Student Protests, Antisemitism and University Leadership that Didn’t Learn from the Past

"I did 92 listening sessions, 75 minutes each, with over 1,500 of our students, faculty, staff…I got to first tell you how I feel as a person, as an individual, and really as a Black man, I get a heightened level of anxiety…When people are in fear, they respond in a protected mechanism, which doesn't always lead to the best outcomes." 

Sacramento State University President Luke Wood, CBS News, May 10th

George Santayana admonished us that “those who do not study the past are condemned to repeat its mistakes.” Seems like a whole lot of university administrators, some with PhDs and JDs were befuddled, easily manipulated, ignored the obvious and turned to the “tried and true”: encourage free speech, revile antisemitism and then call-in cops with batons, shields and a touch of “those privileged kids need a lesson” gleam in their eyes. Clear them out. Arrest, arrest, arrest. As for those “outside agitators” – generally addressing that many on campuses were not students, although very few would actually qualify as rabble rousers – a whole lot of them seemed to be elected officials, with a disproportionate number in state legislatures and Congress. After all, it is an election year.

For the record, Luke Wood’s personal willingness to listen, take his students seriously, encouraging dialog along the way, was the right approach. In the second week of May, “Luke Wood oversaw a peaceful end to a campus protest over the Israel-Hamas war, one of the many that have taken place at universities nationwide in recent weeks… Sacramento State's encampment came down, not with violence, but with dialogue.” CBS News. It took work. Wood didn’t sleep much. He didn’t cancel events, try to please liberal or conservative alumni or discuss “policy directives” in stentorian speeches. He listened, opened doors, encouraged dialog and accepted divergent voices, however strident. It wasn’t, here comes the violence that marked the Vietnam protests in the 1960s. Wood wasn’t old enough to have been there.

Indeed, California and New York, particularly in their big cities and universities with academic stature, are ethnic and religious melting pot states. Minnesota and particularly Michigan have heavy concentrations of ethnic Arab and other Muslim citizens… remnants of a 1920s effort by Henry Ford, facing significant absenteeism and productivity lapses from alcohol consumption on his assembly lines, to bring Muslim immigrants, whose faith did allow them to drink, to work at Ford Motors. The famous regional breweries had a few secondary negative aspects, it seems.

Few Americans are aware that in the last election in Gaza (2006), Hamas campaigned on a platform of moderation, an ability to get along with Israeli leadership. Hamas turned quickly to the dark side of a culture war that was pitting Western culture against a rising tide of seething anger led by puritanical Muslim extremists. There have been no elections in Gaza since, and over half the local Arab population never got to vote. Since the 1979 Shiite revolution in Iran, Teheran’s Ayatollahs’ theocracy has galvanized anti-US and anti-Israel feelings into fully funded Iranian surrogates waging a hot and cold war effectively on Iran’s behalf. Iran and Hamas have long since declared themselves to be our enemy. The residents of Gaza were for the most part revulsed by Hamas… but poverty and tight borders with less-than-receptive Arab neighbors… kept them hemmed in. The West Bank, once pledged to be part of a separate “Palestine” under a US brokered set of Oslo Accords from the early 1990s, was being taken over by rightwing Jews.

But there has been a concomitant rise in the horrific voices of antisemitism in this country. Jews have historically become victims in times of strife, and the quick and justified disgust and horror of many Jewish students in the United States at October 7th, the clear hatred of Hamas (a feeling that too often and to quickly embraced antipathy for all Gaza residents) amplified their vitriol. Hostages. Innocents attending a music festival. Homes broken into. Women and children kidnapped. Hamas was lambasted for the pure evil they fomented, with weapons and training from toxic Iranian manipulators… the same manipulators pulling strings in Lebanon (Hezbollah) and Yemen (Houthis). Zionism – the protection of Israel as a Jewish state – rose fiercely.

Then, Israel countered, an indicted Prime Minister and his ultra-right coalition partners pledging unrealistically to root out Hamas in its entirety from Gaza. Using massive supplies of US made munitions, the Israeli Defense Force began a campaign of utter destruction, claiming 34,000 lives by the second week of May… mostly innocents (lots of children)… and rendering most of Gaza’s building and infrastructure into an uninhabitable wasteland. World opinion turned against Israel’s perceived overkill. Lines were drawn everywhere – from the US Congress to college students – struggling with American involvement in supplying Israel with weapons, which, even as Biden paused the shipment of the most people-killing bombs and missiles, began to tear American society apart. That this turmoil came in an election year, with demands from lots of factions to shut down the protests, made a bad situation much worse.

Much as Israel overreacted in its attack on Gaza, American politicians put pressure on college leaders to get their houses in order… another overreaction that has failed miserably. Like it or not, those are our kids at those schools. Writing for the May 12th, The Guardian UK, Arielle Angel asked a simple question, referencing that antisemitism seemed to go hand-in-hand with ethnic strife way too often: Who really benefits from rising antisemitism?

“Since 7 October, commentators have been ringing the alarm that a growing protest movement in solidarity with Palestine signals not just the end of a ‘golden age’ for American Jews – as Franklin Foer recently put it in the Atlantic – but for American liberal democracy itself… As Foer wrote, the ‘surge of antisemitism is a symptom of the decay of democratic habits, a leading indicator of rising authoritarianism’. Writing before the start of the encampments, he noted that Columbia was ‘a graphic example of the collapse of the liberalism that had insulated American Jews: it is a microcosm of a society that has lost its capacity to express disagreements without resorting to animus’. Meanwhile, on CNN, the anchor Dana Bash invoked 1930s Europe – ‘and I do not say that lightly … the fear among American Jews is palpable right now’.

“There is no doubt that many Jewish students – especially those raised to believe that their Jewish identity is indivisible from the political ideology of Zionism – feel uncomfortable, or that many of them feel ostracized by their peers. But their discomfort has justified a powerful attack on academic freedom and first amendment rights that long predates the student encampments – part of a longstanding rightwing project to curb speech and reshape the public sphere.

“Foer and Bash are right that American democracy is imperiled. But as the draconian crackdown on non-violent student protests makes clear, accusations of antisemitism are not themselves evidence of liberal decline, but rather the tip of the spear in a frightening illiberal project serving the agenda of an emboldened, autocratic right wing…

“Alongside this effort to tar protest as terrorism, the right is seizing on the emotions inflamed by Israel’s war to make headway in a longstanding offensive on education. Over the past several years, the GOP has sought to meddle in the academic freedom of universities, which they allege are indoctrinating students into ‘woke’, leftwing ideology… Republicans have also taken aim nationally at diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, introducing more than 30 bills targeting DEI funding, practices, and promotion at schools. Nine have been signed into law – efforts that the ACLU says ‘represent yet another attempt to re-whitewash America’s history of racial subjugation, and to reverse efforts to pursue racial justice’.

“The moral panic around antisemitism has been a useful vehicle to further the campaign against DEI, as congressional hearings on antisemitism since 7 October have made clear. ‘Evidence shows that campus DEI bureaucracies play a major role in propagating the spread of antisemitism,’ said the US representative Burgess Owens at a November hearing . ‘It is a dirty little secret at the heart to DEI.’” Remembering that evangelical fundamentalist doctrine calls for Armageddon in the Middle East, a war that will bring Jesus Christ back, and create the Rapture taking all true believers into heaven, leaving the rest of us behind. We are all Americans, a mix of faiths and ethnicities, a blend that once made us strong, a tolerance the defined our values… and that reality is being tested as never before.

I’m Peter Dekom, and you only have to look at the forces trying further to polarize our nation against those who truly seek our traditional desire for unity through diversity to understand who is fomenting divisive hatred as their underlying political focus.