Here Is the Hate for Israel That Flooded Colleges After the October 7 Hamas Massacre

The horrific October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas has generated an unprecedented wave of global antisemitism. Like the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, the call is not for a two-state solution but rather to destroy Israel. The idea that “colonized” people have the right to “resist” by “any means necessary” has been coupled with denial that Hamas had committed atrocities and the allegation that Israel is committing “genocide” in its efforts to recover hostages and end the threat from Hamas. These ideas have propagated from campus to politics to the streets, putting Israel and Jews worldwide at grave risk.

The initial Hamas attack was praised by the BDS movement and other Hamas supporters as “resistance,” “armed struggle,” and “decolonization,” while the Israeli effort to end the threat from Hamas was condemned as “genocide.” Countless protests took place globally which included calls to “Gas the Jews,” “globalize the intifada,” “there is only one solution,” and “Allahu Akbar.”

Massive upswings in antisemitic violence around the world were recorded, with synagogues and schools, Jewish owned businesses, and individuals targeted.

Enormous protests in London, New York, Berlin, and other cities turned out thousands of Hamas supporters and featured a variety of symbols including Hamas and ISIS flags, as well as slogans such as “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free.” Support for a two-state solution was conspicuously absent while calls to oppose “75 years of occupation” and thus the existence of Israel were common.

Many protestors accused Israel of “genocide” in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attack, and later denied that Hamas had committed its self-documented atrocities.

Campus reactions to Hamas were swift and telling. Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapters celebrated the attacks as a “historic win for the Palestinian resistance,” with cries of “resistance is justified,” “intifada, intifada, “from the river to the sea Palestine will be free,” “globalize the intifada,” and “there is only one solution intifada revolution.”

“Vigils for the martyrs” — that is, dead Hamas terrorists — were also held at many campuses.

A Hamas declared “Day of Rage” was held, with SJP and aligned groups participating, that forced the closure of countless Jewish institutions such as schools. This was followed on October 25 with “National Walk-Out Day” which featured additional protests and harassment.

A bare minimum of 100 antisemitic incidents have been recorded on campus since the initial Hamas attack, which included the barricading of Jewish students into a library at Cooper Union before their rescue by campus security, death threats at many institutions, and physical assaults at schools like Tulane.

At UCLA, a crowd chanting “Israel, Israel you can’t hide, we want a Jewish genocide!” marched across campus. At New York University, the crowd chanted “We don’t want a Jewish state, we want all of it.” A student with an Israeli flag was assaulted by pro-Hamas demonstrators at Tulane University, while pro-Hamas demonstrators occupied an administrative building at the University of Massachusetts. At Cornell University, postings on a Greek life message board aimed specific threats of violence against the Jewish residence house.

•  At Harvard University a collective of 30 student groups wrote that they ‘‘hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.’’ The letter was ignored by the university administration but was quickly condemned by former Harvard president Lawrence Summers, who described it as “morally reprehensible.” A variety of groups soon withdrew their endorsement claiming they were unaware of the letter’s contents.
•  The University of North Carolina chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine claimed ‘‘it is our moral obligation to be in solidarity with the dispossessed, no matter the pathway to liberation they choose to take. This includes violence…’’
•  The Swarthmore SJP chapter issued a statement celebrating how “Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have confronted the imperial apparatus that has constricted their livelihoods for the past seventy-five years. In an unprecedented violation of Zionist intelligence and military rule, the resistance broke its people out of the open-air prison.” The statement noted further that the “Zionist regime’s murderous occupation has rendered a Palestinian response inevitable.”

Numerous other campus affinity groups celebrated the massacres and signed statements. Some retracted their signatures later after exposure, claiming they were unaware of what they had signed or that signatures had been attached without their permission.

In response 30 Jewish groups issued a statement calling on universities to remove recognition and defund SJP chapters, and demanded “moral accountability and official punishment for SJP and its chapters for their campaign to glorify the Hamas attacks on Israel of October 7.”

More substantively, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis ordered that the state defund SJP chapters at specific universities on the grounds that they provided material support for terrorism by means of printed guides which state “Palestinian students in exile are PART of this movement, not in solidarity with this movement.” The order threatens administrators with suspension if funding is not halted.

Legal groups also sent letters to some 200 university presidents demanding universities investigate SJP chapters “vocal and potentially material support to Hamas, a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization.”

The firestorm of criticism also resulted in efforts to identify and shame individual students who had participated in pro-Hamas protests directly or through group statements. As students who had signed statements were identified, a number of law firms rescinded employment offers.

One example was New York University law student Ryna Workman, who had posted on the NYU Student Bar Association’s online newsletter that Israel bears “full responsibility” for Hamas’ attack. The firm Winston & Strawn rescinded its employment offer, stating “Winston stands in solidarity with Israel’s right to exist in peace and condemns Hamas and the violence and destruction it has ignited in the strongest terms possible.” Workman defended her remarks as did the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). Meanwhile, NYU’s Black Allied Law Students Association and the Women of Color Collective called the rescinding of Workman’s offer “systemic, concentrated violence.”

In response, a growing number of university alums and trustees announced they were halting contributions and would refuse to employ students who had participated in pro-Hamas demonstrations or statements.

University of Pennsylvania donor Mark Rowan, CEO of Apollo Global Management and board chair of UJA-Federation of New York noted that the university had hosted the “Palestine Writes” festival, and that the university board and president had attempted to purge the board of critics, and stated that he would no longer donate, and called on others to join him and for the president to resign.

Penn faculty responded with a statement condemning the “intimidation” “by individuals outside of the University who are surveilling both faculty and students in an effort to intimidate them and inhibit their academic freedom.”

The hostility of campus environments, especially at elite or selective institutions, towards Jews is now indisputable.

A Harris poll taken on October 19 2023 showed that American voters viewed Israel favorably by a large margin and regarded Hamas as a terrorist organization. Shockingly, however, 51% of 18-24 year olds regarded the killing of Israelis as justified while at the same time 62% saw the killings as genocidal. In contrast, a much smaller Generation Lab poll indicated that 52% of students blamed Hamas with only 11% blaming Israel.

The role of burgeoning “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) bureaucracies in fomenting antisemitism on the basis that Jews are the epitome of white oppressors and “settler colonialists” has been repeatedly pointed out.

A large number of faculty members spoke in support of Hamas and its murderous onslaught, stating that it was a legitimate form of “resistance,” and decrying “Israeli genocidal violence.”

• At the University of Michigan, some 1,000 faculty members signed a letter blaming the “decades-long Israeli occupation of Palestine and the structural apartheid Palestinians residing both within Israel and the Occupied Territories endure on a daily basis” for the violence, condemning the university president’s statement to the violence, especially the implication “that only Israelis have been wounded, traumatized, or killed in the ongoing violence,” and the “university administration’s continued erasure of our campuses’ Palestinian communities.”
•  At the City University of New York (CUNY), the faculty union sent emails to its 23,000 members decrying the “Zionist genocidal campaign” and encouraging members “to channel your grief and rage over the nearly 1,000 Palestinians martyred, including nearly 300 children, into upcoming rallies across CUNY campuses and New York City.”
•  Some 130 Columbia University faculty issued a statement “contextualizing” the Hamas massacres as “a military response by a people who had endured crushing and unrelenting state violence from an occupying power over many years” and condemning the university for not supporting pro-Hamas students. They also demanded the university sever relations with Israel in all ways.

Countless individual faculty members also spoke out against Israel, particularly via social media, in response to the Hamas attack, as well as for the alleged attack on a Gaza hospital that was actually damaged by a failed Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket launch.

One notable example was well-known BDS supporter Joseph Massad of Columbia University, who published a long piece which described the massacre as “awesome” and the terrorists who para-glided into a music festival in Israel to murder and rape the young people there as “the air force of the Palestinian resistance.”

More egregious examples of harassment and threats were also common. At Stanford University, lecturer Ameer Hasan Loggins was suspended after asking Jewish and Israeli students to identify themselves and stand in a corner saying ‘This is what Israel does to the Palestinians.” Loggins also stated “How many people died in the Holocaust?” and in response to “Six million,” said, “Colonizers killed more than 6 million. Israel is a colonizer.”

Statements praising Hamas and condemning Israel, such as that signed by over 1800 sociologists, most of them graduate students, suggest that the next generation of Western intellectuals and faculty members will be hopelessly hostile toward Israel.

Reactions to the massacre in Israel and campus protests from university administrations ranged widely. At Harvard University, President Claudine Gay offered a weak statement on October 9, to which she added the next day, “let there be no doubt that I condemn the terrorist atrocities perpetrated by Hamas. Such inhumanity is abhorrent, whatever one’s individual views of the origins of longstanding conflicts in the region.” At the same time, she responded to the appalling statement from 30 Harvard groups in support of Hamas that “Let me also state, on this matter as on others, that while our students have the right to speak for themselves, no student group — not even 30 student groups — speaks for Harvard University or its leadership.”

University of Pennsylvania president M. Elizabeth Magill’s first statement on the events noted, “We are devastated by the horrific assault on Israel by Hamas that targeted civilians and the taking of hostages over the weekend. These abhorrent attacks have resulted in the tragic loss of life and escalating violence and unrest in the region.” This was revised on October 10.

Responding to enormous anger from the Penn community, including from trustees and donors, the chair of the trustees issued a statement on October 16 noting the board had “discussed the terrorist attacks by Hamas in Israel, condemning the horrific atrocities and expressing solidarity with the Jewish community” and then reaffirmed “that President Magill and her existing University leadership team are the right group to take the University forward.”

The most forthright condemnation came from University of Florida president Ben Sasse, who stated, “I will not tiptoe around this simple fact: What Hamas did is evil and there is no defense for terrorism. This shouldn’t be hard. Sadly, too many people in elite academia have been so weakened by their moral confusion that, when they see videos of raped women, hear of a beheaded baby, or learn of a grandmother murdered in her home, the first reaction of some is to ‘provide context’ and try to blame the raped women, beheaded baby, or the murdered grandmother.”

Numerous examples of pro-Hamas protests were also noted at high schools across the US. These demonstrations by ethnic and other radicalized students reflected the desired outcome of mandated “ethnic studies” classes that have become widespread throughout the country, particularly in California, where BDS groups facilitate them directly.

The “University of California Ethnic Studies Council” — which includes a variety of BDS supporters involved in setting state standards for “ethnic studies” — made its position clear in a widely condemned letter that damned Israel for “hold the ongoing, 75-year occupation and settler colonial violence to blame for all violent struggle that is currently taking place on Palestinian lands.”

The author is a contributor to SPME, where a version of this article was first published.

The post Here Is the Hate for Israel That Flooded Colleges After the October 7 Hamas Massacre first appeared on Algemeiner.com.