More than 80 percent of Americans favor Israel over the Palestinian Hamas terror group in their ongoing conflict. Among college-age Americans, more than 57 percent favor Israel.
That’s according to a recent Harvard CAPS-Harris poll reported by the Center for American Political Studies.
Which raises the question of why pro-Palestinian protesters have dominated the campus scene in California and nationwide, staging far more rallies, setting up all encampments, occupying buildings and threatening and committing far more violent acts than their pro-Israel counterparts.
Now the AMCHA Initiative, a Santa Cruz-based group that has tracked campus antisemitism since the earliest years of this century, has found at least a partial explanation: It’s the faculty.
Related: UC academics side with Hamas
More specifically, it’s an on-campus group called Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP), whose collegiate chapters and membership ballooned just after the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas incursion into Israel that massacred more than 1,200 persons and took 251 hostages, many of whom Hamas killed in captivity.
FJP exists to further activities of the Hamas-linked college group Students for Justice in Palestine, whose anti-Israel and antisemitic demonstrations mushroomed on Oct. 8, 2023, just one day after the massacre and more than one week before any Israeli troops entered Gaza in their current war with Hamas.
In a detailed study of protests at 100 universities, AMCHA found the number of demonstrations, the time encampments lasted and the number of incidents involving death threats and threats of violence against Jewish students was vastly higher on campuses with FJP chapters than those without.
This was true nationally and in California, where FJP and its affiliates have UC chapters at the Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz campuses, as well as at Stanford and USC, most of which saw lengthy encampments and building takeovers.
The study found incidents involving violent physical assaults of Jews on campuses were 7.3 times more likely at schools with an FJP chapter than those with none, like Santa Clara University and many Cal State campuses.
Death threats against Jews labelled “Zionists” were 3.4 times as common at colleges with FJP chapters, whose membership at California schools ranges from seven to 40 professors per campus.
FJP formally has two main purposes: to promote the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement designed to isolate Israeli universities and their faculty, and to purge all Zionist expression from their campuses.
Here’s some of how that played out at UC Santa Barbara, in a student’s description of one of many campus meetings about the Israel-Hamas war:
“For the Jewish students in that room, the betrayal in what a Black speaker said was palpable. (Jews) were framed as oppressors, even though it was their people who had been slaughtered just weeks before, over 1,200 lives, most of them Jewish, lost in the worst massacre against the Jewish people since the Holocaust.” they said.
“The reality of that horror was ignored. Instead, the speaker, president of (an) organization that…celebrated the Oct. 7 invasion, portrayed Palestinians as the only victims, as though the grief of the Jewish students…was offensive. (His) narrative left Jewish students stunned. They were grieving, heartbroken, and terrified, and now they were being painted as aggressors in a story where they had just buried their dead. This was soul-crushing.”
That experience, multiplied many times over, is one reason many Jewish students have transferred away from campuses they attended last year.
In a way, their leaving is a victory for FJP, one of whose stated goals is to squelch disagreement with its views. Another stated goal is to dismantle many schools’ foreign study programs linked to Israeli universities.
Administrators at UC, Stanford and other campuses this fall adopted some of AMCHA’s suggested safeguard and enforcement mechanisms aimed at keeping politics out of classrooms, while leaving campuses open to peaceful expression of all views.
It’s too early to know how this will play out, but an official FJP statement said “the work to educate and organize (students) will grow in new ways.”
One big question: How many students will be willing or able to risk their grades and futures by defying the views of some of their professors and how many will go along to get along?
Email Thomas Elias at [email protected].
