NEW AMCHA STUDY LINKS FACULTY GENOCIDE ACCUSATIONS TO PRE-OCT 7 ACTIVISM

Analysis of 278 academic events finds those featuring pre-October 7 BDS supporters were roughly 40 times more likely to contain an accusation that Israel was committing genocide — a charge academic units led by pre-October 7 academic-boycott supporters began advancing within days of the Hamas attack and before Israel’s major ground invasion of Gaza

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Foster City, CA, August 26, 2026 – A new study of Israel-related academic programming at U.S. universities finds a striking relationship between preexisting BDS activism and the promotion of the accusation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, raising concerns that academic institutions are being used to give political advocacy “institutional and scholarly authority.”

The AMCHA Initiative study, When Political Advocacy Acquires Academic Authority: BDS and the Genocide Accusation, analyzed 278 publicly available recordings of academic-unit-sponsored events during the 2024-2025 academic year at 51 U.S. campuses popular with Jewish students. Of those events, 93 featured at least one speaker with documented pre-October 7 support for boycotting or sanctioning Israel, or the BDS movement.

The study found:

• Genocide accusations: Events featuring a speaker with documented pre-October 7 BDS support were roughly 40 times more likely to include an accusation that Israel was perpetrating genocide – 85% versus 2% of events with no identified BDS-supporting speakers.
• Academic sponsorship: Those events were also nearly nine times more likely to be sponsored by an academic unit led by a pre-October 7 academic-boycott supporter — 56% versus 6%.
• Departmental promotion: The pattern extended beyond the speakers. One-quarter of events featuring a pre-October 7 BDS-supporting speaker were promoted by sponsoring departments using language accusing Israel of genocide. Of those departments, 96% were led by a pre-October 7 academic-boycott supporter, compared with 43% of departments whose promotion did not include the genocide accusation.

The report notes that in academia, a core aim of BDS is to prevent the “normalization” of Israel – ordinary academic engagement that activists view as legitimizing or whitewashing Israeli wrongdoing. Within that framework, portraying Israel as genocidal functions as a form of anti-normalization, making ordinary engagement with Israel appear morally unacceptable and helping justify boycott and exclusion.

The researchers warn that repeated presentation of the genocide accusation under the names and academic authority of university departments and centers can give the claim added credibility and help spread it beyond campus. Among the events containing the accusation, there was a median of seven genocide references per event, with some events containing as many as 53. Universities need not originate a political claim, the authors argue, to play an important role in legitimizing and amplifying it.

The report also documents how quickly the genocide framing entered the academy. Between October 10 and October 24, 2023, before Israel’s major ground invasion of Gaza, academic units at 12 campuses sponsored events or issued statements accusing Israel of genocide. Every one of the 14 academic units involved was led by someone who had endorsed an academic boycott of Israel before October 7. At UC Santa Cruz, for example, the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department described Israel’s actions as a “genocidal attack on Gaza” on October 10, just three days after the Hamas attack. Two weeks later, it held “The Genocide in Gaza in Our Classrooms: A Teaching Palestine Workshop,” geared toward instructors and teaching assistants and offering resources for classroom discussions.

“These results are hard to dismiss,” said Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, Director of AMCHA Initiative and co-author of the report. “What was being presented on campuses as an academic assessment of the war was overwhelmingly tied to a political effort to boycott and isolate Israel that predated the war. When departments put their names behind it, they effectively cloaked a political accusation in academic legitimacy.”

The report further warns that this institutional legitimization can have consequences for Jewish and pro-Israel students. When Israel is presented as a genocidal state, students associated with Israel or Zionism can themselves be stigmatized as defenders or supporters of an extraordinary moral crime, helping fuel exclusion, harassment and hostility.

The authors call on universities to establish content-neutral safeguards preventing academic units from using institutional authority and resources to advance political campaigns, backed by independent enforcement mechanisms. They also call on state governments to condition relevant public funding on meaningful safeguards against academic politicization, urge federal policymakers to consider comparable requirements, and call on state legislatures to consider prohibiting public universities from using academic functions to implement politically motivated academic boycotts.

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AMCHA Initiative is a non-partisan, non-profit organization dedicated to combating antisemitism at colleges and universities in the United States. The organization monitors more than 750 campuses for antisemitic activity, as defined by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) and the U.S. government. AMCHA is not a pro-Israel advocacy organization, nor does it take a position on current or past Israeli government policies; criticism of Israel that does not meet the IHRA and U.S. government criteria is not considered antisemitic by the organization. AMCHA has recorded more than 12,000 antisemitic incidents on college campuses since 2015, which can be accessed through its Antisemitism Tracker.