Wednesday, the House of Representatives passed the “Antisemitism Awareness Act,” which requires colleges to enforce rules on discrimination using a definition that equates anti-Zionism with antisemitism. The problem of campus anti-Israel activism creating an atmosphere of antisemitism is real. The “solution” of regulating anti-Zionism as hate speech is absurd.
Representative Josh Gottheimer, a moderate Democrat and co-sponsor of the bill, is at least blunt about what he hopes the bill would accomplish. “It allows criticism of Israel,” he said. “It doesn’t allow calls for the destruction or elimination of the Jewish state.”
But why shouldn’t colleges allow students or faculty to call for the destruction or elimination of the state of Israel? To be clear, destroying or eliminating Israel is a ghastly idea that could only be accomplished through Hitlerian-scale violence. Colleges are supposed to allow people to advocate bad ideas.
What makes this bill so controversial among Democrats is its reliance on equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. That equation is accepted as a truism on the right and among many Israel supporters, but it rests on shaky ground.
Zionism was the solution Jews devised for the problem of endemic discrimination. Centuries of experience had shown that even countries that initially welcomed them eventually discriminated against them, expelled them, or murdered them. The crisis grew especially acute after the Holocaust, which left the Jewish survivors homeless and stateless. The latter problem hasn’t fundamentally changed: If Israel’s Jewish population were somehow persuaded to leave, where would they go? Nobody, including the United States, is lining up to take in 7 million Jewish immigrants.
You can disagree historically with the premise of Zionism without being antisemitic. Not every ethnic group enjoys self-determination — is it bigotry to oppose statehood for Kurds or Tibetans? You can even believe that somehow the Jewish population of Israel will survive and prosper in a world in which their state has dissolved, because naïveté is not bigotry.
In practice, anti-Zionist activism tends to place intense pressure on Jews to abandon their communal traditions to be accepted into the wider community. It has long been a fact of life that progressive activist spaces often require participants to renounce Israel as the price of admission to groups and causes that have nothing to do with Israel. Since Jewish people disproportionately (if not universally) believe in Israel’s existence in one form or another, this informal requirement amounts to de facto discrimination.
The encampments that have sprung up around campuses provide a vivid sense of this discrimination in its most literal form. Student protests have illegally seized campus spaces for their exclusive use. Their first step has been to bar “Zionists” from entering territory they control. Encampment after encampment has established rules barring “Zionists” from areas of campus that remain open to non-Zionists. At UCLA, the protesters seem to have set up checkpoints they used to keep Zionists from accessing parts of campus:
This is, functionally, antisemitism. They may not be preventing Jews per se from accessing these areas, but they have created a litmus test that will effectively deter many and perhaps most Jewish students while creating a general atmosphere of discrimination and fear.
Predictably, the UCLA method of giving radical students autonomous control of portions of campus quickly spiraled into anarchy, and pro-Israel counterdemonstrators unleashed horrific (and, to be clear, totally wrong) violence that night.
It is the spectacle of these sort of unauthorized encampments that have caused Congress to leap to its legislative response. “We must give the Department of Education the tools to … hold college administrators accountable for refusing to address antisemitism on their campuses,” said Republican representative Michael Lawler of New York, a lead sponsor.
But the tools to handle these actions already exist. Colleges simply need to enforce their time/place/manner restrictions on public spaces. Those restrictions not only don’t need to piggyback on defining anti-Zionism as hate speech, they shouldn’t. Effective and legitimate rules about public spaces must be content-neutral. If you want to hold a march at the National Mall, you need to get a permit, and those permits aren’t granted on the basis of whether or not your cause is hateful.
Campuses allocate their public space the same way. If you abstract away from the merits of the cause, the need to regulate common space on campus is obvious. The glee club isn’t allowed to set up camp on the quad and decide they want to make everybody listen to their songs day and night. Protesters who hate Israel can’t do that, either.
The crisis of antisemitism on campus is ultimately going to require a solution arrived at through force of reason — that is to say, a liberal solution. You don’t win the argument by having Congress pass a vote saying you’re right.
