So, you wanna understand Israel-Palestine debates on campus.
The first thing you have to do is stop talking about BDS.
Shocking, right?
But really, the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement doesn’t summarize what Israel conversations on campus are all about these days. BDS resolutions on major campuses are actually going down, and yet, somehow, they still make up the bulk of Jewish news about students.
The truth is, divestment proposals happen perennially, people freak out for two to three weeks, and then students on all sides return to lives of calculus, life pondering, activism and 3 a.m. pizza.
So if we shouldn’t be talking about BDS, what should we be talking about?
Anti-normalization. Because it creates a fascinatingly complex new landscape for Jewish students, who are both on its receiving end and active participants.
If you know what I’m talking about, skip this paragraph, wise one. If you don’t, anti-normalization is an idea popular on the left that some beliefs are so untenable you can’t allow them to be left unprotested and accepted as normal. That means calling attention to their proponents at the very least, and having a zero-tolerance policy at most.
The things-not-to-normalize list includes no-brainers such as racism, sexism, homophobia and Islamophobia. It also often includes Zionism.
That means pro-Palestinian activism on campus looks different these days — because all activism looks different. Instead of pushing boycotts, protesting Israel-related events has become a more frequent form of organizing.
A brief history: One of the earliest instances of interrupting Zionist speakers on campus happened at UC Irvine in 2010, when Israel’s former ambassador to the U.S., Michael Oren, spoke and was disrupted by students. In 2015, the same happened to former Israeli Supreme Court chief justice Aharon Barak at UC Irvine and Israeli philosophy professor Moshe Halbertal at the University of Minnesota. In 2016, the tactic was used against Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat in a talk at San Francisco State University.
And what happened last month at the Chicago Dyke March is also a prime example. Women marching with what march organizers saw as Zionist flags couldn’t be allowed to stay, because that would be letting Zionism go unchallenged.
What does this mean?
Speaker shutdowns and event protests don’t make us special.
For what it’s worth, speaker shutdowns and event protests don’t make us special. If you follow campus news, these are happening everywhere to all kinds of speakers from controversial scholar Charles Murray at Middlebury College to conservative commentator Anne Coulter and alt-right provocateur (read: troll) Milo Yiannopolis at UC Berkeley.
But anti-normalization does mean Jewish students, particularly Zionists, are tackling a whole new host of questions on campus: Do left-leaning Zionists have a place on the campus left if liberal activists won’t categorize Zionism as an acceptable view? And if only non-Zionist Jewish students find acceptance on the left, is the campus left tokenizing Jewish students, deciding who’s a “good Jew” or a “bad Jew” from outside our community?
What does it mean to Jewish students that Zionist speakers are considered indefensible alongside alt-right speakers and worthy of the same protest by their peers? Are Zionist students and pro-Palestinian activists defining Zionism the same way?
The trend is also a major factor in Israel activism on campus. Zionist student groups are arguably already engaging in their own form of anti-normalization rhetoric and have been for a long time. One could even argue Jews were anti-normalization pioneers. When anti-Semitic or anti-Zionist remarks on campus are labeled “hate speech,” that’s our community declaring ideas too unconscionable to be expressed without protest.
Jewish outcry over Palestinian American activist Linda Sarsour speaking at City University of New York one recent example. Right-wing Jewish organizations, such as the Santa Cruz- based Amcha Initiative or Canary Mission, marked speakers, professors and student leaders too-reprehensible-for-campus before it was cool.
Whatever term you want to use, this isn’t just a leftist movement, and Jewish students across the political spectrum are experiencing it and are a part of it.
We can argue endlessly about whether anti-normalization is good or bad — and we are. Questions about this concept are at the core of today’s most fraught campus debates. Does declaring ideas unredeemable limit free speech? Or does it quash systemic societal ills? Who decides the parameters, and when are they too broad?
I can’t answer any of these questions. (That’s a different, much longer column.)
But I can call on our community to recognize them.
It’s time we see the anti-normalization forest through the BDS trees. Because until we do, we’re missing out on the juicy stuff — the larger debates happening on campus and the real questions Jewish students are asking themselves.
The simple solution here is to cut Israel off of the US money teat. If we are being forced to pay for Israel, and we feel that Israel is an apartheid society that commits war crimes and crimes against humanity–we get to think that–then we have some standing to disrupt speech that we are forced to subsidize. We’re paying for that microphone.
Actually you aren’t paying for it.
That’s the point.
You and the hateful lies and distortions you have incorporated into your anti-Semitic worldview are extreme minority views. The overwhelming majority of Americans, therefore taxpayers, support Israel. They’re the guys that send Israel a couple billion a year or less than one percent of israel’s gdp.
For that the us gets access to the only democracy in the region and become the primary trading partner for Israel technology. Ask Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Intel…basically any American tech or biotech company how much of their r&d comes out of Israel…israel is your only trading partner that actually produces American jobs. Most Americans like jobs. They like democracy. They hate Arab terrorists.
You disrupt speech for the sane reason the Nazis did. The truth is who ever shouts the loudest. Especially when you’re talking about minority rights. Especially when you’re talking about Jews. Fear and intimidation in academic settings is the first step to a final solution. That solution is the dehumanization, abandonment and extermination of israeli jews.
Academics won’t fight back.
Not for jews.
So just like the Nazis did in prewar Germany your hate speech because it’s loud and unopposed by cowards has growing legitimacy in the minds of millions of college students.
You wanna know how things like the shoah happen? People don’t stand up to people like yourself.
It’s kinda sad that american Jews can’t see it’s happening again. It’s not coming from the right. Heck…you wanna see where it’s really coming from? Look in the mirror.
I am not anti-semitic, I am a Jew. I take the lessons of the holocaust seriously–never again applies to us as well. Israel is Bad for the Jews because it has perpetrated a decades long crime spree ostensibly on behalf of all Jews. Others take Israel at its word and we are endangered for that.
Israel can be either democratic or Jewish, and the latter is unsustainable. It is time for American Jews to come out against being forced to subsidize these crimes. I have no quarrel with Palestinians.
Like I said…you’re not subsidizing anything. American Jews make up a tiny portion of the american population and many if not most of you are only Jews by accident these days. The overwhelming majority of the other 98%of Americans support israel.
You’re nothing new. There’s always been these cowardly assimilationist Jews that point the finger at Jews who stand up for ourselves and our traditions. What do you think channakuah was about? Greeks?
Of course you don’t have any quarrel with anyone trying to murder Israelis. You think we make you look bad. The hellenized Jews didn’t have any problem with Greeks murdering Jews either.
Man you don’t get it.
But I wouldn’t worry about it. I’m sure no one really mistakes you for a Jew. And just like the assimilationist Jews of the hannakuah era , noone will remember you and yours either.
I am not going to be a “Good American” and just follow orders, thanks.
You are a capo serving Nazis
Netanyahu is the fascist, seeking Lebensraum for Jews in attempting to annex parts of the occupied territories that are otherwise contained like a ghetto one might have found in Warsaw.