Students Boycott Israel at Their Own Peril

Image Credit: GaryRobertsphotography / Alamy Stock Photo

Anti-Israel student protesters have always sought convenient, effortless ways to demonstrate their hatred for Israel. In the past, this has meant trying to remove Sabra brand hummus from campus food services. Starting at DePaul University in 2010, efforts to embargo the Israeli-made food spread quickly to other campuses (University of Ottowa in 2014, Swarthmore College in 2018, Dickinson College in 2019, and Harvard University in 2022), but after October 7, student boycott demands grew more expansive. It's no longer enough to change brands of hummus. Today's students want to ban everything from Israel.

Graduate Students at the City University of New York (CUNY), for instance, now demand not only the familiar Sabra prohibition but also a ban of "all fruits and vegetables grown in Israel." And their list doesn't end with food. They also demand that the entire CUNY system "cancel all forms of cooperation with Israeli academic institutions, including events, activities, agreements, and research collaborations."

What goes unsaid here is that not a single student will ever actually live up to these demands. The rhetorical flourishes are purely for show.

If the thousands of college students calling for a boycott of all things Israel want to live up to their sanctimonious rhetoric, they will have to give up a lot more than one brand of hummus. And they will end up sick, hungry, and underemployed.

I call on all anti-Israel, BDS, protesting students and faculty members alike to prove that they aren't the pikers, posers, and half-milers I say they are by following through on their categorical rejection of any contact with, use of, or compliance with, any and all Israeli technologies, companies, products, ideas, and universities. I dare these Pecksniffian pretenders to put their futures where their mouths are and abandon entirely anything with the taint of Israel.

It won't be easy.

Let's start with their cell phones. Israeli technology is central to the iPhone platform, so Apple phones are out. Unfortunately they can't just switch to Samsung. They'll have to give up their digital umbilical cords altogether because the cell phone was invented in 1973 by Motorola's Israeli Research and Development Department.

And it's not just cell phones they will have to shun. Israeli technology is integral to many modern conveniences that college students rely on. If they want to live up to their anti-Israel commitment, they will have to stop using USB ports (an Israeli invention), thumb drives (an Israeli invention) and firewalls (another Israeli invention). Writing term papers, theses, and dissertations without computers worked for centuries. They'll adapt.

If today's protesters ever find gainful employment outside of a few select cities, they will need a car, but they'll have to boycott all models with cameras pointing outward. An Israeli invention called the Mobileye has been warning of obstacles and keeping drivers in their lanes for years. Mirrors work too, as committed protesters will learn.

"No fruits or vegetables from Israel," say the CUNY student protesters. Will they also eschew all fruits and vegetables grown with Israeli technology? Israel invented drip irrigation, which is used in almost all modern agricultural enterprises. After researching which fruits and vegetables were not grown with drip irrigation, anti-Israel protesters might find it easier just to give up fruits and vegetables. Or maybe they'll grow their own (an unlikely scenario in New York City).

Will they boycott life-saving drugs and research developed by Israel? Multiple sclerosis is treated with a drug called Copaxone, developed at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.

It may soon be impossible to avoid Israeli NaNose technology and the "Sniff-Phone" which smells diseases before they are manifested, allowing for preventative therapies prior to the onset of symptoms. Committed Israel boycotters will have to shun this technology in favor of the old ways of detecting diseases – often when they are too advanced to treat effectively.

Assiduously avoiding all Israeli medical technology may lead to unnecessary discomfort, or worse. For instance, the "pill cam," invented in Israel, has led to the "capsule endoscopy," in which a patient swallows a pill-sized wireless digital camera that transmits images as it travels from entrance to exit. Adhering to their anti-Israel ethos will require committed protesters to endure some far larger and more intrusive cameras should their physicians ever need a look at their entire digestive system. Perhaps this won't matter since most anti-Israel protesters are big-mouthed giant a**holes.

Many of them seem heartless too, but those who one day need heart surgery will have to forgo the flexible stent, invented at an Israeli company called Medinol. The NIR stent or EluNIR™ has become standard since its invention in 1996. Protesters who shun all things Israel might be able to find some third-world clinic willing to use the rigid stents of an earlier era. I wish them luck.

I suspect that most of the anti-Israel protests are led by faculty and students in the humanities and social sciences, where anti-Israel virtue signaling is de rigueur and comes with few repercussions. Students in other areas of specialization, however, will have to make debilitating career challenges to live up to their performative rhetoric.

Israel has the greatest number of tech companies outside of Silicon Valley, but its influence on the field extends far beyond Israel. The recent Miami Tech and Invest Conference showed the extent to which Israeli companies are "transforming Miami into a global tech hub." Any student of computer science or software engineering, as well as any budding tech entrepreneur, will suffer greatly by boycotting all things Israel.

STEM students who refuse to work with Israeli technologies, scientists, and universities will sabotage their careers. They will likely wind up at the bottom of their professions – far from important research and Nobel Prize winners. Israeli universities and research companies are responsible for many breakthroughs in detecting and treating cancer, and Israelis have dominated the Nobel Prize in chemistry for most of the 20^th century.

Naturally, none of the student demands should be taken seriously. In America today, no one virtue signals like a college student. Their hunger strikes begin after breakfast and end at lunch – so too do their demands end the moment they sign a resolution or shout in front of the camera.

Of course, I would love for just one anti-Israel, BDS, boycotting/divesting protester to prove me wrong and truly refrain from using or benefitting from anything derived from Israeli ingenuity. Write me, using pen and paper of course, and tell me how it's going. Find an envelope and stamp and mail it to me at the Investigative Project on Terrorism, 5614 Connecticut Ave NW, No. 341, Washington, DC 20015.

Chief IPT Political Correspondent A.J. Caschetta is a principal lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a fellow at Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum where he is also a Milstein fellow.