The article below was first published by the Israeli daily Haaretz on July 22, 2025.
Its author, Elijah Kahlenberg, is the president and founder of Atidna International, a university-based peace group uniting Jewish and Arab students. He also works for the editorial and legal research teams of Democracy for the Arab World Now.
Kahlenberg, who is Jewish, graduated this spring from the University of Texas (UT) at Austin. Last year, he took part in UT student protests condemning Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza and demanding the school divest from entities that do business with Israel.
In his article, Kahlenberg explains that, far from “protecting” Jewish students, those attacking pro-Palestinian student protests are the ones endangering Jews.
These attacks include “gagging students and faculty who have opposed Israel’s mass slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, as university officials are moving further to the right under pressure from the Trump administration,” as World-Outlook noted in introducing a brief essay by Rashid Khalidi first published in The Guardian last March.
Khalidi, who recently retired from Columbia University in New York, served as the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies. During his 22-year-long tenure at the college, he also edited or co-edited the Journal of Palestine Studies. He has authored several books, including The Hundred Years War on Palestine.
As World-Outlook reported earlier this year in Trump’s 2nd Term: One-Man Rule & the Danger of Incipient Fascism (II), “Trump has launched a dangerous assault on democratic rights, under the guise of ‘combating antisemitism,’ by issuing another executive order that can target any opponent of Israel’s war on the Palestinian people. Meanwhile, he makes excuses for the overt antisemitism of his most reactionary supporters.”
Under this pretense, the White House has been investigating some 60 universities, aiming to accomplish there what it has already achieved at Columbia, where university authorities caved in to Trump — instituting widespread restrictions on free speech and doling out a range of punishments to students who occupied a campus building in the spring of 2024 during nationwide pro-Palestinian student protests.
Simultaneously, the Trump administration is carrying out a witch-hunt of international students who have spoken out against the Israeli war in Gaza.
The government has been demanding from colleges lists with the names of such students or faculty and their nationalities. The State Department is accusing many of them of “aiding Hamas” or carrying out “antisemitic attacks” and in a number of cases arresting them, revoking their visas or residency papers, and preparing to deport them.
World-Outlook is publishing the article that follows for the information of our readers. The headline, subhead, first photo, and text below are from the original. The other photos, as well as breakers and notes, are by World-Outlook.
— World-Outlook editors
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It’s Not Gaza Campus Protests That Endanger Jews, It’s Misguided Efforts to ‘Protect’ Them
What truly poses a danger to Jews today is not young people demanding peace on campuses, it’s the way in which authorities, both university and governmental, but also the Jewish establishment, respond
Jul 22, 2025
On June 4, Matt Most, a leader in the ADL’s Mountain States division, penned an op-ed urging his readers to avoid “finger pointing” in response to the recent attacks in Boulder,[1] Washington D.C.[2] and beyond. Yet his piece reads as an exercise in exactly this. It offers accusatory, unsubstantiated blame leveled squarely at one group he believed to be responsible for inciting such horrifying violence: college protesters.
As a Jewish student who actively participated in my campus’ protest movement against Israel’s destruction in Gaza, I feel compelled to respond to Most’s accusations based on my personal experience. His only connection between student protests and the horrific recent violence is in the use of shared slogans – phrases like “Free Palestine” – which are commonly used by any voice that considers itself remotely pro-Palestine.
I graduated from the University of Texas at Austin a couple of months ago, where I devoted much of my time to peace activism – ranging from organizing Jewish-Palestinian dialogue to joining protests demanding an end to Israel’s carnage in Gaza. This included advocating for a cease-fire and pushing my university to divest from weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin and Boeing. Connecting these actions, whose chief aspirations were for nonviolence and against bloodshed, to the violence in D.C. or Boulder is dishonest.
I’m sure there were specific, isolated individuals at campus protests who were in fact antisemitic. But overwhelmingly, campus demonstrators have been anchored in nonviolent, grounded pleas for the bloodshed to stop. Branding this as an “ideology of hate,” as Most writes, conflates student protests with extremist violence.
It’s critical also to remember that university students, especially Jewish students, have long been central to movements toward justice and equality in U.S. history – from opposing the Vietnam War to participating in the Freedom Summer in Mississippi, where Jewish activists Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were murdered by the KKK while fighting for Black voting rights. The majority of campus protesters against the carnage in Gaza are undoubtedly following in this tradition.
What truly poses a danger to Jews today is not young people demanding peace on campuses, it’s the way in which authorities, both university and governmental, but also the Jewish establishment, respond.
Arab students on U.S. campuses welcome Jewish peers in peace protests
I personally, while partaking in this activism, never hid my Jewish identity. In fact, many of my Arab and Palestinian student peers warmly embraced me because of it. It was common for them to approach me at a protest after spotting my Magen David necklace and thank me for standing against the atrocities taking place in Gaza. Not once did I feel unsafe around them. Not once was my Jewishness questioned or targeted.
I do not want my story to be used to negate any legitimate encounters with antisemitism on U.S. campuses. My aim is simply to advocate for fairness – for all students to be treated equally, regardless of their ethnic, national or political identities. The only times I personally felt at risk on campus stemmed not from the actions of students but the actions of administrators and institutional leaders.
For example, on April 24, 2024, I took part in “occupy the lawn,” with art workshops and teach-ins organized by the Palestine Solidarity Committee. But then-University President Jay Hartzell, under instructions from Texas Governor Greg Abbott, called in state troopers to shut it down, while justifying the move in the name of combatting campus antisemitism.
Ironically, the only Jew I am aware of that was harmed during the whole episode was me: I sprained my ankle when I was pushed to the ground by a state trooper on horseback.
But the physical injuries were merely one facet of the broader sense of vulnerability I felt, and continue to feel. Far more insidious are the institutional gestures that make the university’s unmistakable pro-Israel bias crystal clear: Moves that ironically and actively feed into classic antisemitic tropes of Jewish control over global systems of power.
University authorities’ double standard for Palestinian vs. Jewish students
When universities confer disproportionate protections and privileges on Jewish students and organizations while intentionally sidelining Palestinians, they risk giving new life to old prejudices. On my campus, this double standard was glaringly obvious.
On October 13, in his first official statement after October 7, our university president pledged enhanced protection for Jewish students – but after a group of non-students with hostage posters called local students organizing an educational event about Palestine “terrorists.” The University did not utter a single word about these threats to its Palestinian student leaders.
In the months that followed, various incidents further solidified this bias. The university continued its silence after a 23-year-old Palestinian man was stabbed just off of campus after attending a pro-Palestine rally.
If universities truly cared about protecting Jewish students from antisemitism, they would promote equity – not confer special treatment. This is what puts Jewish students at risk.
But this bias is not limited to campus administrators. Most notably, the Trump administration has utilized Jewish safety as a pretext for detaining student activists and freezing research funds. Jewish institutions themselves – including the ADL, where Matt Most works – have also played a major role in amplifying these biases, hence placing Jewish students in an even more targeted and precarious position.
Most openly stated he and his ADL colleagues leveraged their power with campus administrators, with elected officials and in the media to discourage them from “echo[ing] the rhetoric of those [campus] protestors who labeled the tragedy in Gaza a genocide.” By trying to silence critics of Israel, they harm Jews by giving credence to the most dangerous antisemitic myths: That Jewish institutions exist solely for control and suppression.
The irreparable damage done to the Jewish community makes me shudder for the future. When these institutions invoke Jewish pain to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel, they delegitimize genuine efforts to combat antisemitism. Before assigning blame to campus protesters for the recent violence in D.C. and Boulder, a moment of honest introspection is both timely and necessary.
Elijah Kahlenberg is the president and founder of Atidna International: a university-based peace group uniting Jewish and Arab students. He also works for the editorial and legal research teams of Democracy for the Arab World Now.
NOTES
[1] Several people were injured at an outdoor mall in Boulder, Colorado, when Mohamed Sabry Soliman threw two Molotov cocktails into the crowd on Sunday, June 1, in an apparent antisemitic attack. The Boulder attack took place at a popular pedestrian mall known for attracting tourists and college students. That Sunday, demonstrators with a volunteer group called Run for Their Lives had gathered to call for the release of Israeli hostages who remain in the custody of Hamas and its allies in Gaza.
[2] On May 21, 2025, another antisemitic attack occurred near the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. A gunman opened fire outside the museum during a “Young Diplomats Reception” hosted by the American Jewish Committee, killing two Embassy of Israel staff members who were leaving the event.
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Categories: Palestine/Israel, US Politics