Deconstructing the Hybrid War Waged on America’s Campuses

Behind the anti-Israel protests lurk left-wing donors, shadowy activists – and hostile intelligence services

This spring’s wave of protests over the Gaza war has buffeted dozens of campuses across the United States, including many elite ones, and has even started to spread internationally. It’s made a mess of graduation season, with a small number of protesters able to harass and intimidate even the great and mighty. Pushback has commenced, with arrests and shutdowns of the “campus intifada,” yet this movement is not yet over. The Israeli war against HAMAS in Gaza is far from complete and we should not expect quick cessation of the protests either.

The unlikely alliance of various leftist activists united for Palestine encompasses the full progressive fringe, from LGBTQ to feminists to environmentalists to racial justice advocates to Islamists and outright jihadists. They share only a hatred for Israel and the West. Pointing out this alliance’s glaring internal contradictions is easy but ultimately futile, since the protesters’ common bond of hatred seems to outweigh all other considerations, at least for now. As I explained in a recent essay, this outwardly improbable anti-Western activist association, aimed at defeating internal as much as external enemies, was predicted some 15 years ago in more than mere outline by my late friend Rich Higgins, but nobody listened.  

A great deal of the “campus intifada” appears far from organic. The same tents, the same slogans, the same gear have been noticed by even casual observers of the protests. Somebody is organizing these operations and supporting their considerable logistics, and whoever it is clearly has deep pockets. As is the custom, suspicion has fallen on the constellation of “progressive” outfits and NGOs that are linked to one degree or another to George Soros, the billionaire bête noire of conservatives. Over at Commentary, Abe Greenwald offers analysis of who’s behind the “Woke Jihad” on our campuses, explaining scathingly:

The union of radical leftism and jihadism on display across American campuses is a marriage born of necessity—and of love. The necessity is reciprocal. Three-plus years after the George Floyd revolution, the left had found itself adrift. With the liberal rank and file no longer interested in police-defunding, the public turning against DEI schemes, whistleblowers revealing the horrors of “gender-affirming care” for trans kids, and the term woke a source of liberal embarrassment, what was there to constitute the vital work of social justice? A revolutionary cannot live on microaggressions alone. The left needed a new animating theme, and jihadist fury would prove more than bracing enough.

Greenwald expands his thesis: “The first thing to understand about any left-wing protest movement is that its nominal cause is irrelevant … Underneath their particular brands, social-justice movements are assorted fronts in a radical war against the good.” He then exposes the gaggle of left-wing donors and activists who are funding the pro-Palestinian cause in the U.S. Greenwald cites, among others, American Muslims for Palestine, which supports Students for Justice in Palestine, a leading activist group. SJP, which makes little effort to mask its support for HAMAS, was founded in 1993, has chapters present on over 200 American college campuses, and has played a vanguard role in the current campus unrest. (For those wondering why the Biden White House seems so sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, at Israel’s expense, it’s relevant to note that the director of intelligence on the National Security Council is Maher Bitar, a Palestinian-American who was an SJP official as a student.)