Why the Anti-Israel Campus Protests Deserve to Fail

Instead of focusing on legitimate grievances about Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, the protestors are engaged in a baseless effort to undermine the legitimacy of the Jewish state.

I have argued on these pages that students’ right to protest over the Gaza War should be respected. But make no mistake, I strongly disagree with much of the message that has been emanating from these protests. 

There is no doubt that these protests were triggered by Israel’s use of force in Gaza and have been galvanized by the excessive harm Israel’s military actions have inflicted on Gazan civilians. Many of the protestors are rightly criticizing Israel’s conduct in the war and treatment of Palestinians over the past decades. But these are not merely anti-war or human rights protests. The rhetoric many of the protestors use and the demands they are making show that their intentions are much broader. Protestors’ claims go far beyond the conflict in Gaza to challenge the very legitimacy of the state of Israel and the Zionist movement that led to its creation. To advance these ideas, these students ignore the persecution that Jews have experienced for millennia and distort the history surrounding the creation of Israel. While I am glad students are demonstrating passion about our troubled world and empathizing with people who are truly suffering, the protestors’ anti-Israel, anti-Zionist project deserves to be rejected by the majority of American college students, the universities the protestors attend, and the broader American public.

It is worth thinking about why these protests began in the first place. This generation of students have not shown themselves to be deeply committed to pacifism or human rights. There were barely any protests on campus during the twenty years of the United States’ War on Terror, even though, by some accounts, it caused approximately 900,000 deaths. In recent years, I have been unsuccessful in an effort with other faculty to get Duke students engaged in advocacy for the Muslim Uyghurs persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party. China has detained estimated 1 million civilians in punitive “re-education camps” based solely on their religion and ethnicity, systematically destroyed virtually all physical manifestations of Islam in the Xinjiang region and created a mass surveillance apparatus to oppress the Uyghur people. What did we hear from the Duke students? Crickets. The Syrian Civil War has resulted in 300,000 civilian deaths and 10 million people either displaced internally or living as refugees abroad. I do not recall American students protesting when the Assad regime dropped barrel bombs on hospitals or used chemical weapons against civilians. While the tragedy has unfolded in Gaza the past seven months, a civil war in Sudan has continued, resulting in 14,700 people killed, 8 million civilians displaced, and 18 million people undergoing famine. There have been no calls by student activists for their universities to divest from companies that do business in Sudan, or Syria, or China.

Yet, when Israel began to use force in direct response to the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7, this was the moment that some American college students decided to rise up to speak out against war, human rights violations, and America militarism. Why? 

To begin to answer this question, it is important to note that many of today’s college students have come of age during the post-George Floyd racial justice movement that seeks widespread structural reforms in society to rectify economic, social, and cultural harms against disempowered groups of people. Pro-Palestinian advocates have insisted that American racial justice activists include the Palestinian cause in their overall campaign for societal reform, claiming that Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians has been motivated by racism. This campaign has been successful as many activists on campus have embraced the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign initiated against Israel in 2005. BDS calls for punitive economic measures to be taken against Israel until it ends its “occupation and colonization of all Arab lands” and allows 6 million Palestinian refugees to return to property within Israel’s internationally recognized borders. Taken as a whole, these measures would radically alter Israel’s borders and make Jews a minority within their own national homeland. As the First Palestinian Conference for the Boycott of Israel in 2007 made clear “the BDS campaign does not only target Israel’s economy, but challenges Israel’s legitimacy … as part of the international community.”

So, when Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, the pump had already been primed on American college campuses to see the decades’ long, complex Israeli-Palestinian conflict in one-sided moralistic terms, with Israel the oppressor, the Palestinians the oppressed, and the concept of Zionism having caused the oppression. This preconditioned worldview explains how, on the night of the October 7 attacks that left 1200 Israeli civilians dead (some having experienced “systematic” and “deliberate” sexual assault) and 120 in captivity, a coalition of Harvard student groups declared that they  “hold the Israeli regime responsible for all the unfolding violence.”  It explains how at Columbia, even before Israel had invaded Gaza, mass protests erupted calling for Columbia to divest from Israel and featuring “from the river to the sea” chants. And it explains why many in the movement cheered the Hamas attack instead of characterizing it as terrorist violence, with the national branch of Students for Justice in Palestine calling the attacks “a historic win for Palestinian resistance.”  The demonization of Israel and Zionism inherent in the BDS message explains (but of course does not excuse) how some protestors engaged in overt acts of violence and harassment against Jews. In fact, some protests  targeted campus Hillels or Jewish centers, because the protestors consider them to be “Zionist” organizations and therefore responsible for repression of Palestinians.  

Valid grievances of the Palestinians are being drowned out by the protestors’ obsession with litigating Israel’s very existence as a nation-state, a position that for many Jews echoes the Nazis project of Jewish annihilation. This tone has been reinforced when the protest leaders have been offered opportunities in their media appearances to denounce the use of violence against Israeli civilians or affirm Israel’s right to defend itself against violent attacks, but have repeatedly declined to do so. 

My strongest objection to the protests, however, is that they totally mischaracterize the history that led to Israel’s creation and are spreading dangerous myths about Israel and Zionism that is penetrating the consciousness of the younger generations. The history is clear—Zionism is an ideology that calls for the creation of a Jewish national homeland as a remedy for the persecution Jews have suffered for millennia. The caravans of Jews migrating to Palestine from the late 19^th to the mid 20^th century were doing the exact same thing as today’s migrants—fleeing violence and seeking safety for themselves and their families. Jewish history is not about the domination or subjugation of others, but rather historic cycles of being attacked and persecuted, then fleeing violence and seeking refuge, only to have this sequence repeated over and over again around the globe.

The idea perpetrated by BDS that Jews emigrated to the Palestine region as a “colonial” endeavor to displace and economically dominate the people who lived there is simply false. Jews came to Palestine because they were fleeing pogroms in Tsarist Russia in the late 1880s and were subjected to violence and mass antisemitism in eastern Europe in the 1890s following publication of the fabricated Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Another wave of Jews emigrated from Germany in the early 1930s to escape the newly empowered Nazi regime. Once World War II began, illegal immigration to Palestine became one of the only escape routes from the concentration camps and gas chambers after the British and United States limited migration from Eastern Europe. In the 1940s and 50s, about 800,000 Jews from the Middle East and North Africa found refuge in Israel when violent antisemitism made it impossible to continue living there. President Biden is right when he says that “if there were not an Israel, we would have to invent one.”

The protestors’ claim that the refugees that have populated modern day Israel were “settler colonialists” is meritless. Unlike the empires that conquered Palestine in previous centuries like the British and the Ottomans, Jews did not come to the region to plunder natural resources, develop a market for exports, or extract labor from indigenous peoples. They came to Palestine because there has been a consistent Jewish presence in the region for over 3000 years and it was their historical homeland. They came to create one small place on the entire globe where it would be safe to be a Jew. 

There is also no basis for the protestors’ claim that Israel is an illegitimate state and that its territory consists of “Arab lands” that should be returned.  Israel was created by the United Nation’s 1947 partition plan of what remained of the British Mandate after Transjordan became an independent state in 1946. While it is true that the Arab majority in the region was allocated slightly less than half the available territory by the partition plan, the U.N. took account of the fact that millions of Holocaust survivors would soon be emigrating to the new Jewish state. Some claim the partition was unfair, but it is worth noting that the vast majority of the territory allocated to the proposed Jewish state was the virtually uninhabited, hardscrabble Negev desert. Regardless, the vote in favor of the partition was 33 to 13, with 10 abstentions, a margin that exceeded the two-thirds threshold required by the United Nations Charter – a treaty accepted by every nation state on the planet. As such, Israel was created through an entirely legitimate process under international law – its territory was not “stolen” from anyone.

It is important to consider that if the Arab states had accepted this United Nations partition plan, a Palestinian state would have been created in 1948 and would have been enjoying its 76^th anniversary this month. We will never know. Instead of accepting partition, the Arab states surrounding Israel and many of the Palestinians in the region opted for war to obliterate Israel. And when they failed in 1948, they tried again in 1967, and again in 1973. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict we are witnessing today was borne of these illegal wars of aggression, not the lawful creation of the State of Israel. Had the 1948 war not occurred, many of the 700,000 Palestinians who became refugees due to the war (as well as, truth be told, ethnic cleansing by the Israeli Army) may have either remained in Israel or migrated to the adjacent new Palestinian state (just as millions of Muslims migrated to the new Pakistan and Bangladesh after the U.N. partitioned the South Asian subcontinent). The contention that the stateless condition of the Palestinian people is exclusively the fault of the Israel and Zionism is a historical fiction.

It is also strangely ironic that the protestors’ deep antipathy towards Israel has so clouded their judgement that they have expressed support for violent “resistance” groups like Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). The protestors contend that they are in favor of combatting hate, inequality, misogyny, and racism, but Hamas and the PFLP do not share this commitment to tolerance and diversity. If given the chance, these groups would govern Palestine according to their distorted interpretation of seventh-century Islamic-law, just as the Taliban has done during its reigns in Afghanistan and ISIS did in its “caliphate” in parts of Iraq and Syria. The society these groups would create would be deeply patriarchal theocracies, with homosexuality and transsexuality violently outlawed and no freedom of speech or religion. Those who wave the Hamas and PLFP flags at their campus Gaza solidarity encampments should think a lot harder about the ideas they are endorsing.

The protestors seem to have convinced themselves that justice is on their side and they continue to double-down on their increasingly violent and disruptive tactics in the face of heavy-handed law enforcement actions by the universities. But in reality, the protestors have been joined by very few of their fellow students. They will hear the boos when they attempt to disrupt graduation ceremonies. And few will come to their aid when they are suspended from school. Ultimately, this is because their message is deeply flawed. We should applaud students when they stand up for human rights and shine light on injustices around the world. And Israel has plenty to answer for regarding its treatment of the Palestinian people. But the students have overplayed their hand by aligning with the BDS movement, lending tacit support to violent terrorist groups, questioning the legitimacy of the Jewish state, and distorting the complex history of Zionism, the creation of Israel, and the longstanding Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 

This is a protest movement that deserves to fail.