Zionist Groups in US Operate Campaigns to Quash Palestine Solidarity on Campus
As the world bears witness to the violent dispossession of Palestinians at the hands of Israel’s apartheid regime, this very same regime is conducting a parallel project of suppression, censorship and surveillance in the United States. An extensive network of U.S.-based pro-Israel lobbying groups, working hand in hand with Israeli intelligence agencies, continue to fund multimillion-dollar campaigns to destroy Palestinian liberation struggles and ensure professional, legal and financial consequences for Americans who dare to speak out against Israeli apartheid.
College campuses have
become a central battleground of the lobby’s suppression efforts. Groups
like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)
pose a major threat to long-term bipartisan support for Israel as their
campaigns unsettle pro-Israel political narratives and introduce young people
to the violent realities of the occupation.
While pro-Israel organizations
that intervene in campus activism often try to do so under the radar, their
counterinsurgency strategies and patterns are being exposed. Truthout spoke
with three SJP chapters across the country about their efforts to advocate for
Palestinian liberation and the challenges of organizing grassroots campaigns in
opposition to a multimillion-dollar lobbying and surveillance regime.
Surveillance
and Smear Campaigns
In 2016, Al Jazeera sent
an undercover journalist to intern and network within the Washington,
D.C.-based Israel lobby. His reporting confirmed
what many advocates for Palestine already suspected: The lobby is funding
complex surveillance operations to undermine Palestine activists, particularly
those on college campuses.
Jacob Baime, the
executive director of the Israel on Campus Coalition (ICC), was caught on
undercover footage boasting about
the organization’s multimillion-dollar surveillance technologies and smear
campaign tactics. The group’s strategy, he revealed, is fabricating allegations
of antisemitism against activists in order to create a sense of crisis. The ICC
conducts “oppositional research,” defames
activists using anonymous websites and promotes these
defamations using targeted Facebook promotions. Baime’s associate, Noah
Pollak, admits that
defamation is a major feature of the lobby’s strategy to suppress criticism of
Israel, noting, “you discredit the messenger as a way of discrediting the
message.”
Organizers in all of the
SJP chapters Truthout spoke with emphasized the personal risks they shoulder in
publicly condemning apartheid. Organizers cited these risks in their requests
to participate in this article anonymously. Many activists end up with profiles
on Canary Mission, a blacklisting website that publishes the private
information of anti-apartheid student activists and academics. When this
occurs, their names are publicly associated with allegations of antisemitism
and “terrorist” affiliations. The website’s explicit aim is to prevent critics
of Israel from accessing professional opportunities. Al Jazeera’s investigation
revealed the Canary Mission website is operated by
Baime and financed by convicted American-Israeli real-estate mogul Adam
Milstein. Milstein is the founder is the Israel-American Council and sits on
the board of prominent pro-Israel lobbying organizations, including the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), StandWithUs, Birthright Israel
and the Israel on Campus Coalition.
For Palestinian students,
the risk is even greater. A member of SJP at the University of Illinois
Urbana-Champaign explains, “Many of us are ourselves Palestinian and of course
run the additional risk of being banned from Palestine by the Israeli
government when we are vocal about the atrocities in Palestine.”
Running surveillance and
smear campaigns against student activists is a common feature of pro-Israel
lobbying operations. Last year, SJP members at Tufts University were nonconsensually
recorded and subsequently doxxed by Israel lobbyists attending
a private, virtual event. Tufts SJP — which was campaigning to end a university
program that sent Tufts University police officers on training trips to Israel
— was targeted by
pro-Israel lobbying groups with a barrage of attacks and accusations of
antisemitism. Some of these organizations included StandWithUs, the
Anti-Defamation League, the Louis D. Brandeis Center and a variety of
pro-Israel news sources.
“Many of us are ourselves
Palestinian and of course run the additional risk of being banned from
Palestine by the Israeli government when we are vocal about the atrocities in
Palestine.”
A member of Tufts SJP
says that the organization is being targeted because of how effective it has
been at changing the narrative about Palestine on campus. She explains, “We
[SJP members] now have to be very careful to conceal our identities and have
become adapted to dissociating our names from our work.” But by building a
broad coalition of social justice organizations at Tufts, “we have been able to
connect Palestinian struggles for freedom to the struggles of others working
towards collective liberation.”
“Lawfare”
Coordinated media attacks
play a particularly important role for the pro-Israel lobby. By accusing SJP’s
student activists of antisemitism, these organizations legitimize the
lobby’s assertion that
advocacy for Palestinian rights on college campuses creates an unsafe learning
environment for Jewish students. The lobby is leveraging this narrative to
accomplish something much more consequential — to redefine civil rights
legislation and anti-discrimination policies to include criticism of Israel as
a form of antisemitism.
“Lawfare,” or legislative
warfare, is a key
aspect of pro-Israel lobby strategies. Organizations like the
Brandeis Center lobby university
administrators and tech companies, as well as local, state and federal
legislatures, to adopt definitions of antisemitism that explicitly include
critiques of Israel. These definitions ultimately punish students standing in
opposition to Israeli apartheid.
In September 2020, the
SJP chapter at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)
successfully passed a
student government resolution calling on the university to divest from
companies operating in illegal West Bank settlements. The resolution
garnered national
outrage from pro-Israel news outlets, and the names of
activists involved in the campaign were eventually added to Canary Mission’s
public blacklist.
Two months later, two
students in collaboration with the Brandeis Center, a pro-Israel lobbying
organization based in Washington, D.C., filed an
official complaint with the U.S. Department of Education alleging that the UIUC
administration had failed to protect students from antisemitism.
Filing complaints with
the Department of Education became a highly effective tool for Israel lobbying
organizations under the Trump administration. Kenneth Marcus, the founder of
the Brandeis Center — the very organization filing antisemitism complaints
against universities — was nominated by President Trump to act as assistant
secretary for civil rights within Betsy DeVos’s Department of Education. There,
Marcus announced the
department would adopt a new “working definition” of antisemitism that would
include criticisms of Israel. In practical terms, Marcus paved the
way for pro-Israel students and organizations to leverage the financial and
legal power of the Department of Education against universities that fail to
take action against Palestine advocacy on their campuses.
The Brandeis Center
complaint filed against UIUC bundles instances
of explicit antisemitism — like the presence of swastika graffiti on campus
property — with criticism of Israel and advocacy for Palestinian liberation. A
Brandeis Center lobbyist even admitted during
a campaign at the University of Tennessee that the real antisemitism that
Jewish students faced on the campus was from Christian evangelicals in the
community trying to proselytize them, not the pro-Palestine activists at the
center of the Brandeis Center’s lobbying efforts.
Filing complaints with the
Department of Education became a highly effective tool for Israel lobbying
organizations under the Trump administration.
The UIUC university
administration, under increased legal scrutiny, ultimately released a
joint statement with
pro-Israel organizations. The statement expressed a commitment to combating
antisemitism on campus, which would include anti-Zionism and criticism of
Israel.
On May 14, 2021 — amidst
the height of bombings of Gaza and one of the largest Palestinian uprisings
since the intifadas — Illinois General Assembly Minority Leader Jim
Durkin introduced new
legislation calling upon the University of Illinois to adopt the International
Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of
antisemitism, which pro-Israel organizations like the Brandeis Center endorse.
This definition expands conceptions of antisemitism to include criticism of
Israeli government policy and challenges to Zionism. Durkin told the Jewish Insider, “this resolution, I
hope, puts the university on notice that we’re watching, and we want you to
resolve this in the appropriate way.”
Jewish-led organizations
like Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow have continuously rejected the lobby’s
efforts to conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism. On the contrary, prominent
Jewish activists and scholars such as Noam Chomsky and Judith Butler have
argued that conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism can itself be antisemitic:
For instance, provocations by Christian Zionists and evangelicals who suggest
Jews living in the United States ultimately belong in Israel. Similarly, the
suggestion that critique of Israeli state violence is antisemitic necessitates
the belief that Israel, and its violent colonial expansion, reflect the will of
the Jewish people as a whole rather than Israeli government policy.
Regardless, the
pro-Israel lobby’s coordinated campaigns to target SJP’s activism have achieved
their desired effect. As a Palestinian member of SJP UIUC explains, “The media
and legal scrutiny have made many students afraid to speak out,” which raises
the “stakes” for pro-Palestine advocacy. Student activists are forced to
reallocate their energies away from effective advocacy for Palestine and
towards addressing suppression campaigns.
What’s
Next?
For Israel, the war of
public opinion, particularly in the West, remains an essential feature of its
national security strategy. Israel enjoys unconditional and bipartisan
political support within the United States Congress, an asset leveraged to the
tune of $10 million each day in military aid.
It’s no surprise that the Israeli government invests enormously in preserving
public support for Israel and subsequently working to neutralize organizations,
groups and individuals engaged in critique of Israel’s illegal occupation and
institutionalized apartheid.
Both the Trump and Biden
administrations have acted in lockstep with this systemic repression campaign.
In September 2020, the U.S. State Department under Trump committed to
“target,” “fight” and “kill” the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement
(BDS), a nonviolent economic boycott campaign modeled after a similar campaign
to fight South African apartheid. The Biden administration also signaled its
commitment to disenfranchising Palestine advocates when his Secretary of State
Antony Blinken affirmed that
the administration “enthusiastically embraces” the IHRA definition of
antisemitism.
The consequences of these
coordinated suppression efforts are not hypothetical. They consume the
political and professional careers of many Palestine solidarity activists.
Recently, amid the bombing of Gaza, Emily Wilder, a Jewish journalist with the Associated Press, was fired following
a campaign from right-wing groups who condemned her years of advocacy with
Students for Justice in Palestine. It’s evident that Israel’s continued
investment in surveillance and defamation campaigns is likely to continue to
have a chilling effect, not only on the movement for Palestinian liberation but
more widely on free speech.
