A large proportion of Jewish intellectuals have long assumed that Judaism and liberal-left politics are entirely consistent with one another. So long as the existence of the state of Israel seemed to harmonize with liberal-left ideals, especially in the years of its socialist founding, it could be actively supported or at least tacitly accepted by most Jewish liberals. But the Six-Day War of June 1967, requiring Jews to choose between liberal pieties and defense of the Jewish state, swiftly and dramatically changed all this.
After 1967, Israel’s Arab foes stopped talking about driving Jews into the sea and instead redefined the Palestinian struggle as that of a “national liberation front.” This change in rhetoric was calculated to appeal to liberals, not least to Jewish liberals. The more Israel was cast in a negative role by “progressive” opinion for its alleged misdeeds, the more eager were Jewish intellectuals to escape the taint, the embarrassment of association with the state and Zionism.
By publicly declaring their contempt for the Jewish state, anti-Israel Jews announce, with a vanity that is both personal and ethnic, what they view as their supreme virtue in being able to transcend their “Jewishness.”[1]
In American academia, the campus war against Israel and the Jews is led by a group of anti-Semites, many of them faculty members, who have made careers for themselves by traveling from one university to another supporting Arab terrorism and Jew-hatred. They invariably pretend that they are promoting peace. But in the Orwellian bubble where these anti-Semites live, Arab aggression and terror are reframed as self-defense, while Israeli self-defense is cast as aggression and terror. Israeli democracy is portrayed as apartheid, while Arab genocide is depicted as liberation.
One of the most bizarre aspects of this campus war against the Jews is the presence of numerous self-hating, anti-Semitic Jews in the ranks of a movement whose ultimate goal is to achieve the annihilation of Israel. These people use their birthright to give authenticity to the campaign of delegitimizing and demonizing Israel. Today the leading promoters of “divestment” and boycott campaigns against Israel are academic Jewish leftists, some of them from Israel itself. In a few extreme cases, this detestation of Israel is combined with a fawning courtship of Islamic terrorists, American and European Neo-Nazis, and even Holocaust deniers.
In recent years Israel has produced hundreds of anti-Israel academic radicals, most of them holding faculty positions at taxpayer-funded public universities throughout the Jewish state. Among these radicals (most of whom are themselves Jewish) are people who reframe Arab aggression and terror as self-defense, and Israeli self-defense as aggression and terror; who justify and celebrate Arab violence against Jews; who help initiate campaigns of boycott and “divestment” directed against their own country in time of war; who collaborate with anti-Semites around the world; and who attempt to get Israeli military officers indicted as “war criminals” in courts outside of Israel.
Some of these academic extremists openly call for Israel to be annihilated altogether. They fashionably claim to favor the “one-state solution,” in which Israel would be folded into a larger state with an Arab/Muslim government and majority; they openly advocate the so-called “Palestinian Right of Return,” which would effectively end Israel’s existence as a Jewish entity; and they campaign on behalf of, and promote the rhetoric of, Holocaust deniers. In 2006 they cheered the terrorist group Hamas as it launched hundreds of rockets at civilian residents in Sderot and other Israeli towns; that same year, they similarly endorsed Hezbollah’s bombardment of northern Israel with katyusha rockets.
In a like manner, throughout Israel’s 2008-2009 “Cast Lead” military campaign against Gaza terrorists, radical Israeli faculty members were active in the media, on campuses, and on the Internet — creating, writing, producing, and disseminating hate propaganda that portrayed Israel as a warmongering fascist state that was practicing genocide against the Palestinians for no conceivable reason. These professors have done the same during Israel’s other military engagements as well.
Israel’s anti-Zionist leftist academics were the driving force behind attempts in the UK and Canada to boycott Israel and its universities. Hundreds of Israeli professors have been involved in efforts to organize mutiny and insurrection among Israeli soldiers; some of these professors have actually been arrested for violently attacking police and soldiers or for other forms of lawbreaking.
In summation, the Israeli university campus has become a highly politicized place. In-classroom, anti-Israel indoctrination is now more widespread than ever before, and a propensity to crusade against Israel has become the chief scholarly credential of a growing number of Israeli tenured academics. Rigid anti-Israel uniformity and monolithic far-leftist consensus is the hallmark of many academic departments in Israeli universities, especially in the humanities, the softer social sciences, political science, and education.