A reckoning is happening on college campuses across the country.

In the last few weeks, students at dozens of colleges and universities have camped out to protest Israel’s U.S.-backed war on Gaza — and often their schools’ investments in companies that profit from that war.

These students have been met with incredible repression. As of this writing, police had arrested more than 2,000 protesters, sometimes violently. Schools have suspended, expelled and evicted student activists even as Congress grills school presidents for not going further.

College administrators, lawmakers and even President Joe Biden have repeatedly claimed that these protests are “antisemitic.” But with basic context, that claim falls flat.

Since the start of Israel’s assault on Gaza (and long before that), there have been Jewish communities advocating for Palestinian rights. While grieving losses in Israel, Jewish-led groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now have called for a permanent cease-fire in Gaza.

Similarly, many campus protests have included Jewish students celebrating Shabbat alongside Muslim students observing Friday prayers. Young Jews are reporting that their faith motivated them to join the encampments. “To be Jewish in a time of genocide means that you have a duty and a responsibility to speak up,” one organizer told Teen Vogue.

In Philadelphia, where I live, students from the University of Pennsylvania’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment invited two Israeli Holocaust scholars to speak about antisemitism. Afterward, the scholars wrote a letter urging the university not to disband the encampment.

“This misguided attempt to shut down speech under the guise of protecting Jews is all the more insidious,” they wrote, “because it diverts attention from the real sources of antisemitism.”

Those “real sources,” they clarify, are political forces on the far right that mingle openly with white supremacists and Nazis — including some of the same figures now calling to bring in troops to shut down these anti-war encampments.

Being Jewish myself, I recently joined a Passover Seder at the UPenn encampment. The sunny, vibrant service — led by multiple generations of Jewish faith leaders — deepened the meaning of the liberation-themed holiday by connecting it to the struggle for Palestinian liberation.

That struggle, as students keep reminding us, should be the true focus of the media right now.

So far the Israeli military has indiscriminately killed more than 34,000 Palestinians — 14,000 of them children. Another child is killed or wounded in Gaza every 10 minutes.

Israel’s blockade of humanitarian aid now threatens the entire population of Gaza with starvation. Mothers surviving on animal feed are watching their infants waste away in their arms, while parents struggle to identify their children by their clothing in newly unearthed mass graves.

You don’t have to be one of the hundreds of scholars warning that this is genocide to know that it’s wrong. In fact, most Americans agree strongly that this must end.

Polling shows that the majority of U.S. voters of all political parties disapprove of Israel’s military actions in Gaza, oppose sending more military aid to Israel and support the U.S. calling for a permanent cease-fire.

But policy makers have yet to listen to us.

Biden just signed the largest-ever U.S. aid package for Israel. His administration continues to supply Israel with U.S.-made weapons, which are being used in violation of our own laws protecting human rights.

It’s no wonder people are demanding accountability. As they have always done, the younger generation is making it clear that if their leaders ignore them — especially in cases of life or death for innocent people — then they will become unignorable.

In these encampments, students are overcoming their differences in order to care for each other and live their values. They’re modeling what a better world could look like at a time when we need it most.

Instead of joining the powerful who are silencing our speech, we should join the students protecting it.

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Sarah Gertler is the Newman Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.

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