Antisemitic slogans, speeches celebrating the October 7 terrorism, and calls for a global intifada. No, this is not a report about an anti-Israel terrorist organisation, but the daily reality of life on campuses where students have been protesting for weeks, at the most prestigious universities in the United States, calling themselves pro-Palestinian. Police intervention has been necessary on several campuses, while pro-Palestinian protesters have also appeared at universities in Western Europe.
On 7 October 2023, the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas launched a major offensive against Israel, killing at least 1,200 people and taking more than 250 civilians hostage in Gaza. In response to Hamas’ attack, Israel promised a strong response and entered the Gaza Strip to dismantle the terrorist organization and free its hostages. At least 34,000 Palestinians have been killed and more than 77,600 wounded in the Gaza Strip since the war began, according to the Hamas–run Gaza Health Ministry.
Immediately after Israel’s offensive in Gaza, pro-Palestinian student protests condemning Israel began, and antisemitic hate speech and atrocities against Jewish students on campuses skyrocketed. According to an ADL survey of US universities, 73 per cent of Jewish students have experienced some form of antisemitism since the start of this academic year.
In December, the inadequate response to antisemitic incidents led to the resignation of several US university leaders, including the presidents of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania. The latter, named Elizabeth Magill, resigned after telling a Congressional Education Committee hearing that she believes it ‘depends on the context’ whether the school’s code of conduct sanctions students who call for the genocide of Jews.
A recent wave of anti-Israel protests began at Columbia University this spring and spread nationwide, including to elite college campuses. In addition to the Columbia, California’s UCLA, Boston’s MIT and Harvard, at least 80 universities have been involved in demonstrations.
Universities appear to be unable to control the situation. In many cases police dispersed the often violent crowds camping in school yards, paralyzing school work and even damaging educational buildings. In New York alone, at least 280 people were arrested last week, after hundreds of police officers were called to the campus of Columbia University at the request of the university’s president after protesters took over a university building. At UCLA, at least 200 people were detained by police last Thursday night during the dispersal. In the wake of the riots, several universities have announced online classes because of their apparent inability to protect students who feel unsafe because of their Jewish background.
While the intensity of the widespread protests across the country obviously varies from university to university,
students seem to have come a long way from peacefully expressing solidarity with Palestinian civilians and opposition to the war.
The slogans accusing Israel of genocide, calling for a free Palestine and relativising Hamas’ atrocities are only the mildest versions of the chants repeated by the students.
According to a Jewish-American student at Columbia University, he has heard chants on campus in recent weeks such as Burn Tel Aviv to the ground’; ‘Globalize the Intifada’; ‘We are Hamas’; ‘October 7 will happen again and again’ and ‘Go back to Poland’.
Shockingly, Khymani James, a leader of the student protesters, said in an online call in January that ‘Zionists don’t deserve to live’ and that people should be ‘Be glad, be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists’. James, who served as a spokesperson for the pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel camp as a member of Columbia University’s Apartheid Divest group, retracted his statements, but the university suspended him only now, months after the video was made public.
Despite the obvious antisemitic incitement, it is far from clear to all Americans where the line between hate speech and the right to free speech lies. The House of Representatives passed the so-called Antisemitism Awareness Act on Wednesday by a vote of 320–91, which would apply the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s stricter definition of antisemitism to the enforcement of federal anti-discrimination laws. The bill has already come under criticism for violating freedom of speech and opinion and restricting criticism of Israel.
In the run-up to the November presidential elections, Joe Biden is trying to downplay the unrest on US campuses, while former President Donald Trump is framing the events as a failure of the Biden administration. As POLITICO has also pointed out, main Democrat donors such as George Soros, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and David Rockefeller Jr. have funded pro-Palestinian efforts to protest the Israel–Hamas war.
After the US universities similar student protests took place at Warwick University in the UK, Sciences Po in France and La Sapienza in Italy.
As Israel watches with concern what is happening at Western universities, they are also witnessing a very disturbing phenomenon: young Americans seem to have put Palestinian ‘liberation’ on the banner of a new generation’s struggle for progressive human rights. And while they interpret the Israeli–Palestinian relationship in the dichotomy of oppressor–oppressed, they feel empowered to act in ways that recall the darkest periods in history. In contrast, the civilians murdered with utter brutality by Hamas, the female victims of sexual violence and the Israelis who remain hostages receive undeservedly little attention.
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