Mick Hartley

From Joe Lockard, associate professor of English at Arizona State University:

Calls for the elimination of the Jewish homeland, Israel, or the deprivation of an equal Palestinian right to self-determination are equally abominable. It is exactly this eliminationism that gained voice at our university and many others where protesters chanted, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” There are frequent defenses that this slogan refers to civic equality. That is neither factual nor truthful. Hamas states openly in both its original and amended charters that liberating Palestine “from the river to the sea” would entail the liquidation of Israel and establishment of an Islamic state. The October 7 pogrom should leave no doubt that this means the liquidation of Jews together with the state.

When a crowd on a US campus begins chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” they are repeating words endorsed by Hamas and the death threat embodied in them. For anyone aware of and sensitive to the history of massacres threatened and enacted against the Jewish people, this chant is the functional equivalent of the Nazi salute, “Seig heil!” Encampments have lent both indirect and direct political support to the theo-fascist movement that is Hamas.

The boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement—in which all the encampments participate—is no less problematic. With a history of over a millennium, boycotts and sanctions against Jews and Jewish communities are perhaps the oldest form of organized racism in the western world. BDS, today’s version of this ancient and much repeated call to separate and isolate Jews, requires a rejection or renunciation of Jewish self-determination. It demands a boycott until the “occupation and colonization of all Arab lands” ends—that is, until Israel no longer exists. BDS organizer Omar Barghouti has stated repeatedly that the “decolonization” process that the boycott represents can end only in the elimination of Israel. Despite the presence in the encampments of a few Jewish students, who attempt to provide a veneer of Jewish approval, Jewish communities throughout the United States overwhelmingly and emphatically reject BDS calls as antisemitism.

The antisemitism that has flourished in campus encampments has spread throughout the US educational system. A schoolmate in Arizona called my sixth-grade daughter a “Zionist terrorist”; her best friend in Massachusetts got labeled a “Zionist baby killer”; and Jewish children in Maryland report numerous hate incidents. Schoolchildren learn epithets from social examples in online media. Rhetoric from the encampments and their signage have flooded the media and provided models of how to insult Jews rather than work for mutual respect and empathy.

And Victor Davis Hanson:

Of course, after the October 7 IDF entry into Gaza, the demonstrations became far bolder and more numerous, but not really different in their aims and rhetoric. More often, Jewish students were chased and assaulted. Few if any protestors asked whether supposedly identifiable Jewish students were pro- or anti-Israel, but simply harassed any who seemed Jewish.

Why did the patently illegal occupation of campus property spread? Why the escalation to medieval anti-Semitic threats to Jews and various takes on the “Final Solution?”

One, throngs of poorly educated American students—many of them part of the diversity/equity/identity movement—saw Gaza as fuel for their Marxist-themed binary of oppressed versus oppressors. So they eagerly plugged Israel into the tired role of a white, interloping, neo-colonialist, and “settler” state—on the correct assumption that they had grown up with the assurance that smearing whites in racist fashion was not only tolerated but encouraged as a blow against white “privilege,” “supremacy,” or “rage.”

These settler and colonialist smears were ahistorical. Jewish “settler” culture and civilization date before 1200 B.C.—some 1800 years prior to the Arab invasions that displaced Byzantine control of the Middle East. But then again, remember, we are dealing with the supposed moral and intellectual elite of America who have no idea what “Palestine” means or where it came from and certainly could not identify Gaza on a map. They often charge America with genocide, but otherwise they were not too bothered by the medieval-style beheadings, rape, and mutilations of October 7.

The students also know little of the “Final Solution” or what their prompters meant by “Go Back to Poland” (again, the ovens of Auschwitz). Instead, clueless, indulged students provide the American-citizen fodder for the protests. They know how campus unrest unfolds and the predictable Munich-like responses of campus administrators and blue-city mayors and governors.

At 11 million, Israel’s population is vastly outnumbered by some 500 million Arab and Muslim neighbors, many of whom are existentially hostile. So the idea of an imperial overdog or colonialist oppressor Israel is absurd. Most of the hatred in the Arab world and its expatriates on Western campuses toward Israel is driven by envy and frustration that Israel is a humane, free, prosperous, and lawful constitutional state in a way most Arab nations are still not. Add that the Arab world has prompted five or six serial wars against Israel, lost them all, and on spec resorted to terrorism to gain what their militaries could not—and yet Israel still prospers while its neighbors do not since that would mean to dismantle autocracy, tribalism, gender apartheid, religious intolerance, anti-Semitism, and inert socialist economies….