On Tuesday, President Biden delivered a speech at a Holocaust-remembrance ceremony about antisemitism, in which he noted an upsurge of hostility on campuses since October 7:
We have seen a ferocious surge of antisemitism in America and around the world. Vicious propaganda on social media. Jews forced to keep their — hide their kippahs under baseball hats, tuck their Jewish stars into their shirts. On college campuses, Jewish students blocked, harassed, attacked while walking to class. Antisemitism, antisemitic posters, slogans calling for the annihilation of Israel, the world’s only Jewish state.
The phenomenon Biden is describing is very real. But it is also prone to be misunderstood in both directions — hysteria and dismissal — and so it merits careful thinking to define precisely how the movement on campus does and does not threaten American Jews.
With very few exceptions, Jewish students do not face physical danger on American campuses. A handful of videos purporting to depict mob violence against Jews are mostly wrenched out of context. There are no pogroms.
The crisis, instead, is the intensification of a long-standing phenomenon. For many years, it has been common for deep criticism of Israel to be a litmus test for participation in left-wing activist spaces. Most American Jews are liberal, and most support Israel’s existence. This litmus test essentially forces many young Jewish people seeking to participate in progressive life to choose between their cultural heritage and full acceptance in a broader community.
The fact that anti-Zionist groups not only allow but encourage and celebrate membership of Jewish students is not a refutation of this problem. It is a description of the problem.
While students are often attracted to the anti-Israel groups out of admirable sympathy for the plight of Palestinians, the beliefs of the organizations behind the protests are murderous and horrifying. They support Hamas and the indiscriminate slaughter and rape of Jewish civilians.
As Jill Filipovic points out, the Columbia encampment’s list of mandatory principles one must align with to join includes support for the right to resist “by all available means.” The demands of the protest coalition at the University of Michigan, which has the support of 81 campus progressive groups, call for “power to our freedom fighters, glory to our martyrs. All eyes on Gaza, the Thawabit is our compass.” (Thawabit is a list of Palestinian political principles, including “the right to resistance in all forms.”)
Media accounts have often described these protests as antiwar, but this is flatly inaccurate. They support one party to the war and call for its victory. Likewise, news accounts have inaccurately depicted the protests as arising in response to Israel’s counterattack (i.e., the Washington Post: “Campus rallies and vigils for victims of the war in Gaza have disrupted colleges since October”). But the groups in fact mobilized in response to, and in support of, Hamas’s attack, and were preparing demonstrations to support what they anticipated would be a war to destroy Israel. (“This action of resistance shatters the illusion of Israel as an impenetrable, indestructible entity. The zionist entity is fragile, and Palestinian resistance is alive. The iOF are still in disarray and the resistance fighters are still launching new attacks into 48,” wrote Students for Justice in Palestine’s central organization in the plans for a “Day of Action” in the United States in the immediate wake of October 7.
These beliefs, which are spelled out clearly in the protesters’ foundational documents, have received astonishingly little attention. Their demands have attracted a bit more scrutiny, but much of that commentary has missed the real significance.
The main protest demands call for universities to brand Israel a genocidal state — a position the United States has not endorsed — and to divest from any company doing business with it. Critics have said that divestment would not “work,” which is true in the literal sense — even the combined weight of every American-university endowment joining a boycott would have a negligible effect on Israel’s economy.
But I don’t think the college protesters believe they can actually starve Israel’s economy into submission through the capital markets. We should take their demands seriously but not literally. And the actual purpose of the demands is to place the university’s imprimatur behind the idea that Israel is a unique source of evil in the world.
After all, they are not planning divestment campaigns for any other state engaged in violence or repression. They haven’t proposed, and almost certainly wouldn’t accept, any neutral human-rights standard being applied to their endowments’ overseas investments. The purpose is to anathematize support for Israel on the American campus.
Most of the encampments either formally exclude Zionists or submit them to harassment and surveillance. When they describe themselves as liberated zones, this is the liberation they envision: a community in which endorsing violence against Israelis is normalized and supporting Israel’s continued existence is vilified as a matter of course.
A brief glimpse of this future was evident on UCLA’s campus. The administration, still burned by the 2020 protests, had held back any police deployment, allowing anti-Israel encampment to control access to multiple points on campus. Videos emerged of protesters manning checkpoints and only allowing students to enter the library if they renounced Zionism.
Anti-Zionism might not be intrinsically antisemitic. But making anti-Zionism a precondition for equal membership in a community is functionally antisemitic. It is the way that antisemitism has most often operated historically in free societies: by forcing Jews to repudiate communal values in order to enjoy full social equality.
Does this vision of a future sound extreme and unrealistic? The American left has enjoyed its greatest success in the transformation of social norms. The casual racism, sexism, and homophobia that used to prevail are now scandalous and even, in many fields, career-ending. Much of this is to the good. Watch a movie that’s a few decades old and you’ll often encounter cruelty, racism, the glorification of rape, and so on. And many of these salutary social changes began on campus or in other left-wing redoubts.
It may seem unrealistic now that the left can trigger a similar change in social norms around Israel so that support for Hamas terrorism is banal and support for Israel’s existence in any form is racist and unacceptable. But look back a few decades when “gay marriage” was a punch line, or a few decades earlier when interracial marriage was illegal and deeply unpopular, and this ambition does not seem so silly. Jews have enough influence that imposing these forms on America as a whole would be difficult, even over the course of decades. But doing so at elite universities and in other progressive-dominated spaces might not be.
I would even grant that some steps in this direction would be beneficial. American society as a whole is deeply insensitive to Arab and Muslim culture, and bias against those communities is distressingly common. In national politics, even restrained criticism of Israel is often smeared as antisemitic.
Students and faculty should be free to advocate anti-Israel ideas, including radical eliminationist variants. The debate should be free and open. But a free-and-open debate is one in which the university administration is not throwing its prestige and authority behind one side.
Just as false charges of racism create cover for genuine racism, false charges of antisemitism create cover for genuine antisemites. Students have a right to challenge Israel. They have a right, perhaps even a duty, to advocate for Palestinian lives. The protesters insist they are being called antisemitic because of the actions of a handful of bad actors or perhaps because their opponents want to silence all criticism of Israel. Yet the main truth is the one Biden acknowledged: The movement is being called antisemitic because it is promoting antisemitism.
