The Israel-Hamas cease-fire has many hurdles to clear before it can be deemed a success. Yet if it succeeds, its consequences will reverberate far beyond the Middle East, reshaping our own domestic politics — especially the anti-Israel activism in higher education.
For two years, anti-Israel activists in the United States anchored their protests in the war itself. Their “cease-fire now” slogan depended on the war’s persistence to maintain moral urgency.
Activists didn’t anticipate a cease-fire actually taking hold, and their silence following the deal’s announcement exposed the disingenuousness of their calls for peace.
Rather than celebrate an end to hostilities, the left is now struggling to reconcile its rhetoric with a reality shaped by a president it vehemently opposes.
Indeed, last week, Students for Justice in Palestine called for the “death” of Palestinians who don’t support Hamas, which the Stanford University chapter reposted on Instagram.
SJP used the killing of pro-Hamas influencer Saleh Al-Jafarawi in a skirmish with anti-Hamas Gazans to call for “Death to Collaborators,” or those Palestinians who resist against the terrorist regime.
The Stanford SJP chapter reposted the national organization’s statement with no regard for human life being slaughtered by Hamas.
The anti-Israel left’s dissonance is partly the product of decades of intellectual manipulation in higher education.
Universities have long pushed a false binary framing of the Israel-Palestine conflict: white versus brown, colonizer versus colonized, Muslim versus non-Muslim.
This reductionist lens erases Israel’s multiracial composition and its long history of subjugation under imperial powers, from Rome to the Ottoman Empire to the British Empire — not to mention the slaughter of a third of the global Jewish population during the Holocaust.
By erroneously reducing Middle East conflicts to Israel vs. everyone else, academia left students ill-equipped to understand why Sunni Arab states such as Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Jordan supported Israel when Shiite Iran launched its 2024 attack.
The reality is that the Middle East is a web of conflicts too layered and complex for rhyming slogans. Today’s campus protesters can’t see, for example, that an end to one war does not resolve the rest of the Middle East’s enduring problems.
Anti-Israel campus protests, which ignited a wave of antisemitism after Oct. 7, have operated entirely within a simplistic ideological framework.
Student activists never thought to pressure Egypt or Jordan about their refusal to accept Palestinians within their borders or to demand Hamas return hostages and stand down for the sake of fellow Gazans.
Instead, they focused their ire on American Jews.
When President Donald Trump forced Qatar and Egypt to pressure Hamas into releasing hostages and agreeing to terms with Israel, the anti-Israel left appeared speechless, unable to integrate it into their worldview.
On campuses across the nation, students had pitched tents, occupied quads and helped spark an antisemitic frenzy that extended far beyond universities, leading to lethal attacks on Jews off campus.
The potentially good news: Many participants were not hardened ideologues; they were merely underinformed students motivated by deceitful platitudes about peace.
With the war’s conclusion, much of their raison d’être has evaporated, leaving only professional radicals to continue protesting.
None of this is to suggest campus antisemitism will disappear. Antisemitism is the world’s oldest form of racism, and it has flourished in higher education since long before Oct. 7 and will persist long after.
What changed after Oct. 7 was scale: Radical faculty and activists harnessed the intellectual distortions they had seeded for decades to mobilize thousands of underinformed students, creating a temporary surge in antisemitic activism.
That surge gave the antisemitic left unprecedented power and confidence.
But if the Trump-brokered cease-fire endures, their ranks may shrink back to pre-Oct. 7 levels, stripping the movement of the numbers that gave it national prominence.
Trump’s efforts to roll back antisemitism and DEI on campuses may help, too.
But university boards, donors and alumni need to make a concerted effort to more fully transform faculty and staff, purge the Israel- and Jew-haters and see that students are taught more accurate accounts of the Middle East.
The success of Trump’s multi-phase deal remains uncertain. But its political consequences at home are already visible, exposing the intellectual hollowness of a campus movement that has thrived on false binary narratives and perpetual conflict.
As the war ends, the campus left will find itself without a rallying cry.
Zachary Marschall, PhD, is editor-in-chief of Leadership Institute’s Campus Reform and an adjunct assistant professor of arts administration at the University of Kentucky.