Juan Cole
Overview
Juan Cole regularly publishes articles demonizing Israel on his blog. He has expressed support for anti-Israel agitators and promoted the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.
Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan (UMich).
Demonizing Israel
On April 12, 2019, Cole authored a blog post in which claimed: “The reality is Apartheid or a one-state solution. Given US perfidy on the Palestine issue and European pusillanimity, a decades-long Apartheid looms.”
Cole continued: “Sooner or later the militant squatters will start a civil war in the West Bank with the aim of driving the Palestinians out entirely, creating a new wave of millions of refugees.”
Cole concluded: “Now we only await the Second Civil War (with the first being 1947-48) to see the Palestinians yet again ethnically cleansed from their ancestral homeland of millennia.”
On March 31, 2019, Cole published a post in which he alleged: “Shooting civilian protesters who pose no realistic danger to troops is a war crime. Systematically doing so, as Israeli snipers have been ordered to do in the past year by the fascist Likud government of Binyamin Netanyahu, amounts to ‘crimes against humanity.’”
Cole continued:“Gaza thus became, and remains, a huge concentration camp encircled on land, water and in the air by the Israeli military.”
On March 30, 2018, some 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza approached Israel’s border to take part in “Land Day Protests” or the “March of Return.” The March of Return was organized and funded by Hamas as a campaign of violent protests along Israel’s border to spotlight the demand of Palestinians to “return” to Israel.
Most of the Gazans who died between March 30 and April 6, 2018, were identified as terror operatives who were killed while carrying out terrorist attacks, rioting against IDF forces or attempting to breach the border fence between Israel and the Gaza Strip.
March participants sent scores of kites bearing explosive devices across Israel’s border to burn Israeli crops and homes. Participants also attempted to breach the border fence, which caused the Israeli Defense Forces to respond with live fire.
Agitators threw Molotov cocktails, firebombs, shot firearms and threw rocks under the cover of smoke from burning tires.
The violent riots continued through 2019, accompanied by military-style attacks carried out by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and other terrorist organizations. The attacks included gunfire, armed rioters penetrating Israeli territory, throwing IEDs and hand grenades and launching incendiary kites into Israel.
On March 23, 2019, Cole wrote a post condemning the United States’s recognition of Israeli’s annexation of the Golan Heights. In the article, Cole wrote that “Israel conquered part of the Golan Heights in 1967 and ethnically cleansed most of the Syrians living there, then brought in its own squatter population, in direct contravention of the Geneva Convention of 1949.”
In a post published on March 22, 2019, Cole charged that Israel had “enacted rules of engagement for unarmed civilian protesters in Gaza instructing the Israeli army to shoot them dead.”
On March 12, 2019, Cole published a post in which he wrote: “Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is fighting for his political life like a cornered rat, by baring his most racist buck teeth, dripping with vitriol.”
Cole went on to write: “You wonder if relatively liberal Israelis who recoil at Netanyahu’s veering toward supremacist racism can really stop their country going off a cliff if they buy into Netanyahu’s cynical projects like “mowing the grass” in Gaza.”
In a post published on March 7, 2019, Cole wrote that “That the Democratic Party was proposing a resolution condemning racism as a way of defending Israel and its supporters is next-level irony,” because, he claimed, “Israel has entered the stage of Peak Racism.”
In a post published on March 1, 2019, Cole wrote: “Israeli politics are not truly democratic, in part because of the occupation of 5 million stateless Palestinians whose fates are decided by the Israeli military and political elite, and in part because of severe censorship of the press. But Netanyahu’s thuggish threats and sweetheart deals to manipulate press coverage of himself are on top of all that.”
On January 25, 2019, Cole wrote a post claiming Israel’s “transfer of hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens to the Palestinian-owned West Bank is a major breach of international law, going beyond a mere war crime in its massive and repetitive nature, and constituting a crime against humanity.”
In a post published on January 16, 2019, Cole wrote that “it is because Palestinians are stateless that they can continually be screwed over by the Israelis, who are slowly but surely stealing their land and water and planting colonies in their cities such as Hebron, in preparation for eventually expelling them to Jordan and making many of them refugees all over again.”
Cole went on to write: “The Israeli hardliners are in essence adopting precisely the same policy toward the Palestinians as the Fascists did toward the Jews and Gypsies and gays in the 1930s.”
Cole went on to write: “The Israeli hardliners are in essence adopting precisely the same policy toward the Palestinians as the Fascists did toward the Jews and Gypsies and gays in the 1930s.”
In a post published on July 20, 2018, Cole alleged: “Israel has for decades been running the occupied territories of Palestine–Gaza and the West Bank– with Apartheid tactics,” and that Palestinians’ “territory in the West Bank is patrolled by the Israeli army, and the Israeli state is actively depriving them of their property and giving it to white squatters.”
On December 26, 2018, Cole published a post claiming that Israel “was founded on a formal racial supremacist principle that Jews must rule the state.”
Cole then wrote that “Israel acquired substantial colonial possessions in the form of the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza, in which its leaders began implementing a classic settler colonial regime reminiscent of Apartheid South Africa.”
Cole concluded:“Israel at the end of 2018 is now unambiguously an Apartheid state, admired only in the US Deep South among those who are nostalgic for their own Jim Crow Apartheid.”
On January 6, 2014, Cole published an article titled “Recognizing Israel as a Jewish State is like saying the US is a White State,” in which he claimed that “Saying Israel is a ‘Jewish’ state in the sense of race would be analogous to insisting that the US is a ‘white’ state and defining Latinos as ‘brown’.”
Cole concluded that “You have a sinking feeling that the real reason Netanyahu wants Palestinians to assent to the Jewishness of the Israeli state (whatever that might mean) is that he has malicious plans for the 20% of the population that is not Jewish.”
Supporting Anti-Israel Agitators
In a post published on March 4, 2019, Cole expressed support for Representative Ilhan Omar, after Omar had been accused of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. The accusations were based on several tweets and comments by Omar, which expressed anti-Israel views and promoted anti-Semitic tropes.
In the article, Cole wrote: “The Israel lobbies that direct campaign money to representatives and senators insist that Israeli policy of imposing Jim Crow discrimination on Palestinians in the Occupied Territories never be criticized on the floor of Congress.
Cole also defended Omar in a post published on February 11, 2019, where he wrote “it certainly is the case that many American politicians are funded by the Israel lobbies, coordinated by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and the shocked protests to the contrary by the Washington elite are disingenuous or propaganda.”
Cole went on to write that the “history of Christian irrational bigotry is no excuse to deny that Jewish nationalists or Zionists have indeed organized themselves to fund political campaigns at a much higher level than average Americans, and to strategize influence in the US government.”
On December 1, 2018, Cole published a post in support of Marc Lamont Hill, who was the center of controversy and terminated from his job as a CNN commentator after expressing support for violent resistance and for the elimination of Israel.
In his article, Cole wrote that “In his speech, Hill carefully explained all the ways in which Israeli Apartheid practices (my word, not his) devastate the basic human rights of the 5 million Palestinians living under Occupation.”
Cole went on to write that “The only thing the Palestinians and their sympathizers can do to make Zionists happy is to bend over and allow themselves to be royally screwed– or better yet, allow themselves to be deported from their homeland of millennia at the hands of the Russian and Polish immigrants.”
Cole then wrote that “One of the reasons the Israeli army is just shooting down unarmed Palestinians in cold blood inside Gaza is that they want to create the image of a violent confrontation where there is none.
On October 12, 2018, Cole wrote an open letter to the University of Michigan (UMich) expressing support for John Cheney-Lippold who sparked major controversy in September 2018 when refused to write a recommendation letter for a student to study abroad in Israel.
In his letter, Cole wrote that he “would not write a recommendation letter for a student to study at Ariel University, which is a squatter institution on illegally acquired Palestinian land in the Occupied West Bank” and “also would not write a letter of recommendation for a student to work at an Israeli firm located in the West Bank.”
Promoting BDS
In an article published on January 28, 2019, Cole championed the BDS movement for “protesting the continued Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, the illegal Israeli blockade on Palestinian civilians in Gaza, and the system of land theft and denial of basic human rights imposed by Israel, which has become a form of Apartheid or in American terms, Jim Crow.”
On December 19, 2018, Cole published an article titled “Airbnb's Boycott of Israeli Squatter Settlements Is a Major Turning Point,” in which he praised the company’s decision to delist the homes of Jewish Israelis living in disputed regions of Israel.
In the article, Cole wrote: “Airbnb has to boycott the Israeli squatter settlements because they are illegal...Just as slaves do not securely own any property, so Palestinians under Israeli occupation can never be sure they actually own their own homes, or farms, or crops, or olive orchards, which can be sabotaged or taken away by the armed Israeli squatters or by the government that backs them, at any time.”
In a post published on November 20, 2018, Cole stated that efforts to combat BDS were aimed “to repeal your first amendment rights in order to protect their Apartheid colonialism in the West Bank.”
BDS
The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement was founded by Omar Barghouti in 2005 to challenge “international support for Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism.” BDS is an allegedly “Palestinian-led movement,” although leading BDS activists have admitted [00:01:01] this is not true.
One of the demands of BDS includes [point 3] what is generally known as the “right of return,” a demand discredited as a way to eliminate Israel. Barghouti said the “right of return” is a means to “end Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.”
Barghouti has said that BDS “aims to turn Israel into a pariah state, as South Africa once was.”
In his activism, Barghouti has also said [00:05:55] regarding Israel: “Definitely, most definitely, we oppose a Jewish state in any part of Palestine. No…rational Palestinian, not a sellout Palestinian, will ever accept a Jewish state in Palestine.”
The movement has been linked to numerous terrorist organizations and received a public endorsement from Hamas in 2017.
BDS initiatives include calling on institutions and individuals to divest from Israeli-affiliated companies, promoting academic and cultural boycotts of Israel, and organizing anti-Israel rallies, protests and campaigns.
The movement’s most notable achievement has been the infiltration of university campuses through lobbying for “BDS resolutions.” In these cases, student governments and student groups, backed by their own anti-Israel members and affiliates, have proposed resolutions on some form of boycott of, or divestment from, Israel and Israeli-affiliated entities.
Boycott resolutions, although non-binding, have been passed by student governments on numerous North American campuses.
BDS activity is often aggressive and disruptive. It has been noted that universities that pass BDS resolutions see a marked increase in anti-Semitic incidents on campus. On one campus, when the student government debated a BDS resolution, reports emerged of violent threats against those opposing it.
Social Media and Weblinks
University Website:https://lsa.umich.edu/history/people/faculty/jrcole.htmlFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/juanricole
Twitter:https://twitter.com/jricole
LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/juancole
Blog:www.juancole.com/
- Status:
- Professor
- University:
- Michigan
- Organizations:
- BDS
- Related Profiles:
- Evelyn Alsultany,
- Salah Hassan,
- Last Modified:
- 05/04/2026
Videos
1 videos
Photos & Screenshots
78 images
Infamous Quotes
“Gaza thus became, and remains, a huge concentration camp encircled on land, water and in the air by the Israeli military.”
“[Israel] was founded on a formal racial supremacist principle that Jews must rule the state.”
“Israel at the end of 2018 is now unambiguously an Apartheid state, admired only in the US Deep South among those who are nostalgic for their own Jim Crow Apartheid.”
“The only thing the Palestinians and their sympathizers can do to make Zionists happy is to bend over and allow themselves to be royally screwed– or better yet, allow themselves to be deported from their homeland of millennia at the hands of the Russian and Polish immigrants.”
