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As Fall Semester Ends, the March of Antisemitism Continues on Campus
A Palestinian flag flies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Photo: Students for Justice in Palestine/Instagram
Heading into the new year, the campus situation continues to be a complex one for Jewish students and faculty. Most universities continue to reject the compacts offered by the Trump administration, which would restore Federal funding in exchange for changes in DEI and other policies. But other institutions have reached settlements with the government, notably Cornell University, which will pay $30 million and invest an additional $30 million for agricultural research. The university will also provide the government with data regarding admissions, conduct campus surveys, and comply with Federal law. The settlement was strongly opposed by Cornell faculty.
Elsewhere, Columbia University’s Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investing rejected a series of Israel divestment proposals. The committee determined that the proposals did not meet the standard of broad consensus within the university community.
Despite the Gaza ceasefire, Israeli academics report intensifying boycotts particularly among European faculty and institutions. At least 1,000 incidents have been recorded with approximately 25% occurring since the summer of 2025. Spain has halted academic collaborations almost completely, with Belgium and the Netherlands following behind. Israelis also report a quiet boycott by American colleagues. Warnings regarding the erosion of Israel’s economic and strategic positions as a result of academic boycotts continue to be sounded.
Student associations and governments continue to be the focal point of anti-Israel and antisemitism on campuses.
In a reflection of elite British student politics, after a debate, the Oxford Union overwhelmingly voted in favor of a resolution that Israel was a “greater threat to regional stability” than Iran. Pro-Hamas students attending the debate displayed red hands, a reference to the lynching and mutilation of Israeli soldiers.
Despite the continuing failure of student divestment measures to prompt university action, Harvard’s undergraduate assembly voted on a poll regarding divestment. Reporting was especially convoluted, but the poll apparently showed that 63% of respondents (1,055 of over 7,000) want Harvard to divest from Israel; the precise results were kept secret.
The student government at the University of Maryland unanimously voted to bar Israeli soldiers from speaking on campus. The vote came after an event sponsored by Students Supporting Israel (SSI) was protested by pro-Hamas students. The student government also voted to demand an apology from the university after two student protestors were detained. An event sponsored by SSI at Tulane University was forced off campus by threats of violence, while another at Louisiana State University was met with a violent protest.
Another BDS resolution was narrowly approved by the University of Michigan student assembly, which was then vetoed by the assembly president. The resolution calls on the university to investigate and divest from its financial ties to the Israeli government. The authors of the resolution later accused opponents of doxxing them.
CAIR has been central to both continuing campus pro-Hamas unrest and resulting lawfare. New reports have shown that CAIR provided financial support to pro-Hamas students who had been suspended by their universities for violence and harassment during protests.
In an example of the extremism that characterizes unionized students and potentially the next generation of faculty, the Cornell graduate student union approved a BDS resolution, which included support for terrorism. The resolution stated, “Standing with the strength of Palestinians resisting a genocide, and their unequivocal human right to resist oppression by any means necessary, workers around the world are building power through the belief that we free Palestine, and Palestine frees us.”
The resolution went on to claim that 680,000 Gazans had been killed, ten times the number that Hamas claims, and stated that, “The perpetuation of racist and anti-Muslim rhetoric is part of a broader doctrine of state-sponsored white supremacy that justifies Israel’s atrocities against Palestinians.”
Finally, at Catholic University, the student government debated, “A Resolution to Advocate For A Ban on Clubs in Support of a Nation(s) Commissioning a Genocide.” The resolution targeted the school’s SSI chapter, charging it was supporting “a Nation or organization that is actively pursuing inexcusable evil, such as genocide or terrorism, acts in a way that is contrary to the faith of the Catholic Church.”
In the K-12 sphere, the direct fealty of teachers unions to pro-Hamas causes continues to cause concern. In one case, the Chicago Teachers Union hosted the National Alliance Against Racist & Political Repression annual conference and featured speakers who praised Hamas and “armed resistance,” and called for the downfall of the US. A representative of the union also spoke at the American Muslims for Palestine conference.
Examples continue to multiply regarding individual teachers who promote anti-Israel narratives in classrooms, for example in an Oakland, CA, high school where Palestinian flags were displayed along side posters which decried “genocide” and which praised Cuba.
The pervasiveness of anti-Israel and antisemitic bias in public schools was also documented by a report from the Massachusetts Special Commission on Combating Antisemitism.Hearings and investigations noted that bias was systemic through all of K-12 education including educational materials, teachers, and classroom behavior. Jewish students, teachers, and staff also reported growing harassment and ostracization, with many opting to hide their identity.
Examples of direct harassment and abuse of Jewish students continue to accumulate. In one recent case from Seattle, a Jewish family has sued the public school system alleging that their daughter was exposed to antisemitic abuse from fellow students to the point of being locked in a classroom by a teacher, in order to shelter her from an angry mob.
Arab and Muslim groups have reacted strongly to efforts that combat antisemitism and anti-Israel bias in public schools. In one case, CAIR and other groups blocked the appearance of Luai Ahmed, a gay, pro-Israel influencer, at Bay Area high schools, which accused him of “pinkwashing.”
Responses to antisemitic bias also came under fire in California, where the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee has sued over a new law establishing an Office of Civil Rights and an antisemitism monitor. The group claimed that combating antisemitism undermined the First Amendment rights of children and “hands classrooms to a foreign agenda.” The claim is yet another that essentially declares that antisemitism is protected speech. Members of the California Faculty Association, including ethnic studies faculty who develop anti-Israel and anti-Western curriculum, have also called the bill “racist.”
In response to growing reports on the antisemitism crisis in K-12 education, the House Education and Workforce Committee has launched an investigation of the Berkeley Unified School District in California, Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia, and the School District of Philadelphia. In each case, there are numerous documented incidents of harassment and intimidation led by staff, teachers, and students, as well as the use of biased educational materials. These include student walkouts, staff endorsements of violence, partnerships with CAIR, a reenactment of October 7, and harassment of Jewish students.
The author is a contributor to SPME, where a completely different version of this article appeared.
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Fatah and Palestinian Authority Celebrate Terrorist Mass Murderers on School Books
French President Emmanuel Macron welcomes Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France, Nov. 11, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Benoit Tessier
As part of its “national and moral responsibility towards its student members,” the student movement of Palestinian Authority (PA) leader Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party distributed free notebooks to students at the Palestine Technical University-Kadoorie at the beginning of the academic year.
Seemingly, this was a praiseworthy act.
But whom did Fatah choose to adorn the cover of the notebook? Was it a Palestinian businesswoman, scientist, or artist?
No.
Terrorist murderer Dalal Mughrabi was the role model chosen to inspire students on the cover. She is, after all, a Palestinian hero according to the Fatah Shabiba Student Movement and the Student Union Council at the university.
Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) has documented that Dalal Mughrabi — who led the attack that, until Oct. 7, 2023, was the most lethal terror attack in Israel’s history — has been turned into a role model for Palestinians by the PA. In the 1978 attack, known as the Coastal Road massacre, Mughrabi and other Fatah terrorists hijacked a bus on Israel’s Coastal Highway, murdering 37 civilians, 12 of them children, and wounding over 70.
Murderer Mughrabi’s picture is also included in a display of drawings of various prominent Palestinian figures at a current exhibition at the Yasser Arafat Museum in Ramallah:
In the front row of figures on the left wearing a keffiyeh (Arab headdress) is terrorist Dalal Mughrabi. Directly above Mughrabi is Fatah terror leader Abu Ali Iyad, above him is terrorist Khalil Al-Wazir, “Abu Jihad,” who was responsible for the murder of 125 people. To the left of “Abu Jihad” is Yasser Arafat, and to the left of Arafat is head of the Black September terror organization Salah Khalaf, “Abu Iyad.”
[Official PA TV, Palestine This Morning, Nov. 11, 2025]
Young Palestinian children are also fed a diet of violence and terror promotion.
At the National Book Fair organized by the PA Ministry of Culture at the Arab American University in Jenin, young schoolgirls read books written by terrorist prisoners at a booth in which the PLO Commission of Prisoners’ Affairs “presented the literary and intellectual works” of terrorists and released terrorists.
One book cover in the center of the table pictured below features a picture of terrorist Marwan Barghouti, who orchestrated three attacks in which five people were murdered:
[PLO Commission of Prisoners’ Affairs, Facebook page, Nov. 4, 2025]
The presentation of terrorists as important cultural and “intellectual” figures at schools, universities, museums, and book fairs follows PA policy of celebrating imprisoned and released terrorists who have written books in prison as esteemed writers
Official PA TV glorified released terrorist Osama Al-Ashqar, who was responsible for the murder of eight people, at an event in Cairo [Official PA TV, Palestine This Morning, Sept. 10, 2025]. Meanwhile, Fatah Movement Deputy Chairman Mahmoud Al-Aloul attended and signed books at the launch ceremony of a book written by released terrorist Raed Abd Al-Jalil, who was involved in the murder of five people:
Fatah Deputy Chairman Mahmoud Al-Aloul signs the book “Love and a Rifle” by released terrorist prisoner Raed Abd Al-Jalil. [Fatah Movement – Nablus Branch, Facebook page, Nov. 5, 2025]
Al-Aloul also stressed another PA ideology — non-recognition of Israel in any borders — presenting the terrorist murderer’s family with an honorary plaque that features the PA map of “Palestine” that presents all of Israel together with the PA areas as “Palestine.”
The author is a contributor to Palestinian Media Watch, where a version of this story first appeared.
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The Annual ‘Jesus Was a Palestinian’ Christmas Lie Is Back — and It’s Antisemitic
Worshipers pray ahead of Christmas morning mass at Saint Catherine’s Church, in the Church of the Nativity, in Bethlehem in the West Bank, December 25, 2021. Photo: REUTERS/Mussa Qawasma
Each December, as holiday decorations go up and familiar music fills the air, another relatively new holiday ritual returns with equal predictability — social media fills with declarations that “Jesus was a Palestinian,” often joined by the equally fictional assertion that he was a “Palestinian refugee.”
These claims appear every Christmas season as reliably as ornaments and carols, as though the propagandists believe that repeating the lies might someday transform fiction into fact.
But this isn’t just a harmless anachronism — like depicting Moses checking Google Maps while wandering in the Sinai. It is part of a longstanding effort to erase Jews from their own history, an effort that has resurfaced in recent years precisely because it is politically useful.
The Truth Has Never Been in Dispute
Jesus lived and died as a Jew from Judea. He was born into a Jewish family, observed Jewish law, taught in synagogues, quoted Jewish scripture, and was addressed as “Rabbi” by his followers. Christian scripture traces his lineage directly to the kings of Judah.
No credible historian debates this. There is not a single academic school, anywhere, that regards Jesus as anything other than a Jew living in the Jewish homeland.
Denying the Jewishness of Jesus is not a new mistake. It is part of a familiar form of appropriation — including supersessionism (replacement theology) — that has targeted Jews for centuries.
The Colonialist Name Activists Pretend Was Ancient
The assertion that Jesus was “Palestinian” collapses instantly under the simplest timeline. During the first century CE, the land was known as Judea, Samaria, the Galilee, or the Land of Israel. At that time, there was no place or nation called “Palestine,” no “Palestinians,” and no political or cultural identity by that name. No person during Jesus’s lifetime ever referred to himself as a “Palestinian.” Claiming otherwise is like insisting that a Pilgrim stepping off the Mayflower in 1620 called himself an “American.”
Notably, the first political or national entity in history to use the word “Palestine” emerged nearly 2,000 years after Jesus, in 1920, when the British Empire established the “British Mandate for Palestine.”
And the Roman Empire only introduced the geographic term “Syria Palaestina” in 135 CE — a century after Jesus’ death — to punish Jews for the Bar Kokhba revolt and to try to break their connection to their own land.
Today, anti-Israel activists echo that Roman attempt at erasure and call it solidarity.
The “Refugee” Myth Is Modern Politics Masquerading as History
Equally absurd is the claim that Jesus was a “Palestinian refugee.” The concept of refugee status did not exist in the ancient world. Applying modern political labels to a first-century Jewish family living in Judea under Roman control is not historical analysis. It is propaganda designed to map today’s conflicts onto a completely different era.
It is emotional manipulation masquerading as moral clarity.
This annual rewriting of Jesus’s identity is not isolated. It fits alongside ongoing efforts to detach Jews from their history: branding Jews as “colonizers” in their indigenous homeland; denying Jewish archaeological sites; questioning whether the Jewish Temples ever existed; claiming Jews descend from Khazars; and appropriating Jewish holidays and symbols.
The logic behind this pattern is straightforward: rewrite the Jewish past to delegitimize the Jewish present.
Why Jews Push Back Every December
When Jews correct these narratives, it is not pedantry. It is protection. Jewish history is not a suggestion. It is documented, excavated, remembered, and lived.
Jews are the indigenous people of the Land of Israel. Our language, traditions, texts, and collective memory all originate in the same land where Jesus lived and died as a Jew. To strip Jesus of his Jewish identity is to participate in the same erasure Jews have resisted for centuries.
This is not an academic disagreement. It is not merely historically illiterate. It is an antisemitic political act.
The facts remain simple:
Jesus was a Jew.
From Judea.
Living in the Jewish homeland.
He was not Palestinian.
He was not a “Palestinian refugee.”
These claims are not mistaken; they are deliberate. And when they return this Christmas season, they should be called out for what they are: an attempt to erase Jews from their history and replace fact with ideology.
Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, antisemitism, and Jewish history and serves on the board of Herut North America.
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Israel Has the Legal Right — and Moral Responsibility — to Protect Itself From Terrorism and Jihadi Warfare
Greta Thunberg and UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese in an embrace with a Hamas terrorist in the artwork “Human Shields” by AleXsandro Palombo. Photo: Provided
In legal terms, intentional acts of injustice call for self-protection. Now faced with multiplying jihadi foes, the State of Israel has a corollary obligation to punish terrorist offenders.
It’s vital to note that a basic difference exists between terror violence (the crime) and Israel’s military response (the punishment). As a matter of international justice, this core difference is legally determinative and politically important.
There are pertinent details. By definition, terrorism is a crime under international law. A vulnerable state’s self-protective actions against terror crimes are law-enforcing. This assessment holds true as long as the terror-beleaguered state (here, Israel) responds with aptly-measured uses of force; i.e. — measures consistent with the codified and customary limitations of humanitarian international law.
During the Gaza War, some argued that the number of Palestinian deaths meant Israel violated the principles of distinction, proportionality, and military necessity. That is not true.
Whether Israel is operating against Shiite Hezbollah in Lebanon, Sunni Hamas in Gaza, or any other jihadi fighting forces based in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, etc., its operations intend to serve legitimate military objectives with minimum civilian harms.
To be sure, noncombatant harm can never be prevented altogether, especially when a perfidious enemy is hiding behind “human shields,” but Jerusalem does what it reasonably can do to keep collateral harms in check. Jerusalem — unlike its Islamist foes — displays no “criminal intent” (mens rea).
There is more. In its law-enforcing wars against jihadist terror, Israel acts on behalf of all law-observant countries. While this point has been difficult to acknowledge by those who focus only on the tangible effects of Israeli counter-terrorism, it is authoritatively supported by long-established global obligations. These are indispensable obligations of “mutual aid.”
By this fundamental principle, each state is required to assist other states imperiled by terror-violence. The most important historical figures in creating and explaining this requirement were Swiss jurist Emmerich de Vattel (The Law of Nations, 1758) and English jurist William Blackstone (Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1765-1769). Subsequently, Blackstone’s Commentaries became the recognizable foundation of US criminal law.
The Palestinian terror crimes of October 7, 2023 — murder, rape, and hostage-taking — represent “Nuremberg-level” violations of humanitarian international law. Under compelling or “jus cogens” rules, all states — not just Israel — have a many-sided obligation to punish such criminals. Jurisprudentially, this obligation is “sacred;” it can never be diminished or removed for geo-political or “practical” reasons.
Principle 1 of The Nuremberg Principles (1950) stipulates unambiguously, “No crime without a punishment.”
Among other conclusions, there would have been no Gaza War and no Palestinian casualties if Hamas had not launched its October 7, 2023, criminal assault and war against Israelis and nationals of other assorted states.
What about Israeli “proportionality”? Under binding laws of war, and contrary to “common-sense” meanings, proportionality has nothing to do with inflicting symmetrical or equivalent harms.
Instead, it derives from a more basic legal principle, namely that belligerent rights always have variously specific limitations. If a “common-sense” definition of proportionality was authentically law-based, then America would have been the principal aggressor during World War II.
Unlike Israel, which expressly laments the collateral damage of its self-defense operations in Gaza and elsewhere, jihadi rocket fire and terror attacks are the relentless product of “criminal intent.” By unhidden design, jihadists aim to maim and kill Israeli noncombatants. In Jerusalem, this overtly criminal aim should now be re-imagined in tandem with growing jihadi access to drone weapons and incrementally/eventually to weapons of mass destruction.
It’s time for further legal details. Deception can be lawful in armed conflict, but Hague Regulations disallow placement of military assets or personnel in civilian areas. Related prohibitions of “perfidy” can be found at Protocol I of 1977, additional to the Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949. These rules are also binding on the basis of customary international law.
All anti-Israel combatants, including Palestinian insurgents alleging fighting for “self-determination,” are bound by the law of war. Among other things, this basic requirement can be found at Article 3, common to the four Geneva Conventions of 1949. It can never be suspended or abrogated. Israel, too, is bound by the law of war, but its Gaza War actions that killed and injured Palestinian civilians did not violate those laws.
There is something markedly ironic. The alleged jihadi goal of Palestinian “self-determination” is founded on an intended crime — that is, total “removal” of the Jewish State by attrition and annihilation. This explicitly genocidal orientation has its origins in the PLO’s “Phased Plan” of June 9, 1974.
In its 12th Session, the PLO’s highest deliberative body, the Palestinian National Council, reiterated the terror-organization’s aim “to achieve their rights to return, and to self-determination on the whole of their homeland.”
In its 1974 plan, a clarifying sequence of Palestinian violence was specifically identified “…to start a Pan-Arab War to complete the liberation of the all-Palestinian territory” (Art. 8). Ironically, this was and still remains the annihilationist plan of more mainstream Palestinian terror groups than Hamas.
At some still-indecipherable point, Hamas or other jihadi criminal forces could launch mega-terror attacks on Israel. Such potentially “perfidious” aggressions could include chemical, biological, or radiological (radiation-dispersal) weapons. Foreseeable perils could also include a non-nuclear terrorist attack on the Israeli nuclear reactor at Dimona. There is already a documented history of enemy assaults against this plutonium-production facility, both by a state (Iraq, in 1991) and by a Palestinian terror group (Hamas, in 2014).
International law is not a suicide pact. When jihadists celebrate the explosive “martyrdom” of manipulated Islamic civilians and when Islamist leaders seek “redemption” (i.e., “power over death”) through the mass-murder of “Jews,” the wrongdoers have no correct claims to immunity from law-based punishment.
Under international law, terrorists are considered hostes humani generis or “common enemies of humankind.” Among other things, this most egregious category of criminality invites punishment wherever the wrongdoers can be found. Concerning their required arrest and prosecution, all pertinent jurisdiction is “universal.”
What next? In all law, truth is exculpatory. Regarding the Gaza War, that conflict is anything but over. Hamas and other jihadist forces are already rearming and President Trump’s so-called international stabilization force is effectively a protracted cover for Israel’s jihadi enemies. Taken as a whole, the American president’s “peace” is merely a bitter self-parody.
In the end, Hamas and other jihadists argue they are fighting a “just war” and entitled to employ “any means necessary.” Under authoritative international law, however, even if a war is determinedly “just,” it must still be fought with determinedly “just means.” In this binding jurisprudence, ends can never justify means. Under no circumstances can there ever be law-based justifications for terror-violence.
We should recall 18th century Swiss scholar Emmerich de Vattel’s still-valid declaration in The Law of Nations: “An intentional act of injustice is an injury. A nation has therefore the right to punish it. … This right … is derived from the right of self-protection.”
Prof. Louis René Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971) and is the author of many books and scholarly articles dealing with international law, nuclear strategy, nuclear war, and terrorism. In Israel, Prof. Beres was Chair of Project Daniel (PM Sharon). His 12th and latest book is Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; 2nd ed., 2018).