Over the last 20 years, groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine, which have historic ties to terror groups, have radicalized students.
After three years at Tufts University as a leader with Jewish on Campus, an antisemitism watchdog, Micah Gritz said he’s gotten used to anti-Jewish and anti-Israel hate on campus.
He’s seen his Jewish peers pushed to explain where they stand: “Israel or Palestine, that traditional litmus test that Jews are increasingly getting on and off campus to decide if they’re worthy,” he said. He’s seen his peers prodded to renounce Zionism. He had a professor, he said, who once stated that the only reason the U.S. supports Israel is because of the “Jewish influence in the American government.”
So Gritz, 21, was not exactly surprised this week when campus clubs at some of the country’s most venerated colleges and universities put out statements glorifying the murderous attacks by Hamas terrorists who butchered hundreds of innocent Israeli civilians — including babies and the elderly —in kibbutzes and at an electronic music festival near the Gaza border.
“I’m honestly used to the dehumanization of Jews and Israelis by certain student groups on campus,” said Gritz, a senior finishing a degree in international security and Judaic studies.
But what was jarring for Gritz was the tone of the statements and the utter disregard for innocent Israeli lives. “When I see folks justify the kidnapping, the assault and murder of innocent Jewish and Israeli civilians, there is a part of me that still is shocked,” he said.
At Harvard, more than 30 student groups said they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible” for the violence perpetrated by Hamas terrorists. Likewise, Students for Justice in Palestine clubs at several major universities called the killers martyrs and heroes who “valiantly confronted the imperial apparatus that has constricted the livelihoods.” To those groups, the slaughter of civilians wasn’t a despicable war crime, but was instead a “step towards a free Palestine.”
The statements supporting the attacks come after years of warnings from Jewish watchdog groups that antisemitism and anti-Jewish antagonism is growing like a cancer on American campuses, among both students and faculty.
Much of the anti-Jewish and anti-Israel hate is ginned up by student clubs like Students for Justice in Palestine and the Muslim Students’ Association, which have historic ties to terrorist organizations, according to watchdog groups who track them. Their activism has grown increasingly strident over the last couple of decades.
Last year, the Anti-Defamation League tracked 219 antisemitic incidents — harassment, vandalism, and assaults — at American college and university campuses, a 41 percent increase over the year before. Last October, a University of Arizona graduate student shot and killed hydrology professor Thomas Meixner after the student mistook Meixner as a Jew, accused him of leading a Jewish conspiracy, and made antisemitic threats on his life.
A recent survey by the watchdog group StopAntisemitism found that 55 percent of Jewish college student respondents said they had experienced antisemitism on campus, and only 28 percent believed that their school leaders take it seriously.
Gerard Filitti, an attorney with the Lawfare Project, a New York City nonprofit that fights antisemitic discrimination and educates students about their legal rights, said he wasn’t surprised by the campus statements this week praising Hamas terrorists. But he said it may be surprising for many Americans to learn that “these are actually terrorist sympathizers.”
“When I was in college in the late 1990s, there was no such thing as Students for Justice in Palestine. We did not have radical groups pushing terrorist ideology on college campuses,” he said. “This is something that has only come into being in the last 20 years or so, but it’s become progressively worse.”
While there have long been college clubs representing various ethnic groups, including Jews and Palestinians, the antisemitic and violent rhetoric ratcheted up starting in the early 2000s, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the rise of the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement.
“They were much more vocal about attacking Israel and attacking Jewish people,” Filitti said of the increasingly radical campus groups.
Campus Clubs or Hamas Front?
Students for Justice in Palestine, which held national “day of resistance” rallies on Thursday, was founded in 2001 at the University of California, Berkeley. The group’s founder, Hatem Bazian, a Berkeley professor, was a fundraiser for a pro-Palestinian group that once had its assets frozen by the federal government because it was suspected of funding Hamas, according to an Influence Watch report. Bazian, who has a long history of anti-Israel statements and tweets, has also called for an “intifada” in the U.S.
On its website, Students for Justice in Palestine claims it has over 200 campus chapters. It aligns itself with far-left social justice movements, including “the struggle for Black liberation, gender and sexual freedom,” and is against capitalism. It also views the United States and Canada as occupied territory, which it refers to as “occupied Turtle Island.”
The Anti-Defamation League has accused Students for Justice in Palestine of endorsing terrorism and disseminating “anti-Israel propaganda often laced with inflammatory and at times combative rhetoric.” The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, an Israeli think tank, describes the group as a “terror-affiliated anti-Semitic network” and a “campus front for Hamas” whose backers, founders, and patrons “have been connected to Islamist terror organizations such as Hamas, Hizbullah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.”
Ilan Sinelnikov, the founder of the campus group Students Supporting Israel, said he and his older sister launched their group at the University of Minnesota in 2012 after they encountered anti-Israel propaganda and misinformation being spread by Students for Justice in Palestine.
The antisemitic and anti-Israel messages promoted by groups like Students for Justice in Palestine may not represent the majority opinion on college campuses, Sinelnikov said, but still, “they have good numbers. The fact is, they reach a lot of students when those students are 18, 19, when their mindset is being shaped.”
In the wake of the Hamas terrorist attacks last weekend, the Muslim Students’ Association put out a statement expressing “its deepest solidarity and condolences to the grieving Palestinian families and individuals in Gaza and the Occupied territories.” It also condemned “Israel’s targeted and indiscriminate killing of civilians, including innocent children, women, and the elderly.” The statement did not condemn the Hamas killers or offer condolences to Israeli families whose loved ones were slaughtered in the attacks.
The Muslim Students’ Association, which was founded in 1963 by members of the Muslim Brotherhood at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has also promoted militant Islamic ideologies on American campuses, according to an Investigative Project on Terrorism dossier. Several of its former leaders had connections to al-Qaeda and terrorist plots, according to a 2010 Investigative Project on Terrorism report.
Antisemitism Spreading Like a Cancer
Liora Rez, executive director of StopAntisemitism, said anti-Jew and anti-Israel groups on campus have flourished in the past 15 years or so, driven by an “influx of millions of dollars from the Middle East, countries such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar.” The money, she said, funds campus departments focused on the Middle East.
“We then see clubs such as Students for Justice in Palestine and their sister and brother groups pop up shortly after that,” she said, followed by rising antisemitism, “like a domino effect.”
Antisemitism, she said, “it’s a cancer. It’s spreading exponentially. We’ve been screaming it from the top of our lungs for the past five years.”
And that antisemitism hasn’t just come from students.
This week, Zareena Grewal, an American studies professor at Yale University, joined the blame-Israel crowd for the killing of Israeli civilians, writing that Israel is “a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle, solidarity.” She also took no issue with Hamas terrorists butchering innocent civilians, because, she wrote, “Settlers are not civilians.”
Similarly, Albany Law professor Nina Farnia praised the “Palestinian resistance” for “tearing down the walls of colonialism & apartheid.” And some students at UCLA were offered extra credit by their professor this week to attend a pro-Palestinian “emergency teach-in” hosted by gender studies and English literature professors, according to media reports.
“These monsters, these defenders of barbaric terrorists, are teaching your kids,” Rez said.
“After 9/11, no one allowed al-Qaeda to come onto college campuses and talk about how evil America was. We knew that was morally reprehensible,” Filitti said. “But colleges are allowing this to happen now targeting Jews in Israel.”
Filitti blames rising campus antisemitism on a failure of leadership.
While many universities are deeply invested in diversity, equity, inclusion, and anti-racism, many school leaders don’t often recognize antisemitism for what it is, he said. For example, the chant, “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” is a Hamas call to arms and a call to destroy Israel. “This is Jew hatred,” Filitti said.
Filitti said there is no problem with debating territorial disputes and questioning government policy. “But when your starting premise is that you are literally stating the battle cry essentially of a foreign terrorist organization that is dedicated to killing people and wiping Israel off the face of the planet, that’s not a political debate,” he said. “That’s genocide.”
Rez said Jews often aren’t welcomed in DEI spaces because “they have painted us as the white oppressor, as those in power.”
Sinelnikov, the founder of Students Supporting Israel, said one of the most important messages his group promotes is that opposition to Zionism — the right of national self-determination of the Jewish people — is itself antisemitic.
“If someone has a critique of an Israeli policy, that is not antisemitism. No one says that. The fact is, half of Israel for nine months is protesting on the streets against the Israeli government. That’s not the issue,” Sinelnikov said. What is an issue, he said, is that “a lot of these students are openly supporting terrorism. They came out of their holes, and they say it openly.”
‘It Doesn’t Stay on College Campuses’
Filitti was heartened this week when President Joe Biden called the Hamas attacks on civilians “an act of sheer evil.” And with that, he said, “there’s an opportunity to do something very important, which is to actually investigate what these [campus] groups do and their connections with terrorist groups in the Middle East. We know, for example, that professors who support SJP, faculty members who support the groups, they travel to the Middle East.”
“And who funds these groups? These are questions that law enforcement should be asking,” he said.
Filitti and other antisemitism watchdogs said they are keeping an eye out for an increase in Jew hatred as Israel prepares to launch a ground attack in Gaza and to destroy Hamas.
On Wednesday, an Israeli student at Columbia University who was hanging up posters with pictures of Hamas hostages, was attacked by another student with a wooden stick.
This week, a group of 44 House Republicans sent a letter to Department of Education Secretary Miguel Cardona urging him to step up protections for Jewish students. Their Democratic colleagues were mostly silent regarding the request.
Filitti pointed to the case of Saadah Masoud, a pro-Palestinian activist affiliated with a group called Within Our Lifetime, which calls for Israel’s destruction. During a 2021 protest in New York over Israel’s war on Gaza terrorists, Masoud attacked at least three people wearing Jewish symbols, flags, or clothing. He was arrested and pleaded guilty to federal hate-crime charges.
Within Our Lifetime was founded at the City University of New York.
“My concern is, based on history, whenever we’ve seen terrorist attacks on civilians in Israel, we have seen that carry over to the college campus,” Filitti said, “but it doesn’t stay on college campuses. It comes to the community.”