They pressured the Hastings Board of Directors into an emergency meeting in which the board decided to “take all steps necessary to remove the UC Hastings name and brand” from the conference. Frank Wu, dean and chancellor, was barred from giving a welcoming talk; a major foundation withdrew funding.

Professors dislike academic intimidation, and this case is no exception. Nearly all of UC Hastings’ tenured professors signed a letter warning that the board’s capitulation to outside pressure on academic freedom risked “great damage to Hastings’ reputation.”

The elected student government, joined by 30 student organizations, charged the board with “stifling their academic freedom” and “prospectively chilling free speech” at future academic conferences.

They are right, of course. But there are bigger issues at stake.

Why were these mainstream Jewish organizations so troubled by the academic pursuit of legal approaches to securing Palestinian rights and freedom?

Perhaps for the first time in U.S. history, there is an aggressive challenge to a one-sided narrative that covers up or justifies ongoing Israeli repression of Palestinians, and U.S. culpability for that repression. The center of that challenge is on campuses, which is why those who have traditionally adopted knee-jerk defenses of Israeli policies are attempting to stigmatize or shut down alternative viewpoints.

In this case, the conference in question was about the legal rights of Palestinians. Its lead convener was former San Francisco public defender and Hastings law professor George Bisharat. He was joined by numerous legal scholars and human rights lawyers, including many Jews, from the United States and Israel.

Yet JCRC head Doug Kahn dubbed the conference, which was focused on nonviolent legal strategies to address the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, “anti-Israel.” He’s right, however, only if you regard Thurgood Marshall’s efforts on behalf of the civil rights movement to be “anti-American.”

Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, a lecturer at UC Santa Cruz, indicated in a letter of complaint that UC Hastings could lose federal funds if the conference proceeded.

Rossman-Benjamin, who has long tried to silence speakers and academics who are critical of Israeli policies, many of them Jewish and even Israeli, recently filed a complaint about alleged anti-Semitism at UC Santa Cruz focusing on educational programming related to Israel and Palestine. The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, the target of a multi-year campaign to criminalize pro-Palestinian student activism led by the Zionist Organization of America, began an investigation. Ominously, such moves suggest that legitimate criticism of Israeli policy is being conflated with anti-Semitism.

If this is allowed to happen, then serious debate on Israel’s illegal actions in the Palestinian territories will be shut down. That is a threat not just to academic freedom but to American free speech and our ability to help secure the rights of everyone in Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

A week before, a shaken program leader said the AIPAC staffer had threatened to get the entire youth program’s funding canceled if I was allowed in the door. The threat worked, and in disgust, they canceled the whole talk.

Pundits will surely argue for years about professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s explosive new book, The Israel Lobby, which blames poor U.S. policy in the Middle East on a loose network of individuals and pro-Israel advocacy groups.

But the book, and the response to it, opens up another controversy: the stifling of debate about unconditional U.S. support for Israeli policies.

Why is Israel’s increasingly brutal 40-year occupation of Palestinian land regularly debated in the mainstream media abroad, including in Israel, but not here? And why is there an almost total lack of discussion among presidential candidates about the dollars that subsidize this occupation and the American diplomatic support that makes it possible?

In a society built on the free exchange of ideas, as Walt and Mearsheimer point out, one answer can be found by looking at the many self-appointed gatekeepers, such as Abraham Foxman and the Anti-Defamation League, or Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who use their Jewish identity as both a shield and cudgel. They work diligently to silence those who question ill-conceived policies of the Israeli and U.S. governments.

Non-Jewish critics, even former President Carter, are denounced as anti-Semites. Special ire is reserved for Jewish dissenters, who are branded as “self-hating” or “marginal,” while Muslim and Arab-Americans are easily smeared and even criminalized with charges of supporting terrorism.

Stunned by the stifling of dissent, we decided to start a Web site, Muzzlewatch, to track the incidents. Just as we launched, Stanford Middle East Studies Professor Joel Beinin was disinvited from a speaking engagement at a high school with just 24 hours’ notice.

After an unprecedented campaign of outside interference waged by Dershowitz, Professor Norman Finkelstein was refused tenure by DePaul University because of his criticism of U.S.-Israeli policy.

Palestinian-American anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj is fighting a political campaign to deny her tenure at Barnard.

Even Walt and Mearsheimer, who are getting plenty of exposure, couldn’t have asked for better proof of their point that the lobby works to stifle dissent when an embarrassed head of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs told them that their scheduled speech was canceled. (They did speak before the World Affairs Council of Dallas/Fort Worth on Sept. 17.) This was apparently because Foxman was not available that day to “balance” their talk.

(They had initially been booked by themselves. The talk was not rescheduled.)

Many groups that started with the important work of fighting real anti-Semitism now rely on anti-Semitism to insist that to show one’s love of Jews, one must offer uncritical support to Israel. They are especially displeased by Jews who believe that enabling Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights is not good for anyone.

Unless this atmosphere of intimidation is confronted, Americans will continue to lack access to information and perspectives necessary to formulate effective Middle East policies, virtually ensuring that Israel and the United States will be at war for many years to come.

A podcast of Walt and Mearsheimer’s presentation, ‘The Israel Lobby,’ is available here.