Many media outlets — such as the Washington Post in this story — have termed the protests that have sprung up on America’s college campuses “antiwar” or “ceasefire” protests. I fear this does not give an accurate picture of the message of some of these protesters.

Consider the manifesto released by “Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine Coalition,” which has recently erected a “Liberated Zone” in Harvard Yard. “Ceasefire” appears only once in the manifesto. While it is a demand, the much broader message of this manifesto is that Israel is a fundamentally illegitimate state.

It proclaims, “There can be no equivocation: Palestine is occupied from the Sinai to the Galilee, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.” But in fact there is a kind of slippery equivocation in this very sentence. The Sinai Peninsula sits across Israel’s southern border, while the Galilee region is at the northern edge; the Mediterranean is the western shore, while the Jordan River is its eastern bound. Are these demonstrators saying that there are occupied Palestinian territories within this region (namely Gaza and the West Bank), or are they instead insinuating that all of Israel is occupied Palestine?

Beyond a “permanent ceasefire,” this group demands “an end to the occupation, and a free Palestine from the river to the sea.” It also demands the disclosure of “any and all investments . . . in Israel” and divestment “from all such investments.” This is not merely a call for a cease-fire. If all of Israel is “occupied Palestine” and protesters want the “end to the occupation,” that seems to imply that Israel should be wiped off the map. Far from denouncing violence against Israelis, this statement offers a possible justification for such violence: “The Palestinian people, like all oppressed peoples, have a right to resist their annihilation.” This is not an overt endorsement of violence, but many of those in the American academy who have defended or excused the October 7 massacres have emphasized exactly this point — that Hamas’s bloody attack is justified resistance.

Harvard’s “Liberated Zone” manifesto speaks to broader trends in the campus protests. As Adam Rubenstein recently reported, a crowd outside Columbia chanted, “We don’t want two states, we want all of it.” One of the alleged leaders of the Columbia encampment said on video that “Zionists don’t deserve to live.”(This student has since released a statement that expresses “regret” for this video but does not spell out exactly which claims are being repudiated.) Some reporters term these demonstrations “pro-Palestinian,” but that, too, might understate the role of performative anti-Israel sentiment in these protests. (And there is reason to doubt that calls for the mass extermination of “Zionists” will actually improve the lives of people in the Palestinian territories.)

Of course, there is a logical distinction between a cease-fire and the elimination of Israel, and it is certainly possible to advocate for an end to Israeli efforts in Gaza while also accepting the existence of Israel. But it’s not clear that all these protesters are in fact drawing that distinction. Some are protesting not the war on Hamas but the existence of Israel itself. If the point of a protest is to send a message, journalists should be sure to explain to their readers what this message really is.