University of California regents said Wednesday that anti-Semitism has “no place” on a college campus but declined to endorse a sweeping statement that would have condemned anti-Zionism as a form of discrimination. Instead, the regents unanimously approved a report that decried “anti-Semitic forms” of the political ideology, which challenges Israel’s right to exist on land claimed by Palestinians.

The move reflects the regents’ struggle to balance concerns about bias and intolerance with the protection of free speech. Israel advocacy groups had pushed for a broad censure of anti-Zionism, which they said was needed to protect Jewish students from hostile attacks. But free-speech advocates said that would have illegally restricted the right to criticize the Jewish state. If the regents had approved it, they would have become the first governing board of any major U.S. university system to condemn the rejection of Zionism.

At a packed board meeting, Regent Norman J. Pattiz proposed to modify the statement after feedback from the UC Academic Council and others.

The council, which represents faculty, had said in a letter to the regents that an unamended statement would harm academic freedom and cause “needless and expensive litigation, embarrassing to the university, to sort out the difference between intolerance on the one hand, and protected debate and study of Zionism and its alternatives on the other.”At the meeting, speakers spoke passionately for and against the proposal, citing family backgrounds as Holocaust survivors and Palestinians living under Israeli occupation of their traditional lands.

Omar Zahzah, a UCLA graduate student in comparative literature who told regents that his relatives were forced from their homes with the creation of Israel in 1948, said the statement was an attempt to silence the voices of Palestinian rights advocates.”Is there no place for us?” he asked the regents. “Are our stories and our struggles … simply meant to be built over, forgotten?”

But Abraham “Avi” Oved, the student regent, whose parents were born in Israel, said the statement “unequivocally embraces the 1st Amendment” while protecting students who have been called “Zionist pigs” or been told that “Zionist pigs should be sent back to the gas chambers.”

Charles F. Robinson, the board’s general counsel, told regents that the statements were “lawful on their face” as they do not impose a ban on any speech or behavior or provide a basis for sanctions against any UC member.

The issue has prompted a flood of dueling petitions, letters and articles, including 1,000 emails to UC President Janet Napolitano since the report was released this month. The report provided no sanctions but called on educators to “challenge” bias.

“It would be a breakthrough,” said Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, a UC Santa Cruz lecturer and director of the AMCHA Initiative, which combats anti-Jewish bias on campuses and led the drive for the UC statement.

Rossman-Benjamin said statement supporters — who include major American Jewish organizations, former UC President Mark Yudof and more than 4,000 UC students, faculty, alumni, parents and donors — had no intention of suppressing free speech. Rather they aimed to raise awareness of how anti-Israel activities have led to harassment and hostility toward Jewish students, she said.

Her group led the push for a statement after a series of incidents targeting Jewish students on UC campuses. They included the defacing of a Jewish fraternity house with a Nazi swastika at UC Davis last year and the questioning of a student’s eligibility for a UCLA campus judicial panel because she is Jewish.

The campaign marks the latest in a series of efforts to address what Rossman-Benjamin says is negative fallout against Jewish students because of anti-Israel activities.

But both the U.S. Department of Education’s civil rights office and a federal judge have dismissed complaints by UC Jewish students that such activities have created a hostile climate and violated their educational rights.

The students complained about such campus actions as mock military checkpoints set up by Palestinian-rights activists during “Israel Apartheid Week” and comments by a professor about Israeli airstrikes.

“In the university environment, exposure to such robust and discordant expression, even when personally offensive and hurtful, is a circumstance that a reasonable student in higher education may experience,” the civil rights office concluded in its 2013 investigation dismissing complaints by Jewish students at UC Berkeley, Santa Cruz and Irvine.

The report was prepared by an eight-person working group of regents, the student regent, a faculty member, chancellor and vice provost. It includes a “contextual statement” that accepts a link between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.

“Opposition to Zionism often is expressed in ways that are not simply statements of disagreement over politics and policy, but also assertions of prejudice and intolerance toward Jewish people and culture,” the statement says. “Anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism and other forms of discrimination have no place at the University of California.”

But the statement asserts that 1st Amendment principles and free speech must be paramount in guiding responses to acts of bias. It also includes concerns raised about bias directed at Muslims, African Americans, immigrant-rights supporters and the LGBT community.

The report includes 10 “principles against intolerance” that specifies that harassment, threats, assaults, vandalism, destruction of property and interference with the right of others to speak will not be tolerated.

The principles affirm the legal right to academic freedom and free speech, but say “mutual respect and civility” in debate and dialog are also important.