I teach Israel studies at NYU. We are importing the worst of Israel and Palestine to our campuses
Pro-Palestinian students and activists protest at an encampment on the campus at McGill University in Montreal April 29. Photo by Graham Hughes/AFP via Getty Images
Since the atrocious Oct. 7 attack by Hamas and the catastrophic response by the Israeli government in Gaza, too many students, faculty, and community members at U.S. universities have been mimicking the worst kinds of discourses coming out of Israel and Palestine.
I have seen those who consider themselves to be on the progressive left, and who care about Palestinians, parroting ultranationalist slogans like “From the river to the sea,” excusing violence that amounts to war crimes with the slogan “By any means necessary,” and using the word “Zionist” as an expletive.
Many of those who care about Israelis proclaim they are “standing with Israel,” without criticizing the Israeli government’s ultranationalist policies of occupation and Jewish supremacy, which are the law of the land in Israel-Palestine from the river to the sea. Others have used the label “antisemitic” to describe anything from actual antisemitism to mere calls for a ceasefire or denouncements of Israeli violence in Gaza and the West Bank.
Everyone protesting on campuses, on every side of the argument, needs to stop shouting for one second and acknowledge the fact that we are not in Israel and Palestine, but on privileged university campuses in the richest country in the world.
Israelis and Palestinians in Israel-Palestine might be turning to extreme politics because they are experiencing ongoing, real threats to their very existence. But we are not. From our position of privilege, safety and comfort on campus, can we stop using words that erase Israel or erase Palestine, and focus on ending this war together?
As an Israel studies scholar, my research has focused on radical right politics in Israel and Palestine. I have written extensively about activists whose vision for Jewish sovereignty from the river to the sea dominates the agenda of the vast majority of the Israeli governing coalition and dictates the actions of the Israeli government. I have also written about Muslim activists who envision an exclusively Muslim Palestine from the river to the sea, the uncompromising staple of Hamas’ teachings and a mirror image of the vision of the Israeli right.
In each of these worldviews, one group is the legitimate inheritor of the entire land, and the other group is a usurper to be demoted to the status of, at best, a tolerated guest.
What has shocked me most about the current campus climate is the extent to which the intolerant approaches and arguments of the Israeli and Palestinian right have not only gone unquestioned by many supporters of Israel and supporters of Palestine respectively, but to some extent have been adopted.
For example, on the pro-Israel side, calling out of the de-facto apartheid that exists in the West Bank, or the suffocating siege on Gaza that’s been ongoing for nearly two decades, or even noting that this siege was the context in which Oct. 7 happened, is denounced as antisemitic libel. This is a well-used tactic of the Israeli right to silence criticism of its policies.
On the pro-Palestine side, the approach to Israelis as usurpers whose “illegitimate” national identity must be erased, have become all too common. I have sat with students who told me that Israelis should not be considered human because they are settlers. I also spoke with students who told me they were collecting donations for the Israel Defense Forces, at a time when its war effort has led to the killing of thousands of children in the Gaza Strip.
Last week, the Center for Israel Studies that I direct at NYU was vandalized with scripture-based threats that could have easily been written by a Christian, Muslim or Jewish fundamentalist. It baffles me that this type of militant discourse finds any place on our college campuses. Instead of coming together to advocate for peace in the region, American students are regurgitating the same radical rhetoric of the most extreme voices in Israel/Palestine. Unable to navigate this moment, university administrators have escalated the situation even further, calling the police to arrest their own students instead of fostering opportunities for more dialogue.
Witnessing the kind of intense polarization, zero-sum thinking and us-versus-them rhetoric on campus that I know so well from my work with the Israeli and Palestinian radical right, I have felt like the protagonist of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer. The character is a double agent who is isolated from the people around him because of his inability to simply be of one “side.” He cannot abandon either of the sides because of his care for each, nor can he fully embrace either, as each demands complete allegiance and refuses nuance and self-critique.
As someone who researches and teaches about Israel and Palestine, I have close personal, professional and intellectual attachments to people in the “pro-Palestine” camp and the “pro-Israel” camp. I empathize with those who are horrified by what the IDF has been doing in Gaza, and what consecutive Israeli governments have been doing to Palestinians. I agree with their outrage, even as I am shocked by their virulent and violent discourse and by their inability to denounce Hamas’s action and ideology.
I also empathize with those who have grown up thinking that Israel is what guarantees the safety of Jews and their right to self-determination. At the same time, I am appalled by their inability to criticize the genocidal discourse coming from the Israeli government, its near-total destruction of life in Gaza and its brutal policies toward Palestinians over the entire history of the state.
The loudest voices on each side reading this last paragraph will likely miss the fact that I feel empathy for them and that I agree with them on many things. They will dismiss what I say as “both-side-ism” or “false moral equivalencies.” I am not interested in obfuscating the real violence in Israel and Palestine, or the fact that the Israeli government, backed by the U.S., is the stronger party and therefore the one whose scale of violence quantitatively outstrips that of Palestinian armed factions.
However, approaches that support violence from one side fuel not only the violence one condones, but also the counter-violence one’s opponents use in so-called self-defense. The current war is destroying the lives and futures of both Palestinians and Israelis. To be against this violence is to be both pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli at the same time.
I wish that the campus protestors and counter-protestors were making allies between people who care about the lives of Palestinians and people who care about the lives of Israelis. Instead, we are witnessing the mimicry of the worst kind of politics in Israel and Palestine — of those who are not able to make space for civil, political and collective rights for more than one ethnic group in the land — and letting them dominate our discourse and our attention.
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