Whose horse blinders were removed by the Morningside Heights Intifada.
Years of allowing student radicalism to fester in academia has created a campus culture of intolerant and violent behaviour.
The images from these past two weeks of screaming college students chanting slogans, surrounding "Zionist" students and blockading them from their shared campus juxtaposed with Congress waving Ukrainian flags are an apropos reflection of the time we are living in. Divisions in American society are getting wider and yet our elected officials are focused on funding foreign conflicts abroad. Israel, which was one of the nations whose funding bills were approved this weekend, would do well to read the room and see that the sun is setting on the era when support for the foreign aid packages was a consensus position supported by both parties in Washington. In a March 21 Pew survey 22% of adults said the US favours Israel too much, as opposed to only 16% that said it overly favours the Palestinians. In almost every category except "white evangelical Protestants" the figures tended to be skewed likewise. Even among Jewish respondents 13% said Israel is favoured too much as opposed to 18% for the Palestinians.
To me it is not surprising that this is happening on American college campuses, not just because there has been a general trend of radicalization within the academia and among students, but also due to my own research from several years ago into one of the movements IfNotNow which at the time was a new organization and part of the Momentum Movement. I profiled IfNotNow in 2019 for the Canadian Institute for Jewish Reseach (CIJR). Formed in 2014, this movement adopted Momentum tactics that were parallels to similar organizations like the Sunrise Movement which would often occupy the offices of politicians like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in order to compel them to adopt radical climate change policies. These organizations operated under the colour revolution model of organizing which used mass civil disobedience as a way to destabilize society and cause give their cause far more penetration into the public consciousness than their proportion of the population. How did I know this? Their organizers Mark and Paul Engler said so in their 2017 book This is an Uprising in which they encouraged activists to adopt tactics against Republicans and centrist Democrats akin to those of demonstrators that overthrew the government of Serbia in the late 1990s. IfNotNow's activities along this line included attempts to disrupt the Birthright Israel trips where big philanthropists of the Jewish community fully funded visits by young Jewish Amercians to Israel with the hope of at minimum fostering greater affinity toward the Jewish state, and more ambitiously to encourage them to move to Israel and raise families there. In doing this they shifted the focus from other anti-Israel Jewish groups in the past like JVP and J Street that focused on boycott campaigns or standard political lobbying.
By targeting Jewish youth, IfNotNow and other groups with similar tactics were engaging with a vulnerable sector of Jewish society, telling them that their youth imparted narrative of Israel as the state and homeland of the Jewish people was a whitewashed one that obscures a long and lurid history of oppression towards Palestinian Arabs. I have met and heard of "self-hating Jews" that join with the enemies of their people to accuse them of crimes, but this is the wrong term. These people don't hate themselves, but rather are desperate for the love and approval of others. I know of what I write because I lived through such a paradigm when I was in grade school. Because I used to read books on the topic from an earlier age, I began to reject the whitewashed view of Israeli history that my religious Jewish educators gave me. Yet this was also at the time of the Second Intifada, and as the violence progressed in Israel I realized that a wall defaced with graffiti is just as misleading as a whitewashed wall. I ended up serving in the IDF during this period and witnessing that many of the barriers imposed on the Palestinians have nothing to do with Israel but rather with their own dysfunctional society and political leadership. This learning process took several years, but the IfNotNow activists are still stuck staring at the vandalized wall and thinking that it is the truth.
Is this a free speech movement?
Are these protests simply an expression by students of their free speech? The wild scenes at Columbia and elsewhere are only the latest in a string of radical takeovers of campuses that arguably began with the 2015-16 University of Missouri student protests that were started over murky incidents of alleged racism. It wasn't just the angry tone of the protests themselves that resembles Mizzou, but also the behaviour of staff enabling student takeovers as exemplified by Melissa Click, a Greek life coordinator there who demanded that a student photographer stop filming the public protest and then demanded that other students remove him. Yesterday multiple professors at Emory University in Atlanta and graduate students at Ohio State were arrested. In some cases, such as at USC, most arrested protesters have no affiliation with the school. What I keep going back to is the newsletter article I had written to celebrated journalist Glenn Greenwald in November urging him to discourage violent protests, to which I received no response. Already then not long after the Oct. 7 atrocities,protesters came out in force to support the Palestinians before Israel had even launched its invasion of Gaza as a response. At that time multiple incidents of violence against demonstrators on both sides were recorded, including one at Columbia against an Israeli student. Unfortunately such incidents are now in the category of “dog bites man” story, meaning that they are so common that many news outlets no longer deem them worthy of reporting.
To this day Greenwald continues to insist the issue here is one of free speech, including during an interview with two Columbia protesters recently. But occupation of campus spaces, class disruptions and harassment of other students or staff is not free speech. Goading the Izz ad-Din Al-Qassam Brigades to target pro-Israel counter-protesters is not free speech. Protesting in the private home of the dean of UC Berkeley Law School after he invited students to come as guests for dinner, is not free speech. Greenwald should know this, he was a civil liberties attorney in a prior career. In a lot of my discussions about freedom of speech and censorship I encourage those Israel supporters who (unlike me) do support censorship to study the case Snyder v. Phelps (2011) concerning the picketing of military funerals by members of the anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church. In that landmark decision the court held by an 8-1 consensus that the obscene protests were protected First Amendment speech. This is because the WBC, obnoxious and hateful as they were, stuck to speech rather than coercion, disruption and physical confrontation. What if the protesters went to the private home of Greenwald, who is gay, and berated him in his own living room about the toils of the hellfire that is to come? That case would never reach the Supreme Court, because anyone with basic common sense understands that one is not entitled to come to someone else’s dwelling and protest. Yet the National Lawyers Guild is stepping up to defend the students who did just that at Berkeley to Prof. Erwin Chemerinsky.
So how do we deal with this cancer? When there are instances of pro-Palestine protesters trying to hold an event, collect signatures for a petition, or encourage a boycott it is important to support their free speech regardless of the message, because those are not coercive. The goal of JAFFA is to foster free speech values in Jewish American society. When solutions that result in overreach arise like a bipartisan bill put forward to create a campus anti-Semitism “monitor” who could penalize schools for lack of progress in combatting the bigotry, I naturally think this is the wrong approach. I would instead offer the following simple rules that should be followed:
Do not punish students for simple expressions of opinion even if they are bigoted. Universities and colleges are entitled to impose speech codes in their codes of conduct by law, yet there is little evidence that these are effective.
As for faculty, their participation in protests at their workplace and often in opposition to some of their own students should include professional discipline if they are seen to defame a specific group. Professors cannot be expected to be impartial to students on the other side of a barricade that they just spent hours yelling epithets at.
Any activity that is violent towards other people or their property should result in academic penalties (expulsion, suspension), criminal charges, and campus bans.
Individuals with no affiliation with a college or university may only demonstrate if they conform to its rules on such activities. If not they must be banned from the campus.
Organizations that continually disrupt campus life and violate rules must be banned and if they persist in their activities sued.
What these student activists, many of them affluent dilettantes, are often doing is curtailing free speech, intimidating dissent, and imposing their own monoculture. For those of us who have children, or who have lost relatives in the war (I have now lost two), this is a signal that the window has closed. I remain a believer in a free society in America and anywhere else possible, but I don't think this is the reality that my children will see if these trends continue. Today's students often make the choice to be anti-Zionist, but they are unwittingly (or perhaps not) creating Zionists out of Jews who otherwise would have been fine doing their degree in the USA and only visiting Israel as a vacation destination.