opinion
An Open Letter to the Editorial
Board of ‘The Harvard Crimson’
BY RICHARD L. CRAVATTS
I n a breathtaking display of tendentiousness and
a misreading of history and fact, you published
an editorial on April 29 in The Harvard Crimson
titled, “In Support of Boycott, Divest, Sanction and
a Free Palestine,” an outrageous column replete
with slanders against the Jewish state that called
for the Harvard community to commit itself to the
corrosive BDS campaign against Israel.
You suggested that the editorial was inspired by
the April demonstrations and programming of the
Harvard College Palestine Solidarity Committee
which, as part of Israeli Apartheid Week, “installed
a colorful, multi-panel ‘Wall of Resistance’ in favor
of Palestinian freedom and sovereignty.”
Even more importantly, you contended, falla-
ciously: “The admittedly controversial panels dare
the viewer to contend with well-established, if
rarely stated, facts.”
What are examples of those “facts” you
alluded to? One panel announced in capital
letters, for example, that “Zionism is: Racism‒
Settler Colonialism‒White Supremacy‒Apartheid,”
mendacious slurs that echo the notorious 1975
Resolution 3379 issued by the United Nations that
proclaimed that Zionism is racism.
Framing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a mat-
ter of race, as this foolish display did, and accusing
Israel of maintaining a system of apartheid is some-
thing that Israel-haters are fond of doing, even
when the charge is patently false. And the puerile
accusation of white supremacy against Israel is
as grotesque and unhinged as is the oft-repeated
claim that Israelis are the new Nazis, committing
genocide against the Palestinians. Both are not
only counter-factual but also forms of antise-
mitic expression described in the International
Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working defi-
nition of antisemitism.
Of course, your claim that the “facts” on the
HCPSC mock wall are “well-established” is only
true inasmuch as these are facts that live in the
minds of progressives and antisemites who care-
lessly throw around words without attention to
their actual meaning and import.
Your other preposterous contention that these
attitudes toward Israel — these supposed facts
— are “rarely stated” is so naive that only college
students who have just begun to counter anti-ac-
tivism could possibly believe them since the cam-
paign to slander, libel and destroy the Jewish state
has been in high gear for some two decades, and
this counter-factual language and the allegations
16 MAY 5, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
within it have been and continues to be ubiquitous
on campuses worldwide. It requires no bravery
at all to be an enemy of Israel on university cam-
puses seeped in such activism, as much as you
try to impute bravery on the part of those who
promote Palestinianism.
In justifying your position in this debate, you
remarked: “It is our categorical imperative to side
with and empower the vulnerable and oppressed.”
Really? Does that include Jewish civilians who
are being stabbed, rammed with cars, blown up
and showered with rockets in their sleep by the
genocidal terrorist organization of Hamas in the
Gaza Strip and lone-wolf Palestinian terrorists?
Or it is only the Palestinians you care about, who
have rejected statehood when offered to them on
multiple occasions, preferring instead to mount
an endless resistance against a sovereign state
they cannot and will not abide simply because its
residents are Jews?
You feel very
comfortable, sitting in
the safety of your
Harvard Square offices,
hectoring Israel to tear
down its security wall.
Calling for a BDS campaign to be unleashed
against Israel demands that, among the many
and various calamitous examples of human strife
and suffering occurring around the world, Harvard
should focus on and commit to denouncing only
one: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And more than
that — just as the Third Reich and Arab League
before them — you wish to target Jewish busi-
nesses, organizations and educational institutions,
and expel them from the world community.
You yearn for the “liberation of Palestine,” but
what do you assume such an event would result
in? When you refer to a liberated Palestine, are
you talking about the West Bank and Gaza, areas
that would comprise a new Palestinian state? Or
are you really describing and eagerly imagining a
liberated Palestine that BDS supporters and their
fellow travelers in the Arab world and in the West
actually seek — one that includes, and subsumes,
present-day Israel?
Israel knows this because of its experience after
cleansing Gaza of all of its Jews, that instead of
working on the creation of the beginnings of a
state for themselves in the Strip, the Palestinians
allowed Hamas to transform Gaza into a terror
enclave from which to continually assault Israel.
And that is something Israelis understandably
imagine could happen again were the West Bank
to be totally controlled by the Palestinian Authority,
Fatah or in another scenario, Hamas.
Conspicuously absent from your editorial is
any questioning or critique of Palestinian agency,
responsibility, behavior, political decisions or even
the nature of their culture and society. You feel
very comfortable, sitting in the safety of your
Harvard Square offices, hectoring Israel to tear
down its security wall, welcoming millions of Jew-
hating Arabs into its country as citizens, abandon-
ing territory it rightfully owns or won in defensive
wars, and otherwise making any concession you
and other critics of the Jewish state demand of
Israel, even to its own detriment and physical
safety — consequences you apparently could
care less about in your relentless quest for social
justice for the long-aggrieved Palestinians.
You make a careless reference to Israel’s killing
of Palestinians, including children, without any
context, failing to mention, of course, the incon-
venient fact that since the 1920s, Arabs have
resisted, through violence and attacks, any Jewish
presence in the Holy Land, including to the current
day. Like other enemies of Israel, you are quick to
count Arab bodies when they are killed by Jews,
but carelessly and immorally ignore the deaths of
innocent Jews in Israel at the hands of psycho-
pathic murderers who randomly attack civilians
without provocation, including the 15 innocent
people murdered randomly in the streets in the
past month as part of an uninterrupted campaign
of terror that you and your fellow travelers help
justify when you euphemistically excuse “resis-
tance” on the part of Palestinians.
The plea in your editorial to employ the corro-
sive BDS campaign as a part of the cognitive war
against the Jewish state again reveals that you are
either ignorant of or indifferent to the actual stated
intention of that movement — namely, extirpating
Israel completely, thereby “liberating” Palestine
and removing any annoying “racist” Jews from
what is now modern-day Israel. JE
Richard L. Cravatts, a Freedom Center Journalism
Fellow in Academic Free Speech and president
emeritus of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East,
is the author of “Dispatches From the Campus
War Against Israel and Jews.”
opinion
Embracing a Data-Driven Approach
to Engaging Jewish Young Adults
BY DAN ELBAUM
COURTNEYK / E+
M ark Twain once wrote, “When I was a boy of
14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly
stand to have the old man around. But when I got to
be 21, I was astonished at how much he had learned
in seven years.”
For decades, many mainstream Jewish com-
munal organizations have struggled with a sim-
ilar issue: Why don’t younger Jews see Israel in
the same way we do? Will their views change
with age, or do we face a fundamental, indeed
existential challenge to the relationship between
American Jews and Israel? The challenge of con-
nectiveness is no less real in Israel, where Israelis
who are fascinated by American culture evince
little interest in the American Jewish community if
an act of antisemitism has not occurred.
In contrast to the usual gloom-and-doom assess-
ments, however, a newly released survey from
the American Jewish Committee contains some
encouraging news on both fronts, as well as an
important call for the Jewish world to utilize a data-
driven approach to young adult engagement.
Let’s start with the good news. The survey
found that 72% of American and 89% of Israeli
Jewish millennials believe it is important for the
American Jewish community and Israel to main-
tain close ties. Overwhelming majorities of both
American and Israeli millennials also feel that a
strong state of Israel is necessary for the survival
of the Jewish people and that a strong Jewish
community outside of Israel is necessary as well.
At the same time, the survey underscored the
substantial challenges surrounding public opinion
on Israel among younger demographics in the U.S.,
particularly on college campuses. Most alarmingly,
more than one in four American Jewish millenni-
als say that the anti-Israel climate on campus or
elsewhere has damaged their relationships with
friends, and the same number say that the anti-Is-
rael climate on campus and elsewhere has made
them rethink their own commitment to Israel.
These findings reveal that the Jewish commu-
nity has a golden opportunity to cultivate a young
adult audience that could be far more receptive to
our message than we originally thought, but that
there is also a need to avoid breathing a collective
sigh of relief and resting on our laurels.
Despite an unprecedentedly partisan atmo-
sphere in both Israel and the United States, and
a relentless and well-funded effort by anti-Israel
groups to drive a wedge between young American
Jews and Israel, deep feelings of attachment are
positively thriving. That’s precisely why Jewish
leaders must use this data as a framework for fur-
ther bolstering young Jews’ connection to Israel
— and each other — on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Jewish Agency for Israel carries out this
mission through a number of initiatives. Yet at its
most basic level, our strategy is simple — bring-
ing more young Jews to Israel and more Israel to
young Jews. This includes Masa Israel Journey,
which since 2004 has brought more than 160,000
young adult participants from more than 60 coun-
tries to Israel for an extended period of time; shli-
chim (Israeli emissaries), who bring Israel-centric
educational and social programming to Jewish
communities in North America and worldwide;
and Partnership2Gether, which connects global
and Israeli communities in city-to-city and region-
to-region partnerships in which participants forge
meaningful connections through unique programs
and one-on-one encounters.
We must, of course, also meet our audience
where they are. Our work to foster U.S.-Israel con-
nections is increasingly incorporating an emphasis
on Israel’s diversity — a message that power-
fully resonates with today’s younger generations.
Last year, the Jewish Agency appointed Gadeer
Kamal-Mreeh, the first female Druze member of
Knesset, as the first Druze community member to
serve as a senior shlichah. She supports engage-
ment efforts regarding Israel on North American
college campuses, working closely with Hillel
International in Washington, D.C. We also hired
Sigal Kanotopsky, a well-known Ethiopian-Israeli
leader, as our U.S. Northeast regional director.
Crucially, the stories of Gadeer and Sigal show-
case the unique and diverse society of Israel.
In the campus arena, our response to the
highly concerning anti-Israel climate is the Jewish
Agency Israel Fellows program, in which shlichim
work at more than 100 colleges and universities
across North America to not only combat antisem-
itism and anti-Zionism, but to proactively cultivate
Israel-positive connections on campus by orga-
nizing educational programming on Israeli culture
and building diverse coalitions of students who
support the Jewish state.
Finally, the Jewish Agency is investing in smaller
Jewish communities that have been ignored for
far too long. In 2022, we will have two new
18-year-old emissaries on the ground in nine
smaller Jewish communities. Members of these
communities have lacked a meaningful interaction
with Israelis. Now, there will be an Israeli presence
in their lives that has not been there before.
The world is changing and our messaging needs
to change with it. Months ago, speaking about
Israel as a refuge for Jews in danger sounded to
many millennials like a speech from their grand-
father’s time. Today, with 11,000 new Ukrainian-
Jewish citizens of the Jewish state having escaped
a devastating war in their country, this idea takes on
a new meaning. It is for us as Israel’s advocates and
supporters to find the right words to make the case
for Israel. The AJC survey exhibits how a younger
audience may be prepared to hear that case with
open hearts and minds. JE
Dan Elbaum is head of North America at the
Jewish Agency for Israel and the president and
CEO of Jewish Agency International Development.
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