The enemies of Israel neither slumber nor sleep. They include not only the technically competent barbarians of Iran, exuberantly aggressive with the prospect of nuclear weapons and the $150 billion “signing bonus” paid them for signing a sham agreement with America; not only Iran’s proxies to the north (Hezbollah) and the south (Hamas); not only most of the surrounding Arab nations, including at least two Palestinian states; not only its own Arab citizens waging a third intifada; and not only those Europeans whose main regret over the Holocaust is that, for a time, it gave anti-Semitism a bad name.
Isn’t this enough? Not in the opinion of numerous Jewish academics of the ostensibly “progressive” persuasion, imbued with the conviction that the litmus test of contemporary liberalism is dedication to “the Palestinian cause.” In actuality, this has come to mean turning the pariah people into a pariah state, and replacing the old question “Can Jews take the right to live as a natural right?” with the newer one: “Does Israel have the right to exist?”
The latest “target of opportunity” for these Jewish academics, a great many of them employed in Jewish Studies programs, is the Hillel Foundation, which in this country and others serves the same function for Jewish university students that the Newman Center does for Catholic ones. They are parochial institutions, not academic ones; they exist to complement universities, not imitate them. Rabbi Hillel’s best-known utterance is: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” Cardinal Newman’s “Idea of a University” is the vade mecum on its subject; but he insisted that a liberal education can give “no guarantee of sanctity or even conscientiousness.”
One of Hillel’s primary tasks has long been to nourish in Jewish students a sense of shared destiny with the constantly beleaguered state of Israel. To ask Hillel to open welcoming arms to ideologues of politicide for Israel would be akin to asking all chapters of the Newman Center to start inviting lecturers who endorse the old Protestant view that “the Mass is of the Devil,” or “the Pope is the Antichrist.”