Myth: The anti-Israel surge on campus is a purely organic, grassroots awakening.

“The anti-Israel surge on campus is a purely organic, grassroots awakening.”

Much of the student feeling is sincere. Gaza’s casualty numbers are real, the images are real, and a 20-year-old with no institutional memory of the Second Intifada or the 1993 Oslo Accords can arrive at outrage on their own. But “purely organic” claims something specific: no organizing infrastructure, no outside money, no faculty steering it, no coordination between campuses. None of that survives contact with the record.

Origin: a movement with a founding date

Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) did not spring up in the weeks after 7 October 2023. It was founded at UC Berkeley in 1993, the same year as Oslo, as a small campus club. What changed the scale was national coordination that arrived two decades later: a national SJP network began convening annual conferences in the 2010s under the umbrella of American Muslim for Palestine (AMP), a group whose founders and early officers include former leaders of the Holy Land Foundation, the Texas charity the US government shut down in 2001 and whose top officials were convicted in 2008 of funneling money to Hamas, per the ADL’s Holy Land Foundation backgrounder. AMP provides SJP chapters with training materials, speakers and a shared messaging calendar; the ADL’s own CAIR backgrounder documents a parallel role for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which runs its own campus chapters and legal-defense apparatus for protesters. None of that is secret. It is published on the organizations’ own sites. It is also not “a spontaneous student club in Berkeley decided this on its own.”

The money, stated plainly

The strongest honest version of the “organic” claim is that individual students are not paid, and that is true; nobody has produced a pay stub for a campus protester. What the record documents instead is the environment those students organize inside. Qatar, which hosts Hamas’s political leadership and has bankrolled it for years, is the single largest foreign funder of American universities, ahead of Germany, China and Saudi Arabia, through billions of dollars in gifts, research contracts and six full US branch campuses it built and funds in its own Education City: Cornell, Georgetown, Northwestern, Texas A&M, Carnegie Mellon and Virginia Commonwealth University. A 2023 ISGAP / Network Contagion Research Institute study found that the American schools taking the most undisclosed foreign funding also saw the steepest rise in campus antisemitism, roughly a 300% increase across 2015 to 2020. That is a correlation, not a proof of direct cause, and the universities involved dispute the framing. But a system that quietly accepted billions from an authoritarian government hosting Hamas’s leadership, much of it filed late or not at all, earned the scrutiny it is now getting.

Who carries the message, and where

The clearest evidence that campus antagonism to Israel is not just student sentiment sits in the faculty, not the quad. Joseph Massad, tenured at Columbia in 2009 after a fight that drew national attention, called the 7 October attack “awesome” and “astonishing” in an October 8, 2023 column, then was assigned by his own department to teach a course on Zionism in 2025. Judith Butler of UC Berkeley has for two decades described Hamas and Hezbollah as part of “the global Left,” and in 2023 defended calling the October 7 massacre “armed resistance.” When Columbia’s president Minouche Shafik testified before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on 17 April 2024, in the hearing titled “Columbia in Crisis,” the university’s own leadership acknowledged under oath that specific named faculty had made statements the administration itself found indefensible. That testimony, and the encampments that followed within days at Columbia, NYU, MIT, UCLA and dozens of other schools in the spring of 2024, moved in near-identical form and timing across campuses that share no formal student government. National coordination, not telepathy, explains synchronized encampments built to the same design on the same week.

The “both sides organize” objection, and why it doesn’t erase the record

Coordinated influence campaigns are not unique to one side of this argument: Act.IL, an app studied by the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab in 2019, organized volunteers to flood social media with pro-Israel talking points on a coordinated schedule, and its own funders never fully disclosed either.

That comparison does not rescue the “purely organic” claim, it undercuts it twice over. If a volunteer app with points and badges counts as organized influence, so does a national SJP network built on AMP training materials, billions in Qatari university funding, and encampments built to an identical design across dozens of campuses in the same week. The honest picture was never a purely organic student movement or a hidden hand controlling passive puppets. It is real grief and real politics, organized, funded and amplified by people with names, dates, and disclosed and undisclosed money behind them, at a scale no single spontaneous campus club could produce on its own.