Noa Tishby Instagram – Right now, the University of Virginia (@uva) is holding a campus-wide #BDS referendum, forcing all of its students to decide where they stand on Israel. BDS is the movement to boycott, divest, and sanction Israel, a movement which doesn’t hide its desire to dismantle Israel. While 134 hostages continue to be held by Hamas in Gaza and antisemitism levels are at a record high in the United States and all over the world. The University of Virginia decides to fan the flames of hate and further marginalized Jewish students. BDS is nothing more than a propaganda campaign that seeks to delegitimize and destroy the world’s single Jewish state, and it has been targeting college students on campuses for decades. In the past couple of weeks, we’ve seen BDS resolutions also pass at UCLA and UC Davis. But what does passing a BDS resolution on campus even mean? I mean, do these students’ votes have any impact on Israel? The answer is no. These universities don’t end up divesting from Israel or having anything to do with Israel at all. But what they do accomplish is the brainwashing of the next generation of leaders and voters to believe that voting to essentially take down a democracy is even a legitimate vote, and to continue to cement the lies about Israel such as apartheid, genocide, and colonialism. That is exactly how we arrived at this situation today, where moments after the largest killing of Jews since the Holocaust occurred, it was justified and celebrated on college campuses everywhere. We all saw it. BDS tries to paint itself as this progressive movement, but make no mistake, BDS is not interested in peace. Its founder specifically said that they oppose the Jewish state in any part of the land. Not only is BDS not for peace, it’s literally against peace. It’s a hate group. BDS is antisemitic at its core and it has led to the rise in antisemitism that we see on college campuses everywhere, which is why we have to ban BDS on campus. Join me in calling on UVA and every other college in America to ban the hate group BDS and put an end to this worldwide antisemitic campaign.