From Harvard to Hamas: How coverage of Israel impacts Jews on campus - opinion

When I was a kid growing up in suburban Chicago, I dreamed the American Dream of going to an Ivy League university.

But such elite colleges unfortunately expect students to have mathematical abilities I sorely lacked, so they all rejected me.

I eventually got my revenge when I was welcomed to lecture about Israel in each of the eight Ivies. But in retrospect, with the anti-Israel environment on all the Ivy League campuses nowadays, I wouldn’t be such a proud alum had I gotten a degree at any of them.

Plenty has also happened at my alma mater, Northwestern, to make me uncomfortable displaying my diploma. But there was barely any political activism on the campus back then, enabling me to study in relative serenity that today’s students can only envy.

“I’ll forever be scarred by what I’ve experienced on campus,” a senior at a top American university told me this week.

The pro-Israel student said he went home and has missed class because he couldn’t deal with the environment on his campus, where the antisemitic group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) has gotten even more abhorrent than usual since the October 7 attacks in Israel.

“The hardest thing isn’t SJP,” he said. “It’s seeing normal people I know, and go to class and parties with, liking their posts. It made me understand how the Holocaust happened.”

How media bias against Israel impacts Jewish students in the US

Ruby Frank, who attended the University of Birmingham in England, explained it well in an article for the media watchdog HonestReporting. She wrote that social media plays such a prominent role within university life, that it extends the campus into the virtual realm. This has tangible consequences, she warned, not only in creating a hostile environment for Jewish students online, but also in-person on campus.

She suggested that the remedy was that Israel and its supporters continue efforts to improve on the media battlefield, particularly on social media platforms, in order to enhance public opinion of Israel among potential future world leaders.

“By addressing and exposing biased media coverage surrounding Israel, we can take important steps toward promoting Israel’s image in the media,” she wrote. “But that would not be the only positive result. Shifting progressive attitudes toward Israel could also significantly impact the challenges Jewish students experience on campus. Addressing Israel-related antisemitism by promoting support for and understanding of Israel among students would ensure a safer experience at universities and colleges for Jewish students around the world.”

Efforts to improve the safety of Jewish students worldwide took a hit last week with Harvard’s decision to not fire its president, Claudine Gay, despite her telling a congressional hearing that the question of whether calls for genocide against Jews violated her institution’s code of conduct “depended on the context.”

Such a blatantly antisemitic answer should have been automatic grounds for immediate dismissal. And perhaps it would have been had top media outlets immediately reported Gay’s egregious answer justifying genocide.

But in their immediate coverage of the hearing, the media were blind to what should have led their reporting and only later became a huge story.

HonestReporting’s survey of the coverage on the day of the hearing shockingly revealed that Reuters, AP, CNN, NPR, The New York Times, and The Washington Post either ignored or buried Gay’s answer to Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik.

Only after there was a public outcry did they update their stories.

That was apparently too little and too late. The momentum that could have started had the media immediately reported the truth hit a backlash before the groundswell of support for Gay’s firing developed.

The media earned a failing grade at Harvard, and consequently Jewish students there and at other top universities will unfortunately remain unsafe.

It also does not help that the university’s student newspaper The Harvard Crimson, which celebrated its sesquicentennial in the presence of hundreds of supporters and former staff in April, endorsed the BDS movement that aims to isolate and demonize Israel.

Revealing the Crimson’s Israel obsession, HonestReporting found that in the year from April 2022 to 2023, the newspaper ran almost 40 news articles and op-eds that touched upon Israel and the Palestinians — considerably more than the combined total of pieces it published about all other key issues in the Middle East.

But there have also been victories on campus since October 7 that have not been highlighted sufficiently. On November 15, the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) student senate passed a resolution condemning Hamas’s October 7 atrocities, with 76% support, becoming the first university student government to pass a resolution condemning Hamas.

Hasbara Fellowships executive director Alan Levine, a UCSB alum whose organization trains pro-Israel student activists, said the victory was especially notable considering that the school has a Saudi-funded Center for Middle East Studies, which for 40 years employed notoriously anti-Israel United Nations special rapporteur on “human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories” Prof. Richard Falk.

Over two decades of speaking to students that Hasbara Fellowships brings to Jerusalem, I’ve seen how they have gone from relatively uninformed Birthright graduates to impressively educated, fearless pro-Israel leaders on campus.

They become pro-Israel animals, leading organizations with incredible names like Dawgs for Israel; Hogs for Israel; Dragons for Israel; and even Slugs for Israel.

Levine lamented that when Jewish students see their peers, their professors, and celebrities attack Israel, it gives them the illusion that everyone is against them and makes them believe the echo chamber.

He said student newspapers have also become a battleground, with many editors aligning themselves with anti-Israel movements. That has made it harder to get pro-Israel opinion pieces printed.

“Our goal is to teach pro-Israel students to make alliances with other student groups and be proactive,” Levine said. “They can’t afford to wait for a crisis, like a war or a vote on BDS in their student senate. They must be engaged and show that there is another side.”

One key goal on campus nowadays is to make students realize that while antisemitic tropes about Jews controlling universities with money are false, that accusation is actually true of Qatar.

Qatar, which as Hamas’s top donor gives the terrorist group $1.8 billion, also gives huge amounts to dozens of American universities, according to US Department of Education statistics. For instance, the Qataris have given Cornell University some $600 million, Carnegie Mellon $300 million, and Northwestern $129 million.

There is also endless money from Qatar supporting SJP and anti-Israel influencers on social media.

The era of intersectionality has labeled Jews “the oppressor” and Palestinians “the oppressed,” even though it is the Jewish community that is under constant attack in Israel and around the world. Amid confusion over intersectionality, students need to realize that it is the anti-Israel movements that are actually “privileged,” while Jews are the victims and the minority that has suffered from the most discrimination.

It is not too late for October 7 to be the historic turning point it needs to be in reinforcing that important message. With proper education and accurate media coverage about what happened on that horrible, fateful day, everyone but the fringes on campuses could potentially understand the truth about what Israel is facing.

“October 7 can still be an opportunity,” Levine said. “It has not been lost. It is up to us to educate the students.” 

The writer is the executive director and executive editor of HonestReporting. He served as chief political correspondent and analyst of The Jerusalem Post for 24 years.