Anti-Israel campus protesters have experienced “some kind of psychiatric break”

Anti-Israel campus protesters have experienced “some kind of psychiatric break”

I was interviewed recently by the Jerusalem office of Mishpacha Jewish Family Weekly, which is targeted at the Orthodox Jewish community in its various forms, about the situation on U.S. campuses.

My interview was one of several interviews as part of an article on Degrees of Hate:

At leading universities across America, the anti-Israel feeling that normally bubbles beneath the surface of the predominating progressive agenda has suddenly taken over normal life.

Class is out as pro-Hamas students intimidate their Jewish peers and tangle with police, all in the name of social justice and supporting the Palestinian cause.

These colleges that are meant to educate America’s elite have been exposed as citadels of intolerance. Institutions founded to develop critical thinking have become hotbeds of support for the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel.

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To observers the world over, the unrest at Ivy League institutions is yet another sign that America itself is in turmoil. Some insist that this will blow over, pointing to the tradition of radical campus activism dating back to Vietnam. But to many who are more closely involved, it all hints at something darker: a shuttering of the academic mind that bodes ill for Israel and for America itself.

The protests raise a host of questions about America’s future. First, is it safe to be Jewish on US college campuses? Are the protests against Israel part of a wider war against Western values? Is there a way forward for Israel advocates on campus?

These questions are at the heart of the testimonies presented here from students and faculty at the schools where some of the most disturbing scenes have been recorded. The rawness and immediacy of these first-person accounts capture the loneliness of being a Jewish student in the post-October 7 world, as well as the stirrings of Jewish pride emerging among those who stand up to be counted.

Students from Harvard, Columbia, and Cornell were interviewed, along with a Rabbi from UCLA, a Israeli Columbia law professor, and a professor at Tauro University.

My interview was title “Pampered Revolutionaries”:

The Jewish students that I’ve talked with at Cornell and other universities have been devastated by the reactions of their peers and professors since October 7. Are you surprised by what’s happened?

I think what October 7 did is bring to the surface a lot of things that had been developing before. I think it’s a major mistake to say October 7 changed things. I think October 8, 9, and 10, and the reaction brought to the surface the cumulative effect of what had been happening. That was the main impact of October 7.

I do believe, also, though, that Israel’s response to October 7, which I think personally is justified, has been propagandized by the other side quite effectively. And we have to add the flow of misinformation, which Hamas and others have always put out.

They always put out effective propaganda. But this time, it was much more so, due to a combination of factors. One, I think they had a more receptive audience, because of this cumulative effect of the demonization of Israel. But today social media is much more influential than it was in 2014, particularly on younger people. Tik Tok didn’t exist. It is so influential now that a lot of students, in particular, get their news from sources like Tik Tok.

Some say we shouldn’t worry too much about this trend because university students have long engaged in protests. What is your take?

I’ve heard that argument since I started covering the anti-Israel campus movement in 2008, and I disagree. Yes, it’s true, students protesting about food in the dining hall is not, in and of itself, an earth-shattering event. But you see a slippage in support for Israel over the years among the class of college students who ended up becoming very influential in our society. These are the students who go into journalism, into government, who staff the NGOs.

Among that group of students who are politically active, Israel is losing the audience that will have a cumulative effect. And I think it already has, where you have, 17 or 20 Democrat senators who have called for a hold on arms shipments to Israel. I think that would have been impossible ten years ago. What will it be in ten years from now? It might be a majority.

It is a long-term threat to American support for Israel, and that is the most important foreign support that Israel has. It’s a kind of drip, drip, drip. And then all of a sudden, you realize the bucket is almost overflowing.

With the violent atmosphere at some campuses, do you personally feel threatened?

I don’t feel physically threatened in any way from the professors or the students. Physically, I’m in the law school. My title is Clinical Professor of Law. At Cornell Law School, the student body is much more career oriented and professional than the undergrads and the other graduate schools. I’m not saying there’s no anti-Israelism at the law school, but it’s nowhere near what you find in the non-professional schools. There is a strong, meaningful group who I think are fairly characterized as anti-Israel, but they’re not as vocal as the undergraduates.

Most of the professors who are essentially anti-Israel agitators work at the university, not at the law school. The students at the law school generally embrace me. There are some who don’t, but I have a very strong following. A lot of students are afraid to speak out, whether on conservative domestic political issues, or on Israel issues, because of a fear of social media.

I’ve not been threatened about Israel. I have been threatened with my job security regarding my criticisms of Black Lives Matter, but not regarding Israel.

I think that undergrad students perhaps feel more threatened than I do because they have to live among the activists. I don’t live among them. The law school also is physically somewhat isolated from the rest of the campus. But there are law student groups, the National Lawyers Guild and a couple of others, that are pretty actively anti-Israel. They’re just not as open and aggressive as they are at the undergrad level.

Aren’t these people supposed to be smart? Many of them, if they set foot in Palestinian territory, would be killed instantly.

The way I look at that whole issue is that you don’t need a political scientist to explain it. You really need a psychiatrist. There is some kind of psychiatric break that has taken place among the left wing in the United States, and I assume in Europe and in Israel, where they identify with people who would abuse them. I can’t explain that in logical political terms. I can’t explain why people who self-identify in the US as progressives would identify with completely regressive societies. But it is true. You have groups who could not set foot in the Palestinian territories or in Gaza, or in Iran, who would be killed instantaneously in Yemen, who are cheering on the Houthis, because they’re anti-Israel, and anti-US.

Are they anti-Israel, or is there something deeper at play?

I think it’s wrong to view this as a purely anti-Israel movement on the US campuses. Certainly it is anti-Israel, but it’s more fundamentally anti-American, anti-Western, and anti-capitalist. And I do think it’s a psychological phenomenon, which makes it harder to deal with. It’s almost become a cult, and in order to be accepted into the cult, you have to announce your hatred for Israel, you have to announce support for people who actually hate you. So there’s something that’s hard to address, because you have people who’ve had some sort of mental breakdown.

As a law professor, do you believe that the attempted student occupation of the campus is legal?

They don’t have a right to occupy a building or part of the campus. They are bound by the same campus rules that bind everybody else.

The First Amendment is a little bit of a complicated issue. It applies clearly to public universities, but it’s less clear how it applies to private universities. But even assuming it applies everywhere, schools and government are permitted to place reasonable time and location limits on disruptive expressions. So you may have a right to go out into the quad and chant, but you may not necessarily have a right to use sound amplification, because other people are studying and they have rights too. You may have the right to march through campus, but you may not have the right to camp out on campus, because the campus has a “no camping” rule.

If you’re going to apply that rule fairly, and you’re going to allow these people to camp, then you really have to open it up to everybody. You could have a homeless encampment on campus, you could have people who just want to camp out and decide the campus is the place to do it rather than the national park. So Cornell has rules against camping on the campus. And those rules, as long as they are applied to everybody equally, are perfectly lawful. And the only ones who have ever attempted to set up a tent encampment on campus are the anti-Israel students. So you can’t say, “Oh, this is only being enforced against the anti-Israel students.” That’s not true. No one else has tried to do this before! So they want special rules for themselves.

Would it be fair to say that in this case, the children are subordinating the adults?

I don’t think you can assert that just based on age, because the faculty are grownups, and many of them are participating in this. I think what you have to distinguish is the administration from the rest of the campus. And the administration has defaulted on its obligation to enforce the rules fairly. It’s the administrations that are the problem, and that’s why in the US, things vary dramatically from university to university. They’re not all Columbia University, Rutgers, or UCLA.

Universities in Florida have fairly, uniformly, and aggressively enforced their rules. The University of Florida issued a statement when protestors tried to set up an encampment, saying that “we are not a day care, and you knew the rules, you chose to violate them. And now you’ll bear the consequences.” Others have done similarly. How the administrations handle things is extremely important.

In places like Columbia, they have completely handed over the operation of the university to the most radical students and faculty, but that is not everywhere. What we’re seeing on the news is maybe 24, 25 universities where you have a significant encampment.

Now, those are the elite educational institutions, I’m not saying they’re not important. But we have over 2,000 colleges and universities in the United States. So this is an elite university phenomenon for the most part. And the administration and the state leadership is what makes the difference between the situation getting out of control and not getting out of control. And that’s why in places like New York City, Boston, and Los Angeles, the problems are the worst.

So is it actually a group of spoiled rich kids playing at being revolutionaries, not fully understanding the ideology they’re supporting?

There is definitely a phenomenon of people wanting to play revolutionary. It’s very easy to play revolutionary from the comfort of your keyboard, in upper Manhattan, because you’re not the one who’s going to have to fight, the one who’s going to die. And some of them are dangerous people, but many of them are just naive, delusional people.

And that’s why you get a phenomenon like people violently taking over a building at Columbia and then complaining that people aren’t bringing them food. People who illegally and violently take over a school building and are now demanding all sorts of food — these are not real revolutionaries. They wouldn’t last an hour in the Middle East conflict. But from the comfort of Columbia University, they are able to play out these fantasies.

And that’s laughable at one level, but very dangerous at another level, right? Because you have people who never have to bear the consequences encouraging violence in the Middle East.

[Featured Image: NYU female students tearing down hostage posters, October 17, 2023]

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