How Objectionable is the Conn College Faculty-Staff “Statement of Solidarity”?

Let Me Count the Ways.

Photo by Garvit Nama on Unsplash

Dear Conn College students,

It is a sad day when some 90 Conn College faculty members can publicly sign a statement accusing Jews of “Jewish supremacy”; Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels would be proud to see his trope so alive and well. What’s next? Deciding that the Nazis were right after all in pursuing the Holocaust?

Never mind that the one sliver of a Jewish state (32 of which would fit inside Texas!) and its 7 million Jews is massively dwarfed by the 460 million Arabs in 20+ Arab states and the 2 billion Muslims in the 50+ Muslim states, most of which actively seek to destroy the one tiny Jewish state in the name of Muslim Arab supremacy—read Hamas’s (never renounced) charter!; and that this tiny state is currently under active attack from Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and of course nuclear-approaching Iran. And lest you think that those actors attack Israel in the name of “human rights,” consider that not one of them provides human rights even to its own citizens. As protesters cheered the recent Houthi attacks, the Houthis announced they were crucifying gay men; at least Iran only publicly hangs their gays. Yet somehow the Jews and their little state are the problem.

It is also sad, even tragic, that such educated people can proffer such absolutely terrible advice. But happily we do have some dissenting opinions here, if only as small a minority as the Jews themselves are, perhaps to help you figure out, of course, your own thoughts on the matter.

In general, I believe it is inappropriate for a mob of faculty to promote their opinions to you this way. There is a bullying process that goes into acquiring signatures that is inconducive to free and open inquiry. This document may also make some of you uncomfortable, and feel unsafe in the classrooms of those who signed it. Are these professors looking at their Jewish students, thinking about those Jews and their evil Jewish supremacy? How could you object to or protest this statement, and expect to prosper in that professor’s class, under the threat of the professor’s grade? At least two staff members in the admissions department also signed it. What signal does that send to Jewish prospectives? That their applications will be treated fairly, when the admissions staff suspects them of Jewish supremacy? For that reason alone I register my objection to it. (I only share my opinion here in response, having failed to persuade my colleagues to desist from their disgraceful action and unable to let it go uncontested.)

The encampments the statement endorses are not a matter of “free speech.” There are many permissible venues and manners of expression, which many of these same people have been taking voluminous advantage of for the past seven months. These encampments violate numerous campus regulations and sometimes local laws, and create enormously unsafe environments for all parties, not to mention significant destruction of lawns and other property. They also massively infringe upon the rights of other members of the community. Your right to free speech is not a right to commandeer a space, destroy property and occupy buildings, threaten and intimidate others, and inflict your opinions upon people who don’t wish to hear them. Nor does it entitle you to disrupt the activities of others, block their access to campus spaces including libraries, and prevent them from obtaining the education they are paying enormous amounts of money for. These are not activities protected by the First Amendment. These are crimes punishable by law.

Perhaps you support the cause. But just because you think your cause is just doesn’t warrant your breaking the rules, rules you agreed to follow when you matriculated and which actually protect everybody, including you. Those who endorse this statement apparently think the rules don’t apply to them and their cause. Well, if they don’t apply to them and their cause then they won’t apply to anyone else and their cause, and we descend into anarchy. We are seeing literally out of control situations on numerous campuses, including many incidents of physical violence. Just the previous week at UCLA a Jewish woman was beaten unconscious and a Jewish man was chased down and tased. These encampments are anything but peaceful, in manner or in content. We shouldn’t want that here, or anywhere, if we believe in genuine free speech and actual education. You wouldn’t accept the Proud Boys behaving on a campus this way, or the KKK, or the Westboro Baptist Church, and you shouldn’t accept anyone behaving this way, much less behave that way yourself.

For those reasons alone you should distance yourself from this statement.

But there are also the deeper concerns.

There’s not a shred of solidarity here with the Jewish constituents of these schools who, still reeling from the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, have dealt with seven months of campus celebrations of that violence and calls for more, now culminating in mass illegal takeovers of public spaces broadcasting more of the same 24/7. There’s the gaslighting of the Jewish community, who have been relentlessly targeted visually, verbally, and in many instances physically on their own campuses, often not for being “Zionists” but explicitly for being Jewish. There’s the affiliation with “Faculty for Justice in Palestine,” a group whose conception of “justice” is the mass murder and ethnic cleansing of all seven million Jews in the Land of Israel: “We don’t want two states, we want all of it!” “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab!” are just two of the many similar chants heard at every single one of these encampments. In case those sentiments aren’t clear enough, the open justification and praise for the October 7 mass slaughter and calls for more October 7’s may help clarify. 

Don’t take my word by it. Start by reading the never-renounced 1988 charter of the Islamic Resistance Movement, i.e. Hamas, which drips with explicit Protocols of the Elders of Zion brand antisemitism and openly endorses the murder of every Jew on earth.¹ And since October 7, Hamas has openly and repeatedly declared its intention to repeat October 7 as many times as necessary to achieve its goal, and that its goal is to remove all the Jews from river to the sea and from north to south. Then look at every one of these encampments and notice the open endorsement of, and celebration of, Hamas and its tactics: “Resistance is justified!” “By any means necessary!” are just two of the many similar chants heard at every encampment, sometimes illustrated by images of homicidal hang gliders in case anything was unclear. Every single person in these camps advocating “for Palestine” right now is, de facto and mostly de jure, advocating for Hamas, and its Islamic-supremacist vision of Jewish-elimination “justice.”

To advocate for these encampments is to advocate for the message they are conveying. 

It is to advocate for the destruction of the one sliver of a Jewish state in the world, which for some reason is objectionable even though the 100+ Christian majority, the 50+ Muslim majority, and the 20+ Arab states seem to raise no problems. The 13.3 million km² of Arab sovereignty is just fine, but the 25,000 km² of Jewish sovereignty—one five-hundredth of the land mass—is just too much.

I understand that some of you may actually agree with those aims. That’s your prerogative. But then please do not advertise yourself as being for “peace” and “justice” when you advocate the mass murder and ethnic cleansing of millions of people. 

It’s hard to believe but things only get worse as we go to the document itself.

---

Par. 1. “choosing to remain neutral in the face of a genocide is, itself, a political position.” 

Of course it is. But so is calling what is happening in Gaza a “genocide.” The inflammatory lie that Israel is perpetrating a “genocide,” much less an “ongoing” one, is in fact as vile as the “Jewish supremacy” lie above.

“Genocide” is what Hamas explicitly seeks (read their charter!), repeatedly attempts to perpetrate (they’ve started five wars since illegally taking over Gaza in 2005), attempted to perpetrate on October 7 (they hoped to go deeper into the country), and repeatedly vows to perpetrate again. After reading their charter, look at literally dozens of their public statements documented on sites such as the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) and Palestinian Media Watch (PMW).

In contrast, in an act of anti-genocide, Israel is attempting to remove the relentless genocidal threat on its borders, as well as rescue its hostages, fighting a just war using just means. Every civilian casualty is a tragedy of course, but regrettably there has yet to be a war without them. The problem is only magnified by Hamas’s use of its population as human shields, hiding itself in tunnels deliberately built under hospitals, mosques, schools and often fighting in civilian clothes. The massive measures the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) takes to minimize civilian casualties in these circumstances while targeting militants—far more than any other army in the world—are widely documented, as is the massive quantity of humanitarian aid delivered daily. (It is literally unprecedented for a state to provide such aid to its enemy during a war.) Unless you call every war a genocide—which this faculty statement does not, for it says not a word about the numerous other ongoing wars in the region that are producing far more casualties and displacement than this one—it is an antisemitic blood libel to call this war, on Israel’s side, a war of Jewish self-defense, a “genocide.” This statement obscenely converts Israel’s efforts to defend Jews from genocide into a Jewish effort to perpetrate genocide—thus dehumanizing Israelis and legitimizing those actually pursuing the genocide against the Jews. Here both Orwell and Goebbels would be proud.

I’m also happy to analyze the alleged numbers of casualties with you, if you are interested. (I have a separate piece available upon request, if you’re interested.) Here, let’s only note that the war largely stopped several months ago, the number of casualties diminishing to near zero in that time. More importantly, just this week the United Nations drastically reduced its count of the casualties, roughly halving the number of alleged women and children and demonstrating that the numbers were never reliable in the first place. The idea that there is an ongoing or pending genocide somehow justifying these emergency encampments is simply ludicrous.

Even if you still somehow think it is a genocide, there is an obvious way to stop it: Hamas could return the hostages and the war stops instantly. Somehow the “ceasefire now” encampments ignore that Hamas has rejected at least a half-dozen ceasefire proposals in the past few months, including one just this week, an odd thing to do if their people were confronting genocide. The reality is that it is a war, it is a two-way war, and they wish to keep fighting, because they believe they can win. These encampments are not protesting a “genocide” as the statement would have you believe but calling for Israel to be destroyed, in support of the Hamas plan to murder and ethnically cleanse 7 million Jews from the area. 

That strikes me as a far less noble aim. 

If your ultimate goal is peace in the region—peace of the coexistence sort, rather than peace of the “genocide the other” sort—then you should advocate for the defeat of Hamas which openly declares and perpetrates its permanent genocidal war against the Jews. But if your goal is “peace” of the “genocide of the other” sort, then at least please stop advertising yourself as “anti-genocide.”

---

Par. 2. “peaceful protest.” 

This is just a bald-faced lie. These encampments are peaceful neither in manner nor in content.

Many are veritable mob scenes, with masked individuals marching and angrily and enthusiastically chanting support for violence (“Globalize the intifada!” “Burn Tel Aviv to the ground!” “Glory to the martyrs!”). They burn bright intimidating smoky flares at night, constantly disrupt the business of the university in every way, forcefully take over buildings and spaces and physically block or restrict people from accessing them, produce a massive amount of graffiti and destruction of lawns and property, openly harass and threaten other students, with numerous incidents of physical assault (including with sticks, flagpoles, and, as mentioned above, tasers), all of which violates the basic legal and university rights of others to get on with their own business on campus. Oh, and they are mostly breaking the law and physically resisting arrest, including throwing bottles at police officers. One suspects (again) that if remotely similar encampments were set up by White Nationalists against minorities or by homophobes against queer people, the statement signers would find them far from “peaceful.” Just imagine a group of white students preventing a Black student from accessing a public space, or a bunch of Jews blocking a Muslim student. You wouldn’t (and shouldn’t) tolerate that for a moment. It is only if you think that harassing, intimidating, and assaulting Jews is all right that you could find these encampments “peaceful.”

There are time, place, and manner rules that allow free expression that is “peaceful.” These encampments are not that.

Nor is what these protesters are calling for “peaceful,” per next paragraph:

---

Par. 3. “These students assembled on campus property to voice their opposition to institutional study abroad programs in Israel that violate college nondiscrimination policies; college and university investments in U.S. companies that produce weapons for sale to Israel; and Israeli companies that develop surveillance and policing technologies deployed to advance the ongoing genocide of Palestinians.” 

That, and to openly call for the violent destruction of the only tiny Jewish state in the world, and the murder and ethnic cleansing of its 7 million Jewish inhabitants. 

But first, the “ongoing genocide” of the Palestinians? Is that the one where their population has increased massively since 1948? The Arab population in Israel in 1948 was about 156,000; in 2024 it is 2.6 million. The Palestinian population in the territories in 1960 was about 1.1 million; in 2020 it was about 5.1 million. The Palestinian population in Gaza in 1948 was about 250,000, while in 2024 it is about 2.2 million. In May of 2024 the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics released a report stating that “the Palestinian world population was 14.63 million by the end of 2023, which means that the number of Palestinians in the world has doubled about 10 times since [1948],” or (more precisely) has increased by 1000%. Worst. Genocide. Ever. That remark alone tells you that the faculty statement is either based in ignorance or in malevolent deception. Again, the “genocide” lie is a dehumanizing tactic to justify violence against Jews. 

You’ll notice here that the statement proclaims itself to be against “discrimination” at the same time that it openly advocates discrimination against Israel and Israelis. Oddly it supports the boycott of Israeli study-abroad programs in the name of “anti-discrimination,” yet (a) ignores the fact that Israel’s universities are highly diverse (40% of Haifa students are Arabs, for example, double their representation in the population) and (b) has not a word to say about Arab study-abroad programs in the many Arab countries that refuse to allow Israelis even to enter the country, much less study there. (Never a mind a word about Qatar, which donates billions to American universities while also donating billions to Hamas in support of their genocidal endeavors and hosting their leadership in style.)

It also claims to defend the principles of “free speech” at the same time that it advocates an academic boycott, a major direct violation of those principles—and one directed not at the real and major human rights violators (and military malfeasants) in the world, such as Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and most of the Arab enemies of Israel including Hamas—but strangely only at the one Jewish state. Students for “Justice” in Palestine have an official policy of anti-normalization: they refuse to dialogue or collaborate with Zionists and openly endeavor to exclude Zionism and Zionists from campus. (“Zionism (and Zionists) off campus!” “We don’t want no Zionists here!” and just plain “Fuck Zionists!”: just several of the many similar slogans in the encampments.) This is about as anti-free-speech as you can get, and it’s what these encampments are about as well: they restrict who may enter their camps, they compel assent to their “rules” and demands, they carefully manage journalists and limit what they cover and who they interview, they openly call to boycott, discriminate against, and prevent other campus members from expressing their opinions as part of their openly stated goal of silencing, excluding, and removing anyone supporting Zionism. Some free speech! In the name of free speech this statement supports those who want to suppress free speech. Orwell again would be proud.

It's a neat trick: in the name of “free speech” these folks want to disseminate all the lies they can about Israel and Jews while ensuring there is no one around to question and refute. They want to libel Israel with charges of “genocide” and not have anyone around to point out the libel. They want an academic boycott of Israel because they don’t want you to meet and hear from Israelis, who just might turn out to be decent human beings like yourself. They want to stop study abroad programs in Israel because they don’t want anyone to go there and see for themselves—that Israel is nothing like the evil monster they portray it to be. Their goal is literally, openly, to remove Zionists—and therefore most Jews—from campus. In the name of “free speech”! 

They also claim to be “against war,” but they are really only against Israel waging war, to defend itself. The encampments they support celebrate the act of war that was October 7—they don’t call on Hamas to surrender or release hostages, they don’t protest when Hezbollah initiates and perpetrates a war against Israel, they don’t protest when missiles are fired from Syria and Iraq and Yemen at Israel—and when Iran recently fired 300 missiles and drones at Israel this was warmly celebrated all over. Their endless chants, often in marches and at night with flares, of “Intifada Intifada!” “The only solution is intifada revolution!” and “By any means necessary!” are not the calling cries of a peacenik movement. No one seems troubled by the contradiction between those chants and their other calls for “ceasefire”—because what they mean is only that Israel should cease while Hamas continues to fire. (Indeed they say they want a “ceasefire,” but offer not a word against Hamas every time Hamas rejects another ceasefire.) These encampments in fact openly advocate war and violence against Israel and Jews, call for the destruction of the Jewish state, and do everything in their power to prevent Israel from defending itself—by depriving it of weapons in the “demand” above, by depriving it of legitimacy (in calling its self-defense “genocide”), and by trying to silence and exclude anyone who might think otherwise. 

That is what these encampments are calling for, and what this faculty statement is therefore supporting.

You don’t get more “pro-war” and “pro-genocide” than this.

Just imagine if even a small group of students illegally took over campus endorsing, celebrating, and calling for more of “the Nakba,” harassing and intimidating Palestinian and Arab and Muslim students. Or White Nationalists did so, calling to reinstate Jim Crow laws or ship African-Americans back to Africa; or religious extremists did so, calling to convert or expel queer people. One cannot doubt that the signatories would be up in arms to protest and remove such non-peaceful encampments calling for such non-peaceful measures.

Yet somehow it is all right as long as they are merely targeting Jews.

---

Par. 5. “contributes to the moral panic that conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism and terrorism.” 

Even leaving aside the offensive gaslighting of Jews here, whose experience of antisemitism is casually dismissed as “moral panic”: Nobody “criticizes Israel” more than Israelis and Jews, but calling for (or perpetrating!) the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state and the mass murder and ethnic cleansing of its 7 million Jewish inhabitants is not exactly “criticism of Israel.” Calling for and taking measures in support of the mass murder and ethnic cleansing of 7 million Jews just is supporting terrorism. The only conflation here is by those who conflate their antisemitism with some sort of principled stand against “genocide” or in support of “free speech.”

Now beyond the numbered paragraphs of the statement:

“We also stand in solidarity with Israeli organizations and activists who oppose Israeli apartheid and Jewish supremacy such as Shoresh.”

There’s the vile racist “Jewish supremacy” lie. One wonders whether the authors been enjoying their reading group with Hamas for Protocols of the Elders of Zion? Perhaps they are in such a frenzy delegitimizing Israel that they don’t realize how profoundly antisemitically offensive that phrase is. In subsequent faculty discussion among the signatories, some did express discomfort with the document’s use of the phrase, only to be answered by disturbing efforts at contextualization, nuancing, and fig leafing it away by invoking some Israelis who agree with it. But no amount of those takes away the fact that this is literally Elders-of-Zion-level antisemitic rhetoric that Connecticut College professors are happy to sign their names to. 

It is also dangerous rhetoric. If a person believes in “Jewish supremacy” they will naturally support drastic measures against Jews, up to and including genocide. Witness the Nazis, directly inspired by the same Protocols as our Conn Coll faculty, and Hamas, whose openly genocidal founding charter liberally quotes from the Protocols. That connection, incidentally, is not accidental. The Muslim Brotherhood worked with the Nazis during WWII, and the infamous Mufti Hajj Amin Al-Husseini, who represented the Brotherhood as the long-time leader of the Palestinian national movement, spent the war years in Berlin collaborating with the Nazis to bring the Final Solution to the Middle East. (I’ll spare you the famous pictures of the Mufti chatting it up with Hitler, enjoying the sun with S.S. head Himmler, and saluting Muslim Nazi soldiers.) Hamas is of course the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza. It may be tempting to distinguish the two (as some faculty members, expressing their discomfort, seemed to do: “Nazism bad, Palestinianism good”), but in the context of the current war, supporting Hamas—as literally every measure demanded by the encampments and by this faculty statement in fact does—just is supporting literally the same Nazi eliminationist program.

This point in fact reveals the fundamental problem, the tunnel vision that perhaps leads so many to casually endorse “Jewish supremacy.”

Israel is surrounded by openly genocidal neighbors. Just in the current war (again) it has been attacked by Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and of course, Iran, with upwards of 16,000 rockets and missiles hitting this 1/32^nd-the-size-of-Texas sliver of a country. Hamas has launched five wars against Israel since violently seizing Gaza in 2007, and that was after two decades of launching suicide bombers, in total murdering thousands of Israelis. And yet all these faculty members can apparently see are Israeli offenses and “crimes,” which they describe using such inflammatory (in fact defamatory) language as “apartheid,” “(Israeli) genocide,” and “supremacy.”

Israel was founded for a reason: to be a safe haven for Jews, perhaps the most persecuted, oppressed, pogromed and then genocided people in history, to be a country where they can live in security, pursue their religion and culture, speak their language. We can debate the justice of that founding indefinitely, but keep in mind one simple fact: that as of the November 1947 U.N. partition proposal there were zero Palestinian refugees. Zionism itself didn’t produce the refugees, but the war that the many Arab armies started to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state. To the contrary, there was significant Arab immigration into Palestine during the early twentieth century precisely because Zionism developed the country, and there was room enough for all. Had the Arabs accepted partition we might have been celebrating the 76^th anniversary this month of the two states living next to each other in peace.

The Arabs chose war, and continued to choose war for decades, and in the form of Hamas, continue to choose war.

Now ask yourselves what the Israelis—the Jews—were supposed to do in this context, apart from consenting to be massacred.

What they did do in fact is remarkable.

Despite ongoing threats and attacks faced by no other country, despite literally relentless terrorism directed at its civilians from the 1920s to this day, Israel built a flourishing democracy that enshrines civil and legal equality for its many minorities, including its at-times hostile Arab minority. It is far from perfect; no country is. It is not free of discrimination and oppression and inequality; no country is. It is a Jewish country in various respects, which creates tensions and challenges and perhaps some inequalities for its minorities; but perhaps every country has a majority nation or culture with similar tensions for its minorities. And yet despite being surrounded by genocidal enemies, dealing with the onslaught of terrorism, and its difficult ambition of being a Jewish safe haven it still manages to be a country where its sometimes hostile Arab minority has more rights and freedoms than Arab citizens have in most Arab countries. It manages to be a country where its own citizens, such as the Israelis exploited as fig leaves above, can freely and openly vociferously condemn its government and its society, even labeling them with such inflammatory labels as “apartheid” and “Jewish supremacy,” if that’s how they feel.

Those who believe in free speech—as the faculty statement claims it does—ought to be applauding that amazing achievement. Not just the critical content itself, which they do, but the fact that Israelis are actually free to say it.

Compare that to literally every single one of Israel’s neighbors, most of whom are its open enemies and actively engaged in trying to murder its citizens. Not a democracy among them, neither freedoms nor basic human rights for their citizens, no equality for their minorities (look up how Palestinians are treated in Lebanon and Syria!), castrating their gays or hanging them, and certainly no rights for their Jews—because they all long ago ethnically cleansed their Jews, hundreds of thousands of them, most of whom were forced to leave everything behind and ended up in Israel because they had nowhere else to go (and are now condemned for living there because they didn’t consent to be massacred!). Compare Israel just to the Palestinian Authority, which forbids land sales to Jews, restricts Jews from accessing holy sites under P.A. jurisdiction, and has for decades run its “pay to slay” program, rewarding those of its citizens who murder Jews. Or Hamas, whose founding charter openly endorses genocide of the Jews and justifies it by the same Protocols that motivated the Nazis. If you’re looking for actual apartheid—legally enforced separation—then you don’t get much more of that than in the expulsion, restriction of mobility, subsidized murder, and wholesale genocide supported and perpetrated by nearly every single one of Israel’s neighbors and enemies.

Rather than myopically see only “Israeli crimes,” then, maybe the faculty statement should consider the crimes of all the surrounding entities; and maybe, just maybe, consider that much Israeli action is actually reaction, reaction to being surrounded by, dwarfed by, dozens of countries and hundreds of millions of people who wish to erase this sliver from the globe and murder its seven million Jews.

And they think “Jewish supremacy” is the problem.

Again: Israel was meant to be a safe haven for Jews from the relentless violence directed at them from every direction, including from the Arabs and Palestinians and the bona fide Islamist supremacists who seek to murder and ethnically cleanse Jews in the name of Islamic domination. (Read the Hamas charter!) If defending oneself from eliminationist violence is a form of “supremacy,” then we should also say Black cultural centers are motivated by “Black supremacy,” women’s advocacy groups by “women-supremacy,” trans-support groups by “trans-supremacy,” sexual assault survivors’ groups by “sexual assault victim supremacy,” and while you’re at it: the Palestinian national movement by “Palestinian supremacy.” (The Hamas charter literally opens with a Qur’anic verse stating, to Muslims, that “Ye are the best nation that hath been raised up unto mankind”!)

Or is only Jewish nationalism a form of offensively racist “supremacy”? Are only Jews trying to defend themselves from extermination “supremacists”?

And if you are opposed to “apartheid,” let me commend to your attention again two other cases of actual apartheid above: the treatment of Palestinians by Lebanon and Syria and the Arab apartheid against the Jews. The former, again, you should look up; shocking that the international “anti-apartheid” crowd has not a word to say, no campus encampments or faculty statements, about that. As for the latter, start with all the Arab countries expelling all their Jews. Indeed, there are also currently zero Jews living under the Palestinian Authority in Judea/Samaria and zero Jews in Gaza under Hamas. Hamas relentlessly launches wars and rockets and directs terrorist attacks against the Jews, including the genocidal October 7 massacre, while the Palestinian Authority restricts land sales to Jews, restricts Jewish access to Jewish holy sites, and funds the murder of Jews. Meanwhile there’s a 22 percent Arab population within Israel, with full (if imperfectly manifest) civil and legal equality, they serve in government, in the academy, in medicine, even in the army, many of them are Israeli patriots who prefer to live in Israel than under an Arab or Palestinian government, and in living in a democracy enjoy more rights and freedoms than most Arabs in most other Arab countries, including those under the Palestinian Authority and under Hamas. And far more rights and freedoms than Jews in most other Arab countries, because there mostly aren’t any—rights or freedoms, or Jews. 

Israel is the literally the only place in the region where Jews and Arabs actually coexist, however imperfectly.

And Israel is the “apartheid” state?

(For thorough debunking of some of the ludicrous non-government organization (NGO) reports on Israeli “apartheid,” see here.)

The apartheid lie, like the “Jewish supremacist” lie, is a vile, antisemitic lie—targeting not the dozens of authoritarian dictatorships that deprive all their citizens or subjects of basic human rights, and generally treat their minorities horrifically (including sometimes massacring them), but the one actual democracy in the region that strives to maintain equal rights under security conditions faced by perhaps no other democracy.

Oh, and that also happens to be a Jewish democracy.

“We are firmly committed to combating any form of racism, including … antisemitism…” 

This declaration would be amusing if it weren’t so offensive, and tragic—occurring in a statement that has not one word of solidarity for Jewish hostages or Jewish targets of physical assaults and victims of barbaric terrorist violence, and directly supports those calling for the mass murder and ethnic cleansing of 7 million Jews. 

“We are also firmly committed to combating all forms of oppression, including caste hierarchies and those targeting sexuality, trans and non-binary gender identification, and disabilities of any kind.”

Absolutely. But odd that anyone so committed would have not a word to say about the comparative status of these identity groups in Israel and under, say, Hamas (or the Houthis or Iran, per above). Seriously, what is the status of women, and gays, and trans and non-binary people under Hamas? How can one hold these values and yet support Hamas, as these encampments do and as those, in supporting these encampments, therefore do? (Many of the encampments also cheered when Iran directly fired 300 missiles at Israel, even as Iran was arresting and murdering women for not wearing hijabs.) Sure, it’s “pinkwashing” (another antisemitic lie) to point out that Israel has the biggest only “pride” parade in the Middle East, but if you’re “committed to combating” anti-gay bigotry in a statement of “solidarity,” isn’t there room for some solidarity with, you know, Israel, at least on this matter?

You know one of the multiple disabled people that Hamas murdered on October 7 was a teenaged girl with severe cerebral palsy. Her father had taken her to the music festival, and would pick her up and carry her to dance with her. First responders found her body not only at a great distance from her father’s—can you just visualize the cruelty of separating them before murdering them?—but also separated from her wheelchair, even further, unfathomable cruelty. I wonder if those who “combat all forms of oppression,” including against those with disabilities, might have a word to say about that. 

Crickets. 

“We strongly reject any claim by our administration that a critique of Zionism is antisemitic or that Zionism is ‘part of Jewish shared ancestry and religion’ … rather than a historically constructed political reality.”

Again, calling for (or perpetrating!) the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state and the mass murder and ethnic cleansing of its 7 million Jewish inhabitants is not “a critique of Zionism.” Call me crazy, but supporting the mass murder and ethnic cleansing of 7 million Jews just sounds a little bit like antisemitism to me.  

Never the mind the gaslighting here, too, that a majority of Jews in fact find the omnipresent angry violent hostility to Zionism to be motivated by or to express antisemitism; in the case of bigotry toward any other identity group it’s considered deeply offensive not to “listen to their voices,” but that doesn’t apply, apparently, to the Jews. 

These folks are trying to say their hostility is “anti-Zionist,” not “anti-Jewish”—and sometimes they succeed in keeping that mask on. After all, among the chants frequently heard are variations of “Zionists off campus!,” going along with all the anti-Israel boycott resolutions and referenda, the explicit policy of “anti-normalization with Zionists,” and the many examples of allowing Jewish students to participate in campus clubs and resources as long as they renounce Zionism. See? That’s only “anti-Zionism,” not “anti-Judaism” or “anti-Jew.”

Sure, but note: Zionism is the movement for Jewish rights and security, including the right of Jews to live in security in their ancestral homeland. All the above amounts to an extended campaign to prevent Jews (or others) from advocating for Jewish rights and security, to silence and exclude them unless they renounce Jewish rights and security. To be “anti-Zionist” or to exclude or silence Zionists is to exclude, and silence, those who believe that Jews have the same human rights all other people have, who believe that Jews deserve the same protections all other oppressed minorities have, who believe that Jews have the right to live in peace and security in their ancestral homeland. 

To be anti-Zionist is to be anti-Jew—all the rhetorical maneuvers one may employ to deny it, and the presence of some Jews in the anti-Zionist camp, notwithstanding.

(For the record, Zionism does not preclude similar rights for others, including Palestinians. And “peaceful coexistence,” such as that envisioned by a two-state solution, could respect the rights of both peoples. But you won’t find a single person in any of these encampments advocating for that. In fact you won’t find a single person who simply calls for “peace,” because what they want is war, a war of extermination. Israel should cease firing; they never call for Hamas to cease firing, much less release the hostages) 

The offensive gaslighting, and deeply disturbing historical ignorance, continues with their denial that Zionism is “part of Jewish shared ancestry and religion.” Are they really presuming to tell people who are Zionists what the nature and source of their Zionism is? Would they do that to any other identity group, override their self-conception of the nature and source of their identity? Sure, there are Jews who are non-Zionist and anti-Zionist, and these days anybody can pick and choose what they want from any religion, and anybody can form their personal identity any way they like. But to those Jews who decide to disaffiliate from the Zionism built into Judaism, built into ancient Judaism and medieval Judaism and three thousand years of Judaism to this very day: you go ahead and do you, but you have no place dictating to the other Jews—in fact still the significant majority of Jews—that their Zionism is not so rooted. And, frankly, non-Jews really ought to stay out of that conversation altogether. (Would you tolerate some white people explaining to Black people the nature of Black identity? A non-Muslim pontificating to a committed Muslim what Islam is about? You shouldn’t tolerate that here either.)

The Jewish people are indigenous to the Land of Israel. The Jewish people had sovereignty or autonomy there for some 1300 years, dating back nearly two millenia before the advent of Islam, and have maintained a continuous presence there for 3000 years. The Hebrew Bible, the Mishna, and one of the Talmuds were composed there. The Hebrew Bible drips with Zionism, and large parts of the Talmud (and many of the laws constituting the religion) are devoted to Jewish obligations that hold only in the Land of Israel. Those in exile continuously prayed to return, and Jews have returned from exile, in small numbers and large, continuously for the past 2000 years. They were already a majority in parts of the Land, including Jerusalem, from the early 19^th century, before modern political Zionism. 

That is “Jewish shared ancestry and religion,” and is the source for most Jewish Zionists’ Zionism. 

How profoundly offensive to suggest otherwise.

To be anti-Zionist is therefore to be anti-Judaism and anti-Jew. 

“We are firmly committed to support and encourage the free exploration of ideas without

fear of intimidation or censure, most especially for our students.”

This would be the most amusing line in the statement were it not also so painfully tragic. For so proclaim those who endorse academic boycotts, who advocate for those trying to remove certain points of view entirely from campuses, doing so in massive illegal coercive mob-scene encampments that are simply rife with “intimidation and censure” of their fellow students. If this is how you feel then you ought to be demanding the dismantlement of the encampments, “by any means necessary”—because dismantling them is actually essential for the principles you claim to uphold. 

Unless your principles don’t apply to the Jews. 

I am happy to engage in good-faith conversation with anyone who is interested.

AP

1. Protocols is of course an infamous early 20^th century antisemitic forgery that produced the conspiracy theory of the malicious Jews attempting to control the world.