. He then attributes collective responsibility to organizations that identify with Zionism. Malloy interprets institutional decisions through a presumption of Zionist power. Finally, he proposes that the university itself adopt his conclusions and act upon them.
At every stage, premises are treated as settled facts, and those supposed facts become the premises for still more ambitious and increasingly tenuous conclusions.
By the end, Malloy is no longer simply criticizing a political philosophy. He is proposing an institutional system in which adherence to that philosophy can become grounds for exclusion.
Perhaps the most remarkable part is that he presents this exclusion of Zionism as a legitimate political opinion as a defense of academic freedom.
First, redefine Zionism
The first problem is foundational.
Zionism is a historical political movement encompassing numerous competing schools of thought. Religious Zionists, secular Zionists, socialist Zionists, liberal Zionists, and cultural Zionists have disagreed profoundly about the character of Jewish national life, the relationship between religion and state, the relationship to Arabs, and the appropriate boundaries of Jewish sovereignty.
For many contemporary Jews, Zionism means the belief that Jews, like other peoples, are entitled to national self-determination in their historic homeland. That belief does not logically entail support for every Israeli government, every Israeli military action, every Knesset vote, or every policy toward Palestinians.
Malloy knows that Zionism has multiple interpretations. His October essay acknowledges its historical complexity and the existence of competing ideological strands. And yet he still argues that those strands ultimately converged on a project dependent upon coercion against Palestinians. From that interpretation, he moves toward a much more sweeping conclusion: Zionism itself is inherently incompatible with the values of a pluralistic university. He states flatly, “Zionism from its creation was both secular and unabashed in its racialized colonialist ambitions… 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.”
This is not criticism of Zionism. It is a substitution of his own definition of the term towards any self-declared Zionist and therefore treating all Zionists — left, right, religious, secular — as having a hateful, genocidal ideology that has no place on campus. Peace deals, offers of a Palestinian state, equal rights for Arab citizens – none of them matter when the entire project is defined as one of exclusivity and constant war against Palestinians.
Philosophers have a name for a related rhetorical maneuver: persuasive definition. A disputed moral judgment is incorporated into the definition of a term, allowing the speaker to treat the judgment as if it had already been proved. If Zionism is defined as inherently racist and oppressive, then anyone who supports Zionism can be treated as supporting racism and oppression.
This is very convenient for those who are antizionist. Their conclusion is built into the vocabulary. We saw something similar with the Green Party UK’s resolution declaring Zionism as racism; they first defined Zionism as a racist ideology so the resolution was a natural result rather than something up for debate.
There is something insidious in having an opponent of Zionism deciding that his definition is the operative one, and labeling anyone calling themselves a Zionist as racist, no matter what their actual beliefs are. Zionists cannot defend themselves because the anti-Zionist has declared them guilty ahead of any argument. In Malloy’s framework, Zionists appear to have remarkably little authority to explain what their own Zionism means. Their opponents get to define it, condemn it, and propose consequences for organizations that refuse to repudiate it.
Malloy and his comrades are not merely judge and jury. They are also the ones who write the laws and the dictionaries. All aligned for a single, and single-minded, purpose.
That is an extraordinary starting point for an academic argument.
The house of cards
The problem becomes clearer when Malloy’s reasoning is separated into its component propositions.
He maintains that Zionism is inherently oppressive. From there, he treats organizations that support Zionism as implicated in oppression. The unsupported conclusions don’t end there: he then attributes to these organizations a significant role in suppressing pro-Palestinian activism at UC. University decisions that favor Jewish students’ civil rights complaints become evidence of Zionist institutional power, not of a university protecting its students or following its own policies.
Finally, the alleged power and culpability of Zionist organizations and undue influence become grounds for excluding them from university relationships.
Each transition requires a new premise that has not been established by the previous one.
Even accepting Malloy’s characterization of some historical Zionist figures as desiring ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs, a widely accepted view among anti-Zionists that has very little support in reality, would not establish that every contemporary Zionist organization endorses their alleged positions.
Nor does evidence that an advocacy organization influenced a university decision prove that the resulting decision was improper. Advocacy is not inherently illegitimate. Universities routinely respond to complaints, lawsuits, public pressure, and arguments from outside organizations. The question is whether the claims are valid, the requested remedies justified, and the institutional decisions consistent with law and academic freedom.
Malloy’s analysis too often appears to bypass those questions by treating the identity of the advocates as the explanation itself. In his framework, if a Zionist organization supports a policy and the university adopts it, that is proof of Zionist domination of the university. Any other explanation, like the university agreeing with the Zionist organization’s arguments on their merits, is not even considered. There could be plenty of other independent legal, administrative, or ethical reasons for the university to decide to side with the Zionist argument. None of those are even considered by Malloy. It is purely an example of Zionist power.
If an antizionist group violently takes over a campus building and destroys property, or violates campus policy on public gatherings, by Malloy’s logic if the campus moves in to enforce its own policies, that is really evidence of the campus Hillel showing its muscle. Evidence is subsidiary to this view of unified, coordinated Zionist power. Which is a problem in its own right.
Malloy’s proposed institutional transformation depends upon a remarkable number of connections that he has not adequately demonstrated. And when the premises are dependent on each other, any one of them can collapse the entire structure.
When identity substitutes for evidence
There is a recognizable intellectual framework behind this reasoning.
Much contemporary academic activism interprets social relationships through structures of power and identity. Groups are classified according to their presumed positions within systems of oppression. Their claims are then evaluated, at least in part, through those classifications.
Power and identity are legitimate subjects of scholarly investigation. They can explain much. The trouble begins when they cease to be things to be investigated and become substitutes for investigation itself.
In Malloy’s account, Zionist organizations are generally assigned the role of powerful actors, while antizionist protesters are presented as targets of repression. Powerful actors are assumed to be oppressive, and the supposedly powerless are victims.
But real power is contextual. It must be demonstrated, not assumed.
A university president may possess enormous institutional authority while facing substantial external pressure. A student protest movement may be politically marginalized in one setting while exercising considerable control over a particular campus space. A Jewish student may belong to a group stereotyped as powerful while being personally unable to enter a university building because the “oppressed” antizionists have blocked the entrance.
These situations require examining what people actually did, who possessed authority and who exercised power in the circumstances. A theory that assigns power according to political identity before examining the evidence is likely to misunderstand the very relationships it claims to explain.
There is an obvious test of Malloy’s approach that was seen many times across the nation in 2024: What happens when Jewish students who support Israel are the people experiencing exclusion?
The UCLA case
In his September 2025 essay, Malloy attacks the litigation arising from the 2024 UCLA encampment. He calls Frankel v. UCLA a baseless lawsuit and points to the presence of antizionist Jews, including Jewish religious activities at the encampment, as evidence against the allegation that Jewish students were excluded.
This is an elementary logical error. The fact that some Jews were welcomed does not establish that other Jews were not excluded. Virtually every historic case of antisemitism included “good Jews” who were trotted out as evidence that the antisemites were not crude bigots.
But more importantly, what academic principle says that one group of students may exclude another group from a public area because of either their religion or their political beliefs?
The federal court’s preliminary injunction addressed UCLA’s failure to ensure equal access for Jewish students. The subsequent consent judgment imposed obligations concerning exclusion from campus facilities and activities, including exclusion related to religious beliefs concerning Israel.
These legal proceedings should be analyzed on their merits. One can disagree with aspects of the litigation, criticize a settlement, or question the appropriate boundaries of remedies. But declaring the case baseless does not make the underlying allegations disappear.
Nor does the fact that Zionist advocacy organizations supported the plaintiffs establish that the students’ complaints were illegitimate.
Malloy’s framing reverses the normal evidentiary inquiry. Rather than first determining whether students were denied equal access, he foregrounds the political identities of those who sought legal remedies. The lawsuit, in his framing, becomes a story about Zionist power instead of a question about whether the university protected its students, one of its primary responsibilities.
Malloy makes another basic logic error. A private advocacy organization bringing a lawsuit against a university is not the same thing as that university being controlled by the organization’s ideology. A court ordering a university to comply with civil rights obligations is not evidence that the university has embraced the plaintiff’s political philosophy. Malloy seems to think that a university is morally compelled to ignore or spurn a court ruling if it happens to be something that helps Zionists. Its decision to adhere to a court order is, in Malloy’s world, evidence of its being captured ideologically by the Zionists. The fear of contempt of court, or fines, or arrests are not even considered as possibilities.
That is not scholarship.
The conspiracy-shaped explanation
This brings us to an especially troubling feature of Malloy’s essays.
Malloy describes an array of organizations, donors, lawyers, administrators, and political actors whose activities he connects to Zionism. Some of these organizations do share political objectives. Some cooperate. Some have advocated similar policies. Their actions are legitimate subjects for investigation and criticism.
But shared identification with Zionism does not make them a single political organism.
The Anti-Defamation League, Hillel, the Brandeis Center, Jewish philanthropic foundations, Chabad, Students Supporting Israel and Israeli universities have different missions, leadership structures, constituencies, and institutional interests. Their positions can overlap without being identical, and their disagreements can be substantial.
In his essays, an abstract political category is being treated as though it were a unified actor.
This has an uncomfortable historical resonance.
For centuries, antisemitic conspiracy theories have explained otherwise disparate political, financial, and institutional developments by attributing them to a common Jewish purpose. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was the most notorious example, but the underlying habit of explanation was older and has proved remarkably durable.
The point is not that Malloy has explicitly endorsed such a conspiracy, or that criticism of Zionist organizations is inherently antisemitic. It is that theories attributing broad institutional outcomes to the coordinated influence of Jewish-associated organizations require exceptional care about evidence, agency, and causation.
As someone familiar with Zionist organizations, the idea of coordination between most of them is hilarious. Each one has a tiny difference from the others and they compete for the same funding dollars. I wish Zionist organizations displayed 25% of the coordination attributed to them by their opponents. I wish their messaging was half as consistent as that of the antizionists.
Presumably Malloy would agree that The Protocols was a classic example of antisemitic theory of secret unified worldwide Jewish control that has no basis in reality. Why then would he seem to support a similar logic by replacing “Jewish” with “Zionist” and “Zion” with, well, “Zionism”? He is asserting a system of unified Zionist control.
When evidence of opposition to Zionist organizations, successful lawsuits by those organizations, university compliance with their demands, and university resistance to them can all be incorporated into a single narrative of Zionist power, we need to ask what evidence could possibly disprove the theory.
An explanation that accommodates every possible outcome is not necessarily a powerful explanation. Sometimes it is a conspiracy theory.
The leap from criticism to exclusion
Malloy’s October essay reveals the institutional consequences of his reasoning. He demands “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.”
His targets include the ADL, the Academic Engagement Network, the Brandeis Center, and Hillel.
He also advocates ending formal arrangements with Israeli universities, restricting certain research relationships, and rejecting donations connected to organizations or individuals he considers complicit.
Some of these proposals could be defended or challenged on grounds independent of ideology. Universities have legitimate reasons to scrutinize donor conditions, conflicts of interest, and organizational conduct. But Malloy’s argument is not to examine their actions and treat each case accordingly. Malloy advocates a sweeping ban of every organization that is perceived to be Zionist. The guilt comes first, any evidence is optional.
His discussion of Hillel is particularly revealing. Hillel is a Jewish campus organization that provides religious, cultural, social, and educational programming. It also embraces a relationship with Israel as an important part of Jewish identity.
Malloy emphasizes that Zionism is central to its mission, then argues that UC should not extend institutional resources or privileges to organizations committed to that ideology.
Because Hillel embraces Israel as a key part of the Jewish experience, Malloy wants to make sure that Jewish students on campus cannot take advantage of any partnership with the university on kosher meal programs, sponsorship of Yiddish film festivals, or cosponsoring lectures on Jewish philosophy.
It isn’t that he objects to particular Hillel policies. He treats Hillel’s support for Zionism as a reason to question its institutional legitimacy.
There are multiple aspects of Jewish existence today. Malloy seems to think that if one of them is supporting the existence of a Jewish state in the Jewish ancestral homeland, that delegitimizes all the others by association.
This also means that a Hillel-sponsored debate between J-Street and a resident of Judea and Samaria about the legality of the settlements is also off limits. The multiplicity of views of Zionism within the Jewish community gets flattened to a caricature of Zionism that would not be out of place in Soviet propaganda of the 1970s.
The implications become clearer when we apply the same standard elsewhere.
Would a Chinese cultural organization be excluded because it supported Chinese nationalism while opposing criticism of China’s government? Would a Palestinian student organization be denied recognition because some Palestinian nationalist movements have engaged in terrorism? Would an American patriotic organization be disqualified because of historical injustices committed in the name of American nationalism?
These comparisons do not imply that the movements or their histories are equivalent. They simply ask whether the same principle of collective culpability would be applied consistently.
If an organization’s actual conduct is the issue, examine its conduct. If a specific donor attempts to control hiring or curriculum, examine the conditions of the donation. If an outside organization engages in harassment or unlawful discrimination, investigate it. This applies to Zionists, non-Zionists and antizionists alike.
But if the operative offense is merely supporting a political philosophy that a professor has defined as reprehensible, we have crossed into entirely different territory. We have moved from regulating misconduct to regulating ideological legitimacy.
The denazification analogy
Malloy does not conceal the historical analogy that informs his thinking.
He explicitly compares “dezionization” with postwar denazification, while acknowledging that the circumstances and institutional models differ.
This is a revealing choice, and frankly, a disgusting one.
Nazism was not simply a controversial nationalist philosophy. It was the ideology of a regime responsible for aggressive war, totalitarian rule, and systematic mass murder, including the Holocaust. The extermination of Jews was an inseparable part of Nazi philosophy.
Malloy is entitled to argue that Zionism has produced grave injustices. But treating it as an ideology suitable for an analogous institutional purification is not a serious argument. It is a socially acceptable way to compare most of today’s Jews to their murderers. The entire reason that Israel is routinely compared to the Nazis is because of how offensive that analogy is to Jews. There is no historic, logical, psychological, political or any other dimension where that comparison survives any serious analysis.
Malloy knows—or certainly ought to know—what the comparison of Zionism to Nazism means to the overwhelming majority of Jews who identify with Israel. Yet he chooses an analogy that associates their national movement with the ideology responsible for murdering six million Jews, then assures them that this has nothing to do with antisemitism. He cannot reasonably expect that assurance to settle the question.
I can imagine Malloy reading this and saying, look, they are using the oldest playbook of comparing antizionism with antisemitism. In this case, the shoe fits. The comparison is objectively obscene. The Jewish pain resulting from comparing Zionist Jews with Nazis is the same pain that Holocaust deniers try to inflict on Jews by saying that gas chambers were a myth. I’m not saying that there can never be any comparison with the Holocaust; I am saying that those who compare Israel to Nazis are not engaged in sober analysis. They are engaged in antisemitism in effect.
In the end, Malloy cannot point to any other political philosophy that is beyond the pale of being taught or discussed or debated at universities. He provides no criteria to say why Zionism is comparable to Nazism in how it should be treated on campus but not Palestinianism, communism, Islamism, Fanonism or any other philosophy that really has justified mass murder and genocide.
As with everything else, this is an assertion based on false premises. The actual argument is missing.
From institutional exclusion to ideological purification
As noted, Sean Malloy compares his proposed “dezionization” of the University of California to the denazification of Germany after World War II. This is highly offensive to the vast majority of Jews.
It gets worse, however, because there is a closer analogy to what Malloy proposes. His “dezionization” is uncomfortably close to the Nazi campaign of Entjudung, or de-Jewdification.
I’m not calling Malloy a Nazi. I’m saying that the structure of his argument has clear parallels to how the Nazis thought about Jews: a hate with no limits.
On March 3, 1939, Josef Bürckel, the Nazi Gauleiter in Vienna, delivered a speech about eliminating Jewish influence from the city’s economy. A contemporary newspaper account, reproduced in English by Calvin University’s German Propaganda Archive, bore the headline “Bürckel Declares War on Jewdified Parasites.”
The account is pure Nazi propaganda. Yet the argument has echoes.
Bürckel began with supposedly predatory Jewish commercial practices, blaming them for high prices of consumer goods. But removing Jewish owners was not enough. He argued that allegedly Jewish practices had infected non-Jewish merchants as well, so the supposedly harmful influence had to be eliminated even where no Jews remained. The accusation expanded from people to their alleged methods, from methods to an influence, and from that influence to anyone the authorities deemed contaminated by it.
That is the feature of the speech worth examining: what is the boundary of a campaign against an influence that its advocates themselves get to define? Every remaining example can be treated as proof that the campaign has not gone far enough.
Malloy begins by defining Zionism as inherently oppressive and incompatible with university values. He then extends that judgment beyond Israeli state institutions to American organizations that recognize Zionism as legitimate, including Hillel and the ADL. Their activities need not be principally about Israeli politics. Association with the condemned ideology is enough to make their university relationships suspect.
And even that is insufficient for Malloy. He argues that Zionism has already shaped the university’s own policies and administration, so the university must eliminate its internal Zionist influence as well. A boycott of identifiable institutions has become a program to remove a purportedly pervasive ideological contamination.
The comparison is not an assertion that Malloy’s intentions, methods, or foreseeable consequences are identical to Bürckel’s. The comparison is to a recognizable mechanism of expanding attribution: define a category as inherently corrupt, treat association as culpability, and keep discovering its influence farther from the original target.
The Nazis famously demonized “Jewish” sciences like theoretical physics, abstract mathematics and Freudian psychology from the universities. These curriculum changes extended out to promoting pseudo-sciences like racial biology and eugenics, twisting the academy to promote Nazi ideology at the expense of academic freedom.
How would the curriculum of a “dezionized” university change? It could affect history, Middle East studies, political science, Jewish studies, anthropology, Biblical studies, sociology, international law and other fields. A university that publicly declares a political stance will inevitably have a dampening effect on any scholarship that might go against it.
But that is only the beginning of how such a policy would affect the campus. Would a Jewish student organization that regards Jewish self-determination as legitimate be allowed ordinary access to campus resources? Would a university policy against antisemitism become suspect merely because a Zionist organization supported it? Could a professor defend Zionism without being regarded as perpetuating the influence the university had committed itself to eliminate?
Malloy offers assurances about private belief, but his proposed institutional mission has no clear stopping rule. If an influence can be discovered in organizations, policies, educational activities, and attitudes, his “dezionization” rules need independently defensible criteria for deciding what lies outside its mandate. Otherwise every remaining disagreement can be construed as evidence of unfinished work. This organization didn’t condemn Israel adequately, this organization maintains ties with the organization that didn’t condemn, this student attends a class by a professor whose father lives in Israel, this organization showed an Adam Sandler movie. When the lines aren’t clear, the entire campus is in the grip of an unseen cancellation committee.
Can Jews sing Birkat Hamazon at a dezionized university?
When you cannot come up with a definition of what “dezionization” looks like, suddenly things look very bad for Jews.
Consider a routine Shabbat dinner at a campus Hillel. Students finish eating and sing Birkat Hamazon, the traditional Jewish grace after meals. Among its familiar words are:
“Have mercy, Lord our God, upon Israel Your people, upon Jerusalem Your city, upon Zion the abode of Your glory….And rebuild Jerusalem the holy city speedily in our days….May the Merciful One break the yoke of exile from our neck, and may He lead us upright to our land.”
These words long predate modern political Zionism. Jews who oppose the modern Zionist movement may recite them too. But they express Jewish peoplehood, attachment to Jerusalem and Zion, and hope for a return to the land of Israel. Those themes cannot be neatly severed from the ideas of Jewish national restoration that modern Zionists also affirm.
Would Malloy permit students to sing these prayers at a public Hillel event with the same campus access available to other religious groups? He might well say yes. But suppose the students explain that these words inform their belief in Jewish national self-determination. Does the prayer then become objectionable political advocacy? If Hillel teaches that interpretation, does its ordinary religious programming become evidence of the Zionist influence the university is supposed to eliminate?
This is not a reductio ad absurdum. The religious and political meanings overlap in actual Jewish communal life. The question is who gets to determine which meaning is permissible. Malloy already has a definition of Zionism that is utterly divorced from actual Zionism. What stops his definition from including aspects of Judaism?
If he says that Jews may say the words privately but an organization that affirms their national implications loses institutional standing, the formal right to believe offers little protection to communal religious life. A program that seeks to eradicate an influence cannot avoid defining its outer limits. The more thoroughly Jewish religious language and Jewish national aspirations intersect, the more consequential that omission becomes.
The consequences for Jewish students and academic freedom
And what happens to the Zionist student in Malloy’s universe?
Malloy assures readers that individual faculty, staff, and students would not have to renounce their personal Zionist beliefs. But that is facetious.
Imagine a Jewish undergraduate who writes a carefully researched paper defending Zionism as a legitimate expression of Jewish self-determination in a “dezionized” university. Would the professor grade the paper on the quality of its evidence and reasoning? Or would its conclusion be treated as inherently racist?
Imagine a graduate student who wants to write a dissertation challenging antizionist historical scholarship. Would faculty members agree to supervise the research? Would the student receive fair evaluations and recommendations? Would the work be assessed on its merits, even if it challenged the political assumptions of the department?
Imagine an openly Zionist scholar applying for a faculty position. Would the hiring committee consider that person’s scholarship, teaching, and qualifications? Or would Zionism itself become an unofficial mark against the applicant?
Imagine an Israel studies program that looks at Israeli democracy, media, relationships with its Arab population, cuisine. In a university dedicated to “dezionization,” the only acceptable field of study becomes antizionism itself. The university’s stated principles would affect the academic freedom of the university itself.
Malloy promises that individual Zionists would remain free to hold their beliefs. But what good is that promise in a university that has officially declared those beliefs incompatible with its values? A Zionist student could theoretically speak while having every reason to fear that doing so would damage his academic prospects. A Zionist professor could theoretically teach while wondering whether colleagues regarded his political beliefs as grounds for professional exclusion. You do not need an explicit blacklist to create an atmosphere in which people learn to keep their opinions to themselves.
A student who receives a poor grade may never know whether political hostility influenced it. A graduate student whose research proposal is rejected may have no way to determine whether the problem was methodological or ideological. A faculty applicant who is quietly passed over may never learn why.
We don’t have to imagine these scenarios. Entire fields have already been captured by antizionists with academic organizations embracing BDS. Malloy’s scheme would formalize what has already been eroding academic freedom for decades.
This is why academic freedom requires more than formal assurances that individuals may hold unpopular opinions. It requires institutional norms that protect their ability to express those opinions, investigate them, organize around them, and have their work evaluated fairly.
Malloy tries to draw the line of maintaining academic freedom for students, but in actuality, he is pushing groupthink. And as we have seen, it does not even have the pretense of having a logical argument behind it. It is guilt by association based on a definition of Zionism that few if any Zionists would recognize as their own.
The committee that already knows the answer
Malloy proposes establishing a University Committee on Dezionization, empowered to investigate the university’s historical complicity and formulate remedies. He wants this body to possess meaningful authority rather than merely issue recommendations.
The very name of the committee shows what its purpose is. Its mandate presupposes that this one ideology has caused institutional harm. Its proposed purpose is to devise and implement remedies for that harm. There is no debate on this topic. Its decisions are predetermined.
It is modern McCarthyism disguised as academic freedom.
This is perhaps the most hypocritical thing Malloy advocates. Someone who spends pages discussing his worries about Zionist power being misused is proposing a committee with immense power to do only one thing: penalize Zionists.
Or perceived Zionists. Or Zionist-adjacent groups. Or groups that are judged not to be adequately antizionist enough.
For someone whose epistemology appears to be centered on discovering and exposing the power of others, this is an astonishing display of how he wants to wield power himself if possible.
I’m not a psychologist but this sounds a lot like projection.
The missing general principle
What makes Zionism uniquely disqualifying? What general principle would justify treating Zionism as an ideology whose institutional influence must be systematically eliminated?
This is the question that Malloy never adequately answers.
Universities study and debate an extraordinary range of political and religious philosophies. Communism, fascism, revolutionary nationalism, religious fundamentalism, anarchism, and many other ideologies have been associated, in different historical circumstances, with repression or violence.
That does not mean universities endorse those ideologies. Nor does it mean every organization advocating them must receive funding or institutional partnerships. But the usual distinction is between ideas that can be examined and conduct that can legitimately be restricted. A university can refuse to facilitate unlawful discrimination or violence without declaring that everyone associated with a broad political tradition is institutionally disqualified.
Would Malloy regard an organization’s identification with the Palestinian cause as sufficient to establish responsibility for atrocities committed by particular Palestinian nationalist groups? Would he treat every organization supporting Chinese nationalism as responsible for abuses committed by the Chinese state? Would he propose a university-wide campaign to eliminate Marxist influence because regimes claiming Marxist inspiration committed mass murder?
Obviously not. In order to treat Zionism as uniquely malicious and dangerous, he needs to define what makes it unique. He hasn’t. He just claims it. Merely asserting that Zionism is uniquely reprehensible does not establish a principled distinction.
If he cannot formulate a rule of what category of political belief is considered too dangerous for universities to tolerate, then he is creating an exception to academic freedom, not a rule to protect it.
When the conclusion precedes the evidence
A genuine scholarly inquiry begins with a question and seeks answers. Malloy’s program begins with a conclusion: Zionism is an oppressive influence that must be removed from the university. He bypasses anything that might resemble actual intellectual work.
What if the proposed committee discovered that some Zionist organizations had strengthened academic freedom? What if it found that a particular Jewish organization’s civil rights complaint was justified? What if evidence showed that university administrators acted independently of Zionist advocacy, or that some anti-Zionist activists had violated the rights of Jewish students? Or, perish the thought, what if a joint research program with an Israeli institution might help cure cancer?
Could those findings lead the committee to reconsider the premise of dezionization itself? Or would they be explained away?
A theory that cannot accommodate evidence against itself has ceased functioning as a theory. It has become a framework for interpreting all evidence in support of a predetermined conclusion. It is a fancy front for propaganda.
And when that framework is given institutional authority, the problem becomes more serious. The institution is no longer merely tolerating an intellectually closed theory. It is empowering people to act upon it.
Prejudice with academic credentials?
I do not think it is possible to establish Malloy’s personal motivations merely by examining the structure of his arguments. People can reach mistaken conclusions sincerely, and even deeply prejudicial proposals can be advanced by people who believe themselves to be acting morally.
But the lack of the ability to even admit disconfirming evidence is damning towards any pretense of academic rigor.
Like it or not, applying a flawed framework to Zionism, and apparently only Zionism, echoes outrages that Jews have been subject to for centuries.
Antisemites have accused Jews of corrupting religion, economics, politics, culture, and national life. They have repeatedly portrayed exclusion as a necessary reform that would liberate society from a harmful influence.
Again, I’m not saying that Malloy’s argument is antisemitic. But proposals to purge institutions of a single allegedly corrupting influence that happens to be associated with Jews deserve careful examination.
The word Zionist does not automatically mean Jew. But neither does substituting the word Zionist for Jew automatically eliminate the possibility of antisemitism. The distinction has to be established through the content, reasoning, and application of the argument. Malloy has done little to escape the analogy beyond assertions.
Malloy is entitled to answer that question. He is also entitled to reject the suggestion that his proposal reflects antisemitic assumptions. But he cannot settle the matter simply by declaring that his target is a political ideology rather than Jews.
Modern antizionism is eerily reminiscent of previous versions of antisemitism, with theories of control and power attributed to shadowy, secretive groups led by Jews. The burden of proof is to show that age old hatred of Jews and fanatic hatred of Jewish nationalism are unrelated.
An institution committed to scholarship should demand that the proof has been provided before adopting pre-ordained conclusions as policy.
The university’s most important obligation
Universities do not have to endorse every political philosophy. They do not have to partner with every organization, accept every donation, or remain silent about every injustice.
But they do have an obligation to distinguish evidence from assumption, individual responsibility from collective guilt, and intellectual disagreement from conduct that warrants institutional sanctions. Above all, they must preserve the possibility that their own conclusions are mistaken.
That is the principle missing from the dezionization program Malloy proposes.
The university that Malloy proposes would violate free inquiry, academic freedom, open debate — the very concepts that are supposed to be fundamental to the academy. It is based on assumptions that are arbitrary at best, malicious at worst. It is discriminatory in effect. And it is anti-intellectual.
Whether that is his intent or not, we cannot know. But he certainly has not argued anything that excludes this interpretation of his proposal.
Once a university begins treating disagreement with a particular conclusion as evidence that a person or organization should be excluded from institutional life, it has changed the relationship between knowledge and authority.
Power is a valuable lens to examine institutions. Malloy wants to use extraordinary power to exclude an ideology he believes is awful without being able to adequately define it.
This sounds more like bigotry than protecting academic freedom.