The Antisemitic Campus: Decolonize Palestine

There are several matters fomenting antisemitism at universities. One of them surrounds the topic of “decolonialization” and its impact on Jews on campus.

It is a plain fact that many European countries planted colonies in far away lands. The United Kingdom planted flags in the Americas, South Africa, India and Australia. Portugal took over Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Macau and others. Belgium took the Congo. France had controlled Morocco, Algiers, Tunisia, Senegal, Cameroon and Madagascar. Spain took much of Central and South America while Italy took Libya. It seemed that any European country with a fleet sailed the world from the 15th to 19th century and seized lands and goods.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, European countries left their colonies and those emerging countries had varying degrees of success establishing new functioning governments. Universities established departments devoted to this topic, which analyze how the past 75 years shape events today, such as Brown University connecting the 2011 Arab Spring to “Decolonization, Development and State Building in North Africa.”

Many of the departments and conferences consider how post-colonial state-building left countries vulnerable to autocratic regimes. The issues are typically handled by region, such as Columbia University discussing decolonialization in the Americas in the Latin American Studies department and those in Africa in the Middle East Studies departments. Other schools do much the same.

Things devolve when it comes to Israel.

Many professors in Middle East Studies departments are deeply anti-Israel. They consider the Jewish State to be a colony thrust upon the local Arab population by the United Kingdom and other countries after World War I. They ignore the fact that the UK did not send any Jewish citizens to Palestine nor did the British seize local resources for British use.

Most glaringly, the anti-Israel professors ignore the fact that Jews are indigenous to the land of Israel. The history of Jews and the core of Judaism is in the Jewish holy land.

Those basic truths are not only ignored on university campuses, but a counter-narrative is proffered. For example, Columbia University’s Joseph Massad called the Jews in the Bible “Palestine Hebrews,” ignoring the reality that Arabs did not come to the land en masse until the 7th and 8th centuries.

It’s grossly antisemitic, and ignored by the school administration.

Beyond the cultural appropriation and historical theft, the anti-Israel movement manufactured a lie that Zionism isn’t even Jewish. At a BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) vote at the University of Wisconsin in 2017, a student said “Israel in its inception is not a Jewish idea but a European one,” a principle at the heart of the decolonialization project.

That insane idea is gaining backers. The Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism (ICSZ) is hosting conferences to advance this proposition in universities around the country. According to its “Points of Unity” which people must sign-on to, the number one affirmation is “Zionism is a settler colonial racial project. Like the US, Israel is a settler colonial state. The Institute opposes Zionism and colonialism, and abides by the international, Palestinian-led call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions.”

Its webite goes on that it “aims to support the delinking of the study of Zionism from Jewish Studies, and to reclaim academia and public discourse for the study of Zionism as a political, ideological, and racial and gendered knowledge project, intersecting with Palestine and decolonial studies, critical terrorism studies, settler colonial studies, and related scholarship and activism.”

This group is trying to sever Jews from the Jewish State and Zionism, and place Zionism in the camp of “decolonial studies” and “critical terrorism studies.”

It is Abhorrent. Repugnant.

And given air at today’s universities.

This antisemitic group is made up of a bunch of teachers in the California school system, teachers at New York University who pushed to boycott Israel, Sarah Lawrence, UMass, and Jewish anti-Zionists like Jewish Voice for Peace and Alissa Wise.

Not surprisingly, this group masks its Jew-hatred under the guise of “academia.” It said that Jews had the October 7 savagery coming to them as part of decolonialization, and was outraged at Jews demanding justice. ICSZ wrote an “open letter to universities and other institutions, demanding they retract their statements endorsing Israeli genocide against Palestinians.” By “genocide”, they meant Israel trying to rescue 200 hostages seized by Hamas, pursue maximum justice for the Satans of Gaza who butchered 1,400 Israelis, and try to return the region to coexistence on either side of the border. Equally upsetting to these evil people at ICSZ, they were “horrified by the ubiquity of messaging from our university administrations that has expressed empathy for Israeli life,” because beheading children and raping women doesn’t deserve “empathy” if the “victims” are Jewish “colonizers.”

This is the state of American academia.

Universities are miseducating students that Jews have no history in the land of Israel and that the Jewish State’s founding was a racist European colonial project. They believe that Israel’s continued existence is an “ongoing Nakba” and Israel must be dismantled “by any means necessary,” which includes the October 7 massacre.

When Joseph Massad of Columbia University wrote about the “start of the Palestinian War of Liberation,” he did not see Arab terrorists hacking children to death and killing the elderly; he saw freedom fighters throwing off the yolk of oppression of Jewish invaders as a moment of “jubilation and awe.”

This depravity is no longer a small fringe. Consider that Brown University hosted “Decolonizing Palestine: Hamas between the Anticolonial and the Postcolonial,” which promoted the idea to “normalize and globalize Hamas.” (27:00)

America’s universities are indoctrinating students in the antisemitic screed of the Hamas Charter, retouched with leftist jingoism to support the slaughter of Jews. And they are pushing the movement to go global. Jews on campuses everywhere have every reason to be terrified.

ACTION ITEM

Demand antisemitic professors and clubs like Students for Justice in Palestine be kicked off campus.