A free speech battle brewing on Harvard Yard is being stoked by professors who led the fight to oust a former president of the university, Lawrence Summers.

Arguing that critics of Israel at Harvard “tremble in fear” when expressing their views on campus, a professor of anthropology and African and African-American Studies at Harvard, J. Lorand Matory, is pushing a politically charged proposal demanding that the university renew its commitment to free speech.

Mr. Matory, who in the past has called on Harvard to divest from Israel, is being accused by students and faculty members of couching an anti-Israel agenda as an issue of free speech.

“It’s a new tactic by virulent anti-Israel people who are whining that they’re being silenced,” a professor at Harvard Law School, Alan Dershowitz, said in an interview. “The only people who tremble on campuses are students at Columbia and Berkeley who are worried that they’ll be graded down for being pro-Israel.”

The student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, last week vilified Mr. Matory on its editorial page: “Mr. Matory’s resolution in favor of ‘civil dialogue’ isn’t really about free speech at all. … The real point of Matory’s resolution, then, was not to reaffirm trite platitudes, but to push an agenda,” the unsigned editorial read.

A sophomore economics major at Harvard, Julia Bertelsmann, said that as the editor of a new journal on the Middle East called New Society, she found that Muslim and Arab students were afraid to criticize terrorist regimes, but not Israel, in her pages.

“Muslim students are not at all afraid to criticize Israel,” Ms. Bertelsmann said. “I have contacted students who have critical views of their governments and are terrified to speak up.”

The motion that the faculty of arts and sciences will take up on December 11 requests in broad language that the faculty reaffirm its dedication to a “civic dialogue.” Last month, the motion was tabled because the meeting was short of quorum. “The author of the motion clearly stood ready to spin any ‘no’ vote as a vote against free speech,” a professor of government at Harvard, Eric Nelson, said. “We did not want to dance to his tune.” Mr. Matory today is scheduled to address a group of pro-Palestinian students at Harvard Law School in an effort to round up support for his motion.

“On no other issue at Harvard have I ever heard of the disinvitation of even one invited speaker, much less three,” Mr. Matory writes in an article he said he plans to publish next week in the Crimson. Mr. Matory lists an Oxford professor, Tom Paulin, a professor of history at DePaul University, Norman Finkelstein, and a biologist at Rutgers University, Robert Trivers, as speakers who were disinvited because they were critical of Israel.

“Dissenting opinions about Israel-Palestine are confined to back-corridor whispers,” Mr. Matori writes. “If we do not face the issue of how the conversation about Israel/Palestine issue in particular has been shut down, the principle of ‘free speech’ will remain an abstract principle, and the only remaining arena of debate — as proposed by President Bush and his pro-Israeli advisors — will be World War III.”

A professor of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard, Ruth Wisse, said the entire debate was a political tactic. “It’s the same thing that happened in the case of Walt and Mearsheimer, when the discussion was not about their attack, but about the fact that people were canceling their speeches. They use the rubric of free speech to discourage free speech,” Ms. Wisse said.