🧵 VICTORY for free speech & Palestinian solidarity! In December, the California Court of Appeal (6th Dist.) upheld the trial court’s denial of an anti-SLAPP motion in Khalil v. Steiner.

With many of you hitting the streets today and in the weeks and months ahead, we wanted to uplift some resources about knowing your rights in a protest, particularly for student activists.

JUSTICE FOR PRO-PALESTINIAN UCLA STUDENTS! During UCLA's drawn-out disciplinary processes, students are reliving traumatic experiences of Zionist doxing and harassment, as well as extreme vigilante violence by Zionist attackers and assault by UC police at the 2024 encampment.

STANFORD STUDENTS ON TRIAL SPEAK OUT! Five Stanford students are facing felony charges for occupying a building to demand Stanford stop investing in companies complicit in Israel’s genocide against Palestinians.

🎉 VICTORY: A federal court has dismissed yet another Zionist attempt to rebrand Palestinian rights advocacy as a Title VI civil rights violation. The lawsuit, Sussman v MIT, argued MIT violated civil rights laws by not doing enough to censor speech critical of Israel on campus.

TRIAL STARTS TODAY for 5 Stanford students facing felony charges for occupying a building to demand Stanford divest from companies complicit in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. Watch this trial closely: it's the most severe criminal case brought against US student protesters against the genocide.

OUR MIT LAWSUIT ARGUMENT: Palestine Legal is defending the First Amendment rights of Palestinian and associated students and professors in an Israel lobby group’s lawsuit against the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

The report “Discriminating Against Dissent: The Weaponization of Civil Rights Law to Repress Campus Speech on Palestine,” discusses how federal Civil rights laws have been weaponized and distorted to suppress pro Palestinian speech. www.aaup.org/news/new-rep...

Palestine Legal wrapped 2025: Most absurd anti-Palestinian censorship at universities!

VICTORY: A federal judge dismissed a Harvard Business School grad's baseless Title VI lawsuit against Harvard. He affirmed that pro-Palestinian political speech, including "from the river to the sea," isn't antisemitic just because some pro-Israel Jewish students claim it is.

In an in-depth “Portrait of a Campus in Crisis” based on more than 40 interviews, @jewishcurrents.bsky.social shows how UCLA’s capitulation to pro-Israel students and groups — and resulting violent repression of pro-Palestinian activists — paved the way for Trump’s attacks on the university.

UNIVERSITIES, STOP SURVEILLING STUDENTS WITH FEDERAL DATA CENTERS! An investigative series by @theintercept.com has found that fusion centers were actively involved in monitoring pro-Palestine demonstrations on at least five campuses across the country.

ANTIDEMOCRATIC TO THE CORE: We condemn Texas Gov Abbott’s designation of @cairnational.bsky.social, alongside the Muslim Brotherhood, as “Foreign Terrorist and Criminal Organizations,” a designation which the Governor has no legal authority to make, and CAIR is vigorously challenging. 🧵⬇️:

Yesterday, Palestine Legal sent a letter to the University of Colorado-Boulder about its discriminatory suppression and criminalization of Palestine activists protesting weapons companies on campus. We are urging the university to drop charges against students immediately.

When the UC system failed to legally challenge Trump's $1.2 billion fine against UCLA, UC faculty, staff, and students sued Trump themselves — and won. Now that they've saved the UC system from Trump's cuts, we demand UCLA drop all charges against student protesters.

DISMANTLE IHRA! A tenured professor is suing the University of Kentucky because the discredited definition of antisemitism is being used yet again to repress pro-Palestinian speech, as reported by @alicesperi.bsky.social for @us.theguardian.com.

Imagine if students, workers, and people of conscience were celebrated for supporting Palestinian freedom. This is the future that Palestine Legal is building through our legal, advocacy, and communications work. FORTIFY DISSENT WITH US: palestinelegal.org/donate

Civil rights laws are being weaponized to to suppress pro-Palestine speech on campus according to @mesa1966.bsky.social and @aaup.org's critical new report released today.

Yesterday, UC Berkeley Law students published a report exposing their university's hostile environment of anti-Palestinian racism, in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Despite repeat formal complaints, UC Berkeley has failed to act on reported incidents of racism.

GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY CENSORS STUDENT SPEECH! Today we sent a letter threatening to sue George Mason University on behalf our client, Mason Students for Justice in Palestine, over its unconstitutional enforcement of the IHRA definition.

The Brandeis Center’s letter threatening Film Workers For Palestine with legal action for boycotting Israeli film institutions is a desperate attempt to silence cultural workers standing on the right side of history. But this isn't the only example: (thread)

VICTORY: A federal court ruled yesterday that the Trump administration’s policy of targeting noncitizen students and faculty for deportation based on their political speech in support of Palestinian rights—particularly protest activity—violates constitutional protections.

UC Berkeley has capitulated to to the "bullying and extortion" of the Trump administration by sharing the names of about 160 students, faculty members, and staff members who have a “potential connection to reports of alleged antisemitism.”

TOP AB 715! AB 715 is an extremely dangerous bill designed to censor criticism of Israel and any education about Palestinian histories, struggles against colonization, and erasure.

Trump and universities are trying to crush resistance to the genocide in Gaza through: 🚔 law enforcement and ICE partnerships 🚫 the Israel lobby definition of "antisemitism" 🤐 new anti-free speech policies Examples of these attacks and how students & faculty have fought back:

VICTORY: Yesterday, a federal judge concluded the Trump admin "used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities, and did so in a way that runs afoul of the APA, the First Amendment and Title VI."

Palestine Legal joined @fightforthefuture.org and 30+ human rights organizations to send a letter to university administrations demanding they roll back harmful surveillance policies and protect their students. Read the full letter here: www.fightforthefuture.org/news/2025-08...

Under Trump, the Dept. of Health and Human Services has a new role, writes @alexbkane.bsky.social for @jewishcurrents.bsky.social: investigating universities, cutting billions of dollars in funding to schools, and "decimating decades of research" to crack down on support for Palestinian rights.

"Universities did everything in their power to suppress the student movement: suspending people, firing professors, banning clubs— Capitulation doesn’t work. The Trump admin is still fleecing them for millions of dollars," said our staff atty Dylan on a panel at @netrootsnation.bsky.social.

VICTORY: Our clients UMD SJP will receive a $100,000 settlement from the University of Maryland — the highest financial penalty likely ever imposed on a US university for violating pro-Palestinian students’ free speech rights, to our knowledge. palestinelegal.org/news/umd-set...

#ArmsEmbargoNow: Data compiled and published by Israel’s own govt makes it clear that it has been deliberately starving Gaza, reports @theguardian.com. A worst-case scenario famine is now unfolding in Gaza, UN-backed food security experts said this week. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

PRESSURE WORKS! Sereen Haddad, a Palestinian student at Virginia Commonwealth University, has defeated baseless charges and had her degree restored after an appeal, a successful pressure campaign, and representation from Palestine Legal. Sereen has lost 200+ members of her family in Gaza.

THREAD: Columbia University continues to bend the knee to Trump, announcing Tuesday it would further repress pro-Palestinian student activism by adopting the distorted IHRA definition of antisemitism and partnering with the ADL, a widely discredited Israel lobby group.