Rude Awakenings: Some effects of the Middle East wars on U.S. campuses

National Review, July 15, 2002 by Jay Nordlinger

When the Arab-Israeli conflict flared again, the reaction on campus was dramatic. It could have been expected to be anti-Israel, and severely so; but it was even more anti-Israel than usual. It was more anti- Semitic, too. (Sadly, these two "anti-"s seem to be going together more and more lately.) Also unusual, however, was the response of pro-Israel students and faculty, chiefly Jews: They were more determined, less cringing, more defiant than in the past. More willing to talk back, and to fight back. A writer in the Israeli daily Ha'aretz sensed that an "awakening" was going on, and that a period of "passive vulnerability" was expiring. This sense is widely shared. Moreover, Jews on campus are reconsidering their politics and alliances. The word "realignment" is being spoken a lot. Many students and teachers are undergoing "second thoughts," to use the phrase of Peter Collier and David Horowitz, who took a sharp turn from '60s radicalism. "After 9/11, everything changed," people say. Some things actually may be.

The press has been full of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic acts from campus lately, of which some of the "highlights" are these: bricks through windows of Hillel centers (Hillel being the international college Jewish organization); swastikas painted on Hillel walls and doors; the word "Zionazi" coined and sprayed; anti-Jewish libels, ancient and modern, spread through student newspapers and websites; jeering anti-Israel demonstrations on, of all days, Holocaust Remembrance Day; retrospective praise for the Nazis. (As in the Middle East itself, enemies of Israel on campus have trouble deciding whether the Israelis are Nazis, or the Nazis are to be hailed.) The worst case occurred at San Francisco State University, where a group of Jewish students, who had participated in a peace rally, had to be escorted to safety by police, from a howling, hate-spewing mob. (Sample screams: "Get out or we will kill you!" and "Hitler didn't finish the job!")

Even where events are less appalling, Jewish students and faculty feel that they are under siege, forced to explain or defend "their" state, or even their status as Jews. The Left's last great campus cause was the anti-apartheid one; it was the last time, whatever their methods or proposed solutions, they had anything like the moral high ground. They are seeking it again, through anti-Israeli activism and rhetoric, including a strong linkage to apartheid. That Israel, like the old Boer Republic, is an "apartheid state" is almost an article of faith on many campuses today. Pro-Arab, anti-Israeli groups are joined by sundry more traditional leftist groups -- environmentalists, "racial justice" advocates, anti-globalizers -- which stuns and chagrins many Jews, previously comfortable in their liberalism. Michael Granoff, a "lay leader" of the Hillel Foundation, voices a common sentiment when he says, "The reaction of the human-rights community has been disappointing to many of us who consider ourselves left of center, but who see this conflict in a different way." The U.N.'s Durban conference, he says -- an affair that proved grossly anti-Semitic -- was a "rude awakening," a "very sobering experience." And only days later came the September 11 attacks, coupled, in short order, with a renewing of the Israel question.

Harvard, as usual, has been the focus of particular attention. Of the many striking events that have occurred there recently, the most notable was the circulation of a "divestment" petition, calling on the university to withdraw its investments from Israel and "U.S. companies that sell arms to Israel." (The petition was a joint effort with neighboring MIT.) In this way, the linkage of the anti-apartheid cause to the anti-Israel cause was explicit and profound. Of all the states in the world, only Israel was so abhorrent as to warrant a complete "divestment." Over 120 faculty members at the two universities signed the petition. This shook Jews and others on those campuses, and a counter-petition was circulated, opposing and denouncing the first petition. Almost 600 faculty signed that one, in an impressive act of "talking back."

Ruth Wisse is the noted scholar of Yiddish and political essayist; she is a prominent conservative at Harvard. Prof. Wisse says that recent events have "changed the atmosphere for every thinking person on campus." Current tensions pit professor against professor, student against student (even roommate against roommate), and professor against student (an especially fragile situation for a student). "Malice toward Israel and those who support it," says Prof. Wisse, "is now acceptable among people who might have felt the same way before but took pains not to make it visible." Jewish students are being, not merely challenged, but "assaulted" on the question of Israel, in class and elsewhere. And "they've never really encountered this before. Israel has not been popular with the Left, with the in-crowd, for many years, but this hostility is really of a different magnitude." Prof. Wisse has had "a run of students come to see me -- ones I don't even know. They are rattled. Seriously rattled."