Did you encounter anti-Israeli activism on campus?

34 comments

1. Yup, definitely. Some of it was reasonable and some was completely unhinged and bordering on antisemitism. That was the case on my campus and the two campuses I worked at after I graduated.

2. I experienced very little activism of any kind.

3. I went to college in an Arab country that doesn’t have relations with Israel

   So

   Yeah

4. No I have never seen any anti-Israeli activism at my university in Ohio. tbh it’s really not talked about much at all. not for any particular reason but i just didn’t encounter any discussions with my degree

5. Not once.

6. Can’t say that I did. Lots of corner preach-yelling, but I feel like it was more focused on the debauchery of youth than anything else.

7. I went to 2 colleges and the only “activism”, in terms of people making displays of themselves, that I recall was a guy with the sign that said “Jesus Loves You” who was frequently on the Diag.

   I can recall once in my life seeing anti-Israeli protesting, there’s an active fringe group that’s been hassling a synagogue in Ann Arbor [for years](https://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/2022/05/us-supreme-court-again-declines-to-hear-ann-arbor-synagogue-protest-case.html), fuck these people.

8. Yes. The group remained underground mostly out of fear of ending up on canary mission, where pro-Palestine students and professors are listed alongside their public information.

9. The only time I’ve seen it at mine was a few winters ago. The campus has a giant fountain in the center of it that they turn off when it snows. Someone wrote “Fuck Israel” in giant letters in the slush. For reference, this is a major public uni in a solid blue state. There’s a lot of pro-Israel activism though.

10. Didn’t see much in the way of activism outside the occasional brimstone preacher, if those count.

11. My university was very small, very Christian, and not very liberal…so I did not.

12. Nope. Occasionally, people might make comments about Israel if the topic comes up, but Israel is just not a priority for most college students in the US.

13. No, never.

    A bunch of pro-Palestine activism, though.

14. Not activism specifically, but like most universities there was definitely an anti-Israel/pro-Palestinian slant overall.

15. Some, usually along side a lot of other far-left gripes.

16. I got called an Anti-Semite for saying that the idea of a country that is based around religious homogenization that is vehemently opposed to immigration while also using that as a basis for casual racism and ethnic violence while being one of the most impacted by racism and genocide through history is both ironic and wrong.

17. Golda Meir was an alum of one of my university’s predecessor institutions, and our library is named after her. Our student body leaned left and some of them were very pro-Palestine. But I can’t say I remember anything explicitly “anti-Israeli.”

18. Yeah, he was a year behind me in the physics program. Really cool dude who changed a lot of my views on Israel. It’s complicated, especially for him being from Isreal himself, but he was firmly in the “My country is operating as an apartheid state” camp. He also made a point that we all need to draw distinctions between The State and The People who the state controls. Drawing that distinction has been really formative to my political views. He introduced me to Food Not Bombs. Actually, on reflection, this guy really made an impact lol.

    This is a very slim-odds scenario. The chance of bumping into any anti-isreal activist is low on campus. I’d argue that you’re more likely to bump into End Of Days Evangelical activists selling tour tickets to Tel Aviv.

19. One time, at the central square at my university, we had pro-palestine and pro-israeli protestors yelling at eachother on opposite sides of the square with this group of three asian dudes just breakdancing in the middle. Very funny.

20. Is this one of those dumbfuck situations where people consider the support of Palestinians as “anti Israel”? Because that’s what this sounds like.

21. I never even experienced anti-Isreali *sentiment*, let alone activism.

    Maybe I’m unique here but nobody gave a fuck about your political beliefs or opinions when I was in college.

22. Not really, I occasionally saw a group or two that would pass out leaflets criticizing settlement by Israeli citizens in land internationally recognized as occupied territory and how the government really should be taking action against that, but that was about the extent of it.

23. No. But it’s a private Catholic school so it’s majority white…

24. I was at Berkeley in 2011. There were random protests of stuff all the time. There was one case that I kind of remember because I had a dorm roommate involved. He mentioned planning to be a part of a “we support Israel” demonstration. For context, he was Jewish and fairly orthodox (he didn’t eat the cafeteria food because the kitchen wasn’t kosher). I don’t remember if the pro-Israel event was to counter something or if something was organized to counter them. But it did end up being two groups counter-demonstrating each other. I don’t remember what the specific issue that started everything was.

    These free-speech type events usually stayed in Sproul Plaza. I only remember one case where I had a math discussion section interrupted because they decided to go marching. So we had to pause for about a minute to let the noisy people pass by outside.

25. Almost none when I was in undergrad 15 years ago. Now I work at a university and people hang up fliers about it, or you might see someone passing out literature. We’re a large open campus so it’s hard to say whether they’re students or not.

26. There was a professor on campus who shouted “Death to Israel” during a lecture. It was pretty scandalous.

    Years later, he was investigated for having ties to ISIS and was charged with lying to the FBI.

    https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndoh/pr/kent-state-professor-julio-pino-pleaded-guilty-lying-fbi

27. I saw a decent amount of pro-Palestinian demonstrations, but nothing that was anti-Israel. Most of those occasions were people protesting the treatment of people in occupied areas, and while they were critical of Israel’s policies, it wasn’t anything about the people of Israel. Most politically active (and sane) Americans distinguish between the government of a place and its people. For example: a lot of people are very critical of the CCP and Chinese government, but they don’t have a problem with Chinese people.

28. Yes I participated in it as well. We worked on a BDS campaign that eventually passed in 2020. I’d like to see Palestine freed

29. Less anti-Israeli, and more anti-Palestinian.

    We were in a critical writing class learning about the conflict.

    Anti- Palestinian kid was a dick when we had a Palestinian guest speaker talking about the conflict so we leaned pro-Palestinian because of him. Won’t say what he did but it was a small scale version of the conflict which made it crystal clear why no resolution has been found despite it being one of the longest rivalries in recorded history.

    Do NOT respond to me about whether one is right over the other.

30. I saw some pro-Palestine activism but it wasn’t a big deal. I went to a commuter college. Most of us were there to take classes and then go home.

31. If anything, on my campus it was the opposite. We had a fairly high Jewish and Israeli population so Zionism wasn’t unpopular. Activism in the other direction was anti-Israel, but not anti-Israeli people.

32. less anti-israel and more pro-palestine.

33. I went to school in Boston in the early 2000’s and it was everywhere.

    To me it just felt like an extension of the anti-Bush sentiment of the time. Bush loved Israel, so the activists had to hate it. The activists were very sentimental at the time toward Islam, so taking up the Palestinian cause went hand-in-hand with that, I suppose.

    EDIT: To clarify, I didn’t see a lot of *on-campus* per se, but during the entire post-9/11 and early Iraq War period, literally the entire city of Boston was one big massive protest against something or other.

34. Do you mean anti-Israeli or anti-Israel?