Campus Anti-Israel Activism Once Used Distorted Facts. Now, It Just Uses Hamas Propaganda

Given the increasing prevalence of fanatical hatred of Israel at American universities, it’s hard to be surprised by the Harvard Crimson’s recent editorial endorsing the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction the Jewish state (BDS). But why now? Dara Horn writes:

I had to hand it to the Crimson for timing, given that the editorial followed several weeks of terror attacks in Israel during which fifteen people were stabbed, shot, and car-rammed to death while engaging in such provocative behaviors as drinking at a bar or walking down the street. . . . Why after these events, one might ask, would these Harvard students change their position now?

Well, one might ask that if one knew nothing about how college students think. The editorial made clear that the editors were inspired less by events overseas than by events in front of students’ noses—specifically, a billboard-sized mural created by Harvard’s Palestine Solidarity Committee. Its prominent placement in Harvard Yard meant that its contents were forced onto the eyeballs of every undergraduate on campus for a week, and it was apparently quite inspiring.

Fifteen years ago, Horn observes, such murals were filled with information, even if it was “presented in a tendentious fashion and frequently featured obvious distortions.” The current anti-Israel display at Harvard is different:

I naively expected those old-school panels of facts and figures, interspersed, as usual, with paintings of doves. . . . Instead, I saw a propaganda mural that would have been at home in any Middle Eastern authoritarian state, where it would have been painted by government lackeys to illustrate classic talking points that openly genocidal groups like Hamas, Hizballah, and their state sponsors in Iran have been pushing to local and Western audiences for years.

And such propaganda isn’t especially concerned with fine distinctions between anti-Semitism and criticism of Israel. Neither are the students at Rutgers who routinely throw eggs at Jewish fraternity members publicly commemorating the Holocaust. Horn found something similar during a visit to the University of California, Santa Cruz:

Two weeks before my visit, the school’s student government had voted down a resolution against anti-Semitism. Once the students had resolved that they were not against anti-Semitism, they apparently decided that they were in favor of anti-Semitism. This became clear four days before my visit to campus, when multiple university buildings were vandalized with spray-painted images of swastikas and nooses. . . . I asked the professor hosting me whether these passionate artists were students, or perhaps people from the town.

“Oh, we definitely think they were students,” my host told me. What made her think so, I asked.

“Because,” she explained, “we found the empty spray paint cans in the recycling bin.”

What are your politics? Kill the Jews, save the turtles.

Read more at Common Sense

More about: Anti-Semitism, BDS, Israel on campus, Recycling

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society