A Jewish student left a recent pro-Palestinian rally on the U.C. Berkeley campus, sat on the nearby grass and wept — not the only Jewish student brought to tears by the demonstration.
Another Jewish student there said the tears came out of “extreme frustration and anger.”
It is not just Palestinian or extremist supporters whose propagandistic fulminations are causing such overwhelming frustration for Jewish students at universities around the country — it is the reactions of protesters who are neither ideological nor anti-Semitic.
Many, in fact, are friendly acquaintances of Jewish students.
At the Berkeley rally, one Jewish student was told by a friend that “Israel’s creation was itself a violent act.” Other protesters nodded every time someone on the podium said, “Israel is a violent society,” or said that, at best, Israel’s recent actions could be equated with those of the suicide bombers.
The speakers repeated these charges to their Jewish friends, who in their frustration cried, “Why don’t they understand?”
The problem of these more innocent — but critical — protesters lies not in their malevolence but in their ignorance.
The more innocent multitudes within these protest movements are distinguished from the fewer self-interested “catalysts” who largely shape and articulate the issue positions (in this case, Arab students and those promoting a general radical ideology). For the most part, the multitude of followers is expressing its instinctual hatred of social injustice and war — and we would hope for nothing less from our elite youth.
Young people have often helped to nudge our society toward positive changes. But they have also frequently presented a fatal problem: In too many cases, they are unaware that they don’t have all the facts on the issue in question –and about history in general. This ignorance usually allows the self-interested protesters to shape the agenda.
In a way, the ignorance of today’s young people is not so surprising. The college youth of these times did not reach their bar mitzvah age until about 1995, give or take a year or two. It is not part of their firsthand knowledge that the U.N. established a Jewish state alongside a Palestinian state for patently legitimate reasons (not as “a violent act”), and that the Arab nations promptly invaded the new state, launching a half-century of violence mainly marked by Arab aggression and Israeli defensive action, however mistaken that defensive action may have arguably been at times.
But that is what education is for — to augment firsthand knowledge with knowledge about the past. Why have so many well-meaning students at one of the country’s top universities — U.C. Berkeley — imbibed so little of this knowledge from the past?
Of course, young people, in their passionate pursuit of the future, do tend to dismiss the dark and swampy past. Their factual misdirection usually comes from the educational environment around them –the media and too often their professors, as well as their “catalyst” peers.
Many of them will recover in time. So why not just take a tranquilizer and forget about the protests and their innocent multitudes? Their numbers are really not so large, and these students are not in sync with the rest of the population. In recent months, more than 40 college campuses in 36 states have held anti-war rallies denouncing America’s actions in Afghanistan — at the same time that nine out of 10 Americans have reported their support of those same actions. And most Americans still support Israel.
But this innocent multitude cannot just be ignored. Many of these students will become –along with some of the “catalysts” themselves — the public pundits and professors whose factual misdirections will become part of tomorrow’s educational environment. A vast program of remedial education is needed, especially for those who are more ignorant than malevolent.
The organized Jewish community has made much information available. The local Jewish Community Relations Council has just published a student manual of excellent quality. But, to be effective, the educational campaigns on the campuses have to be carried out by students themselves.
The frustration of too many Jewish students also stems from the fact that they themselves don’t know the facts about the Middle East and relevant history well enough to lead that educational campaign, although a few are now valiantly trying. In this case, knowledge, like charity, begins at home — and begins early, in our families and institutions.
Now we have to catch up.