How pervasive is antisemitism on US campuses? A look at the language of the protests
The protesters who seized Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall on Tuesday swiftly unfurled a banner down the front of the storied building with just one word: intifada.
Other students among the proPalestinian demonstrators in the heart of the New York campus were sceptical about invoking the Arabic call for an uprising because it has been so widely used by pro-Israeli groups to discredit their cause as support for terrorism and therefore antisemitic.
Those students’ fears were swiftly realised when the White House described the use of intifada as “hate speech”. Supporters of Israel at Columbia said it represented a threat to Jewish lives on campus because it amounted to a glorification of the Palestinian suicide bombing campaign during the second intifada against the Israeli occupation two decades ago.
Eric Adams, New York’s mayor, accused the students who hung the banner of being antisemites as he sent in the police to haul them out of Hamilton Hall and dismantle a tent camp erected to demand the university sell its investments in Israel and to show support for the Palestinians as the war in Gaza grinds on.
Columbia’s administration said it called in the police to stop the protest that began on the campus last month, and then spread to other universities, in part to protect the safety of Jewish students threatened by antisemitic actions.
But pro-Palestinian students accuse Columbia of using concerns about safety as cover to shut them down under pressure from politicians and pro-Israel groups with a long history of wielding claims of antisemitism to curb legitimate protest against Israel.
It’s hard to deny that there have been antisemitic incidents on the campus, including the targeting of students, probably Jewish, called “Nazi bitches” and told to “go back to Poland”.
One female Jewish student described a masked pro-Palestinian demonstrator confronting her as she walked across campus one evening. She said he got extremely close and menacingly demanded to know if she was a Zionist. After that, she stopped wearing a Star of David necklace.
“It was genuinely frightening. Looking back, I don’t think he would have physically attacked me but I was very afraid in that moment and I am still afraid to come on to campus alone,” she said.
Gil Zussman, a professor of electrical engineering and member of Columbia’s antisemitism taskforce, said other students had had similar experiences of being threatened or verbally attacked.
“Several times I met Jewish girls sitting on the stairs and crying. They are being targeted personally. When people are calling a Jewish girl, with family murdered in the Holocaust, a Nazi, this is really, really bad,” he said.
Nonetheless, instances of threatening behaviour directed at individuals appear to have been relatively isolated and more likely to occur at parallel protests by non-students outside the campus.
The wider issue for Zussman and other pro-Israel activists is the more complex area of anti-Zionism that they claim creates an “unsafe” and “threatening” climate for Jews at Columbia.
The day before the police shut down the protests, pro-Palestinian students led marches around the heart of the campus chanting “Brick by brick, wall by wall, Israel will fall” and “We don’t want no two state, we will take all of it”. Others led with a variation on the popular but contentious “river to the sea” slogan: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab.” One protester cried: “Fuck Israel, Israel’s a bitch.”
Zussman, who was part of a small group of Israel supporters gathered next to a wall overlooking the camp the day before the police arrested the protesters, argued that the denunciations of Zionism, as opposed to opposition to the war in Gaza or protests in support of an end to occupation, left many Jewish students feeling threatened on campus.
“I’ve seen relatively large crowds of more than 100 people saying Zionists are not wanted here. This has really veered away from free speech and into something you will never see in a college campus towards any other minority group. When they shout ‘no Zionists here’ then they are targeting us personally,” said Zussman, who is Israeli and Jewish.
“Even if you are unhappy about the policies of Mexico, if somebody would be shouting ‘we don’t want Mexicans here’ the university would act very quickly.”
Zussman said he had also seen students carrying signs glorifying Hamas rocket attacks.
“It’s like, we will kill you because you are Israeli or Jewish,” he said.
The university suspended one of the protest leaders, Khymani James, after video emerged of him saying in January that “Zionists don’t deserve to live” and “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists”.
James also said that Zionists, white supremacists and Nazis “are all the same people” because their existence is “antithetical to peace”.
“I feel very comfortable, very comfortable, calling for those people to die,” he said.
James apologised for his comments after they were made public and said they were “wrong”.
“Every member of our community deserves to feel safe without qualification,” he wrote.
After James’s remarks were made public, university officials wrote to Columbia students denouncing antisemitism as threatening safety.
“Chants, signs, taunts and social media posts from our own students that mock and threaten to ‘kill’ Jewish people are totally unacceptable, and Columbia students who are involved in such incidents will be held accountable,” the letter said.
James’s comments were widely condemned by pro-Palestinian groups, which said they did not represent the views of the movement. But pro-Israel activists and politicians have painted the student protesters at large as rooted in support for Hamas, terrorism and the destruction of Israel.
That message was reinforced in parts of the media. The CNN presenter Dana Bash drew widespread scorn for likening the situation on US campuses to antisemitism in 1930s Europe.
“The fear among Jews in this country is palpable right now,” she said.
Bash also dismissed the motives of pro-Palestinian calls for a ceasefire in Gaza by claiming there was a ceasefire before the Hamas attack on 7 October notwithstanding continued Israeli aggression in the occupied territories, including the shooting of hundreds of Palestinians in the West Bank and the army’s complicity in Jewish settler violence against Palestinians. Armed groups also fired hundreds of rockets from Gaza into Israel earlier in the year.
Nadia Abu El-Haj, a professor of anthropology and co-director of the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia, told the New York Review of Books that she did not doubt there had been antisemitic incidents on campus alongside abuse of Muslim and other students. But El-Haj said that the “rhetoric of safety”, specifically that of Jewish students, has been used to drive a “crackdown” against pro-Palestinian activists.
One of the student protesters, Jamil Mohamad, who was born in Jordan to an exiled Palestinian family, acknowledged that some Jewish students are genuinely fearful. But he said that was in part because pro-Israel groups push the claim that opposition to Zionism amounts to support for Hamas and a call to attack Jews.
Mohamad attributes charges of antisemitism to students who do not like hearing legitimate differences of opinion such as accusations that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
“There is a distinction between being unsafe and feeling uncomfortable. It’s very notable to see the discourse around this issue because the right in this country that’s been talking about woke culture, and how young people are snowflakes, are suddenly adopting this narrative around safety, which is really a narrative around comfort,” he said.
“People do not have a right to feel comfortable in their ideas. This is a university. This is a place to challenge people’s ideas. Discomfort is not the same thing as danger.”
Mohamad said that the “narrative of antisemitism” was being used to silence opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza and decades of occupation. He is not alone in accusing Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, of seeking to appease Republican politicians who described the university as a “a hotbed of antisemitism and hatred” since protests surged in the wake of the 7 October Hamas attack and Israel’s subsequent assault on Gaza.
“The university is catering to external political pressure, and also probably pressure from donors who are threatening to pull money out of the university because of the widespread protests against Israel on campus. Shafik very much adopted this line before Congress about antisemitism on campus without any nuance or qualification,” he said.