What a difference a year makes. This time last year, anti-Israel encampments dominated the quads of multiple major campuses. Jewish students were being harassed and physically attacked. All the while, most college administrators were quick to abandon their Jewish students as they rushed to appease the anti-Israel mob. 

Today, there are no encampments and fewer anti-Israel protests. A powerful trio of actors — pro-Israel donors, lawyers and the Trump administration — have shown college administrators that there is a price to pay for their failure to protect Jewish students. They will lose donations. They will suffer lawsuits. They will even lose federal funding. The antisemites are no longer the only ones who frighten college presidents. 

These victories are extremely significant. Rarely have so few made such a large difference so quickly. 

But those tempted to crack the champagne bottles should hold off. All of these recent victories are limited to forcing administrators to restrict the ways anti-Israel students can express their hatred of Israel. These victories do absolutely nothing to change the fact that so many students hate Israel in the first place. What cannot be said on campus today will be said in the public square and the halls of Congress tomorrow. We are merely postponing the day of reckoning.

The most serious challenge we face on our college campuses has nothing to do with the administrators. As anyone who’s been watching polls for the last decade knows, support for Israel among college students has been steadily declining. And these students don’t magically change their minds about Israel when they graduate, get jobs and take mortgages — instead they take their anti-Israel views to the activist heart of our politics. The March Gallup poll showing that only 33% of Democrats view Israel favorably should surprise no one who’s been watching. 

Given the stakes, we have no alternative but to go beyond administrators to fight for the hearts and minds of the students themselves. We must challenge the anti-Israel narrative that dominates our campuses before these sentiments harden into lifelong convictions. This will be a long, tough slog. It will require fighting an endless series of difficult battles on hostile territory — and for the time being, these struggles will play out against the backdrop of ever-worsening polls. 

Yet we can’t permit the difficulty to discourage us. The fact is that we can still fight and can still win on campus. We can slow the decline of support for Israel and, in time, begin to claw back lost territory. This is not a time to cut and run. This is a time to identify what works and triple down on it. 

By now we should all understand that the standard menu of pro-Israel campus activities — speakers, tabling and falafel brunches — is woefully inadequate to the challenge at hand. We need much more effective interventions. We must find ways to penetrate the tall, thick walls of the progressive opinion silo most students inhabit. We must bring the truth about Israel to those who will never leave their ideological comfort zone to listen to our pro-Israel speakers, read our pro-Israel literature or eat our falafel. 

At the Maccabee Task Force, years of trial and error convinced us that the only effective way to win new campus allies is to take the most influential students on each campus to see Israel and the Palestinian Authority for themselves. The thousands of non-Jewish student leaders we’ve taken to Israel have been mostly progressive Israel skeptics and critics. Yet our post-trip surveys show that 97% of students who held anti-Israel views before our trip were more supportive of Israel after their visit. These are not anti-Semites. They are good people who believe a false narrative. Challenge the narrative and you change the student.

Upon their return to campus, each trip participant serves as a bridge to their respective communities. These new allies help us build broader coalitions, and these coalitions have enabled us to win far more votes than we have lost. During the 2022-2023 academic year, for example, an anti-Israel resolution passed on only one of our 100 campuses. In almost every case where we defeated anti-Israel initiatives, our new allies played pivotal roles in the victory. 

While we are proud of our efforts, we know they are insufficient. Our community must focus its time, energy and precious resources on developing and implementing strategies that can bring the truth about Israel to the spaces from which it’s been exiled. We need more organizations promoting smarter solutions. And we need more honesty about what works and what’s never worked. We have too few resources to continue wasting them on outdated efforts that change nothing. 

Those of us who worry about our campuses have much to celebrate. But our recent victories with college administrators mustn’t distract us from the more important battle for the hearts and minds of the students themselves. We are blessed with so many brave and talented pro-Israel students who want to engage with the larger campus despite all the adversity. They know the truth about Israel and are desperate to share it. The least we can do is bring them the strategies and resources they need to do so effectively. 

David Brog is the executive director of the Maccabee Task Force.