column

We’ve known the campus threats for decades and failed our students

Then, as now, there was a fear among many Jews that it was problematic to appear too pro-Israel. That has come back to haunt the community.

Students at Doe Library at the University of California, Berkeley. Credit: sarangib/Pixabay.
Students at Doe Library at the University of California, Berkeley. Credit: sarangib/Pixabay.
Mitchell Bard
Mitchell Bard
Mitchell Bard is a foreign-policy analyst and an authority on U.S.-Israel relations who has written and edited 22 books, including The Arab Lobby, Death to the Infidels: Radical Islam’s War Against the Jews and After Anatevka: Tevye in Palestine.

Since last Oct. 7, we’ve read daily reports about the campus horrors our students face. Young Jews are harassed by antisemitic peers and faculty. They report being so frightened that they hide their Jewish identity. Most come to campus unprepared emotionally and intellectually for such challenges.

And it’s the fault of a generation of Jewish leaders who have known about the problems on campus and failed to adequately address them.

On Oct. 29, 1969(!), AIPAC’s Near East Report published a special survey, “The Arab Propaganda Campaign on Campus.” The problem was so extensive it took 12 pages to describe all the threats. It noted that the principal student propagandists were the Organization of Arab Students (OAS), which was formed in 1952(!) by the anti-Israel American Friends of the Middle East, which was subsidized by the CIA after the King of Saudi Arabia lobbied the Eisenhower administration to support an Arab lobby to counter the pro-Israel lobby.

Do any of these excerpts from the NER report sound familiar?

“In our most prestigious universities, the extreme right represents a small minority. Many activist and vocal students and faculty are oriented toward the left.”

“Many Jewish students, startled by Arab attacks, are not equipped to enter into the controversy because they are not sufficiently versed in Middle East history to distinguish between truth and falsehood and to reply to the latter.”

“The major propaganda attack on Israel is the denial of her right to exist. … For the new American left, Arab accusations of colonialism, imperialism and Zionist racism are timely.”

“The Arab propaganda apparatus has become increasingly sensitive to charges of antisemitism. Great pains are taken to draw a distinction between antisemitism and anti-Zionism.”

“Arab campus propagandists are attempting to rework the image of Israel by repeated accusations of unspeakable brutality.”

“Arab students and propagandists have valuable allies in American professors who have backgrounds in Middle East diplomacy. … Their close association with the Arab world enables them to gain appointments to a growing number of Arab-oriented and sometimes Arab-endowed Middle East study centers and American universities.”

“‘Palestine Weeks’ have been standard propaganda fare on campus for several years.”

“Middle East’ teach-ins’ are “shrill, polemical and one-sided; their conclusions are foregone.”

Guess which campus was used as an example?

Columbia University hosted the “Teach-in on the Middle East, Arab Liberation vs. Imperialism-Zionism.”

At that time, the few Jewish students who identified with the Arab position, NER observed, were subservient to “left-wing ideology.”

Little changed by the time I reached college and graduate school. For example, while I was studying public policy at the University of California, Berkeley in 1983, I wrote that Israel was involved in a propaganda war on campus. “If we can convince our peers that support for Israel is just, that it is in America’s interest to back Israel, we will ensure that America will remain Israel’s closest ally.

I was working for AIPAC in 1991. It had a terrific student program at the time, and yet I believed that “the Israeli lobby has done a woeful job of preparing students to confront antisemitic attacks.” Even then, it was clear that America’s universities were “probably the only places where antisemitism is considered legitimate and attacking Jews has become politically correct.” 

In 2002, I ran the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, created the Jewish Virtual Library, and published the first edition of Myths and Facts: A Guide to the Arab-Israeli Conflict since I wrote the 1993 edition for AIPAC. “The plight of Jewish students on college campuses is desperate,” I wrote in another op-ed. “They are under siege from anti-Israel speakers, protesters, and organizations, and they are being taught by professors who distort history.”

“What is particularly depressing is that the Jewish community has allowed the situation to persist,” I continued. “The climate on campus is worse than it was when I was in school in the 1980s, which just shows how little we’ve done to address the problems. I am traveling around the country speaking on campuses, and I can’t overstate the distress.”

Similarly, I cited pollster Frank Luntz’s 2003 study “Israel in the Age of Eminem,” which found that “a large majority of younger Jews seem to know little about Israel, almost nothing about their religion, and show little interest in either.”

In 2004, I wrote: “For educators and the professionals who work on campus, the greatest challenge is not training students to respond to Israel’s detractors but educating them about the history and politics of the Middle East so they can become independent thinkers who love and understand Israel, warts and all. This challenge is not being met because of the absence of scholars who can imbue this knowledge and because most of the faculty teaching about the Middle East today are hostile toward Israel.”

In another column that year, I noted that “the mantra of academic freedom has become a license for the sanctioning of teachings and forums that are antisemitic, and I would argue that the application of academic freedom to issues affecting Jews is itself antisemitic because no other minority group permits universities to rationalize racism and bigotry.”

I’ve been concerned with faculty for decades and noted that “students, especially self-described liberals, want to look at the issues in a Tevye-like fashion on the one hand Palestinians do bad things, but on the other, so do the Israelis, even if the facts are not symmetrical.”

“Faculty critical of Israel also tend to be extremely vocal and active,” I added. “For a variety reasons, including intimidation, lack of knowledge, political correctness and concern for their image on the campus and in their fields, pro-Israel faculty are hesitant to engage in public or even private support for students or to take on their colleagues.” While anti-Israel faculty in subjects unrelated to the Middle East use their classrooms to advance personal agendas, I noted, “such behavior by pro-Israel faculty is unheard of.”

In 2009, after “Operation Cast Lead,” I wrote that “anti-Israel activities have continued and are reaching a level of intensity that we have not seen since its height. What is different now is that in addition to the campuses that are known hotbeds of hostility, anti-Israel incidents have occurred at a variety of schools, many of which have never had these problems before.”

Then, as now, there was a fear among many Jews that it was problematic to appear too pro-Israel. And Israel education was almost non-existent, certainly outside Orthodox yeshivahs. I argued then and would say the same today, “By the time students get to college, it’s very late to be first learning the aleph-bet of Jewish history. The education process needs to begin in high schools, if not before.”

Again, in 2015, I opined that campuses were the one place that tolerated antisemitism.” Jews were not “afforded the same protections or consideration that other minorities receive on campus.”

In 2016, my concern was that “uninformed and gullible students join groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and ignore their organizations’ raison d’être. Instead, they are fooled into believing these organizations are human rights advocates seeking peace and justice for the persecuted Palestinians living under Israeli ‘occupation.’ Once they become members, these often well-meaning students, try to persuade their peers, who know little or nothing about the conflict, to vilify Israel.”

There is also a generational issue. Before Oct. 7, younger Jews never experienced Jews in peril. The last time Israel was in any real danger was in 1973. College students at that time would now be retirees.

A 21-year-old college student today was only 3 when Israel fought the last Lebanon war. Our grandparents worry about remembering the Holocaust, but now the Yom Kippur War is ancient history. Teaching about the Holocaust is about as relevant to today’s students as the Peloponnesian War.

Twenty years ago, I wrote that “Israel is like spinach to many young Jews. That’s the real difference from the earlier generations, which saw Israel as meat and potatoes. This identity was ingrained through family, synagogue and Jewish education. Today, all three pillars are tottering.”

The older generation also could distinguish between real faults in Israel and specious moral equations, such as comparing settlers to suicide bombers. Too many educators confuse “free thinking” with critical thinking.

Some of the principal changes since 1969 are that Jewish students are more commonly disseminators of propaganda; Muslim extremists have become the most serious threat to Israel; Arab students play less of a role than a broader coalition of leftists; and there is no Arab student organization supported by Arab governments and the Arab League.

On the positive side, many entities that never existed now focus on campus issues, and millions of dollars are being spent to help students.

This raises the question: How is it possible that everything written about the campus in 1969, and the many op-eds that I and others have written are as applicable today as they were when those were published? And, if you believe, as many Jews do, that the situation on campus is now worse than ever, isn’t that a damning indictment of our collective failure over the last 55 years?

The opinions and facts presented in this article are those of the author, and neither JNS nor its partners assume any responsibility for them.
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