There are also the mock eviction notices slipped under the dorm room doors of students. These notices demand the students leave their rooms, pretending that the evil Israeli empire is confiscating their dwelling space. Although there is (at least now) a line usually at the bottom of the notice, informing the student that the eviction notice is not real, the level of anxiety it creates is real, as is the feeling of students having their private space violated.
These tactics, along with the Israel divestment resolutions (all of purely symbolic value as students cannot vote on how a university’s money is invested, but the platform provided to bash Israel can be deeply upsetting nonetheless) and activities promoting the boycott of, divestment from and sanctions against (BDS) movement have metastasized. In the past few years several large academic organizations have focused a great deal of time and energy on whether to boycott Israeli academic institutions.
As expected from an enormous, mainstream organization, the report seemed just as determined to exude calm, avoiding what might be considered histrionics.
“There has been a dramatic increase in anti-Israel activity reported on campus. But while the activity is intensifying, it is still not widespread,” said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director. “As of now the vast majority of Jewish students on campus are not effected and do not encounter these events.”
Daniel Mael, a senior at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, has been writing about the problem of anti-Israel activities on U.S. campuses at the TruthRevolt site for about six months. Mael was not as sanguine as Foxman about the situation. Mael’s been in the “belly of the beast” for the past four years and the reaction from his front row seat is one to be heeded:
“The furious nature of anti-Israel students has a chilling effect on the campus atmosphere,” Mael responded to The Jewish Press in an email.
“Many students consider the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic behavior that is occurring to be systemic with the university administrations either blind to the problem or worse, emboldening groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine. In BDS hearings a large portion of the students advocating for boycotts present malicious lies and students increasingly feel that the campus atmosphere is intolerable.”
Jacobson, another observer in the front row, agreed with the ADL that most campuses in the U.S. do not experience problems with openly hostile anti-Israel activity. But, Jacobson explains, “that is not for lack of trying. Groups like Students for Justice in Palestine, often with the assistance and encouragement of anti-Israel faculty, have become more aggressive in the past two years.”
Not to put too fine a point on it, but isn’t Foxman’s approach not that far from what the Jewish leaders in Germany were saying in the early 1930’s?
HOW TO MEASURE WHAT CONSTITUTES ANTI-ISRAEL ACTIVITY
Of course that’s playing the Hitler card where it need not go, some might say. Except that the ADL’s press release has its director, Abe Foxman, saying this:
Not all criticism of Israel is anti-Israel in nature, and not all anti-Israel rhetoric and activity reflect anti-Semitism. However, anti-Israel sentiment increasingly crosses the line to anti-Semitism by invoking anti-Semitic myths of Jewish control and demonic depictions of Israelis or comparing Israel’s actions to those of the Nazis during the Holocaust.
Professor Jacobson commented on the dangers of downplaying campus anti-Israel activities.
Not all criticisms of Israel are anti-Semitic, for sure, but that does not mean that the BDS movement is not a form of anti-Semitism. BDS singles out the only majority Jewish state in the world using standards and with an obsessive intensity applied to no other nation, precisely because of Israel’s Jewish national identity.
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