Richard L. Cravatts, PhD
No sooner
had the California State Assembly voted on and passed House Resolution
35 (HR 35) that calls upon California public universities to “increase
their efforts to swiftly and unequivocally condemn acts of
anti-Semitism” than the University of California Students Association
(UCSA), a system-wide student organization with representatives from
each campus, hastily passed a resolution denouncing the resolution,
contending that it compels
educational institutions “to directly suppress legitimate criticism of
Israeli policy and Palestine solidarity activism, and stifles robust
political debate on public university campuses.”
Scheduled to be voted on the day before
the Jewish holidays, and allowing no debate from pro-Israel students or those
with opposing views, the UCSA resolution suggested that “While HR 35 purports to oppose
anti-Semitism, much of HR 35 is written to unfairly and falsely smear as
‘anti-Semites’ those who do human rights advocacy focusing on Israel’s illegal
occupation, alleging that the UC faculty and staff involved in such work are
motivated by anti-Semitism rather than by the political ideals of equality and
respect for universal human rights they affirm, ideals UCSA and most California
students share.”
Campus radicals who promote the
Palestinian cause may purport to be guided by “political ideals of equality and
respect for universal human rights,” but it will come as a surprise to no one
that they are less than willing to extend those same rights and ideals of
equality for Israelis or Jews, and for anyone on North American campuses—Jewish
or not—who wishes to articulate his or her own support for the Middle East’s
only democracy.
In fact, the problem on campuses
across the country is that pro-Palestinian activists, in their zeal to seek
self-affirmation, statehood, and social justice for the ever-aggrieved
Palestinians, have waged a very caustic cognitive war against Israel and Jews
as their tactic in achieving those ends—part of a larger, more invidious
intellectual jihad against Israel led by some Western elites and those in the
Muslim world who also wish to weaken, and eventually destroy, the Jewish state.
A central part of that cognitive war
involves the speech and behavior that HR 35 specific sought to address, namely,
the demonization and venomous intellectual attacks on the character, moral
standing, legality, and social behavior of Israel, and its role as colonial
occupier, brutal oppressor, and racist state. Where that anti-Israel speech and
behavior has seemingly crossed the line of civil discourse, and why the
California lawmakers passed their resolution in the first place, is in those
frequently, and ever increasing, instances when what is described as activists
as criticism of Israel has devolved into speech, representations, and tropes
that can be considered raw anti-Semitism, not the political discourse or
academic inquiry it is said to be by those who perpetrate it.
HR 35 was very specific in relying
on working definitions of anti-Semitism used by, among others, the U.S. Department of State, Britain’s
All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Antisemitism, and the European Union Agency for Fundamental
Rights, which, as the Bill states, observe “that in context certain language or
behavior demonizes and delegitimizes Israel or attacks Israel with classic
anti-Semitic stereotypes, such as denying the Jewish people their right to
self-determination, applying double standards by requiring of Israel a behavior
not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation, drawing comparisons of
contemporary Israeli police to that of the Nazis, and accusing the Jewish people,
or Israel, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust”—exactly the type of
expressed attitudes and accusations regularly seen in academia.
In fact, being pro-Palestinian on
campuses today does not mean that one is committed to helping the Palestinians productively
nation-build, or creating a civil society with transparent government, a free
press, human rights, and a representative government. Being pro-Palestinian on
campuses involves very little which actually benefits or makes more likely the
birth of a new Palestinian state, living side by side in peace with Israel. What
being pro-Palestinian unfortunately has come to mean is continually denigrating
and attacking Israel with a false historical narrative and the misused language
of human rights, peppered as it is with distorted truths in statements like
that of Emiliano Huet-Vaughn, a member of the Berkeley chapter of the
virulently anti-Israel group Students for Justice in Palestine, who welcomed
the USCA vote because it was “evidence that UC students across the system do
not share some people’s moral blindspot when it comes to profiting from
Israel’s human rights abuses.”
And, echoing the accusations of other
anti-Israel activists, BDS proponents, Muslim student groups, and others who
regularly demonize Israel and the behavior and perceived moral defects of the
Jewish state, Huet-Vaughn applauded the UCSA vote to condemn HR 35 because, in
his words, it provides a “strong defense of the right of student activists and
scholars to tell the truth about Israel’s racist and illegal occupation.”
The moral uprightness that
anti-Israel activists feel in denouncing what they perceive to be Israel’s
racist, apartheid character, combined with its role as the illegal occupier of
stolen Muslim land, has manifested itself in paroxysms of ideological assaults
against Zionism, Israel, and, by extension, Jews in general. And of great
concern to those who have observed the invidious byproduct of this radicalism,
including the California legislature, is the frequent appearance of anti-Israel
sentiment that often rises to the level of raw anti-Semitism, when virulent
criticism of Israel bleeds into a darker, more sinister level of hatred –enough
to make Jewish students, whether or not they support or care about Israel at
all, uncomfortable, unsafe, or hated on their own campuses. In fact, a recent
study commissioned by UC President Mark G. Yudof to measure the climate faced
by Jewish students found that anti-Israel activism and on-campus attacks on Israel
and Zionism regularly “engender a feeling of isolation, and undermine Jewish
students' sense of belonging and engagement with outside communities.”
Those findings aside, critics of HR
35 were quick to denounce the resolution as an attempt to suppress academic
free speech, that instead of a measure to protect Jewish students and others
from having to endure a hostile campus climate the resolution was actually a
way of “chilling” expression and, more specifically, of suppressing what some
believe to be legitimate criticism of the Israeli government and its policies.
Universities
continually give lip service to how much they embrace the notion of “academic
free speech,” using it as a license to permit both professors and outside
speakers to hurl invectives at activists’ favorite targets, while
simultaneously sheltering designated victim groups from any kind of critique or
examination. Universities do that by designating speech they do not like—speech
against perceived minority groups—as “hate” speech, further proscribing it with
punitive speech codes, rigid codes of conduct, or other regulatory vicissitudes
emanating from the campus “thought police.” In the Israel/Palestinian debate
this has had the pernicious effect in which outrageous extremists and academic cranks
are regularly invited to speak against Israel, Jews, and the United States, but
when conservative or pro-Israel speakers are invited to defend Israel, their
speeches are interrupted or cancelled entirely because the speakers are accused
of being Islamophobes, racists, or purveyors of “hate speech.” So while
administrators and faculty have never had any difficulty in identifying
so-called hate speech on campus when it is aimed at African Americans,
Hispanics, GLBTs, Muslims, or other victim groups—and vigorously, and
appropriately, denounce any speakers or events which have resulted in the
sensibilities of those groups of students to be harmed—when the discussion is
about Israel and the Palestinians, and the target of the virulent speech and
demonstrations is Zionism, the Jewish state, or Jews in general, both
administrators and campus radicals conveniently inoculate themselves from
responsibility for what they would otherwise deem hate speech by invoking the
protection of academic free speech.
But legal scholar Kenneth L. Marcus, President of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human
Rights Under Law and
former director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, accuses universities of
using what he calls “First Amendment opportunism” when they provide moral cover
for extremist speech on campus with which they seemingly agree, but seek to
criminalize other speech on the same campus when it is deemed hate speech by
those who disagree with its point of view—its content. In the context of
allowing radical anti-Israel, anti-Semitic speakers to degrade the educational
environment for Jewish students, the question for Marcus is: “When a state
university permits the creation of a hostile environment for certain students,
can it really hide from harassment claims behind the First Amendment, when the
university actively controlled each of the elements which ultimately created
the environment?”
No reasonable observer would suggest that criticism
of Israel cannot exist in academia, or that borders, diplomacy, Palestinian
statehood, the refugees, the status of Jerusalem—all of those legitimate topics
for debate and scholarly inquiry—cannot and ought not be discussed on campuses.
That type of debate is not only appropriate for academia, but that is precisely
what universities are designed to do and do well, when, and if, scholarly
inquiry and discussions are not biased, politicized, one-sided, or hijacked by
a prevailing orthodoxy. HR 35 was necessitated, not because legislators wanted
to stifle academic free speech or expression of ideology or beliefs, but
because the speech and behavior around the Israeli/Palestinian issue by
radicals is positioned as being honest academic debate, but has regularly violated
the intent of the concept of academic free speech by the egregious excesses of
its tactics, expression, and frequency.
When Amir-Abdel Malik-Ali, a frequent guest
speaker at Muslim Student Union anti-Israel events in California, points to
Jewish students in the audience on an American campuses and tells them that
“y’all the new Nazis” because they support Israel; when on-campus events are
sponsored with names like “Holocaust in the Holy Land,” “Israel: The Fourth
Reich,” “Never Again: The Palestinian Holocaust,” implying that Israel’s
treatment of the Palestinians is comparable to the Nazis’ treatment of Jews and
that Palestinians are being randomly exterminated by Jews; when 40 campuses
worldwide sponsor “Israeli Apartheid Week” and Israel is denounced as a racist,
apartheid regime that denies civil rights to Palestinian Arabs based on race;
when a sociology professor sends his class a grisly collection of side-by-side
photographs comparing Jews under the hands of the Nazis to Gazans under the
Israeli occupation and suggests the situations are historically or morally
equivalent; when a purported academic conference is held at Harvard University
to discuss a “one-state” solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict—meaning
the end of the Jewish state through what professor Efraim Karsh has termed
“demographic subversion”—and every one of the 19 speakers at the event is a well-known
anti-Israel activist or scholar; when a student is physically assaulted by
being rammed with a shopping cart by a member of Students for Justice in
Palestine because she is a Jew; when a Jewish attendee at an event during
Israeli Apartheid Week at the University of Toronto attempts to ask a question
he is told by security guards: “Shut the f**k up or I’ll saw your head off;” when
Jewish students at San Francisco State University are observing Holocaust
Remembrance Day, pro-Palestinian counter-demonstrators physically assault the
Jewish students, spit on them, and scream such epithets as “Too bad Hitler
didn't finish the job;” when York University’s Hillel invites Natan Sharansky
to speak and radical pro-Palestinian student groups jeer him and scream “Get
off our campus, you genocidal racist” and “you are bringing a second Holocaust
upon yourselves;” when a Jewish student at Columbia is “steered” out of taking
a particular course because the professor has a well-known animus against
Israel; and when Jewish students and others regularly are confronted with mock
“apartheid walls,” Israeli flags dripping with blood, the Star of David equated
with a swastika, and incessant calls for academic and economic boycotts,
sanctions, and divestment from the Middle East’s only democracy in which the
central theme is that Israel is a racist, apartheid regime with no moral right
to continue to exist and should be weakened and eventually destroyed—when all
of this takes place, as it does month after month on campuses, then the talk
about protecting legitimate academic free speech is clearly disingenuous at
best, and the reason that HR 35 was necessitated in the first place.
Pro-Palestinian
activists have successfully hijacked the narrative about the
Israeli/Palestinian conflict on campuses, but in elevating the Palestinian
cause by degrading Israel they have unleashed an ideological tsunami replete
with virulent language, slanders, blood libels, inversions of history and fact,
and, often, as former Harvard president Laurence Summers put it, have unleashed
forms of expression that are “anti-Semitic in their effect, if not their
intent.” That is the issue here, and why it is necessary and important that, in
the effort to promote the Palestinian cause and help them to achieve statehood,
another group—Jewish students on American campuses—do not become victims
themselves in a struggle for another group’s self-determination.
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