The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) released a new report on Wednesday finding that anti-Israel activity on American college campuses nearly doubled this past academic school year.
The report documented 665 anti-Israel incidents in American college campuses in 2022-23; the year before the ADL documented 359 incidents. Most of the anti-Israel incidents in 2022-23 were protests/actions (326; compared to 165 in the previous academic year), followed by events (303; the previous academic year: 143), harassment (24; the previous academic year, 19), vandalism (9; the previous academic year: 11) and resolutions supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement (3; the previous academic year: 20). There were no anti-Israel incidents of physical assault, with one occurring the previous academic year.
Among the incidents that the ADL documented in the 2022-23 academic year included “From the River to the Sea Palestine Will Be Free” graffiti at UC Santa Barbara’s Chabad Center in May, anti-Israel activists disrupting former Israeli Knesset Member Michael Cotler-Wunsh’s speech on antisemitism in April and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapters in Portland State University and Boston University sharing Instagram posts in February calling for Zionist teachers to be fired. Additionally, the report noted that a number of anti-Israel events on campus featured a screening of the movie “Farha,” which the report described as a “highly decontextualized and skewed accounting of the 1948 Arab Israeli War” focusing on “the purported experience of a young Palestinian girl who hides in a cellar as her village’s population is driven out as a result of fighting between Israelis and Palestinians and the armies of several Arab states.”
Other events focused on the allegations of “pinkwashing” or “greenwashing,” which the report defines as terms used “to dismiss or deny Israeli society’s achievements in LGBTQ+ rights and environmentalism, respectively” because “of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians … These activists refuse to recognize the intersectional identities, lived experiences and improved lives of Israelis – both Arab and Jewish – on their own merits,” the report added.
The report ascribed the rise in anti-Israel incidents on college campuses in part to “continued momentum-building in the anti-Israel movement generally” and anti-Israel activists seemingly “emboldened” to call for “Zionists, Zionist institutions and organizations that associate with Zionists to be excluded from communal life and/or dismantled” as evident by various SJP chapters promoting The Mapping Project. The ADL has described The Mapping Project as being “threatening” because it calls “for the dismantling and disruption of the Boston Jewish community.”
“Every year, young Jewish people go to college with the hope that their Jewish identities, including their connection to the Jewish state, will be welcome on campus,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. “This sense of community is increasingly at risk as concerning anti-Israel incidents increase. University leaders must respond effectively to this hatred so that Jewish students feel safe.”
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