On June 14, National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP) posted the following on Instagram:

National SJP condemns the Zionist, US-backed attacks on Iran. The Zionist entity has been attempting to ignite a regional war since the day the genocide began […]. Israel’s actions are those of a colonial project that knows its time has come to a close—the world wants Israel to be dismantled, and for Palestine to be free.

This is not fringe rhetoric. NSJP is one of the most prominent anti-Israel student organizations in the United States, and groups like it — some with documented links to extremist and even terrorist organizations — are not just influencing but organizing a growing share of anti-Israel activism on US campuses. As our recent research shows, these networks are coordinated, ideological, and increasingly radical.

In our Anti-Israel Campus Groups: Online Networks and Narratives report, my research team and I analyzed 76,000 Instagram posts, reviewed nearly 10,000 antisemitic incidents, and mapped more than 1,000 anti-Israel campus groups.

What we found was sobering: pro-Hamas and pro-Iranian rhetoric has become normalized in some campus protest spaces. These are not simply students speaking out against a government — they’re echoing propaganda from internationally recognized terrorist organizations.

How did we get here? How did so many students adopt such extreme views so quickly? The answer lies partly in social media — and partly in the silence of campus leadership.

Back in early 2024 — months before campus encampments against Israel dominated national headlines — students in my Social Media & Hate Research Lab flagged several troubling posts from pro-Palestinian student groups. These weren’t calls for peace or for a two-state solution. They were open endorsements of Hamas, a group responsible for mass murder, rape, and kidnapping.

I was skeptical at first. I had spoken with some of these activists a few weeks and months earlier; they seemed reasonable — even critical of Hamas in private. But the posts were public and unambiguous: “Glory to Hamas.” “Hamas is morally superior to Israel.”

These posts were not buried in the dark corners of the internet. They were posted by prominent student leaders, easily accessible on platforms like X and Instagram. When a compilation of these posts was circulated publicly, the response from university officials was telling: silence.

I attempted to engage students directly. Some couldn’t explain the slogans on their own signs. One read, “IUPD, KKK, IOF, all the same.” The students holding it had no idea what “IOF” meant — a derogatory term for the Israeli Defense Forces. Others shut down any conversation altogether. “We don’t talk to Zionists,” one organizer told me.

So I did what professors do: I started researching.

We found that some of the most radical posts by anti-Israel groups on social media had become also some of the most popular ones.

The most widely shared post we found was published on October 8, 2023 — one day after the Hamas attacks in Israel. It came from a group called SUPER at the University of Washington. While Hamas militants were still actively killing civilians, SUPER posted a statement endorsing “the right of Palestinians to resist,” without qualification. SUPER has since doubled down and become more extremist. In May, they helped lead the occupation of the Interdisciplinary Engineering Building at the University of Washington in Seattle. Their June 6 “Right to Resist Teach-In” featured a promotional image depicting a Hamas-seized IDF tank flying the Palestinian flag — the same image used on the cover of the Hamas propaganda booklet Our Narrative…

 

This pattern isn’t limited to one group. NSJP, the same group that posted the call to dismantle Israel and siding with Iran, acts as a strategic and narrative hub. On October 8, 2023, NSJP published a toolkit celebrating the Hamas attacks as a “historic win for the Palestinian resistance,” along with templates and talking points for organizing campus protests.

Off-campus groups like the Palestinian Youth Movement, which has documented ties to the PFLP, also play a key role. So do radical left-wing organizations and foreign actors aligned with Iran. The rhetoric often avoids explicitly calling for violence against Jews. Instead, it adopts the language of resistance and decolonization — terms that mask the underlying glorification of armed struggle.

And yet, many Jewish students know exactly what it means. After the murder of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., the Tariq El-Tahrir Youth and Student Network called the killings “a legitimate act of resistance.” The rhetoric is escalating and can lead to violence, even if it’s only a fringe part of the students who are protesting.

The data supports what many Jewish students have long felt: antisemitism rises alongside anti-Israel activism.

Universities with more anti-Israel groups report significantly higher numbers of antisemitic incidents. The correlation is strong, and it’s growing with the number of anti-Israel groups that can establish an anti-Zionist climate on campus that effectively targets Jews.

This isn’t protest in the traditional sense. It’s propaganda, often shaped by off-campus entities and disseminated through social media with strategic precision. Faculty members and graduate student unions often lend moral cover. Dissent is increasingly treated not as dialogue but as betrayal. And pro-Hamas rhetoric is ignored and pretended to be non-existent on campus.

When I gave a talk in May entitled, “In the Mind of a Pro-Hamas Student,” backlash followed swiftly. Complaints were filed, letters written, and pressure applied — not to engage with the argument, but to silence it.

But we can’t afford to pretend. We can’t pretend that celebrating Hamas isn’t happening on our campuses. Or that slogans like “resistance by any means” are merely poetic. Or that calls to “globalize the Intifada” are harmless slogans.

Pretending comes at a cost. It threatens the safety of Jewish students. It erodes the academic values of open inquiry and honest debate. And it undermines our ability to distinguish justice from its dangerous imitations.

We don’t need to agree on everything about Israel and the Palestinians. But we should be able to agree on this: a campus culture that tolerates — or worse, celebrates — terrorism is not one that fosters justice. It is one that fails everyone.

Günther Jikeli holds the Erna B. Rosenfeld Professorship at the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism in the Borns Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University. He heads the research lab “Social Media & Hate.”

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