In an effort to deflect from the growing focus on AIPAC’s outsized role in American politics, Zionists have latched onto the alleged role that Qatar plays in American domestic affairs.
Beyond the gaslighting, blaming alleged Qatari influence — which is supposed to be behind everything from social media content to campus protests — serves as a balm for Zionists frustrated by declining support for Israel. Unwilling to subject their presuppositions about Israel to scrutiny or even consider that Israel’s destructive policies have undermined its reputation, Zionists, almost extemporaneously, search for inane explanations.
As failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton recently told a gathering of pro-Israel partisans, young people dislike Israel not because of what Israel has done, but because of supposedly “made-up” videos on their social feeds.
Accordingly, Qatar’s donations to American universities have been used to explain why so many students are pro-Palestinian. In their typical bad-faith manner, Zionists refuse to credit any genuine concern for human rights or opposition to genocide. Instead, they attribute malice or ignorance. And Qatar, we’re told, is behind this.
Another obvious problem with this logic is that pro-Israel money is a very salient factor on American campuses. It is not as if Zionists are not trying to do the very thing they accuse Qatar of by promoting pro-Israel viewpoints on campuses.
Even if we buy into the argument that every Qatari dollar is put into the service of the Palestinian cause (and there is no reason to suppose that this is true), it does not explain why Qatari funding would trump the Zionist side.
Zionists would do well to ponder that maybe Zionism is unpopular amongst young people, not due to an alleged Qatari campaign drowning them out, but because Israel is an unappealing cause — despite the ample resources Zionists have thrown around to sell it.
This is a point we made concerning social media:
There is no shortage of pro-Israel content on social media — the Israeli government literally operates labs to push its propaganda. And there are plenty of pro-Israel influencers, some of them paid by the Israeli state.
Pro-Israel content has found less traction than pro-Palestinian content because it does not align with the values of most people, especially young people.
Given that Zionists are obsessing over the alleged foreign influence operation of an Arab country, it is worth examining what pro-Israel funding looks like on campus.
Centers for Israel Studies
It is useful to break down Zionist influence on college campuses into discrete categories. Let’s start with the effort to often inject pro-Israel views under the veneer of scholarship at the myriad Center for Israel Studies that exist on numerous campuses.
Here’s a partial list of them:
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Meltzer Schwartzberg Center for Israel Studies (CIS) (American University, Washington, DC)
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Schusterman Center for Israel Studies (Brandeis University, Massachusetts)
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Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies (University of California-Los Angeles)
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Center for Israel Studies (Binghamton University, New York)
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Taub Center for Israel Studies (New York University)
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The Schwalb Center for Israel & Jewish Studies (University of Nebraska)
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Israel Center Studies (College of Charleston, South Carolina)
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Jan Koum Israel Studies Program (Stanford University, California)
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Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies (Northwestern University, Illinois)
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Center for Israel (Liberty University, Virginia)
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Institute for the Study of Modern Israel (Emory University, Georgia)
Moreover, there are plenty of Jewish studies programs that include a major component focused on Israel, such as the Israel Studies program at the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies at UT Austin.
Many Israel Studies centers produce thoughtful scholarship, including work that turns a critical eye on Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians. But, often, these institutions serve as pro-Israel advocacy organs on campus. At times, centers that deviate too much from that mission risk donor backlash:
Campus Activism
Now, let us consider campus activism. For starters, there is Stand With Us, which devotes plenty of resources to campus activism, including its Emerson Fellowship, funded by notorious anti-Muslim bigot and self-styled “terrorism expert” Steve Emerson.
(It is very common for Zionists to mingle with the worst sort of bigots, but then have the audacity to subject supporters of Palestine to the most absurd scrutiny over any possible hint of prejudice.)
Stand With Us has a budget of over $27 million, according to its most recent available tax filing, of which over $6.5 was spent on “campus and community support in the U.S.”
The Maccabee Task Force was founded in 2015 with major financial support from the late ultra-Zionist billionaire Sheldon Adelson:
Then there’s Students Supporting Israel, which is a much smaller organization but still boasts chapters across the United States.
And, finally, one has to consider Hillel, an international Jewish campus group with a hardline on Israel.
Read our recent story: Hillel’s False Campus Antisemitism Report
Hillel International, a Jewish campus organization, is a partner in the “Campus for All” project that tracks alleged antisemitism on American college campuses. For the academic year 2024-25, the report shows the figure of 2,334 “antisemitic incidents” on campuses, the most the organization has ever reported since it began tracking in 2019.
If that figure is true, it would be a terrible spike in anti-Jewish prejudice on college campuses that should alarm everyone. But the data is partisan propaganda designed to falsely present an antisemitism crisis on college campuses, which can then serve as justification for the suppression of free speech, academic freedom, and even the deportation of college students.
So it is obviously the case that Zionists have campus groups, ones that are significantly better funded than chapters of Students for Justice for Palestine and Jewish Voices for Peace. And yet, the latter consistently best the Zionists. Because the moral message is stronger.
Major Donors
Pro-Israel donors have long deployed their leverage in the corporate university to enforce their views. After Oct. 7, 2023, for instance, universities faced enormous pressure to clamp down on pro-Palestinian protests.
Zionists often use their leverage for matters outside campus, even when the university is only tangentially involved. Consider Conflict Kitchen, the brainchild of two Jewish retirees in Pittsburgh who decided to start a culinary nonprofit.
It was the simple idea of breaking bread, and it eschewed overt politics. This was about saying: Even if our governments are at odds, we can still see the humanity in ordinary people.
They operated for two years without issue, including hosting luncheon lectures in partnership with the University of Pittsburgh Honors College. They featured Afghanistan, Iran, Venezuela, and even North Korea. But then they turned to Palestine, which, as co-founder Jon Rubin related, led a local Jewish organization to try to marginalize them by undercutting their relationship with the local university:
We decided to co-host an event a week before the opening of the Palestine version with a young Palestinian doctor and a professor from the University of Pittsburgh who works on Palestinian human rights issues.
After the program was announced, a representative from the Jewish Federation of Pittsburgh went to the Honors College dean, asking him if he knew that he was going to be co-sponsoring an anti-Semitic hate speech event. They said that if Conflict Kitchen did not add the Jewish Federation to the event or if the university did not pull their sponsorship, they would go to the board of trustees and tell their Jewish members to pull their support for the university.
The University of Pittsburgh Honors College dean eventually caved to the pressure and made the decision to end their relationship with us moving forward.
Such browbeating tactics are par for the course.
In 2016, University of Michigan professor Juan Cole was up for an appointment at Yale until a media smear campaign by Zionists in conservative outlets:
Even people who are merely up for an honorary degree for their non-academic achievements get blackballed. Jewish playwright and screenwriter, Tony Kushner, is one such case, in which a Zionist trustee demanded a symbolic degree offer be rescinded.
In the end, Kushner got his honorary degree, in part due to the New York Times editorial board coming to his defense. There can be no gainsaying that Kushner’s Jewish heritage and his high-profile status as a popular writer permitted him to prevail where others were left with tarnished reputations.
And, in case you were wondering, this happens in Canada, too:
Israeli State
Don’t think Israel is just lying back and letting its American partisans do the work for it. As recently reported:
And the history:
The fact is that attacks on college campuses are not new for Zionists, who long have tried to monopolize discourse on Palestine and Israel to shut down any positive visibility, let alone support, for Palestinians.
Even at times when Palestinian voices were immaterial, which was the case until recently, the American Zionist movement still exhibited a deep intolerance toward dissident perspectives and mobilized to try to erase any deviation from pro-Israel boilerplate. Like any good authoritarian, it was not enough to dominate; one must also run up the score against your opponent and ensure 100% compliance.
The focus of Zionist attacks has shifted — from professors to mainly students — but it is decades old. Back in 1982, when Harvard accepted a donation from a Saudi businessman to endow a chair in Arab studies to be held by the doyen of Palestinian historians, the inimitable Walid Khalidi, there was an outcry from Zionists and smears on Khalidi from the misnamed Anti-Defamation League and AIPAC.
As the New York Times reported at the time,
“News [of the donation] has stirred some complaints among Jewish groups and faculty members who say privately that the donation is improperly linked to the appointment of a man who some contend is a sympathizer of the Palestine Liberation Organization. […]
”There is a sensitivity about the Middle East,” Oleg Grabar, Aga Khan professor of Islamic art, said in a telephone interview from London. ”If this was a chair in German studies and we were talking about an Alsatian scholar, no one would care in the slightest.”
(It is the ultimate irony of Zionist protestations that they now claim they are being ostracized when they have spent decades, and continue to press on, trying to erase Palestinians from public life.)
Smear campaigns continued even after Khalidi was hired, as the Times’ Anthony Lewis reported in 1983:
Professor Khalidi’s name on lists of supposed anti-Israeli activists in two books published in 1983, by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. Even more amazing were some of the things advanced as facts about him. […]
It must be, I fear, that some people see his very moderation as dangerous. He is a Palestinian nationalist, after all, and one must not allow that idea to have any legitimacy.
Before 2023, Zionist attacks on higher education reached a critical junction in the early 2000s, during the Second Intifada.
In an otherwise American monoculture on Israel, a few academics critical of Israel became the fierce obsession of a Zionist campaign to enforce a partyline.
The main target, then as now, was Columbia University, where a then undergraduate student named Bari Weiss was one of the key instigators in a failed attempt to fire two Palestinian professors. Weiss, of course, would later make her mark as a (disingenuous) anti-cancel culture warrior.
In 2004, The David Project, a Zionist group out of Boston, released a documentary alleging anti-Israel and anti-semitic bias on campus titled “Columbia Unbecoming.” The film targeted three professors: Joseph Massad, George Saliba, and Hamid Dabashi; Palestinian, Lebanese, and Iranian, respectively.
Massad was the primary bête noire, and “Columbia Unbecoming” was hardly the first shot, but the culmination of years of attacks on him. In 2002, for instance, arch-Zionists Daniel Pipes and Jonathan Schanzer attacked Massad and others in an op-ed in the New York Post titled “Extremists on Campus.”
Massad was even attacked by a colleague on campus who sent him an email saying, “Go back to Arab land where Jew hating is condoned. You are a disgrace and a pathetic typical Arab liar.”
Pipes infamously started the McCarthyite website Campus Watch to monitor and intimidate professors critical of Israel, and encourages spying by students. As the Times reported in Sept. 2002:
A Web site started last week by a pro-Israel research and policy group, citing eight professors and 14 universities for their views on Palestinian rights or political Islam, has opened a new chapter in a growing debate over campus anti-Semitism.
Many academics see Campus Watch as an effort to chill free speech about the Middle East, and are particularly perturbed by the ”Keep Us Informed” section … inviting students to turn in their professors.
Attacks on other professors, including American Jews, are too numerous to detail here, but it is worth noting that Zionists were able to get the U.S. House of Representatives, in early 2004, to pass a bill that would have ended academic freedom: the International Studies in Higher Education Act, HR 3077.
While the bill did not mention Israel, its champions were Zionists:
The most prominent advocates of HR 3077 have been Martin Kramer, a senior associate in the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University and editor of the Middle East Quarterly; Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum (which publishes the Middle East Quarterly); and Stanley Kurtz, a fellow at the Hoover Institution and contributing editor to National Review.
