VAIDA: I'm an Israeli citizen. Students' pro-Iran bile exposes new depths of anti-Semitic rot in higher education.
The dust had barely settled from Iran’s unprecedented April 13 drone and missile attack on Israel when Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)—who else—launched its rhetorical volleys against the Jewish state.
I’m a dual Israeli-American citizen. I have a master’s degree from Harvard University in Middle Eastern Studies. I remember the program being incredibly hostile to Israel. Students questioned why Jews need our own state. ‘Nobody is coming after you in America,’ they said.
The campus reactions to October 7 proved them wrong. And the same anti-Israel groups’ defense of Iran’s attack on Israel exposes just how perilous the situation is for Jews in American higher education.
They are coming after us. They already have.
The dust had barely settled from Iran’s unprecedented Apr. 13 drone and missile attack on Israel when Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)—who else—launched its rhetorical volleys against the Jewish state.
Columbia University’s SJP claimed that the attack was merely “a response from Iran after Israel bombed Irans [sic] embassy in broad daylight in Syria . . . The escalation was and has been because of Israel.” The group also said that Israel “may now hope to use Iran as a distraction from its genocide in Gaza.”
Meanwhile, the University of California - Irvine’s SJP condemned the “fascist Jordanian monarchy” for playing a part in intercepting Iran’s attack, calling this action a “betrayal.”
Campus Reform covered these horrific reactions as part of our mission to expose liberal bias in higher education. The attacks were not limited to just college campuses, but when anti-Israel activism does take place on campuses, it’s difficult for uncritical thinkers to appreciate the depth of the danger the protests pose to Jewish and pro-Israel students.
It is easy to laugh off the antics of anti-Israel groups on campus, to see them as just obnoxious protestors who routinely interrupt events and who apparently can’t keep a hunger strike going for five minutes without reaching for a bag of Cheetos. But dismissing such activists is dangerous.
The same obnoxious protesters who cause us to roll our eyes will graduate one day—and take their toxic anti-Semitic ideas with them into their future positions at the State Department, universities, the federal service, Congress, and other institutions where they can spread their poisonous Jew-hatred.
And however much they try to disguise it with the cliche that “I’m not anti-Semitic, I’m just anti-Zionist,” there’s no hiding the Jew-hatred that honeycombs much of the anti-Israel feeling on campuses today.
How else to explain the anti-Israel demonstrations that broke out in schools following the Oct. 7 massacre?
In those early days after Hamas’s atrocity, Israel was still recovering and had not yet launched its justified counterattack—frequently and erroneously called a “genocide” by the SJP crew and their allies—so what exactly were these protestors protesting if not the very existence of the Jewish State?
Anti-Semitism can sometimes seem indestructible. It has thrived for millennia in wildly different contexts: Under Russian Tsars, Islamic caliphs, and communist dictatorships, culminating most tragically, of course, in the Holocaust.
Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, saw the ineradicable nature of anti-Semitism and realized the only response was to found a Jewish State as a safe haven. In his historic pamphlet, “The Jewish State,” he wrote:
“In countries where we have lived for centuries we are still cried down as strangers, and often by those whose ancestors were not yet domiciled in the land where Jews had already had experience of suffering. . . . old prejudices against us still lie deep in the hearts of the people.”
Since Herzl wrote his work in 1896, Jews are now decried as strangers even in our own ancestral homeland—Israel.
But rejection of Israel’s right to exist, as evidenced by the constant calls to “free Palestine from the river to the sea,” isn’t the only example of anti-Semitism on campus.
You need only take a quick look at stories Campus Reform published just this year to see a cornucopia of examples, whether the story is about University of Massachusetts students posting lovely messages like “F*** the apartheid white supremacist, genocidal pedophile ‘state’” (That’s Israel, in case you were wondering), a University of California Santa Barbara Jewish student leader being personally threatened, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology student group expressing support for a Palestinian terror group, or Columbia Law School supporting an event with a professor who fanboys over Hamas.
Is it any wonder that “over 70% of Jewish college students say they feel less safe on campus” since Hamas’s massacre?
Rampant anti-Semitism on American college and university campuses is exactly why Jews need Israel.
Editorials and op-eds reflect the opinion of the authors and not necessarily that of Campus Reform or the Leadership Institute.
