College students could have plenty of other places to worry about

In his cleverly titled book, “The Arc of a Covenant,” Wall Street Journal columnist Walter Russell Mead wrote of a special concern Americans have with Israel. As he put it: “The state of Israel is a speck on the map of the world; it occupies a continent in the American mind.”

Likewise, over a decade ago, in a Foreign Policy piece headlined “America’s Israel Obsession: Why are Americans so preoccupied with my country?,” Tel Aviv-based writer and editor Shmuel Rosner wrote : “The overrepresentation of Israel in the American public square is at times a headache and at times a cause for celebration.”

And, as so distressingly demonstrated by the anti-Israel demonstrations on campuses last spring, this “overrepresentation” is particularly acute at universities. “The State of Israel is an obsession of today’s university, a linchpin around which an extraordinary volume of discourse, pedagogy, and politics revolves,” scholar Rachel Fish wrote presciently in 2022 in a piece for Sapir headlined “Can the Academy be Saved from Anti-Zionism?”

So, as Kamala Harris and Donald Trump prepare for a debate likely to at least touch on the Israel-Gaza war, and as students gather on campuses anew – with some surely planning to mount a new round of disruption – it’s worth speculating on why so many conflicts generate far less of a storm in the U.S. Some have been far bloodier.

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens was helpful on the point in “Can We Be a Little Less Selective in Our Moral Outrage?”

Consider Sudan, Stephens writes. “In Sudan’s case, the humanitarian group Operation Broken Silence estimates that at least 65,000 people have died of violence or starvation since fighting broke out last year, and nearly 11 million people have been turned into refugees.”

And Ethiopia, he adds. “In Ethiopia, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed — possibly history’s least deserving recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize — first turned his guns on ethnic Tigrayans in one of the world’s bloodiest recent wars, with a death toll estimated as high as 600,000. Now the government is waging war against former allies in the Amhara region, even as the Biden administration last year lifted restrictions on aid owing to its abuse of human rights. How many college protests has this elicited?”

Moreover, what of the suffering of various peoples in other places? “There are also Rohingya in Myanmar, Uyghurs in China, Christians in Nigeria and ethnic minorities in Russia, to name a few,” Stephens notes.

In the face of such horrors, why should a war in a distant nation just a bit larger than New Jersey bring students and others out to march, pitch tents, occupy buildings and otherwise protest? Yes, the numbers of people killed in Gaza are high, even if the Hamas-reported total of 40,500 is inflated — with maybe 17,000 of the dead being combatants who were pledged to the destruction of Israel. But aren’t such figures dwarfed by those in other wars raging about the globe?

Where is the outrage for the other 109 or so wars the Geneva Academy says are now sullying the world? Why are there no demonstrations about the tens of thousands killed in the Russia-Ukraine war? Perhaps more than 150,000 have died so far in that grinding war, which is the result of an unjustified invasion. By contrast, of course, Israel’s actions in Gaza came in response to an invasion of its territory last Oct. 7 and the ensuing massacre and hostage-taking by Hamas and allied groups.

Deaths in war are awful. Civilian deaths, in particular, are horrific. And it’s especially repugnant in Gaza that Hamas treats the deaths of fellow Palestinians — innocents — as “necessary sacrifices.” The great moral tragedy for Israelis is that they’ve been drawn into pulling the triggers in Hamas’s murderous efforts against its own people.

Of course, the moral tragedy on U.S. campuses is that protestors aren’t massing to condemn Hamas. Really, is it not the instigator and true perpetrator here?

On or off campuses, Americans have a host of reasons for their intense focus on Israel. Experts cite the special relationship between the countries ever since Harry S. Truman became the first world leader to recognize Israel as a Jewish state in 1948, only 11 minutes after its creation. Many Christians in the U.S., moreover, have long been preoccupied with Israel, both with the Biblical nation and the modern one. And going back, at least, to President Jimmy Carter in the 1970s, American leaders have tried to broker peace between Israel and its neighbors. Also, the U.S. remains the leading foreign supplier of weapons to the country.

But there is something different about the attention Israel gets on campuses, especially regarding the Gaza bloodshed. First, Palestinians and Arabs generally have been building their presence on many campuses for decades, both among students and faculty.

At my graduate alma mater, Columbia, for instance, the Middle East Institute dates back to 1954. It has set itself apart with such centers as one for the Study of Muslim Societies and another for Palestine Studies. At best, a handful of faculty members associated with the MEI specialize in Israel studies, which is not surprising since the MEI has been funded well by Arab countries and interests. Indeed, Arab interests have been funding some schools quite well:

The Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies on Columbia’s campus is far smaller. But, to its credit, the university does also maintain a dual-degree program with Tel Aviv University. Protestors, of course, want to do away with that five-year-old effort as they try to crush Israel’s relationships with U.S. institutions.

While it’s not clear how many Arab Americans are enrolled in U.S. universities, their numbers are substantial enough to merit attention by researchers. In all, there are believed to be about 3.7 million Arab Americans in the U.S., compared with 7.5 million Jews. Moreover, there are substantial numbers of foreign students from the Middle East studying in U.S. schools.

Given such numbers, anti-Zionist and antisemitic groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine have found ready markets for supporters on some campuses. Elite schools such as Columbia, Harvard and Penn – which have notable Arab student populations – have dominated headlines. But activists set up encampments at more than 100 institutions last spring, as tallied by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

And let’s not discount antisemitism, which has been rising sharply in the U.S. College students swim in the same sea as all Americans, so some are sure to share the ugly sentiments of those around them.

Still, the campus activism against Israel may be louder and more visible than the real level of concern among students — the hostility may be more wide than deep. A survey last May found that only 8% of some 1,250 students polled took part in demonstrations. Moreover, those surveyed ranked the war as ninth among issues that concern them in a list headed by healthcare reform and educational funding and access.

In all, three surveys by Intelligent.com, Generation Lab/Axios, and Newsweek/College Pulse last spring found that roughly three in five students were on campuses where pro-Palestinian protests occurred. But the vast majority stayed away from the occupations.

Less encouragingly, a significant portion of students not participating were supportive of the protests, as reported by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. According to the Intelligent.com survey, support among students for the protests ran as high as 65%.

The dawning academic year will test many things. How prepared are administrators to handle protests? Perhaps more important, how prepared are they to see to it that their students are more knowledgeable than many proved to be last year? Ignorance of the issues involved was astonishing among students, with many protestors unable to even identify which bodies of water they referred to in chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” 

In her insightful work for Sapir, Fish offered some compelling optimism:

“Is it possible to change anti-Zionist ways of thinking in at least those institutions of higher education that claim to welcome critical thinking and value a true liberal arts approach?,” Fish wrote. “I believe so. But it will require faculty who have the moral courage to question the received wisdom, and senior administrators who believe that the university ought to be a marketplace of ideas rather than a place where students imbibe the ‘truths’ of an anti-Western, anti-Zionist monoculture. The greatest challenge of all will be to cultivate within students not only the critical thinking skills that will allow them to arrive at their own conclusions, but also the courage to risk the implication of those conclusions — the willingness not to fit in with the conventional wisdom, which is unsubtly backed up by a small but powerful cadre of students and faculty whose beliefs dominate university discourse today.”

Of course, she wrote that in 2022, well before the year of discontent that was the last academic year. Now, efforts to build a solid education, to provide true and complete information, seem more essential than ever.