How Social Activists Came to Gang Up On Israel

I should have seen it coming, but I didn’t. 

As an undergraduate (2001-2005) and former leader of a campus pro-Israel group, I witnessed sporadic alliances between anti-Israel students and members of other student groups. At my alma mater, UC San Diego, one anti-Israel event was co-sponsored by a group representing Chicano students, but I didn’t pay much attention to it. 

In fact, I was hard pressed to believe that anyone who didn’t belong to UCSD’s Students for Justice in Palestine or the Muslim Student Association, the two organizations that always held anti-Israel events on campus, would jump on the Israel-bashing bandwagon. But that was a different time, before Jews were categorized as white and privileged, and before proposed ethnic studies programs in California put us even more on the defensive. Still, how dangerously misguided I was. 

But as early as 2006, when I was serving as Director of Academic Affairs at the Consulate General of Israel in Los Angeles, I realized something was amiss. One morning, a Jewish professor emailed me a flyer for a vehemently anti-Israel event that was planned at a local campus. Its co-sponsors? Students for Justice in Palestine and an LGBTQ student organization. I was dumbfounded.

Today, I am completely resigned to intersectional Israel bashing. I even expect it, which is why I wasn’t surprised to read that the 2018 Chicago Dyke March included many Palestinian flags, after banning flags depicting the Star of David the prior year. Marchers also waived Mexican and Puerto Rican flags and chanted “No pride in occupation, no pride in deportation.” In 2019, the DC Dyke March also banned flags with the Star of David, calling it a symbol of “violent nationalism.” 

I’ll never forgive myself for not taking the signs more seriously—specifically, how so many communities now band together in social justice spheres to vilify Israel. And now, it might be too late.

Israel is being squeezed out of every cause that’s deemed good and right, and this is only the beginning. 

Israel is being squeezed out of every cause that’s deemed good and right, and this is only the beginning. A few weeks ago, I ran into another former pro-Israel student leader from UC San Diego who told me, “We really should have seen it coming.”

To be fair, the Jewish and pro-Israel community has been trying to invest in relationships with other communities for decades. It has also worked tirelessly not to allow Israel to become a partisan matter. 

I remember a time as an undergraduate when it was a no-brainer to ask the College Democrats to condemn an anti-Israel student government resolution. Most members of that student group not only supported Israel, but also they understood that the College Republicans would also be condemning such anti-Israel resolutions, and they didn’t want to be left out. 

It’s clear that those days, and the ease with which pro-Israel students were able work closely with College Democrats, are no longer a guarantee. This is partly due to the far-Left’s overrepresented and unchecked voice within the Democratic Party these past few years. Yes, I’m including the poisonous ways in which some Democratic congresswomen have incessantly singled out and condemned Israel. 

When I was an undergraduate, it was an embarrassment if College Democrats didn’t support Israel on campus. Today, it might be a liability if they do show such support. Is this the case across all campuses? Of course not. But I now see that former pro-Israel students like myself may have taken their relationships with College Democrats for granted, because we didn’t anticipate such openly anti-Israel voices would arise within the party. 

Why has so much changed since I graduated college in 2005? For one thing, social media is an antisemite’s dream, especially for those who manage to cloak themselves as anti-Zionists (it’s getting harder and harder to distinguish the two). Social media not only allows them to magnify their insidious claims quickly, but also it turns someone whose arguments would have been questioned a decade ago into a geopolitical expert, armed with something none of us can argue against: his or her own truth.  

And there’s something else. A new generation of 72 million young people (called Gen Z) that was born between 1997 and 2012—in other words, too young to recall Sept. 11, 2001—is entering campuses and workplaces with not only a preference, but also a perfectly normalized (in their minds) demand to turn everything political. 

Last month, The New York Times featured a story titled “The 37-Year-Olds Are Afraid of the 23-Year-Olds Who Work for Them,” which highlighted a seemingly unbridgeable gap between millennials (my generation) and Gen Z.

“Subtly yet undeniably, as generational shifts tend to go, there’s a new crop of employees determining the norms and styles of the workplace,” wrote the Times’ Emma Goldberg. “And they have no qualms about questioning … all the antiquated ways of their slightly older managers, from their views on politics in the office to their very obsession with work.”

Today, I am completely resigned to intersectional Israel bashing. I even expect it.

Gen Z expects everyone, from its professors to its co-workers and bosses, to take political sides. “The youngest members of the work force,” Goldberg wrote, “have demanded what they see as a long overdue shift away from corporate neutrality toward a more open expression of values, whether through executives displaying their pronouns on Slack or putting out statements in support of the protests for Black Lives Matter.”

You know what that means? The next time Israel defends itself against Hamas terror rockets, as it did this past May, a 22-year-old at a Santa Monica start-up that has nothing to do with politics will demand that her employer release a statement claiming Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians, using talking points readily available on Twitter. 

Don’t believe me? The New York Times story cited a telling example: One Saturday morning in June 2020, a young worker at a vibrator company demanded to know how the company was going to respond to Black Lives Matter protests. According to the article, the company’s co-founder “knew that for her employees this signified a state of emergency.”

The article also featured reflections by a co-founder of a company that sells plant and mushroom supplements. His observation was spot-on: “You talk to older people and they’re like, ‘Dude we sell tomato sauce, we don’t sell politics.’ Then you have younger people being like, ‘These are political tomatoes. This is political tomato sauce.’”

I may not have seen it coming, but I now know what Israel’s detractors are doing, and they’re not going to let up until they’ve pushed Jews out of every space and made “Zionist” synonymous with bigot. 

Maybe it’s too late to undo this libelous assault, but we shouldn’t concede defeat. Giving up is not the Jewish way. And I know at least one member of Gen Z who has no plans to give up, and, in fact, is throwing himself into the lion’s den of antisemites: activist and social media influencer Rudy Rochman, whose unbelievable experience in a Nigerian prison this past July I recount in this week’s cover story. “Jews,” Rochman told me, “aren’t pro-Israel; we are Israel.”

So how do we make sure Jews aren’t squeezed out and that “Zionist” doesn’t become synonymous with all things evil and ugly? That’s for a separate column. But it involves confronting a whole lot of rotten tomatoes.

Tabby Refael is a Los Angeles-based writer, speaker, and civic action activist. Follow her on Twitter @RefaelTabby