The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) warned in a new report on Wednesday that vilification of Zionists and expressions of support for terror against Israel took center stage on college and university campuses between June 2022 and May 2023.
The report, “Anti-Israel Activism on US Campuses, 2022-2023” warns there is a growing radical movement on American campuses “in which opposition to Israel and Zionism is required to be fully accepted.”
In the report, the ADL said that “for decades,” vocal student groups and faculty “have espoused anti-Israel and anti-Zionist views and engaged in related activism.”
In a total of 665 campus anti-Israel incidents during the 2022-2023 academic year, there were zero instances of physical assault; nine instances of vandalism; 24 instances of harassment; 303 events; 326 protests/actions; and three BDS (Boycott, Divest & Sanctions) resolutions.
Many but not all incidents may be characterized as antisemitic.
The total number of incidents was nearly double that from 2021-2022.
In two categories, the incidents were similar during both periods: The number of physical assaults declined from one to zero, and instances of vandalism declined from 11 to nine.
On the bright side, the number of BDS resolutions surveyed across undergraduate institutions, faculty/staff unions and graduate student programs fell, from 20 to three. On the not-so-bright side, all three of those resolutions passed in undergraduate student bodies.
Additionally, instances of harassment rose from 19 to 24, suggesting campus activists are finding other ways to express their hate.
There has been an uptick in explicit promotion of violence against Israel and a “coarsening of rhetoric” vilifying and ostracizing Zionism and Zionists, the report noted.
“Activist groups, in particular Students for Justice Palestine (SJP) (the largest and most active campus anti-Israel group in the US), appeared to be less restrained in expressing support for US State Department-designated terrorist organizations and individuals who are known to have killed Israelis,” according to the report.
As part of this trend, the ADL reported on the June 2022 promotion of poisonous The Mapping Project. An initiative of the SJP, the project includes a call to “dismantle” and “disrupt” all of the named organizations on its interactive map, which pinpoints the locations of 500 Jewish communal and other community organizations in Massachusetts, including the ADL.
Another group cited by the ADL is the Resistance News Network (RNN), a radical anti-Zionist English-language channel on Telegram and Instagram that promotes violence against Israel. The channel, which has nearly 7,000 members (6,948) emerged in October 2022 and includes explicit promotion of terrorist groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), along with images of gun-toting terrorists and rockets being fired at Israel.
The Jisr Collective, which became popular in summer 2022, also became increasingly popular among anti-Zionist campus activists, and was promoted by multiple SJP chapters on US college campuses, the ADL reported. However, Elon Musk banned the group from Twitter in November 2022 after its posts praised a deadly bombing in Jerusalem. The group is now dormant, thanks to Musk.
“The embrace by many SJP chapters of RNN, Jisr Collective and The Mapping Project signals that explicit promotion of violence against Israel and calls to eradicate Zionism and dismantle Zionist institutions are accepted among large swaths of the campus anti-Zionist movement,” the ADL added.
