George Washington University student Ty Lindia poses for a photograph at the site of last spring’s students tent encampment at George Washington University Yard in Washington, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
BY COLLIN BINKLEY
October 5, 2024
WASHINGTON (AP) — As a junior at George Washington University, Ty Lindia meets new students every day. But with the shadow of the Israel-Hamas war hanging over the Washington, D.C., campus, where everyone has a political opinion, each new encounter is fraught.
“This idea that I might say the wrong thing kind of scares me,” said Lindia, who studies political science. “You have to tiptoe around politics until one person says something that signifies they lean a certain way on the issue.”
He has seen friendships — including some of his own — end over views about the war. In public, he keeps his stance to himself for fear that future employers could hold it against him.
“Before Oct. 7, there wasn’t really a big fear,” said Lindia, of Morristown, New Jersey.
A year after Hamas’ attack in southern Israel, some students say they are reluctant to speak out because it could pit them against their peers, professors or even potential employers. Social bubbles have cemented along the divisions of the war. New protest rules on many campuses raise the risk of suspension or expulsion.
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Tensions over the conflict burst wide open last year amid emotional demonstrations in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack. In the spring, a wave of pro-Palestinian tent encampments led to some 3,200 arrests.
Colleges raise the stakes for students protesting the war in Gaza
Israel-Hamas war latest: An American woman is killed in the West Bank during protest
The atmosphere on U.S. campuses has calmed since those protests, yet lingering unease remains.
In a recent class discussion on gender and the military at Indiana University, sophomore Mikayla Kaplan said she thought about mentioning her female friends who serve in the Israeli military. But in a room full of politically progressive classmates, she decided to stay quiet.
“In the back of my head, I’m always thinking about things that I should or shouldn’t say,” Kaplan said.
Kaplan, who proudly wears a Star of David necklace, said that before college she had many friends of different faiths, but after Oct. 7, almost all of her friends are Jewish.
The war began when Hamas-led fighters killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in the Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel. They abducted another 250 people and are still holding about 100 hostages. Israel’s campaign in Gaza has killed at least 41,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
At the University of Connecticut, some students said the conflict doesn’t come up as much in classes. Ahmad Zoghol, an engineering student, said it remains a tense issue and he has heard of potential employers scrutinizing political statements students make in college.
“There’s definitely that concern for a lot of people, including myself, that if we speak about it there’s going to be some sort of repercussion,” he said.
Campuses grapple with divisions
Compared with the much larger campus protests of the Vietnam War era, when few students openly supported the war, campuses today appear more divided, said Mark Yudof, a former president of the University of California system. For many, the issues are more personal.
“The faculty are at odds with each other. The student body is at odds with each other. There’s a war of ideologies going on,” he said.
Some universities are trying to bridge the divide with campus events on civil discourse, sometimes inviting Palestinian and Jewish speakers to share the stage. At Harvard University in Massachusetts, a recent survey found that many students and professors are reluctant to share views in the classroom. A panel suggested solutions including “classroom confidentiality” and teaching on constructive disagreement.
Meanwhile, many campuses are adding policies that clamp down on protests, often banning encampments and limiting demonstrations to certain hours or locations.
At Indiana University, a new policy forbids “expressive activity” after 11 p.m, among other restrictions. Doctoral student Bryce Greene, who helped lead a pro-Palestinian encampment last semester, said he was threatened with suspension after organizing an 11:30 p.m. vigil.
That’s a startling contrast to past protests on campus, including a 2019 climate demonstration that drew hundreds of students without university interference, he said.
“There’s definitely a chilling effect that occurs when speech is being restricted in this manner,” said Greene, who is part of a lawsuit challenging the new policy. “This is just one way for them to restrict people from speaking out for Palestine.”
New rules allow protests, but with conditions
The tense atmosphere has led some faculty members to rethink teaching certain subjects or entering certain debates, said Risa Lieberwitz, general counsel for the American Association of University Professors.
Lieberwitz, who teaches labor law at Cornell University, has been alarmed by the growing number of colleges requiring students to register demonstrations days in advance.
“It’s so contradictory to the notion of how protests and demonstrations take place,” she said. “They’re oftentimes spontaneous. They’re not planned in the way that events are generally planned.”
Protests have continued on many campuses, but on a smaller scale and often under the confines of new rules.
At Wesleyan University in Connecticut, police removed a group of pro-Palestinian students from a campus building where they held a sit-in in September. Wesleyan President Michael Roth said he supports students’ free speech rights, but they “don’t have a right to take over part of a building.”
Wesleyan is offering new courses on civil disagreement this year, and faculty are working to help foster discussion among students.
“It’s challenging for students, as it is for adults — most adults don’t have conversations with people who disagree with them,” Roth said. “We’re so segregated into our bubbles.”
Schools try to find balance on free speech
American universities pride themselves as being places of open discourse where students can engage across their differences. Since Oct. 7, they have been under tremendous pressure to uphold free speech while also protecting students from discrimination.
The U.S. Education Department is investigating more than 70 colleges for reports of antisemitism or Islamophobia. Leaders of several prestigious colleges have been called before Congress by Republicans who accuse them of being soft on antisemitism.
Yet finding the line where protected speech ends is as hard as ever. Leaders grapple with whether to allow chants seen by some as calls of support for Palestinians and by others as a threat against Jews. It’s especially complicated at public universities, which are bound by the First Amendment, while private colleges have flexibility to impose wider speech limits.
At George Washington University, Lindia said the war comes up often in his classes but sometimes after a warming-up period — in one class, discussion loosened after the professor realized most students shared similar views. Even walking to class, there is a visible reminder of the tension. Tall fencing now surrounds University Yard, the grassy space where police broke up a tent encampment in May.
“It’s a place for free expression, and now it’s just completely blocked off,” he said.
Some students say moderate voices are getting lost.
Nivriti Agaram, a junior at George Washington, said she believes Israel has a right to defend itself but questions America’s spending on the war. That opinion puts her at odds with more liberal students, who have called her a “genocide enabler” and worse, she said.
“It’s very stifling,” she said. “I think there’s a silent majority who aren’t speaking.”
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Associated Press writer Michael Melia in Storrs, Connecticut, contributed to this report.
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Weaponizing Antisemitism 101: A Back-to-School Special
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
It is irony at its most bitter. Not so very long ago, hundreds of white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia. With tiki-torches held high, they chanted “Jews will not replace us!” And yet here we are, seven years later, and apparently these fanatical card-carrying antisemites have indeed been “replaced” in the minds of many Americans. Why? Because a deceitful campaign now portrays anti-genocide college students (including many Jews) as the leading purveyors of “the world’s oldest hatred.” But for anyone — including a Jew like myself — who hasn’t stubbornly closed their eyes and covered their ears over the past eleven months, one thing should be obvious: it’s simply absurd to label outrage, protest, and despair over the plight of Palestinians in Gaza as “antisemitism.” Period.
Last October 7th, Hamas and other armed groups unleashed a brutal attack in Israel. Several hundred civilians were killed, over 200 were taken hostage, and the fear, agony, and trauma experienced by the distraught and the grief-stricken are profound and unrelenting. But these horrors — amplified and distorted by vengeance-stoking misrepresentations from Israeli officials — can never justify the response that followed.
Ever since that dreadful day (and after the immiseration of a decades-long occupation), an unfathomable humanitarian catastrophe has been unfolding in Gaza. Israel has killed over 40,000 Palestinians — most of them women and children— and more than twice as many have been injured. Gaza’s health care, education, and vital water systems have been systematically destroyed. Almost the entire population of Gaza has been displaced once or more. Starvation is increasingly widespread. Paralytic polio has now emerged. And all of this has been made possible by the United States’ ongoing provision of political cover and lethal munitions to the Israel Defense Forces.
Acknowledging the genocidal dimensions of this assault stirs controversy — even though Israel’s leaders were quick to make their intentions known from the very outset. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — who has insisted that he speaks as “a representative of the entire Jewish people” — vowed “mighty vengeance” and described the conflict as “a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle.” President Isaac Herzog warned, “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible.” IDF spokesperson Daniel Hagari explained that the focus would be “maximum damage.” And Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced “a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.”
Last November, distinguished Israeli historian and genocide scholar Omer Bartov wrote in the New York Times, “there is no proof that genocide is currently taking place in Gaza.” But in an essay published in The Guardian last month, Bartov abandoned his optimistic view:
I no longer believe that. By the time I travelled to Israel, I had become convinced that at least since the attack by the IDF on Rafah on 6 May 2024, it was no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions. It was not just that this attack against the last concentration of Gazans – most of them displaced already several times by the IDF, which now once again pushed them to a so-called safe zone – demonstrated a total disregard of any humanitarian standards. It also clearly indicated that the ultimate goal of this entire undertaking from the very beginning had been to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable, and to debilitate its population to such a degree that it would either die out or seek all possible options to flee the territory.
The overwhelming evidence of profound and recurring violations of international law in Gaza has seemingly left inveterate defenders of Israel —including most politicians in Washington, DC — with only one card left to play (over and over again). Unwilling or unable to present a convincing defense of Israel’s policies, they indiscriminately and unfairly target critics with accusations of antisemitism. As we’ve seen, Israeli government officials and their apologists have repeatedly sought to discredit, demonize, and silence anyone — non-Jew and Jew alike — who speaks out against the country’s abhorrent actions or in support of Palestinian rights, a humanitarian ceasefire, or an arms embargo to end the killing. The CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) provided a memorable example of this demagoguery when he described progressive Jewish organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now as “hate groups, the photo inverse of white supremacists.”
There’s no question that antisemitism — when reasonably defined as “discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish)” — is a very serious and growing threat. Recent research shows that such antisemitic attitudes become increasingly more pronounced as one moves ideologically from the left to the right, especially among young people. But when antisemitism is intentionally conflated with legitimate criticism of Israel, we can lose sight of the fact that the primary danger to Jews (and other at-risk groups around the world) is found among the fascists and white nationalists on the right, not among the left-leaning, pro-Palestinian activists — of all faiths — on college campuses today. Indeed, oversized attention to the latter draws much-needed scrutiny away from the former—and from the virulent antisemitic acts that demand a dedicated and comprehensive response.
This doesn’t mean that there aren’t opportunistic agitators taking advantage of the horrors in Gaza to foment hatred of Jews more generally. Indeed, white nationalist organizations actively promote recruitment to their own ranks by piggybacking onto and hijacking the efforts of others engaged in urgent and non-violent human rights advocacy. Last October, for example, a leader of the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville told a crowd gathered in front of the White House, “We Americans have been snookered into supporting [Israel] by Jewish control of our banks, our media, and our politicians.” Now that is antisemitism, nurtured by a range of conspiracy theories that encourage violence against Jews, Muslims, Blacks, and immigrants (among others) in order to prevent the “replacement” of White Americans.
The utter magnitude of death and destruction in Gaza makes it especially important to recognize the crucial distinction between antisemitism and legitimate criticism of Israel and its policies. Unfortunately, however, “pro-Israel” organizations in the U.S., such as the ADL, instead blur this difference. In part, they do so by relying upon and actively promoting the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) “working definition” of antisemitism, which encourages the view that criticism of Israel is intrinsically antisemitic (seven of the IHRA’s eleven examples of antisemitism reference Israel).
A range of scholars have criticized the IHRA’s approach to defining antisemitism for its misplaced focus on Israel rather than on Jews as Jews. Moreover, the lead drafter of the IHRA working definition warned several years ago of efforts to weaponize it in order to attack “academic freedom and free speech” and to pursue legal sanctions against those who engage in political speech critical of Israel and in support of Palestinian rights. And this past May, over 1,300 Jewish faculty published an open letter that called upon elected leaders not to codify the IHRA definition into U.S. federal law. That letter includes this: “By stifling criticism of Israel, the IHRA definition hardens the dangerous notion that Jewish identity is inextricably linked to every decision of Israel’s government. Far from combating antisemitism, this dynamic promises to amplify the real threats Jewish Americans already face.”
Nevertheless, the ADL routinely presents “anti-Israel” sentiment as indicative of broader “anti-Jewish” prejudices. For example, consider the organization’s “Antisemitic Attitudes in America 2024” report, based on a survey of a representative sample of Americans this past January. Three items that were included to measure “anti-Israel” sentiment focused specifically on Israel’s treatment of Palestinians: “Israelis are indifferent to Palestinian suffering,” “Israelis intend to cause as much suffering to Palestinians as possible,” and “If Israelis had their way, they would live in a world where all Palestinians were killed.” The percent of respondents who said they “strongly” or “somewhat” agreed with each statement were 43%, 42%, and 36% respectively.
How should we appropriately interpret these findings? Do they actually demonstrate “anti-Israel” bias as the ADL claims, or are they better understood as reflecting a reasonably accurate appraisal of reality? Two results from Pew Research Center polling of Israelis this past spring shed light on this crucial question, albeit imperfectly. First, when asked whether Israel’s military response against Hamas in Gaza has gone too far, only 4% of Israeli Jews agreed (in sharp contrast to 74% of Arab Israelis). Second, when asked whether social media posts expressing sympathy for civilians in Gaza should be prohibited, 70% of Israeli Jews agreed (compared to only 18% of Arab Israelis). These are striking figures. Whether they originate from fears of the future, traumas of the past, or denials of the present, how can we doubt that most Israeli Jews are, at best, seemingly indifferent to the horrors in Gaza? And on what basis, then, is recognizing this an expression of antisemitism?
As the new academic year begins here in the U.S., college administrators around the country have already adopted draconian measures to further crack down on anti-genocide actions and even speech itself. The context in which this is all unfolding is monstrous: education has been obliterated in Gaza — a clear case of scholasticide — with universities now buried under rubble. And yet false accounts accusing pro-Palestinian advocates of abusive language and violent disruptions on campus — spread by “pro-Israel” groups, by ambitious, anti-diversity-equity-inclusion politicians, and by wealthy, arrogant donors — have instead helped to turn the focus to the emotional distress experienced by Jewish students.
Can actual data overcome this manufactured hysteria? I do not know. But toward that end, consider some findings of a recent report from the Jim Joseph Foundation, which describes itself as “devoted exclusively to supporting Jewish education of youth and young adults in the United States.” Published just this month and titled “A Year of Campus Conflict and Growth: An Over-Time Study of the Impact of the Israel-Hamas War on U.S. College Students,” the report examines focus groups and survey data collected from a broad swath of Jewish and non-Jewish students between 2022 and 2024.
One survey question directly asked Jewish students whether and where they had been “personally targeted by antisemitic comments, slurs, or threats” since last October 7th. (It appears that no definition of antisemitism was provided.) The percents of affirmative responses were as follows: 15% on social media, 16% within the campus social environment, and 10% in classrooms. Undoubtedly, some of these adverse experiences were tied to calls for the freeing of Palestine (e.g., “from the river to the sea”), which have a range of divergent meanings, some much more threatening than others.
Regardless, while these self-reported figures are not negligible, they certainly don’t reach levels one might have imagined from stories of universities being inundated with antisemites. Indeed, two summaries from the report’s focus groups are instructive here:
Even though some students point to physical violence or antisemitic actions, Jewish students noted that their campus environment was tamer than media portrayals of campus unrest. Some students had to reassure their family members that they were not feeling physically threatened on campus and that they were safe, in contradiction to alarming media portrayals.
Students overwhelmingly reported that the campus protests they saw this year were peaceful. Most Jewish students, but not all, said they did not feel physically unsafe. In general, Jewish students articulated a view that even though most protesters probably did not harbor antisemitic attitudes, there are some who clearly did.
Another widely promoted claim is that Jewish students are being psychologically traumatized in large numbers by their experiences on campus. But here too the recent Jim Joseph Foundation survey suggests otherwise. It found that 13% of Jewish students described their own mental health or emotional well-being as “poor” this past spring (10% of non-Jewish students did the same). Not only is this figure much lower than various anecdotal accounts suggest, it’s not any higher than the findings from other past surveys of college students conducted prior to last October 7th. In 2022, 22% of students described their mental health as poor, and 16% did so in 2023.
To be clear, the mental health struggles of individual college students are no small or inconsequential matter. Familiar stresses include academic performance pressures, interpersonal relationship struggles, and challenges in balancing school with other obligations. And it is surely true that experiences with antisemitism can add to this toll. But sensationalizing campuses as sites of Jewish trauma is unwarranted. Those who nonetheless encourage this inaccurate and overblown perspective are as likely to be pursuing a narrow political agenda aimed at suppressing academic freedom and critical discourse as they are to be concerned about Jewish students’ emotional well-being.
At the same time, far less attention and support have been devoted to the welfare of other university constituents. These include Palestinian and Muslim students who may have lost family members in Gaza and have been subjected to attacks, threats, and religious discrimination on campus; students who’ve faced suspensions, expulsions, arrests, and lost job opportunities over their participation in protests and encampments; Jewish students who’ve participated in anti-genocide actions (and may themselves be traumatized by what Israel is doing); and faculty who’ve been suspended or fired over their support for these students.
Ultimately, as a distraction if nothing else, false charges of antisemitism may become even louder in the weeks immediately ahead. These fraudulent accusations are seemingly the only arrows left in the quivers of those struggling to counter the growing international condemnation of Israel for its abominable actions in Gaza. As the mournful first anniversary of October 7th approaches, this is assuredly a time for care and compassion across divides — for all who’ve suffered from the past year’s violence. But it is not a time for silence. For everyone’s benefit, the weaponization of antisemitism must be challenged whenever and wherever it arises. We owe it to the many voices that can no longer be heard.
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