There is an Antisemitism Problem Among the Faculty at UC-Santa Cruz
“to make it clear that the racist settler-colonial ideology of zionism is not welcome on this campus!”
There is a contingent among the faculty at this school which is as radical as some student groups.
Algemeiner reports:
How Anti-Zionist Faculty Captured a University of California Campus and What It Means for the Future of Jews in America
“Let’s make it clear – zionism is not welcome on our campus” read a recent Instagram message, which was followed by raised fist and Palestinian flag emojis.
At first blush, this posting appeared to be one more bullet in the barrage of vitriolic hatred and harassment aimed by anti-Zionist students groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at Israel’s supporters on campus, especially Jewish students, in the aftermath of Hamas’ genocidal attack on Israel last fall.
But that’s not the case. The above message shunning the campus presence of Zionism — and by obvious extension, Zionists, which the vast majority of Jews identify as — wasn’t authored by students at all.
Rather, it came from their professors — more than 100 of them — founders of a Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapter at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC).
Let that sink in. A large group of faculty at one of the finest public university systems in the world is using a popular social media platform to proclaim the modern-day equivalent of the ubiquitous Nazi-era slogan “Juden sind hier unerwünscht” (“Jews are not wanted here”).
Even more chilling is the fact that the faculty group’s message was part of a larger post urging their colleagues and students to attend an on-campus “March Against Zionism” organized by an allied anti-Zionist student group, whose goal was “to make it clear that the racist settler-colonial ideology of zionism is not welcome on this campus!”
Like the student brownshirts in the early 1930s, who vilified and bullied Jewish students and professors until they were completely purged from German universities, the student organizers of the faculty-supported “March Against Zionism” threatened to — and actually did — disrupt a Jewish student gathering and harass its participants.
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
UC santa cruz. Welcome to the booby hatch. Is that the university without grades?
This is the inevitable outcome of the decades-long campaign to convince people that anti-zionism is not the same as antisemitism. Open antisemitism is still unfashionable, but if you call it “anti-zionism” it becomes kosher. As long ago as the 1960s Martin Luther King found it necessary to point out that “anti-zionism” is a code word for antisemitism, because there were already people out there denying it.
And all along, fair-minded pro-zionists have unwillingly encouraged it by constantly feeling the need to concede that technically the two ideas are different, and it’s possible for a person to hold one without the other. It’s possible to be antisemitic but pro-zionist, and it’s also possible to be philosemitic but anti-zionist. It’s even easy to find examples of both.
But this hides the larger reality that in the real world this is uncommon, and in almost all cases the two go hand-in-hand. Anti-zionists in public life are almost always antisemites, and antisemites are almost always anti-zionist.
More to the point, I cannot think of any way, even in theory, that a person could support the “Palestinian” cause of conquering Israel and replacing it with an Arab state, without being an antisemite. Unless one hates Jews, there are simply no grounds, as far as I can tell, for believing that Arabs ought to rule the Holy Land and Jews ought not. At most one could wish for a two-state solution, which has been the preference of good-willed outsiders for the last century or more, but that is compatible with zionism and incompatible with the “Palestinian” cause.
For a century, the zionist cause has been a positive one: to have a Jewish state in the Holy Land; preferably in all of it, but if that’s impossible then at least in part. But the Arab cause has been negative: they have never been interested in having their own state (remember, they started out insisting there was no “Palestine” but only Syria), but only in the Jews not having one, no matter how small. And there’s no way to claim that is not antisemitism.