Omar Zahzah
ANOTHER name has joined the ever-growing roster of academics facing repression over Palestine: Idris Robinson. On March 24, 2026, Robinson filed suit against his employer, Texas State University, which is seeking to fire Robinson from his position as Assistant Professor of Philosophy on May 31, 2026, for a talk he gave about Palestine during an off-campus event in the Summer of 2024.
The suit names Texas State University President Kelly Damphouse, Provost Pranesh Aswath, Senior Vice-Provost Vedaraman Sriraman, Thillainatarajan Sivakumaran, inaugural Vice President of TXST Global, and the Regents of Texas State University. Damphouse also initiated the illegal firing of TSU History Professor Tom Alter in November 2025 for an off-campus talk Alter gave at a Revolutionary Socialism conference.
On June 29th, 2024, Robinson delivered a talk entitled “Strategic Lessons from the Palestinian Resistance” in Asheville, North Carolina, as part of an anarchist book fair. A fight broke out during Robinson’s presentation when it was discovered that Zionists were in attendance and filming the proceedings; Robinson was escorted out of the room and gave follow-up commentary in a Q & A session the next day.
As reported in the Guardian, on June 5, 2025, David Moritz, one of the Zionists who had surreptitiously filmed Robinson’s talk, made an Instagram post targeting Robinson and blaming him for the fight that broke out in June 2024: “This professor praises violence and incited a mob attack in Asheville,” Moritz wrote in the first slide.
The next day, despite a stellar teaching record, Robinson received an email from senior vice-provost Sriraman informing him that he was being placed on academic leave “following the receipt and internal assessment of multiple complaints and allegations regarding an incident that occurred in the summer of 2024,” and on July 8, 2025, administration notified him that his contract would be terminated in May 2026. Robinson appealed the decision, and Texas State University denied his appeal, despite being unable to substantiate its decision nor clarify exactly what rules or laws Robinson had allegedly violated, per the Guardian.
For his part, Moritz made his goal manifestly clear. He concluded his Instagram post with the following sentiments and call to action:
This isn’t academic freedom
This is incitement to violence
This is glorification of terrorism
And it happened under the name of a US university
Texas State University must act
Idris Robinson must be investigated and removed
Promoters of violence do not belong in the classroom
Terror apologists do not belong in the classroom
Violence should not be taught as a ‘how-to’ University subject
Take Action
Contact Texas State University
Tell them: Fire Idris Robinson
First and foremost, Dr. Robinson’s case must be championed by all proponents of academic freedom. But in addition to the particulars of the transgression, the sequence of events that includes Texas State University’s violation of Robinson’s rights for speaking on Palestine is significant for how familiar it is. Individual Zionist trolls like Moritz and organizations like Canary Mission, Stopantisemitism.org or Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus that are dedicated to doxing and harassing supporters of Palestinian freedom and liberation have largely been able to count on reflexive institutional legitimization of their defamatory profiling.
Manufactured outrage campaigns that cast students and faculty outspoken about Palestine as “violent,” “extremists,” or even “terrorists” or “terrorist supporters” whose rights need to be instantaneously abrogated for the sake of campus safety and institutional prestige have an ominous purchase in the cynical economy of the corporate university.
The question of violence provides a productive frame to this conversation for several reasons. In the first place, it helps attune us to the dynamics of inversion at play. Students peacefully protesting genocide and faculty who support them are automatically constructed as threats, and often in ways meant to legitimize the literal violence of the state—from police assaults across multiple campuses to rooftop snipers and ICE kidnappings—being visited upon them. This is an institutional extension of the longstanding cultural dehumanization of Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims more broadly, which incentivizes repression and violence against them, as revealed by the recently uncovered assassination plot against Palestinian activist Nerdeen Kiswani—a plot that was actively stoked by vigilante groups such as Betar USA and politicians alike.
Secondly, it can remind us of the university as a crucial site of violence in its own right. A decolonial approach to the university means attending to how slavery and settler colonialism are not isolated episodes from the past, but systemic structures of violence that made possible and continue to shape the material gains and ideological limits of campuses in settler colonies such as the US.
The relevance to Palestine is patently clear: as scholars Eman Ghanayem and Theresa Rocha Beardall brilliantly state in their analysis of “interconnected settler colonialism” between the US and Israel, “The University is a Colony”. Honing in on Cornell, Ghanayem and Beardall explore how the university is an ideal site for assessing the material and ideological overlaps between US and Israeli projects of settler colonial violence and dispossession, and how this affinity manifested in response to righteous student opposition to institutional investment in Israel’s genocide from 2023-2024:
Our assertion that the university is a colony might appear figurative or far-reaching to some. However, we must not let the symbolic quality of the statement overshadow how literal colonialism can be, and has been, in the history of land grabs, segregation, repression, and investments in war technology. In response to these settler colonial university legacies, student encampments and “liberated zones” rose from campus grounds in 2023/24, reactivating the awe-inspiring power of the people to bend the world toward liberation by putting their bodies, voices, and futures on the line… At the same time, we also witnessed how university administrations wielded empty language and the power of state violence to dismantle student encampments and suppress their critical awareness and analysis… As other settler colonies have done and continue to do, universities responded as they always have, by defending their right to protect and punish, especially on issues concerning Palestine and the plight of its people.
Administrators threatened, attacked, and pressed charges against their students, unleashing police officers in full gear and militant formation on them. Students were beaten and bruised, rounded up, and taken to jail, their clothes and hijabs ripped, and their belongings destroyed. Through each of these moments, the university’s origins as an epicenter of aggression was broadcast around the world.
Our current moment in which universities uncritically defer to bad-faith complaints against outspoken faculty by repressing them for anti-colonial speech—and legitimizing misrepresentations of these precarious subjects as ultimate threats to boot—did not occur in a vacuum. The current criminalization of Palestine in academe did not begin under the latest Trump administration, but Joe Biden, who enabled Israel’s latest, escalated genocide in Gaza every step of the way, including by laundering debunked Israeli atrocity propaganda meant to manufacture consent for the genocide. Unfettered support for Palestinian death and dispossession has long been a bipartisan consensus within the US political establishment.
Fully appreciating the tenor of the current academic status quo requires appreciation of how the American academy was instrumentalized in key ways from the Cold War through the War on Terror. McCarthyist sentiment cast academics as crypto-Communists and potential saboteurs, even as intellectual advancement was seen as a key element to countering Soviet ascendance in the years to come.
As Joseph Massad convincingly argues, following 9/11, and with the subsequent rise and normalization of police militarization and surveillance, Israel/Palestine operated as a foundation for elites to mount a broader assault upon academic freedom and faculty governance—a way, ultimately, to roll back the curricular and epistemological advancements of various anti-war and liberation movements that had treated the campus as an arena of struggle.
Even as academic and political elites have finally lost a hegemonic consensus upon the unimpeachability of Israel and Zionism in spaces conventionally associated with erudition and prestige, the post October 7, 2023 crackdown upon students and faculty builds upon a decades-long process of reshaping the university in a way most directly aligned with the dictates of the geo-imperial status quo, which has also entailed reversing counter-hegemonic contestations of normative educational policy as reflected in initiatives such as ethnic studies.
In a climate whose current conditions were cumulatively abetted through years of Orientalist dehumanization of Palestinians, and in a moment where Israel’s genocide in Gaza has expanded to a vicious US/Israeli war on Iran and Israel’s US-abetted ethnic cleansing in Lebanon (much of which, it must be said, is made possible by the products of reactionary and vehemently anti-intellectual technofascists,) we can be sure that the repression will continue, and be legitimized by recasting the victims and opponents of violence as its perpetrators.
We must not back down in our support of all impacted by such repressive campaigns, nor in the ongoing project of dismantling settler-colonial and imperial apologia that traffics in such inversions to protect the integrity of state-sanctioned extermination and conquest of the many for the privilege and profit of the few.
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Omar Zahzah is a writer, poet, organiser, and Assistant Professor of Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas (AMED) Studies at San Francisco State University. The article appeared in The Palestine Chronicle.
