BDS activists say they successfully pressured a college to end its Israel study-abroad program

An elite West Coast liberal arts school will no longer pre-approve students to study abroad at Haifa University, in a decision announced after its student government voted against the program in protest of Israel.

Anti-Zionist activists at Pitzer College and beyond are cheering the change as a victory for the movement to boycott Israel. Jewish Voice for Peace and the school’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine wrote on Instagram Monday that the decision was “historic” and said it “sets precedent for colleges and universities across the US to hold complicit Israeli universities accountable.” 

But administrators at Pitzer, part of the Claremont Colleges consortium of schools in Southern California, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the decision was not due to the boycott movement.

Rather, they said, it stemmed from student disinterest. No students have signed up for the program in the past eight years, a college spokesperson said, and Haifa was one of 11 study-abroad programs the school removed from its pre-approval list.

In a statement, the college emphasized that students can still elect to study abroad in Haifa if they wish. 

“These programs are not closed to Pitzer students, nor do any of these actions reflect an academic boycott of any country or educational institution,” the statement read.

Anti-Israel activity across the campus

The decision follows a swell of student anti-Israel activism on campus. In February, Pitzer’s student government held a formal vote to insist the university discontinue its Haifa program along with all other associations with Israeli institutions.

Student and faculty groups held similar votes in 2018 and 2019, which Pitzer’s president Melvin Oliver said he would ignore. But the latest came amid intense student activism around Israel since the outbreak of war in the Gaza Strip — and Jewish staff at the colleges said there have been tensions around Israel there for years.

“I learned from Pitzer Jewish students that going to Israel was ‘social suicide,’” Bethany Slater, director of the Claremont Colleges Hillel, told JTA. “Those who had been before college spoke about hiding that information from their peers. They said if people learned of plans to travel to Israel they would be subject to verbal harassment from other students as well as shaming on the anonymous social media platform used by students at Pitzer. I believe this is a significant reason for why the program was underutilized.”

Slater, who became the Claremont Hillel’s first full-time independent director last year, said student hostility toward the Haifa program was indicative of a deeper “vitriolic anti-Hillel discourse that has a hysterical quality.”

She said her “attempts to open conversation have been rebuffed by both students and faculty” and alleged that she had been “slandered by Jewish students publicly” in her capacity as Hillel director.

“As someone who spent many years living within both Palestinian and Israeli societies and as a scholar of inter-religious dialogue I had hoped it would be easier to build bridges here,” she added, describing JVP and SJP’s views as “suspicious and hateful.”

Despite the college’s stated reasoning for rescinding pre-approval of the Haifa program, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel celebrated the decision, as did JVP’s national organization, which trumpeted the move as the first major BDS victory on an American college campus.

It claimed in a press release that the Haifa program’s policy change was “based on its nonalignment with Pitzer’s Core Values of ‘social responsibility’ and ‘intercultural understanding’” — a claim Pitzer denies. 

The groups added that they would continue their activism “in order to prevent any future re-opening of the Haifa program or any other institutional relationships with Israeli universities.” 

In a follow-up social media post Wednesday, Claremont’s JVP and SJP shared what they said was an email from the college’s study-abroad committee noting “considerable community support” for dropping the Haifa program due in part to “alignment with Pitzer values.”

The email, the groups claimed, demonstrated that the move was due in part to boycott efforts; they added that the college’s failure to acknowledge as such was “attempting to undermine student organizing for Palestinian liberation.”

“What they call ‘lack of enrollment’ is over 6 years of informal student boycotting of the program,” the groups added. “The admin will never call a BDS victory what it is, but student organizing always wins.”

Dan Segal, a Jewish anti-Zionist emeritus professor at Pitzer, suggested on the social network X that his college’s administrators were covering up the real reason why the Haifa program ended.

“Yesterday @pitzercollege closed the Pitzer-Haifa exchange program. Today the Dean said the program was no longer ‘approved’ but it was not ‘closed.’ LOL,” Segal wrote. “Do [the administrators] have any integrity?”