A new report published by the AMCHA Initiative on Wednesday claims that accusations of genocide against Israel in university academic programming are overwhelmingly concentrated among speakers and department leaders with preexisting support for boycotting or sanctioning Israel.
The AMCHA Initiative, which monitors antisemitism and anti-Zionism on American college campuses, sought to understand how claims accusing Israel of perpetrating genocide in Gaza entered academic spaces following the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war.
Researchers noted that between October 10 and October 24, 2023, before Israel launched a major ground invasion of Gaza, 14 academic units across 12 United States campuses sponsored events or issued statements accusing Israel of genocide. Every one of those units was led by a senior official who had publicly supported an academic boycott of Israel prior to October 7.
Examples were examined from multiple universities
Examples included departments at University of California Santa Cruz, California State University San Bernardino, Syracuse University, University of California San Diego, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a multi-university teach-in series co-organized by programs at institutions including Harvard, Brown, and the University of Chicago.
The study analyzed 278 publicly available recordings of academic-unit-sponsored Israel-related events held during the 2024 to 2025 academic year across 51 US campuses popular with Jewish students. Researchers categorized events based on whether speakers had documented pre-October 7 support for boycotting or sanctioning Israel, or the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement more generally.
Out of the total sample, 93 events featured at least one BDS-supporting speaker, while 185 featured no speakers identified as supporting a boycott.
Events were also evaluated and categorized according to strict, predefined rules regarding the presence of accusations of genocide, the number of references, promotional materials, and the boycott stance of the sponsoring academic unit’s leadership.
The findings revealed a substantial disparity between the two groups. Events featuring a pre-October 7 BDS-supporting speaker were roughly 40 times as likely to contain an accusation that Israel was perpetrating genocide. Specifically, 85% of the 93 BDS-speaker events included the accusation, compared to just 2% of the 185 events with no identified BDS-supporting speakers. Among the 83 events containing the claim, the number of references ranged from one to 53, with a median of seven per event.
Furthermore, BDS-speaker events were nearly nine times as likely to be sponsored by an academic unit led by a pre-October 7 academic-boycott supporter. When the genocide accusation appeared directly in an event title or promotional announcement, 96% of those events had at least one sponsoring unit led by a boycott supporter.
Findings align with BDS anti-normalization framework
The report discusses how these findings align with the BDS movement’s anti-normalization framework, which seeks to sever ordinary academic engagement with Israel by portraying the country in ways that make collaboration appear morally unacceptable.
The authors argue that when academic units give a platform to these claims, political advocacy acquires the institutional authority of scholarship, giving claims the appearance of having passed through institutions devoted to evidence and expertise. This process helps amplify the narrative from activist discourse into broader public society.
The report warns that the consequences extend beyond foreign policy debates, as presenting Israel as a genocidal state under university auspices can cause the stigma to bleed into Jewish and pro-Israel students. These students can be treated as defenders of an extraordinary moral crime rather than participants in a political disagreement, fueling exclusion, harassment, and campus hostility.
To address these concerns, the report recommends that universities establish content-neutral safeguards prohibiting academic departments from using institutional resources to take political positions or advance political campaigns, alongside independent enforcement mechanisms.
It also suggests that state and federal governments condition relevant public funding on the enforcement of such safeguards, and that state legislatures consider prohibiting public universities from implementing politically motivated academic boycotts.