Anti-Israel protests have been taking place in the campuses of the top universities in the United States and the West ever since October 7; the protest intensified with the beginning of the invasion of the Gaza Strip in mid-November.
Many people have redacted the motives behind the phenomenon to "antisemitism," but the truth is much more complex, and good old hatred of Jews is merely the tip of the iceberg in a well-oiled, well-timed, and well-organized campaign whose effects have been trickling down for years and were just waiting to erupt.
In April, the protests expanded to dozens of campuses and took a violent turn. In addition to flags of support raised for Hamas and Hezbollah and the burning of Israeli and American flags, protesters at several institutions clashed with police, called for an intifada and to "burn Tel Aviv," and threw firecrackers and teargas. At Columbia University, the rioters went further when hundreds of them broke into a university building, smashed windows, barricaded themselves inside for hours and, according to one maintenance worker, held him hostage.
How did Columbia University, whose official seal, which includes the explicit name of God and the name of the angel Uriel in Hebrew, and whose first president, Samuel Johnson, said that as soon as a child has mastered English, he should begin to learn Hebrew, "the mother of all languages and eloquence," become a bastion of anti-Israel sentiment and antisemitism? And how did students from the most liberal wing of the world's most prestigious institutions become defenders of terrorists whose values completely contradict everything these protesters believe in?
Same ideology, different terminology
"Workers of the world, unite!" Karl Marx declared in the Communist Manifesto. The father of communism's most famous quote accurately reflects Marx's ideology: ignore your national, religious, or moral affiliation and celebrate your class affiliation.
Canadian psychologist Dr. Jordan Peterson argues that by the end of the 1960s, it was clear to all that communism, in all its forms, had failed colossally and he blames the adoption of Marxism by the younger generation in the West on another ideological current, postmodernism. According to Peterson, after Marxism collapsed, postmodernists, who were also Marxists, were forced to change their rhetoric. They have replaced the proletariat and the struggle of the working class with the bourgeoisie with a struggle of oppressed against the oppressor, when in fact it is just the same ideology in different dress.
Here Marxist theories combine with the dominant cluster of theories in academic institutions in Western countries this century, critical theories. Critical theories are largely based on Marx's view that any struggle can be summed up as the oppressor versus the oppressed but add a dichotomous view in which once a person belongs to one of the camps, he is either an oppressor or oppressed. All the oppressed desires is equality, while the oppressor's sole desire is to preserve his privilege.
In this way, everyone who belongs to the group of oppressors is bad, even if that person is an infant, while members of the oppressed group are considered good even if they are terrorists who murdered the infant who belongs to the oppressors. Even if a person from the oppressed group is a successful person with high status, and even if he states that he is not oppressed, the critical theorists will reply that he has been "conditioned" to think this way by the oppressors. This constitutes a winning combination of an unfounded and irrefutable theory, together with the bigotry of low expectations.
The last colonialist
One of the most prevalent critical theories in the United States in recent years is critical race theory (CRT). The theory accepts the foundations of critical theory but also takes it another step forward: the Black race is inherently oppressed and therefore Black people are good, while the white race is the oppressor and thus the bad guys. The popularity of the theory stems from the American trauma of slavery, racism toward Black people, and what their ancestors did to Native Americans.
This is where American ignorance about Israel and the Palestinians, especially among young Americans, comes in. They believe that Israelis are white colonialists and accordingly bad, while Palestinians are brown natives and accordingly good. When even according to their own hollow moral assessment they ignore the fact that many Israelis are dark-skinned and came from Arab countries. In addition, these young Americans have bought into the lies of certain intellectuals – more about them later – that Israel invaded the State of Palestine and stole its lands. They ignore the fact that there are archaeological findings proving a Jewish presence in the Land of Israel as far back as before 1000 BCE, when the Arab conquest of the Levant and the Land of Israel came almost two thousand years later, in the seventh century CE.
These young people, wallowing in the guilt of the sins of their ancestors, seek to cleanse their conscience by fighting the last representative of white colonialism against the dark-skinned natives- i.e., Israel. Most of the non-Muslim students who march wearing keffiyehs on the streets of Western cities today do so not out of antisemitic motives, but from a place of identification with those they perceived as victims, as "oppressed."
Foreign funding
According to the U.S. Department of Education, since 2012, the Qatari regime has given $3,281,809,223 to about 28 universities across the United States. The Saudis and United Arab Emirates together contributed more than $2 billion during this period, in addition to about half a billion dollars from other Arab countries, such as Kuwait, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Syria, and even the Palestinian Authority, whose name was apparently removed from the Department's list for an unknown reason.
Some of these funds go to the advancement of Marxist and postmodern thought, and others are directed to more concrete anti-Israeli goals, such as Israeli Apartheid Week, campus advocacy activities about the Nakba, Palestine Film Week, and more.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Students for Justice for Palestine (SJP), the Black Panthers, and other extremist and antisemitic groups trained students involved in the current campus protests for months.
It is not only Arab countries that feature on the list of prominent donors to academic institutions in the United States. In second place on the list of donors is China, which transferred about $1.733 billion, Russia about $141 million, and even Venezuela has donated $4 million in the past twelve years, which brings us to a discussion of the "Red-Green alliance."
Dr. Kobby Barda, a researcher of American politics, wrote on the social network X that the Chinese modus operandi manifests itself in two ways: physical and cognitive. China's physical operations manifest in the production of synthetic opioid drugs, especially fentanyl, their distribution to Mexico, from where they enter the United States, which has led to a spike in the country's overdose death rate, with 109,600 people dying from opioid overdose in 2022. Its cognitive operations are reflected in the money that China transfers in various ways to American institutions, professors, and students. In the same way as investment from the Arab world, these funds are used to endear China and its culture to the American public; indeed, since China began to invest in American academia, almost no studies critical of China have come out of leading institutions in the United States.
The radical left ignores dark, fascist, and illiberal tendencies: the staunch opposition to abortion, the inferior status of women, the desire to impose Sharia law, support for terrorism, and antisemitism. Some circles on the Western left are willing to swallow antisemitism when it takes on the guise of "anti-Zionism," as, after all, it is white colonialism that is the enemy.
Anti-Western sentiment
If you ever look at feed on TikTok USA, you will see many young people who claim that America is the worst country in the world, the most racist country in the world, the evilest country in the world, and so on. These statements are not made in a vacuum and express something far deeper than just the rants of spoiled and disgruntled teenagers. The West has become ashamed of its values, its achievements, in what made it the world's leading civilization; to describe this shame it has come up with terms like "white guilt" – feelings of guilt for being a white person, especially a white American – now embellish the discourse of the world's greatest power.
Last November, the Chinese app was flooded by a wave of young Americans promoting a letter written by arch-terrorist Osama bin Laden and expressing solidarity with its contents, some even saying that the September 11 attacks, which killed 3,000 Americans, were justified and inevitable from Bin Laden's perspective. At the height of this phenomenon, I read Bin Laden's 2002 essay and expected to encounter some kind of intellectual challenge, but to my disappointment what I found was an inexhaustible cache of lies, historical distortions, and theories that ranged from "unfounded" to "absolutely baseless."
It is no coincidence that pro-Palestinian demonstrators burn American flags, chant "Death to America," desecrate American national monuments with graffiti, place keffiyehs on statues of America's founders, and replace American flags with Palestinian posters. A common term in American discourse is "Judeo-Christian values," and its accepted interpretation is Western values. Israel is not the disease, but only the symptom; the real disease in their eyes is Western values, liberty, and individual freedom. America is the West, and Israel is merely its representative.
The American philosopher Harvey Mansfield seems to have been right when he asserted that the principal task of contemporary conservatism is to save liberalism from liberals.
"The Corona Effect"
Fact One: Pictures of dead or people bleeding are never a pleasant sight, all the more so when children are involved.
Fact Two: Tens of thousands of people were killed in Gaza, many of them were filmed and photographed and these images were uploaded to social networks and television channels.
Result: The average American Joe, who knows nothing about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, sits and scrolls through the feed of his favorite social network and see in video after video and photo after photo, destroyed cities and countless dead people, and from here the path to supporting Gaza is short. He does not have enough time, attention, or interest in studying the subject in depth, reading about the history of the conflict, about Gaza before and after 2005, and he comes from Cancel and Woke culture that has long dismissed the possibility of dialogue with the other side and encourages the cowardly solution to "cancel it," and designate it as beyond the pale.
We were exposed to the mass panic created by social media content and its effects at the beginning of the coronavirus when without the horror videos from China, it is not at all certain that lockdowns, certainly not such aggressive ones, would have been imposed in so many countries around the world.
Ironically, perhaps the most significant factor in creating such a shallow culture of discourse in the United States and the West is social networks, which have immeasurably deepened societal polarization and driven the parties to a monolithic way of thinking and almost complete separation from the opposing camp. When a person does not study a subject in depth and does not hold a dialogue with those with opposing opinions, he refrains from challenging himself, and when he does not challenge himself, he degenerates. Many young Americans are confident in the justice of their path and values, but these perceptions are based on shaky foundations and when someone challenges their worldview, which they have no ability to explain rationally and profoundly, they immediately go on the defensive and react aggressively.
Intellectual autism
The younger generation is completely unaware of the horrors that took place under communism in the Soviet Union and China, and, as has often been the case in history, the students have taken the wrong side.
According to a recent Harvard University survey, nearly 45 percent of respondents aged 18-29, the group that makes up the majority of campus protesters, said they don't know enough about the situation in Gaza to form an opinion, and that was only the respondents willing to admit it.
Their lack of knowledge makes them easy prey for the phenomenon that Hebrew University philosopher Prof. Elhanan Yakira calls "intellectual autism." Academics who believe in radical postmodern and Marxist theories pounce on a single published lie, often using it in their articles, while they and their colleague build interpretation upon interpretation into a mound of lies as if they were absolute truth.
In his book "Industry of Lies: Media, Academia, and the Israeli-Arab Conflict" journalist Ben-Dror Yemini cites several such examples, among them an article published in The New York Times in 2011 by Prof. Joseph Massad of Columbia University Professor Joseph Massad of Columbia University in which he wrote that Netanyahu had called for the expulsion of 1.6 million Arab citizens of Israel in a speech at the UN. He constructed around this a whole theory about apartheid within Israel, adding that Tel Aviv is the only city in the West where there are no Muslims. Of course, these claims were outright lies, and, accordingly, so too was the theory constructed upon them. Incidentally, Netanyahu's only reference to Israeli Arabs in that speech was to state that "Israel will continue to preserve the full rights of the Arab citizens of Israel." While lies may not have legs, unfortunately, they do have an effect.
The big question
We should not ignore the dangers and potential impact of the student protests, but it is important that we view them in perspective. Most Americans still support Israel, according to a recent Morning Consult poll. In addition, they would like colleges to ban political demonstrations, and the vast majority support the heads of colleges and universities asking police to protect campuses from violence. While these protests concern Israel in the short term, they are perhaps more relevant to the United States and the West in the long run.
President Abraham Lincoln once said: "America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves." The question the West must answer is not where it stands in the struggle between Israel and Hamas or the Palestinians, but whether it is capable of fighting forces that threaten to destroy them from within.
