Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY). Photo: Screenshot.

August saw the seasonal upswing in campus activity from the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. This time, it was with faculty taking the lead.

One of the most important developments was the announcement of a newly formed “Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism,” which will sponsor two conferences this fall to attack the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism.

The “institute”defines its missions as:

The Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism aims to support the delinking of the study of Zionism from Jewish Studies, and to reclaim academia and public discourse for the study of Zionism as a political, ideological, and racial and gendered knowledge project, intersecting with Palestine and decolonial studies, critical terrorism studies, settler colonial studies, and related scholarship and activism.

The Institute approaches Zionism as a broad set of colonial and repressive work and solidarities, efforts to curate knowledge and identities, and to dismantle movements that resist it. In other words, Zionism’s project extends beyond the borders of Palestine.

Many scholars and activists are working to illuminate such “other work” of   Zionist institutions and discourses, historically and in the present, to shape the material conditions of life, the movement of capital, the construction of racial identity, and more.

The institute’s “founding collective” includes well-known BDS activists including Rabab Abdulhadi of San Francisco State University, Christine Hong of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Emmaia Gelman of Sarah Lawrence College. Its funders include the Sparkplug Foundation, a longtime supporter of BDS and radical causes, including the “Palestine Youth Movement.”

In an interview, Gelman, who is a Sparkplug Foundation board member and daughter of the founders, Felice and Yoram Gelman, noted that “Without minimizing how Zionism operates directly on Palestinians and implements anti-Palestinian racism, we want to tie it [Zionism] to this much larger western supremacy and white supremacy that’s been endemic to these organizations even since before they were Zionist organizations.”

Conferences will be held at New York University Law School, long a hotbed of BDS activity, and at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

The creation of this “institute” brings together a number of recent trends in BDS and antisemitism. One is to focus on the IHRA definition as a unique form of repression or “censorship,” a claim made with increasing frequency by NGOs, including those that have been shown to receive funding from governments that have adopted or supported the IHRA definition.

Another trend is to characterize Israel and the United States as “settler colonialist” societies that are inherently racist, illegitimate, cruel, and unjust. A more sinister trend is to relabel the roles of Jews in politics and culture as conspiratorial “Zionist interventions” that are allegedly fundamental to “racism, group supremacy, violence, militarism, colonialism, and capitalism.”

The institute’s claim that its efforts aim at “delinking of the study of Zionism from Jewish Studies” implies the latter is intellectually and socially contaminated by the other, along with Judaism itself.

This all points toward the increasing institutionalization of anti-Israel hatred in academia. This was complemented in August by reports regarding an upcoming course at Princeton University’s Near Eastern Studies Department, “Decolonizing Trauma Studies from the Global South,” which includes the much criticized book The Healing Humanities: The Right to Maim by BDS supporter Jasbir Puar, which claims that the Israeli military deliberately “maims” Palestinians and harvests their organs, along with a host of other anti-Israel libels.

Response to the inclusion of Puar’s book was swift and critical, both from Jewish and other sources.

The inclusion of Puar’s book in the course’s reading cleverly sets up an unwinnable situation for Princeton and for supporters of Israel. As the course is criticized, up to and including demands that the book be removed and the professor fired, these are deemed calls for “censorship,” as a recent open letter claims. If the course goes ahead without criticism, then students will be demanded to accept Puar’s calumny against Israel, among others. For their part, Princeton’s “Alliance of Jewish Progressives” called criticism, including from Princeton’s mainstream Jewish leaders, a “right-wing Zionist attack.”

The Princeton situation highlights the manner in which Israel-obsessed academics have come to dominate and shape discourse at universities, including the move of noted BDS supporter Marc Lamont-Hill from Temple University to the City University of New York.

Similarly, the appointment of anti-Israel activists as faculty and staff have been revealed in Britain. Reports there indicate that Islamic Student Association chapters have hosted viciously antisemitic talks from both Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and global jihadist Hizb ut-Tahrir speakers.

More positively, fallout from the American Anthropological Association (AAA)’s formal adoption of BDS has begun to expand. The organization’s decision was condemned by New York University President Linda G. Mills and Interim Provost Georgina Dopico, who noted that “academic boycotts contravene the concept of the free exchange of ideas, a key tenet of academic freedom.” There are reports of individuals resigning from the organization, but it is too soon to determine how widespread these might be.

As many commentators have noted, the AAA decision transforms it from an academic to a political organization, with a simplistic worldview of oppressor and oppressed, in which Jews are particular villains. The AAA resolution was endorsed, however, by a Latin American association of anthropologists.

In the cultural sphere, the manner in which the BDS movement associates Israel with all contemporary horrors, was demonstrated by a social media posting from Jewish Voice for Peace, linking “the climate disaster and exploitation Native Hawaiians are experiencing right now” with the fictitious “Tantura massacre,” where the Israeli government “built a parking lot over a mass grave of Palestinians murdered by Jewish militias in 1948.”

In the political sphere, with the election season heating up, charges and counter-charges related to Israel and anti-Zionism have been fully integrated into campaigns. A recent AIPAC-sponsored junket to Israel for House Democrats brought a slew of condemnations from the “Squad” and pro-BDS groups.

The Squad’s feud with AIPAC also included attacks on AIPAC’s support for pro-Israel candidates, including thus far unnamed challengers to individuals such as Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY). This has included accusations by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) that the organization was “funneling dark money” targeting “progressive, working-class candidates of color,” and that “We just got word: AIPAC is at it again. They’re trying to recruit an establishment executive to run against my brother in The Bronx, Jamaal Bowman.” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) used the same “dark money” rhetoric in a series of social media ads, while Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) also described AIPAC as “a right-wing bully group that supports actual insurrection, white supremacists.”

At the same time, leading BDS group IfNotNow has targeted pro-Israel Democrats including Rep. Jerry Nadler (NY) and Rep. Dan Goldman (NY) specifically for accepting support from AIPAC.

A version of this article was originally published at SPME, where the author is a contributor.