Anti-Israel Campus Groups Blacklisted

Experts and activists have praised the Israeli government’s inclusion of American anti-Zionist student groups in a new initiative announced on Sunday that will prevent the entry to the country of foreigners that promote a boycott of the Jewish state.

The blacklist published by the Israeli government includes 20 organizations, among them Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), which spearhead boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) resolutions on campuses nationwide, and have been criticized for whitewashing Palestinian terrorism and creating a hostile environment for Jewish students.

Several experts who spoke to The Algemeiner on Monday pointed to the incendiary nature of the [ anti-Israel campus ] groups and their adverse impact on many college campuses.

Dan Diker, project director of the program to counter political warfare and BDS at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs think tank, said Israel’s move may send a message to “university administrations that have been reluctant to draw a line in the sand.”

SJP activists “threaten, intimidate, and harass students on campus,” argued Diker, who co-authored an extensive report on the group in November. “They shut down free speech and they promote anti-normalization of relations not only with Israel, but with Jewish students on campus.”

He observed that individual SJP members and chapters have been found to glorify terrorist groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

“They are, simply put, a tyrannical student organization that university administration has been afraid to confront, with several exceptions” — namely Northeastern University, Vassar College, and Fordham University, Diker said. “They have basically co-opted the university campus as a place for the peaceful exchange of ideas” to advance their own agenda — “the dissolution of Israel as a nation-state of the Jewish people.”

“No civilized country can countenance that kind of behavior,” he added.

Read More: Algemeiner