Allies of Jewish US students visit Israel after Oct. 7 – and come back armed with info
The Maccabee Task Force brings pupils together to combat antisemitism and disinformation on American college campuses – a place where Israel supporters have fewer friends
Reporter at The Times of Israel
NEW YORK — After a fall semester of nearly non-stop anti-Israel protests and an atmosphere that has become increasingly uncomfortable for Jewish students — if not downright antisemitic — Aidan Bloomstine is determined to shift the tenor at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles.
“Students for Justice in Palestine [SJP] sucked up all the energy last semester. We need to reclaim some of that energy now. The goal is to increase visibility as well as give comfort to Jewish students,” Bloomstine, a public policy major, said in a Zoom interview with The Times of Israel.
“It’s been absolutely shocking to see people blatantly disregard atrocities and support a group whose sole purpose is to terrorize Israelis and eliminate them,” he added, referring to the Hamas terror organization, which perpetrated a brutal massacre on October 7 that saw 1,200 people murdered in southern Israel, most of them civilians, and another 240 abducted to the Gaza Strip.
A self-described ally of Jewish students but not Jewish himself, Bloomstine recently returned from an eight-day fact-finding trip to Israel in early January sponsored by the Maccabee Task Force (MTF). Just as he did during the trip, Bloomstine continues to share his experience on social media with his peers and campus organizations like the bipartisan student advocacy group Trojans for Israel. It’s work he’s determined to do even though he faces certain backlash.
“I walked into my public policy class this week and several students who knew I went to Israel wouldn’t look at me,” said Bloomstine, 21. “I have been asked if I am a tool of the Israeli government. I can only say, this was my true experience — this is what I saw, this is what I heard.”
He and the other 40 non-Jewish and Jewish student leaders from dozens of US universities saw the places where thousands of Hamas-led terrorists murdered, raped and kidnapped civilians on October 7, and heard firsthand testimony from massacre survivors.
The late billionaire businessman and activist Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Dr. Miriam Adelson, founded MTF in 2015 to build allyship with non-Jewish students on campuses steeped in anti-Israel and antisemitic sentiment. The organization’s executive director David Brog said prior to the 2020 school year that the organization was expanding to cover 100 campuses across the US.
Working directly with student organizations on campus, it recruits students — mostly non-Jewish student leaders — and sends them on a trip to Israel that, unlike the Birthright program for Jewish young people that Adelson also helped fund, includes visits to the West Bank and meetings with the Palestinian Authority.
Campuses have become battlegrounds
After the October 7 Hamas onslaught, antisemitic incidents spiked nationwide, leaving Jewish students on many campuses wondering where their allies were. And so MTF conceived of a wartime trip to Israel for the group’s alumni. The idea is they would use the knowledge gained to help push back against the tide of antisemitism and bolster allyship between non-Jews and Jews.
“Campuses have become battlegrounds. We wanted students who document what life in Israel has been like since October 7 and who could make a difference on campus when they return,” said MTF national director Ben Sweetwood.
James B. Romano, a second-year law student at Indiana University, has already begun that work.
“There is a tendency in the US to see everything as a binary, to not try and understand the complexities. Now that I’m back, I hope to reach out to some people we met and have them speak [virtually] to some student groups I’m involved with,” said Romano, who is also not Jewish.
Meanwhile, despite social media backlash, Romano has been sharing his experience with his classmates.
“My two roommates are Muslim, and we’ve talked a little about the conflict before. When I got back, I showed them my photos and videos. That really helped humanize the situation,” he said, adding that he will also invite various people the group met with in Israel to address student organizations via Zoom.
A tour of atrocities
The students started their trip in Tel Aviv, where they joined a vigil for hostages at the public plaza outside the Tel Aviv Museum of Art which has now been renamed Hostages’ Square. During a meal with Miri Eisin, a retired IDF colonel and former political adviser, they learned about the current geopolitical situation facing Israel. They also met with Jonathan Elkhoury, an Israeli-Lebanese Christian media and public diplomacy adviser.
They toured Sderot and saw bomb shelters and homes that are now husks. They met with teachers and police officers, and survivors of the Nova Music Festival where 360 mostly young people were tortured, raped, maimed and killed. They went to Kfar Aza, a kibbutz near the Gaza border, and heard about how terrorists rampaged a pajama party and saw footage of a family trying to flee on foot, only to be shot by terrorists in trucks. They met with a ZAKA medic who shared information and evidence of rapes and sexual assault.
It’s this type of eyewitness testimony that Yoline Decomsa, a junior at Florida Atlantic University, has used to counter misinformation and disinformation on social media.
“My whole thing is to provide credible sources of information. I feel it’s my obligation to talk about it,” Decomsa said.
Even when that means losing friends.
I’ve lost a couple of friendships over this, but most of the fight is online
“I’ve lost a couple of friendships over this, but most of the fight is online. Students won’t get personally in your face about it — instead, they will slide up in your DMs and tell you that what you’re saying isn’t true. Their response is also to unfollow you, or ignore what you said if it doesn’t fit their personal narrative,” Decomsa said, adding that she wants the Jewish community to know there are non-Jewish people like her who stand in support of them and Israel.
When 21-year-old USC journalism major Jacob Wheeler was invited to join the MTF trip to Israel, he was stunned by what he saw.
“It’s an active war zone. The idea of going was unsettling, but my curiosity powered me through; I wanted to see it with my own eyes,” Wheeler said.
Like Bloomstine, Wheeler also hails from Sacramento and attended a Christian K-12 school. And like others on the trip, Wheeler had been to Israel with MTF before — an experience he tried to use while covering both pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel rallies for USC’s Annenberg Media.
“Students on campus were and are openly discrediting the atrocities. There’s a shocking sense of denial, of moral ambivalence, about what’s happened,” Wheeler said.
Students on campus were and are openly discrediting the atrocities
Now that he’s back, he’s eager to share what he saw and heard, including what it was like to visit Barzilai Hospital in Ashkelon, where many of the October 7 wounded were treated. There they met with a physician who recounted hiding with his wife for 13 hours while hearing his neighbors scream as terrorists killed them.
But it was perhaps their visit to Jerusalem’s Mt. Herzl military cemetery that struck the deepest chord.
“Throughout the trip, I did my best not to become overcome with emotion. It was extraordinarily hard, but what cut most deeply was Mt. Herzl. To see the sanctity of life Israel has and to contrast that with Hamas’s disrespect for life — nothing can prepare you,” Bloomstine said.
