Sean L. Malloy
On October 28, 2022, almost exactly fifty-four years after the landmark student strike that helped win the establishment of a College of Ethnic Studies, San Francisco State University (SFSU) published a report from the Jewish Campus Climate Initiative. The report was produced by SFSU’s Division of Equity and Community Inclusion in cooperation with three Zionist organizations: Hillel International, San Francisco Hillel, and the Academic Engagement Network (AEN). Hillel International proudly declares itself to be “steadfastly committed to the support of Israel,” views “Israel as a core element of Jewish life and a gateway to Jewish identification for students,” and forbids its campus affiliates from partnering with any speakers or groups that “support boycott of, divestment from, or sanctions against the State of Israel.” The AEN, a campus-focused Zionist group founded in 2015, declares that among its core goals is to oppose any efforts to “delegitimize Israel and demoralize its supporters” while protecting the “Zionist identities” of students and faculty.[1]
Unsurprisingly, given the organizations with which it partnered, the 2022 SFSU Jewish climate report largely focused on Zionism and Israel. In an email accompanying the report, the task force’s cochairs lamented that “Jewish students had their right to a Zionist identity explicitly denied by fellow students, staff and even by senior administrators.”[2] In providing specific examples of antisemitism, the report offered the following: “When asked whether students had witnessed or experienced antisemitism on campus, one Jewish student shared that their professor posted ‘anti-Israel memes’ labeling Israel as an ‘oppressor and colonizer’ on a social media platform using an SFSU-affiliated account. Another Jewish student shared that their professor told them that ‘Israel is a colony state and BDS is a legitimate social movement.’ Students describe these experiences as ‘othering,’ ‘uncomfortable,’ and inciting a fear of ‘being openly Jewish on campus and being active in Jewish organizations.’ ”[3] The clear implication of the report was that any criticism of Israeli settler colonialism or support for Palestinian solidarity—whether in the form of grassroots activism or “anti-Israel memes”—constituted a form of harassment and “othering” of Jewish students that must be addressed by the university. Among the recommendations offered by the report were ensuring “that Jewish ethnic-religious identification with Israel or Zionism is recognized as one aspect of Jewish identity and that policies protect Jewish students, faculty, and staff from discrimination based on this identification.” It also suggested that “academic departments should hire with the intention of having faculty who represent diverse viewpoints on contentious topics including Israel/Palestine.”[4] The avowed goals of these recommendations was to create “safe, apolitical spaces in which [Zionist students] can build community and learn from others across cultural, ethnic, religious lines.”[5]
The students and community members who engaged in the 1968–1969 strike at SF State self-consciously declared themselves to be engaged in a “fight to the death to make sure that all peoples of the Third World, and all human beings in the world, have a right to determine their social, educational, and economic, and political destiny.”[6] Looking beyond the campus, they announced their solidarity with global anticolonialism and antiracism, proclaiming that “students at SF State are fighting for the millions of people around the world who are oppressed by this racist system.”[7] How was it that some fifty years later, in the name of “SF State’s foundational commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion,” the university produced a report that recommend protected status for supporters of Israel—a nation identified by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem as guilty of the crime of apartheid in its treatment of Palestinians—while simultaneously portraying its goal as somehow apolitical?[8] The SFSU climate report, and the role of Zionist organizations such as Hillel and AEN in producing it, is far from unique, but it is particularly ironic in light of SF State’s history as the site of a highly politicized struggle against settler colonialism, apartheid, and empire. In fact, the report stands at the crossroads of two long-term and ongoing countermobilizations within the US academy: one against the radical energies unleashed by student and community activists such as those at SF State during the 1968–1969 strike and a second against Palestinian solidarity efforts from the 1960s onward.
While often associated with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which formally originated in 2005, the Palestinian solidarity movement on US campuses long predated BDS and has employed a wide variety of tactics ranging from divestment petitions to sponsoring speakers and classes and more direct actions such as mock checkpoints, apartheid walls, and the disruption of talks by pro-Israeli speakers. Central to these efforts are identifying Israel as a violent, settler colonial, apartheid state while calling for self-determination and full human rights for Palestinians, as well as the right of return for those displaced in the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe), the foundational act of ethnic cleansing from which the state of Israel was violently born. Accompanying the Palestinian solidarity movement has been a rich and growing scholarly literature. Authors including Rabab Abdulhadi, Hatem Bazian, Nora Barrows-Friedman, Ashley Dawson, Keith Feldman, Amy Kaplan, Robin D. G. Kelley, Jennifer Mogannam, David Lloyd, Jennifer L. Kelly, Sunaina Maira, Loubna Qutami, Bill V. Mullen, and Steven Salaita have offered both firsthand testimony and theoretical and historical perspectives in support of the Palestinian cause. Rather than duplicating the excellent work of these scholars and activists, my research examines the countermobilization against BDS and other Palestinian solidarity efforts in the academy, situating it within a larger nexus of state repression, neoliberal governance, and institutionalized liberal multiculturalism. In doing so, it contributes to the field of critical Zionism studies, which demystifies and denaturalizes the role that Zionism has played in legitimating not only settler colonialism and genocide in Palestine but also broader movements of racialization and state repression.[9]
A full picture of the countermobilization against Palestinian solidarity on US campuses requires critically examining federal, state, and local governments, university administrations, Zionist lobbying groups and think tanks, and the Israeli government and its agents. This article focuses primarily on the role played by private, nonprofit Zionist organizations (such as Hillel and the AEN). While fraught with potential controversy, in some ways documenting the work of the Zionist lobby on campus is the simplest and most straightforward part of this story. Governments—and universities—are complex entities that contain a multitude of overlapping and sometimes conflicting priorities and constituencies, and their internal deliberations are often opaque. Lobbying groups and activists, in contrast, while not always monolithic, unchanging, or in step with one another, by definition must have a clearly defined and publicly articulated goal and message. There are nontrivial differences in approach between groups focused on antisemitism such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), those devoted to shoring up the American-Israeli relationship such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and campus-focused groups such as the AEN. But it should be both unsurprising and uncontroversial to say that all Zionist groups are committed to shaping the terrain of the debate in a way that promotes Israel and suppresses pro-Palestinian voices. Nevertheless, a close study of these groups and their changing tactics remains an important part of an overall assessment of the countermobilization against Palestinian solidarity while overlapping with debates about the university and its response to the radical energies that led to the birth of ethnic studies and related fields in the 1960s and 1970s. If, as Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira contend, “the academic battle over the permissibility and boundaries of knowledge production about Israel-Palestine has . . . become one of the most charged sites of manifest knowledge in the imperial university today,” then it behooves us to understand and analyze the Zionist organizations and activists that seek to shape the terrain of this debate.[10]
Palestinian Mobilization and Zionist Countermobilization in the United States, 1950s–1990s
Zionist countermobilization against Palestinian solidarity efforts in the United States can be divided into two periods. The first was defined by a roughly fifteen-year span encompassing the Arab–Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973 and the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Prior to 1967, mainline American Jewish organization such as B’nai B’rith (founded 1843), the American Jewish Committee (AJC, 1906), the ADL (1913), and Hillel International (1923) had focused on domestic and civil rights issues facing American Jews rather than on Zionism (and, later, the new state of Israel).[11] With the exception of Hillel, which emphasized providing cultural and religious community to Jewish college students, mainline Jewish organizations prior to the 1960s were not deeply involved on campus except in response to explicit anti-Jewish discrimination and admissions quotas at elite universities such as Harvard, Yale, and Stanford.[12] The Israeli victory over its Arab neighbors in 1967 and its near-defeat six years later in the 1973 war electrified the American Jewish community and led to a new focus on Israel as a key issue for organizations such as AJC and the ADL. These older Jewish organizations were supplemented by newer groups that focused specifically on solidifying American relations with Israel, most notably the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC, 1963), Americans for a Safe Israel (AFSI, 1970), the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (1976), and the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA, 1982).
The most obvious reason for the shift in focus among mainline American Jewish organizations to highlight the central place of Israel, as well as the creation of new groups such as AFSI and CAMERA, was the dramatic military and diplomatic developments in the Middle East from 1967 to 1982. Among other things, these conflicts helped to cement the belief that continued US military aid was vital to the survival of Israel.[13] While such aid would eventually become a bedrock, bipartisan, foreign policy consensus in Washington, in the era of the American military disaster in Vietnam and ensuing retrenchment, détente in the Cold War, and the power of the Arab-dominated Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to withhold oil from allies of Israel, this prospect was far from a given. As a result, Zionist groups devoted increasing resources to campaigns to sway American public opinion in support of such aid. Equally important, however, was the way in which these wars in the Middle East combined with domestic developments in the United States and larger trends in the revolutionary Third World to fuel a new set of challenges to Zionism to which these organizations felt compelled to respond. Within the United States, three groups stood at the forefront of small but vocal challenges to the otherwise strong support for Israel in this period: Arab Americans, Black Power activists, and elements of the New Left, all of which had particular strength on college campuses, including prominent actions such as the Third World student strikes at SF State, University of California, Berkeley, and elsewhere.
Palestinian solidarity efforts on college campuses have a long history in the United States, dating back to the 1950s and early 1960s with organizations such as the Organization of Arab Students (OAS, founded, 1952), the Muslim Students Association (MSA, 1963), and the Association of Arab American University Graduates (AAUG, 1967). The dramatic defeat in the 1967 war ironically served as a spur to Palestinian nationalism as it became clear that their nominal Arab allies were either unwilling or incapable of effectively challenging Israel. In the 1970s, several new groups picked up the struggle, including the first US-based chapters of the General Union of Palestine Students (GUPS), as well as the Palestine Human Rights Campaign and the Palestine Solidarity Committee. Though the tactics and membership of these groups varied and they did not always operate in harmony, in the aftermath of the 1967 war many emphasized connections to the revolutionary Third World as well as to domestic groups seeking radical change in the United States. “In the midst of this ferment,” notes historian Pamela E. Pennock, “politically conscious Arab and Arab American students connected their advocacy of Palestinian resistance to the activist style and ideologies practiced by other global and American anti-imperialist and antiracist struggles prominent in the New Left movement of the period.”[14]
Black Power activists also played a crucial role in bringing Palestinian solidarity efforts from a relatively fringe position to one that at the very least demanded public attention. Drawing from figures ranging from Malcolm X and cultural critic Harold Cruse to Che Guevara and Frantz Fanon, organizations such as the Revolutionary Action Movement, the Black Panther Party (BPP), and elements within the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) embraced an analysis in which Black Americans were not citizens unjustly denied their rights but rather the victims of internal colonialism that must be overthrown by any means necessary. This analysis, which was heavily influenced by the Algerian and Cuban Revolutions as well as the resistance of the Vietnamese against French and American imperialism, predated the 1967 war in the Middle East. But the post-1967 Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza combined with US collaboration in the Israeli war effort at the height of the Vietnam War led many in the Black Power movement to explicitly link the two nations as inherently violent imperial projects that needed to be forcibly confronted. What scholar Keith P. Feldman dubs “Black Power’s Palestine” highlighted links between the Israeli and American imperial projects while insisting that “anticolonialism routed through the Palestine question.”[15]
In summer 1967, the SNCC Newsletter published an article entitled “The Palestine Problem: Test Your Knowledge” that highlighted the ethnic cleansing at the heart of the Zionist project. Strongly influenced by the work of Palestinian scholar Fayez Sayegh, the article moved beyond condemnation of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza to locate the foundation of Israel as a project of “terror, force, and massacres” conducted against the Indigenous Palestinian population with the full backing and support of “Great Britain, the United States, and other white western colonial governments.”[16] Later that summer, the Black caucus at the National Conference for New Politics in Chicago demanded that the delegates, who represented a cross section of American radical movements, adopt a resolution condemning “the imperialist Zionist war.”[17] The Black Panther newspaper, meanwhile, published a statement from the OAS imploring its readers to “keep in mind the great similarity between the conditions under which the black people live in the U.S. and those under which the palestinian arabs live in Israel.”[18] In the coming years, the BPP would not only offer consistent rhetorical support for the struggle of the Palestinian people but also develop formal links with the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and even seek training at Fatah camps in the Middle East.[19]
SNCC and the BPP both faced strong pushback from white liberals and figures within the civil rights movement for their anti-Zionist turn in the late 1960s and 1970s.[20] But while Black Power critiques of Israel remained a minority position, they opened a new front that linked Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine to a larger set of issues that included the plight of Black people in the United States. In 1974, ADL director Benjamin R. Epstein and associate director Arnold Forster lamented that “perhaps most disturbing of all to the Jewish community is the evidence of anti-Jewish attitudes (often, but not by any means exclusively, expressed in hostility to Israel) among young blacks on American campuses. These, after all, will be among the black leaders of tomorrow. Will they be Martin Luther Kings, Roy Wilkinses, Bayard Rustins, Whitney Youngs—or the Stokely Carmichaels, Eldridge Cleavers, LeRoi Joneses?”[21]
In part as a result of the example set by the Black Power movement, elements within the predominantly white American New Left also became critical of the Zionist project in the aftermath of the 1967 war.[22] Presaging later activist efforts in the twenty-first century, students in the late 1960s organized “Palestine weeks” on their campuses, distributed anti-Zionist literature linking Israel to apartheid, and organized clubs and groups centered around Palestinian solidarity.[23] As with Black Power activists, the New Left critique of Israel was linked to a larger global analysis in which both Israel and the United States were implicated in colonialism and imperialism. Leadership elements within Students for a Democratic Society strongly embraced the Palestinian cause, as did several of the groups that emerged from its post-1969 split, including the Weathermen and the Revolutionary Youth Movement II, which exhorted its members to “support the just struggles of the Palestinian, Congolese, Colombian and all other peoples fighting for national liberation.” Other post–New Left groups, including the Weather Underground and the Yippies, also embraced the Palestinian cause in the 1970s.[24]
As with the broader Black freedom struggle, the New Left was divided on the issue of Zionism during this period. Jews were disproportionately represented in the New Left, and while some came to embrace anti-Zionism (or at least express sympathy for Palestinian resistance), others strongly rejected this line of analysis.[25] An early example of the kind of Israeli exceptionalism came in the pages of the New Left–affiliated journal Ramparts in July 1967, where Harvard professors Michael Walzer and Martin Peretz penned an article entitled “Israel Is Not Vietnam” in which they argued that leftists could support the struggle of the Vietnamese against American imperialism while simultaneously welcoming American intervention in the Middle East in support of Israel.[26] While some Jewish leftists initially sought to reconcile their support for Israel with their other political commitments, during the 1970s an increasing number of them drifted rightward. As several scholars note, Zionism helped birth the neoconservative movement in the 1970s as former liberals and leftists embraced a hawkish foreign policy agenda that accorded Israel a special place of prominence.[27]
The post-1967 Zionist countermobilization against Palestinian solidarity efforts in the United States took a variety of forms, several of which presaged more recent efforts to silence pro-Palestinian voices. One key development was a redefinition of antisemitism from an individual or structural prejudice against Jewish people to encompass Israel as a nation. The redefinition first took root in the early 1970s, largely as a reaction by Zionist organizations against left-wing criticism of Israel. As early as 1969, Austrian intellectual Jean Améry published an essay entitled “Virtuous Antisemitism” in which he argued that “today’s anti-Israelism and anti-Zionism and the antisemitism of yesteryear find themselves in absolute agreement. . . . What certainly is new, however, is that this form of antisemitism, now dressed up as anti-Israelism, is located firmly on the left.”[28] By the early 1970s, American Zionist organizations and even elements of the Israeli government had begun to embrace this definition. In 1971, David A. Rose, chair of the ADL’s national executive committee, warned that “the anti-Israel hate campaign by these extremists not only poses a serious threat to Israel’s survival, but is, in its broadest sense, anti-Jewish.”[29] The following year, at a gathering sponsored by the AJC, Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban identified this phenomenon as the “new anti-Semitism” aimed at Israel, one specifically associated with “the rise of the new left.” Staking a claim that would define the shape of Zionist efforts to silence criticism of Israel for the next fifty years, Eban asserted that “the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all. Anti-Zionism is merely the new anti-Semitism.”[30] In 1974, ADL director and associate directors Benjamin R. Epstein and Arnold Forster published The New Anti-Semitism, which helped to popularize the expanded definition of antisemitism and specifically tie it to the leftist critiques of Israel and Zionism that had flourished in the United States in the aftermath of the Six-Day War. “In the rhetoric of the black extremist and left revolutionary organizations,” they declare, “‘anti-Zionism’ became a vehicle for anti-Semitism.”[31]
ADL director Nathan Perlmutter (writing with Ruth Perlmutter) went even further in 1982 by explicitly arguing that the “new antisemitism” in the form of anti-Zionism posed a greater threat to Jews than the more traditional forms of prejudice and violence associated with the Right:
Stand with me on the corner of Forty-second Street and First Avenue in New York City in front of the United Nations. Let us watch the diplomats on their way to work. Turbaned men, women in saris, tall Black men and short swarthy men, blond Europeans and yellow Orientals—all well groomed, educated, cosmopolitan. Diplomats. Surely there isn’t one among them who is a Klansman. Surely there isn’t one who would, under night’s cover, furtively sneak onto a Jew’s lawn, daub a swastika on his door. But who threatens Jewish interests more ominously—the diplomats who regularly affirm that Zionism is racism, or the juveniles with paint cans?[32]
The antisemitism of the Right—cross burnings and swastikas—might pose a threat to individual Jews, but this was dwarfed by the anti-Zionism of the Left, which threatened the entire Israeli settler colonial project. While contemporary Zionist advocates sometimes avoid the crude racist language employed by Perlmutter, the core concepts of the “new antisemitism” as developed in the 1970s and 1980s—including the focus on Israel as “the world’s Jew” and highlighting the danger posed by leftist anti-Zionism as equal to or greater than that of traditional right-wing antisemitic groups such as the Ku Klux Klan—have been central to ongoing efforts to suppress Palestinian activism in the United States and around the world.
In addition to the more generalized move toward redefining antisemitism, responding to the anti-Zionist critiques from Arab Americans, Black Power activists, and the New Left also prompted more explicit engagement with the college campus in an effort to cement over the small but potentially dangerous cracks in support for Zionism within the United States before they could spread. Even prior to the Six-Day War, some Zionist groups had expressed concern about Arab college students in the United States. AIPAC head Philip S. Bernstein charged in 1964 that Arab students were “trying to influence the minds of professors and fellow students” against Israel.[33] Post-1967, however, the danger posed by anti-Zionist activity on campus assumed a much more prominent role. In 1969, the Near East Report, an AIPAC publication, warned about a “new propaganda line” on American college campuses that “attempts to stigmatize Israel as the embodiment of racism, colonialism, and imperialism” and that “many Jewish students . . . are not equipped to enter into the controversy.”[34] The AIPAC College Guide: Exposing the Anti-Israel Campaign on Campus (1984) sounded a similar alarm in the process of profiling “anti-Israel propagandists” including Edward Said and Noam Chomsky and organizations such as GUPS and the MSA: “American college students are being exposed to a steady diet of anti-Israel vituperation that most other Americans are not. The propaganda barrage is being directed not only to particular policies of the government of Israel, but also at the very right of the Jewish state to exist. Students from pro-Israel home are being singled out as particular targets of the campaign, because its organizers attach special importance to undermining and eroding the confidence of America’s future pro-Israel leadership.”[35] In language that would remain little changed fifty years later, The AIPAC College Guide lamented campus “resolutions condemning Israel” and warned that “American students who support a strong relationship between the United States and Israel are challenged and at times intimidated and harassed.”[36]
Countering pro-Palestinian “propaganda” and bolstering the Zionist presence on campus took two main forms during this first period of countermobilization. One was cooperation between various Zionist groups to mount their own pro-Israel campaigns. As noted in The AIPAC College Guide, “a major effort to counter the anti-Israel campus campaign is being mounted by AIPAC’s Political Leadership Development Program, working with the existing campus pro-Israel infrastructure centered in the B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundations and in cooperation with other organizations.”[37] At the same time, some Zionist organizations conducted covert campaigns to surveil and subvert pro-Palestinian student groups. The ADL, for example, sent undercover operatives pretending to be local journalists to the 1969 convention of the OAS while AIPAC recruited volunteers to report on student groups and professors deemed to be anti-Israel. ADL representatives in the 1970s publicly admitted not only to gathering files on pro-Palestinian and pro-Arab individuals but also to sharing that information with the FBI.[38] In 1993, the ADL settled a lawsuit brought by San Francisco district attorney Arlo Smith after it was revealed that, for the past thirty years, the organization had been working with a private investigator who maintained surreptitious connections with various law enforcement agencies in order to gather information on a variety of individuals and organizations ranging from Palestinian solidarity groups to antiapartheid activists, colleges, and independent media outlets.[39]
The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and ensuing atrocities, mostly notably the Sabra and Shatila massacre in which the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) actively facilitated the killing of thousands of Palestinian civilians by a Lebanese Christian militia, saw escalating criticism of Israel in the US mainstream media and politics. Neoconservative commentator Norman Podhoretz lamented in October 1982 that the “war in Lebanon triggered an explosion of invective against Israel that in its fury and its reach was unprecedented in the public discourse of this country.”[40] In rhetoric that was characteristic of the surging neoconservative movement, Podhoretz attacked Israel’s critics as not only antisemitic but also anti-American and anti-Western: “I charge here that the anti-Semitic attacks on Israel which have erupted in recent weeks are also a cover. They are a cover for a loss of American nerve. They are a cover for acquiescence in terrorism. They are a cover for the appeasement of totalitarianism. And these attacks not merely of anti-Semitism but of the broader sin of faithlessness to the Interests of the United States and indeed to the values of Western civilization as a whole.”[41] The Lebanon invasion was, in the words of historian and journalist Natasha Roth-Rowland, “the war that canonized America’s hasbara playbook.”[42] Hasbara is a Hebrew word that can roughly be translated as “explaining” but in practice refers to a form of “public diplomacy” or propaganda in support of the state of Israel. And while not all American Zionists shared Podhoretz’s apocalyptic response, mainline Jewish organizations such as the AJC, ADL, and AIPAC, along with new groups such as CAMERA, engaged in a vigorous defense of Israeli actions while lashing out at critics with a particular focus on the media and college campuses.[43]
Despite the acrimonious debates it unleashed, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon ultimately passed without a significant decrease in official or public US support, and by the early 1990s it appeared that the conflict over Palestine had entered a quiescent phase.[44] There were a variety of reasons for this period of relative calm. The most obvious explanation was the signing of the Oslo Accords by PLO leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1993. The accords, which were supposed to mark the start of a process by which a Palestinian state was created in areas of the West Bank and Gaza, faced substantial opposition from elements in both Israeli and Palestinian society from the very beginning. The burst of optimism surrounding their initial signing, however, helped to lower the temperature around the Palestinian issue in the United States. The reduced attention to Palestine in this period was also, however, the result of a shifting balance of power between pro-Palestinian and Zionist groups in the United States.
By the dawn of the 1980s, two of the three broad groupings that had been most critical of Israel—the New Left and Black Power organizations such as the BPP—had been almost entirely neutralized by a combination of state repression and internal rifts. Arab American and Palestinian groups inside the United States remained active throughout this period but were subject to a similar campaign of state repression. The FBI and the CIA conducted investigations of Arab Americans during the 1970s, while the Nixon administration’s “Operation Boulder” targeted both Arab nationals on visas and American citizens of Arab descent under the pretext of combating terrorism. Government pressure and the changing national and international political environment led many Arab American groups to chart a more moderate course by the 1980s, abandoning support for anticolonial resistance and solidarity with the revolutionary Third World while embracing the so-called two-state solution to the future of Palestine that would become the basis of the Oslo Accords.[45]
While pro-Palestinian groups often retreated or moderated their stances, Zionist organizations in the United States grew increasingly vocal and powerful in the 1980s and 1990s. AIPAC, in particular, gained a reputation as a nearly unstoppable political force on issues related to US–Israeli relations. US support for Israel had remained relatively consistent, if occasionally troubled, since 1967. By the end of the Reagan administration, however, it had become a bipartisan orthodoxy that few dared to challenge. The near-hegemonic support for Israel by the 1990s was not entirely the work of AIPAC and other Zionist lobbying groups. As scholars including Kaplan, Feldman, and Salaita demonstrate, the historical, cultural, and ideological links between the United States and Israel as settler colonial states generated a form of solidarity that existed independent of more traditional political lobbying, as did Cold War geopolitics and a renewed focus on international terrorism in the post–Cold War period.[46] But the combination of these historical resonances with a powerful lobby at a time when revolutionary anticolonialism was in retreat around the world and neoconservatism was rising as a political and ideological force in the United States cemented unprecedented bipartisan support for Israel in a way that seemingly removed the issue from the realm of normal politics in the 1990s. Military aid to Israel is probably the best example of this trend, with the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama all signing unconditional ten-year memoranda of understanding to provide such aid (with values of $21.3 billion, $30 billion, and $33 billion, respectively).[47] Thus even as US domestic politics became increasingly polarized in the 1990s and 2000s, support for Israel seemed to have been enshrined as a nearly unassailable aspect of the Washington Consensus.
Intifada, the Collapse of Oslo, and a Second Zionist Countermobilization, 2000–Present
While the battle over Palestine never entirely ceased in the United States, it entered a new phase in the first decade of the 2000s following a decade of relative quiet. Early in the new century, the Oslo peace process, with its promise of a two-state solution, collapsed amid Israeli intransigence and Palestinian resistance during the Second (or Al-Aqsa) Intifada. In this atmosphere of renewed crisis, a variety of new grassroots Palestinian solidarity groups sprang up in the United States and around the world. Students for Justice in Palestine was founded on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, and catalyzed by the events at the start of the new century it spread to some two hundred other chapters in the United States and Canada. The first decade of the twenty-first century saw an acrimonious debate over Zionism and apartheid at the United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa (2001), an informal call by British academics Steven and Hilary Rose for a boycott of Israeli universities (2002), the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (2004), the formal call by Palestinian civil society for BDS (2005), the inauguration of Israeli Apartheid Week in Toronto (2005), which quickly spread to other countries, cities, and universities, and the creation of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (2009). While by no means confined to colleges and universities in the United States, these developments spurred campus activism around Palestine, with further spikes occurring in the wake of high-profile Israeli assaults on the Gaza Strip in 2008–2009, 2014, and 2021 and the geocidal war that began in October 2023.[48]
The tumult of the early 2000s and the ensuing rise of a new generation of Palestinian solidarity groups in the United States prompted a renewed Zionist countermobilization. In many ways, this campaign was continuous with the efforts that began during the 1960s in the aftermath of the Six-Day War. The most significant point of commonality, and one that transcended the campus to color virtually all Zionist activism, was the redefinition of antisemitism that had its origins in the early 1970s. The “new antisemitism,” with its emphasis on Israel and the anti-Zionism of the Left rather than on the traditional anti-Jewish bigotry associated with the Right, was hardly new anymore by the twenty-first century. The key development in this period was the attempt to institutionalize this expanded definition in ways that gave it the authority to discipline Palestinian solidarity activists. In the 1970s and 1980s, the new antisemitism was primarily a term hurled about by Zionist activists and columnists such as Podhoretz in speeches and op‑eds. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, however, this definition gained formal acceptance by a growing number of governmental and intergovernmental agencies in the West as part of a campaign that involved both traditional and new Zionist organizations working in cooperation with the Israeli government.
The most important step in institutionalizing this new definition, as well as in focusing it on college campuses, came with the publication of a 2004 article by Natan Sharansky, then minister for Jerusalem and diaspora affairs in the Israeli government. Sharansky, a dissident Soviet Jew who emigrated to Israel following his release from prison in 1986 and served in a variety of governmental roles from the 1990s through the early 2000s, came to see Palestinian solidarity efforts on Western college campuses in nearly apocalyptic terms. At various points he linked these efforts to Nazi genocide, warning that “the infrastructure for future crimes or even genocide is being laid by ideologists at universities of the free world” and that efforts to delegitimize Israel were “the same approach that created the atmosphere that led to the Holocaust.”[49] He also frequently charged that US campuses were bastions of Soviet-style totalitarianism. “These types of remarks I heard again and again on different campuses in Western countries,” he declared, “reminded me of communist rule.” On another occasion he was reported to have said, “U.S. college students have become like Russian Jews who kept silent because they feared state retaliation if they spoke out about being persecuted.”[50] In response, Sharansky proposed the so-called 3D test to distinguish between “legitimate criticism” of Israel and that which fell into the realm of antisemitism. The three D’s in question, according to Sharansky, were demonization (“when Israel’s actions are blown out of all sensible proportion”), double standards (“when criticism of Israel is applied selectively; when Israel is singled out . . . for human rights abuses while the behavior of known and major abusers, such as China, Iran, Cuba, and Syria, is ignored”), and delegitimization (“when Israel’s fundamental right to exist is denied”).[51] Under this definition, all anti-Zionism was to be understood as a form of antisemitism, and even those who accepted the existence of Israel had to ensure their criticism stayed within certain bounds and was matched by a proportional critique of other human rights abusers.
Sharansky’s strident efforts to brand anti-Zionism as antisemitism echoed similar sentiments from Eban, Epstein, and Forster decades earlier. The key difference was that Sharansky was able to successfully leverage his apocalyptic arguments into institutional policies. In 2005, elements of Sharansky’s 3D test were enshrined as part of the European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia’s (EUMC) “Working Definition of Anti-Semitism.” Of the eleven examples of antisemitism offered by the drafters, seven involved the state of Israel, including “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.”[52] In 2010, the US State Department officially adopted its own definition of antisemitism that was largely identical to that proffered by the EUMC, though it made the 3D test even more prominent with respect to criticism of Israel.[53] Finally in 2016, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) adopted a subtly modified version of the EUMC working definition that kept intact the eleven examples and their links to the 3D test.[54] While criticized by scholars, lawyers, and activists for conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism, the IHRA definition was subsequently adopted by at least forty countries and was explicitly endorsed by the administration of Donald Trump in a December 2019 executive order.[55]
For all of its overlap with previous Zionist efforts, this second period of countermobilization is organizationally and rhetorically distinct in a number of ways. For one, the international and domestic environment of the new century complicated some of the rhetorical strategies that had dominated the first Zionist countermobilization. From the 1960s through the 1980s, groups such as the ADL and AIPAC routinely dismissed support for Palestine in the United States as the result of foreign Arab influence and propaganda. Consistent with a longtime Zionist effort to deny the agency or even existence of Palestinians as a people, ADL publications such as Target USA: The Arab Propaganda Offensive (1975) and Pro-Arab Propaganda in America: Vehicles and Voices (1983) portrayed the battle over Palestine as part of a larger Arab struggle against Israel rather than as a genuine national liberation movement. Even on American college campuses, Zionist organizations highlighted the role of the visiting Arab students. The AIPAC College Guide, for example, declared that “unlike other student movements, the campus anti-Israel campaign is energized and led primarily by visiting foreign students, particularly Arab students from countries still formally at war with the State of Israel.”[56] When they acknowledged Palestinians at all, it was usually to blame the PLO or Fatah led by Yasser Arafat as the shadowy master behind the international solidarity campaign rather than acknowledging its grassroots support and appeal. Target USA, for example, characterized the AAUG as a “valuable asset to the Arab-PLO propaganda offensive in this country” that was “being tapped for expertise by the oil-rich Arab regimes.”[57] As late as 1989, a fundraising letter by B’nai B’rith warned that “the Arab presence on campus is poisoning the minds of our young people.”[58] Even the predominantly white New Left was, in the words of historian Tom Milstein, “a vehicle for the propagation of pro-Al Fatah positions to the American public.”[59] The dual effect of these sorts of charges was to discredit the notion of Palestinian nationalism while opening up individual students and organizations to charges of terrorism or disloyalty to the United States and its allies.
By the first decade of the 2000s, however, these highly racialized arguments, which were dubious to begin with, no longer passed the straight face test. In the post–Cold War era, the dream of pan-Arab unity was long dead, and while public opinion in the region still strongly favored the Palestinians, most Arab states had either formally agreed to peace with Israel or had come to at least tacitly accept its existence, a process that only accelerated with the advent of the Abraham Accords in 2020.[60] Meanwhile, televised images of young Palestinians risking their lives by standing up to Israeli tanks, guns, and fighter jets during the First and Second Intifadas made it impossible to deny that Palestinian nationalism was a genuine, grassroots movement. Similarly, the widespread disillusionment with the Oslo process and the newly created Palestinian Authority (PA), which was dominated by elements of the PLO, made it difficult to pin these resistance efforts on old villains such as Arafat (who died in November 2004). Indeed, the most significant post-2000 liberation efforts, both in Palestine and internationally, took place outside the structure of the PA/PLO and were in some cases actively opposed to it.
In the United States, meanwhile, the diverse array of grassroots Palestinian solidarity efforts that spread across campuses and beyond during the early twenty-first century could no longer be plausibly attributed primarily to Arab or Arab American students or foreign actors. While Deborah E. Lipstadt insisted as late as 2005 that “Arab interests with a seemingly anti-Semitic and anti-Israel agenda have tried in various ways to have an impact on the campus,” even vehemently pro-Zionist groups such as the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise had concluded by 2012 that Palestinian solidarity groups on campus “are student-led with little or no professional assistance” and “have less money and are more disorganized than the pro-Arab groups of past decades, which [they claimed] were organized on a national basis and had the financial and political backing of the Arab League.”[61]
One response to these changes in the first decade of the 2000s was the rise of an entirely new set of pro-Israel groups, many of which were largely or entirely devoted to campus matters. While older organizations such as the ADL, AJC, and AIPAC continued to play an important role and expanded their campus operations, they were supplemented by a dizzying array of new groups in this period. Among the organizations that joined the Zionist countermobilization in this period were StandWithUs (2001), the Israel on Campus Coalition (2002), Campus Watch (2002), the David Project (2002), Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (2002), the Lawfare Project (2010), the Israel Action Network (2010), the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law (2012), the AMCHA Initiative (2012), Students Supporting Israel (2012), Canary Mission (2014), the Academic Engagement Network (2015), Alums for Campus Fairness (2015), Zachor Legal Institute (2015), Stop the Jew Hatred on Campus (2016), StopAntisemitism (2018), the Deborah Project (2019), Jewish on Campus (2020), the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values (2021), and the Jewish Leadership Project (2022). These national groups were joined by, and often allied with, local campus groups such as Tikvah: Students for Israel (UC Berkeley) and Anteaters for Israel (UC Irvine).
The plethora of new pro-Israel groups that sprung up in this period in part reflected a deliberate embrace of a more decentralized effort to combat the growing grassroots support for Palestine. Part of this involved the creation of groups entirely devoted to Zionist lobbying and pressure at the university level, including groups such as the AEN with a roster filled with past university presidents as well as professors. It was also, however, the result of disillusionment among some Zionist activists and funders with what they saw as the failures of larger mainstream organizations, such as the ADL and AJC, to confront Palestinian solidarity efforts more aggressively on campus. In 2012, the David Project (which nominally operated under the umbrella of Hillel International) issued a report entitled A Burning Campus: Rethinking Israel Advocacy at America’s Universities and Colleges. Cofounders Charles Jacobs and Avi Goldwasser warn that “established Jewish organizations and Jewish faculty failed to stem the problem when it began, and even today they fail to fully understand the institutional nature of the battle. Their failures created a need for new organizations.” Specifically, the report argues that “it’s not good enough that we stop the U.S. from becoming anti-Israel. We have to make sure the U.S. remains pro-Israel, which is a much taller task.”[62] A decade later, Israeli American real estate mogul and philanthropist Adam Milstein outlined a similar set of complaints in an article in the Jerusalem Post titled “Combatting Antisemitism Through Strategic Venture Philanthropy.” The older mainline groups, he argues, “have created unbelievable redundancy, with dozens of virtually identical organizations operating in silos, mired by conflicting interests and competition for donors,” and thus find it “hard to change and adopt new strategies to combat antisemitism.” What was needed were new groups and strategies to “complement what the legacy organizations are doing with new and different approaches.”[63] Even those such as Milstein who were critical of the legacy organizations did not seek to replace them entirely. Rather, these newer and more nimble groups usually operated in a complementary fashion with larger and more traditional groups such as the ADL and AIPAC. In some cases this took the form of direct cooperation, but these smaller groups were also able to take more aggressive actions, such as Canary Mission’s public blacklisting and shaming of Palestinian supporters, that might be too controversial for more established groups to outright endorse.[64] As Milstein puts it, “You work together and we will raise you the money. . . . You no longer have to worry about financing and fundraising. You just need to be united.”[65]
Another major organizational change in the early 2000s was the increasingly direct role played by the government of Israel in combating Palestinian solidarity in the United States. Cooperation between US-based Zionist organizations and the Israeli government was not an entirely new phenomenon. As early as 1961, ADL director Epstein wrote privately of the organization’s domestic intelligence-gathering operations that “our information, in addition to being essential for our own operations, has been of great value and service to both the United States State Department and the Israeli Government. All data have been made available to both countries with full knowledge to each other that we are the source.”[66] Prior to the first decade of the 2000s, however, the Israeli government was largely focused on foreign and internal military threats rather than on the nonviolent organizing around Palestine that took place outside its borders. This changed in the new century as larger Arab–Israeli tensions cooled while the threat posed by grassroots Palestinian resistance and its external supporters appeared to grow.
In 2010, the Reut Institute, an Israeli think tank with close ties to the political and military establishments, published a report that called attention to the national security danger posed by “delegitimization” efforts such as BDS. The effectiveness of such efforts, they argue, “stems from their ability to engage and mobilize others by blurring the lines with Israel’s critics. They do so by branding Israel as a pariah and ‘apartheid’ state; rallying coalitions around ‘outstanding issues’ such as the ‘Gaza blockade’; making pro-Palestinian activity trendy; and promoting grassroots activities such as boycotts, divestments, and sanctions (BDS) as a way to ‘correct Israel’s ways.’ ”[67] In responding to this new threat, Reut warned that “decades of neglect in resources, organization, and attention have kept Israel’s political and diplomatic arm weak and therefore ill-structured to address the global challenge of delegitimization.” What was needed, the authors argue, was not simply the recognition of the threat posed by these nonviolent movements but also “re-structuring the foreign affairs establishment in terms of modes-of-operation, resource allocation, human resource management, etc. to meet the global delegitimization challenge.” In particular, they suggest that, given the decentralized nature of the Palestinian solidarity movement, “it takes a network to fight a network.”[68] Thus, in addition to strengthening the Israeli government’s official apparatus to combat BDS, the government should work with other partners around the world while “focusing on the hubs of delegitimization—such as London, as well as potentially Paris, Toronto, Madrid, and the [San Francisco] Bay Area—and on undermining its catalysts.”[69]
In fact, Israeli government efforts to tamp down foreign support for BDS and Palestinian solidarity more broadly had already begun at the time of the Reut report, though they would accelerate substantially in the years to come. In 2009, the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs (MSA), under former IDF general Yossi Kuperwasser, had been charged with studying BDS and other elements of the delegitimization movement in order to articulate a state-level response. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly declared BDS to be a “strategic threat” in 2015 and elevated the status of the MSA, which became, in the words of scholar Ronnie Olesker, “the ministry of BDS.”[70] In 2023, much of those functions were taken on by the renamed Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, which sought, in the words of Minister Amichai Chikli, “to unite various departments dealing with antisemitism and the fight against the delegitimization of Israel under one roof.”[71] The Knesset, meanwhile, passed several bills designed to combat foreign BDS efforts, including a 2011 law that allowed Israelis to sue and collect damages from anybody who promoted the boycott of Israel and a 2017 amendment to the Entry Law of Israel that barred those who had publicly supported BDS from entering the country, including those seeking to visit the nominally Palestinian-controlled areas in the West Bank.[72]
This more aggressive campaign against Palestinian solidarity led naturally to an increase in cooperation between the Israeli government and US-based Zionist organizations and activists. In a follow-up report issued in 2018, the Reut Institute revealed that “in 2010, the Israel government and world Jewish organizations began to substantively come together in identifying the delegitimization assault on Israel as a top-priority issue. This cooperation tangibly manifested, for example, in adaptations to structure, re-allocation of resources, and enlargement of existing resource pools. Resulting efforts coalesced around the idea of cultivating a network, based on a shared set of goals and causes, to hit back at anti-Israel movements.”[73] Prior to the efforts led by the MSA, Israeli consuls and ambassadors in the United States had occasionally gotten involved in campus disputes in an informal capacity.[74] While hard to track precisely, these efforts appeared to expand in the second decade of the twenty-first century. For example, in attempting to enforce the new law against BDS supporters entering Israel, the Israeli government relied at least in part on information provided by Canary Mission’s blacklist.[75] Sometimes these efforts were more overt. In October 2022, Israel’s Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism, actress Noa Tishby, was dispatched to the campus of UC Berkeley following a vote by several student groups at the law school agreeing not to host Zionist speakers. Tishby’s mission led to a farcical scene where she attempted to hand out water bottles to protesters at Sproul Plaza, one of whom referred to her as “ ‘the dumbest motherfucker’ he had ever talked to.”[76]
In pursuing their battle against Palestinian solidarity on U.S. campuses in the twenty first century, American Zionist organizations and their allies and partners have employed a variety of tactics. These have included lobbying for laws, now applicable in 35 states, prohibiting the boycott of Israel as well federal and state level declarations opposing BDS, the filing of civil rights and Title VII lawsuits against university administrators and Palestinian solidarity groups, publishing blacklists of pro-Palestinian students and professors, behind-the-scenes lobbying of university administrators and trustees to punish activists, and even calling on the police to intervene.[77] The remainder of this article, however, focuses not on these tactics, but rather on the rhetorical and ideological arguments mounted by pro-Zionist groups as part of this more recent countermobilization. Broadly speaking, I categorize these into three frameworks: Right-wing, liberal, and a Zionist identity politics approach. It is important to note that these frameworks are not necessarily exclusive or incompatible with one another: a single pro-Zionist organization or even individual might use arguments from all three frameworks in efforts to shut down pro-Palestinian movements on campus. Nevertheless, there are clear ideological and institutional differences between these lines of attack, and it is worth distinguishing them for both intellectual and political reasons.
Terrorism, the Red-Green Alliance, and “Woke” Antisemitism: Conservative Attacks on Palestinian Solidarity
One set of arguments employed by Zionist organizations and activists to shut down Palestinian solidarity on campus is closely tied to racialized wedge issues usually associated with the political Right in the United States. An important element of these arguments, and one that is not confined to the campus, draws on long-standing stereotypes that portray Arabs and Muslims as “terrorists” in order to label Palestinian solidarity movements as threats to both Israeli and American national security rather than as a legitimate form of political expression. In Terrorists in Suits: The Ties Between NGOS Promoting BDS and Terrorist Organizations, the Israeli Ministry for Strategic Affairs (MSA) asserted that BDS was “a premeditated, coordinated and organized modus operandi of the terrorist organizations, which seek to ‘whitewash’ their end-goal of eliminating the State of Israel by hiding behind the façade of ‘legitimate’ human rights NGOs, primarily operating in the Palestinian Authority, the UK and the US.”[78] Building on this claim, MSA head Gilad Erdan announced in June 2018 that, “[t]he relationship between terrorist organizations and the BDS movement has never been closer, ideologically or operationally.” These charges of “terrorism” serve both a public relations purpose as well as providing the basis for more coercive legal, financial, and political actions against BDS.
On U.S. college campuses, the attempts to link BDS and other Palestinian solidarity efforts to terrorism often take the form of attacks on student groups, and particularly Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and the Muslim Student Association (MSA). Though SJP is a domestic student group, Zionist organizations have repeatedly attempted to smear it as a “Hamas-funded terrorist support group” that operates as part of a “campus terrorist movement” and as “steeped in an ideology that has its roots in Nazi antisemitism and Jihadist extremism. . . .”[79] Tammi Rossman Benjamin, co-founder of the AMCHA Initiative, asserted with no evidence that “[t]hese are not your ordinary student groups like the young college Republicans or the young Democrats; these are students who come with a serious agenda who have ties to terrorist organizations.”[80] In October 2023, in the midst of a genocidal war against Palestine, the ADL and the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law issued a letter to 200 university and college presidents to “investigate the activities of your campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) for potential violations of 18 USC 2339A , and its state equivalents, that is, for potential violations of the prohibition against materially supporting a foreign terrorist organization.”[81] When Brandeis University subsequently suspended it’s SJP chapter, former Israeli Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism and Delegitimization of Israel Noa Tishby approving tweeted that “SJP is Hamas on campus.”[82] Whether applied to Palestinians resisting occupation or to college students and professors expressing their solidarity, these arguments remain rooted in a form of orientalism that casts Arabs and Muslims as inherently backward and violent.
Another set of arguments goes even deeper down the Right-wing rabbit hole by invoking the specter of the so-called “Red-Green” or “Islamo-leftist” alliance. In this formulation, which has clear links to the rhetoric of Norman Podhoretz and other neoconservatives, Islamic terrorists are joined by a host of homegrown American radicalisms as part of a shadowy cabal aimed at undermining not only Israel, but also the United States and the West more broadly. Adam Milstein, a prominent Israeli-American funder of Zionist groups on campus, offered a prime example of this line of attack:
Radical groups – the radical left, the radical right, radical Muslims, and the radical African Americans who champion Louis Farrakhan – are spearheading efforts to erode the core principles that make our country exceptional. The Islamo-leftist alliance, in particular, is gaining momentum. While many Jewish and other civil rights organizations singularly focus on the far-right white nationalists as the main generators of extremism, the Islamo-leftist alliance parades in public as a social justice cause while infiltrating and undermining our communities and institutions. Collectively, these radical groups reject the Judeo-Christian values that have supported the foundation of our country and have protected all minority communities in America, including Jews.[83]
The conspiratorial “Red-Green Alliance” formulation is not confined to conservative political operatives, pundits, and funders outside the academy. Zionist academics, including Andrew Pessin, Corinee E. Blackmer, and Robert Wistrich, have mounted similar arguments in opposing Palestinian solidarity efforts. “Political Islam,” argued Blackmer and Pessin, “has adopted the rhetoric of progressivism on Western university campuses and is meeting with success in creating a ‘red-green alliance.’”[84]
Some Zionists forgo the fraught politics of Arab and Muslim “terrorism” and rely instead on old fashioned McCarthy-era anti-communism, focusing specifically on the “Red” component of Palestinian solidarity on campus. The argument here is not necessarily that students proposing divestment resolutions are Marxist radicals, but rather that they have imbibed, knowingly or unknowingly, a set of anti-Zionist arguments that were created not by Palestinians or even anti-Zionist Jews, but rather by the Soviet Union. While invoking the shadowy hand of the long-dead USSR as an explanation for BDS seems far-fetched to the point of satire, it is a position that has been embraced by a number of prominent Zionist activists. Historian Deborah Lipstadt, appointed by President Joseph R. Biden as the US State Department’s Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism, had previously asserted that “The BDS movement is a direct descendant of Marxist antisemitism and anti-Zionism.”[85] ADL director Jonathan Greenblatt similarly suggested in May 2022 that “Stalinists” had pioneered anti-Zionism “even if the lies today are repeated by DSA [Democratic Socialists of America] boosters rather than 1950s Kremlin supporters.”[86]
Zionist efforts to label those engaged in Palestinian solidarity efforts as terrorists, Soviet dupes, or members of a shadowy Red-Green alliance often fit into a larger broadside against the university itself. This line of argument builds on the backlash against the university as an incubator of radicalism that came out of the turmoil of the 1960s and continued through the “canon wars” and battles over “political correctness” in the 1980s all the way through the contemporary assault on intersectionality, critical race theory, DEI programs, and “wokeness.” The David Project’s 2012 report on A Burning Campus: Rethinking Israel Advocacy at America’s Universities and Colleges made this link explicit, asserting that “[w]e are fighting forces that are rooted in the intellectual, political, and social revolutions of the 1960s.” Specifically highlighting “Postmodernism and relativism,” the report suggests that “Anti-Israelism is an outgrowth of ideological forces on campus that do not relate directly to Israel or Jews” but rather targets the West in general.[87] While the canon wars now seem like ancient history, recent years have seen a revival of attacks on the academy from the Right. The panic about Critical Race Theory (CRT), intersectionality, “cancel culture,” DEI efforts, and “the woke mind virus” have found a receptive audience in parts of the Zionist community. At a February 2022 panel organized by the AEN, political scientist Samuel Abrams lashed out at disciplines such as Ethnic Studies as “identity politics nonsense” while enjoining his fellow academics to “stop fixating on issues of identity and harm and victimization. . . .”[88]
Zionists have attacked the discipline of ethnic studies, and particularly critical ethnic studies, for its role in linking Palestine to larger anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles. Many of these attacks follow the same racialized formulation that accompanies more generalized conservative attacks on the university in which knowledge produced by and about white people is rigorous, apolitical, and scholarly while knowledge produced by and about people of color is shoddy, biased, inherently flawed. Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, for example, explicitly called out the SF State student strike for its role in “the establishment of departments whose missions included the promotion of racial/ethnic identity and the pursuit of social justice—rather than the promotion of reason and the pursuit of knowledge. . . .”:
The eschewal of objective scholarship in favor of political advocacy and activism undoubtedly helped to create a politically charged climate at the university, at least within the College of Ethnic Studies. Moreover, the coupling of political passions with an ideology of victimhood, which was an essential component of the original conceptions of both black and ethnic studies, fomented political hatreds that targeted groups identified as “oppressors.” Initially it was “whites” who were targeted by the political animus of the College’s programs. In time, it would also be “the Jews.”[89]
Critical ethnic studies is particularly threatening from this perspective because unlike formulations that focus narrowly on particular racial or ethnic groups, it highlights the kind of connections between groups and across borders that helped animate the calls for radical transformation and anticolonialism during the radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Thus recently Rossman-Benjamin and AMCHA have turned much of their fire on ethnic studies requirements in California K-12 schools (and potentially the UC system), warning that “a clear and present danger remains, as ‘critical’ ethnic studies faculty shift their focus and efforts to a new theater of war — training the next generation of K-12 ethnic studies teachers to be able to take even the most benign, multicultural curriculum and turn it into a highly politicized, divisive, and antisemitic ‘critical’ ethnic studies course.”[90]
The great advantage of the various Right-wing tinged pro-Zionist arguments is that they build on ideological frames, including anti-Arab racism, Islamophobia, distrust of universities, and hostility to various forms of anti-racist organizing, that not only have a long history in the United States, but also are closely tied to powerful political, intellectual, and media entities such as the Republican Party, conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, and Fox News. Summarizing this linkage, Adam Milstein forthrightly declared that “American Jews need to create alliances with other Americans focused on helping the public to understand that anti-Semitism spreading BDS, CRT, Ethnic Studies and DEI are first and foremost a threat to our core American values.”[91] This formulation is not entirely new – its origins can be seen in the Neoconservative movement of the 1970s – but the potential advantages of this approach were particularly clear during the Trump presidency. Trump deliberately embraced Zionism as part of a political strategy to create a wedge with the Democratic Party which he declared had “gone very far away from Israel. . . They want to take away foreign aid to Israel. They want to do a lot of bad things to Israel.”[92] As part of this effort, he delivered tangible results that included moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, dropping opposition to Israeli control over parts of the Golan Heights and West Bank, and signing an executive order on antisemitism that specifically embraced the expansive IHRA definition as part of a campaign against “anti-Semitic harassment in schools and on university and college campuses.”[93]
For all of its apparent success, however, the Right-wing Zionist framing within the United States has both built in limits, particularly in the context of colleges and universities, as well as real potential dangers for supporters of Israel. First, and most obviously, this tactic poses a threat to the greatest achievement of Zionism in the United States, which is its long-held status as bipartisan orthodoxy. While the vast majority national- and state-level figures in the Democratic Party remained strongly pro-Israel, Trump’s effort to exploit the issue for political gain and the willingness of some pro-Zionist organizations and individuals to explicitly link their agenda to Right-wing attacks on “woke” social justice organizing threatens to tie Zionism to a particular political party and orientation in a way that has the potential undermine the long history of bipartisan support for Israel. These fears appear to have become realized by 2023, when a Gallup poll showed that for the first time self-identified Democrats expressed more sympathy for Palestinians (49%) than for Israel (38%).[94]
Even when they can be successfully applied without overly disrupting bipartisan support for Israel, Right-wing arguments have limits in the context of colleges and universities. Invoking a conspiratorial “Red-Green alliance” and the dead hand of Soviet-era anti-Zionism or labeling ordinary college students as “terrorists” may play well with a certain demographic of Fox News viewers, but it is not likely to be as effective outside that echo chamber. Moreover, when combined with the more general Right-wing assault on universities, these tactics may well backfire when employed on college campuses. While universities are hardly the hotbeds of radicalism as portrayed in some circles, few administrators and professors appreciate broad based attacks or threats of defunding directed at the institutions that employ them, particularly when pitched in a culture war tone that even more conservative members of the university community may find alienating. Though university administrators in the United States have thus far unanimously rejected BDS and have been generally sympathetic to Zionism and Israel, provocative racialized rhetoric, accusations of terrorism, and attacks on liberal norms of academic freedom or the university itself are often seen as going too far. As Deborah Lipstadt noted, “[w]e must not think of fighting antisemitism or anti-Israel animus as a one-size-fits-all process. Tactics that may succeed in the halls of Congress may well fail, if not backfire on the campus.”[95]
Academic Freedom, Civility, Nuance, and Preserving the University: Liberal Attacks on Palestinian Solidarity
A set of Zionist attacks on Palestinian solidarity closely attuned to the traditional norms of the university comes from a broadly liberal perspective and is often led directly by faculty or faculty-affiliated Zionist groups. In this formulation, the battle on campus is portrayed as being between enlightened liberalism on one side and illiberal forces on both the Left and the Right on the other. Central to these arguments is a flattening or erasure of the context of these “radicalisms” such that Right and Left are equally culpable. At a 2021 AEN event, Jewish studies scholar Avinoam Patt offered a perfect distillation of this thesis, suggesting that “we have like white nationalist movements and Charlottesville and Holocaust denial and distortion that’s rampant right now in the anti-vaxxer movement but we’re also seeing it in chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and calls for boycott and divestment and so we have to engage it from both sides. . . .”[96]
That students calling for human rights for Palestinians are somehow equivalent to torch-wielding white nationalist is on its face a ludicrous assertion. And yet this sort of framing is endemic among liberal Zionists, particularly on campus matters. The AEN’s college guidebook, for example, blithely asserts that “[w]e often see that far-right incidents on campus coincide with activism commonly associated with the anti-Israel far left, such as pro-BDS campaigns, votes, resolutions, and referenda.”[97] To make this seemingly illogical argument more plausible, liberal Zionists go to great pains to paint BDS as, in the words of the AEN guidebook, “reactionary and fundamentally illiberal.”[98] While conservative arguments link Palestinian solidarity with far Left radicalism, liberal Zionists often skew the other direction by linking it not only with antisemitism, but also with Right-wing formulations such as Nazism and McCarthyism while insisting that BDS undermines efforts at peace and the creation of an independent Palestinian state. As Jeffery Herf phrased it at a May 2022 AEN event, “one of the great ideological alchemies of the last 70 years is to turn a movement which has roots in the global far Right and racism and anti-Semitism into a darling of the global Left to the point where our undergraduate and graduate students are terrified of being called racists if they support Israel.”[99]
Another common tactic among liberal Zionists seeking to discredit BDS and Palestinian solidarity efforts more broadly is to suggest that these movements are actually hurting Palestinians by hindering the prospects of peace. While more reactionary framings deny the existence of legitimate Palestinian nationalist aspirations, liberal Zionists frequently suggest that a peaceful “two state solution” is possible but that it is Western activists who are the real barrier to the realization of those aspirations by rejecting conciliation and thus emboldening Palestinian resistance and prolonging the cycle of conflict. Alan Dershowitz asserted that “[t]hose who believe that academic boycotts or divestment campaigns directed only at Israel will either bring peace to the region or improve the human rights situation around the world are kidding themselves — or, more likely, are trying to mislead others. These campaigns only encourage terrorists to persist in their efforts to take lethal actions against Israeli civilians, which then forces Israel to respond in ways that escalate the demand for sanctions.”[100] Prominent Zionist academics and activists, including Cary Nelson and Kenneth Stern, have advanced virtually identical arguments, with Stern declaring that “[b]ecause opposition to the existence of a Jewish state alongside a Palestinian one is a formula for perpetual conflict, apparently without concern about how many Jews and Palestinians die in this fight, one can argue that BDS is both antisemitic and anti-Palestinian in effect.”[101] Nelson, meanwhile, argues that “BDS actually offers nothing to the Palestinian people” and it is only popular in the West because the movement offers “students and faculty in North America and Europe opportunities to feel good about themselves, and to take symbolic actions that announce they stand for an abstract principle of justice.”[102]
With respect to the academy, liberal Zionist arguments generally avoid the sweeping jeremiads that characterize conservative rhetoric in favor of more targeted attacks on disciplines and departments which they insist are damaging the intellectual integrity and political viability of an otherwise noble institution. Ursinus College professor Jonathan Marks, for example, claims that “I became interested in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement less out of concern for Israel than out of concern for higher education,” primarily because “BDS fosters solidarity at the expense of inquiry [103] Cary Nelson, who has written thousands of pages aimed against BDS and Palestinian solidarity, is perhaps the best exemplar of this trend. As former president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), Nelson is at great pains to defend the academy as an institution while simultaneously decrying “the degradation of some disciplines over decades” which he claims to have been accelerated by “BDS’s lunatic fringe.”[104] . The AEN guidebook again provides a handy distillation of this approach, bemoaning that:
While BDS is not a dominant presence on every campus in the United States, where it is active it often creates a toxic climate for Jewish and Zionist students and faculty and an atmosphere that is hostile to campus free speech and academic freedom. BDS activism tends to isolate, demean, and marginalize Jews, Zionists, and Israelis on campus. . . . BDS also tends to forestall reasonable conversations about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, sows divisions, and polarizes the campus community. It thereby undermines the central mission of the academy.[105]
The threats evoked above to academic freedom, free speech, civility, and nuanced scholarship are a staple of the liberal Zionist effort to discredit Palestinian solidarity.
While conservative arguments lament what they see as the corrosive effects of academic relativism on the pursuit of truth, liberal Zionists often take the opposite approach by accusing supporters of Palestine of simplistic and one-sided thinking that elides the “nuance” and “complexity” of the conflict. The goal of this tactic is to link anti-Zionism and Palestinian solidarity to extreme Right-wing movements while simultaneously carving out a space in the nominal center in which supposedly apolitical academics employ nuance, reason, and open dialogue to wrestle with complicated questions within the confines of their academic disciplines without overtly challenging a status quo that heavily favors Zionism and Israel. At a May 2022 AEN event, UC Berkeley political scientist Ron Hassner offered a particularly blunt formulation of this argument: “why are we the ones presenting both sides and the others aren’t? That’s because we’re the good guys. The good guys present both sides. The professional scholars who take their jobs seriously present both sides. The others are hacks.”[106]
Liberal Zionist arguments within the academy also often invoke the need for “civility” to discredit or discipline those in support of Palestine. Palestinian solidarity in the academy, laments Pessin and Doron S. Ben-Atar, “corrodes civility, by rejecting it as a tool of oppression while at the same time using its codes to stifle dissent, and with the deterioration of civility comes the corrosion of community.”[107] The AEN guidebook similarly warns that “BDS has contributed to a toxic campus climate at a number of universities and colleges. . . . [T]here can be no doubt that the BDS movement has also degraded free expression and civil discourse.”[108] This discourse around civility serves a similar purpose to the emphasis on “complexity” and “nuance” in that it places limits around acceptable discourse in a way that serves to protect the status quo while policing the ability of academics to address it in terms other than those acceptable to Zionists.[109]
A third pillar of the liberal approach to silencing Palestinian solidarity revolves around the selective use of academic freedom as a cudgel. While more conservative Zionist frameworks often emphasize threats against “subversive” professors and students, liberal Zionist arguments acknowledge that the traditional norms of the university, including both academic freedom and some form of faculty or shared governance, place at least nominal limits on the ability to arbitrarily discipline their opponents. However, selective use of this concept allows them to weaponize it against Palestinian solidarity in a similar fashion to other liberal norms. On the one hand, Zionists employ a maximalist definition of academic freedom to condemn boycotting Israel as contrary to the fundamental norms of the university. Summing up a common Zionist trope, Cary Nelson solemnly declared that, “the academic freedom of students and faculty in the US and Israel can only be protected by institutional neutrality over national political policy. Institutions can only protect and defend community members’ academic freedom to make political statements if institutions remains neutral.”[110] Typical of liberal arguments, this application of academic freedom claims the mantle of being apolitical while in effect placing the academic freedom of Israeli institutions above that of both Palestinians and other academics in the United States and elsewhere who wish to collectively act against Israeli apartheid. Academic freedom in this context is thus both absolute to the extent that it trumps larger concerns about Palestinian human rights and relative in that its protections can be enjoyed by Israelis and Zionists but not by those who seek to use their academic associations and institutions to act collectively in support of Palestine by endorsing BDS.
Indeed, for all their professed concerns with academic freedom, liberal Zionists are quick to point to the limits of this concept as soon as it might be used to empower Palestinian solidarity efforts on campus. This is particularly true in the classroom. While liberal Zionists such as Nelson are careful to acknowledge that “[b]ecause of the risks to academic freedom and the potential for unwarranted criticism we need to tread very carefully in examining the pedagogical practices of individual faculty,” he also makes clear that “[t]here is too much evidence of the political corruption of academic disciplines, however, to treat pedagogy as sacrosanct.”[111] Building on these arguments, the AEN college guidebook suggests that “[d]epartment and faculty curriculum committees could certainly recommend correctives to one-sided, politically motivated courses—and they should. Administrators, too, are not bereft of options. After all, academic freedom does not entitle a professor to teach a particular course.”[112] Liberal Zionists are also quick to draw limits around academic freedom when it comes to the collective actions of faculty departments or associations in support of Palestine. In the wake of the ASA’s 2013 decision to join the academic boycott of Israel, historian Jeremi Suri blasted scholars who “use their intellectual authority to encourage narrow-mindedness, shallow self-righteousness, and intolerance to different points of view” and suggested that “[t]hose who cannot move past acts of national, religious, and ethnic exclusion do not deserve the academic freedom that they flaunt.”[113]
The solutions typically offered by liberal Zionist activists and institutions to the “problem” of BDS and Palestinian solidarity on campus reflect a similar blend of coercive measures cloaked in liberal pieties. The David Project’s 2012 report was unusually frank in this regard. “In the long-term,” the report recommended, “efforts must be made to limit the ability of faculty members to use their positions to propagandize against the Jewish state.” The authors recognized, however, that academic norms made this difficult and such measures were “realistically unlikely to fully bear fruit for a generation or more.” Thus, “[i]n the interim, accusing faculty members who propagandize against Israel of ‘academic malpractice’ is likely to be a much more effective strategy than challenging specific allegations or invoking anti-Jewish bigotry. . . . [T]he current campus atmosphere is much more sympathetic to charges that teachers are not satisfactorily teaching their subject than to complaints of anti-Jewish bias and Israel supporters will likely have a greater practical impact by framing their concerns in this manner.”[114]
As of the early 2020s, the AEN remains the most active example of an organization employing the liberal approach to combating Palestinian solidarity through the application of existing university governance structures. Careful to avoid directly infringing on academic freedom or faculty governance, the AEN seeks instead to leverage those structures to protect Zionism while suppressing Palestinian solidarity through the selective application of academic norms. In its 2022 guidebook for faculty and administrators, the AEN invoked classical liberal tropes in declaring that “[w]e support remedies that encourage free, open, and robust disagreement, argument, and debate since the best remedy for bad speech is to surround and confront it with good speech.”[115] This high-minded rhetoric cloaks a fundamentally coercive approach to Palestinian solidarity. First, and most obviously, by identifying BDS and other forms of pro-Palestinian activism as “bad speech” on par with white supremacy and other forms of hate speech, it puts the onus on university administrators and faculty to actively speak out against it. Nelson suggests that this might well entail “new faculty hires” with the specific goal of countering pro-Palestinian faculty viewpoints in the classroom.[116] Here links to the IHRA definition and the new antisemitism are important as they provide an institutional justification for compelling this sort of “good speech” on the part of the administration. Once criticism of Israel as a settler colonial, apartheid state is declared to be antisemitic (as well as a form of “academic malpractice”), it is far easier to pressure university administrators to actively enter the fray on the Zionist side.
Liberal Zionist efforts to curtail Palestinian solidarity on campus offer several advantages over the Right-wing approach. Both their language and their policy proposals are more attuned to the cultural mores of the university and hence more likely to gain traction among faculty and administrators than blunt assaults on the academy as an institution. As Deborah Lipstadt observed, “[t]he efforts that have been successful recognize that universities have their own unique modus operandi and rules of engagement. . . . Protestors must speak in language to which the university resonates.”[117] This approach allows Zionists to cloak their efforts to tamp down Palestinian solidarity in liberal norms and institutions (such as academic freedom and faculty governance) that have a long tradition within the academy. It is also (usually) eschews the kind of overtly racialized language of terrorism that characterizes conservative rhetoric, replacing it with a more subtle form that casts “degraded” fields (such as Ethnic Studies), which have much higher representation of marginalized people, as “biased” or insufficiently rigorous and hence in need of institutional discipline. Crucially, this discipline should, in the liberal formulation, come from inside the institution itself and abide by liberal academic norms. The effect is ultimately no less coercive and racialized and is arguably more dangerous to the extent that it turns the university’s own apparatuses into an enforcement mechanism for Zionist orthodoxy. While outside political pressure might backfire or produce a counterreaction even from pro-Zionist faculty (as was the case in the 2022 controversy at the UC Berkeley law school), instilling faculty governance, administration, and academic publishing with a Zionist prospective (e.g., “good speech”) provides a more effective mechanism of combatting Palestinian solidarity by embedding it at the heart of the day-to-day functioning of campuses.
For all its effectiveness, the liberal Zionist approach within the academy also has institutional and ideological limits and faces an uncertain future. Structurally, liberals are not incorrect to see themselves and the norms they selectively cherish as under assault. On the one hand, the Right has increased its attacks on the university, with notable success in more conservative states such as Florida and Texas. Meanwhile more progressive academics and students are also challenging liberal norms, both inside and outside the academy, and exposing the way in which they are used in defense of a status quo that appears increasingly untenable and indefensible. A quick glance at the demographics among leading advocates of the Zionist position within the academy makes this problem appear in stark relief. Represented by figures such as Cary Nelson, Leila Beckworth, Andrew Pessin, Mark Yudof, Kenneth Stern, Alan Dershowitz, Ronald Hassner, and Alvin H. Rosenfeld, this group tends to be heavily weighted towards older, white faculty and administrators, many of whom are in the twilight of their careers. These sorts of demographics at the top of the academic hierarchy are not a new phenomenon, nor are they confined to the ranks of liberal Zionism. It is questionable, however, whether the advocates of liberal Zionism in the academy will be able to significantly refresh and diversify their ranks going forward.
Institutional and structural changes within the academy also complicate this task of liberal Zionists. The neoliberal evisceration of the university has produced a situation in which an increasingly small number of professors are hired on the tenure track, with their place taken by a growing class of adjunct labor. As academic work becomes increasingly contingent, with a dwindling number of professors enjoying the power and protection provided by tenure (or at least the prospect of tenure), appeals to institutional norms are increasingly difficult to maintain. In the short term, this is not likely to matter much as the aging core of academic liberal Zionists can leverage their accumulated institutional power and prestige to weaponize these norms without the need for support from contingent or even younger and more diverse tenure track faculty. Longer term, however, it is unclear if the structural and ideological currents surrounding both Israel and the academy will allow this particular strain of Zionism to reproduce itself effectively.
“Zionist Identities,” Space Spaces, and DEI Capture: Zionists and the Progressive Frame
The conservative and liberal Zionist strategies for combating Palestinian solidarity on campus have long histories, dating back to at least the 1970s, and draw on themes deeply embedded in U.S. political discourse. A more recent approach involves leveraging laws and rhetoric traditionally associated with civil rights, identity politics, and the academy’s DEI apparatus to portray Zionist students and faculty as a marginalized population in need of institutional protections. The origins of this new approach can be traced to efforts by Kenneth L. Marcus, who also provides a particularly striking example of the links between Zionist lobbying groups, the federal government, and American universities. Marcus, who received his JD from UC Berkeley, served as Staff Director for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights under George W. Bush from 2004-2008 where he engineered a policy change under which the OCR would use Title IX and Title VII to apply to religious groups, including Jewish students, as a protected category, which in turn opened up a slew of complaints filed by Zionist groups against a number of UC campuses as well as Rutgers, Barnard College, and Brooklyn College. Following his tenure under Bush, Marcus founded and became president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law in 2011, which has become one of the more prominent U.S. organizations dedicated to combatting BDS and which helped to file some of the complaints which were then heard under the very rule change that Marcus had helped to implement while in the OCR.[118] In October 2017, Marcus was nominated by Donald Trump to serve as Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights where among other things he re-opened a case filed against Rutgers by the Zionist Organization of America which had been closed during the Obama administration. After leaving the Trump administration, he returned to the presidency of the Brandeis center, continuing this revolving door of U.S. government service and pro-Zionist lobbying.
While Marcus’ initial attempts to leverage state and university power to stifle Palestinian activism on campus relied largely on Civil Rights-era legal formulations, other Zionist activists and groups have since wedded this approach to rhetorical and institutional efforts that employ language and framing more often associated with modern progressive Left while centering protections for students under the rubric of “Zionist identities.” This tactic represents a bizarre mirror image of ethnic studies organizing that took place at SF State and other colleges and universities during the late 1960s and early 1970s. While student protesters in that era challenged the academy to better reflect and serve the marginalized and racialized communities they came from while engaging in a larger anti-racist and anti-colonial struggle, some Zionists now employ the rhetoric of identity politics in service of defending Israeli apartheid and settler colonialism while silencing Palestinian anticolonial activism. Andrew Pessin and Doron S. Ben-Atar’s 2018 edited collection Anti-Zionism on Campus, which was funded in part by the AEN, offers several good examples of this type of framing. In the accounts of these authors, students face “invisible microaggressions against Israel-identified Jews” who find it “dangerous to be an ‘out of the closet’ Zionist in academia” (Gabriel Noah Brahm), forcing “pro-Israel students to retreat to the safe spaces of their Chabad or Hillel chapters” (Cary Nelson). “As a result,” bemoans Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, “Jewish students are becoming the single most vulnerable ethnic group on campus. . . .”[119] AEN co-founder Mark Yudof similar warned that “[i]n an age of exquisite sensitivity on some campuses to microaggression, or language that subtly offends underrepresented groups, the ironic toleration of microaggression against Jews often goes unnoted.”[120] In its 2022 guidebook, the AEN explicitly endorsed this formulation, warning of “a countless number of antisemitic microaggressions suffered by Jewish students on a daily basis” and declaring that “[a]n extreme and unrelenting portrayal of Israel and Zionism contributes to and reflects an increasingly intolerant campus climate.”[121]
Crucial to this new approach is the creation of “Zionist identities” that must be protected by university administrations (and if necessary by the state or federal government). Zionists have long sought to portray their cause as deeply linked to Jewish religious identity and thus protected on that basis. This task has been complicated, however, by the persistent existence of anti-Zionist Jews, a tradition that dates back well before the 1948 creation of Israel. Some Zionists have responded to this with blanket attacks on anti-Zionist Jews as “self-hating” or deluded.[122] More recently, however, organizations and activists have advanced the concept of “Zionist identities,” which erases anti-Zionist Jews by excluding them entirely while simultaneously widening the umbrella to include all of those, including non-Jews, who support Israel. The AEN guidebook, for example warns that “Jewish and pro-Israel students face an increasingly challenging learning environment” and that those “who wish to express their Zionist identities and attachment to Israel are now being demonized and demoralized.”[123] Zionists have also appropriated the notion of “lived experience,” a concept originally mobilized by feminists whose lives and experiences were not reflected in mainstream narratives, in service of defending Israel from criticism. The AEN, for example, attacked academic departments that issued solidarity statements with Palestine by claiming that they were “effectively erasing the history and lived experiences of Israelis, both Jewish and non-Jewish, in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”[124] AEN Executive Director Miriam F. Elman similarly lamented, “[h]ow can Jewish Zionists, Israeli students feel welcome and respected in departments that so thoroughly deny. . . their lived experiences?”[125]
Having adopted a warped form of identity politics in support of Israel, activists and organizations such as the AEN then seek to mobilize university resources in defense of “the right of students and faculty to express their Jewish and Zionist identities on campus.”[126] Unlike the more traditional liberal Zionist approach, which appeals to faculty governance and the selective employment of academic norms, this new strategy largely bypasses faculty and aims instead at the growing DEI bureaucracy in US universities. Though both conservative and liberal Zionists have expressed attitudes ranging from skepticism to outright hostility towards DEI offices, there is a growing awareness that these institutions can be effectively coopted in service of defending Israel. At the 2022 AEN National Conference, Elman frankly admitted she was “not particularly thrilled with the trends we are seeing requiring for promotion and tenure statements on DEI.” However, she also noted that while “I’m not saying I’m supporting it, I’m saying we can like strategically use that [mechanism].” In particular, she cited an example of AEN working with a faculty member and the deputy dean for diversity and inclusion at the Yale Medical School to sponsor programming that would counter efforts to boycott of Israel. The increasing emphasis on institutional DEI efforts, she concluded, are “going to give you the reason to be a part of this network [AEN] and then bring that back to campus and be able to put on what’s becoming on some campuses mandatory now not just optional but mandatory. . . .”[127] Thus even Zionists who are skeptical of the inherent value of DEI work have come to understand its potential strategic utility in campus struggles over Palestine.
In order to better mobilize the institutional power of DEI machinery to defend Israel, groups such as the AEN and AJC have worked to influence the shape and mission of those offices. Key to this effort is institutionalizing and then enacting a definition of antisemitism that can be used to stifle Palestinian solidarity efforts. The 2022 AEN guidebook promotes “[a]ntisemitism-awareness training” which “should be mandatory for student-government leaders and heads of student organizations; materials and workshops also should be offered for midlevel staffers and officials in Offices of Student Affairs and in the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) spaces on campus.”[128] In service of this effort, the AEN has created an “Improving the Campus Climate Initiative” (ICCI) that offers trainings, consultation, and campus speakers to participating universities.[129] In 2022, AJC published a “Call to Action Against Antisemitism” that explicitly advocated for integrating “antisemitism as a focus within DEI and in student trainings related to DEI, including first-year and transfer students’ orientations.” Like the AEN, “AJC is happy to furnish guidance on how to provide such training.”[130] On the surface, such trainings seem innocuous or even laudatory and AJC is quick to assure universities that “that in identifying antisemitism, there is no institutional restriction on protected speech.”[131] Crucially, however, the AEN and AJC “antisemitism awareness” trainings and resources rely on the IHRA definition, which brands any attempt to criticize Israel as a settler colonial state or for its practice of apartheid and racism as inherently antisemitic.[132] By working to engrain the IHRA definition within the daily operations of diversity offices and the trainings they offer to students, faculty, and administrators, Zionists can enlist the DEI machinery in service of defending Israel and suppressing Palestinian solidarity efforts.
The 2022 SFSU Jewish Campus Climate Initiative, conducted with the aid of the AEN and Hillel, is a perfect example of the DEI capture strategy in action. The end goal is to use DEI mechanisms to, in the words of the report, protect the “right to a Zionist identity” and create “safe, apolitical spaces” on campus for supporters of Israel.[133] While some conservative Zionists attack “identity politics nonsense” and ridicule “the campus where [the] current institutional cultural focus is on victims,” a small but growing number of activists have embraced notions of Zionist safe spaces enforced by the university administration.[134] “[W]e all wanted,” insisted Oberlin student and Zionist activist Eliana Kohn in the AEN-funded volume by Pessin and Ben-Atar, “this safe space to discuss Israel. Having a space where we would not face scrutiny or be marked as horrible people was comforting.”[135] Contrary to the language in the SFSU report, however, these safe spaces are far from apolitical. As made clear by the body of the report itself, they entail a massive intervention by the university administration in areas ranging from the classroom to academic hiring and the kind of events offered to students in order to protect one country, Israel, from criticism. Assuaging the Zionist desire for safe spaces means, among other things, that “[a]cademic departments should hire with the intention of having faculty who represent diverse viewpoints on contentious topics including Israel/Palestine.”[136] It is hard to imagine similar calls for hiring faculty with “diverse viewpoints” about apartheid South Africa or the Jim Crow South. Yet the Zionist fragility represented by this approach to the campus is such that it requires constant interventions by the administration in order create an environment in Zionist students can be safe from “othering” experiences such as being exposed to “anti-Israel memes” or hearing that “Israel is a colony state and BDS is a legitimate social movement.”[137]
While Zionist identity politics employs new DEI machinery rather than the more traditional liberal institutions of faculty governance, both approaches seek to enlist the university’s own mechanisms in the fight to defend Israel. Both also claim to be non-partisan and apolitical, concerned only with defending the university and its community. Unlike the liberal approach, however, Zionist identity politics centered around the need to “protect” students does not require an attachment to, or knowledge of, the byzantine inner workings of academic governance. Complaints about “debased” disciplines, the standards of academic university presses, or “the use of university channels and resources—official university websites and listservs, and academic department speaker series” to promote Palestinian solidarity are easy to dismiss or ignore as arcane academic infighting that has little or no relevance outside a small handful of tenured professors.[138] Conversely, appeals to campus climate, student well-being, and the specter of “Jewish students are being marginalized, demoralized, harassed, and bullied” have more immediate resonance both on and off campus and can appeal to well-meaning faculty, administrators, donors, and parents.[139] It also allows Zionists to frame the issue in a way that avoids potentially uncomfortable debates about Israel and its policies. Rossman-Benjamin was explicit on this point, observing that “defending the basic civil rights of Jewish students to equal protection under federal law or university policy is far more acceptable to the general campus community than defending the Jewish state” and that “[i]t is considerably easier to rally Jewish organizations and community members behind protecting Jewish students than behind protecting Israel.” While pursuing “protections for Jewish students through federal law, university policy, or by some other means” is more palatable to campus audiences, she also argued that it will “almost certainly lead to a diminution of the demonization and de-legitimization of Israel on campus.”[140]
The vulnerability of DEI offices to Zionist capture efforts are the result of both structural and ideological factors. Structurally, university administrations concerned about their reputation and “brand” are incentivized to avoid any kind of negative publicity about campus climate and student experience. By defining any form of anti-Zionism – or even critiquing Israel as an apartheid or settler colonial state – as antisemitic and stressing the need to protect the “Zionist identities” of their students, groups such as AEN can effectively threaten universities with adverse publicity as a result of faculty or student-led Palestinian solidarity efforts. These same groups can then turn around and offer their services (in the form of speakers, grants, or other pro-Zionist educational programming) as a way to avoid or mitigate that damage. Unlike the blunter conservative assault on the academy, this approach creates a problem (threats to students’ “Zionist identities” and campus climate), but then identifies an internal university solution (administrative DEI efforts) and offers external resources (such as speakers or grant funding) to help implement it. When combined with a campaign of negative publicity, this approach provides an effective mix of threats and incentives that, when successfully applied, creates a symbiotic relationship between Zionist organizations and the university.
While it is a potentially powerful combination, the mix of external threats and incentives outlined above does not tell the full story of the evolving relationship between Zionist groups and DEI offices. Scholars such as Steven Salaita, Keith Feldman, and Amy Kaplan have demonstrated that U.S. support for Israel is not simply the result of lobbying efforts by groups such as AIPAC, but also linked to shared values as settler colonial states grappling with ways to contain racial and ethnic strife. Similarly, the willingness of DEI offices to embrace Zionist identity politics also speaks to a shared set of values that include opposition to the radical anticolonial and antiracist energies that motivated the student protests of the 1960s and 1970s. As Roderick Ferguson, Sara Ahmed, and others have demonstrated, university administrators reacted to this challenge not only through blunt suppression, but also by trying to co-opt and institutionalize it in ways that rendered “diversity” non-threatening and even beneficial to the status quo by substituting a form of representational politics for the more radical anti-racist and anticolonial demands of the protesters. A combination of domestic counterinsurgency and the changing international situation has largely blunted or neutralized radical movements both on and off campus since the 1970s. The struggle for Palestinian national liberation remains, however, and one reason it may be so troubling to university administrators is that it cannot be made to comfortably fit in the confines of liberal multiculturalism and the range of containment strategies associated with DEI bureaucracies. The manifest failure of the Oslo process and the two-state solution and the increasingly overt genocidal rhetoric and actions employed by Israel in Gaza render moot liberal canards about dialogue or an emphasis on representation, even as strategies of delay or containment. BDS and other solidarity efforts, note David Lloyd and Malini Johar Schueller, “interrupts a liberal multicultural discourse in the settler university about cross-cultural ‘dialogue’ between Palestinians and Israelis, Jews and Muslims, which elides Zionism and anti-Palestinian racism.”[141] To this extent, we might think of Palestine as an unsutured seam in the smooth surface of liberal multiculturalism, one that joins abolitionist movements and the indigenous Landback campaign as profound challenges to the decades-long efforts to contain radical change under the rubric of diversity.
Lesson from the Past and the Future of Zionist Countermobilization on Campus
Drawing lessons from the recent past and precarious present is always a fraught endeavor, but for scholars and activists invested in Palestinian solidarity it is also a necessary one given the escalating Zionist countermobilization. One observation is the malleability of Zionism as an ideological and political force in the United States. Since its foundation, Israel has maintained strong support across partisan, racial, ethnic, gender, and class divides in the United States. Developments during the Trump era threatened to undermine the bipartisan nature of this support, particularly among younger liberals, but Zionism remains a flexible organizing tool.[142] Zionist organizations, ranging from established mainline groups such as the ADL and AIPAC to the newer groups such as the AEN and the AMCHA Initiative, have effectively operated in complementary fashion, sometimes in direct cooperation with the Israeli government or closely affiliated NGOs such as the Jerusalem Institute for Public Affairs. Moreover, a single Zionist organization such as AEN or AJC can employ rhetoric and tactics that appeal to conservative, liberal, or even nominally progressive audiences. We might think of this as a form of “Zionist right-intersectionalism” that is able to flexibly mobilize a variety of rhetorical, ideological, and institutional frames to repress Palestinian solidarity.[143]
Looking ahead, it seems likely that we will see growth on the two ends of the Zionist spectrum, in part reflecting the high level of political polarization within the United States. In so-called red states such as Florida and Texas, Zionists seeking to contain Palestinian solidarity efforts can make common cause with governors and legislatures that are increasingly hostile to both universities and any kind of antiracist or progressive education and organizing. Meanwhile in supposedly blue states like California and New York they can employ a progressive-sounding form of identity politics with an emphasis on “Zionist identities” that is more tailored to resonate with culturally liberal parents, administrators, faculty, and voters. A continued rightward shift in Israeli politics combined with the willingness of some Republican politicians to make Israel a partisan issue in US politics might conceivably upset this balance, but the diversified state and local strategies employed by Zionist organizations on campus provide a relatively resilient and flexible set of tools.
One factor common to all the contemporary strains of Zionist countermobilization on campus is a reliance on the IHRA definition and its equation of anti-Zionism, as well as any references to Israeli apartheid and settler colonialism, as inherently antisemitic. While the IHRA definition is relatively new (formally adopted in 2016), it builds on the formulation of the “new antisemitism” that dates to the first Zionist countermobilization in the early 1970s and was gradually codified as a result of Sharansky’s 3D test (2004), the EUMC working definition (2005), and the US State Department definition (2010). This process of codification and the ensuing effort to convince governments, universities, and other institutions (including police departments) to formally adopt it is arguably the most significant recent development among Zionist organizations and activists in the twenty-first century, and it cuts across the rhetorical and political spectrum. Though academics have in some cases managed to resist the imposition of this definition, part of the Zionist strategy appears to involve continuing to press its adoption at all levels to build a critical mass of adopting institutions that might serve to normalize it and build pressure on the holdouts.
It was in response to the practical and ideological threats posed by radical students and community activists at places like SF State that both the government and the university launched a counterinsurgency in the 1970s that sought to neutralize these campaigns. In addition to applying blunt force in the form of the National Guard, police, and the coercive use of administrative power, university administrators also sought to tame and contain these radical energies through tightly controlled efforts at representational diversity in place of the more radical vision of collective resistance posed by the strikers. “The struggles taking place on college campuses because of the student protests,” Roderick A. Ferguson observes, “were inspirations for power in that moment, inspiring it to substitute redistribution for representation, indeed encouraging us to forget how radical movements promoted the inseparability of the two.”[144] It is here we return to the contemporary Zionist countermobilization, as this effort is increasingly proving adept at exploiting another contemporary structural feature of the academy, which is the institutionalization of this form of liberal multiculturalism within the university DEI apparatus. As Ferguson notes, “Those same institutions of state, academy, and capital responded to student movements calling for greater racial and gender representation by making diversity an administrative specialization—hence the rise of diversity offices, diversity officials, and what we might think of as the diversity bureaucracy. . . . Folding diversity into the bureaucratic machine and moving it up into the administration was one way of mitigating student demands and preventing them from becoming matters of social transformation.”[145] In substituting representation for the redistribution of power and a liberal multiculturalism tied to the US state in place of transnational anticolonialism, the DEI apparatus is uniquely vulnerable to cooptation by Zionists. Indeed, words such as cooptation or capture are actually somewhat misleading in that the very design of these offices is intended to contain radical redistributive and anticolonial energies by managing diversity within institutional structures in service of the kind of multicultural nationalist and imperialist projects represented by both the United States and Israeli state.
There are interesting parallels between the university’s use of DEI bureaucracy to contain radical calls for power redistribution and the Israeli approach to managing the challenge of Palestinian nationalism. As historian Seth Anziska observes, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, under “the influence of [Ze’ev] Jabotinsky’s ideas about Jewish territorial dominance and the discourse of liberal nationalist thinkers,” embraced an approach to the occupied territories that envisioned “Palestinian Arabs as a minority that could be granted rights under Israeli rule rather than a self-determining political entity deserving of sovereignty.” Begin’s approach, in which Palestinians “should be treated with a degree of fairness but without collective rights for self-determination,” bears striking ideological similarities to the response of university administrators to the radical demands of student activists by channeling them into the limited discourse of liberal multiculturalism.[146] It is not surprising, then, that both Zionists and administrators are often at odds with critical ethnic studies programs that continue to nurture the more radical traditions of self-determination and anticolonialism of the 1960s and 1970s.
This article has focused on the Zionist countermobilization on US college campuses, and in doing so it has inevitably dwelled on the rhetoric, ideology, and actions of Zionist groups and their supporters. It is important to note, however, that this is ultimately a story of a countermobilization, and as such it is in many ways a testament to the success of grassroots activism around Palestine and the threat that it poses not just to Israel but also to Zionism as an ideology, as well as to settler colonialism and apartheid more broadly. I do not want to overemphasize the role of solidarity networks in the West and elsewhere; this struggle began in Palestine and it will end with a Palestine that is free from the river to the sea. And while activists and academics around the world have paid, and continued to pay, real costs for Palestinian solidarity, it is those on the ground in Palestine who suffer under not only Israeli bombs and guns but also the grinding slow death of Israeli necropolitics. Yet it is telling that even in the late 1960s and early 1970s, at a time when most of the world was focused on the very active Arab–Israeli military conflict, Zionist organizations and elements of the Israeli government had already singled out transnational grassroots solidarity efforts as enough of a threat to warrant a fundamental redefinition of antisemitism in an effort to snuff this nascent resistance. It is not a coincidence that those efforts were revived and redoubled in the early 2000s in response to a new wave of transnational organizing around BDS and Palestinian solidarity.
This essay was submitted three weeks after the start of the genocidal Israeli assault on Gaza following the Al-Aqsa Flood attacks led by Hamas. The war grinds on with the full backing and support of the United States and other Western governments, while supporters of Palestinian solidarity find themselves targeted by a renewed wave of repression and censorship.[147] And yet in many ways, the Zionist countermobilization has never seemed weaker and the Israeli hasbara machine appears to be sputtering in the face of massive popular revulsion against the war around the world. The future remains as uncertain as ever and the past is an uncertain guide. Times—and material conditions—change, and even if we were to somehow replicate the radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s exactly, there is no guarantee they would be any more successful in the contemporary domestic and international environment, which is arguably even more unfavorable than it was at the time of the Third World student strikes. But if this essay does nothing else, it should remind readers that grassroots efforts to organize against Zionism, even under the most imperfect and challenging conditions, have been threatening enough to provoke the countermobilizations outlined here. While the future may well bring more repression, it also contains the possibility of not only a free Palestine but also an opportunity to confront the constellation of forces—including settler colonialism, white supremacy, and apartheid—that have nurtured this countermobilization.
Sean L. Malloy is Professor of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Merced. He received his PhD and MA in history from Stanford University and a BA in history from the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Atomic Tragedy: Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Bomb Against Japan as well as articles dealing with nuclear targeting in World War II and the radiation effects of the atomic bomb. His most recent book is Out of Oakland: Black Panther Party Internationalism During the Cold War. His current research project examines the countermobilization against Palestinian solidarity efforts at US universities.
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“Hillel Israel Guidelines,” Hillel International, https://www.hillel.org/israel-guidelines/; “Our Missions,” Academic Engagement Network, https://web.archive.org/web/20240126135849/https://academicengagement.org/mission/ ↑
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San Francisco State University, Division of Equity and Community Inclusion, Jeff Jackanicz, Vice President for University Advancement, and Fred Smith, Associate Vice President for Equity & Community Inclusion, Co-Chairs of the University Jewish Campus Climate Initiative, “Update from SFSU’s Jewish Campus Climate Initiative Advisory Committee: Campus Context, Process, and Next Steps,” email message, October 28, 2022, 9:01 a.m. ↑
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San Francisco State University Campus Climate Assessment Report (Hillel Campus Climate Initiative, TCC Group, and Academic Engagement Network, November 2021), 12, https://www.sfhillel.org/uploads/6/0/0/1/60018313/sfsu_campus_climate_assessment_report_11.22.21_.pdf. ↑
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San Francisco State University Campus Climate Assessment Report, 16, 18. ↑
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Jackanicz and Smith, “Update from SFSU.” ↑
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“Our Survival Is Non-Negotiable,” SF State College Strike Collection, https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/strike/bundles/187912. ↑
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“Support the Strike at State,” SF State College Strike Collection, https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/strike/bundles/187967. ↑
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Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians, (Amnesty International, 2022), https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/MDE1551412022ENGLISH.pdf; Human Rights Watch, A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution (Human Rights Watch, 2021), https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/media_2021/04/israel_palestine0421_web_0.pdf; B’Tselem, “A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This Is Apartheid,” January 12, 2021. https://www.btselem.org/sites/default/files/publications/202101_this_is_apartheid_eng.pdf. ↑
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The critical study of Zionism is not a new field. See, for example, Edward Said, “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims,” Social Text 1 (1979): 7–58. However, until recently the academic study of Zionism was largely monopolized by Jewish studies and related departments dominated by Zionist prospectives. In 2023, the foundation of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism represented an intervention that sought to provide an academic home for scholarship conducted from an explicitly anti-Zionist perspective. ↑
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Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira, “The Imperial University: Race, War, and the Nation-State,” in The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent, ed. Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 12. ↑
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The ADL and Hillel both began as divisions within B’nai B’rith. Seth Anziska, Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo (Princeton University Press, 2018), 43; Keith P. Feldman, A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 104, 109; Amy Kaplan, Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance (Harvard University Press, 2018), 159; Michael R. Fischbach, The Movement and the Middle East: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Divided the American Left (Stanford University Press, 2019), 59. ↑
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Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admissions and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (Houghton Mifflin, 1979). ↑
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Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, Jews and the New American Scene (Harvard University Press, 1995), 122–23. ↑
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Pamela E. Pennock, The Rise of the Arab American Left: Activists, Allies, and Their Fight Against Imperialism and Racism (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 47. ↑
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Feldman, Shadow over Palestine, 60–61, 98–99. ↑
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“The Palestine Problem: Test Your Knowledge,” SNCC Newsletter, June–July 1967, 4; Michael R. Fischbach, Black Power and Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019), 39. ↑
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Pennock, Rise of the Arab American Left, 89; Simon Hall, “On the Tail of the Panther: Black Power and the 1967 National Conference for New Politics,” Journal of American Studies 37 (2003): 66; Fischbach, Black Power and Palestine, 10. ↑
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“The Role of the Arab Student in the U.S.,” Black Panther, September 7, 1968, 5. ↑
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Sean L. Malloy, Out of Oakland: Black Panther Party Internationalism During the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2017), 143–47. ↑
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Pennock, Rise of the Arab American Left, 86. ↑
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Arnold Forester and Benjamin R. Epstein, The New Anti-Semitism (McGraw-Hill, 1974), 212–13. Also see ADL Research Report, The Anti-Semitism of Black Demagogues and Extremists (Anti-Defamation League, 1992), 5. ↑
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Fishbach, Movement and the Middle East, 25. ↑
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Fishbach, 26–28. ↑
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Fishbach, 16–18, 137. ↑
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Fishbach, 3. ↑
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Michael Walzer and Martin Peretz, “Israel Is Not Vietnam,” Ramparts (July 1967): 11, 14. ↑
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Fishbach, Movement and the Middle East, 6, 160; Pennock, Rise of the Arab American Left, 103–4; Lipset and Raab, Jews and the New American Scene, 159. ↑
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Jean Améry, “Virtuous Antisemitism,” in Essays on Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, and the Left, ed. Marlene Gallner (Indiana University Press, 2021), 34. ↑
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“ADL Warns Opposition to Israel and US Support for State May Replace Vietnam as Issue for Left, Right,” JTA Daily News Bulletin, November 23, 1971, 4. ↑
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Abba Eban, “Our Place in the Human Scheme,” Congress Bi-Weekly: A Journal of Opinion and Jewish Affairs 40, no. 6 (1973): 7. ↑
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Forester and Epstein, New Anti-Semitism, 189. ↑
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Nathan Perlmutter and Ruth Perlmutter, The Real Anti-Semitism in America (Arbor House, 1982), 106. ↑
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Irving Spiegel, “Rabbi Contends Arab Students Foster Sentiment Against Israel,” New York Times, September 14, 1964, 8. ↑
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Gordon George, “The Arab Propaganda Campaign on Campus,” Near East Report, October 29, 1969, 99. ↑
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Jonathan S. Kessler and Jeff Schwaber, The AIPAC College Guide: Exposing the Anti-Israel Campaign on Campus (AIPAC, 1984), v. ↑
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Kessler and Schwaber, AIPAC College Guide, 3. ↑
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Kessler and Schwaber, vi. ↑
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Pennock, Rise of the Arab American Left, 53–54; John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 179; David Young, “Arabs, Jews Wage War on the Propaganda Front,” Chicago Tribune, July 27, 1975, A2. ↑
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Al Miskin, “ADL’s Spy Ring,” Middle East Report 183 (1993): https://merip.org/1993/07/adls-spy-ring/; Sasha Polakow-Suranksy, The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa (Pantheon Books, 2010), 209–10. ↑
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Norman Podhoretz, “J’Accuse,” New York Times, October 24, 1982. ↑
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Podhoretz, “J’Accuse.” ↑
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Natasha Roth-Rowland, “The War That Canonized America’s Hasbara Playbook,” +972 Magazine, October 28, 2022, https://www.972mag.com/american-jews-israel-hasbara-lebanon/. ↑
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See, for example, the special issue “Hasbara: Israel’s Public Image: Problems and Remedies,” Congress Monthly 51, no. 2–3 (1984): https://www.bjpa.org/search-results/publication/17103. ↑
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Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, Jews and the New American Scene (Harvard University Press, 1995), 124–25. ↑
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Pennock, Rise of the Arab American Left, 202. ↑
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For discussions of deep historical and ideological links between the United States and Israel, see Kaplan, Our American Israel; Feldman, Shadow over Palestine; Steven Salaita, Israel’s Dead Soul (Temple University Press, 2011); Steven Salaita, The Holy Land in Transit: Colonialism and the Quest for Canaan (Syracuse University Press, 2006); Steven Salaita, Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native American and Palestine (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). ↑
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Jeremy M. Sharp, Congressional Research Service, RL33222, “U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel,” updated March 1, 2023, https://sgp.fas.org/crs/mideast/FRL33222.pdf. ↑
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There is no comprehensive history of the growth of Palestinian solidarity movements on US campuses in the twenty-first century, but the best one-volume source is Nora Barrows-Friedman, In Our Power: U.S. Students Organize for Justice in Palestine (Just World Books, 2014). ↑
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Natan Sharansky, introduction to Academics Against Israel, ed. Manfred Gerstenfeld (Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 2007), 13; Natan Sharansky, “A 3D Test for BDS,” in Behind the Mask: The Antisemitic Nature of BDS Exposed (State of Israel, Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy, September 2019), 6. ↑
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Sharansky, introduction, 14; Deborah E. Lipstadt, “Strategic Responses to Anti-Israelism and Anti-Semitism on the North American Campus,” in American Jewry and the College Campus: Best of Times or Worst of Times?, ed. Deborah E. Lipstadt, Samuel G. Freedman, and Chaim Seidler-Feller (Dorothy and Julius Koppleman Institute on American Jewish-Israeli Relations/American Jewish Committee, 2005), 8. ↑
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Natan Sharansky, “3D Test of Anti-Semitism: Demonization, Double Standards, Delegitimization,” Jewish Political Studies Review 16, no. 3–4 (2004): https://www.jcpa.org/phas/phas-sharansky-f04.htm. ↑
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Michael Whine, “Progress in the Struggle Against Anti-Semitism in Europe: The Berlin Declaration and the European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia’s Working Definition of Anti-Semitism,” Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, February 1, 2006, https://www.jcpa.org/phas/phas-041-whine.htm. ↑
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Kenneth Marcus, The Definition of Anti-Semitism (Oxford University Press, 2015), 166–69; US State Department, Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, “Defining Anti-Semitism,” June 8, 2010, https://2009-2017.state.gov/j/drl/rls/fs/2010/122352.htm. ↑
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“About the IHRA Non-Legally Binding Working Definition of Antisemitism,” International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definitions-charters/working-definition-antisemitism. ↑
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“Information on Endorsement and Adoption of the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism,” International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definitions-charters/working-definition-antisemitism/adoption-endorsement; Donald J. Trump, “Executive Order on Combating Anti-Semitism,” December 11, 2019, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-combating-anti-semitism/. ↑
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Kessler and Schwaber, AIPAC College Guide, v. ↑
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Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, Target USA: The Arab Propaganda Offensive (Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, 1975), 106; Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, Pro-Arab Propaganda in America: Vehicles and Voices—A Handbook (Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, 1983), i. ↑
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Ari L. Goldman, “B’nai B’rith Apologized for Letter Containing Anti-Arab Statements,” New York Times, February 10, 1989, A14. ↑
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Tom Milstein, “The New Left: Areas of Jewish Concern,” in The New Left and the Jews, ed. Mordecai S. Chertoff (Pitman Publishing, 1971), 305. ↑
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The best single-volume account of this process is Anziska, Preventing Palestine, which covers developments through Oslo, though new work will need to be done to link this to the ongoing normalization campaign with Gulf States as part of the Abraham Accords. ↑
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Lipstadt, “Strategic Responses to Anti-Israelism,” 13; Mitchel G. Bard and Jeff Dawson,, Israel and the Campus: The Real Story (American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, 2012), 6–7. ↑
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Charles Jacobs and Avi Goldwasser, “Being ‘Pro-Israel’ Isn’t Enough,” Forward, March 2, 2012, https://forward.com/opinion/152224/being-pro-israel-isnt-enough/; David Project, A Burning Campus, Rethinking Israel Advocacy at America’s Universities and Colleges (David Project, 2012), 1, https://www.bjpa.org/content/upload/bjpa/c__c/A%20Burning%20Campus%20-%20Rethinking%20Israel%20Advocacy%20at%20America%27s%20Universities%20and%20Colleges.pdf. ↑
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Adam Milstein, “Combatting Antisemitism Through Strategic Venture Philanthropy,” Jerusalem Post, April 25, 2022, https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-705004. ↑
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On Canary Mission, see Committee on Academic Freedom, Middle East Studies Association of North America, “Exposing Canary Mission: A Resource for College and University Leaders,” https://mesana.org/pdf/Exposing_Canary_Mission.pdf. ↑
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Nathan Guttman, “Secret Sheldon Adelson Summit Raises up to $50M for Strident Anti-BDS Push,” Forward, June 9, 2015, https://forward.com/israel/309676/secret-sheldon-adelson-summit-raises-up-to-50m-for-strident-anti-bds-push/. ↑
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ADL Lawsuit, Exhibit A, Benjamin R. Epstein, ADL National Director, to Saul Joftes, Executive Secretary of B’nai B’rith, July 7, 1961, https://www.israellobby.org/adl-ca/. ↑
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Reut Institute, Building a Political Firewall Against Israel’s Delegitimization (Reut Institute, 2010), 4. ↑
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Reut Institute, Building a Political Firewall, 65, 69. ↑
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Reut Institute, 17. ↑
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Ronnie Olesker, Israel’s Securitization Dilemma: BDS and the Battle for the Legitimacy of the Jewish State (Routledge, 2022), 112 ↑
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Zvika Klein, “Israel’s Diaspora Ministry to be Renamed for Fighting Antisemitism,” Jerusalem Post, January 2, 2023, https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/politics-and-diplomacy/article-726433. ↑
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Kenneth S. Stern, The Conflict over the Conflict: The Israel/Palestine Campus Debate (University of Toronto Press, 2020), 100; Ronnie Olesker, Israel’s Securitization Dilemma: BDS and the Battle for the Legitimacy of the Jewish State (Routledge, 2022), 112. ↑
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Reut Institute, The New Frontiers of Community Relations (Reut Institute, 2018), 12. ↑
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John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 182. ↑
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Stern, Conflict over the Conflict, 112. ↑
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Aaron Bandler, “Some Heated Exchanges as Israel Envoy Noa Tishby Engages UC Berkeley Students,” Jewish Journal, October 14, 2022, https://jewishjournal.com/news/352305/some-heated-exchanges-as-israel-envoy-noa-tishby-engages-uc-berkeley-students/. ↑
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Vijeta Uniyal, “Israeli Study Asserts Link Between BDS Movement and Palestinian Terrorist Groups,” Legal Insurrection, June 21, 2018, https://legalinsurrection.com/2018/06/israeli-study-asserts-link-between-bds-movement-and-palestinian-terrorist-groups/; MSA, “Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy, Terrorists in Suits: The Ties Between NGOS Promoting BDS and Terrorist Organizations (February 2019),” 7 ↑
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Sara Dogan, “The Top Ten Jew-Hating Colleges and Universities,” Stop Campus Jew Hatred, April 24, 2022, https://www.stopcampusjewhatred.org/news/top-ten-jew-hating-colleges-and-universities; Charles Asher Small and David Patterson, “Antisemitism, Soft Jihad, and Extremism in US Canadian Universities: The Contextualization of National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP),” Corinne E. Blackmer and Andrew Pessin, Poisoning the Wells: Antisemitism in Contemporary America (Oxford: ISGAP, 2021), 250 ↑
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“UCSC Lecturer Tammi Benjamin Accuses Muslim and Palestinian Student Groups of Connections to Terror,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnSlbOhZgGI. ↑
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“ADL and Brandeis Center Letter to Presidents of Colleges and Universities, October 26, 2023, https://www.adl.org/resources/letter/adl-and-brandeis-center-letter-presidents-colleges-and-universities ↑
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https://twitter.com/noatishby/status/1721666599281705169?s=43&t=xh2svX4p1_OVCRXxhB__IA ↑
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Adam Milstein, “Defining Antisemitism as a Jewish Problem is a Lose-Lose Proposition,” Adam and Gila Milstein Foundation, November 15, 2020, https://www.milsteinff.org/united-with-israel-defining-antisemitism-as-a-jewish-problem-is-a-lose-lose-proposition ↑
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Small and Patterson, “Antisemitism, Soft Jihad, and Extremism in US and Canadian Universities,” Blackmer and Pessin, Poisoning the Wells, 248. ↑
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Deborah E. Lipstadt, Antisemitism: Here and Now (New York: Schocken Books, 2019), 176. ↑
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Aaron Bandler, “ADL CEO: ‘Anti-Zionism is Antisemitism,” Jewish Journal, May 3, 2022, https://jewishjournal.com/news/united-states/347530/adl-ceo-anti-zionism-is-antisemitism/. ↑
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The David Project, “A Burning Campus, Rethinking Israel Advocacy at America’s Universities and Colleges,” 2012, https://www.bjpa.org/content/upload/bjpa/c__c/A%20Burning%20Campus%20-%20Rethinking%20Israel%20Advocacy%20at%20America%27s%20Universities%20and%20Colleges.pdf,, 3, 8, 19. ↑
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Academic Engagement Network, “Academic Freedom and Campus Free Expression: Exploring Current Challenges and Controversies,” February 16, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U8AnhuILxM&t=4s ↑
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Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, “Identity Politics, the Pursuit of Social Justice, and the Rise of Campus Antisemitism: A Case Study,” Alvin H. Rosenfeld, Resurgent Antisemitism: Global Perspectives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 509. ↑
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Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, “The Next Ethnic Studies Battleground: Look Who’s Teaching the Teachers,” August 2, 2022, https://www.algemeiner.com/2022/08/02/the-next-ethnic-studies-battleground-look-whos-teaching-the-teachers/. ↑
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Adam Milstein, “The Undeniable Link Between Antisemitism and America’s Decline,” The Jerusalem Post, January 17, 2023, https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-728700Milstein. ↑
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Amnon Cavari, “Trump and Israel: Exploiting a Partisan Divide for Political Gain,” Israel Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Spring 2022), 171. ↑
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“Executive Order on Combating Anti-Semitism,” December 11, 2019, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-combating-anti-semitism/ ↑
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Lydia Saad, “Democrats’’ Sympathies in Middle East Shift to Palestinians, March 16, 2023, https://news.gallup.com/poll/472070/democrats-sympathies-middle-east-shift-palestinians.aspx ↑
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Lipstadt, Antisemitism, 206. ↑
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“Teaching About Antisemitism on Campus: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives,” The Academic Engagement Network, December 3, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PXiNRIIr1k. ↑
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Raeefa Z. Shams, “Anticipating Challenges: Future Trends in Campus Anti-Israel Activism,” The Academic Engagement Network, Antisemitism, Jewish Identity, and Freedom of Expression on Campus: A Guide and Resource Book for Faculty and University Leaders (January 2022), 129. ↑
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Miriam F. Elman, “The Anti-Israel Movement on the U.S. Campus,” Ibid.,, 17 ↑
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Jeffery Herf, “Israel’s Moment International Support for & Opposition to Establishing the Jewish State.” AEN National Conference, May 19, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAnFBqDTgtg. ↑
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Alan Dershowitz, The Case for Israel (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2003), 116 ↑
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Kenneth S. Stern, The Conflict Over the Conflict: The Israel/Palestine Campus Debate (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020), 223 n. 12. ↑
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Cary Nelson, Israel Denial: Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism, & the Faculty Campaign Against the Jewish State (Bloomington: AEN and Indiana University Press, 2019), 22. ↑
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Jonathan Marks, Let’s Be Reasonable: A Conservative Case for Liberal Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), 146, 160. ↑
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Nelson, Israel Denial, 290. ↑
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Elman, “The Anti-Israel Movement on the U.S. Campus,” 17. ↑
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“Challenging Misinformation and Stereotypes Through Israel Education,” AEN National Conference, May 17, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tg3-L1yZNIA. ↑
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Andrew Pessin and Doron S. Ben-Atar, “The Introduction and Overview,” Andrew Pessin and Doron S. Ben-Atar, Anti-Zionism on Campus: The University, Free Speech, and BDS (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), 5. ↑
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Miriam F. Elman, “Introduction,” Antisemitism, Jewish Identity, and Freedom of Expression on Campus, 12. ↑
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Steven Salaita, Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015), 42-43. ↑
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Nelson, Israel Denial, 351. ↑
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Ibid., 206-207. ↑
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Elman, “Antisemitism and Israel Delegitimization on the U.S. Campus,” 136. ↑
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Jeremi Suri, “Intolerance, Boycotts, and the ASA,” Academe Blog, December 20, 2013, https://academeblog.org/2013/12/20/intolerance-boycotts-and-the-asa/. ↑
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The David Project, “A Burning Campus, Rethinking Israel Advocacy at America’s Universities and Colleges,” 2012, https://www.bjpa.org/content/upload/bjpa/c__c/A%20Burning%20Campus%20-%20Rethinking%20Israel%20Advocacy%20at%20America%27s%20Universities%20and%20Colleges.pdf, 34. ↑
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Elman, “Introduction,” 13. ↑
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Nelson, Israel Denial, 15. ↑
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Deborah E. Lipstadt, “Strategic Responses to Anti-Israelism and Anti-Semitism on the North American Campus,” in Deborah E. Lipstadt, Samuel G. Freedman, and Chaim Seidler-Feller, American Jewry and the College Campus: Best of Times or Worst of Times? Dorothy and Julius Koppleman Institute on American Jewish-Israeli Relations/American Jewish Committee, 2005, 21. ↑
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Marcus outlined the legal theory behind this approach in Kenneth L. Marcus, Jewish Identity and Civil Rights in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Also see Kenneth L. Marcus, The Definition of Antisemitism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015, 169-174. ↑
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Gabriel Noah Brahm, “Slouching toward the City That Never Stops: How a Left-Orientalist Anti-Israel Faculty Tour Forced me to Say Something (Big Mistake!),” Andrew Pessin and Doron S. Ben-Atar, Anti-Zionism on Campus: The University, Free Speech, and BDS (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), 84, 88; Cary Nelson, “Conspiracy Pedagogy on Campus: BDS Advocacy, Antisemitism, and Academic Freedom,” Pessin and Ben-Atar, Campus Anti-Zionism, 191, Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, “Retaliation: The High Price of Speaking Out about Campus Antisemitism and What it Means for Jewish Students, Pessin and Ben-Atar, Campus Anti-Zionism, 312. ↑
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Mark Yudof, “BDS and Campus Politics: A Bad Romance,” Inside Higher Education, December 14, 2015,” https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2015/12/14/colleges-should-commit-robust-debate-about-middle-east-conflicts-essay. ↑
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Naomi Greenspan, “The Importance of Antisemitism Awareness Education on College and University Campuses,” AEN, Antisemitism, Jewish Identity, and Freedom of Expression on Campus, 120, 22. ↑
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See, for example, Dershowitz, The Case Against Israel’s Enemies, 100; Alan Dershowitz, The Case for Israel (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2003), 220, Cary Nelson, Israel Denial: Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism, & the Faculty Campaign Against the Jewish State (Bloomington: AEN and Indiana University Press, 2019), 417 ↑
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Miriam F. Elman, “Preface,” The Academic Engagement Network, Antisemitism, Jewish Identity, and Freedom of Expression on Campus: A Guide and Resource Book for Faculty and University Leaders (January 2022), 7. ↑
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Miriam F. Elman, “The Anti-Israel Movement on the U.S. Campus,” Ibid., 94. ↑
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The Academic Engagement Network, “Academic Freedom and Campus Free Expression: Exploring Current Challenges and Controversies,” February 16, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U8AnhuILxM&t. ↑
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Elman, “The Anti-Israel Movement on the U.S. Campus,” 27. ↑
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“Countering Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism on Campus: Reflections and Contributions from STEM Faculty,” AEN National Conference, May 19, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNIQFwimZwo&t=10s. ; https://www.algemeiner.com/2022/09/08/new-grant-program-to-support-fight-against-antisemitism-on-college-campuses/; “AEN Launches New Nationwide Antisemitism Education Initiative,” September 8, 2022, https://academicengagement.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/2022-09-08-AEN-Launches-New-Nationwide-Antisemitism-Education-Initiative.pdf ↑
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Miriam F. Elman, “Antisemitism and Israel Delegitimization on the U.S. Campus,” AEN, Antisemitism, Jewish Identity, and Freedom of Expression on Campus, 136. ↑
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Academic Engagement Network, “Improving the Campus Climate Initiative, https://academicengagement.org/improving-the-campus-climate-initiative/. ↑
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“AJC’s Call to Action Against Antisemitism: A Society-Wide Nonpartisan Guide for America,” September 2022, https://www.ajc.org/call-to-action/report; American Jewish Committee, “AJC University and Secondary School Training on Antisemitism,” https://www.ajc.org/media/ajc-university-training-on-antisemitism. ↑
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“AJC’s Call to Action Against Antisemitism.” ↑
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Ibid. ↑
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San Francisco State University, Division of Equity and Community Inclusion <equity@sfsu.edu>, Jeff Jackanicz, Vice President for University Advancement, and Fred Smith, Associate Vice President for Equity & Community Inclusion, Co-Chairs of the University Jewish Campus Climate Initiative, “Update from SFSU’s Jewish Campus Climate Initiative Advisory Committee: Campus context, process, and next steps,” Friday, October 28, 2022 9:01 AM. ↑
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AEN, “Academic Freedom and Campus Free Expression”; “Roundtable Discussion: Antisemitism, Jewish Identity, and Freedom of Expression on Campus,” AEN National Conference, May 19, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae7O1905ABs ↑
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Eliana Kohn, “On Being Pro-Israel, and Jewish, at Oberlin College,” Pessin and Ben-Atar, Anti-Zionism on Campus, 375. ↑
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“San Francisco State University Campus Climate Assessment Report,” November 2021, https://www.sfhillel.org/uploads/6/0/0/1/60018313/sfsu_campus_climate_assessment_report_11.22.21_.pdf, 16, 18. ↑
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Ibid., 12 ↑
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Elman, “Antisemitism and Israel Delegitimization on the U.S. Campus,” 135. ↑
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Elman, “Introduction,” AEN, Antisemitism, Jewish Identity, and Freedom of Expression on Campus, 12. ↑
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Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, “Fighting on the Front Lines: Anti-Semitism at the University of California and Efforts to Combat It,” Israel Affairs, 18:3, July 2012, 497. ↑
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David Lloyd and Malini Johar Schueller, “The Israeli State of Exception and the Case for Academic Boycott,” Ashley Dawson and Bill V. Mullen, ed., Against Apartheid: The Case for Boycotting Israeli Universities (Chicago: Haymarket Press, 2015), 89. ↑
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Lydia Saad, “Democrats’ Sympathies in Middle East Shift to Palestinians,” Gallup, March 16, 2023, https://news.gallup.com/poll/472070/democrats-sympathies-middle-east-shift-palestinians.aspx. ↑
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I am grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers for this concept of a “Zionist right-intersectionalism.” ↑
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Roderick A. Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 8. ↑
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Roderick Ferguson, We Demand: The University and Student Protests (University of California Press, 2017), 26, 27. ↑
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Anziska, Preventing Palestine, 50. ↑
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Jonathan Shamir, “An Anti-Palestinian Crackdown Across Europe,” Jewish Currents, October 26, 2023, https://jewishcurrents.org/an-anti-palestinian-crackdown-across-europe; Priyanka Sankar, Pranav Dixit, and Usaid Siddiqui, “Are Social Media Giants Censoring Palestine Voices Amid Israel’s War?,” Al Jazeera, October 24, 2023, https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/10/24/shadowbanning-are-social-media-giants-censoring-pro-palestine-voices. ↑