Anti-Israeli teaching on American campuses: Origins, Extent, and Remedies

T. Belman. Russia created the PLO in 1964 but the US embraced the idea of a Palestinian State in 1969, as this article attests, and won’t let go of it

Since when did the Palestinians become entitled to a state?,

Ken’s Blog Nov 29, 2023

Ken Stein (appeared in The Jerusalem Strategic Tribune, November 2023), Part I and Part II

Since the June 1967 war, Anti-Israeli sentiment on US campuses has grown to extraordinary proportions merging with previously evolved anti-Zionism that emerged in late Ottoman and Mandate times.  Hamas’s October 7 murderous killing of  1300 lives and 239 hostages was a disastrous tsunami of indiscriminate violence. It hit Israelis with enormous ferocity and sudden force in the villages and kibbutzim on the Gaza border.  In contrast, the ensuing explosion of anti-Israel protests on American campuses and streets was a continuation of simmering anti-Israeli or outbursts.

What was unexpected, however, was the intensity and anger of these public protests. At the core of both was lethal and indiscriminate antisemitism. This antisemitism includes extreme verbal degradation, indiscriminate killing of Jews, their demonization, delegitimization of Jewish self-determination, and systematic sowing of doubt that Zionism and Israel are just and moral, and therefore not worthy of sustained emotional, physical, and financial support, otherwise defined as “distancing.”

This essay identifies multiple reasons for the growth of anti-Israeli sentiment on American campuses.  It asserts that 1) both the Hamas massacres and the anti-Israel demonstrations reflect delegitimizing of Jews as a people, undercutting the legitimacy of Jews to constitute a state. Embedded in modern Arab and Muslim attitudes toward Zionism and Israel are a century of denigration, boycott, and belittlement interrupted with significant, yet transactional Arab acceptances of the Jewish state; 2) the public and scholarly realms have become increasingly abusive of Israel, acerbic toward her policies, and vengeful toward her political leaders; 3) campus teaching of the Middle East and Israel in the US since 1967 has disfavored students broad learning about Israel except for studying Hebrew; 4) college professors and campus organizations have increasingly preached anti-Israeli views to unsophisticated, apathetic, and unknowing students; 5) pre-collegiate learning about Zionism and Israel, for Jewish and non-Jewish students alike, is sporadic, often lacking in content and concept, and self-limited to less than half of American Jewish students between the ages of 5 and 18.

Historic anti-Zionism as a core element of modern antisemitism

Conceptually, the brutal killings and anti-Israeli protests are linked by a prolonged and relentless objective to degrade and obliterate the inalienable right of Jews to self-determination in their own state. Anti-Semitism has ancient roots in thousands of years of Jewish history. The Salience of Islamic Antisemitism, in the words of Martin Kramer, may be found in numerous Koranic passages, and earlier in Christian theology, reaffirmed as anti-Zionism in Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine through local Arab leadership’s rejection of Jewish state-building. It was summarily expressed by the Arab League Secretary General, Azzam Pasha in September 1947, “The Arab world is not in a compromising mood. We shall try to defeat you. I’m not sure we’ll succeed, but we’ll try. We were able to drive out the Crusaders, but on the other hand we lost Spain and Persia. It may be that we shall lose Palestine. But it’s too late to talk of peaceful solutions.”

Arab League Secretary General, Azzam Pasha and Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Hajj Amin Al-Husayni (Israel Government Press Office), 1947

Delegitimizing Israel was carried forward by the USSR and Soviet Bloc states in the Cold War to curry favor with states recently independent of Western colonial presence. It took the forms of an Arab economic boycott of Israel and denial to Israeli diplomatic representatives of access to acceptability as a legitimate state. In the Arab world this led by Nassar’s May 1967 rhetoric to eliminate Israel. It was sustained after the June 1967 war with a general Arab policy of ‘no negotiation, no recognition, no peace’ with Israel stated unequivocally at the 1967 Khartoum Arab League Summit Resolutions. Hamas reaffirmed that 1967 concept in the 1988 Hamas Charter. Article 15 of the 1964 PLO Charter asserts that “the liberation of Palestine…aims at the elimination of Zionism in Palestine.”

The disparagement chain against Israel is continuous, intervening with times of Arab state diplomatic recognition. Yasser Arafat, Hafez al-Assad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Palestine Islamic Jihad, and many Palestinian leaders held steadfast to the same central objective of seeking Israel’s disappearance or eradication. Faisal Husseini, a prominent PLO leader in Jerusalem, said on September 9, 1996, on Syrian Television, “All Palestinians agree that the “just boundaries” of Palestine are the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea… realistically, whatever can be obtained now should be accepted and that subsequent events, perhaps in the next fifteen or twenty years would present an opportunity to realize the just boundaries of Palestine.”

CONTINUE