ANTI-SEMITISM ON CAMPUS – THEN AND NOW – TIMOTHY LYNCH

Following the October 7 Hamas invasion of southern Israel and the atrocities committed on the day, pro-Hamas/Palestinian demonstrations and protest about Israel has engulfed the Western world especially on university campuses. Jewish students have been attacked, vilified and made to feel unwelcome on campus. The protests have spread to affect the Jewish community at large and brought fears of age-old anti-semitism becoming a new norm. To discuss in depth this phenomenon on Australia’s university campuses, Joe Gersh – Executive Chairman of Gersh Investment Partners Ltd and President of the Australasian Union of Jewish Students (AUJS) in 1975 – Freya Leach, Director of the Centre for Youth Policy and Professor Timothy Lynch, Professor of American Politics at the University of Melbourne came together to lead a seminar at The Sydney Institute on Monday 30 September 2024.

ANTI-SEMITISM ON CAMPUS – THEN AND NOW

TIMOTHY LYNCH

The four lenses I’d like to use to explain campus anti-semitism are, first of all, an understanding, a crude understanding, of Israeli history and Israeli politics. Then I’d like to talk about how the campus, and how campus politics has corrupted and, in part, wilfully corrupted an assessment of that Israeli history. But then I’d like to talk about how the USA has gotten us into this mess. And then I’ll turn, finally, to how far Australian politics and the Australian campus has imbibed much of the nonsense that we’ve heard for too long in the United States and on the US campus.

Distorting Israeli history

The remarkable thing about Israel and the perception of the left is how far at the beginning it was seen as a great vehicle for liberation and progress. This was the kibbutz, this was agrarian socialism of the sort that any number of Soviet-inspired regimes were incapable of making work. Israel made them work. Ironically, it was this success, and the army made possible by it, that destroyed Israel’s reputation with the left. Israel stopped being the plucky, little agrarian nation trying to make the desert bloom, and morphed into a lackey of the United States and humiliator of Arab armies.

And the left has never forgiven Israel for that, that essential crime, the crime of success. It is envy and jealousy of the success of the experiment, which causes the hatred. Everything else is flimflam. And it’s earned this success, of course, in a part of the world where you wouldn’t design an experiment in liberal democratic self-government. There are 56, depending on how you count them, other Muslim-identifying states and only one Israel.

Campus politics

There’s a performative element to campus anti-semitism, which we shouldn’t see as genuine conviction. Hating Israel is easy. It doesn’t oblige any sort of commitment. You can sit in the quad only when the weather is warmish and there’s good coffee nearby. It doesn’t entail any sacrifice — none of the sacrifice of those on both sides of the conflict in the Middle East are obliged to make. It’s egged on by a minority of anti-semitic activist scholars. But they tend to make the running. They inform the context in which universities address “the Israel problem”.

I think there are a third of my campus, and I would suspect most other campuses in the West, which are susceptible to this anti-semitic “Israel is the source of all evil” caricature. Another third, which don’t care, never think about Israel or Hezbollah or international politics. And another third, who are perhaps quieter, are very sceptical of that first third, but because of their reticence don’t make their presence felt. I can live with that ratio. I think when you break cover on some of these issues – it’s absurd to actually claim you have to break cover to defend the only liberal democracy in the Middle East – but when you do, I found, in my lived experience, that I have allies. “Thank God you’ve said that. Don’t tell anybody I’ve said that to you. But thank God you’ve gone on record.” And that makes me optimistic about Israel’s prospects.

There is also on the campus a deep and profound ahistoricism. Marxism demands a myopic reading of history. Us against them, bourgeoisie v. proletarian, oppressor v. oppressed. And it means we are robbed of the kind of nuance which would compel the activists to take seriously the real humanitarian disasters, like Sudan today, or like Syria in the middle 2010s, or the Iraq war, or Afghanistan, or even the oppression of Uyghur Muslims in China. These are magnitudes greater than the Palestinians suffer at the hands of the IDF, but receive no attention and garner no protest.

That historical illiteracy – that’s probably better than ahistoricism as a descriptor – explains why there is such a particular focus on Israel. It’s easy to study Israel. I’ve studied Northern Ireland – the focus of my first book. And these conflicts are separate in many more ways than they are united. But one way in which they are comparable is that they are easy to study. Northern Ireland was the most overstudied conflict of the twentieth century. Both sides speak English. You can take tours of the conflict zones, see the ‘peace’ walls, go to pubs on both sides, drink Guinness. You’re essentially immune as an observer, and Israel has some of that quality as well. Even people that hate Israel will go and visit it because they’re safe and secure and they can indulge their ideological obsessions. And that’s not true of these other conflicts. That appeals, I think, to students whose first concern is their own safety, psychological and otherwise. I would offer that as a strange kind of optimism about Israel’s situation.

American anti-racism

The US is culpable on several different levels for the rise of campus anti-semitism. It’s been on the American campus that we’ve seen the rise of critical race theory, of identity politics, and this simplistic view is imposed on the dynamics of the conflict in the Middle East. It’s not helped by the fact that the American campus has been denuded of sceptical liberals and intelligent conservatives. There are no real conservatives left, not enough that would form any sort of counter-revolution against this new progressive hegemony.

We don’t hear reasoned debate on issues like Israel because there isn’t the diversity of academics able to conduct it. That’s a problem. And we can then perhaps talk about how far a rising Muslim vote makes it competitive for both parties to have a broadly sceptical line on Israel in Michigan, possibly in a razor-thin election. Muslim votes in Michigan could potentially move it one way or the other, but I wouldn’t overplay that as a decisive factor.

Australian campus complicity

Australian campuses have allowed themselves to become victims to the most profound and pernicious form of American imperialism, this left-wing notion that identity determines fate and legitimacy. And the attempt has been successful, largely, I think, to pretend that our problems with race and disadvantage map exactly onto the American experience. The more you study the history of race relations in both these nations, the more you realise how extraordinarily different they are one from another.

But the Australian left, whilst being anti-American, profoundly so, in lots of different ways, has imbibed wholesale the American racial narrative. And Israel is construed within that racial narrative. So, if you’re looking to blame someone, blame the United States and the loss and the fall of the academy, much more profound there than here, to forces which find anti-semitism trendy and fashionable.

Conclusion

Jews find themselves trapped. They are either Übermensch or Untermensch. They are either too rich or too poor, they’re too integrated, and therefore control everything, or they are too isolated and insular and therefore not to be trusted. Whatever they do, wherever they are, they are the problem. The one state set up to defend the Jewish people is regarded as the most illegitimate state in the world today. They’re too rootless and they move around corrupting cities and are expelled. Or they’re too rooted because they have claimed their ancient land in Israel. That’s a very difficult characterisation for any nation to resolve. Whatever it does, it faces condemnation. And that’s an extraordinary difficult place to be if you’re a liberal democracy in a very dangerous region.