Illustrative: Thousands of anti-Israel demonstrators from the Midwest gather in support of Palestinians and hold a rally and march through the Loop in Chicago on Oct. 21, 2023. Photo: Alexandra Buxbaum/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect

Activist scholars employed by the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) department of the University of California, Santa Cruz are using their classrooms to promote extremist anti-Zionist propaganda, according to a new study by antisemitism watchdog group AMCHA Initiative.

The university’s “CRES department has engaged in anti-Zionist advocacy and activism since at least May 2021, when CRES pledged departmental allegiance to ‘the struggle for Palestinian liberation’ and committed its faculty to bringing the academic boycott of Israel onto campus and into the classrooms,” AMCHA said in a press release on Thursday. “However, according to the study, incidents involving CRES’s anti-Zionist political advocacy and activism have drastically increased in frequency and intensity since Hamas’ massacre of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, 2023.”

AMCHA’s new report cites a litany of what it describes as politically motivated decisions CRES leaders have made both before and after the Oct. 7 onslaught, including the creation of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism (ICSZ), which declares on its website that Zionism is a “colonial racial project” and that Israel is a “settler colonial state.” The organization was co-founded by a professor who said in a podcast interview last year that academics should “tie [Zionism] to this much larger Western supremacy and white supremacy” and “de-link the study of Zionism from Jewish studies.”

Among other incidents, CRES issued a statement rationalizing Hamas’ terrorism on Oct. 7, an act of mass violence in which Palestinian terrorists from Gaza murdered 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapped 240 others during a rampage across southern Israel. There has also been mounting evidence showing the terrorists committed widespread torture and sexual violence, including mass rapes, against Israeli women and girls.

“What we are witnessing needs to be understood in the context of 75 years of settler colonial displacement, military occupation, and enclosure,” the department said in the statement cited in the AMCHA report. “As in the past, racialized media coverage dehumanizes Palestinians, delegitimizing their aspirations for freedom from militarism, colonial rule, and incarceration.”

Additionally, the department participated on Oct. 20 in a “Call for a Global General Strike,” refusing to work because Israel mounted a military response to Hamas’ atrocities — an action CRES called “Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza.” On Oct. 24, the department held an event titled, “The Genocide in Gaza in our [sic] Classrooms: A Teaching Palestine Workshop,” in which professors and teaching assistants were trained in how to persuade students that Zionism is a racist and genocidal endeavor.

“CRES’s commitment to anti-Zionist political advocacy and activism, as a department and as a core element of its discipline, can’t help but corrupt the academic mission of the university and violate students’ fundamental right to be educated and not indoctrinated,” AMCHA Initiative director and co-founder Tammi Rossman-Benjamin said on Thursday. “Our research has consistently shown that on campuses where individual faculty and departments use educational spaces for anti-Zionist political advocacy and activism, rates of antisemitic activity — including assaults, threats of harm, vandalism, and bullying — are significantly elevated.”

AMCHA, as well as other civil rights and educational organizations, have previously issued warnings about the allegedly political and even antisemitic motivations of Ethnic Studies departments throughout the University of California system (UC). Last September, about 100 such organizations called on UC to reject a proposal that would require applicants to schools in the UC system to take an ethnic studies course, arguing that anti-Zionist activists are developing and leading the effort to implement the measure.

Some of the leading academics pushing for mandatory ethnics studies courses are anti-Zionists. Christine Hong, chair of CRES at UC Santa Cruz, co-chairs the UC Academic Senate working group developing the admissions proposal. Another co-founder of ICSZ, Hong said on a podcast last August that ethnic studies should teach “the extraordinary violence of Zionism, the settler colonial violence, [and] the militarism that is inflicted on Palestine and Palestinian people.”

Rossman-Benjamin urged the public on Thursday to also focus its attention on CRES’s activities in their children’s school districts. If UC approves the proposal for mandatory ethnic studies, high schools across California would offer such courses based on the criteria developed by CRES faculty and other academics in the field of critical ethnic studies.

“Shockingly, these same professors who are using their university positions and resources to unabashedly promote anti-Zionism and antisemitism are the ones who our state has entrusted with developing what will be taught to every California student about Jews and Israel,” Rossman-Benjamin said.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.