A U.S. based pro-Palestinian organization is collecting names of Jewish students on college campuses across North America, reports Israel Radio.
Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) is reportedly putting together lists of Jewish college students which includes details like their dorm addresses.
According to The Times of Israel, the report surfaced as Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee met on Tuesday to talk about Israel’s boycott initiative at U.S. colleges.
The head of the committee, Likud MK Avi Dichter, says Israel “has a commitment [to protect] to every Jew when they are attacked for being a Jew.”
The Jerusalem Post reports the meeting began with NGO Reservists on Duty, active members in various reserve units of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)
who are part of an effort to fight misconceptions about IDF soldiers, put forth a report regarding intimidation of Jewish college students in the U.S. as a result of activists calling for boycotts of Israel.
One such example presented was the eviction notices posted on the doors of Jewish students at Connecticut College earlier this year and posted on the doors Jewish students at NYU in 2014 by the SJP.
Reservists on Duty’s research director Amnon Goldstof said anti-Semitic incidents on American college campuses nearly doubled in 2015 to 90 from 47 in 2014.
“Jewish students are the most persecuted minority on campuses in the US,” Goldstof remarked. “It’s an outrage. It’s part of their intimidation tactics against Jewish students on campus. It’s not acceptable that they do this. They can’t win the argument on the facts. So they’re trying to intimidate the Jewish students from speaking out.”
“We’ve seen in history of compiling Jewish names and it’s unacceptable,” Farley Weiss, President of the Council of Young Israel, told The Daily Caller Tuesday.
“There’s been an extraordinary upsurge in violence against American Jewish students in the last year and it’s mainly from [SJP] and it is something that the universities need to be clear that the free speech of Jewish students need to be protected,” Weiss added.
Oren Segal, Director of ADL’s Center on Extremism, however, says the organization has not seen evidence of lists of Jewish students being compiled by SJP.
“According to our research, there is no evidence pointing to Students for Justice in Palestine compiling specific lists of Jewish students. However, we have long expressed our concerns over SJP’s campus efforts, which have resulted in troubling tensions between students and have fostered a hostile atmosphere for pro-Israel and Jewish students,” said Segal in an e-mail statement.
