Starting his undergraduate career at Stanford University, Elliot Kaufman soon discovered the campus—even the bathrooms—plastered with posters accusing Israel of fanciful crimes and blaming it for police brutality in the U.S. Investigating further, he learned that behind this ongoing propaganda lay the ideology of intersectionality, which claims that those fighting any form of oppression must join together to fight all alleged forms:

The posters were the work of Stanford Out of Occupied Palestine, a rainbow coalition of nineteen student organizations, including the Black Student Union, MEChA (a large, radical Latino student group), the NAACP, Stanford Students for Queer Liberation, the Stanford American Indian Association, the First Generation and/or Low-Income Partnership, and so on. Their opposition was the Coalition for Peace. This was an odd kind of coalition, consisting of only one group: the Jewish Student Association.

Fellow students explained the disparity as the natural result of the sympathy from the marginalized for the marginalized. No doubt that is partly true. But what I saw that year, in 2014, was a well-oiled machine whose leaders were able to whip their constituent groups into action and frame the issue as the weak versus the strong, the weak versus the Jews. Defection from the anti-Israel cause meant not only abandoning one’s group and facing real personal costs, but also becoming a servant to “power.” I had just been introduced to intersectionality and witnessed its grip on the American campus. . . .

By putting Israel ahead of the coalition [of the “marginalized,” its Jewish defenders] appear to [be] clinging to their place in the power structure. The intersectional movement can interpret this Jewish intransigence in the way that it understands all opposition: as backlash from the power structure. Who else would oppose the oppressed but the oppressors? So when Jewish students organize against the intersectional coalition, they confirm that they do not fit in among the marginalized, an impression aided by their observable or presumed “whiteness” and wealth. . . . The oppressors of the Palestinians and the oppressors of black Americans, therefore, can be joined in the same system of power relations.

This theory can be vulgarized quite readily into a conspiracy. One need only conceive the power structure as a unit, undertaking coordinated action. It then appears to have many tentacles striking all over the world, to be exceedingly powerful and organized. But it’s also secretive and denies it has any diabolical plans. In other words, it starts to resemble the House of Rothschild, Henry Ford’s International Jew, or the Elders of Zion of the anti-Semitic imagination. It is sadly axiomatic that those who perceive evil as residing in a single matrix or enemy will eventually blunder into anti-Semitism. . . . This is how remarkably diverse conspiracy theories converge. And this convergence is always to the detriment of the Jews.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.