Is the wave of BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) activity on U.S. campuses, directed at Israel, essentially a protest movement aimed at getting Israel to withdraw from some disputed lands?
As scholar and author Ruth Wisse recounted in an article last May:
In February, a Jewish college student was hospitalized after being punched in the face at a pro-Palestinian demonstration on a campus in upstate New York…. [O]ther such incidents, some caught on camera, include a male student punched in the face at Temple University, a female student at Ohio University harassed for defending Israel, and a male student at Cornell threatened physically for protesting anti-Israel propaganda. On three successive days last summer, the Boston police had to protect a student rally for Israel from pro-Palestinian mobs shouting “Jews back to Birkenau!”… Every year, some 200 campuses now host a multiday hate-the-Jews fest [called] “Israel Apartheid Week.”
Indeed it sounds like something that goes beyond “protest” or attempts to achieve a “two-state solution.” A 2013-2014 survey by the Washington-based Louis D. Brandeis Center, founded in 2011 to counteract such intimidation, reported that “more than half of Jewish American college students [have] personally experienced or witnessed anti-Semitism.” Jewish students at UCLA and Stanford who wanted to run for the student government were challenged on the basis of “strong Jewish identity”—as evidenced by having traveled to Israel.