It's outrageous, but campus antisemitism in US is nothing new - opinion

The antisemitic and violent demonstrations against Israel at universities across the United States, in which Jewish students and lecturers are experiencing events reminiscent of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, have reached a boiling point. The repeated calls for the murder of Jews and the elimination of Israel on the prestigious campuses in America, which is still a beacon of light for democracy, tolerance and freedom of speech, have made them intolerable and even dangerous places for Jewish students and lecturers.

Despite the pro-Palestinian demonstrations alongside the widespread antisemitism against Jews in academia in the United States, it is important to note that all of this is not a new phenomenon. For years, the venomous criticism against the Jewish state was nurtured in the classrooms of American universities, and it reached its peak after October 7 with words of praise and support for Hamas and the Palestinians.

The sad and outrageous thing about this whole story is that those critics were not only Muslim professors and student organizations sponsored by the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States, such as the SJP (Students for Justice in Palestine), who naturally are not Zionists. A significant number of those academics, who for political reasons criticized Israel’s policy towards the Palestinians, are Jews themselves. The trouble is that now the reality explodes in their faces, because they themselves have become a target due to their being Jewish.

Campus antisemitism is an intellectual failure

As part of their political struggle against the Israeli governments on the one hand, or due to their naivety in thinking that if only Israel makes far-reaching concessions for the Palestinians then peace will be damaged on the other hand, those respected academics, who unsurprisingly are mostly associated with the left side of the political spectrum, explained to us and the world that criticism of Israel is not antisemitism.

Even if this was not their intention, and I truly believe that their struggle was political and not aimed at bringing about the destruction of the Jewish state, their conduct provided a powerful weapon into the hands of those who call for the elimination of Israel. The “Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism” from 2021 is well remembered, which actually qualified the criticism of Israel as a non-antisemitic act.

Those respected professors even tried to explain that by doing so they are trying to prevent the division of the Jewish world, which is in a very heated debate about the definition of antisemitism that infringes on freedom of expression. More ridiculously, they claimed that their goal was to strengthen the partnership with Palestinians and Arabs in the fight against antisemitism.

Less than two months before the barbaric massacre committed by Hamas, they even continued to claim that Israel is an apartheid state that carries out ethnic cleansing, and called on Washington to limit military aid to the Jewish state and stop defending it in the United Nations. These claims came in the context of the unsurprising opposition of those academics to the judicial reform led by the Netanyahu government. Thus, they argued that if a solution to the Palestinian problem is not found, either within one state, two states or any other political framework, there is a danger that Israel will become a dictatorship.

Even after the October 7 massacre, the largest against the Jewish people since the Holocaust, that there are still those among them who claim that any comparison to the genocide of the Jewish people by the Nazis is an intellectual and moral failure.

In conclusion, the situation on campuses in the United States is indeed outrageous and boiling, when support for Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran is a matter of routine. At the same time, why should we travel so far when in Israel itself there are academics who take advantage of academic freedom in order to attack the Jewish state and express support for terrorists?

Only recently did we see how they treated with leniency the senior lecturer from Tel Aviv University who expressed support for a Palestinian terrorist. If the State of Israel and the Israeli academy do not know how to remove those who support its destruction, we should not make claims that the academy in the United States allows the rampage of antisemitism to take over the campuses.

The writer is a lecturer and research fellow at the University of South Wales, UK. His recent book is Israel: National Security and Securitization (Springer, 2023).