Students from more than 60 colleges gave up a summer day recently to learn about combating anti-Semitism and anti-Israel activism on campus.
Earlier this month, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America staged a four-day student conference in Boston; a record 85 students attended.
“Reports of intimidation on campus are becoming all too common across the globe,” said Aviva Slomich, CAMERA’s international campus director. “Unfortunately campus anti-Semitism seems to be on the rise, which explains why so many students are eager to learn the skills that are offered at CAMERA’s conference.”
The Aug. 7-10 conference came at a critical time. A recent report by the Amcha Initiative, a campus watchdog group co-led by U.C. Santa Cruz lecturer Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, found a spike in campus anti-Semitism during the first half of 2016.
“Nearly 100 more incidents of anti-Semitism occurred on campus during the first six months of 2016 compared with the first six months of 2015,” according to the report released last month.
Anti-Semitic activity was twice as likely to occur on campuses where the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign was present, eight times more likely to occur on campuses with at least one active anti-Zionist student group such as Students for Justice in Palestine, and six times more likely to occur on campuses with one or more faculty boycotter, the report noted.
Now in its sixth year, CAMERA’s Student Leadership and Advocacy Training Conference attracts students from North and South America, Europe and Israel, with many receiving all-expenses-paid trips to attend, according to the CAMERA website. A spokesperson for the organization said two students from the Bay Area attended, Lily Greenberg Call and David Shelton, who are both vice presidents of the Jewish Student Union at U.C. Berkeley.
Seminars at the event covered the BDS movement, bias in the media, techniques on how to talk with extreme anti-Israel activists on campus and working within student government to fight BDS resolutions.
One of the highlights: a mock BDS hearing at which students experienced firsthand the challenges they may face during the school year.
“What we offer students is high-level intellectual training and emotional support to meet the challenges of the modern college campus,” said Gilad Skolnick, CAMERA’s campus program director.
Rezwan Ovo Haq, a University of Central Florida student, said that the conference was “phenomenal” and that it “arms [us] with knowledge and information to combat anti-Israeli rhetoric and BDS on college campuses.”
Haq is not your typical pro-Israel student; raised Muslim, he moved to the United States from Bangladesh at age 13. He shared his story in a session titled “Why I left SJP and joined a CAMERA supported group.”
He said, “As I child, I knew I supported Palestine, I just didn’t know why.”
In college, Haq said he reached out to his local Students for Justice in Palestine group, helping SJP bring to campus the “Israeli Apartheid Wall,” which aims to mimic the security barrier between Israel and the West Bank.
Yet it was that very same wall that led him to become an advocate for Israel. It was there that he spoke to a former Israel Defense Forces soldier for the first time in his life. “Before then,” Haq said, “I used to believe that IDF soldiers were terrorists. Yet [we] had a genuine conversation when he shared the story of his best friend being killed during Operation Protective Edge [in 2014].”
It was at that moment, he said, that IDF soldiers became “humanized” in his eyes. “I realized that me and this former IDF soldier both wanted peace. We just had a different way of going about it,” he said.
Haq called it a moment of clarity that set him off on a frenzy of learning. His major takeaway: He realized that many pro-Palestinian organizations never hold Palestinian leadership accountable for their actions, “and that they solely exist to slander Israel,” he said.
Another student at the conference, Jason Storch of Vassar College in New York’s Hudson Valley, was led to pro-Israel advocacy after seeing an “increasing level of tolerance toward open hostility [on campus] at anyone so much as on the fence about BDS or Israel as a whole.”
He said he “felt it necessary to at least lend an alternative viewpoint [that] was being withheld from the discussion.”
He called his campus “highly anti-Israel.” Indeed, in March the Vassar Student Association voted to endorse the BDS movement. However, after an outcry from pro-Israel groups, alumni and school administrators, a second vote was held, and the resolution was defeated.
Efforts by pro-Palestinian groups on North American campuses and beyond are expected again in the 2016-17 school year.
As someone who has been on both sides, Haq believes it’s important for students to listen to each other in hopes of forging peace, not only on campus but for the conflict overall.
“We should put down our talking points and truly listen to what the other side has to say,” Haq said. “So if you’re an Israeli or an advocate of Israel, take the time to listen to a Palestinian — and vice-versa.”