Problematic Campus Protests
The authors of the letter “We Are Activists, We Are Jewish, And We Support the Student Protests…” refer to “Israel’s war on Gaza,” but the war is in fact between Hamas and Israel.
Hamas’s night of evil was a horrific provocation, calculated to produce an appalling body count when Israel inevitably responded. The authors give one line to the fact that the first casualties were the 1,250 civilian men, women, boys, girls and babies variously raped, tortured, shot or burned to death by Hamas. Like the protestors on campus, these authors do not concern themselves with the return of the hostages. Their outrage is conspicuously one-sided.
No other justice movement in history has ever embraced language calling for the destruction of an actual country. Israel is a nation of 9.5 million people. If “From the river to the sea” were to become a reality, their fate would hang terrifyingly in the balance. The campus protests are problematic, not because they call for cease-fire, but because the rhetoric of the movement embraces the annihilation of the State of Israel. The movement is not merely causing Jewish students to feel physically unsafe in an immediate sense; it is contributing to a growing sense of danger among Jews in general. Virulent anti-Semitism is on the rise, and “Never again” is an idea that has suddenly become urgently relevant.
As the ’60s slogan goes, “War is not healthy for children or other living things.” Messrs. Applebaum, Flacks, Molotch, and Winant are old school anti-Vietnam War activists. They are understandably nostalgic for their glory days, but the comparison they draw between the 1960s peace movement and today’s campus protests distorts more than it reveals. They point to their own Jewishness to deny the very real sense of jeopardy experienced by Jewish students on campus today. It is bad logic. If a Jewish student presented themself as both pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian, and attended the protest with the intent of calling on both sides to make peace, they would put themself at risk.
This protest movement is not a big tent. The fact that some of the protestors are Jewish is irrelevant, because anti-Semitism is baked into the campus protests. Many Jewish students are both pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian, and they oppose the way the current coalition government in Israel is conducting its side of this terrible war. That doesn’t mean they align with Mike Johnson, or support the police and the National Guard coming onto college campuses. Until the campus protest movement abandons its implicit call for Israel’s destruction, and calls on Hamas to immediately free the hostages, its character will remain anti-Israel, and fundamentally anti-Semitic.
Peter Jacobson is past professor of Middle East Studies at Santa Barbara City College.