The Battle for Justice in Palestine by Ali Abunimah

Author:Ali Abunimah
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Political Science, Middle East
ISBN: 978-1-60846-347-3
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2014-02-03T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

The War on Campus

American public support for Israel remains strong, but the “growing cracks” in that support are most evident on campus, according to the David Project, and universities across America form “the leading venue for anti-Israel activity and the spread of anti-Israelism.”1 The case for working to stop this dangerous trend is clear: universities are not only “where the thinking of America’s future political leadership is molded” but also “where the worldview of a large swath of influential people outside of the political class as well as the population at large is largely formed.”2 These warnings are contained in the David Project’s 2012 white paper, A Burning Campus? Rethinking Israel Advocacy at America’s Universities and Colleges. This document can be seen as the university-focused counterpart of the Reut Institute’s blueprint for suppressing Palestine solidarity activism and criticism of Israel more broadly. The David Project, a four-million-dollar-per-year organization focusing on Zionist advocacy on campuses, was founded in 2002 and became notorious in the early 2000s for its witch hunt against Columbia University professor Joseph Massad as well as its aggressively Islamophobic rhetoric.3 Under new leadership, the group has entered the mainstream of Israel advocacy in the United States and now boasts partners including AIPAC, the Hasbara Fellowships, Hillel, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, the Jewish Federation of New York, and Taglit–Birthright Israel, the organization that sends thousands of young North American Jews on free trips to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories.

The white paper criticizes earlier approaches to suppressing Palestine solidarity activism and academic inquiry related to Israel on campus, and lays out a new framework. The old approach involved confronting and debating. The new strategy, directly inspired by the Reut Institute, emphasizes making friends and influencing people. Surprisingly, the paper demolishes the notion, long promoted by Zionist groups, that American college campuses are rife with anti-Semitism. “Most American campuses are not hostile environments for most Jewish students,” the paper acknowledges.4 “Racial antisemitism of the kind most associated with the Nazis is not likely a serious problem on any American college campus.” Claiming otherwise “does not jive with the lived experience of many Jewish students, who know they can identify as Jews and largely not suffer repercussions.”5 Consequently, “depicting campus as hostile to Jews has not to date proven to be an effective strategy for decreasing anti-Israelism.”6 For anyone committed to the struggle against racism in any form, the lack of anti-Semitism on campus can only be good news. But for Zionist organizations it makes the campus environment a more challenging, though no less central, battleground. To solve the problem posed by the absence of anti-Semitism, the David Project has promoted a new term, “anti-Israelism,” which it describes as “a specific form of bigotry targeted against the modern state of Israel.”7 This redefinition—as we shall see—is a crucial element in the effort to restrict campus discussions of Israel’s racist practices or its claim to have a right to exist as a Jewish state.

In the rest of the

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