As the academic year at University of California Santa Cruz was about to end in June, 2013, pro-Palestinian students initiated a resolution that called on the university to divest from companies profiting from the “Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.” The resolution was defeated, yet the non-binding resolution that would have no effect on university policy is not as disconcerting as the atmosphere on campus that the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish students and professional provocateurs behind them seek to foster. They are bent on creating a climate that legitimizes and engenders anti-Israel, and anti-Jewish hostility.

The BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israel) movement has assembled a rather strange sort of bedfellows. It is led by Arab-Muslim professional propagandists who seek Israel’s destruction, along with leftist students and faculty members seeking a ‘cause,’ and non-better than one “to stick it to the Jews.” Among them, one could find naïve students with little understanding of the history of the Middle East or the Arab-Israeli conflict. It matters not that their cause is unjust, and transparently anti-Semitic, or that the Arab world unlike Israel’s open democracy is homophobic, enslaves women, is utterly intolerant of Christians and Jews, or that its schools breed hatred and misanthropy.

Those BDS champions on campuses throughout America and Europe do not want to be confused by facts about the Arab-Israeli conflict. Their minds are made up. They hate Israel because it is a success story and tolerant, and because it provides religious freedom, and human rights to its citizens in spite of Palestinian terrorism. They despise Israel because Arab-Muslim students on Israeli campuses can display their hatred of the Jewish state with impunity. Deep in their mashed heads they should know that similar demonstrations on Palestinian or Arab campuses against an Arab regime, or any pro-Israel and pro-Jewish display, would be met with violence and death. The terrorist alerts Israeli school children and college students face is something that the privileged students of the UC Santa Cruz’s of this world would never have to endure. They hate Israel mostly because it is willing to defend its citizens from Palestinian terrorists, and if it means checkpoints, and a barrier fence that inconveniences Palestinians, so be it.

On May 11, YNet News reported that the Irish BDS movement placed yellow stickers on Israeli products reading ‘for justice in Palestine – Boycott Israel’. Israeli Foreign Ministry said that “the phenomenon is severe and it is not by chance that the BDS organization chose to express its protest with a yellow sticker – which is reminiscent of dark days of racism and incitement,” a reference to the Nazi Holocaust in Europe.

Derek Hopper, a native of Ireland, where he studied history at the National University of Ireland, had this to say in a Times of Israel article, October 9, 2013: “Israelis may or may not be aware that Ireland is one of the most outspoken critics of Israel. I have written about why this is so before, and the reasons are too complex to address…but for whatever reason most Irish see Palestine as the plucky underdog in the Middle East and not Israel, a country that produces genius after genius while being surrounded by millions of people who despise its very existence.” Hopper continued, “Given our own experiences with Britain, we tend to see in any weaker power a kindred spirit. It doesn’t matter that we share many values with Israel and far fewer with Arabs, who, if they’ve heard of us, see us as drink-sodden libertines. Never mind that we should want to draw parallels with Israel, the true underdog in the region who against all the odds created a prosperous democracy in a desert. In this battle many Irish have sided with the Palestinians and that’s just how it is.”

Hopper explained that, “Irish and global opposition to Israel in recent times has manifested itself in several ways. The most well-known of these is the BDS movement, which seeks to isolate Israel, ‘in order to force change in Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians which opponents claim is discriminatory or oppressive.’ The Irony that the movement is one spearheaded by many Palestinians attending Israeli universities is apparently lost on its supporters. Comparisons with the odious apartheid regime in South Africa continue unabated despite a million Israeli Arab citizens enjoying more rights in Israel than anywhere in the Arab world.”