Days of Shame

Campus support for Hamas butchery is anti-Zionism at its very worst

A sad sign of the times: American university students supporting mass murder

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The progressive Left would have us believe that anti-Zionism has nothing whatever to do with antisemitism. Indeed, they take great offense to any such suggestion. Anti-Zionists aren’t against the Jews, we are admonished. No, they just want “justice for Palestine.”

Recent events have given the lie to such pleasing rationalizations.

And nowhere has this been more obvious than on American college campuses. Southern Israel was still littered with the bodies, often savagely mutilated, of men, woman and children, the overwhelming majority of them civilians, almost all of them Jews, when student activists rallied for “Palestine” at Harvard, Columbia, and many other universities across the country.

Two days ago, a coalition of student activist organizations at Harvard signed a statement holding Israel responsible for this terrorist atrocity. They lamented: “Israeli officials promise to ‘open the gates of hell,’ and the massacres in Gaza have already commenced. Palestinians in Gaza have no shelters for refuge and nowhere to escape. In the coming days, Palestinians will be forced to bear the full brunt of Israel’s violence.” The Hamas attack, which started this war—for war it is—received not the slightest criticism. All the outrage was reserved for Israel’s “colonial retaliation.”

At the University of Virginia, a group calling itself Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) will hold a “teach in” tomorrow, promoting ”solidarity with Palestinians resisting occupation.” This follows a statement by SJP last Sunday. “The events that took place yesterday are a step towards a free Palestine,” it read. “They reflect the power and resilience of the Palestinian people in the face of 75 years of continued brutal oppression.” Yes, indeed, it takes “power and resilience” in plenty to gun down unarmed concertgoers, and to behead infant children.

At the New York University Law School, the President of the Student Bar Association, one Ryna Workman, released a statement blaming Israel and the United States “military-industrial complex” for the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas and pledged her “unwavering and absolute solidarity for Palestinians in their resistance toward liberation and self-determination.” (Workman identifies as “non-binary,” incidentally, and uses they/their instead of she/her—but I’m not playing that game. Suffice to say that non-binary/antisemitic is an interesting example of intersectionality.)

It pleases me to report that Workman’s venture into postmodern geopolitical analysis caused the law firm that had planned to hire her after graduation to withdraw its offer.

So it went across the country as the people of Israel mourned their dead. I’ve long been dismissive of claims on behalf of the idealism of youth: ideas that the rising generation, full of optimism and superior wisdom, will lead humanity into broad, sunlit uplands. The Sixties refutes that shimmering vision and, as the historian Paul Johnson has noted, at every stage of his ascent to power Hitler’s earliest and most fervent supporters were to be found on Germany’s university campuses.

It’s not surprising, therefore, that the contemporary progressive variant of anti-Zionism manifests itself most stridently and achieves its maximum virulency on campus. And there it can be most profitably studied.

Anti-Zionism is antisemitism because it, like other variants of the world’s oldest and most popular prejudice, dehumanizes its object. Why are pro-Palestinian student activists unmoved by the spectacle of scores and hundreds of dead Jews, savagely murdered, their bodies mutilated and proudly displayed to the mob? Because to them, the victims are not people. They’re “settlers,” “colonial exploiters,” “white supremacists,” agents of “genocide,” practitioners of “apartheid.” The labels applied to them erase their humanity. Thus the anti-Zionist, surveying with cold eyes the carnage caused by Hamas, remains unmoved.

This is nothing new. The antisemitism of National Socialism operated in much the same way, applying to the Jews terms and images designed to dehumanize them. The central conception was that of the Jew as the Other: a “rootless cosmopolitan,” to use the term favored in the Stalinist Soviet Union. Uniquely among the peoples of the world, the Jews were said to have no fatherland, no roots in the soil of any land. They were, therefore, alien interlopers wherever they appeared, a corrupting, polluting presence.

No less than the Nazis, progressive anti-Zionists embrace this doctrine of Jewish rootlessness—but with a curious twist. Today, a Jewish fatherland does exist, and the position of the progressive antisemite is that it should not exist. Uniquely among the peoples of the world, the Jews are not entitled to a country of their own. They are rootless cosmopolitans with no claim on any land. Therefore, the Jewish state is a historical calamity, an abomination, and it must be destroyed.

As for the Palestinian Arabs, they’re nothing more than convenient proxies for the new generation of antisemites. Palestinian suffering, which is real enough, serves to justify the demonization and dehumanization of the Jews. It enables people like Ryna Workman to look past the scatter of bodies on the ground in southern Israel, toward a myth of the future: Palestine, free and pure from the river to the sea, purged of the Other.

Once can easily understand why such an ideology of Light and Darkness, of Righteousness and Evil, is particularly attractive to young people on campus—who are by nature dogmatic and intolerant, great simplifiers, and whose heads have been filled by their professors with the sludge of postmodern discourse. Thus for higher education in the United States, these have been days of shame.

It’s been somewhat heartening, however, to see that the outburst of support for Hamas on campus and elsewhere has touched off a backlash. Even AOC and the Democratic Socialists of America are backtracking, shamefacedly pretending that they really didn’t mean what they said at first.

This is all to the good. As noted above, one antisemitic outburst cost a law student her job offer. After the first round of such demonstrations at Harvard, the university administration released a characteristically craven—and tardy—statement. This drew a strong protest from 150 members of the Harvard faculty, who slammed the university for its failure to condemn the demonstrators who openly celebrated an act of terror. Numerous Harvard alumni also expressed their displeasure with the university’s pusillanimous behavior.

But the memory of that first, disgusting, response by anti-Zionist progressives on campus and elsewhere can’t be erased. Their antisemitism was fully exposed, nor is there any reason to think that they’ve changed their minds about the Jews. The war just beginning will last a long time, and I have no doubt that the vile rhetoric and hatred will come creeping back—on campus first of all—as the fighting intensifies, and the body count ticks upward