More Universities Cave to Pro-Hamas Agitators as Demonstrations Continue

The University of California, Riverside (UC Riverside) has agreed to make major concessions to anti-Israel protesters on campus in exchange for the termination of their anti-Zionist demonstrations on campus, continuing a gradual normalization of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel — a trend that risks purging Jews and Zionists from the American academy.

Details of the settlement were disclosed by the university on Friday. It includes shuttering UC Riverside School of Business “global programs” in Israel — as well as the US, Brazil, Jordan, Egypt, Vietnam, China, and Cuba — appointing potentially anti-Zionist students to a task force on the university’s endowment, and exploring the possibility of banning Sabra Hummus, which is co-owned by the Israeli food manufacturer Strauss Group, from campus.

“This is par for the course of UC Riverside, illustrating that it is on board with antisemitism at an institutional level,” Ian Oxnevad, a research fellow at the National Association of Scholars (NAS) and author of  The Company They Keep: Organizational and Economic Dynamics of the BDS Movement, told The Algemeiner on Monday. “Boycotting an Israeli brand due to student demands recalls the Nazi youth’s demanding boycotts of Jewish businesses in the 1930s. We saw then what we’re seeing now: antisemitism becoming a social grace in academia.”

UC Riverside’s apparent capitulation followed a precedent set by Northwestern University last week, when the school agreed to establish a new scholarship for Palestinian students and form a new investment committee in which anti-Zionists students and faculty may wield an outsized voice.

Brown University also yielded to anti-Israel protesters, agreeing to hold a vote on divesting from companies linked to Israel.

The policy announcements are both substantive and performative, said Alex Joffe, an anthropologist and editor of the BDS Monitor for Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.

“It is a careful bit of theater,” he explained. “The plan states the task force will investigate removing Riverside’s endowment from the management of the UC system’s investment office. It is unclear whether or not the statewide system would or even could legally allow Riverside to make its own divestment decisions, or ‘divest,’ meaning to sell shares in weapons manufacturers held as individual stocks or as part of larger funds.”

Joffe also suggested that the number of study abroad programs the university has closed is indicative of strategic restructuring that may not, in the bigger picture, be related to BDS.

“Israel programs have been targeted for years and in some cases pressures have been so great that students have been ostracized for expressing interests, but since programs in Jordan, Vietnam, and Oxford are also being closed, the reality is that the Business School is undertaking a broader rethinking,” he continued. “But the school’s commitment to review the status of Sabra Hummus shows not only how petty the demands of pro-Hamas students are, but the ways in in which universities are capitulating on matters small and large in order to restore calm.”

Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington has also agreed to divest from companies linked to Israel, according to a “Memorandum of Understanding Between the Evergreen State College and the Evergreen Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” which the school posted on its website. The school has also agreed to issue a statement dictated by the protesters. The statement, a portion of which includes pro-Hamas propaganda, will “be reviewed by negotiators and a faculty representative before it is released.”

“The cries of ‘intifada revolution,’ ‘death to America,’ ‘death to Israel,’ and the celebration of ‘resistance’ — and the displays of thuggish tactics, taking over public areas, harassing Jews, and others — demonstrates that the BDS movement was simply the thin edge of a broader anti-American and anti-Israel movement that cares less about the Palestinians than it does about revolution,” Joffe explained.

Formally launched in 2005, the BDS campaign opposes Zionism — a movement supporting the Jewish people’s right to self-determination — and rejects Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. It seeks to isolate the country comprehensively with economic, political, and cultural boycotts. Official propaganda issued for the campaign’s academic boycott delineates specific restrictions that adherents should abide by — for instance, denying letters of recommendation to students who seek to study in Israel — and says that it aims to ensure that “projects with all Israeli academic institutions should come to an end.”

Student involvement in promoting the BDS movement and anti-Zionism amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war in Gaza has been widely covered by major news outlets across the world. However, the role of university faculty in leading the push against Israel has received little attention, experts have told The Algemeiner.

Last week, campus antisemitism expert Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, who founded the AMCHA Initiative watchdog group, explained that far more focus must shift to the faculty, who have provided material and intellectual support to the student protesters and, in many cases, are the individuals responsible for steering them into antisemitic movements fueled by anti-Zionism.

“So much of this has to do with faculty — it’s the missing piece for understanding all of what’s happening, but particularly administrative responses to it,” Rossman-Benjamin said. “The protesters were students who were protected, supported, and, in many cases, colluded with by faculty. Almost all of these encampments, especially the most vicious and antisemitic, have faculty groups that either have their back and are running interference with the university administrations or are actively conspiring and participating in what’s happening on campus, giving it academic legitimacy, inciting it, and encouraging the adoption of more antisemitism and aggression.”

Rossman-Benjamin added that when a university president concedes to the demands of a student mob, they do so at the insistence of faculty, who can prematurely end their employment by issuing votes of no confidence, a measure that all but guarantees a president will be removed from office. This tactic has gained traction at a growing number of universities since the eruption of anti-Israel demonstrations on campuses last month.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.