RUTHFULLY YOURS

It’s that time of year again—Israel Apartheid Week. This “week” starts in Europe in February and spreads to North America in March. It’s an arm of the BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel) movement, which is in turn an arm of the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Israel Apartheid Week is essentially an invasion of Western universities by Middle Eastern terrorism. Its aim is to abet the destruction of a country, Israel, by poisoning the minds of a whole generation against it. Its cri de coeur is “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” In other words, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea—no “two-state solution,” no compromise, no Israel.

One way to further that aim is to spread the “big lie” of Israeli “apartheid.” The Israel Apartheid Week activists know that it’s a lie, as does anyone—that is, anyone not blinded by ideological hatred—who has ever spent time in Israel. Here’s an Israeli Arab Supreme Court justice. Here’s an Israeli Arab brigadier general. Here’s an Israeli Arab leader of a parliamentary faction. Class, can you point to equivalents among blacks during apartheid South Africa?

It’s not only, though, that “apartheid” is a ludicrous lie to toss at Israel. It’s also that—as grim, hate-ridden Israel Apartheid Week plods on—Israel is increasingly a blessing not only to its Arab citizens but to the Arab world as a whole.

To start with the Israeli Arabs—as Evelyn Gordon notes, a poll in 2015 asked them:

“If you had the opportunity to become a citizen of the United States or any other Western country, would you prefer to move there or to remain in Israel?” Fully 83.4 percent said they would rather remain in Israel—virtually identical to the proportion among Israeli Jews (84.5 percent).

Israeli Arabs know, of course, that Israel gives them a level of freedom, democracy, and economic advancement that the surrounding Arab countries can hardly match. It’s very possible that if Israel had not become Israel, it would now be Southern Syria. The poll didn’t ask if Israel or Southern Syria would be a better place to live, but one can imagine where the responses would fall.

Peak warmism has already hit, and the global warming movement is now on its long glide path through loss of government funding, budget and hiring cuts, less media attention, on the way to unfashionability, embarrassment, and eventually obscurity, a historical footnote like phrenology (which was once the rage in elite academic circles). In retrospect, the December 2015 Paris Climate Accord, which was still able to draw heads of state but which could accomplish nothing substantive other than promise money, may well be seen as the definitive moment at which the movement began its official decline.

Now elite institutions, which always have their antennae attuned to the ebb and flow of the concerns of the world’s power elite, are acting out the consequences of decline. If you are a university president responsible for raising mega-donations by convincing the holders of wealth that they can achieve prestige and maybe a little immortality by funding your Good Works, then you have to be aware of their changing concerns.

Only a few years ago, global warming seemed like a sure winner to Yale’s then-president Richard C. Levin, when he announced in 2009 the establishment of the Yale Climate and Energy Institute and secured Rajendra K. Pachauri as its first head. Pachuari was the head of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the major force pushing global warming as a central battle to be fought to save humanity, and he was to serve both the U.N. and Yale at the same time, locking them together as leaders of the fight to rescue us all from doom.

During several sleepless nights, watching loops of 24-hour news broadcasts devoted to the U.S. presidential race, I noticed certain themes that otherwise might have escaped my attention. One was the claim that first-time voters are “too young to remember” the scandals surrounding former president Bill Clinton and wife Hillary’s behavior during the period that the couple occupied the White House.

This assertion was like a hidden key to unlocking another phenomenon related to Americans in the age group under discussion and the surrounding culture’s attitude toward them. I am talking about the latest “radical chic” on campuses across the country — fever-pitched anti-Israel activism.

At both Ivy League and state schools, accusing the Jewish state of war crimes against the “oppressed Palestinian people” is the current ticket to peer acceptance. Campaigning for boycott, divestment and sanctions against “Israeli apartheid” is so popular that anything from complaints about high tuition and student loans to criticism of professors and guest lecturers has become part and parcel of the movement.

The response of university administrators and faculty has been to cower and hold meetings with student-body representatives to discuss free speech. So rampant has this scenario become that alumni are starting to wake up and take measures, among them threats to cease donating money to their alma maters.

I raised one that has long been bothering me – whether Western secular values were undermining the ability of the Jewish people to survive.
At Jewish Book Week in London a few days ago, I took part in a panel discussion about the most pressing questions facing Jews today.

I raised one that has long been bothering me – whether Western secular values were undermining the ability of the Jewish people to survive.

Across the West, there has been a terrifying rise in anti-Jewish feeling. This is fueled by an unprecedented campaign of lies and libels against Israel aimed at destroying it through delegitimization.

This campaign displays the same signature motifs of classic Jew-hatred that go back through the centuries.

A Connecticut College professor has told colleagues that his school has grown so hostile toward Jews that he can no longer recommend Jewish students or professors study or teach at the college.

“In my opinion, this harassment of Jews on campus in the name of fighting for social justice should end; immediately,” wrote Spencer J. Pack, an economics professor, in a faculty-wide email.
His comments were triggered by the smear campaign that pro-Palestinian students successfully waged against a pro-Israel professor, resulting in his indefinite leave from campus, and a more recent push to malign Birthright (a program enabling student travel to Israel) by plastering the campus with posters. The posters reportedly intimidated Jewish or pro-Israel students and faculty, while attempting to poison the minds of uninformed students and faculty with vicious falsehoods about Israel. The posters were put up by Conn Students in Solidarity with Palestine (CSSP), whose faculty adviser, Eileen Kane, runs the school’s Global Islamic Studies program.

Kane’s Global Islamic Studies program also invited Palestinian-American poet Remi Kanazi to speak at Connecticut College on April 12. Kanazi, who is scheduled to give a “poetry performance,” is on the organizing committee of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel and listed among its endorsers. His strategy has been to connect anti-Israel politics with popular urban struggles.