Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by the Times of Israel on February 18, 2025. With edits to match MTC’s style guidelines, it is cross-posted here with permission.
“It is time to escalate for Palestine,” wrote Bowdoin College’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). In early February, 50 SJP students occupied Bowdoin’s Smith Union, the center of campus life. This was the first anti-Zionist encampment on an American college campus since Donald Trump’s inauguration last month.
The crowd outside, numbering around 100, also included students from nearby Bates and Colby colleges, members of local Palestinian advocacy groups, and Bowdoin alumni. When campus security acted to close Smith Union, student protesters inside physically broke the security perimeter and held the front doors open to allow their accomplices entry. Bowdoin College’s administration took five days to restore order to campus and end the encampment.
This is no surprise. Many of Bowdoin’s faculty and administrators–and far too many members of American higher education–believe the same pro-Hamas ideologies that animate SJP students.
The Bowdoin Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FSJP) chapter, for example, immediately urged the college to “divest [from] any entity that abets the genocide committed by Israel against Palestinians.” FSJP praised the pro-Hamas student encampment as representative of “the core values of Bowdoin College, namely its commitment to the Common Good.”
[RELATED: Deporting Radicalism: Trump’s Crackdown on Anti-Israel Campus Protests]
The faculty’s endorsement of their students’ behavior categorically excludes and misrepresents what is common or good. Bowdoin’s faculty support for pro-Hamas student activism propagates the ideology that Jews are not only part of the oppressive class but, in fact, the whole system’s puppeteers.
When I was a doctoral student in education at Stanford University, my classmates used this same argument. In the winter of 2024, one classmate crafted a conspiracy theory about Jewish power wherein Jews control the whims of the United Nations (UN). I later left Stanford in disgust of the rampant and pervasive anti-Semitism.
What happened? Talking about the humanity of children, this classmate said, really got her thinking about the terrible conditions facing Gazan youth. She said Israel does not care about protecting Palestinian schoolchildren. I interrupted because Israel does not run or fund Gazan schools. My classmate clarified that she intended to say that Israel “defunding UNRWA,” the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, meant Gazan school children would suffer.
Israel could not have “defunded UNRWA,” as it never funded it in the first place. When I fact-checked my classmate, she clarified that she actually meant the Israeli government strategically timed the release of allegations that UNRWA employees participated in the October 7th atrocities. She believed the Israeli government, as part of its war strategy, persuaded United Nations member states to withdraw funds from their own UN organization.
My classmate speculated that the Israeli government is so powerful that the Jewish state holds the power to convince these huge Western nations to punish the Palestinian people on their behalf. In a Stanford graduate classroom, she argued anti-Semitic conspiracy theory as though it were fact.
My classmate argued a super high-level anti-Semitic conspiracy theory about Jews holding political power over the United Nations. She not only characterized the Jewish state as all-powerful, which played into imagery of the classic anti-Semitic trope of Jews as puppeteers of world affairs, but also rooted her argument in a completely wrong thesis that the UN gives Jews special treatment. Quite the opposite. The international community has failed Jews repeatedly throughout history.
Rather than allowing our class to work through these tensions, the professor ended class abruptly. Many of my classmates were upset because they thought I unfairly attacked my classmate for voicing a ‘valid’ belief. I was upset because no one else clocked my classmate’s argument as a conspiracy theory that clearly played into classical anti-Semitic tropes.
The campus Palestinian liberation movement that my classmates, those at Bowdoin, and on other American college campuses ascribe to redefines Jewish nationalism exclusively through its own self-fulfilling lens: As a settler colonial evil, a proxy of empire and racism.
[RELATED: Anti-Semitic Protesters]
SJP affiliates invert the dichotomy of oppressor and oppressed. SJP’s ideology then depicts violence against Jewish Israelis – mass murder and rape, the starvation of hostages – as necessary means toward decolonization, absent any moral imperative for the sanctity of all human life. Even more so, SJP demands that the only solution to Palestinian pain is the complete dismantling of the Jewish state.
A legitimate and moral resolution is not achieved by demanding the immediate destruction of the only Jewish state in the world. Nor is it achieved by treating Israel as a global pariah country, supporting anti-Semitic jihadists like Hamas, or accusing Jewish Zionists of puppeteering global affairs and therefore deserving of eradication.
This narrative is a regurgitation of what students like those at Stanford and Bowdoin are being taught in their classes. Beginning in the late 1960s, an era characterized by student strikes on campuses across the United States, Bowdoin College began integrating social justice themes into its curriculum. More recently, Bowdoin’s 2006 Strategic Plan reinforced these commitments by prioritizing diversity, multiculturalism, and community engagement as core elements of their liberal arts education. These decisions recast the school as an echo chamber for one-directional radical politics and social justice activism where students are neither encouraged nor expected to engage curiously with contradictory opinions that might make them feel uncomfortable.
When the college’s administration issued letters of suspension to students at the encampment last week, Bowdoin SJP posted a statement on their social media page describing the university’s actions “as forms of repression and collective punishment.”
Interpreting a valid institutional response to repeatedly breaking campus rules as “collective punishment” suggests that these students want to be seen as victims. These students, operating from a prestigious American liberal arts college that costs roughly $65,000 USD per year to attend, imagine themselves as part of a global, collective struggle against empire and power.
At Bowdoin, Stanford, and other American colleges and universities, students compete over who is more oppressed. Professors teach college students to see themselves along a spectrum of victimhood. These students only know what they’ve been taught: a delusional and dangerous world-view about Jews.
An example of anti-Semitic conspiracy theory disguised as scholarship can be seen in none other than Achille Mbembe’s “Necropolitics.” Mbembe is a Cameroonian historian and political theorist well known for his writings on colonialism and its consequences. He is a leading figure in new wave French critical theory who has held appointments at Columbia University, the Brookings Institution, the University of Penn, Berkeley, Yale, and Duke, among others outside the United States.
Mbembe’s now well-regarded theory of “necropolitics” is a response to Michel Foucault’s “biopower.” Foucault argued that state powers control human bodies for their own means. Mbembe countered that Foucault’s theory does not adequately address the components of race. Mbembe argued that states control human bodies along racial lines where some people (white people) have power and some people (people of color) are disempowered. He then offered his quintessential example to ‘prove’ this argument: The Israeli apartheid regime and the Palestinian suicide bomber. According to Mbembe, “The most accomplished form of necropower is the contemporary colonial occupation of Palestine.”
Mbembe draws a line from slavery to Nazi Germany wherein the Shoah is only so atrocious when read through the lens of being a display of the cruelty of slavery reaching the European continent itself. He completely denies Jewish indigeneity to the land of Israel by proclaiming that “The colonial state derives its own fundamental claim to sovereignty and legitimacy from the authority of its own particular narrative of history and identity. This narrative is itself underpinned by the idea that the state has a divine right to exist.” Mbembe’s reading of Zionism utterly ignores spiritual, linguistic, and social evidence of Jewish expulsion and return. He also denies any validity to internal Jewish notions about identity.
Mbembe valorizes Palestinian suicide bombers as the owners over their own bodies, depicting them as the ultimate martyrs against state power. He depicts the Palestinian suicide bomber as the absolute resister to racialized, colonial oppression because in the same moment that the suicide bomber kills their oppressor, they also take control of their own body by killing themselves. According to Mbembe, with the suicide bomber, “death goes hand in hand with the death of the Other. Homicide and suicide are accomplished in the same act […] resistance and self-destruction are synonymous.”
[RELATED: Reflections on Pro-Palestinian Protests]
By depicting the Palestinian suicide bomber as the ultimate martyr, Mbembe argues that the most meaningful resistance to Zionism is dual murder-suicide: to murder Jews at the same moment as one kills themselves. To him, this strategy brings the Palestinian suicide bomber the rights over their own body while at the same time resisting colonialists by actively murdering them. Killing Jews becomes the ultimate form of the oppressed, colonized person’s resistance.
Mbembe treats Jewish history and ways of understanding the world as completely irrelevant, inadequate and factitious. Based on Mbembe’s arguments, Foucault’s theory about the genocide of European Jewry, because it fails to explain contemporary racism, should be disregarded and replaced by a theory that highlights and uplifts Palestinian modes of resistance to Zionism.
Mbembe’s essay, which he later extended into a book, is taught in courses at elite American universities. My classmates at Stanford quoted Mbembe. And Mbembe is not alone in creating high-level, well-articulated anti-Semitic conspiracy theory disguised as “scholarship.” He is just an example.
In schools where faculty’s own ignorance about Jewish history passes for insight, and where students learn a form of Jew hatred so cleverly disguised as academic ‘theory,’ it should come as no surprise that students choose combativeness over coexistence.
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Image of “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” at Brown University by Kenneth C. Zirkel on Wikimedia Commons
In a great irony, Israel has voted, along with the U.S., against Ukraine and in favor of Russia, in the U.N.. This is transparently due to Trump/American pressure on Israel, which is starting to look puppet-like.
This is regarded, quietly, with shame in Israel.
The whole aspect is bewildering and horrifying, most certainly including the “encampments” on the U.S. campuses.