Anti-Zionism, as a social movement, arrived on North American campuses in 2001. It began with grassroots efforts by student groups mobilizing around Palestine. By 2005, within just four years, Israel Apartheid Week was launched, soon becoming an annual fixture of campus life alongside the growing BDS movement. Together, these recurring campaigns became powerful vehicles for recruiting and radicalizing students, particularly into the anti-Zionist cause.
Confrontational and intimidating, campus anti-Zionism quickly created a hostile campus climate for Jews. Chants such as “Zionist settlers leave us alone, Palestine is our home,” and “Hey hey, ho ho, Zionism has got to go” became normal university slogans from coast to coast.
However, the movement reached a dramatic escalation during the 2023-24 campus encampments, which in several instances resulted in discrimination, harassment and physical assaults against Jewish students and faculty. In some cases, phrases such as “Death 2 Zionism” and “Zionist Baby Killers” were scrawled on buildings or sidewalks. In other instances, Jewish students and professors identified as “Zionists” were prevented from moving freely on campuses.
At Columbia University, encampment leaders declared, “We have Zionists who have entered the camp,” before calling on protesters to link arms and surround Jews who had made their way inside.
The picture is troubling, but it also raises an unavoidable question: How have the major Jewish organizations responded to the rise of the anti-Zionist campus movement from its inception in the early 2000s? The short answer is: They haven’t.
Indeed, the response—or lack thereof—from some of the world’s largest and most well-funded Jewish organizations should be setting off alarm bells. American Jewish leadership, shaped by the assumptions of a Western liberal democracy, mislabeled anti-Zionism as mere political expression. In doing so, they failed to recognize it as an organized campaign designed to weaken the Jewish state while undoing the sacredness of Israel to the Jewish world. Without any substantive counter-response, university campuses have been left completely undefended.
Before the rise of organized anti-Zionist activism, refined as a propaganda instrument by Islamists and left-wing radicals, Jewish student life on campus was largely anchored by Hillels and Chabad centers. But these were not designed as advocacy, prevention or rapid-response bodies. Rather, their mission was to serve as a “home away from home,” a space where students could observe Shabbat, have coffee and network, celebrate holidays, engage in Jewish learning and build social connections with other students. This institutional orientation is significant because Hillel was not structured to confront antisemitism or anti-Zionism as political or ideological movements.
When anti-Zionist activism began to gain traction on U.S. campuses, many Hillel professionals interpreted it as a form of political criticism rather than as an expression of Jew-hatred. As a result, Jewish students who encountered and experienced anti-Zionist harassment and/or discrimination often experienced frustration at what they perceived as institutional inaction. Some reported being advised by Hillel staff to avoid confrontation or to refrain from drawing attention to the activities of groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine.
Because of this, initiatives such as Israel Apartheid Week were left unchecked, becoming routine, leading many Hillel chapters to adopt a sort of “parallel programming.” Rather than directly countering anti-Zionist events, they organized alternative activities intended to foster positive Jewish expression.
For instance, during Israel Apartheid Week hosted by academic departments at the University of California in Los Angeles, the campus Hillel organized a “peace arts and crafts fair” to channel student reactions into messages of coexistence and hope. Hillel has also routinely advised students not to protest or engage with anti-Zionist campus events, encouraging them instead to use Hillel as an “open door” for comfort and solace. The response to hostile anti-Zionism on campuses has, in effect, not been a response at all. It has become a retreat inward, characterized by withdrawal, de-escalation and the avoidance of direct action.
Similarly, the Anti-Defamation League, which first officially recognized that there may be an anti-Israel problem on campuses in 2010, framed anti-Zionism as something that may “cross the line into antisemitism” when it demonizes, delegitimizes or applies double standards to Israel. In doing so, they implicitly accepted anti-Zionism as a valid position that only occasionally goes too far. This framing has limited the ability to analyze the issue as an ideological hate movement designed to destroy Israel and Jewish life in the Diaspora.
This insistence on preserving wide latitude for criticism of Israel is distinctly American. The United States was founded on principles of rupture, dissent and the freedom to exercise political will. From the civil-rights movement to the anti-war protests of the 1960s, protest is embedded in the national ethos.
Americans are, in many ways, culturally conditioned to view political mobilization and public dissent as democratic virtues. Yet this very openness, America’s identity as a beacon of freedom, also renders it vulnerable to dangerous and deadly propaganda. Anti-Zionism, which is rooted in Soviet statecraft as a form of ideological warfare, entered the American landscape not as what it was but as what Americans were predisposed to see: legitimate political expression. In that sense, a product of state propaganda passed through the field of vision of a free society ill-equipped to confront blatant hatred veiled as discourse.
Even after the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, when it became increasingly difficult to deny that anti-Zionism is an ideology that kills, American Jewish leadership has still not launched a sustained campaign against it. In fact, instead of launching a campaign against anti-Zionism, Jewish groups tasked with defending Jews, such as the ADL, strongly recommend not using the words “anti-Zionism” and “Zionism.” Every time Jews refuse or avoid using the word that precisely describes hate, they cede the battlefield and allow anti-Zionists to get away with their genocidal objectives.
Naming and confronting anti-Zionism requires a fundamental rethinking. It means recognizing anti-Zionism for what it is: a lethal ideology that seeks to destroy Israel precisely because it is a Jewish state. It also requires reclaiming Jewish nationhood as a core element of Jewish identity. If Jewish peoplehood and nationhood are not seen as integral to Jewish life, then attacks on the legitimacy of Israel can appear as fair game, rather than an assault on Jewish existence.
Jewish organizations often respond to blatantly libelous and antisemitic statements as “inflammatory,” “misleading” or “harmful to dialogue,” but they rarely identify the core root that produces those accusations. The result is a dangerous conceptual gap. When institutions say that anti-Zionism only becomes problematic when it “crosses a line,” they implicitly accept that anti-Zionism is fine up until a certain point.
The problem is not that anti-Zionism sometimes crosses a line. Anti-Zionism is the line.
