The Anti-Israel ‘Occupations’ of American College Campuses Have Been in the Making for Decades

The Anti-Israel ‘Occupations’ of American College Campuses Have Been in the Making for Decades

As someone who was a political prisoner in the former Soviet Union, Natan Sharansky knows a few things about history.

He writes at Tablet:

Totalitarian societies survive by relying on a core of true believers to frighten even those who don’t buy the ideological party line into becoming “doublethinkers”—people who adhere to the party line in public regardless of their private thoughts—rather than outright dissidents. In the normal course of events, the percentage of doublethinkers is always on the rise, as more and more people grow disillusioned with the false promises of the regime yet continue to pledge allegiance to it out of fear instead of faith. The regime controls them not through their own convictions but through the power its institutions hold over their lives, livelihoods, and safety. In other words, it controls them by frightening them into censoring themselves on the regime’s behalf.

Of course America is a free country and not a totalitarian regime. However, it was impossible to miss the resemblance between the culture I encountered in the American academy 20 years ago and the Soviet worldview of my youth. Like the Communist party (following Marx), more and more people started dividing the world into oppressors (read: always bad, always in the wrong) and oppressed (read: always in the right), and claiming that whoever belonged to the first camp wasn’t worthy of the same rights, freedoms, and protections as the latter. Since Israel and successful “white” Jews elsewhere were a priori classified as oppressors, hating and indeed abusing them became less and less taboo.

In the past 20 years, the ideologues of this new antisemitism continued to pour their fervor into demonizing Israel, and to use every tool at their disposal to press the majority of American Jews who don’t believe their lies into becoming doublethinkers. They made it more and more difficult to get a public position in a student body for students who supported Israel or even visited it on a Birthright trip. They gaslighted Jewish students who spoke about their personal experiences of antisemitism by telling them that what they experienced was really “only” and “legitimate” anti-Zionism, putting them on the defensive for their so called “alarmism” and “rejection of legitimate criticism.” More and more Jewish students found that standing up for their beliefs marked them for discrimination and harassment. Jewish students found themselves unwilling doublethinkers in the very places that are supposed to be the bedrock and bastion of free society…

The occupation of the campuses, which 20 years ago was but a metaphor, has become a real movement with funding, leadership, and physical presence. Young Jews no longer face ostensible threats against their professional futures; they face daily threats against their physical safety and the core of their identities as Jews and as human beings.

It was into this foul atmosphere that Columbia’s Jewish students wrote their letter. Five hundred of Columbia’s Jewish students declared that they won’t be cowed by the haters, that they reject the attacks against their Jewish identity, and that Zionism is a part of Jewish identity. They called out their haters for the antisemites they are, and the administration of the university for downplaying and mishandling the attacks that target Jews. They flatly rejected attempts to victim-blame the Jews for the hatred that targets them. Most remarkably, they all signed the letter with their full names, proudly and openly, shedding the self-censorship and silence of the doublethinker for the proud stance of the dissident. In the days since then, more and more Jews added their names to this list.

When I was a dissident in the USSR, my friends and I knew well that a revolution can only start when a critical mass of doublethinkers stops being afraid and crosses the line into open dissent. Only when the masses lose their fear and drop the mask of pretense, can they lead their society into a different future. It was true in the USSR, and it is true today: The ideological regime of antisemitism that has entrenched itself in America’s universities for decades will only collapse when enough Jews stop being afraid. It will only collapse if they stop unwillingly aiding it by hiding and self-censoring, and instead speak their truths openly and loudly.

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