By John Podhoretz
Tuesday, January 16, 2024
‘I have never felt like this
before’
I
have lost count of the number of times the phrase “I have never felt like this
before” has been spoken in my ear, texted to me, or sent to me in an email, in
the three months since the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023.
When
I talked with Israelis on a trip in November, the phrase described a gut
emotion few under the age of 50 said they had ever experienced—the sense that
they were personally vulnerable to outside attack in a manner more like an
extended military invasion than a terrorist blow. They had lived through years
of ineffectual rocket fire that was all but magically extinguished by the Iron
Dome and Arrow anti-missile systems. Those interceptions had provided a feeling
of near-divine protection. No longer. Israelis feel raw now, and such
vulnerability is never momentary or transitory; one might say the opposite.
Once it seizes you, it might take years before you wake up one morning and
notice suddenly it’s no longer there.
I
experienced that blissful moment once in my life, in New York City in 1998,
when I was walking alone late at night across Central Park and realized I was
doing something I simply would never have done before in my 37 years as a
native Manhattanite. The feeling in the gut of every New Yorker of my age—the
need to protect oneself from some sudden onslaught, in part because everyone we
knew had been attacked in one way or another—was just no longer there, and I
had never felt it disappearing. Because of the crime drop, because of increased
police visibility, because of the presence of others like me in exactly the
same place at exactly the same time, this new sense of freedom was now my new
reality.
I
am not saying Israelis ever felt secure in quite that way before October 7.
They had, of course, lived through 60 years of terrorist attacks (the Palestine
Liberation Organization was founded in 1964 as a violence-worshipping gang
designed to attack civilians on the model of the anti-colonialists in Algeria)
and several short wars over the past half century. But through the 2010s and
early 2020s, the sense of immediate danger for Israelis had split in two—and
might therefore have seemed, oddly enough, twice as weak.
The
threat had either become too geopolitically large to affect their quotidian
existences (like the existential risk posed by Iran’s nuclear program) or could
have only come so suddenly and unexpectedly that it would have been absurd to
disrupt your daily life taking personal countermeasures (Palestinians engaged
in a bus-stabbing spree at one point; how do you defend against that?).
These
kinds of perils were certainly haunting, and they played a significant
political role in Israeli elections and Knesset debates, but they were more
theoretical to 9 million Israelis than actual.
So,
now, when an Israeli says, “I’ve never felt like this before,” what he’s
describing is a loss of stability, as though the very earth under his feet is
no longer truly solid but might crumble beneath him. This is why the Hamas
action, though not a terrorist attack in the traditional sense, may have been
the most effective strike against Israel in the history of the Jewish state. It
has destabilized people internally, which is terrorism’s goal. It also helps us
understand the ongoing traumatic effect of the continuing crisis involving the
hostages in Gaza. They have been held in unknown conditions for months now by
monsters whose vicious acts on October 7—and sadistic conduct during the
captivity of those hostages who have been released—makes the thought of what
they might be going through utterly paralyzing and terrifying when it crosses
your mind even for a second.
Israelis
have the sense that, but for the slightest accident of timing and location, any
of them might have been one of those hostages. And they hear the air-raid
sirens, and they run to the shelters and do not do so in the almost
lackadaisical way most of them did before October 7. The larger threat to
Israel’s existence, and their own existences, has moved from the theoretical to
the actual. After all, Hamas actually invaded Israeli territory and roamed on
Israeli soil for three days before the Gaza envelope was cleared of them. Fail
to finish them off now, and it could, it would, it will, happen again.
The
second-intifada period, from 2000 to 2003, might have been similar to 10/7 in
the steady dread it evoked, particularly for Jerusalemites. But even during
those years, when 140 Palestinians took out more than 1,000 Israelis in suicide
bombings, it was never clear what strategy the Palestinians might employ to
move beyond the chaos they were inflicting and onto Israel’s destruction. Now
there is a clear and terrifying path that runs right to, and from, Tehran.
Three
Iranian catamite organizations—Hamas, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hezbollah in
Lebanon—are directly in the fight to varying degrees, creating massive
disruptions in Israel’s south and north, and (to a lesser degree) in
water-based commerce in the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. Due to Hamas, tens of
thousands of Israeli citizens have been displaced from the small cities in the
Gaza-envelope area. Due to Hezbollah, tens of thousands more have been
evacuated from their homes near the border with Lebanon. All in all, more than
100,000 Israelis are living in hotel rooms in the far south or with relatives
elsewhere in the Holy Land. Due to the Houthis, commerce in the region is being
affected.
Thus,
to some extent, the destruction of normal Israeli life sought by Hamas’s
terrorists has been achieved, if (one hopes) temporarily. The restoration of
some version of normality in Israel will require the country’s leaders to play
their hand brilliantly over the next year—which is a tall order for a
dysfunctional government and a military and intelligence sector that missed the
signs leading to October 7.
And
can such normality even be achieved without the outbreak of major hostilities
between Israel and Hezbollah—with its hundreds of thousands of rockets and
missiles buried just north of Israel’s border with Lebanon? Those hostilities
would impose a new obligation on Israel as serious as the one relating to
Hamas—to pacify the area of Lebanon such that Hezbollah’s rocketry no longer
poses an active threat. Even more alarming: Can such hostilities be avoided
until Israel completes its mission in Gaza, or will Israel find itself instead
in a two-front shooting war with a third minor front featuring missiles fired
from Houthi sites in Yemen?
The
ensuing chaos might shake up the globe—and might conceivably provide Tehran
with the casus belli it has long sought to wipe Israel off the
map.
Now,
this is a nightmare scenario, this potential cascade toward a nuclear exchange.
And nightmares are things of the mind, not actuality. But things of the mind
can be haunting enough to disrupt a person’s, or a nation’s, consciousness even
when they are impossible. And remember, this is not an implausible nightmare.
Tehran has been openly talking about wiping Israel off the map since 2005.
The
choices that Israel may find itself facing over the next year could be
excruciating because there’s no way to game them out. This explains the almost
universal consensus inside Israel about the post-10/7 goal of eradicating
Hamas. To many Westerners, such an aim may seem an unachievable goal—for won’t
the root causes of Palestinian suffering that have given Hamas its power simply
remain present and keep Hamas alive? Well, Hamas can remain alive and active
only if its leaders and fighters remain literally alive. If they are dead, they
will have to be replaced by equally skilled leaders and newly trained fighters,
and such an effort is the task of a generation, not a few months.
This
is not a revenge movie. Fighters and planners don’t just get good at fighting
and planning because they’re really angry. The idea that if you cut Hamas down,
it will rise up more powerful than you could ever have imagined is not based in
geopolitics—it’s lifted from George Lucas’s screenplay for Star Wars.
For Israelis to resume the lives they were leading before 10/7, the eradication
of Hamas is the only way forward. Any effort to end the conflict short of that
aim will leave Israel in an existentially unsettled state whose ramifications
could be catastrophic.
So
no wonder Israelis say they’ve never felt anything like this before. How could
they have? Has anyone?
But
what about Jews outside Israel who use the same phrase—who also say, “I’ve
never felt anything like this before”?
‘I CAN’T BELIEVE
THIS IS HAPPENING’
For
those deeply bound up with the condition of the Jewish state—Zionists whose
commitment to the cause has made them hyperaware of the risks and opportunities
in Eretz Yisrael, and those whose Israeli family members give them a personal
stake in it—October 7 was also a trauma, though perhaps not entirely
unprecedented. To feel the individual instability I just described really
requires being an Israeli in Israel right now. For the rest of us, the
combination of terror, war, hostages, and slaughter evoked feelings not
experienced in klal Yisrael, the worldwide Jewish community, since
the 1970s.
In
four years’ time, recall, Israeli athletes were taken hostage and massacred at
the 1972 Munich Olympics. The Yom Kippur War of 1973 shattered the triumphalist
spirit that had prevailed since the 1967 Six-Day War. By 1974, the Soviet Union
had made it clear it would keep Jews hungry to emigrate to Israel imprisoned
inside Soviet borders. The United Nations declared that Zionism was racism in a
notorious 1975 resolution. A planeful of Jews was hijacked to Entebbe in July
1976.
The
idea that Israel, Israelis, and would-be Israelis have become targets of a new
kind of evil took depressing, even debilitating, root. The staggering rescue of
those Entebbe hostages helped calm the overwhelmingly anxious atmosphere that
prevailed at the time among world Jewry—and was followed the next year by the
stunning journey to Jerusalem by Egypt’s dictator Anwar el-Sadat and by the
Camp David peace treaty between Israel and Egypt in 1979. The crisis facing
Israel seemed to be over, and the depression lifted.
That
was nearly a half-century ago. In the decades since, Israel has continued to be
a source of unity for American Jews and Jews worldwide, the efforts of
the New York Times to convince us otherwise notwithstanding.
The data are absolutely clear. American Jews have supported Israel,
consistently and in vast numbers—though in broad-brush terms, and there’s no
question the fractiousness of the Diaspora community regarding Israel’s
internal politics and behavior is often deeply unpleasant and divisive.
For
every 10 Jews in the Diaspora, there have been 12 opinions about Israel’s
political and social situation. Truth to tell, what we thought hasn’t really
mattered all that much, no matter how hard we tried to believe it did. Here at
home, we had our own problems anyway, and they weren’t that we were under
threat or potential threat from outside forces. Our problem was, as the rueful
joke had it, that once-hostile Gentiles didn’t want to kill us, they wanted to
marry us. We weren’t at risk of disappearing due to violence; we were at risk
of melting away into the great American melting pot.
Consider
this astounding fact. After the lynching of the Atlanta businessman Leo Frank
in 1915 at the hands of a mob that believed he had raped a worker in his
factory, it would be another 52 years until a Jew in America was publicly
murdered for being a Jew. That happened in 1977 in St. Louis, when a neo-Nazi
shot a few men at random outside a synagogue. It would then be another 41 years
before the massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018. In the
intervening four decades, you could count on one hand the number of
anti-Semitic killings in the United States. The fact that there were any such
killings is awful, of course, but the point stands: American Jews of my age and
younger simply did not feel themselves to be at any specific physical risk for
being Jewish.
That
began to change after the Tree of Life killing spree. Hate crimes in general
against Jews began to spiral in number—including two subsequent synagogue
attacks in California and Texas. YouTube kept displaying short videos of
visible members of the tribe (those with black hats, beards, fringed garments)
being randomly assaulted from behind on the streets of Brooklyn and elsewhere
in so called knock-out attacks. A kosher grocery store was shot up in New
Jersey. The home of a haredi Jew in Monsey, New York, was invaded by a man with
a machete. Though polls still demonstrated that the United States remained the
most philo-Semitic nation the world has ever known, actual violence against
Jews for being Jews was bubbling to the surface after remaining largely still
over the previous century.
Even
so, as the danger mounted, more secular and less easily identifiable American
Jews could readily comfort themselves with the thought that their relative
invisibility as Jews was still affording them some kind of
protection. And, as they are often made uncomfortable by co-religionists who do
place their faith at the center of their lives and (for example) send their
kids to yeshivas the New York Times regularly defames, they
could stave off any worries that this dangerous new targeting of Jews for being
Jews might affect them personally.
The
brilliant novelist and essayist Dara Horn published a book two years ago
called People Love Dead Jews, in which she explored the ways Jews
have been treated sympathetically when we are perceived to be powerless,
suffering, and victimized. This observation explains why there was a
craze in this country surrounding the construction of Holocaust memorials and
museums—because while Jews can agree on little else, we apparently share the
hope that reminding people of our historical vulnerability and recent near-destruction
will generate concern that can help keep us safe.
For
the same reason, leaders of Israel tours love to take Gentiles to Yad Vashem,
the original Holocaust memorial, to provide them with a reminder that the
impressive country they’re visiting came into being only a few years after
European Jewry was all but wiped out. For some of us, this has always left a
sour taste in our mouths, as if Jews are saying, “Do not view our present
success and think us admirable for it; rather, pity us our horrific past and
see us as no threat.” But in Israel and across the world, Jews-as-victims had
become a community-consensus approach toward non-Jews, with the implicit
message that they should help us, or at the very least, not fear us.
The
global response to October 7 changed all that, and in all but an instant. What
we learned, and with shocking speed, is that people just don’t love dead Jews
the way we thought they did. Or, to put it another way: Rather than serving as
morbid protection for the living, the 1,200 dead Jews of the Gaza envelope had
instead become the wellspring of a new and unprecedented series of assaults
against Jews in the United States.
At
a vigil on the Upper West Side of Manhattan two weeks after the attacks, I ran
into a very liberal rabbi I’ve known for a long time. As we passed by the
concrete blocks put up by the NYPD to make sure a car didn’t drive through to
smash into the gathering, I asked how she was. “I can’t believe this is
happening,” she said.
And
for the first time in our long acquaintance, I agreed with her.
‘THIS TOOK TWENTY
YEARS’
Several
seemingly unconnected arguments and controversies in the United States that had
been carefully cultivated over the past couple of decades sprang into full
flower on October 8 and thereafter. The weapons were ideas that had flowed for
a quarter century from university graduate programs to activist groups to K–12
education and then began to reach millions through online mailing lists,
listservs, and social-media entertainment services.
These
have, over time, included, but are not limited to:
·
Efforts
to make university endowments and other funds disinvest, boycott, and sanction
Israeli companies;
·
The
adoption of “intersectionality” arguments at all educational levels, featuring
the claim that Jews are part of a white oppressor class rather than a tiny and
historically oppressed minority;
·
Assertions
that Palestinians are the indigenous peoples of an area on the globe that has
literally been called Judea for 2,000 years (as well as other adjacent areas
where Jews have been unceasingly resident since before the birth of Christ);
·
The
slow but steady journey from the slanderous accusation that Israel is an
apartheid state to the reverse-Nazi notion that Israel is a genocidal state
(with the people whose genocide it is plotting growing in number by the year);
·
The
mass adoption of the slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine shall be
free”—a call for Israel’s destruction—among people who have no idea where
Israel is, what river is being referred to, and on what sea Israel has its
western border.
Throughout
Israel’s history, it has been the constant object of conspiracy theories and a
means by which Arab states and others have kept their populations focused on a
supposed outside evil rather than on the failings of their own regimes. The
United Nations has been the key player in this look-hey-squirrel distraction
game. Every year, more than half the General Assembly’s resolutions dealing
with individual countries are attacks on Israel—which is only one of 193 member
nations at the UN and whose population makes up less than 1/10th of 1 percent
of the people of the earth.
But
for most of the state’s existence, that gamesmanship was largely played out in
international organizations and at meetings and publications sponsored by the
foreign-policy establishment. The least-read op-ed columns of the world’s
newspapers have also been fixated on the “question of Israel” for decades—but
it was an elite fixation without a grassroots component. It was bad, don’t get
me wrong. But it was a specific concern of a specific class of
people—influential people, to be sure, but not a mass movement.
That
changed during the 2010s, when the social-media landscape increasingly became
fertile ground for resurrected conspiracy theories and long-discredited ideas
that could be fed to young people who had not lived through the events they
sought to pierce and knew no better. This we all knew from the social-media
wars of 2015 and 2016, and the media retailing of the preposterous idea that
Facebook had somehow hypnotized ordinary Americans into choosing Donald Trump
over Hillary Clinton.
But
what most of us old folk didn’t know was that apps with particular appeal to
young people, notably Instagram and TikTok, were being swarmed by “content
creators” whose purpose was to “message” these new Protocols of the Elders of
Anti-Zion and make them familiar and uncontroversial around the world. And all
those efforts were fertilized by hundreds of millions if not billions of
dollars spread around for this very purpose by the sovereign funds and large
donors living in Persian Gulf satrapies—and by the algorithms designed by
ByteDance, the owner of TikTok and effectively a subsidiary of the Chinese
military. No one was being asked to choose a president here, or even to pay
attention for more than 15 seconds at a time. All that was being conveyed was a
vibe. And that vibe was: Palestinians are oppressed, Israelis are the
oppressors, and Israel is backed by Jews worldwide.
All
of this was happening under the radar—or at least under my radar and the radar
of the people I know. It came as a surprise to many of us, no matter how
literate we believed ourselves to be in the propaganda war against Israel, to
learn that #FreePalestine has been an active social-media hashtag from 2019
onward.1
Indeed,
if you’d asked me, or people like me, how involved young people in America and
elsewhere actually were in anti-Israel activities, I would have answered that I
thought the movement small in number but passionate in determination. Many of
us developed real concern about college activism against Israel in the 2010s—in
part because there was a youth-movement president who was hostile to Israel and
it seemed like he and his young acolytes might actually come together to dig a
moat between the Jewish state and the only country on earth that was its
reliable ally.
At
the time of Barack Obama’s rise, American Jews themselves had been growing
obsessed with the supposed fissures in the community. In 2007, the group
JStreet was founded to serve as a counterweight to AIPAC, the lobby for
Israel’s interests in the United States. Though bizarrely and suspiciously
funded,2 JStreet was brilliantly timed. It came into being a
year after allegations that AIPAC was puppeteering American foreign policy
became mainstream fodder through the writings of academics John Mearsheimer and
Stephen Walt and then the scribblings of the Tokyo Rose of world Jewry, Peter
Beinart.
JStreet
was a media sensation, and it rode the wave of the Barack Obama victory. He
rode JStreet’s wave too, a bit. He came into office declaring a new approach
toward Israel—one he called “tough love,” though there would soon prove to be
no love at all in it. Obama’s barely disguised hostility gave surprising new
life to a quixotic movement to boycott, ban investment in, and lay sanctions on
Israel on the grounds that it was a supposed “apartheid state.”
Though
the American Jewish community was divided about its feelings both toward
right-wing Israeli governments and efforts by haredim in Israel to control
religious sites, this was simply a bridge too far for anyone but the most
committed leftists and open anti-Semites. After all, the boycotting of
Jewish-owned businesses was one of the first steps the Nazis took toward their
eventual Final Solution. Organized Jewry mostly came together again to
neutralize the danger of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. BDS
efforts in corporate boardrooms and state legislatures were rigorously opposed
and went nowhere, scoring only an occasional symbolic victory in some radical
latte town or other.
Things
were worse on campuses, to be sure. Student activists undertook disgraceful
assaults on Jewish organizations and Jewish professors. But here, too,
organized Jewry stepped up, hiring lawyers for these groups and people and
strengthening Jewish life at Hillel houses and other organizations throughout
American academia.
In
Washington, the fight was joined as well. Obama proved he was truly
representative of the views of the Democratic Party’s leading activists in
2012, when delegates at the party convention loudly and overwhelmingly
voice-voted their disapproval of a platform plank declaring Jerusalem the
capital of Israel.3 That voice vote became a full-blown
vanguard trend six years later when the 2018 midterm elections saw the
installation of five radical women in the House of Representatives who called
themselves “the Squad”—among them a Palestinian given to talking about the dual
loyalties of Jews and a Somali Muslim refugee who made dark reference to Jewish
money controlling Washington. The Squad in Congress has behaved disgracefully,
and the Democratic Party has been appallingly ineffectual in its treatment of their
anti-Semitic extremism, but there has been implacable opposition to them and
their antics throughout their time in the sun.
All
this suggests I should have been more emotionally prepared for the outbreak of
anti-Jewish activism on October 8 here in the United States than my rabbi
acquaintance was. After all, the focus of her activities and those of people in
her ambit has been tikkun olam—the demand that American Jewry join
the larger effort on the left to elevate and reinvigorate the welfare state,
combat global warming, and be a voice for global peace. She and others
expressed fears about American anti-Semitism only when it became a sometime
feature of the Trumpian radical right, and it therefore seemed more a
subsection of their anti-Trump feelings than a worry on its own. But, as a
friend said to me as we watched the horrors unfolding after 10/7, “This took 20
years to develop.”
So
what reason had I to be surprised? After all, in the pages of this magazine and
on our website, we have been warning about growing anti-Semitism for the past
15 years, on both the left (as detailed above) and the right (with the chants
of “the Jews shall not replace us” at the Charlottesville march in 2017). The
articles and blog posts we published on the subject had a funereal and
pessimistic tone—because, to be honest, we did not really have any concrete
idea how to reverse the trend. Oh, we demanded changes to the educational
system and encouraged donors and activists to continue bravely opposing the
implacable efforts of the other side. But such demands were largely rhetorical,
as we saw no real path to changing these institutions.
Nonetheless,
having lived 62 years without ever having experienced any kind of anti-Semitism
personally outside of Twitter and ugly mail and email, that America has and
will always be history’s golden gift to the Jewish people never wavered in my
heart and in my gut. Until October 8.
‘IT’S HAPPENING ALL
AT ONCE’
It
wasn’t just the fact that the world didn’t instantly react to the Hamas
invasion of Israel the way it did to the attacks of September 11 or the
invasion of Ukraine—with an outpouring of support and sympathy across the
globe. More than 1,200 people were murdered and at least 3,500 injured in the
space of six hours; what civilized person wouldn’t feel the attack was a
monstrous barbarity? The answer was: plenty of people, everywhere. That was bad
enough. What was worse was how anti-Israel and anti-Jewish actions came flying
at us from everywhere simultaneously. “It’s happening all at once,” I told a
friend who asked me why this felt so different from other bad moments for
American Jews.
On
October 9, less than 48 hours after the attack, 31 self-proclaimed student
organizations at Harvard—including a chapter of Amnesty International as well
as the Harvard Islamic Society and Harvard Jews for Liberation—issued a joint
statement: “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime
entirely responsible for all unfolding violence. The apartheid regime is the
only one to blame.”
While
this was happening in Cambridge, across the country at Cal Polytechnic
University in Humboldt, the phrase “Free Palestine, F— Israel” was scrawled
across a sukkah put up by the Jewish Union on campus.4 Also,
the same day, Black Lives Matter’s Chicago chapter put up a meme on social
media featuring the image of a hang-gliding person and the slogan “I Stand With
Palestine.” Hang-gliding Hamas fighters had landed on the site of the Nova
Music Festival in Israel and proceeded to participate in the murder of 260
people and the rapes and physical assaults of hundreds more.
One
night that first week, two Israeli artists in New York printed up hundreds of
posters of the Israelis held hostage in Gaza and released the images they had
created on the Internet so others could print them out and put them up. In a
matter of hours, Jews and others traumatized by the events, and feeling
helpless to do anything to help, swung into action. Thousands of the posters
appeared on the streets of New York. And just as quickly as they went up, other
people started to tear them down.
A
street battle commenced. And it has continued for months now, as people print
up more posters and laminate them ever more fixedly to lampposts and deserted
store fronts while vandals continue to work to destroy or deface them. It has
become a kind of proxy war itself between those who want to remind everyone of
the horrors of Hamas and those who either don’t care, or simply hate the faces
of these Jews and want to obliterate them, or are actively supporting the
terrorist organization whose founding charter includes this sentence: “The Day
of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight Jews and kill them.”
A
week after the attacks, on a subway platform in midtown Manhattan, 28-year-old
Christopher D’Aguiar punched a 29-year-old woman in the face. Stunned, she
asked why, and he said, “because you’re Jewish,” before running away. This
began a series of individual assaults on Jews as Jews across the country. The
next week, in Skokie, Illinois, a young man named Peter Christos was escorting
an elderly Jewish couple through a pro-Palestinian demonstration to help them
get to a pro-Israel demonstration when he was attacked by a mob. He said on
Twitter that he had been “punched repeatedly, kicked in the head, and hit with
a flagpole.” As his surname might suggest, Christos is not himself Jewish, but
his attackers did not know that (and in his noble action, he joins history’s
list of the righteous who deserve special honor from us for protecting our
people).
Three
days later, in Studio City, California, Daniel Garcia invaded a home with a
mezuzah on its doorjamb at 5:20 a.m. He kicked in the master-bedroom door,
where a man and his nine-months-pregnant wife were asleep. “I’m going to kill
you because you are Jewish,” Garcia said. Her husband fought with the invader
and got him outside, where police found Garcia brandishing a kitchen knife and
shouting “Free Palestine.”
Eleven
days later, about 15 miles from that house in Studio City, 65-year-old Paul
Kessler was killed by a pro-Palestinian demonstrator—hit with a megaphone,
Kessler fell to the ground, smashed his head on the pavement, and died. The
accused is Loay Abdelfattah Alnaji, a computer-science professor at Moorpark
College. This was the second time since October 7 that a megaphone had been
used in a pro-Palestinian act of violence. In New Orleans, on October 26, a
19-year-old Tulane student named Dylan Mann5 went to help a
friend who was engaging with demonstrators as they attempted to deface the
Israeli flag, and had his nose broken by a masked man brandishing a megaphone.
As of this writing, there have been at least 17 acts of individual personal violence
against Jews across the country since the Hamas attack.
Also
simultaneously, campuses spat up one educator or administrator after another
openly supporting the terrorist group that had murdered and injured so many
thousands—and offering incarnadine threats. On Monday, October 9, Cornell
University professor Russell Rickford spoke at a rally and declared that now
the Palestinians are “able to breathe for the first time in years. It was
exhilarating! It was exhilarating, it was energizing…. I was exhilarated!” A
few weeks after, the building that housed the Center for Jewish Life at Cornell
had to be closed down temporarily because of horrific anti-Semitic threats
traced back to 21-year-old student Patrick Dai.
On
October 10, at the University of California, Davis, an assistant professor of
American Studies named Jemma Decristo made some views known. The department
calls Decristo “a scholar-artist-activist [who] writes about Black art and
community” and views America as a “problem space.”6 Here is
what Decristo tweeted: “One group of ppl we have easy access to in the US are
all these Zionist journalists who spread propaganda & misinformation… they
have houses and addresses, kids in school… they can fear their bosses, but they
should fear us more.” The tweet concluded with emojis of a knife, an ax, and
three drops of blood. Though Decristo does not have tenure and is no longer
featured on the university’s website, there is no record of any disciplinary
action, more than three months after her tweet.
In
Commentary’s December issue, KC
Johnson offered more
examples of the professoriat’s response, all in the first few weeks:
Columbia professor Joseph Massad…celebrated
as “awesome” the “Palestinian resistance’s takeover of several Israeli
settler-colonies near the Gaza boundary.” Yale professor Zareena
Grewal…asserted that “Israel is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians
have every right to resist through armed struggle.” When a journalist pointed
out that she was talking about the deaths of innocent civilians, Grewal was
dismissive: “Settlers are not civilians. This is not hard.” George Washington
professor Lara Sheehi…deemed the massacre a justified response to “Israel’s
genocidal intent.” Columbia, Yale, and George Washington each declined to
condemn their faculty members’ remarks.
The
campus controversies that began to dominate the news, though, were not
primarily about the repugnant views of individual professors, but rather the
actual harassment of Jewish students and student organizations—and the silence,
inaction, and moral turpitude of administrators and college presidents. These
were on view also almost from the first week. And they had many causes.
First,
and least noted, was that the powers-that-be in higher ed were following the
unwritten rule in place since the assaults on them during the 1960s—which is
that you’re supposed to humor, cater to, and pat the heads of leftist agitators
when they do their thing, whatever that thing is. To be sure, many of these
people are in agreement with the agitators, since that’s what they once were,
too, back in the day.
Universities
are populated by middle-aged one-time radicals who rose to become the deans or
administrative managers of the new departments and disciplines higher-ed has
incepted to satisfy the ideological fashions of the present moment or to
fulfill the reporting mandates of state- or federal-level departments of
education so they can be showered with public dollars. But it’s also a deeply
ingrained bureaucratic habit to buy off the troublemakers however you can. That
is what the pro-Hamas agitators expected and received even as they crossed the
line into advocating for the genocide of the Jewish people with the chant “from
the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free.” They openly harassed fellow
students who, understandably, do not want their own people to be the victims of
a new genocide.
There
were almost constant videos of scenes at Harvard and Penn and George Washington
University in which students who were also expressing pro-Israel views on the
war were coming under visual and verbal assault and at times actual physical
menace from others—with those others clearly feeling they were impregnable from
criticism or discipline from the administrators on their campuses who were
either cowed by them or actually supportive. The fact that a line had been
crossed was invisible to the cogs in the higher-ed machine, who did what they
always do—pull out the playbook on “how do I get out of this and even get some
of these people to like me”?
And
this, in turn, is what triggered the remarkable donor revolt at Penn and
Harvard and MIT, which has led to the cessation of massive gifts to these
schools that will collectively deny them several billion dollars. The refusal
on the part of university administrators to speak against the anti-Jewish
animus, and instead to speak with demented sentimentality about the pain on
both sides of the conflict and the need for civility, was the trigger for the
now-infamous hearing before Congress where the presidents of three leading
universities publicly found it impossible to say that calls for the elimination
of Israel were expressions of anti-Semitism. Indeed, Claudine Gay of Harvard
would only say that she believes that Israel should be permitted to exist “as a
state,” not as a state for the Jewish people.
How
could she have had so little emotional intelligence, or strategic savvy, in
answering that question? The answer is that she, and Katherine Magill of Penn,
and Sally Kornbluth of MIT have spent their careers kowtowing to (and advancing
the interests of) a different set of power brokers. They know in their marrows
how not to offend that set—especially since they themselves have emerged from
it and used it as a ladder to climb to the top of the greasy pole of academe.
As
the elite world reeled from their astoundingly tone-deaf and morally depraved
performances, an interesting factoid bubbled out that added to the sense of
alarmed disbelief among American Jews, especially those who had gone through
elite institutions themselves. We learned that the Harvard University student
body now has a Jewish population below 10 percent. This had been noted
previously, by Tablet in 2018 specifically, but it did not make any real noise
back then.
The
low number flies in the face of all reason. Harvard (and other Ivy League
institutions) set explicit internal quotas on Jewish students in the 1920s at
15 percent. When the quota was lifted in the early 1960s, the Jewish population
at Harvard began to rise, reaching as high as 25–30 percent at the end of the
decade. Thousands upon thousands of Harvard students in the 1960s and 1970s and
afterward have had children. According to reports, 37 percent of those admitted
to Harvard are “legacies,” the children of the university’s graduates.
Thus,
Jewish applicants to Harvard should actually have a pretty significant leg up,
given the school’s embrace of the legacy system.
It
does not compute that the Jewish population at Harvard has fallen the way it
has without someone putting his or her hand on the scale to tip the balance in
the other direction. Harvard and other Ivies with similar declines in the
number of Jewish students over the past 40 years appear to be actively
attempting to dilute the Jewishness of their campuses. Indeed, a new group
formed in the wake of October 7 called the Harvard Student Alumni Alliance
reports: “We have seen data that suggest that the Jewish population at the
College has declined…5-7 percent today, but that almost all that decline
occurred in recent years. We have heard from multiple sources at the University
that it is the official, undisclosed policy of the school to drive down Jewish
admissions to 1-2 percent of the student body, proportionately matching Jews’
percentage of the U.S. population.”
The
very fact that the presidents who sat before Congress felt so little pressure
internally or emotionally to say something when Israel and Jews came under
attack after October 7, and showed themselves to be unsympathetic at best and
heartless at worst when they did speak, is testimony to how unimportant the
feelings or concerns of Jews are within the sociological landscapes they tend.
The
adoption of some kind of implicit Jewish quota suggests a return to a different
sociological landscape, one also dating back a century—and not an American
landscape at all. I’m referring to the attacks on Jewish-owned businesses and
explicitly Jewish institutions across the country. On October 10, in Fresno,
California, the glass door of a shul was smashed by a rock at 6 a.m.; at 8:30
a.m., the Noah’s Ark bakery nearby also had a window smashed with a letter left
behind threatening Jewish businesses. (The bakery is owned by Armenian
Christians.) A man named Orlando Javier Ramirez was arrested. At least 19
synagogues across the country—among them shuls in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Burbank,
Mercer Island, Oakland, and Baltimore—have been defaced with swastikas and
slogans or had Hanukkah menorahs vandalized. And at least 18 restaurants and
tourist shops in Philadelphia, Brooklyn, the Upper West Side, Flagler Beach in
Florida, and Los Angeles have been the sites of protests, acts of vandalism,
and petitions for boycott.
Put
simply: Since October 7, Jews in America have found themselves targeted on
college campuses, at the businesses they own and work at, at the shuls in which
they pray, and in their homes and on the streets in a national onslaught that
has no precedent in American history or American life.
They’re
coming after us.
1 This, notwithstanding
the fact that the phrase “Free Palestine” is the name of a pretty peculiar
terrorist organization that began on the West Bank but then moved to Syria in
the early 2010s as some kind of mercenary force in support of the regime of Bashar
al-Assad.
2 Nearly 10 percent of
its substantial donation base in its early years, around $810,000, came from
one Consolacion Esdicul, a woman in Hong Kong who was allegedly friendly with
another donor, a non-Jewish Pittsburgh horse-track gambler who herself had and
has no known connection to Jewish matters.
3 The chair claimed the
majority had actually voted for it, and the plank was retained.
4 A sukkah is the
outdoor booth practicing Jews set up to participate in the holiday of Sukkot.
5 This one hits
particularly close to home for me; Dylan was in nursery, elementary, and middle
school with my oldest daughter for a decade.
6 Other information on
the Internet suggests Decristo is a transgender female. As UC Davis has deleted
all mention of Decristo, I was unable to find any educational history or the
source or subject of her Ph.D. dissertation.
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