To the degree discourse about Israel and Palestine has been captured by the student and faculty left, the university has been made more strange in the wake of the Hamas terrorist attacks on October 7. On the one hand, a simple and deep human concern and political curiosity inform solidarity with Palestine and opposition to the war. On the other hand, the discourse against Israel and Zionism has become more pronounced than ever before. Linda Dayan here at Ha’aretz described the Janus-faced character of the protests at the encampment at UCLA. “The two halves of the event felt dichotomous. One was an invitation to learn, an outpouring of grief, an act of sharing and listening that, cliched as it might sound, seemed radical at a time when free expression feels like it’s under attack the world over. The other was exactly what the movement’s detractors believe it to be: a glorification of violence and maximalism, a grafting of simplistic western buzzwords and concepts onto a complex foreign cause.”

Representing a new norm, the most recent and powerful mutation of anti-Zionism at its most extreme is inherently anti-Semitic. It embraces open support of violence against Jews in Israel, calls for the destruction of Israel, and imposes litmus tests excluding Jews and Israelis from campus life and the public sphere. Pervasive and virulent expression of anti-Zionism contributes to a hostile environment on campus that is anti-liberal and anti-humanist. In the post-truth age of Trump and digital media, this new pro-Palestine-anti-Zionist norm on campus builds upon larger historical loops of anti-Israel violence and Palestinian dispossession fed into our hypermediated and polarized environment generating radical animus against the people and State of Israel across large parts of the academic left. The hardest edge of the new anti-Zionism is not uniformly distributed. It varies from campus to campus and inside individual campuses. It reflects the sharp animosity of a narrow subset of activists and supporters, and extends into larger social networks. In this way, Israel becomes a crystalized object of hate determining large swaths of discourse on campus.

At its most radical extreme, the new norm against Israel is an antithetical structure that conforms to an internal binary logic. [1] To be left today is to be pro-Palestine. [2] To be pro-Palestine is to be anti-Zionist and anti-Israel, i.e. in total opposition to the Zionist “settler colonialism” and to the existence of the State of Israel. [3] After October 7, to be on the extreme pro-Palestine-anti-Zionist left is to be either pro-Hamas, Hamas-adjacent, or Hamas-apologetic to the degree that Hamas is seen as the main force of “the resistance” against Israel and Zionism. [4] To be pro-Hamas or Hamas-apologetic is to be “anti-Jewish” to the degree that Jews identify with Zionism and Israel. [5] This ideo-logical chain opens the door to anti-Semitism based on any number of metrics (holding Jews responsible for actions taken by the Israeli government, establishing Israel-based litmus tests excluding Jews from public life, holding up Zionism as a unique source of evil in the world, targeting “Zionists” on campus).

Large or sizable student demonstrations are, by nature, amorphous. It cannot be that anywhere near a majority of students and faculty on campus, including those protesting Israel’s conduct of the war against Hamas, are personally motivated by this binary logic. Opposed to the government of Israel and the occupation of the West Bank, they are simply critical of Israel, which is not anti-Semitic and not anti-Zionist. But discourse follows a logic of its own. It is hard to know if the majority of students and faculty grasp the import of slogans and chants and talking points organized by student groups and their affiliates leading the protests. Speaking in the name of “the resistance” after October 7, student and outside organizers leading the demonstrations determine a relatively uniform set of pro-Palestine-anti-Zionist messaging that is explicitly or tacitly pro-Hamas, anti-peace, and anti-Semitic.

For the last two decades, student activism against Israel has been led by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and their affiliates and allies across the organized campus left. Including Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), the core activism goes beyond “criticism of Israel.” Against any middle ground between Israel and Palestine, an all or nothing binary dominates the organized activist left in relation to Israel. SJP has been the primary student body conducting “anti-normalization” campaigns against dialogue and cooperation with campus groups that are “pro-Israel.” Anti-Zionism on campus embraces only the small, token minority of Jews who align with movement goals. In its most extreme formulation, “nuance” is dismissed as “violent.”

The politics of Israel and Palestine have always been binary, but not to the degree seen on campus today, not in this media environment where there is little to zero room for political middle ground. The polarization on campus in the immediate wake of October 7 was made openly manifest by incidents involving individual professors, for instance at Columbia, Cornell, Yale, and elsewhere, expressing exhilaration for the Hamas assaults on southern Israel. These expressions were not condemned by student activists or faculty on campus. If anything, the extreme sentiment expressed by such statements has become an accepted part of the larger political fold on campus. The pro-Palestine-anti-Israel organizing on campus is anti-liberal, not in support of universal human rights and coexistence, not antiwar, and not pro-peace. Leading segments of the student and faculty left call for the “decolonization” of Israel, i.e. the abolition of Israel, a “settler-colonial” state. The crimes against civilians in the south of Israel are taken to represent the legitimate “armed resistance” of an occupied people against a “genocidal” regime.

[I]

In a letter drafted in 1989, Edward Said was going to reach out to American Jewish intellectuals. The letter was recently published for the first time here at the anti-Zionist Jewish Currents. The editors do not explain why Said considered the appeal “too incendiary to publish.” The open letter is a timepiece when American Jews began shifting away from uncompromising support for Israel in light of Israeli policy in the occupied territories and during the First Lebanon war. At the time of the First Intifada, before he came to advocate a single-secular-democratic state, Said recognized in Israel and Palestine the unequal and violent co-existence of two national movements. Unlike the Second Intifada, the First Intifada is almost universally acknowledged as having been largely, although not completely non-violent. At the time, the Palestinian national movement at the time was not religious; neither was the Jewish political right in Israel and the United States. Hamas had not yet become a power in Palestinian politics. Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and Gaza enjoyed nothing like the political-electoral force they do today. At that political moment, Said challenged American Jewish intellectuals to declare themselves “plainly and in the full light of day” for “the joint, politically equal survival of two peoples.”

Said, of course, later came to reject the two-state solution. Harsh as he was in his critique of Israel, Said retained an underlying liberalism this is at odds with the uncompromising expression of anti-Zionist animus that is widespread today. The basic political values supported by Said were essentially liberal, based on appeals to equality, universal human rights, and the imperative of mutual recognition. What Said wrote in 1989 still rings true and bears repeating, “Palestinian and Jewish histories are, for the 20th century at least, inscribed within each other; they cannot be separated, and they must be evaluated and acknowledged in moral terms, in terms of a future in which both peoples have the rights of survival and decent existence in a shared Palestine, partitioned into two states. No less than Jews, Palestinians have achieved an undeniable and irreversible degree of national self-consciousness which it would be (and is) ethnocidal to oppose. It seems to me then that the way before us is quite clearly marked. We are either to fight for justice, truth, and the right to honest criticism, or we should quite simply give up the title of intellectual” (emphasis in bold added).

[II]

The liberal humanism expressed by Said in his appeal to Jewish intellectuals no longer defines the pro-Palestine-anti-Zionist left. If anything, the left on campus mirrors the hard right and religious hard right in Israel. As articulated by student leaders and faculty supporters, campus discourse is strained by an either/or opposition between Palestine and Israel. Israel is simply and only a colonial power, not a genuine national community, as recognized by Said or his successor at Columbia, the historian Rashid Khalidi. Against the possibility of mutual recognition, it is taken for granted on the radical left that the logical/necessary consequence of Israel is the suppression of Palestine, and that the liberation of Palestine entails the complete abolition of Israel. Messaging on the pro-Palestine-anti-Zionist left mimics “the resistance,” as if Hezbollah and Hamas is part of “the international left. Some and maybe most pro-Palestine-anti-Zionist critics on campus might oppose the tactics Hamas. But they support the end goal and cause of Hamas: the total abolition of Zionism and the creation of an Arab Palestine between the River and Sea.

What sharpens the Israel and Palestine discourse today is the extremist government of Israel under Netanyahu and the religious right, on the one hand, and the power in Palestine of Hamas, on the other. Each mirror the other and polarize the politics of Israel and Palestine. Each abuse their own people. Unprecedented assaults on civilian life –the trauma suffered by Israelis on October 7 and the trauma suffered by Palestinians during the war– mark a watershed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a watershed in campus politics.

Prior to October 7, pro-Palestinian-anti-Zionist activism was led by BDS. In addition to calling for university boycotts and divestment targeting Israel. In addition to staging their own protests and initiatives, activists from SJP and other campus groups in support of BDS were involved in disrupting “pro-Israeli” events and shouting down speakers. Associated with SJP, activists working under the auspices of BDS were also responsible for the early emergence of anti-normalization campaigns against Jewish student groups on campus. BDS always insisted that the movement was non-violent, although, arguably, violence always underpinned BDS. A primary demand of BDS remains a comprehensive Palestinian right of return to 1948 Israel, entailing the dismantling of the country, which was never going to be non-violent. At the moment of truth, activists pushing BDS supported “armed resistance” against civilians in Israel and intimidation tactics on campus, despite BDS claiming to support universal human rights.

After October 7, activists raised the politics of Palestine on campus to a new pitch: anti-liberal and in open support of violence. The violence of October 7 was echoed in the protests, subliminally and consciously, as led by the hard core of pro-Palestine-anti-Zionist activists leading the chants and governing the protests calling for the destruction of a UN member state. What some still claim are non-violent or ambiguous slogans like “Free Palestine” and “River to Sea” are given a hard meaning when conjoined in the direct wake of October 7 with calls for “Intifada Revolution,” “Resistance By Any Means Necessary,” and “Zionists Off Campus.” Added to the aggregate are calls from student organizers supporting not just resistance, but “the resistance,” namely Hamas. One recalls in relation to these displays the abovementioned thrill on campus and off-campus in the wake of October 7. Directly invoking the Hamas massacre at the Nova musical festival, the early appearance of a paraglider insignia was quickly dropped, although Nova was an object of protest in June by the off campus activist group Within Our Lifetime in New York City. Increasingly common are displays at protests and encampments of inverted red triangles, a symbol used in Hamas propaganda videos to mark IDF military assets targeted by Hamas fighters in Gaza as per here and here.  

It bears repeating: I am making no broad claims about the prevalence of latent or manifest anti-Semitism on campus. It is impossible to gauge what relatively large groups of people are thinking at any given moment. It is safe to assume that most students and faculty outside the hard core of activists are motivated by human concerns and human suffering, a desire for peace, as suggested here. In a normal political context, opinion is amorphous and hard to assess even as one wonders what students and faculty who know nothing about the history of Israel and Palestine are quickly gathering onsite and from social media in the immediate wake of October 7.

Easy to read is the hypermediated messaging on campus by SJP leadership and the polarizing effect on the general discourse. A handful of universities suspended SJP chapters along with Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) for violating codes of student conduct and university policy. On many campuses, protest leaders refused to negotiate with the university administrations over core demands relating to divestment and boycotts. Invested in conflict and confrontation, National SJP and campus SJP chapters along with JVP and others were the ones who drew the brightest ideological positioning and political lines that gave clear definition to messaging at the protests. Radicalizing the anti-Zionist animus on campus, one that targets Jewish students, the agenda, if not openly anti-Semitic, is easy to read as polarized and polarizing.

[III]

What’s brand new and disturbing about the new norm is open support of “the resistance.” Radicalizing the current campus discourse, anti-Zionist student leaders and faculty advisors “contextualize” Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthi violence against Israel –up to the point of justifying and embracing violence against civilians.

A case in point is the first organized student statement at Columbia University, “Oppression Breeds Resistance” which you can read here. The student statement, which you can read here, acknowledges “tragic losses” on both sides of the conflict, Israeli and Palestinian, before feeding directly into a virulent strain of structural anti-Zionism that marks the letter as a whole.  

The first paragraph of the student statement, depending on what one means by “the Israeli occupation,” are words that many people of good faith should have been able to sign off on. The initial support of universal rights, peace, and justice is expressed in the argot of mourning and grief typical of Generation Z. Written in the passive voice, the statement makes no mention of Hamas nor does it condemn the violence of October 7. And then the entire onus for the “untenable status quo” is placed on Israel. The untenable status quo is left undefined. It could mean the ongoing siege of Gaza since Hamas took over the territory in 2007, or the 1967 occupation, or the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.

After the first paragraph, the Columbia student statement turns into a very narrow corner. No longer from the heart, the student statement is dominated by readymade talking points about “settler colonialism,” “apartheid,” and “root causes” that are the basis upon which to “contextualize” the massacres in the south of Israel. The students address the larger historical arc that is the history of Palestinian dispossession since 1948 with no regard for historical nuance or ideological complexity. According to the student statement, “The weight of responsibility for the war and casualties undeniably lies with the Israeli extremist government and other Western governments, including the U.S. government, which fund and staunchly support Israeli aggression, apartheid and settler-colonization.” In support of “the Palestinian people’s legitimate right to self-determination,” the statement concludes by calling for ending relations between Columbia University with Israel and Israeli academic institutions.

In support of the student statement, a letter from Columbia and Barnard faculty, which you can read here, quickly followed. The faculty signatories joined the students in “recontextualizing” the Hamas atrocities of October 7 in terms of legitimate armed resistance, an act of popular war, “just one salvo in an ongoing war between an occupying state and the people it occupies,” not the calculated action of Hamas, a terrorist organization and ruling governing authority funded by Qatar and trained by Iran. In addition to defending the student signatories from criticism, including the accusation that the protests were themselves anti-Semitic or abetting anti-Semitism, perhaps the faculty letter was meant to do a bit of damage control regarding human rights. The faculty signatories recognize the “right to resist violent and illegal occupation, something anticipated by international humanitarian law in the Second Geneva Protocol.” In the same breath, they concede this right must “conform to the laws of war, which include a prohibition against the intentional targeting of civilians.” They then claim, “The [student] statement reflects and endorses this legal framework, including a condemnation of the killing of civilians.” The professors’ statement was a tacit recognition that the Hamas attacks were not, in fact, a legitimate act of armed resistance, while obfuscating what the students themselves actually wrote. In fact, the student statement, alongside calls for “resistance by any means necessary,” did not endorse legal frameworks against the intentional targeting of civilians. The students mourned the loss of civilian life without condemning Hamas. Neither did the faculty. The faculty statement says nothing about the anti-Semitism experienced by Jewish and Israeli students and faculty-colleagues except to obscure it.

Both the student sympathy for civilian life and the faculty statement aligning analysis around international law quickly gave way before the gravitational force of a deep-seated anti-Zionism. Being one-sided against the people of Israel, there was nothing to brake the remarkably harsh anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic messaging expressed on and off-campus at Columbia and other campuses over the course of the protests after October. In private, some Columbia faculty expressed genuine shock at the most extreme anti-Semitic messaging and at acts and threats of physical violence against Jewish students. But they quickly sought to protect the main body of putatively peaceful student protestors and blamed violent outsiders. This was disingenuous. The protests on campus were largely peaceful, but the messaging was not. The main part of the messaging just off campus was the exact same messaging on campus by student demonstrators against Israel, against “Zionists” on campus, against “Zionist” control of the university, and in support of “the resistance.”

The student and faculty statements engage in no little gaslighting. Both statements ignore the harsh reality of anti-Jewish violence by Hamas directed against civilians in Israel. The calls at protests for ceasefire at the height of the Israeli assault on Hamas in the first weeks of the war were not calls for peace. In support of Palestinian national self-determination, they were not accompanied by calls for coexistence or universal human rights. Israel was uniformly anathematized. The pro forma rejection of anti-Semitism relying heavily on a minority token of anti-Zionist Jews did nothing to allay protest support for anti-Jewish violence in Israel or discourage, in the most extreme cases, the creation of a discriminatory anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic climate against “Zionists” on campus.

[IV]

Aligning campus protests with “the resistance,” National SJP, local SJP chapters, and affiliated campus groups represented the public face leading the protests and responsible for its messaging. Sowing the seeds of a new pro-Hamas norm on campus, National SJP embraced the violence of October 7 as “heroic” and “historical.” The violence of October 7 was seen as key to the Palestinian struggle for freedom and self-determination against Israel.

Confrontational and non-compromising, an index of the pro-Hamas mood on and off campus was invoked by violent graphics. First there were images of paragliders on a major National SJP document signaling support of the terrorist attacks on the Nova festival. The tagging of inverted red triangles was common and remains common at the most extreme protests, encampments, and actions. In its public statements, National SJP speaks in the name of “the resistance,” the Palestinian people, “our people,” glory, martyrs. National SJP calls for the return to all of Palestine, and the elimination of Israel as a nation-state. National and local SJP statements included dog whistling about “Zionist money” and control of the media. National SJP and local chapters are the major voice group behind anti-normalization campaigns targeting Jewish student groups like Hillel and Chabad, demanding to have them removed from campus. Off campus, activists tore down or ripped up and otherwise defaced flyers with photographs of Israeli hostages, children and old people alike; entire neighborhoods were tagged with anti-Israel messaging against “genocide” and calling for “intifada.”

In addition to the ADL profile on SJP, which you can read here, I am recommending Arno Rosenfeld’s detailed and nuanced historical sketch of SJP, which you can read here. He tells what is a muddled story about its history, variously placing its founding in the 1990s during the Oslo period when SJP emerged as a moderating voice on campus. Local SJP chapters centralized in 2010 under the National Students for Justice in Palestine. The local chapters are still mostly autonomous, while the national organization provides leadership. Some chapters are moderate, others very extreme. A founder of the original SJP chapter at Berkeley is quoted by Rosenfeld as expressing worry that SJP is now flirting with support for Hamas. Rosenfeld notes as well that rightwing Zionist advocacy groups tie the SJP national leadership, to American Muslims for Palestine (AMP). Rosenfeld cites the ADL link above and this here from the conservative NGO Monitor  (With alleged links to Hamas, AMP is a not-for-profit corporation. But AMPS is not a federal,9 501c3, tax-exempt organization, which would obligate the to file an IRS 990 form and make its finances more transparent. As reported by Rosenfeld, only a fraction of SJP’s funding is known and publicly accessible. It is highly difficult to ascertain how much funding SJP receives from sources outside universities.)

Many and most SJP activities fall under protection of academic freedom. But this does not inure SJP and allies from criticism, especially concerning rhetoric espousing violence and actions aggressively targeting the rights of others on campus to their own expression of free speech and academic freedom, and participation in campus life.

On the day after October 7, National SJP issued a Day of Resistance Toolkit meant to guide pro-Palestine-anti-Israel discourse and demonstrations. Including the infamous image of a paraglider evoking the murders and sexual assault at the Nova festival, the toolkit provided historical and ideological framing and talking points for the first major protest scheduled for October 12, shortly after the massacres. Rosenfeld reports that steering committee members have “steadfastly” refused to discuss the toolkit, which is subject to legal dispute in Florida claiming that two local chapters at state schools and National SJP provided “material support” to a terrorist organization. Rosenfeld reports as well that some former leaders are concerned that the toolkit and other recent actions by current steering committee members make it easier for critics to accuse SJP of supporting terror. Rosenfeld also reports that members of National SJP who spoke to him expressed frustration by media attention on “past rhetoric about October 7.”

Not a matter of “past rhetoric,” the National SJP toolkit remains a highly visible and controversial manifesto. It is a prime example of how messaging on campus contributed to the polarizing charge that characterized many campus protests and encampments. I am citing it here in part:  

“National Students for Justice in Palestine is calling for a national day of resistance on college campuses across occupied Turtle Island and internationally this Thursday, October 12th, 2023 On the 50th anniversary of the 1973 war, the resistance in Gaza launched a surprise operation against the Zionist enemy which disrupted the very foundation of Zionist settler society. On the morning of October 8th, the Palestinian resistance stormed the illegitimate border fence, gaining control of the Gaza checkpoint at Erez, and re-entering 1948 Palestine. Referred to as Operation Towfan Al-Aqsa (Al-Aqsa Flood), the resistance has taken occupation soldiers hostage, fired thousands of rockets, taken over Israeli military vehicles, and gained control over illegal Israeli settlements. In the West Bank, the Palestinian resistance has called for collective action by the Palestinian masses amidst attempts by the Zionist entity to lock-up the West Bank. The Palestinian resistance has called for mass protests in every Palestinian city, and Palestinian workers have called for a general strike. In Gaza, Israel has launched an onslaught of airstrikes. As of Sunday, Oct 8th at 12pm ET, Israel has murdered 320 Palestinians and left over 2200 others injured. Despite this, our people choose resistance over negotiated cages on our homeland. Fearlessly, our people struggle for complete liberation and return. Today, we witness a historic win for the Palestinian resistance: across land, air, and sea, our people have broken down the artificial barriers of the Zionist entity, taking with it the facade of an impenetrable settler colony and reminding each of us that total return and liberation to Palestine is near. As the Palestinian student movement, we have an unshakable responsibility to join the call for mass mobilization. National liberation is near— glory to our resistance, to our martyrs, and to our steadfast people.”

More from the SJP Toolkit:

“Messaging and framing: For over 75 years, our Palestinian people, through steadfast resistance, have waged a prolonged war for liberation and return to our colonized homeland. What we are witnessing now is a heightened stage of the Palestinian struggle–through tearing down colonial infrastructure and liberating our colonized land from illegal settlements and military checkpoints, our people are actualizing revolution. Palestine will be liberated from the river to the sea, and our resistance, through their bravery and love for land, continue to bring dignity and honor to the Palestinian people. As the diaspora-based student movement for Palestine liberation, our responsibility is to not only support, but struggle alongside our people back home. The forces of Zionism engage in media campaigns which attack our people and resistance from all sides– it is our responsibility, therefore, to break through their hegemonic narratives of “war” and “unprovoked aggression,” and instead ground our campuses and communities in a narrative which centers the legitimacy of resistance and the necessity of complete liberation. Please find below a breakdown of framework and important messaging which help contextualize, frame, and above all normalize and support our fearless resistance.”

The SJP Toolkit offers to speak in the name of “the resistance” which they clearly identify with Hamas.  It whitewashes the massacres and abuse on October 7 that triggered the current Hamas-Israel war and civilian death in Gaza by Israel. The soaring pro-resistance-pro-Hamas rhetoric made no mention of the murder, sexual assaults, and kidnapping of civilians in the south of Israel. No word is given as to how Hamas dug itself deep under civilian neighborhoods and civilian infrastructure, ready to offer Palestinian civilians as a necessary sacrifice. Israel is the “Zionist enemy” and the “Zionist entity.” The Toolkit complains about “the media.”

The former leader of SJP quoted by Rosenfeld says he is “worried that anger over Israel’s increasingly brutal violence against Palestinians and the lack of an obvious alternative is pushing the Palestinian solidarity movement into the trap of supporting Hamas. And that this could turn off potential supporters. He says, “I’m sure there are a lot of people — including Jewish Americans — who are standing on the sidelines, and don’t feel that they can belong on either side,” he said. “I want the side we represent to be more welcoming.”

This might be easier said than done. National SJP and several chapters have a history predating October 7 supporting terrorism. National SJP and chapters glorify terrorists responsible for violence against Israeli civilians, including Hamas. As reported here at this Jerusalem based rightwing Zionist NGO, The authors of the report observe how “National SJP annual conferences feature speeches by convicted Palestinian terrorists from designated terror organizations while the conference steering committee has frequently supported Palestinian terrorists, often linking social media posts to the terror groups themselves.”

SJP talking-points affirming “the resistance” were re-enforced by speeches at the  Columbia protest on October 12, 2023, which you can read here. The speeches include words from Black, Jewish, Indigenous, Bengali allies. Some statements are more “moderate” than others; some regret the death of Israeli civilians. Notably, the representatives from JVP and BLM support the Palestinian struggle for rights and self-determination without mentioning “the resistance.” However, all of the statements are uncompromising in their opposition to Zionism, which they see as the root cause of October 7. SJP representatives took the first and last words, framing the protest as a whole. These speeches extoll “resistance,” “the resistance,” the “right to resist,” and “the inevitability of resistance.” They express voiced opposition to “peace” and “peaceful resistance.”

In the most extreme cases, the public face of the movement was hermetically sealed by protest organizers. Maintaining message discipline at the encampment, a Columbia SJP statement from April 2024 demanded that participants respect “inviolable principles” that are “non-negotiable,” unconditional allegiance and support of “armed resistance,” total opposition to Zionism and a rejection of conditional “solidarity.” The closed capture was reflected in reports from some of the most radicalized “liberated Zones” where access was regulated in order to keep media out.   At one point, Columbia faculty in yellow vests manning the camp entrance turned reporters away in deference to protesters’ demands, telling them that reporters would have to wait for an official student news conference. Meant to protect protesters from public doxxing, this kind of controlled access and the anonymity, as reported here, offered by wearing masks re-enforced message discipline . At Columbia and other campuses, “Zionists” were physically restrained from entering encampment sites or crossing protest lines in the middle of campus.

What’s new and remarkable is how National SJP, local chapters, and allies have captured the moment after October 7 and the Hamas Israel war to create on campus, in its most extreme form, a new and polarizing anti-Zionist norm based upon hard inside/outside binary zones of inclusion/exclusion.

In the most extreme cases, binary speech and hermetic protest circles created a hostile environment on campus. In northern California, demonstrations evoked Palestinian militancy with large banners at encampments in the center of campus, stretching across colonnades: “Glory to the martyrs, victory to the resistance!” At Berkeley, signs were flanked with the inverted red triangles.

Caught inside an extreme pro-Palestine-anti-Israel, the progressive left on campus catalyzes straight-up anti-Semitism, not from so-called outside agitators, but from student leaders themselves. Consider in this light the statement from UCB Divest + UC Berkeley Graduate Students for Justice in Palestine at the end of the academic year when they folded up the encampment at Berkeley in May 2024. You can read it here   The statement announcing the encampment’s closure blamed a litany of evils on Israel, “from the extermination of indigenous peoples, to racist border regimes to industrializing killing and the policing of insurgent life.” In this worldview, “Palestine condenses all” of those harms into one single issue. In its isolation and demonization of Israel as a unique and crystalizing evil in the world, the pro-Palestine-anti-Zionist left reiterates the classic anti-Semitic canard of Jewish world control.

The most disturbing violation of campus norms is the targeting of events sponsored by Jewish students, organizations like Hillel, and Jewish faculty.

As reported here, pro-Palestinian student groups led by the SJP chapter along with allies at Baruch College in New York City protested the school’s Hillel. The Jewish campus group was accused of murdering children and supporting fascism and genocide. The protesters carried a banner “It is right to rebel, Hillel go to hell” with the inverted red triangle targeted over the letter “i” of Hillel. As reported, “student demonstrators repeatedly flashed inverted triangles with their hands at counter-protesters. Another protester brandished a banner that had a swastika inside a Star of David while shouting, “Synagogue of Satan”  and reported here.

In a socially polarized and hostile environment, what are still outlier events threaten to become part of a new norm targeting Jews on campus. At Berkeley, as reported here and here Bears for Palestine (the SJP-affiliated group on campus) organized a violent protest at an event by Jewish students forcing them to evacuate under campus security escort.

[[By way of update posted October 6, 2024, I am including this link re: Columbia Univerity Apartheid Divestment (CUAD). An offshot of SJP and JVP after their suspension from campus, CUAD represents the leadership cadre of student protesters at the university supporting acts of terror committed against Israeli citizens under the rubrics of decolonialism and Political Islam]]

Under this emerging pro-Palestine-anti-Zionist norm, Jewish administrators are not immune to targeting. Berkeley Law Students for Justice in Palestine targeted a dinner for law students hosted by the Dean of the Law School Erwin Chemerinsky and Catherine Fisk at their home. Prior to the event, the SJP chapter circulated a cartoon of the dean holding a fork and knife covered in blood. The flyer called for a cancellation and boycott of the faculty sponsored student event. “No dinner with Zionist Chem while Gaza starves,”  as reported here. David Schraub writes about this SJP action against Chemerinsky here: Schraub’s focus is on breached norms of conduct, in this case a tradition of faculty hosting students at their private homes. Clearly the violation of old norms, what Schraub calls a bond of trust, was justified by the protestors due to Chemerinsky’s being “a liberal Zionist.” The incident indicates that every Jew who supports Israel is a potential on-campus target for abuse and exclusion from ordinary campus life. That anti-Zionist Jews support the imposition of such litmus tests does not make the new norm any less anti-Jewish and might, in fact, prove the point.

Pushing back against this new emergent norm on campus, Chemerinsky addressed the confluence of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism here at the LA Times.  Nothing, he says, prepared him for the anti-Semitic onslaught he experienced at Berkeley and witnessed across the country since October 7:  the horrid expression by professors across the country celebrating October 7 and student chanting for the elimination of Israel. Like many other administrators, Chemerinsky said he had refrained from speaking out against those who defended Hamas’ terrorist attacks because he did not want to appear Islamophobic. An expert on the First Amendment, his takeaway is that students have the right to say offensive and hateful things, but school administrators — deans, presidents and chancellors — have free speech rights too, which they must exercise even if it offends some and subjects them to criticism.

[VI]

Attempting to create common ground with the most radical pro-Palestine-anti-Zionist student-activists and faculty is a non-starter only because they reject in toto the liberal norm of dialogue. Especially exhausting are the American and European students and faculty with no connection to the region and its people, the ones who don’t know anything about the history, but opine freely with readymade theoretical models they impose on the conflict. The only way to block the emergence of this antipathetic norm is with better norms, ones that disaggregate pro-Palestinianism and anti-Israelism. A norm of creative dissonance would bring Jewish and Muslim-Arab-Palestinian students, faculty, and staff together without obfuscating the complex and asymmetrical reality of conflict and violence in Israel and Palestine. Recognize the principle of human diversity and dignity, coexistence and the right to political self-determination, the fact that seven million Israeli Jews and seven million Palestinians form the backbone of two national communities between the River and Sea. Undoing the binary logics of perpetual war and dispossession, intellectuals should, per Said, commit “plainly and in the full light of day” to “the joint, politically equal survival of two peoples.”

A norm of creative dissonance on campus would combine critique and empathy against animus based on ethnic, national, and religious identity. Criticism of Israel and the government of Israel and the 1967 occupation is not anti-Semitic, not anti-Zionist, not anti-Israel. Criticism of Hamas is neither anti-Palestinian nor Islamophobic. The challenge is to isolate the hard edges of the discourse and engage around them, to listen carefully and speak from a human point of view, to create open lines of communication across lines of difference. Democratic norms of study and scholarship and student-faculty activism bring attention to the warp and woof of human suffering and intersecting histories. At stake are bedrock principles of democratc citizenship, equality and justice, self-determination and mutual recognition. I refuse to believe that basic humanism is not a broad consensus position on campus life in the United States.

POSTSCRIPT (Feb. 2026)

On support for Hamas on the left, Arno Rosenfeld has written here with polling data. This is where the discourse has shifted. For many young Americans, Hamas now defines “the resistance” to “Israel” and “Zionism.”