The BDS Movement at UC Berkeley: How It Failed and Lessons Learned (Part 1)

BlueTruth is proud to publish this report from the front lines of the divestment battle at the University of California at Berkeley (known locally as "Cal"). Ariel Kaplan, who graduated from Cal this past spring, is one of the founders of Tikvah: Students for Israel, the pro-Israel student group at Cal. This is his analysis of what happened this spring when the BDS movement unsuccessfully attempted to get the ASUC (the student government at Cal) to endorse a one sided anti-Israel resolution. We hope this will be useful for students at other campuses, and community members who support them, in resisting attempts by the BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement to hijack student government organizations in support of their agenda of unending war against the existence of Israel.

Some of you may ask why we would want to openly publish a document that will include strategic advice for students. The answer is that once the situation is described, the strategies are relatively obvious and in large part simply utilize the same methods that the other side already uses. This story will also expose some of the vulnerabilites of the BDS advocates on campus-- but as those are an integral part of who they are and what they stand for, they will not be able to remedy them. Having this story openly available ensures that all those who need to see it will be able to access it easily.

What was initially going to be a short writeup became a 20 page paper. Therefore, we are posting this in several parts over the next few days.

Ariel's opinions and suggestions are his own. There are many approaches to such situations, but few have been written by someone who has as been personally involved as Ariel.

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The Story of the Divestment Resolution

1. What Happened

In the Spring of 2010, anti-Israel activists nearly managed to get an anti-Israel bill passed in UC Berkeley’s student government. This bill, if passed, would have given anti-Israel activists worldwide the opportunity to claim that Berkeley’s student body is in support of divestment from Israel. The story of how this bill came about, what the battle over it was like, and how I and my colleagues in the pro-Israel community managed to see the bill defeated is an important one, and I’d like to explain this story. I also would like to offer commentary and advice to current and future college students on how to fight and defeat anti-Israel measures in their own student governments.

It began when I heard through the grapevine that a divestment bill was being proposed in Berkeley’s student government, the ASUC (Associated Students of the University of California).

My student group, Tikvah: Students for Israel (I was an executive member of the group in Spring 2010, and had been one of the group’s first members, helping shape the group’s ideology and methods, during the group’s inception back in the Fall of 2007), only heard about this at the last minute, and so several of us went to the Senate committee meetings which would determine whether this divestment bill would make it on to the general floor, with the intent of trying to stop that from happening.

It was useless; as a friend of mine in the ASUC, a Jewish student senator, told us: “There’s nothing we can really do to stop this from getting through and on to the general floor.” People’s – the Senators’ (or those Senators who were in the relevant committees) – minds had already been made up by the time we got to the committee meetings. I write “meetings” plural: Students for Justice in Palestine, the notorious, vehement anti-Israel group on campus, had actually written up two bills of nearly identical text in order that if one failed (didn’t get through the Senate committee it was being brought up at), the other, proposed at a different committee, might yet pass and get on to the general floor. As it would turn out, one of these bills did make it through.

The bills had both been written by two particularly inflammatory members of the Berkeley chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine: one, Tom Pessah, is an Israeli expatriate who seemingly has made it his personal mission to spread hatred for his own state as wide as possible in Northern California; the other, Emiliano Huet-Vaughn, was a newcomer to Berkeley, a new graduate student who had a track record of stirring up anti-Israel sentiment abroad at the London School of Economics and attempting (once successfully) to pass divestment there. (Huet-Vaughn’s past was even more sinister than that, I would soon find.) These two Berkeley graduate students had done ‘meticulous research’ and written up the two essentially identical bills, both extended diatribes against the state of Israel tossing in all the language typical of rejectionist anti-Israel propaganda (‘illegal occupation’, ‘war crimes’, ‘disregard for human rights’, ‘laying siege to the citizens of Gaza’, etc.). Their bill was loaded with citations from organizations which Israel advocates know to be either horrendously biased, or simply hateful and generally not credible: Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, in particular, belonging to the former category. (Concerning the latter group: It is worth noting that Robert Bernstein, founder of Human Rights Watch, had only recently publicly disowned his own organization, on the basis of its having become obsessively anti-Israel. His opinion piece in the New York Times can be found here)

The bill which ended up making it to the general floor (and which I will henceforth refer to as the ‘divestment bill’) was voted on very promptly and passed. This led to a flood of over ten thousand emails sent from around the world to ASUC members and officials, as well as to campus officials, variously praising and disapproving of the passage of the bill. Anti-Israel partisans, unsurprisingly, wrote of the ‘moral fortitude’ and ‘courage’ expressed by the Senate for approving divestment; pro-Israel individuals wrote of their shock and disgust that the only even reasonably moral state in the Middle East was being singled out for criticism and was publicly being tried and convicted, in the absence of any clear evidence, of all manner of atrocities.

The divestment bill was then vetoed by the conscientious ASUC President, Will Smelko (see here for an interview concerning his feelings on the Berkeley divestment bill and why he didn’t support it); and then was unsuccessfully resuscitated twice in attempts to see the President’s veto overridden (the second time, through all manner of political trickery). Both resuscitation attempts failed, though both meetings where the attempts occurred lasted all night – one went, all told, from around 7 PM to 7 AM the next morning, on a weeknight (the first four or so hours were devoted to finding a suitable venue for the rapidly expanding group of spectators and guest speakers on the bill) – and were filled with a shockingly obscene level of vitriol and animus, including hate speech almost entirely emanating from the mouths of the hundreds of anti-Israel students and community activists who attended the meetings. It is worth noting that the frenzy of the anti-Israel activists, which I saw in the massive ballroom where the latter two Senate meetings were held on those fateful meeting nights, was unlike anything I’d ever seen in person before – a mass of hundreds of individuals wearing identical green ‘I am a ___ [Jew, Christian, UC Berkeley Student, Pastor, etc.] and I support divestment’ shirts, whooping loudly when people on ‘their side’ would speak and openly mocking and laughing at those of us on the ‘other side’ when we would speak, as well as shouting hateful things and curse words (at least one pro-Israel speaker was called “Nazi”) and, occasionally, anti-Semitic tropes such as ‘the Jews are Christ killers’, ‘Zionists control politics, even on this campus’, ‘the Israel lobby is yet again stifling all voices counter to it’. I remember solemnly having to assent to a pro-Israel student colleague’s observation, at the end of the very first divestment bill meeting, where the bill had passed, that the ‘other side’ of the room had cheered extremely loudly, whooped and grinned and laughed at us after their ‘victory’, not to celebrate their own ‘victory’ so much as to make us feel as bad and weak as possible – naked sadism. And I also remember feeling queasy upon the realization that the rhetorical tactics being used by the anti-Israel speakers at the various divestment bill Senate meetings were strikingly reminiscent of those used by Hitler in his infamous speeches of the 1930s: wearing a ‘uniform’ (aforementioned green ‘I support divestment’ shirt, keffiyeh) and starting off speaking slowly and calmly, but with an intensity and composure, before slowly raising the pitch of one’s voice and, ultimately, ranting at high pitch and full volume while gesticulating wildly, with passion and anger and intensity and hatred, a cacophony of hate designed to gain ‘followers’, to enthrall the audience to join the speaker in his or her hatred of his or her preferred target (in this case, we pro-Israel advocates and students, as well as the state of Israel herself). At the second Senate attempt to override the veto, these speakers, not content with having been granted a 2:1 ratio on the speakers list (in the grounds that there were more of them in attendance than us) even signed up for our speaking slots to make the scene even more one sided. Fortunately, the Senate parliamentarian caught on to this deceitful tactic fairly quickly.

Ultimately, again, we won the day, managing to convince (with a little help from the aforementioned thousands of pro-Israel individuals who emailed the Senators to protest the initial passage of the divestment bill) three more Senators after the initial four who had opposed the divestment bill not to vote for it, and thereby keeping the pro-divestment vote stuck at 13 out of 20 Senators, one less than is necessary to override a Presidential veto.

2. Students for Justice in Palestine and how they operate

The questions I would like to examine are: “How did we win?”; and, “How can college students at other campuses learn from what we at Berkeley experienced, so they can keep anti-Israel bills from passing at their university student governments?” Indeed, it would seem miraculous, I think, to consider that in spite of spending many thousands of dollars on trying to get the bill passed (from buying the hundreds of green ‘I support divestment’ shirts which were used, to flying worldwide-known anti-Israel activists such as Hedy Epstein into the Bay Area for the event), getting thousands of emails sent to Senators approving of their (the Senators’) initial passage of the bill and urging an upholding of that passage of the bill, and getting international celebrities like Noam Chomsky and Desmond Tutu to write letters of support for the Berkeley divestment bill (letters prominently put up around campus), the anti-Israel community at Berkeley and worldwide failed to pass a divestment bill in a student senate with only three Jewish senators (one of whom is vocally anti-Israel), the student senate of the most notoriously politically radical (and therefore, as far as current politics go, anti-Israel) campus in the U.S. if not the world.

The divestment bill war raged for about half of this past Spring semester and dominated campus news and discourse. The lessons learned here will, I hope, help those who face similar challenges at their own universities.

The first matter which needs to be discussed is how anti-Israel campus groups operate – how, that is, the bill gained so much traction so quickly as it did, and how it gained such support within the student senate that if it hadn’t been for the President’s fateful (and unexpected) decision to veto it, it would have passed.

Having been one among the founding class of Tikvah: Students for Israel at Berkeley some two and a half years before this divestment bill was put forth in the student senate, I’d already learned a great deal about how the anti-Israel campus cabal operates, and I’d like to share that.

Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), whose Berkeley chapter was, again, the primary group behind the divestment bill, is one of several prominent, nationwide college student organizations which dedicates itself to delegitimizing Israel and spreading lies about the Jewish state. (There are other prominent anti-Israel groups on campuses in America – the Muslim Student Association, the Muslim Student Union, and various groups opposing ‘Israeli Apartheid’ – but SJP is the most prominent one at Berkeley, indeed the campus where SJP was founded in 2001) [1].The obvious question one would have is why anyone listens to them on campus, especially in light of their extremely impassioned rhetoric, often thuggish behavior and clearly one-sided view of a conflict which most Americans see as complex and multifaceted.

The answer to this question is really pretty simple: groups like SJP exist and thrive on college campuses, and specifically at college campuses, because the student culture at universities (especially at the most elite universities in America) is usually overwhelmingly progressive and left-leaning, and it’s not hard for groups like SJP to distort the history and events of the Middle Eastern conflict in order to frame it in terms that progressive-minded students can relate to [2].Specifically, the narrative of the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict which groups like SJP sell to the student body and to specific student groups (more on this later) is one of Western imperialism vs. an indigenous, peaceful people: the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, SJP members insist, is a history of white European Jews having been illegitimately given the land of innocent Arab (i.e., Brown) indigenous peoples in the Middle East by colonial European powers, and then forcibly seizing this land, displacing the peaceful indigenous residents and fostering a culture (in Israel) of racism toward the Arabs while simultaneously neglecting to respect the human rights of those helpless Arabs living right next door to Israel in unspeakable squalor.

That this narrative bears very little relation to what actually happened with the founding of Israel and what has happened since then is obvious to anyone with an even casual understanding of 20^th century Middle Eastern history, and refuting it is beyond the scope of this article [3].The reason I bring up the narrative is to illustrate how easy it is to deceive great masses of conscientious, morals-minded people committed to justice – most university students fit this description – by feeding them calculated stories which bear almost no relation to reality; Hitler famously wrote that while the masses may well question small lies and wonder if they might be lies, it is so inconceivable to most that people would manufacture and sell the public completely outrageous ‘big lies’ in a coordinated manner that no one really fathoms this possibility or takes it seriously.

Since its inception in 2001, SJP at Berkeley has taken great care to ally itself with the great coalition of progressive groups on campus: the African American student groups, the Hispanic student groups, the LGBT student groups, the women’s rights student groups, the environmentalist student groups. [4] These efforts have been very successful, to the point where SJP’s interests steer the ship of one of the two major political parties in the UC Berkeley student government as much as any other group’s interests do: it’s seemingly impossible to find even one member of the powerful far-left CalSERVE party who isn’t anti-Israel by any standard definition of that term, or at least in sympathy with SJP. As Jon Haber, a pro-Israel blogger who documents BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel) activities in America at Divest This! , has noted, it is a standard, tried-and-true tactic of the anti-Israel movement to market itself such that it ends up seizing political control of organizations such as churches, unions, student governments and food cooperatives, finally using them to write and pass resolutions directed against Israel. One major reason the divestment bill at Berkeley was so immediately successful was because CalSERVE and its allies had a plurality in the Senate to begin with last year, and therefore over half the Senate votes were already guaranteed to go for divestment before discussion on the bill even started.

So SJP and similar groups market themselves as champions of justice, supporting indigenous oppressed peoples against the White Man, and manage to gain tremendous political power and influence on student campuses as a result, by allying themselves with all the other progressive and far left groups and gaining prominence in those circles. That’s one reason divestment, and SJP, nearly succeeded.

Incidentally, before moving on, I would like to bring up briefly what SJP’s ballyhooing about human rights is a smokescreen for: terrorism apologetics. Students for Justice in Palestine and groups like it routinely oppose Israel’s ‘occupation’ of ‘Palestinian lands’ and allege that the Jewish state commits human rights violations on a level perhaps unrivaled in the world today. What, then, is SJP’s solution for ending this ‘occupation’ and the ‘crimes’ committed by the state of Israel associated with it? What SJP calls ‘ending the occupation’ more rightly could be called ‘destroying Israel’: a salient and often missed detail in SJP’s outspoken goals is reversing the ‘Nakba’, the ‘catastrophe’ (how the Arabic word is usually translated) which occurred with the resolution of the 1948 Israeli War of Independence and the founding of Israel and the creation of the ‘Palestinian refugee crisis’. SJP, indeed, refers to ‘occupation of Palestinian lands by Israel’ as having taken place since 1948. 1948 was the year Israel was founded. SJP wants Israel to cease to exist. [5]To this end, SJP never puts on events criticizing Palestinian or Arab violent terrorism, instead framing terrorist acts such as mass murder of Israeli civilians as at least an understandable –if not completely justified – response to ‘occupation’.

Another reason why SJP is such a force on campus is that SJP itself – again, this applies in other universities, where there are other student groups dedicated to the same anti-Israel end – is chock full of what are essentially ‘professional students’ (the aforementioned Tom Pessah is one), graduate students who are taking seemingly forever (more than a decade, for instance) to finish up their studies in part as a smokescreen for being able to continue to have influence on campus and feed anti-Israel propaganda to students. SJP and the anti-Israel movement worldwide know that in order to convince college students of a point, their representatives should ideally be college students themselves, so we find various cases of 35 year old graduate students who seem to spend more time doing anti-Israel advocacy on campus than graduate work. At least several students who fit this description are among the leaders of SJP at Berkeley, and their status as graduate students (especially in fields which would lend apparent credibility to their pronouncements on the Middle East, fields such as Middle Eastern Studies, Law and, regrettably, my own field of Philosophy) lends them credibility in the eyes of impressionable undergraduates on campus who care about justice and are concerned and curious about the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East.

A third reason SJP is so powerful on campus, and reaches so many students, is that it seems never to lack resources: every event they put on is guaranteed a hundred or more loyal, regular attendees (many of whom though are not college students but adults who live around the Berkeley area), SJP prints hundreds of fliers for their events, buys hundreds of t-shirts. In the case of the divestment bill fight, again, SJP even flew in worldwide anti-Israel activists. The question of where college anti-Israel groups get their money is a very important one which more research needs to be done into, especially in light of recent events such as the revelation that the Muslim Student Union at UC Irvine may have funneled donation money to Hamas in 2009 [6].I do not believe it would be premature to raise the question of where SJP’s money comes from, and if any of it may come from nefarious and sinister sources (one place to start poking around would be the International Solidarity Movement, an international anti-Israel group which works closely with college students and anti-Israel student groups, as I’ll go into more later). The bottom line is that SJP seems never to lack money when they need it, and can be seen to spend much more extravagantly than other student groups on campus, in general, when they put on events.

Fourth, and most shockingly, SJP at Berkeley has managed to look Jew-friendly, even Jewish itself, to the point where one pro-divestment Senator memorably told me when she and I got lunch during the divestment bill war on campus, “I know some Jews, many Jews, are against divestment, and many Jews are for it, too”, in response to my informing her that nearly all of American Jewry, the overwhelming majority, would be not only against divestment from Israel but horrified at the very notion of it. There are several ways in which SJP has successfully managed to portray itself almost as a rival Jewish group, a home for Jewish students who ‘conscientiously object to the occupation of Palestine’, and the fact of SJP’s success in selling itself to college students as representative of many American and Israeli Jews is probably the fact most worth noting of any I mention in this article.

(part 2 tomorrow: how SJP infiltrated the UC Berkeley Hillel, and some of the key arguments used to help change several Senators' votes)

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[1] I do not mean to suggest that Muslims are naturally or generally anti-Israel. Unfortunately, student groups who claim to represent Muslim students on American college campuses often are.

[2] Note that I am not saying that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a Left or Right issue, since I don’t believe that it is. For whatever it’s worth, I myself am left-leaning. I merely believe that anti-Israel activists and propagandists tend to frame the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a Leftist issue in order to sell their viewpoint on it to avowed progressives and hard leftists, such as the majority of politically engaged students at campuses like Berkeley.

[3] Though many good books, as well as many websites and articles available for free online, do a good job refuting it. I personally would chiefly recommend Samuel Katz’s book Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine; another good place to start is Myths and Facts online, available for free at http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/myths/mftoc.html.

[4]Of course, it is supremely ironic that SJP, who subtly champion or at least ally themselves strongly with regimes and cultures which feature institutionalized racism, sexism and great discrimination toward homosexuals, and no regard for the well-being of the environment, would be a member of a coalition of student groups championing every one of those social causes. I am not the first to notice this.

[5]The group often says that it doesn’t want Israel to cease to exist, only to cease being a Jewish state. SJP’s spoken desire is to see Israel become a ‘binational state’ and absorb all of the Palestinians, as well as dropping its own identity as a Jewish state. This would, of course, bring about an Arab-majority state like the 22 others in the Middle East, end Israel as a concept, and seriously endanger the Jewish residents of this new ‘Israel’ with mass murder through the influx of thousands of armed terrorists bent on killing Israelis. I think it’s clear that demanding Israel cease being a Jewish state is akin to demanding that France cease being a French state, or England cease being an English state, and become a state ‘open to all peoples’, not one based on the concept of being run by and for Frenchmen/Englishmen/etc. The Jews are a people like any other, and their having a state of their own is no different, in my mind, than Spaniards as a people having a state of their own.

[6]The university has since brought it to the attention of the US Department of Justice: http://www.zoa.org/sitedocuments/pressrelease_view.asp?pressreleaseID=1715. The question is this: If anti-Israel groups fundraise for terrorist groups in the Middle East, who’s to say the relationship doesn’t go two ways? And even if money doesn’t come directly from terrorists, who’s to say it might not come from Arab oil money, the same source of funds terrorism in the Middle East draws from?

Facing Hatred on Campus

(This article originally appeared on JewishJournal.com )

May 11, 2010

Facing Hatred on Campus: You Can’t Fight Fire With Flowers

BY ROZ ROTHSTEIN AND ROBERTA SEID

An increasing number of students report that efforts to demonize Israel have intensified on college campuses. Most recently, the student senates at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), held marathon debates about anti-Israel divestment resolutions. In May, the annual Hate Israel Week will be held on many campuses yet again.

Bruised by these painful experiences and taken aback by their increasing frequency, many pro-Israel students are concerned about the growing trend. They wonder why each time they douse anti-Israel fires, the flames reignite. They wonder what they are up against.

It’s simple. They face a dedicated anti-Israel movement that is not discouraged by temporary setbacks. The Muslim Student Union (MSU) and Muslim Student Association (MSA), allied with extremist groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), focus single-mindedly on one goal: demonizing Israel. This is not your normal student activism. MSU and MSA members are obsessively driven by their mission. They are determined, methodical, focused, well-funded and strictly organized. The leaders are usually devout and infuse religious and moral justifications into the movement, making hatred of Israel akin to a religious as well as social justice cause.

The MSU, MSA and SJP groups don’t just plan actions for their own schools. SJP and the 600 MSU/MSA chapters across North America use the Internet to coordinate their anti-Israel strategies and to share their best practices. They exchange anti-Israel propaganda. They share fliers, props and slogans. They analyze what was effective and refine their tactics and execution for the upcoming year.

The MSU and MSA also maintain continuity. New leaders are groomed to replace leaders who graduate. Incoming students are actively recruited, welcomed into the supportive fold of the organization, indoctrinated and fired up with zeal. Other methods also ensure continuity. For example, a young man standing at the “apartheid wall” display on a California campus this past April told a reporter for the Daily 49er at California State University, Long Beach, that he is a Muslim missionary who is volunteering for three years to accompany the wall and “educate” students about it.

The methods used by the MSU, MSA and SJP have only one goal — instilling hatred and intolerance against Israel and anyone who dares to defend it and the sincerity of its search for peaceful coexistence. They launch slick campaigns, street theater and campus displays like the “Apartheid Wall.” They orchestrate demonstrations against pro-coexistence speakers and host pseudo-academic panels. They showcase far too many speakers whose only credentials are a Jewish background and a willingness to spew anti-Israel propaganda. They bid for academic credibility by asking professors hostile to Israel to co-sponsor their events. (For example, the programs for UCSD’s May 2010 anti-Israel week are co-sponsored by academic departments.) They form coalitions with campus groups by supporting popular student causes and by claiming they are activists for social justice and human rights, when in fact their only purpose is to vilify Israel, and they ignore the serial human rights abuses rampant in other countries. They work to promote their agenda in student government and the student newspaper.

Once they’ve laid this groundwork, the MSU, MSA and SJP move on to bolder measures: recommending punishment for Israel that their new allies will support, such as divestment. Divestment resolution campaigns, in turn, mainstream their anti-Israel message and bring it to an ever-wider circle through debates in student government and media coverage.

All of these tactics are part of a carefully thought-out, well-orchestrated, long-term offensive for turning Israel and its supporters into campus pariahs. This larger movement is at the root of anti-Israel actions on campuses. Most Israel supporters ignore this larger picture, hoping that the fires will burn out and go away. But they are not going away. The movement is becoming more entrenched and more aggressive for two reasons: One is that the zeal of MSU, MSA and SJP membership is growing, fed partially by their successes and by their financial supporters. Even when they don’t win campaigns like divestment resolutions — and in most cases they know in advance that winning is impossible — they consider it a victory that divestment was seriously discussed and that they created a platform to air their propaganda and to put Israel on trial. As divestment leaders commented after losing the vote at Berkeley, “We lost the vote but won the night. We made a statement recorded for posterity and forced everyone to listen and watch.”

The second reason for the growing aggression of MSU, MSA and SJP is their expectation of a disorganized response from Israel’s supporters. Pro-Israel students are focused on other things, like school, their social lives and their futures, as students should be. They did not go to college expecting they would have to defend their identity or Israel. But on too many campuses, they are rudely awakened. Most become involved not because they intended to or have some sense of mission, but out of necessity.

Consequently, pro-Israel students are often caught off guard and unprepared for new anti-Israel ambushes, as happened with the UCSD student senate divestment bill this past April. The bill suddenly appeared on the agenda, and they had only a few days to put together presentations opposing it. Yet the divestment proponents had prepared for a year, recruiting allies and polishing their speeches, slogans and video presentations of Jewish far leftists and anti-Israel activists like Anna Baltzer and Hedy Epstein.

The pro-Israel students cannot be entirely faulted for their inconsistent responses. They are often conflicted about what to do. They are hamstrung by concerns about offending other groups on campus and by often unsupportive or nonconfrontational administrations who give cover to these bigoted campaigns under the umbrella of free speech. Most university systems lack standards that protect the rights of all students, including those who are under attack by hostile campaigns. Pro-Israel students also sincerely believe that reaching out with sympathy and understanding for the other side’s grievances and engaging in reasonable debate will help defuse the situation. Unfortunately, this has rarely been the result.

Pro-Israel students are also taken aback by the other side’s use of half-truths and racist anti-Semitic stereotypes, by their aggressive violation of the usual rules of conduct on campuses, and by some measure of discomfort, intimidation and even outright fear. The 11 MSU students who tried to shout down Ambassador Michael Oren at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), in February violated standards of civil decorum and free speech, and they were arrested. One of those arrested was the president of the MSU at UCI. In the United Kingdom, where, in May, Israel’s deputy ambassador was virtually assaulted by a menacing crowd, the constant intimidation has made Israel’s supporters there fearful of organizing pro-Israel events. At the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, students placed a Palestinian flag on top of a pro-Israel exhibit. When a Jewish student removed the flag, MSU students physically attacked him.

The constant harassment and incitement have made some students fear similar violence will be directed toward them. Some frustrated students are beginning to think that timid administrations are waiting for a pro-Israel student to actually be assaulted and injured so that they can finally take firm disciplinary measures. Still other students wonder if administrations will act only after the divisiveness escalates to a religious war on campus.

It is time for Israel’s supporters to stop operating under the misconception that these attacks are only campus-specific, sporadic or will simply burn themselves out. They cannot keep putting out individual fires without recognizing the arsonist. They must be willing to meet fire with fire, not with flowers. The flowers haven’t worked.

The seriousness of the situation must be recognized. Well-meaning students must absorb the disconcerting fact that the problem they are dealing with is a dedicated, international, orchestrated movement with a long-term battle plan. Judging from the recent divestment campaigns, if pro-Israel students don’t mobilize soon, their voices will be silenced and a false, ugly image of Israel will become the academic norm of North American education.

What’s needed is a coordinated, carefully thought-out, long-term strategy that proactively plans programs and campaigns that are ready in advance to preempt the predictable anti-Israel actions. Coalitions must be built among Jewish and non-Jewish pro-coexistence groups on campuses across the country. Best practices should be identified and kept in place so incoming students can fill the shoes of graduating seniors, just as we see the “other side” doing.

Israel’s supporters should not expect to change the minds of those dedicated to the anti-Israel campaign. Their goal should always be directed at educating and engaging the wider community to affect the hearts and minds of the campus community as a whole.

Concerned students must also be willing to challenge the libelous charges hurled against Israel. Many students fear that debate will offend people or bring unwanted attention and credibility to the accusations, and some Jewish professionals advise them not to respond. But ignoring the charges hasn’t worked. They have grown like a cancer over the past several years.

The anti-Israel groups must be labeled and exposed for what they are: extremists who oppose peaceful coexistence, instill hate and divisiveness, not understanding; who are bent on destruction, not on constructive solutions or compromise; who stand for racism, not human rights. They are not pro-peace or pro-Palestinian, but spoilers of peace who want to perpetuate the conflict.

If the courageous and far-too-often beleaguered pro-Israel students more fully adopt the long-term strategies, determination and coalition-building needed to face the MSU, MSA and SJP, there will be a positive change on campuses. Until then, the anti-Israel fires will continue to flare and Israel will continue to be unjustly marginalized by extremist groups that should have been exposed and marginalized themselves on campuses long ago.

Roz Rothstein is the co-founder and CEO of StandWithUs, and Roberta Seid is director,
research-education, StandWithUs.