opinion
Should Israel Lead the Fight
Against Antisemitism?
BY BEN COHEN
T he just-published Annual Assessment of
the Jerusalem-based Jewish People Policy
Institute makes for sobering reading when it comes
to the section of antisemitism.
It’s not that the report contains any new infor-
mation or fresh insights. Largely culled from the
reporting of other institutions, the analysis in the
JPPI publication notes that during the last two
years, two events — the war in Gaza between
Israel and Hamas in May 2021 as well as the
persistence of the COVID-19 pandemic — have
profoundly shaped antisemitic discourse and our
perception of it. Further, it observes that the
“fight against anti-Semitism has attained increas-
ing awareness and support. It is the focus of more
conferences and seminars than ever before, and
legislative initiatives against anti-Semitism have
multiplied.” Yet despite “the proliferation of ini-
tiatives, some reports have declared the effort to
eradicate anti-Semitism a ‘failure,’” it adds.
Given that there is a question mark over whether
antisemitism can ever be entirely eradicated, as
opposed to controlled and marginalized, such
judgments on existing efforts are perhaps unfair.
Nevertheless, it is certainly true that in recent
years, an unprecedented infrastructure for coun-
tering antisemitism has crystallized in place at just
the same time that the problem has worsened on
a scale not witnessed since World War II.
Many democratic countries have appointed gov-
ernment officials to deal with the fight against
antisemitism and the preservation of Jewish life
more broadly. This global infrastructure is almost
20 years old, with the first steps towards its cre-
ation emerging in 2003 in the wake of a major inter-
governmental conference on antisemitism hosted
by the Organization for Security and Cooperation
in Europe. During that time, these officials have
stressed similar themes to counter antisemitism on
both sides of the Atlantic Ocean: more Holocaust
education in schools, more training for police
officers, emergency responders and other front-
line personnel in recognizing and responding
to antisemitism, and the active promotion of the
International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance
working definition of antisemitism, which includes
instances of anti-Zionism among its examples.
A particularly grim account of what the resur-
gence of antisemitism has meant for Jewish com-
munities was provided last week by Eddo Verdoner,
the government-appointed national coordinator to
counter antisemitism in the Netherlands. In an
14 OCTOBER 13, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
extensive interview with the Dutch newspaper
Trouw, Verdoner revealed that his office is inun-
dated with reports from Jewish students and
Jewish employees that complain of antisemitic
harassment — for example, Jews being told they
have to first criticize Israel’s policies toward the
Palestinians before they are permitted to partici-
pate in a campus debate.
“The result is that Jews hide their identity or
apologize for it,” Verdoner remarked. “Children
say: ‘Why am I even here?’ Or they don’t even
want to be a Jew at all … A child should be able
to express his identity at school, a student should
feel safe at university, and in the workplace peo-
ple should be able to say that they are Jewish to
colleagues without any worries.”
The Israeli government
has been an
important partner in the
fight against antisemitism.
global dimensions. Striking, too, is its conclusion.
“The return of anti-Semitism could become a
long-term fixture of global discourse, while the abil-
ity of Jewish communities and Israel to influence it
is limited,” it states. “Under these circumstances,
Israel, as the world’s strongest Jewish organizing
force, cannot confine itself to attempts to ‘fight
anti-Semitism.’ Israelis must understand what it will
mean to live in an era when anti-Semitism is a per-
sistent factor in Jewish life, and prepare for that era
accordingly, while formulating plans for appropriate
explanatory, diplomatic, and security activity.”
Hence, the report went on to say, the response
to antisemitism should be entrusted “a single
integrative body with powers and implementation
capabilities” created by the Israeli government.
For anyone familiar with the troughs and peaks
of antisemitism over the last 20 years, such a pro-
posal should give pause.
The Israeli government has been an import-
ant partner in the fight against antisemitism, for
example running a vocal social media campaign
to counter the anti-Zionist boycott, divestment
and sanctions movement through its Ministry of
Strategic Affairs. But it doesn’t follow logically
that the Israeli government should be the main
address for those who want to step up the fight
against antisemitism.
There are several reasons for this. To begin with,
antisemitism impacts Jews who are citizens of
other countries, not Israel; it is their governments
that need to be mobilized and it is local Jewish
organizations, not Israeli diplomats, that are best
placed to secure that response. Additionally, Israel
is not just a Jewish state but an active member
of the international community; in recent years
and months, Israel has encountered diplomatic
tensions with Poland, France and Russia among
other countries over domestic antisemitism. Will
making antisemitism a confirmed priority lead to
more or less clear thinking when it comes to for-
mulating Israeli foreign policy? The jury is out on
that question.
Finally, and depressingly, Israel taking the reins
in this particular fight will simply reinforce the
antisemitic meme that all Jews are closet Israelis
who are more loyal to Israel than their countries of
citizenship. Better, then, for Israel to remain what
it has always been — a beacon of hope and a ref-
uge for those who need one, but absolutely not a
substitute government for Jews in the Diaspora. JE
This disarmingly simple statement is more reveal-
ing than the dry statistics that document the rise
of antisemitic agitation in both Europe and North
America. Essentially, Verdoner is saying that the cli-
mate of fear among Jews in the Netherlands — where
the size of the community is estimated between
30,000 and 50,000 — has become so great that it is
a factor in their day-to-day routines. Will my Jewish
identity, many Dutch Jews are evidently asking them-
selves, create a fresh problem for me today?
As the JPPI report makes clear, these issues are
not confined to the Netherlands. In France too, it
notes, Jewish students are equally prone to hiding
their identities in the face of hostility, while the dis-
cernible movement of Jews from neighborhoods
that are less Jewish into those that are more so —
dubbed by some an “internal aliyah” — continues
apace. And hiding Jewish identity is even a factor in
the U.S. The JPPI report cited an American Jewish
Committee study which discovered that “four out of
ten American Jews say they have avoided posting
content online that would reveal their Jewishness
or their views on Jewish issues, and 22 percent
refrained from publicly displaying Jewish items.”
While the JPPI report doesn’t really tell us any- Ben Cohen is a New York City-based journalist
thing about antisemitism that we didn’t already and author who writes a weekly column on Jewish
know, it is nevertheless a useful overview of its and international affairs for JNS.
opinion
Campus Newspapers and the
Cognitive War Against Israel
BY RICHARD L. CRAVATTS
F or at least two decades, university campuses
have been roiled by anti-Israel activism,
manifested by Israeli Apartheid Weeks, BDS
resolutions rammed through student governments
and the toxic activism of groups like Students for
Justice in Palestine.
This cognitive war against Israel, which fre-
quently morphs into antisemitism, has resulted in
a campus climate that oppresses Jewish students,
who are often vilified as racist Zionists who sup-
port an alleged apartheid regime that oppresses
the ever-aggrieved Palestinian Arabs.
Now, a new report from the antisemitism watch-
dog group Alums for Campus Fairness has revealed
that university student newspapers are part of the
problem. The report, entitled, “Institutional Bias:
Campus Newspapers and Israel,” reviewed nearly
2,000 articles on Israel published since 2017 in
the primary student newspapers of 75 selected
campuses. “Of the 1,450 articles that address Israel,” the
researchers found, “over a third — 532 — present
the Jewish state in a negative way.” A mere “17%
provided a positive view of the country.” Moreover,
“Over half of op-eds addressing Israel on all col-
lege campuses — 307 out of 585 — were negative.”
ACF also pointed out that, tellingly, “These same
newspapers are notably silent on antisemitism
and discrimination against Jews on their own cam-
puses, publishing only 505 news articles about
this growing trend in their own community.” That
statistic is particularly relevant in light of data from
the Anti-Defamation League showing that some
one-third of Jewish students had experienced
antisemitism in 2021.
Examples of anti-Israel media bias exposed by
the ACF report are, unfortunately, numerous. One
troubling example is the 2016 controversy involv-
ing The McGill Daily, which admitted that it refused
to publish “pieces which promote a Zionist worl-
dview, or any other ideology which we consider
oppressive.” “While we recognize that, for some, Zionism rep-
resents an important freedom project,” the editors
wrote, “we also recognize that it functions as a set-
tler-colonial ideology that perpetuates the displace-
ment and the oppression of the Palestinian people.”
At Connecticut College in 2014, Prof. Andrew
Pessin found himself vilified after he wrote about
Hamas on his Facebook page: “One image which
essentializes the current situation in Gaza might
be this. You’ve got a rabid pit bull chained in a
cage, regularly making mass efforts to escape.”
The editors of the campus paper The College
Voice insisted that Pessin’s words were “dehu-
manizing” to Palestinians and had “caused wide-
spread alarm in the campus community.” The
paper’s editor, Ayla Zuraw-Friedland, initiated a
campaign of lies against Pessin, contending that
the students viciously attacking him for his speech
were “victims of racism,” which they were not. In
March 2015, the Voice ran three op-eds, including
on the paper’s front page, that condemned Pessin
and accused him of racism.
In April of 2022, the University of Chicago’s
student newspaper The Chicago Maroon violated
journalistic and free speech principles by retract-
ing an op-ed written by students Melody Dias and
Benjamin ZeBrack entitled, “We Must Condemn
the SJP’s Online Anti-Semitism.” The piece ques-
tioned the tactics and ideology of members of the
university’s SJP chapter. On Jan. 26, it noted, SJP
posted the shocking admonition “DON’T TAKE
SH***Y ZIONIST CLASSES” on its Instagram page.
Students were asked to “support the Palestinian
movement for liberation by boycotting classes on
Israel or those taught by Israeli fellows.”
Dias and ZeBrack made a number of accusa-
tions against SJP in their now-deleted op-ed,
including that the SJP post “demonizes [Israeli]
nationality by declaring all courses taught by
someone affiliated with the nation as propa-
ganda.” SJP demanded the “immediate deletion
of the article” for what it called “offenses,” as well
as a “public apology issued by the Maroon to SJP
UChicago and to Palestinian students for the dis-
semination of misinformation and the disregard of
journalistic integrity and factual reporting.”
Astoundingly, in response to SJP’s absurd
demands, two feckless editors, Kelly Hui and
Elizabeth Winkler, not only deleted the offending
op-ed but wrote a craven editorial in which they
dissected the op-ed for its supposed factual inac-
curacies. They justified their surrender by claim-
ing that Dias and ZeBrack’s op-ed could be the
source of campus enmity. SJP’s call for a boycott
of courses about Israel apparently was not.
This double standard was also evident in a 2021
editorial, “In support of Students for Justice in
Palestine,” written by the editorial board of The
Daily Campus, the University of Connecticut’s stu-
dent newspaper. The editors were troubled by the
fact that during an SJP event, UConn Hillel “held
a demonstration nearby in direct opposition to the
ideas behind UConn SJP.” In other words, Hillel
attempted to engage in a balanced debate by
presenting its own views on the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. This, it appears, was unforgivable.
The Harvard Crimson has also taken an extrem-
ist anti-Israel position, particularly in a controver-
sial editorial published in April entitled, “In Support
of Boycott, Divest, Sanction and a Free Palestine,”
which was replete with slanders against the Jewish
state and called on the Harvard community to
commit itself to the corrosive BDS campaign.
The editorial was inspired by the April demon-
strations 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.” The fawning editorial
heaped praise on this childish mock wall and
suggested that “art is a potent form of resistance.”
The writers added that they were “humbled by
our peers’ passion and skill” in creating such an
activist masterpiece.
They further contended, “The admittedly con-
troversial panels dare the viewer to contend with
well-established, if rarely stated, facts” (emphasis
added). What were these “well-established facts”?
One panel, for example, announced in capital let-
ters, “Zionism is: Racism — Settler Colonialism —
White Supremacy — Apartheid.” It appears that the
word “facts,” in this case, was synonymous with
crude slander and libel. The editorial’s endorse-
ment of the claim that Israel is a white suprema-
cist state, moreover, constitutes antisemitic hate
speech according to the International Holocaust
Remembrance Alliance’s widely adopted defini-
tion of antisemitism.
Although most universities claim that free
speech is one of their chief principles, the ACF
report shows that it is rarely for everyone. It is
reserved for the lucky few who feel they are mor-
ally qualified to express themselves. As for their
ideological opponents, they must be silenced.
Biases are to be expected in the marketplace of
ideas. In newspapers, however, editorial bias and
the exclusion of alternate views are intellectually
corrupt practices that violate the spirit and pur-
pose of journalism. This is especially the case on
university campuses, where vigorous debate and
scholarship should be the supreme value, not bias
and suppression of others’ ideas. JE
Richard L. Cravatts is a Freedom Center Journalism
Fellow in Academic Free Speech and president
emeritus of Scholars for Peace in the Middle
East, is the author of the forthcoming book, “The
Slow Death of the University: How Radicalism,
Israel-Hatred and Race Obsession are Destroying
Academia.” JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
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