Zionist “security patrols” on campus show little concern for Jewish safety

Image by Janne Leimola.

Last academic year, university students on North American campuses formed solidarity encampments in Gaza to protest the ongoing Israeli genocide against the Palestinians and their universities’ financial complicity in the carnage. The sit-ins received widespread media coverage and helped push Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians to the forefront of Western news.

Although these campus protests were mostly peaceful and involved many anti-Zionist Jewish students and professors, supporters of Israel in the media, politics, and academia itself responded to the demonstrations by accusing the demonstrators of peddling anti-Semitism and intimidating Jewish students. Toward the end of the academic year, police broke up most of these campus protests, arresting hundreds of students and charging them with crimes ranging from third-degree trespassing to burglary.

Today, as a new academic year begins and genocidal Zionist aggression continues in Gaza, students across the West Bank and Lebanon are once again mobilizing in protest. These student protesters are already facing further intimidation from university administrations, threats from political leaders, abuse from police, and unfounded accusations of anti-Semitism from the mainstream media. . Additionally, this academic year, campuses are facing a new threat: intimidation from so-called Zionist “self-defense” groups with ties to the far right.

At the University of Toronto, Magen Herut Canada (Defender of Freedom Canada), a volunteer Zionist self-defense group affiliated with Herut Canada – an organization linked to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right revisionist Likud party, which advocates for the “colonial vision of Greater Israel – has been mobilized to supposedly “defend” Jewish students against what they claim is the anti-Semitism of the protesters.

Magen Herut plans to expand its “volunteer security patrols” across Canada and the United States. Membership requires ideological alignment with Zionism and experience in policing, security, or the military. With more than 50 members, Magen Herut coordinates via WhatsApp groups to patrol up to 15 areas, including university campuses, and show up at solidarity protests in Gaza, where they intimidate participants. They patrol in large groups, wearing black T-shirts that identify them as members of the Magen Herut “surveillance team.” The group’s leader, Aaron Hadida, a security expert, teaches “Jewish self-defense,” including the use of firearms. Magen Herut works closely with J-Force, a private security company that provides “protest security” for supporters of Israel. J-Force deploys volunteers at pro-Palestinian events in tactical gear. Both groups are expected to remain active on campus throughout the academic year.

Zionist activists from the Jewish Defense League (JDL), a hate group designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center whose stated goal is to “protect Jews from anti-Semitism by any means necessary,” were also spotted at of pro-Palestinian events at the university. The group, which was largely inactive before October 7, was deemed a “right-wing terrorist group” by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 2001, with Israeli newspaper Haaretz reporting that several “counter-protesters” waved flags with the Israeli flag. JDL or Kahane Chai symbol on them during a small pro-Palestinian march at the University of Toronto on September 6. Kahane Chai is an Israeli fascist group linked to the JDL, which campaigns for the forced expulsion of Arabs from Israel. Other participants in the Zionist action, according to the newspaper, were seen wearing Kahane Chai caps and chanting songs calling for violence against Muslims and Palestinians, including “Let’s turn Gaza into a parking lot.”

The JDL has a long history of racist violence and terrorism. Its members bombed Arab and Soviet properties in the United States and assassinated those they called “enemies of the Jewish people,” focusing on Arab American activists. They were linked to several 1985 bombings, one of which killed Alex Odeh, West Coast regional director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee; the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre in 1994, in which 29 worshipers were shot and killed at a Hebron mosque during Ramadan; and a 2001 plot targeting U.S. Representative Darrell Issa in his district office in San Clemente, California, and the King Fahad Mosque in Culver City, California.

The presence of uniformed far-right Zionist “patrol teams” and JDL flags at the University of Toronto is alarming. This means that persecutory tactics long used by Zionists to curb anti-colonial resistance in Palestine and elsewhere are now being imported to North American college campuses, which in the last year have become epicenters of anti-Zionist resistance and solidarity. between the country’s anti-colonial movements. West.

The goal of these Zionist groups is twofold: to break down, weaken and defame intersectional resistance to white supremacy, which of course includes Zionism, and to provide support for Western imperial expansionism and genocide led by the United States and led by Israel.

To distract from their ties to the far right, their fascist roots, and their blatant aggression against student anti-genocide protesters, the Zionist militias active at the University of Toronto deceptively present themselves as forces of ” Jewish self-defense.

The concept of “self-defense” has very different meanings for the colonized and the colonizer. For the colonized, the “self” is linked to cultural identity, ancestral land and vital resources. Whereas for the colonizer, it relies on a constructed identity, the theft of land and the protection of stolen resources, as well as the blaming of resistance to colonization on the colonized victims. Indeed, the main Zionist militia from 1920 to the 1940s, precursor of the “Israeli Defense Force”, was called Haganah, which means “defense” in Hebrew, and played a major role in the appropriation of Palestinian lands. and in their clearance of its indigenous population.

Zionist self-defense groups like the JDL employ the same “self-defense” rhetoric and methodologies used in Palestine since 1948 to justify offensive aggression and colonization while appropriating and confusing Jewish victimhood. with Zionist criminality. They invoke fear to generate subjugation and support for their eliminatory agenda. These groups rely on concepts of deterrence and dehumanization of Palestinians to justify extreme measures, presenting their actions as defensive, thereby obscuring the potential illegality that accompanies offensive aggression while responding to perceived threats with deadly force.

Zionist vigilante groups on college campuses across North America are targeting anti-genocide protesters under the guise of “Jewish defense” as a means of defending white supremacy in its Zionist and American forms and breaking down anti-colonial resistance led by Palestinians, Blacks, Browns, Indigenous people, immigrants and anti-Zionist Jews.

In contrast, the anticolonial alliance, both in North America and around the world, is based on a shared understanding that white supremacist oppression is rooted in systemic racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and imperialism. By presenting a united front against all forms of racism and capitalism, it challenges colonial and neocolonial establishments. As part of this resistance, he rejects Zionism as a European-led white supremacist project, drawing parallels with other manifest destiny ideologies that fueled Western colonial projects, including in the United States.

Regardless of the outcome of the upcoming U.S. election, white supremacy, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism continue to grow across North America. Additionally, election rhetoric risks distracting attention from the threats posed by the growing presence of Zionist groups with direct ties to far-right violence. To face it, people, including Jews, must oppose all forms of ethnocentrism and exclusion. The Jewish community’s long history of trauma and persecution should inspire a unified quest for justice, freedom and equality for all, rejecting Zionist vigilante terrorism.

This piece first appeared on AlJazeera.