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Will Pro-Palestinian Boycott Mobs Abandon Their iPhones and Other Devices?
An Apple iPhone. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
Anti-Israel student protesters have always sought convenient, effortless ways to demonstrate their hatred for Israel.
In the past, this has meant trying to remove Sabra brand hummus from campus food services. Starting at DePaul University in 2010, efforts to embargo the Israeli-made food spread quickly to other campuses (University of Ottowa in 2014, Swarthmore College in 2018, Dickinson College in 2019, and Harvard University in 2022), but after October 7, 2023, student boycott demands grew more expansive.
It’s no longer enough to change brands of hummus. Today’s students want to ban everything from Israel.
Graduate Students at the City University of New York (CUNY), for instance, now demand not only the familiar Sabra prohibition but also a ban of “all fruits and vegetables grown in Israel.” And their list doesn’t end with food. They also demand that the entire CUNY system “cancel all forms of cooperation with Israeli academic institutions, including events, activities, agreements, and research collaborations.”
What goes unsaid here is that not a single student will ever actually live up to these demands. The rhetorical flourishes are purely for show.
If the thousands of college students calling for a boycott of all things Israel want to live up to their sanctimonious rhetoric, they will have to give up a lot more than one brand of hummus. And they will end up sick, hungry, and underemployed.
I call on all anti-Israel, pro-BDS students and faculty members alike to prove that they aren’t the posers and half-milers I say they are by following through on their categorical rejection of any contact with, use of, or compliance with, any and all Israeli technologies, companies, products, ideas, and universities.
I dare these pretenders to put their futures where their mouths are, and abandon entirely anything with the State of Israel.
It won’t be easy.
Let’s start with their cell phones. Israeli technology is central to the iPhone platform, so Apple phones are out. Unfortunately they can’t just switch to Samsung. They’ll have to give up their digital umbilical cords altogether because the cell phone was invented in 1973 by Motorola’s Israeli Research and Development Department.
And it’s not just cell phones they will have to shun. Israeli technology is integral to many modern conveniences that college students rely on. If they want to live up to their anti-Israel commitment, they will have to stop using USB ports (an Israeli invention), thumb drives (an Israeli invention) and firewalls (another Israeli invention). Writing term papers, theses, and dissertations without computers worked for centuries. They’ll adapt.
If today’s protesters ever find gainful employment outside of a few select cities, they will need a car, but they’ll have to boycott all models with cameras pointing outward. An Israeli invention called the Mobileye has been warning of obstacles and keeping drivers in their lanes for years. Mirrors work too, as committed protesters will learn.
“No fruits or vegetables from Israel,” say the CUNY student protesters. Will they also eschew all fruits and vegetables grown with Israeli technology?
Israel invented drip irrigation, which is used in almost all modern agricultural enterprises. After researching which fruits and vegetables were not grown with drip irrigation, anti-Israel protesters might find it easier just to give up fruits and vegetables. Or maybe they’ll grow their own (an unlikely scenario in New York City).
Will they boycott life-saving drugs and research developed by Israel? Multiple sclerosis is treated with a drug called Copaxone, developed at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.
It may soon be impossible to avoid Israeli NaNose technology and the “Sniff-Phone” which smells diseases before they are manifested, allowing for preventative therapies prior to the onset of symptoms. Committed Israel boycotters will have to shun this technology in favor of the old ways of detecting diseases — often when they are too advanced to treat effectively.
Many of them seem heartless too, but those who one day need heart surgery will have to forgo the flexible stent, invented at an Israeli company called Medinol. The NIR stent or EluNIR
has become standard since its invention in 1996. Protesters who shun all things Israel might be able to find some third-world clinic willing to use the rigid stents of an earlier era. I wish them luck.
I suspect that most of the anti-Israel protests are led by faculty and students in the humanities and social sciences, where anti-Israel virtue signaling is de rigueur and comes with few repercussions. Students in other areas of specialization, however, will have to make debilitating career challenges to live up to their performative rhetoric.
Israel has the greatest number of tech companies outside of Silicon Valley, but its influence on the field extends far beyond Israel. The recent Miami Tech and Invest Conference showed the extent to which Israeli companies are “transforming Miami into a global tech hub.” Any student of computer science or software engineering, as well as any budding tech entrepreneur, will suffer greatly by boycotting all things Israel.
STEM students who refuse to work with Israeli technologies, scientists, and universities will sabotage their careers. They will likely wind up at the bottom of their professions — far from important research and Nobel Prize winners. Israeli universities and research companies are responsible for many breakthroughs in detecting and treating cancer, and Israelis have dominated the Nobel Prize in chemistry for most of the 20th century.
Naturally, none of the student demands should be taken seriously. In America today, no one virtue signals like a college student. Their hunger strikes begin after breakfast and end at lunch — so too do their demands end the moment they sign a resolution or shout in front of the camera.
Of course, I would love for just one anti-Israel, BDS, boycotting/divesting protester to prove me wrong and truly refrain from using or benefitting from anything derived from Israeli ingenuity. Write me, using pen and paper of course, and tell me how it’s going.
Chief Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) Political Correspondent A.J. Caschetta is a principal lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a fellow at Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum where he is also a Milstein fellow. A version of this article originally appeared at IPT.
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New York City Jews Targeted for Most Hate Crimes in March, NYPD Stats Show
Orthodox Jewish man waiting for the train in the New York City subway. Photo: Hans Lucas via Reuters Connect.
Jews in New York City were victims of more hate crimes in March than any other group even as crime across the Five Boroughs fell to “historic” lows, according to statistics issued by the New York City Police Department (NYPD) on Thursday.
39 hate crimes targeted Jews last month, the Algemeiner reviewed data shows, outstripping the combined total of all other groups combined — 28 — and constituting 58 percent of all hate crimes reported to authorities. So far, there have born 85 antisemitic hate crimes in New York City through the first three months of 2025, with the month of February seeing a 100 percent increase in them over the previous year and March seeing no improvement at all.
The data continues a trend that has persisted for several years and concurred with a rise in antisemitic incidents across the US.
Jews represented a disproportionate share of hate crimes perpetrated in New York City in 2024 as well. Of the 641 total hate crimes tallied by the NYPD that year, Jews were victims of 345, which, in addition to being a 7 percent increase over the previous year, amounted to 54 percent of all hate crimes in the city.
As The Algemeiner has previously reported, antisemitic hate crimes have posed a major threat to the quality of life of New York City’s Orthodox Jewish community, which was the target in many of the incidents. In just eight days between the end of October and the beginning of November, three Hasidim, including children, were brutally assaulted in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. In one instance, an Orthodox man was accosted by two assailants, one masked, who “chased and beat him” after he refused to surrender his cellphone in compliance with what appeared to have been an attempted robbery.
In another incident, an African American male smacked a 13-year-old Jewish boy who was commuting to school on his bike in the heavily Jewish neighborhood. Less than a week earlier, an assailant slashed a visibly Jewish man in the face as he was walking in Brooklyn. Days after the week-long antisemitic hate crime spree, three men attempted to rob a Hasidic man after stalking him through the Crown Heights neighborhood.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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NYC ‘Dyke March’ Bans Zionists From Participating in Annual Demonstration
(Source: Reuters)
NYC Dyke March, a public demonstration held by members of the lesbian community in New York City, has banned self-proclaimed “Zionists” from its annual event, citing a desire to stand against the so-called “genocide” occuring in Gaza.
The group revealed in a statement that their decision to ban Israel supporters from their ranks came after multiple members dropped out of the organization due to differences in “political beliefs and values.” After engaging in discussions with frustrated members, the NYC Dyke March committee agreed to adopt “an explicitly anti-Zionist position.” The organization claims that it will “strengthen our commitment” to fighting against Israel and advocating on behalf of Palestinians.
Last year, the NYC Dyke March previously came under scrutiny after organizers settled on “genocide” as the theme of its 2024 event. In a statement, decrying “ethnic cleansing, violence, and dehumanization,” the organization compared the ongoing war in Gaza, to the mass slaughters occurring in Ethiopia, Myanmar, and Sudan.
The organization plans on recycling the same theme for this year’s march, titling it “Dykes Against Genocide.” The group released a statement clarifying that Jews are allowed to attend and condemned the Oct. 7 slaughters as a “senseless loss of life.” After an apparent uproar from its members, the organization deleted the post and wrote that the group “unapologetically stands in support of Palestinian liberation.” In addition, the group affirmed that “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism and any language we put out which is not clearly opposed to a Zionist, imperialist agenda is harmful to us all.”
In the 17 months following the Hamas-led massacre of roughly 1200 people throughout Israel, the NYC Dyke March has produced numerous statements lambasting Israel and declaring “solidarity” with Palestinians amid their so-called “ongoing genocide.” The organization also accused Israel of engaging in supposed “pinkwashing” and “manipulative use of Jewish and queer identities,” with the aim of justifying its war efforts in Gaza.
Israel offers an expansive set of rights for members of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transngender (LGBT) community, including recognition of same-sex marriages. Every year in June, Tel Aviv holds one of the largest LGBT Pride celebrations in the world. Meanwhile, members of the LGBT community are routinely imprisoned or murdered in other parts of the Middle East, including the Palestinian territories.
The NYC Dyke March’s announcement was met with widespread condemnation.
“You cannot exclude the majority of Jews and call yourself inclusive,” said the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in a post on X/Twitter, adding that the group “essentially equates Zionism with racism” in their announcement.
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Trump Administration Planning $510 Million Cut to Brown University Budget, Report Says
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks with journalists onboard Air Force One en route to Miami, Florida, U.S., April 3, 2025. REUTERS/Kent Nishimura
The Trump administration reportedly plans to terminate $510 million worth of federal contracts and grants awarded to Brown University, according to media reports.
Brown University’s failure to mount a satisfactory response to the campus antisemitism crisis, as well as its embrace of the diversity, equity, and, inclusion (DEI) movement — perceived by many across the political spectrum as an assault on merit-based upward mobility and causing incidents of anti-White and anti-Asian discrimination — prompted the alleged pending action by the federal government, according to the right-leaning outlet The Daily Caller.
The announcement comes as Brown scrambles to cover a $46 million budget shortfall and other universities across the country have faced similar funding cuts.
Brown University officials, however, denied that the university had received any directives from the Trump Administration.
“We have no information to substantiate these rumors,” Brown University provost Francis Doyle issued a statement. “We are closely monitoring notifications related to grants, but have nothing more we can share as of now.”
Meanwhile, Brown’s Jewish community rushed to the university’s defense, issuing a joint statement with the Brown Corporation which said that the campus is “peaceful and supportive campus for its Jewish community.”
The letter, signed by members of the local Hillel International chapter and Chabad on College Hill, continued: “Brown University is a place where Jewish life not only exists but thrives. While there is more work to be done, Brown, through the dedicated efforts of its administration, leadership, and resilient spirit of its Jewish community, continues to uphold the principles of inclusion, tolerance, and intellectual freedom that have been central to its identity since 1764.”
Brown Divest Coalition — an anti-Zionist group which recently saw its campaign for the university to adopt the boycott, divest, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel defeated by the Brown Corporation — weighed in too, denouncing the reported cut as “a means of suppressing all forms of popular dissent to the renewed violence of the US war machine abroad.” US Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) also criticized the move, accusing the administration “of a broader pattern of behavior…that will negatively impact communities across the country and lead to layoffs, restrict research, and more.”
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, the Trump administration is following through on its threats to inflict potentially catastrophic financial injuries on colleges and universities deemed as soft on antisemitism or excessively “woke.” The past six weeks has seen the policy imposed on elite universities including Harvard and Columbia, rattling a higher education establishment that has for better and worse operated for decades with little interference from the federal government even as it polarized the public and contributed to a growing sense that elites are contemptuous of Americans who live outside of their cultural enclaves.
In March, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon announced the cancellation of $400 million in federal contracts and grants for Columbia University, a measure that secured the school’s acceding to a slew of demands the administration put forth as preconditions for restoring the money. Later, the Trump administration disclosed its reviewing $9 billion worth of federal grants and contracts awarded to Harvard University, jeopardizing a substantial source of the school’s income over its alleged failure to quell antisemitic and pro-Hamas activity on campus following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel. Princeton University saw $210 million of its federal grants and funding suspended too, prompting its president, Christopher Eisgruber to say the institution is “committed to fighting antisemitism and all forms of discrimination.”
Additionally, 60 universities are being investigated by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights over their handling of campus antisemitism, a project that will serve as an early test of the administration’s ability to perform the essential functions of the agency after downsizing its workforce to increase its efficiency.
One of those universities, Northwestern University, on Monday touted its progress in addressing campus antisemitism, noting that it has adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, a reference tool which aids officials in determining what constitutes antisemitism, and begun holding “mandatory antisemitism training” sessions which “all students, faculty, and staff” must attend.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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