This spring, the pro-Israel campus group Students Supporting Israel (SSI) resumed its annual Palestinian Apartheid Week, which mirrors the Israeli Apartheid Week, a campaign in support of the anti-Israel BDS (boycott, divest, sanctions) movement. 

At New York University, SSI student leaders set up camp in the same room as an anti-Israel student campaign, placing an “End Jew Hatred” sign right alongside posters that condemned Israeli “occupation” and equated “Palestinian liberation [with] black liberation.” SSI posters included a quote from Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority, referring to “the dirty feet of the Jews”; images of Palestinian terror victims captioned “Their Lives = Palestinian Terrorist Salaries”; and “‘freedom fighters’ do not slaughter children in their sleep,” referring to the massacre of an Israeli Jewish family in 2011.

NYU’s campus has a long-standing history of anti-Israel activity, including the handing out of mock eviction notices to Jewish students by Students for Justice in Palestine.

At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, an SSI chapter set up a table with messaging similar to that of NYU’s Palestinian Apartheid Week, along with a couple dozen Israeli flags. The campaign also took place at Florida Atlantic University, Texas A&M, UC Berkeley (also notoriously anti-Israel), and UCLA. 

Within ten years, SSI has grown in membership and to over 50 chapters today, sponsoring a variety of creative forms of outreach — van campaigns, Jewish summer-camp collaborations, and an annual conference, to name a few. But Palestinian Apartheid Week is its boldest initiative yet, turning the tables on anti-Israel activists by exposing their hypocrisy and the horrors under which Palestinians live because of their own leadership. 

Appealing to students’ democratic (and human) sensibilities, Palestinian Apartheid Week presents enemies of the Jewish State as antisemitic human-rights abusers. Shedding light on a basic truth, SSI activists can only hope that students stopping by the campaign tables reconsider their anti-Israel sympathies and what those sympathies really imply.