The Symbolic Significance of Jewish Students in the Pro-Palestine Campus Protests — The Revealer

When House Speaker Mike Johnson visited Columbia University in April he castigated pro-Palestine student protestors and university administrators alike for their role in creating what he called an unsafe and antisemitic campus environment. His speech was drowned out by heckling from protestors who emphatically asserted their First Amendment right to demonstrate. The students countered that they are not antisemites demonstrating against Jews, but rather that they are protesting the catastrophic effects both Israeli state violence and Zionism, a political movement, have on Palestinians. Furthermore, they argued that the protests were intended to maintain local and global focus on the Israeli atrocities in Gaza, contending that the attention should be on Gaza and not their methods of protest.

What happened on college campuses across the United States this spring—a massive wave of nonviolent student encampments protesting the war in Gaza and universities’ investments in companies that profit from that war—is a reminder of the power people have to organize for social change. And like the most successful social movements in history, the student encampments built a broad-based coalition of support, which included Palestinian and Arab students; Black, Brown, white, and multiracial students; and students of all nationalities and immigration statuses who are Christian, Muslim, Hindu, other religions – and, especially, Jewish.

I have been following the participation of young American Jews in the Palestine solidarity movement, on campuses and off, for the last decade as I conducted research for my book Unsettled: American Jews and the Movement for Justice in Palestine. In the book, I argue that young Jewish American Palestine solidarity activists view their activism and commitment to ending Israeli state violence as a Jewish value. For them, active participation in this social justice movement is a reflection of Jewish ethics, motivated by their Jewish identities and the values they learned through Jewish education. The activists intentionally and strategically infuse their work with Jewish teachings and customs in ways that strengthen and reinforce their Jewish identities, making Palestine solidarity activism not only a reflection of their individualized values but an expression of a collective Jewish ethos.

This is exactly what occurred on college campuses in the spring across the United States. Young American Jews showed up as Jews to say they reject the Israeli state violence being conducted in their names as both Jews and Americans. And they played an essential role in the Palestine solidarity encampments.

The visible presence of Jews at these protests was crucial, in part because the most common way the pro-Israel establishment discredits and smears Palestine solidarity activists is by calling them antisemitic. Accusations of antisemitism constitute a widespread and effective tool in silencing those who support justice in Palestine. When Jewish activists show up visibly as Jews, they deflect such smears and render it clear that the pro-Palestine encampments are not inherently based on antisemitism but rather are rooted in the principles of justice, equality, and human rights for Palestinians. These values do not threaten Jewish safety or wellbeing, but they are a direct threat to the existing order in Israel, which guarantees rights and protections to Jews that it denies to Palestinians. For example, as Israeli citizens, Jews have the right to vote and access to national health care, social security, and education. Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, who have no citizenship status, have none of these rights and are unable to vote for the government that controls their lives. Furthermore, Palestinians are subject to severe violence from both Israeli settlers and the Israeli military. Palestinian political prisoners, including minors, are often held under administrative detention without charge or trial, and Israel routinely demolishes Palestinian homes, targeted due to a lack of building permits or security concerns, leading to massive Palestinian displacement and the loss of livelihoods. Students and the broader movement for justice in Palestine are concerned with these and other Israeli violations and are generally not motivated by antisemitism.

Of course, there are individuals who engage in dangerous and antisemitic rhetoric within these encampments and beyond. But to paint the movement as a whole as antisemitic because of a few individuals is both disingenuous and factually inaccurate, and that devalues the very real forms of antisemitism that physically threaten Jews and our communities, which we must take seriously. The threats of white supremacy and increasing white nationalism in the United States have already proven deadly for Jewish communities, as was made evidenced by the attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and the Poway Chabad in California, to name just two such attacks. When nonviolent activism in support of Palestinian rights is deemed antisemitic merely because it challenges Jewish supremacy in Israel, it makes it harder to combat the violent antisemitism of white nationalists in the United States who endanger the lives of Jewish and other marginalized communities.

At numerous universities around the country, Jewish student activists engaged in Jewish rituals in the encampments – holding Passover seders, Shabbat dinners, and prayer services – inviting Jewish and non-Jewish faculty and students to participate in and witness Jewish culture. Joining in Jewish ritual as a form of Palestine solidarity activism is a profound way these activists differentiate and liberate their Jewishness from Zionism. At one encampment Passover seder, students included olives on the traditional seder plate to symbolize Palestinian freedom and chanted “next year in free Jerusalem” at the end of the ritual. Jewish students adapted the holiday’s traditional rituals for the current moment, emphasizing that if the Passover holiday is a commemoration of emancipation, that it should extend to the freedom of Palestinians as well. By participating in a Passover seder within the context of the Palestine solidarity movement, the Jewish activists framed their participation in the protests as rooted in Judaism. And by bringing Jewish rituals to the encampments, they made it clear that their public resistance to the war in Gaza was an explicit expression of their Jewish identities and values.

Many young American Jews, including students on university campuses, feel alienated from Zionism, Israel, and the mainstream Jewish organizations that maintain a close relationship with both. In fact, many Jewish students on campuses today actively oppose Zionism and identify proudly as anti-Zionist Jews. Rather than participate in mainstream Jewish organizations, they have found new places to engage with Jewish life and have created Jewish communal spaces that foster dissenting views on Israel and Zionism and that embrace Palestine solidarity activism as one way to express one’s Jewishness and commitment to liberal and progressive Jewish values.

Engaging in Jewish rituals at the encampments forms solidarities among anti-Zionist Jewish students who don’t feel welcome in mainstream Jewish spaces, in particular at Hillel, the organization for Jewish life on campuses that has widely and publicly condemned the encampments. They engaged in Jewish rites and showed up as Jews in order to form new Jewish communities where their values can be on full display and where they can say “not in our name” to the genocide in Gaza.

For some Jewish students, showing up as Jews included being part of formal groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace, which is a distinctly Jewish organization that organizes in solidarity with Palestinians on campus and beyond. Other Jewish students participated in the protests not through affiliation with any groups but made sure to be there alongside them, thereby forming a Jewish bloc of protestors that was able to respond to detractors challenging the broader protest movement. Regardless of how they came to participate, at campus protests the Jewish student activists highlighted the significant Jewish emphasis on the idea of “never again,” a post-Holocaust phrase invoked to suggest that Jews will never allow another Jewish genocide. But rather than taking the particular view, which would indicate “never again for Jews,” the student activists emphasized the universalist approach to say “never again for anyone,” including Palestinians.

Many of the activists I interviewed for my book indicated that their participation in Palestine solidarity activism is essential to transforming their relationships to Judaism. They often mobilize based on the premise that upholding their Jewish identity and their conception of Jewish values obligates them to organize in solidarity with Palestinians. Their activism stems from the ethical imperative of justice that many were taught in the Jewish educational and communal environments in which they were raised.

This new generation’s engagement in Palestine solidarity activism is based on a love for and commitment to the Jewish people, a safe and secure Jewish future, and the consistent application of the Jewish values of freedom, liberation, equality, and justice that they were taught by Jewish institutions. Today’s young Jewish activists believe that Israel’s human rights abuses of Palestinians are not only morally repugnant but also a harm to Jewish life, identity, and culture in both Israel and around the world. For them, the unwavering support of Israel by mainstream Jewish institutions conflicts with the Jewish values upon which they were raised—those of freedom, equality, liberation, and liberal democracy—which compels them to resist Israel’s policies of occupation and apartheid toward Palestinians.

Perhaps most significantly to the campus protest movement, Jewish students are participating in Palestine solidarity activism in ways that can transform their local communities materially and symbolically. On a material level, Jewish students participate in boycott and divestment campaigns that are rooted in localized, winnable efforts to pressure their universities to divest from companies that profit from Israeli occupation, including many companies in Israel and weapons manufacturers across the globe that don’t align with the mission and values of the university. Inspired by a similar international movement to end apartheid in South Africa, Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns create opportunities for U.S. based activists, including American Jews, to target something local, familiar, and achievable rather than something far away that seems impossible to win. Put simply, while ending the war in Gaza seems like an unlikely possibility to achieve from U.S. campuses, students are able to pressure their universities to divest from companies that profit from war and to end official partnerships with Israeli academic institutions. Many of the Jewish activists I interviewed perceive BDS campaigns as a viable and powerful nonviolent tool for resisting and combating Israeli state violence from the United States. Unlike other forms of activism that might require them to travel halfway across the world to the Middle East, BDS campaigns enable activists to work toward change from their homes and campuses where they have more power to influence their institutions.

Symbolically, the presence of Jewish activists in the student encampments challenges the narrative that Palestinians and Jews are enemies in perpetual conflict with one another while simultaneously showing the world that Jews are willing to put their bodies on the line in solidarity with Palestinians to end Israeli injustices. The participation of Jewish activists challenges power, seeks to disrupt the status quo, and rejects the perception that Jews and Palestinians are on opposite sides of a protracted conflict. Put simply, most Jewish activists who engage with the Palestine solidarity movement are concerned with the material gains of improving everyday life for Palestinians as well as the symbolic notion that Jews and Palestinians can resist Israeli state violence collectively, in alliance with one another.

To dismiss campus protests as antisemitic and to ignore the large symbolic presence of Jewish student activists is to miss the point of this movement. It intentionally detracts from the mass atrocities the Israeli military is committing to instead condemn the methods of protest rather than the atrocities themselves.

These protests are about keeping an eye on the genocide unfolding in Gaza and the complicity of universities in the violence against Palestinians. Jewish students are an important element in the broad-based coalition protesting the war. Critics of the protests would rather smear the entire movement as antisemitic, focusing on the means of protest, so as to ignore the actual genocide. But as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. reminds us in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” the protestors aren’t the ones creating the tensions. They are merely bringing the tensions to the surface.

 

Oren Kroll-Zeldin is the assistant director of the Swig Program in Jewish Studies and Social Justice at the University of San Francisco where he is also assistant professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies. He is

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