How Israel Lost America
Saree Makdisi writes on the student protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
By Saree MakdisiJuly 12, 2024
JEWISH STUDENTS on our university campuses are in danger.
They are facing the threat of assault and arrest by overzealous riot police, suspension by universities such as Columbia, Princeton, and UCLA, character assassination and doxing by well-funded lobbying organizations and individuals, and blacklisting on murky websites connected to a manipulative foreign power.
They are not alone, however: these Jewish students are working together with countless others—Asian, Black, Latinx, Indigenous, white, and Arab—to protest the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza. Every chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) that I know of has vocal and active Jewish members, and there are many overlaps between SJP and campus chapters of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP).
Yet this is not how recent events on campuses across the country are being depicted in mainstream media and political representations. Both the ongoing campus protests and the broader discussion of Israel’s genocide in Gaza have persistently been framed by a disingenuous political narrative—picked up and thoughtlessly recycled in far too many mainstream media reports—as a crisis of “antisemitism on campus.” Just the other day, for instance, I saw yet another article in the US edition of The Guardian claiming that “antisemitism was on the rise in the US before Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October” and that law enforcement officials have recorded “a spike in threats against Jewish Americans” in the months afterwards. President Joe Biden himself recently warned of “a ferocious surge of antisemitism” across the country, as I referenced in my previous essay on this subject for LARB. And if you take at face value House Speaker Mike Johnson decrying the “hatred and antisemitism” he says is growing on our campuses, or Senator Tom Cotton urging the National Guard to be summoned to prevent what he called “nascent pogroms” at Columbia University, you could almost be excused for thinking that there really is a crisis of anti-Jewish violence on campuses across the country, with Jewish students facing mortal danger simply for being Jewish. When North Carolina Representative Virginia Foxx assembled a congressional committee to investigate “antisemitism on college campuses,” the crisis seemed to take on a life of its own, one so detached from actual circumstances on campuses across the country that it would be clumsily comical if it were not so deadly serious.
I pointed out in another piece last fall that this “crisis” stems from, builds on, and is now adding to the carefully choreographed and mendacious campaign by Zionist organizations to stretch the term “antisemitism” to the breaking point and beyond. For years, organizations including Jonathan Greenblatt’s Anti-Defamation League have worked assiduously to try to redefine the very concept of “antisemitism” in order to force criticism of Zionism or of the policies of the Israeli state into the dictionary meaning of that term—i.e., racism against Jewish people. Thus, when the ADL tallies up reports of “antisemitism on campus,” or issues desperate warnings of “spikes in antisemitism” across the country since October—warnings that are picked up, read at face value, and amplified by newspapers like The Guardian or The New York Times—it’s deliberately impossible to distinguish in its data instances of actual anti-Jewish sentiment from the protests against Israel’s war in Gaza that certainly have “spiked” on campuses across the country.
That’s because the intent of the ADL and similar outfits (as well as the politicians with whom they are coordinating) is to misrepresent the enormous tide of student protest against Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza not merely in order to discredit it but to banish it altogether. Their aim, in fact—and this is no longer mere speculation but already taking form in pending legislation—is to render criticism of Israel not simply “immoral” but all but illegal. In the meantime, they seek to suppress protest against a genocide enabled and financed by every taxpayer in the United States—and to displace concern about the genocide itself with a manufactured crisis designed to draw attention away from Gaza, allowing the Israeli government to grind away at Palestinian lives. Little wonder, then, that the ADL has been warning of a spike in what it calls “antisemitism” since October. Little wonder, too, that the editors of Wikipedia recently concluded that the ADL is an “unreliable source” for discussions of antisemitism that overlap in any way with the question of Palestine, as the current “crisis of antisemitism” certainly does.
Meanwhile, right-wing politicians have been quick to take advantage of this sense of crisis to propose new forms of surveillance and censorship on an academic system that they have long wanted to bring under control, whether in their resentment at DEI initiatives or their fury at whatever it is that they imagine “critical race theory” to be. Suddenly feigning concern for Jewish students (about whom they never previously seemed to care), they are quickly taking advantage of a narrative of “crisis” that has been handed to them by an institutional Zionist establishment, even seeking to make federal funding for education conditional on the suppression of criticism of Israel on college campuses. Institutional Zionism, which for decades was the darling of progressives and the Left in Europe and the United States, has backflipped and is now in bed with the Far Right.
I don’t doubt for a minute, of course, that actual anti-Jewish racism persists along with other forms of racism in the United States, including anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, and anti-Palestinian racism. But other communities and ethnicities don’t have an equivalent of the ADL or countless other similar organizations, whose role in combating domestic discrimination has long since been superseded by their function in the larger assemblage of the Israel lobby. By now, these outfits have perfected the art of instrumentalizing “antisemitism” and turning it into a rhetorical weapon, aiming it directly at constitutionally protected speech, academic freedom, the right to protest, and other matters that Americans have hitherto taken for granted, all of which we are today at risk of losing, as the interests of a foreign state and those of revanchist American politicians have been whipped up into a perfect storm. As James Bamford recently pointed out, Israel is in effect operating a secret spying network on US campuses, sharing information gathered on American student protesters with Israeli state intelligence in order to “crush them.” And another recent report, in The Guardian, reveals the extent to which Zionist lobbying organizations in the US are coordinating closely with the Israeli state in order “to strike back at student protests, human rights organizations and other voices of dissent” in the United States.
In the fall, the “antisemitism crisis” came to a head in congressional hearings in which the presidents of three major universities were persistently faced with questions such as whether they think campus calls for a “genocide of Jews” are acceptable. Although the president of MIT—alone among those interrogated at the time—did point out that no such call had in fact been made, the gap between life and art (in this case the artfulness of racist right-wing politicians masquerading as moral campaigners against racism) has continued to grow ever since. And if in the fall the sense of a well-nigh national crisis was orchestrated around an event that never took place (calls for “Jewish genocide”), with the advent of the Palestine solidarity encampments that students set up on campuses across the nation this spring, the gap between reality and the politicized narrative of the “antisemitism crisis” has grown exponentially.
It’s not just that the assertions made by politicians like Tom Cotton, Mike Johnson, Elise Stefanik, and Virginia Foxx are unfounded in reality—they have taken leave of reality altogether. Certain mainstream media outlets have joined up in this make-believe reality, and the more they indulge in it, the more real it seems to become, to the point where even ordinary people—above all certain sectors of the Jewish community, whose principal organizations have been sounding alarm bells for months—are now convinced of the need to live in fear for their very lives and therefore actually able to psych themselves, as they did in the fall, into mishearing a chant such as “we charge you with genocide” as “we want Jewish genocide.”
Even very close to home and away from any campus, it’s possible to see evidence of the widening gap between the world of reality and that of media and political (mis)representation. Read almost any mainstream media account of the protest recently held outside the Adas Torah synagogue here in Los Angeles and you could be forgiven for thinking an angry antisemitic mob had just randomly pitched up outside a house of worship simply out of racist anti-Jewish malice and spite. “Protest Outside L.A. Synagogue Spurs Widespread Condemnation,” screamed the headline in the Los Angeles Times. Mayor Karen Bass, Congressman Ted Lieu, Governor Gavin Newsom, President Biden, and a host of other local and national figures were quick to condemn the protest and to demand “action” against the protesters. You’d have to dig deep into the bowels of the eventually updated (not the initial) L.A. Times story, and in a follow-up piece a full week later, to discover that the protest—held on a Sunday, not the Jewish Sabbath—had nothing to do with worship at a synagogue and everything to do with a real estate fair held at the synagogue. The fair was offering property for sale in what the sponsoring company referred to as “Israel,” though some of the property was actually in the militarily occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem and all of it was violently expropriated from Palestinian families. That a protest against the colonial sale of stolen land could be so wantonly depicted—either by lazy journalists or by even lazier politicians—in terms of the “antisemitism crisis” is evidence not simply of the strength of that narrative but also of the exponential growth of an alternative reality that this narrative helps to sustain.
Meanwhile, as everyone in this alternative reality wrings their hands over the supposed fate of Jewish students facing Cotton’s “nascent pogrom,” over here in the mundane real world in which the rest of us live, the students actually being materially and emotionally harmed (in all the ways I outlined in my above-mentioned LARB essay) are the ones protesting against the genocide and advocating for Palestinian rights, including many Jewish students. Yet there is no national concern for them, no sense of a national crisis—and certainly no congressional committee anxious to protect their rights. Thus this narrative has managed to almost entirely occlude the material, demonstrable, and documentable harm actually suffered by our students, whose fears and worries carry no political weight because our politicians, our media, and our universities, with very few exceptions, have let them down through sheer indifference; if anything, in fact, by helping to perpetuate the antisemitism narrative, these institutions are actually helping to justify the violent repression of American students in order to protect Israel and safeguard its genocide in Gaza.
In this sense, the congressional hearings on “antisemitism” represent the legislative continuation of the frontal assaults mounted on peaceful Palestine solidarity encampments by Zionist mobs (most shockingly at my own campus, UCLA) or riot police using the same tactics on American students that Israeli police have long used on Palestinian protesters—including firing rubber bullets at people’s heads from point-blank range. This has yielded devastating results, including a UCLA student sustaining damage to his lung from such a projectile, fired on our campus by riot police summoned by the university itself to suppress its own students.
“We have a clear message for mealy-mouthed, spineless college leaders,” proclaimed Virginia Foxx, the North Carolina Republican chairing the House committee claiming to investigate the antisemitism crisis on campus. “Congress will not tolerate your dereliction of duty to your Jewish students,” she added. “American universities are officially put on notice that we have come to take our universities back.” It may be true that many, if not all, of the United States’ college leaders are indeed mealymouthed and spineless (albeit for different reasons than those cited by Foxx). Far too many of them have been happy to play along with Foxx and her show trial rather than having the courage to call it out for what it is: grotesque political interference in higher education and academic freedom, unprecedented since the McCarthy show trials of the 1950s (and the McCarthy hearings at least nominally had to do with US national security—whereas the censorship and violence on view here today are in the interests of a foreign country, not our own).
“Trying to reconcile the free-speech rights of those who want to protest and the rights of Jewish students to be in an environment free of harassment or discrimination,” claims the president of Columbia University in her written testimony to Foxx’s committee, “has been the central challenge on our campus, and many others, in recent months.” She writes as though Jewish students at Columbia—other than the ones protesting against the genocide in Gaza—have actually faced systematic harassment and discrimination, of which there is no documented evidence, certainly not in comparison to the pile of evidence about doxing and harassment or worse faced by students—including countless Jewish students—supporting Palestinian rights on campuses such as Columbia’s. Moreover, statements like this, which have been reiterated by campus administrations across the country (including at UCLA), enact the very antisemitism that they purport to be resisting, by treating “Jewish students” as a monolithic mass, Jewishness as indistinguishable from Zionism, Jewish American identity as inexorably aligned with the interests of Israel, and hence American Jews as, in effect, merely the local proxies of another country rather than rational individuals perfectly capable of expressing their own heterodox, divergent, and dissenting political positions. The administrators and politicians making such statements might want to take the time to listen to Jewish students rather than seeking to reduce them to an inert mass and ventriloquize them into silence. Granting the central thesis of the right-wing and Zionist fantasy, however, grounds its other elements, including the calls for government intervention and worse.
In the case of the Columbia testimony, things started badly and deteriorated rapidly from there, with one member of the committee (Rick Allen) asking the university president Minouche Shafik in all seriousness whether she wanted her campus to be cursed by God (she didn’t) and another (Lisa McClain) asking her if she thought the call for “infantada” (by which she presumably meant “intifada”) is antisemitic. The one moment of sincerity in Shafik’s entire testimony came when she admitted that she found calls for student protest “distressing.”
Needless to say, neither the Columbia president nor any of the congresspeople grilling her offered any credible evidence to back up their claims—nor did Shafik make any effort to contest the claims being foisted upon her, nor did she hesitate for one moment to throw her students and faculty under the proverbial bus in order to protect herself.
However, when what passes for “evidence” is presented in these congressional hearings, the extent of the detachment from reality becomes all the more apparent. When, for instance, the Foxx committee set its sights on UCLA—a campus with which I am intimately familiar—it presented a preposterous accumulation of “evidence” in order to justify summoning the UCLA chancellor for yet another show trial. For the May 15 letter addressed by the Foxx committee to the UC/UCLA leadership recycles a farrago of threadbare lies propagated by Zionist agitators and printed without hesitation or the need for corroboration, often by either right-wing or Zionist media, including many Israeli news outlets. There were obvious falsehoods: the letter claims that the UCLA encampment “illegally denied students access to campus buildings.” Anyone familiar with the UCLA campus would recognize this as a lie. There were wide walkways between the camp perimeter and the closest campus buildings and people would have had to actually go out of their way to even encounter the camp at all. There are more insidious claims. The letter purports that “on April 28, 2024, anti-Israel activists shoved a Jewish student counter-protestor from another local college to the ground, kicked her in the head, and stepped on her. The assault left her bleeding and caused her to lose consciousness and to be rushed to the hospital.” Although the Foxx letter “documents” this claim with a footnote linking to an article in the Times of Israel, it has been widely debunked in video evidence and in detailed analysis in the Los Angeles Times. The Jewish counterprotester was inadvertently knocked down by the Zionist crowd in which she was moving and sustained injuries—including blows to the head—in trying to retrieve the Israeli flag she had dropped.
The letter also includes distortions, like “Jewish students were attacked, harassed, and intimidated for walking on their own campus.” At no point were students—Jewish or otherwise—attacked, harassed, or intimidated by the members of the encampment, whose energies were directed solely inwards into what they called a “liberated zone.” A couple of Zionist activists had posted carefully curated videos of themselves trying to get into the camp in order to disrupt it (as they had been doing, with varying degrees of violence, from the moment the camp went up) and being nonviolently blocked by students in the camp. At least one of these videos was picked up by Fox News and posted under the absurd headline, “Video Shows Anti-Israel Protesters Block Jewish Student from Getting to Class.” The videos posted by way of evidence of “attack,” “harassment,” and “intimidation” show those protecting the camp (after days of violent abuse by Zionist counterprotesters) declining to engage with the would-be intruders and silently and nonviolently resisting their attempts to break in.
Merely reconnecting these distortions and outright lies back to the truth misses the point, however, because the truth itself is not what is at stake here. There’s simply no contest between a network of journalists, Zionist organizations, and politicians and an individual scholar like me or my colleague Robin D. G. Kelley, who in a recent piece similarly sifted through a mound of misinformation to reveal the lies and fabulations sustaining them. The lies, like the “crisis” of which they are supposed to constitute “evidence,” have taken on a life of their own.
Meanwhile, the most urgent actual recent events on campus are not receiving nearly the level of attention that they ought to be. Again at UCLA, a task force (on which I serve) appointed by the provost to address anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, and anti-Palestinian racism on campus published a report that reveals the extent—going back years—of a racist climate at UCLA that has deprived students, faculty, and staff from Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian backgrounds from enjoying equal access to resources and protection. A second report by the task force illustrates the alarming militarization of our campus and the administration’s instant recourse to police violence as a means of containing student protest. The task force reports have received no attention from campus leadership or from the national media, and certainly not from Congress. In the congressional hearings to which the UCLA chancellor was summoned, his long record of racist indifference to Palestinian life—to which public attention has repeatedly been drawn, including in these pages—was never mentioned, let alone challenged. The chancellor’s testimony and the entire media-political narrative containing it drove home the point that, while alleged antisemitism is worthy of a media circus and congressional hearings, routine and pervasive anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, and anti-Palestinian racism at our universities is barely worth a shrug. Some lives matter; others just don’t.
What is at stake in these congressional hearings and the manufactured “crisis” they claim to be addressing? The “antisemitism” narrative is being used not only to stifle dissent on our campuses and delegitimize protest against Israeli racism and violence but also to obscure the extent to which American public opinion—especially among students and young people—has turned decisively against Israel. The “crisis of antisemitism” is being used to shift attention away from Israel’s genocide in Gaza, then, but it also signals the extent to which Israel has lost America, or at least a substantial portion of America—and certainly the portion representing the nation’s future. The uprising on college campuses across the country is the surest index of that loss. Students at campuses across the country express the last vestiges of the nation’s conscience in the face of apocalyptic horror. And only the violence of racist mobs or riot police has been able to derail the students—and then only temporarily. The consensus—the Zionist hegemony—that once held sway on campuses can no longer be taken for granted; even maintaining its semblance requires handcuffs, rubber bullets, and the threat of disciplinary action, police arrest, or worse. The endless accumulation of ADL reports, the circus of congressional hearings, and the college administrators goaded into action by donors or boards of regents to repress their own students may all look like evidence of the enduring strength of Zionism’s grip on the United States. What they actually constitute, however, is evidence of its terminal decline.
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Featured image: Frederic Edwin Church. Parade Entering Jaffa, Palestine (Tel Aviv, Israel), 1868. Gift of Louis P. Church. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (1917-4-522). CC0, si.edu. Accessed July 10, 2024.
LARB Contributor
Saree Makdisi teaches English and comparative literature at UCLA. His books include Reading William Blake (2015) and Tolerance Is a Wasteland: Palestine and the Culture of Denial (2022).