After first visiting American college campuses 20 years ago, as the minister in charge of combating antisemitism, I reported to then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that American universities had become “occupied territory.” At the time, I intended the term as a metaphor to call attention to the emerging problem of delegitimizing ideology and hateful rhetoric about Israel in academic debate.
Since October 7, however, the term “occupied territory” has ceased to be a metaphor and become a reality. Buildings and entire campuses have been occupied by protesters forming massive demonstrations, chanting, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Jewish students have faced verbal and physical harassment simply for identifying themselves as Jewish.
To understand how we got here, one has to go back a few decades to the advice that the late Columbia professor Edward Said gave to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Said told Arafat that he should not see the Palestinian struggle as a local conflict between Arabs and Jews but rather place it in the context of a global conflict between Western imperialists and those they had oppressed.
Said outlined this theory in his 1978 book, Orientalism, which explained how the West had sought for millennia to dominate and exploit the Eastern world. To Arafat, Said explained that by framing the Palestinian struggle in these terms, he could garner worldwide support for his cause.
In recent years, pro-Palestinian activists have used this advice with increasing success, galvanizing public opinion against the alleged crimes of the “settler colonialist” Zionist oppressor.
But the greatest triumph of this ideology came in the immediate aftermath of October 7. Pogroms are the symbol of antisemitism, and the attack on that black day amounted to the most vile and sadistic pogrom in centuries.
Yet, thanks to the groundwork laid by post-colonialists and related theories, many self-proclaimed progressives felt emboldened to defend Hamas’s actions as part of a legitimate resistance struggle. As a result, the most vulgar forms of antisemitism have also received newfound legitimation.
Riding on the wings of neo-Marxist theories about oppressors and oppressed, depictions of Jews as cunning and blood-thirsty have exploded into the public domain from the “prison” in which they were mostly kept since 1945.
In the face of this totalizing ideology, rational arguments can hold little sway. Many of those fervently demonstrating for Gaza have no understanding of what “from the river to the sea” means, and in fact, it doesn’t matter to them because, in their view, liberation must be global and will eventually encompass every river and every sea.
Fewer still are willing to consider how much more restrained Israel’s war in Gaza has been compared to the wars of the United States and European countries in, for example, Iraq and Yugoslavia. Such factual comparisons are simply drowned in the sound and fury of calls for revolution.
It is no wonder that for the first time, polls of younger Americans show that when asked whether they support Israel or Hamas, almost as many choose Hamas as Israel – not considering for even a moment the distinction between the Palestinians, suffering immensely from being used as human shields, and the repressive terrorists who rule over them.
SOME OF Hamas’s Western apologists admit that the acts of October 7 were terrible and cruel. But they deny that Hamas targeted Israelis because we are Jewish and insist instead that it is because we are Zionists and colonialists. The same logic was at work in the most vicious pogroms that took place in Russia in the late 19th century.
Then, Marxist revolutionaries who endorsed the violence claimed that its victims were chosen not because they were Jews but because they were capitalists and, therefore, legitimate targets of the people’s anger.
These conditions put American Jews, and particularly Jewish Zionists on university campuses, in an extraordinarily difficult position.
In this climate, Hillel International recently convened in Atlanta a special conference of Jewish student activists who are not willing to remain silent as their people face vicious and institutionally sanctioned attacks. More than 1,000 people from almost 200 colleges and universities attended. They were accompanied by shlichim, Israeli fellows of the Jewish Agency, who spend one to three years at colleges across the country supporting Zionist students.
The fellowship program was started 20 years ago when it became clear that the intellectual anti-Zionist campaign had started to affect American Jewry. Thanks to the generosity of Miri and the late Sheldon Adelson, we now have close to 100 shlichim, mainly in the United States – young men and women who have completed their army service or first degree and who undergo a careful selection process and special training to qualify them for this important work.
Defending Israel on campus or in Gaza was a tough choice to make
Since the war in Gaza began, many of our shlichim have been torn between wanting to return to Israel to support the military effort and to continue their work with students. In my conversations with them, I have reminded them that while on the Israeli front, there are many volunteers, on the campus front, they are irreplaceable – the commandos of the Zionist struggle. Those who felt they had to support their combat units did so for two or three months and immediately returned to fight on the second front in the US.
If the shlichim are commandos, the student activists are our infantry. In previous visits to American campuses, I was often struck by the differences between American students and their Israeli peers, who enrolled in university only after their formative army experience. Today, American Jewish students are more mature, focused, and determined than ever.
Quite a few spoke Russian with a heavy accent, indicating that their parents had emigrated from the USSR. For them, it seems, the family history of communist oppression helped them realize immediately the dangers of neo-Marxist post-colonialist ideology. Some others spoke native-level Hebrew – much better than mine – indicating that they grew up in Israeli families. For them, the connection between anti-Zionism and antisemitism does not even have to be explained.
MOST IMPORTANT, all of these students understand that they are engaged in a battle with historic consequences for our people. There were many excellent speakers and workshops.
In one, a popular multimedia journalist was asked how Columbia University, from which she graduated twenty years ago, is different today than when she attended. She answered that back then if she put on a t-shirt that said, “I am a Zionist,” no one would pay attention. Today, a student who does the same will face an angry mob. The audience reacted with an understanding sneer because by raising the banner of Zionism every day, they face exactly this reality.
Only a few weeks before, I had spent time at Columbia, and even senior professors there told me that they feared for their security while walking through violent crowds demanding that Israeli students be expelled and the “Israeli Occupation Force” banned from campus.
At Barnard, Columbia’s all women’s college, the administration decided to start a new semester with a special day of dialogue and canceled classes. Out of 3,000 enrolled students, only 60 showed up to engage in civilized debate. Of course, these were the 60 who did not need to be convinced of the legitimacy of Israel’s war.
Similarly, when I asked Ivy League student activists whether any campus organizations or human rights groups had officially expressed sympathy or grief following October 7, they answered no – not at Harvard, not at Penn, not at Cornell. Only the Yale students responded that one group, the Buckley Society, the most conservative organization on campus, had come out with a statement of support.
While in private, many non-Jewish students did reach out, in public, their organizations either denied the violence or justified it as an unavoidable byproduct of the global struggle for the liberation of the oppressed.
In light of such reports, it is easy to understand the outrageous position expressed by three major university presidents in their congressional hearing last December, in which they testified that whether advocating for the killing of Jews constitutes harassment depends on the context. The presidents are clearly not antisemites. But the discourse on their campuses has become so extreme, and the support for a violent struggle against “settler colonialists” so accepted that they were unable to maintain any intellectual or moral clarity about the threats and intimidation occurring on their watch.
IT WAS for this reason, and to give courage and support to American Jews facing a tsunami of delegitimization and hatred, that a number of activists, including myself, pushed to hold a massive demonstration for Israel in Washington, DC.
It was for the same reason that Hillel convened the recent meeting of Jewish student activists. In these efforts, our goal must not be to convince our enemies that we are not as bad as they say we are or that we, too, are among the oppressed. Rather, our aim must be to strengthen our pride as Jews – to remember that we have nothing to be ashamed of and that this is the moment at which our fate as a people will be decided.
Thinking back now about that conference, I remember the final scene especially standing out. Students were asked to check out of their hotel rooms at noon. At 3 p.m., while waiting for their buses, I found them all sitting outside their doorways on the hallway floor, everyone with their laptops. They discussed strategies and the next steps in a language replete with acronyms and other slang that I could only partially comprehend.
I was instantly reminded of my visits to soldiers outside Gaza. As they prepared to go back into battle, they spoke to each other in special terms and told jokes that only they could understand.
And just as divisions within Israel have retreated in the face of our shared goal of defeating Hamas, American Jewish students and activists – religious and secular, liberal and conservative, Hillel and Chabad – are now working together despite the disagreements that seemingly defined them on October 6.
May our soldiers on both fronts continue to be strong. Our future depends on them.
The writer is the founding chair of the Adelson Shlichut Institute at the Jewish Agency.