By Jonathan Marks
Friday, November 15, 2019
In a riveting and sad New York Times op-ed,
Blake Flayton, a student at George Washington University and a “gay abortion
rights advocate and environmentalist,” explained why his fellow progressives
call him a “baby killer” and “apartheid enabler.” Like 95 percent of Jews,
according to Gallup, the op-ed’s author has a “favorable” view of Israel.
George Washington University has been in the news lately
for a blatant kind of anti-Semitism. A “pro-Palestinian” student was captured
on video, saying, “We’re going to f**king bomb Israel, bro. F**k out of here,
Jewish pieces of s**t.” The student, who says she was intoxicated, has
apologized profusely and claimed she didn’t “even know why I said that.” I take
her at her word. But the line between “Zionist” and “Jew” can be thin in
anti-Israel discourse. In vino veritas.
Jewish students, who constitute about a quarter of GW’s
student body, say that they experience anti-Semitism on campus. But crude
anti-Semitism is not Flayton’s focus.
Instead, Flayton described a rally he attended in support
of higher wages for custodial staff. In the course of that rally,
representatives of the two leading campus anti-Israel groups, Jewish Voice for
Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, spoke. They “railed against the
oppression of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, which, according to them,
had everything to do with G.W. janitors making less than their fair share.”
Flayton asks, “Reasonable people recognize that
conflating the Jews with being money-hungry or cheap is anti-Semitic. How is
tying the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to janitors not getting paid enough at
an American university any different?”
Good question.
It remains only to note that blaming the Jewish state for
every species of injustice is a feature of the campus anti-Israel movement, not
an anomaly. At the City University of New York in 2015, multiple Students for
Justice in Palestine chapters signed a statement against CUNY’s “Zionist
administration.” The topics? High tuition and low wages for campus workers.
Jewish Voice for Peace has since 2017 been running a “Deadly Exchange”
campaign, the core of which is that Israel is responsible for police violence
against blacks in America. The strategy is clear enough: if you blame the
Jews—sorry, “Zionism”—for everyone’s ills, you can draw more allies into your
movement.
Anti-Semitism, you see, is a potent political strategy.
It’s even more potent when student governments ignore Jewish students and
condemn, as the student Senate at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign
did recently, the “equation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.” Four hundred
Jewish students, including the lone Jew in the Senate, walked out.
Once, certain student governments were satisfied to make
pronouncements about the Middle East without educating themselves about it. Now
they have graduated to lecturing and condemning Jews who complain about
anti-Semitism without educating themselves about anti-Semitism.
Kudos to Mr. Flayton for stepping forward and to the New
York Times for publishing him. No doubt, some adherents of the campus left
are beyond shame. But in my experience, even professed anti-Zionists are more
thoughtful and persuadable than their public pronouncements suggest. They
genuinely believe, perhaps because they rub elbows mainly with the 5 percent of
Jews who do not have a favorable view of Israel, that the people who charge
them with anti-Semitism are disingenuous.
They haven’t thought it through, but they’re not beyond
help.
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