Year two of the siege on Jewish students begins

The passage of a few months since the end of the spring school semester doesn’t seem to have changed much. Students returning to colleges and universities across the United States this past week were often greeted with indications that the war on the Jews on campuses is hardly over. On the contrary, round two may be just as dangerous for their ability to live openly as identifiable Jews and supporters of the one Jewish state on the planet as the past school year.

Throughout the nation came evidence that the infrastructure and the funding, whether from domestic radicals or dark foreign sources such as Iran, of pro-Hamas and openly antisemitic activists have not dissipated during the summer.

At the University of Michigan, Israel-haters not only harassed newly arriving students but shut down student government to push the school to adopt an illegal discriminatory BDS divestment program.

At Temple University in Philadelphia, members of the openly antisemitic Students for Justice in Palestine made clear their intentions and strategy by starting off the semester with a demonstration outside of the school’s Hillel chapter while waving the flag of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a designated foreign terrorist organization. That they would choose to target Hillel, which has, for the most part, not been in the vanguard of the pro-Israel movement but is in most cases simply a communal group for Jewish undergraduates, says all there is about what it means to be "pro-Palestine" in 2024.

These are just two of many examples where anti-Israel agitators have shown that they are prepared to resume the same siege on Jewish campus life that was the hallmark of the 2023-24 academic year in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks and atrocities on southern Israel that launched the current war.

Some university presidents have lost their jobs for their indifference to the surge in Jew-hatred within their institutions; others have voluntarily resigned, albeit under pressure from their actions—or rather, their inaction. But for the most part, the end result from those in charge of America’s elite and sometimes not-so-elite schools remains one in which they regard the problem as navigating between two supposedly equally legitimate interests. In doing so, they place the right of Jews to live and learn on campus without being attacked for their faith and beliefs as being no more important than the right of those who are allied with the genocidal antisemites of Hamas to openly express their hateful beliefs. And to make life difficult, if not impossible, for Jews who are not willing to go along with leftist intellectual fashion and denounce Israel.

The focus on the presidents of schools also ignores the far more important part that is being played by their lower-level employees who staff diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) departments that, among other duties, help craft student orientation programs that set the parameters for appropriate behavior. Since these are the very people who help promote the false doctrines of critical race theory and intersectionality that provide an intellectual cover for the hatred of Israel and Jews, resistance against any effort to promote awareness of antisemitism is likely.

More than just college campuses

Moreover, as we’re increasingly learning, the danger is not confined to institutions of higher education. The situation in secondary schools and even the lower grades in many places across the country is just as, if not more, dire. The educational establishment and teachers’ unions have been captured by leftist ideologues just as ready to falsely label Israel as a "settler/colonialist" and "apartheid" state and to regard it and Jews as "white" oppressors.

The question then arises as to what, if anything, should be different about the response of the Jewish community, organizations, educators, parents and students to this challenge.

Each school and community is different. Some institutions behaved better than others in responding to the way that pro-Hamas mobs tried to take over campuses and create hostile environments for Jewish students and faculty. It’s also true that many schools exhibited no lack of decorum, where the crisis passed without there being much evidence of its impact.

"The educational establishment and teachers’ unions have been captured by leftist ideologues just as ready to falsely label Israel as a 'settler/colonialist' and 'apartheid' state and to regard it and Jews as 'white' oppressors."

But whether individual school districts are relatively free of antisemitic and anti-Israel propaganda or where they run rampant, the need for Jews and friends of Israel to think seriously about how to respond to another several months of ongoing siege warfare is imperative. At the college level, the same is true for parents, students and alumni to understand that recycling the community relations strategies of earlier times or merely hoping that the storm will pass or be dissipated by the end of fighting in the Middle East (a doubtful outcome) won’t address the problem.

There is no shortage of ideas about what to do. Some involve withdrawing Jewish kids of all ages from the secular system for education. Some say just abandon the current elite schools for places where more sensible policies are employed, or create new colleges altogether. Others promote pressure campaigns in which funding—either from alumni of specific schools or from the government—would be cut to offending institutions.

There is something to be said for all these ideas. But in terms of a broad strategy in dealing with what must be understood as a crisis for Jewish life in America, what is needed is a consensus about basic principles.

The first requires Jews to drop the pretense that the current debate about Israel and antisemitism in American education is one in which there is something to be said for those on both sides of the demonstration lines popping up at campuses across America.

They don’t ‘have a point’

Contrary to what President Joe Biden said at the Democratic National Convention or what Vice President Kamala Harris has said in several different contexts in the last three years, those falsely accusing Israel of genocide do not "have a point."

Whatever people think about specific Israeli military actions, the purpose of the protests in the United States is no different from those of the terrorists who carried out the worst mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust on Oct. 7. Whether they call themselves "pro-Palestine" or anti-Zionists, the goal of eradicating Israel—something that could only be accomplished by the genocide of its population—is the same.

No one who cares about the safety of Jews in the United States, the greater diaspora or Israel should concede the point that there is a moral equivalence between the Palestinian war to destroy the Jewish state and efforts to defend it.

It is also vital that every Jewish and campus community understand that treating anti-Zionism as a valid idea worthy of debate in the current context is a betrayal not only of Israelis fighting for their lives but of Jewish kids who are caught up in the current political maelstrom. Rather than seek to paper over these differences, we must make it clear that those chanting "from the river to the sea" or cheering on Palestinian terrorism are engaged not just in hate speech but in open incitement to carry out acts of violence against Jews.

Don’t fall for the Islamophobia trap

Part of that must also involve something difficult for many liberal Jews, and especially, the largely failing organizations that purport to represent them. They must drop their acceptance of the moral equivalence between the fight against antisemitism and the entirely dubious cause of addressing "Islamophobia," a stance embraced by the Biden-Harris administration. The vast majority of what is now labeled Islamophobia is no more than an acknowledgment of the rampant anti-Jewish hatred among American Muslims and those who claim to represent them. Muslims are not being targeted on college campuses. Jews are.

That also means that the Jewish community must stop relying on failed liberal groups like the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee to speak up for their interests. Despite their outsized budgets and impressive public relations campaigns in which they have sought to position themselves as responding to the crisis, such organizations have proven unable to shake off their past allegiance to the same toxic leftist doctrines that created this mess. As much as it is instinctual for Jewish groups to try to unite in such circumstances, they are arguably as much a part of the problem. Like they must do at and for academic institutions, Jews need to seek to build new groups and coalitions that understand what is at stake and can move forward with concrete actions to help mitigate antisemitism across America.

"They must drop their acceptance of the moral equivalence between the fight against antisemitism and the entirely dubious cause of addressing 'Islamophobia,'."

Another key point to keep in mind is for those defending Jewish kids to put forward solutions that defend free speech while treating anti-Jewish hate language the same way society deals with racism against other minorities. We must be clear that criticizing Israeli policies or even expressing opposition to Israel’s existence is entirely legal. But calls for Jewish genocide or support for Hamas and its allies should be treated, especially in private venues rather than public squares, the same way authorities deal with advocacy for anti-black racism or support for the Ku Klux Klan. Which is to say, it cannot be tolerated. And just as history teaches that anti-masking laws helped take down the KKK, the same can happen to those hiding their identities behind face masks and keffiyehs.

Perhaps even more difficult for American Jews to understand is that there is no possible compromise with the anti-Zionists either in the context of campus protests or in efforts to rid K-12 schools of antisemitic propaganda, whether it is labeled human-rights advocacy or "liberated" ethnic studies. There is no halfway point at which Americans can agree to disagree with those who think the grievances of the Palestinians justify destroying the only Jewish state or terrorism. The unspeakable atrocities of Oct. 7 were a feature of the Palestinian and anti-Zionist cause, not a bug. Those who think otherwise or believe such "resistance" is understandable, if lamentable, are not taking a reasonable point of view but justifying mass murder. That will remain the case whether or not there is some temporary halt to the fighting in Gaza or even if Israel avoids an expansion of the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon and their paymasters in Tehran.

Jews are not alone

Another mistake is overestimating the strength of contemporary antisemites.

Though they largely control the educational establishment and have a powerful grip on popular culture and other sectors of society, antisemites remain a minority among Americans, most of whom continue to support Israel, the sole democracy in the Middle East. Whatever one may think of the sincerity of those on the left, including Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, who maintain that they are supportive of Israel while also being reflexively hostile, their fear of being labeled "anti-Israel" is an acknowledgment of political reality. Jews are not alone in this country. Even as support for Jerusalem has lessened among Democrats and liberals, who have fallen prey to woke ideas that bolster the myth of the "settler/colonial" Jewish state, most independents and Republicans remain solidly pro-Israel. The same can be said about a sizable minority of Democrats. These basic facts show why a timid approach to confronting the pro-Hamas mobs is a terrible mistake.

"Jews are not alone in this country".

Lastly, we must never lose sight of the foundation for contemporary antisemitism: woke ideology. The surge in left-wing antisemitism would be unimaginable without the way American institutions of higher learning have been steeped in critical race theory and intersectionality. They have indoctrinated a generation of educators, academics and students in a belief in an endless and unwinnable race war in which all oppressors and all victims are somehow linked. That is why so many otherwise ignorant students now reflexively believe that Israelis are all "white"—though a majority are, by the definitions of the left, people of color because they trace their origins to the Middle East or North Africa—and that the conflict with the Palestinians is one about race, rather than Islamist intolerance of the Jewish presence in their ancestral homeland.

Any solution to the current problem of American antisemitism must therefore include a rolling back of the woke tide and DEI infrastructure in education, the arts and government.

Above all, Jews who worry about another year of a siege of Jews in American education must remember not to play by the rules of the antisemites. We must push back and stand up, rather than seek shelter and concede the public square to the Jew-haters. Anything else is a recipe for the further erosion of Jewish safety.

© JNS