At University of Michigan, ‘Long Live the Intifada’ Is the Tip of the Iceberg

By Charles Hilu

Friday, January 20, 2023

On January 12 — the same day that Vice President Kamala Harris visited the University of Michigan for a panel on climate change — a video of protesters from Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE), holding Palestinian flags and hollering attacks on the Jewish state of Israel, went viral. Among the students’ chants were “Long live the Intifada,” “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” and “There is only one solution.” At a rally before the group marched, one speaker described how Israelis “water their invasive species with Palestinian blood,” according to the Michigan Specter, the official publication of the university’s Young Democratic Socialists of America chapter.

Such rhetoric is, of course, inexcusable, and it is difficult to believe that the students were unaware of their slogans’ meanings. During the Second Intifada, one of two such Palestinian uprisings against Israel to date, civilians made up over 68 percent of the Israelis killed, according to B’tselem. “From the river to the sea” is nothing short of a call for Israel’s destruction, which would likely result in the mass death of the Jews who call the country home. And the talk of “only one solution,” a play on the so-called two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, evokes the Nazis’ “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.”

Sadly, this was far from an isolated incident on the University of Michigan’s campus.

The pattern goes back to at least 2015, when SAFE set up a mock “apartheid wall” in the center of campus to represent the barrier on the border between Israel and the West Bank. A conservative Jewish student and member of the school’s Central Student Government, Jesse Arm, challenged the protesters, saying they were “not serious about this” and calling their demonstration “disgusting.” After the event, SAFE called for Arm’s removal from student government and successfully incited CSG to conduct its first ethics investigation against him. “I was threatened with removal from office because I had the audacity to condemn an anti-Israel protest where Arab students cosplayed as IDF soldiers and celebrated violence against Jews,” Arm told me. In the end, the ethics committee recommended taking no action against him, finding that his efforts to push back on SAFE’s protest were protected by the First Amendment.

Similar attitudes to SAFE’s are also present among University of Michigan faculty. In 2018, cultural-studies professor John Cheney-Lippold rejected a request from a student to write a letter of recommendation for her to study abroad in Israel. Many departments at the school had “pledged an academic boycott of Israel in support of Palestinians,” which extended to “writing letters of recommendation for students planning to study there,” Cheney-Lippold claimed, though he also told the student that he would be happy to write recommendation letters for her that did not involve Israel. To the university’s credit, the administration disciplined him appropriately, declaring that his conduct had “fallen far short” of the standards it has set forth for the faculty, denying him a salary increase for a year, and freezing his sabbatical eligibility. Its statement of reprimand added that his claim about departmental boycotts was false: “To be clear, there are no University departments participating in the boycott and in fact, the University formally and publicly opposes a boycott of Israeli academic institutions.”

But that decision did not stop further bad behavior from student organizations. In May 2021, with Israel and Hamas clashing in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood dispute, Central Student Government released a statement. The statement, signed by CSG’s president, vice president, and DEI coordinator, called the broader fight between Israelis and Palestinians “not a ‘conflict,’ but emblematic of Israeli settler-colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid.” The authors claimed that “on our own campus, anti-Palestinian sentiment has been allowed to run wild” and accused the university of remaining “complicit by choosing to not divest from Israeli companies profiting off of the settler state’s occupation.” In writing the statement, CSG partnered with SAFE, as well as Michigan’s Arab and Muslim student associations. No Jewish groups were consulted. Jewish organizations did, however, combine with individual campus figures to denounce the statement, which “was released while rockets were being launched into Israel, with no consideration of how Jewish students with a connection to Israel may be feeling,” in the words of Michigan Hillel. The university made no direct comment on the controversy aside from clarifying that CSG did not speak for the school and pointing to its policy on the freedom of expression.

In the weeks following the CSG polemic, higher-ups at the university put out various statements addressing the division the conflict had wrought, one of which generally lamented “increasing instances of threats, intimidation, hateful speech and vandalism directed toward members of the U-M community, including on and near our campus.” None made any mention of abuse specifically directed toward pro-Israel Jews.

In July 2021, an unknown group marked up “The Rock,” which students and others often paint to advertise events or spread certain messages, with vulgar slurs such as “F*** Israel.” The Rock is located next to the Hillel building, and the graffiti was on the side of The Rock facing the building. Then, on September 12 of last year, prior to Harris’s visit, students found slogans such as “end apartheid” and “stop the genocide” graffitied on the rock. On September 29, during the period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, part of the holiest time of the year for Jews, SAFE conducted an “apartheid wall” demonstration similar to the display Arm had criticized in 2015. In 2016, SAFE had conducted that same protest during Rosh Hashanah. In every one of these cases, university administrators remained silent.

The abominable rhetoric we witnessed last week did not occur in a vacuum. The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is complex and thorny, and it requires respectful debate and discussion. So it’s particularly unfortunate that the University of Michigan has allowed an allergy to thoughtful dialogue to take hold on campus in recent years. The SAFE protesters and other pro-Palestinian students have the right to free speech, and the administration is right not to punish them. But despite having the largest number of DEI bureaucrats in the country, the annual salaries of whom total over $18 million, Michigan has not given enough support to its Jewish community, and such negligence has real consequences. A poll conducted before the Sheikh Jarrah skirmishes found that 65 percent of Jewish college students nationwide felt unsafe on campus, and that 50 percent felt the need to hide their Jewish identity. A study conducted in the aftermath of the Sheikh Jarrah skirmishes found a 100 percent increase in “threats to Jewish identity.”

The climate for pro-Israel Jews on Michigan’s campus reflects this national trend, and will only continue to deteriorate if the university’s administration does not begin to denounce antisemitic hate.