A pro-Hamas encampment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, May 6, 2024. Photo: Brian Snyder via Reuters Connect
Anti-Israel activity on college campuses has reached crisis levels in the 11 months since Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, according to a new report the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) issued on Monday.
Revealing a “staggering” 477 percent increase in anti-Zionist activity involving assault, vandalism, and other phenomena, the report — titled “Anti-Israel Activism on US Campuses, 2023-2024” — paints a bleak picture of America’s higher education system poisoned by political extremism and hate.
“As the year progressed, Jewish students and Jewish groups on campus came under unrelenting scrutiny for any association, actual or perceived, with Israel or Zionism,” the report says. “This often led to the harassment of Jewish members of campus communities and vandalism of Jewish institutions. In some cases, it led to assault. These developments were underpinned by a steady stream of rhetoric from anti-Israel activists expressing explicit support for US designated terrorists organizations, such as Hamas, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and others.”
The report added that ten campuses accounted for 16 percent of all incidents tracked by ADL researchers, with Columbia University and University of Michigan combining for 90 anti-Israel incidents, 52 and 38 respectively. Harvard University, University of California – Los Angeles, Rutgers University New Brunswick, Stanford University, Cornell University, and others, filled out the rest of the top ten. Violence, it continued, was most common at universities in the state of California, where an anti-Zionist activists punched a Jewish student for filming him at a protest.
The ADL also provided hard numbers on the number of pro-Hamas protests which struck campuses across the country following Oct. 7, a subject The Algemeiner has covered extensively. According to the report, 1,418 anti-Zionist demonstrations were held at 360 campuses in 46 states during the 2023-2024 academic year, a 335 percent increase from the previous year.
“These actions included frequent walkouts, with coordinated days of action nationwide during which students collectively walked out of classes. Sit-ins and die-ins (when a group of people gather and lie down as if dead) were also popular, alongside more traditional rallies and marches intended to draw attention to the Palestinian causes,” it continued. “As the school year progressed, activists increasingly felt that protests alone were insufficient to pressure campus administrations into divesting from Israeli companies or disassociating from ‘Zionist’ donors and groups.”
These actions culminated in the establishment of “Gaza Solidarity Encampments,” where pro-Hamas students lived for up to several weeks, as well as “physical occupations of buildings, vandalism, and tent encampments across the country.” Not all of this activity was explicitly antisemitic, the ADL explained, but a significant portion of it was.
“Jews and/or Zionists were associated with greed and bloodthirstiness or compared to rodents and other animals,” the report said. “In one incident on April 19, 2024, at the encampment at Yale University, a protester displayed a sign depicting a shirtless Joe Biden cradling and breastfeeding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is drinking drops of blood from dollar signs on Biden’s bosom.”
ADL chief executive officer Jonathan Greenblatt said on Monday that the report’s findings are unprecedented and he called on college officials to address the existential threat campus antisemitism poses to the academia’s Jewish community.
“The antisemitic, anti-Zionist vitriol we’ve witnessed on campus is unlike anything we’ve seen in the past,” Greenblatt said in a statement. “Since the Hamas-led October 7 attack on Israel, the anti-Israel movement’s relentless harassment, vandalism, intimidation and violent physical assaults go way beyond the peaceful voicing of a political opinion. Administrators and faculty need to do much better this year to ensure a safe and truly inclusive environment for all students, regardless of religion, nationality or political views, and they need to start now.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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