When Zionism is treated as a slur, Jewish identity becomes collateral damage

Over the next few weeks, campuses around the world will mark “Israel Apartheid Week” (IAW).

There will be aggressive rallies, discriminatory installations, hateful slogans, and biased social media campaigns. Students will walk past mock checkpoints on their way to class and posters declaring that the Jewish state is illegitimate.

Defenders will call it political activism or free speech.

But on campus, for Jewish students and their supporters, the result is far more insidious and personal.

When Zionism is treated as a slur, Jewish identity becomes collateral damage.

Not rhetorically. Practically.

An 18-year-old first-year student wonders whether to tuck their Star of David under their shirt, or take off their kippah. A student hesitates before speaking in a lecture hall or seminar. A friend group goes quiet when Israel comes up in conversation.

The message absorbed is subtle but powerful: If you identify with Zionism, you are suspect. If you are suspect, you are separate. And if you are separate, you do not fully belong.

For most Jewish students, Zionism is not an abstract geopolitical theory. It is the belief that the Jewish people — like any other people — have the right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland. It is woven into family history, communal memory, prayer, and identity.

When that belief is reframed as morally illegitimate – criminal even – Jewish students do not experience it as policy critique.

They experience it as an indictment of their identity.

That is the collateral damage.

Israel Apartheid Week is often defended as “education.” Universities should indeed be places of rigorous debate. Israel — like any nation — should be subject to scrutiny and criticism.

But debate that renders one people’s foundational identity inherently immoral and inhumane is not well-meaning discourse. When Zionism is caricatured into racism, the distinction between criticizing a government and delegitimizing a people collapses.

And when it collapses, Jewish students feel it immediately.

The impact is rarely dramatic. It is incremental.

It is choosing not to post something Jewish online.
It is avoiding certain conversations.
It is calculating whether wearing visible Jewish symbols is worth the emotional cost.
It is staying silent in discussions that feel one-sided.

No administrator mandates this. No policy requires it.

It is social pressure of the most powerful kind.

At Hillel Ontario, serving 14,000 Jewish students across nine universities, we see it in real time. We also know what counters it.

If the problem is that Zionism is distorted into a slur, our response must be clarity and confidence — not retreat.

Reclaiming Zionism means explaining what it actually is: a national liberation movement of an indigenous people returning to sovereignty in their homeland. It means acknowledging complexity without conceding legitimacy. It means refusing to allow others to define Jewish self-understanding.

But reclaiming Zionism is not only intellectual.

It is physical presence.

It is a celebration of Jewish and Israeli pride in the busiest campus corridors. It is a public minyanim held in central quads. It is postering to push back against the vicious lies. It is social media campaigns to reclaim our roots and narrative. It is enriching our spaces with Jewish joy, and educating and empowering Jewish leaders on the front line. It is training student leaders to articulate their identity boldly and thoughtfully. It is direct engagement with university and provincial leadership to ensure those who violate policies are laws are held to account.

And, this is exactly what we plan to do.

Jewish students deserve campuses where they can debate vigorously without their identity being cast as inherently illegitimate. They deserve to belong without qualification.

Permitting Zionism to be reduced to a slur does not advance dialogue. It narrows who is permitted to stand comfortably in the public square.

And that is a cost no university should accept — and no Jewish student should have to bear.