More than 1,000 pro-Israel students and professors gathered in Washington this week for the Israel on Campus Coalition’s annual summit.
Jacob Baime, CEO of the coalition, told JNS that two years after college campuses were rocked by anti-Israel tent encampments taking over quadrangles across the country, his organization remains focused on “the fight in front of us.”
“The fact that we don’t have encampments on campus doesn’t mean that the problems don’t exist,” Baime said.
The former national field director for AIPAC, Baime said that Israel’s political adversaries in the United States have taken their campus activism into mainstream politics.
“The same folks who were Students for Justice in Palestine then started running for local office, and now look at the election results in Michigan,” he said, of Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in the Democratic primary for Senate.
El-Sayed is one of the most vociferously anti-Israel candidates in the country.
“In the same way that we saw on Oct. 7 and Oct. 8, the pro-Hamas protests—they started on the campuses and then they spilled out into the city streets and into the public square,” Baime told JNS.
Israel’s place in American politics has shifted dramatically since Oct. 7, with a growing number of Americans expressing skepticism about the U.S.-Israel relationship. That includes both a rising faction of the Democratic Party calling for the United States to cut off aid to the Jewish state and Republicans, like U.S. Vice President JD Vance, accusing elements of the Israeli government of trying to undermine negotiations with Iran.
Conference-goers from 308 schools across 43 states and the District of Columbia heard from Israeli and American politicians, including both Republicans and Democrats, about where the U.S.-Israel relationship is headed.
Ron Dermer, the former Israeli minister of strategic affairs and a former ambassador to the United States, said that people “romanticize” the U.S.-Israel alliance.
“Israel has shared values in the United States. There’s no question about it, but that’s not what drives relations between states,” he said at the event. “Values are not what drives the alliance. It’s actually the interests that make the difference.”
“Those who care about Israel have to start defending Israel in terms of the interests in it for the United States of America,” he told attendees.
Other speakers at the conference included Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), U.S. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon and Martin Marks, director of Jewish engagement at the White House.
Jewish and pro-Israel groups have struggled in recent years to navigate the shifting partisan perceptions of Israel among the wider American public, with “AIPAC funding” becoming a cudgel in intra-Democratic Party primaries and pro-Zionist organizations having internal disagreements about whether “Zionism” is an effective or persuasive label for supporters of Israel.
Baime told JNS that his organization, which met under the tripartite slogan of “American, Zionist, proud,” believes that being clear about values and embracing bipartisanship, rather than non-partisanship, is an effective path forward for groups supporting Israel.
“There’s a lot of concern out there that can you even bring the Jewish community or pro-Israel community, Democrats and Republicans, together in the same room and have a constructive conversation due to polarization?” Baime said.
“This summit is proof positive that it is possible,” he told JNS. “We really want to encourage young Democrats, who are Zionists, to be leaders in the Democratic Party and young Republicans, who are Zionists, to be leaders in the Republican Party.”
“I don’t think it’s going to work for us to play four-dimensional chess,” the ICC head said.
“I think we have to be honest that this is who we are,” he told JNS. “This is what we believe, and we’re not going to shy away from it.”
