At Columbia University Hatred of Israel Is Part of the Curriculum

In the words of Martin Luther King Jr., "Hate is too great a burden to bear." Yet for thousands of keffiyeh-wearing "pro-Palestinian" demonstrators on college campuses, hostility is winning the day.

"Go back to Poland!" protesters taunted Jews at my alma mater, Columbia University, where some were heard calling for "10,000" more Oct. 7 massacres. One protest leader even live-streamed a video in which he said, "Zionists don't deserve to live." Jewish students felt targeted even before a campus rabbi warned them to "return home as soon as possible," contending that the university couldn't guarantee their safety. Just yesterday, in scenes reminiscent of the Jan. 6 insurrection, students stormed Hamilton Hall, smashing windows, barricading exits and temporarily held faculty hostage.

Watching it, I wonder where the "pro-Palestinian" warriors were in 2015, after Syrian President Bashar al Assad laid siege to the Damascus Yarmouk refugee camp, home to an estimated 150,000 Palestinian refugees? Assad's air force dropped barrel bombs on the camp, which had been taken over by Islamic State and the Al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat Al Nusra. Unlike the Israeli military in Gaza, the Syrian armed forces blocked humanitarian supplies, including food and water, from entering the camp.

Many Palestinians died of hunger.

As a student at Columbia University at the time, I remember. Demonstrators were setting up stands for "apartheid week" to demonize Israel. But I do not remember these courageous students condemning Jordan, which arbitrarily strips citizenship from its citizens of Palestinian origin. Or Lebanon, for keeping Palestinian refugees and their descendants from owning property, working at certain jobs or applying for citizenship.

Today, this same movement that calls Gaza an "open-air prison" avoids faulting Egypt, which confines Palestinians from crossing its border. And they almost never turn their spotlight on Hamas or the U.S.-backed Palestinian Authority, which routinely abuse, torture and murder Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

What Israeli and American Jews can see plainly is that the protesters prefer to single out Israel for blame. That's why they ignore the voices of Palestinians who call for peace or criticize Hamas. In just one example, the Columbia chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine has blocked numerous anti-Hamas Palestinian activists on X (formerly Twitter), including John Aziz, Hamza Howidy (who wrote an excellent opinion piece on the protests), and Ahmed Fouad Al Khatib. Al Khatib, who is from Gaza, has lost several family members in Gaza since the beginning of the war. All three have condemned Oct. 7 and argued for a two-state solution.

It's hate, not compassion, that motivates the students' chants of "intifada revolution" and "from the river to the sea." Those aren't calls for Palestinians to live peacefully alongside Israelis. They're calls for continued violence and the destruction of Israel.

For whatever reason, be it ingrained antisemitism or the sheer excitement of expressing self-righteous anger, many of these students are sympathetic to Hamas not despite its explicit goals of ethnic cleansing, but because of them. Adding insult to injury for American Jews, U.S. media are sanitizing the expressions of hate, while casting the protesters as heroes.

New York Times opinion writer Charles Blow recently likened the anti-Israel protesters to the idealists who demonstrated against the Vietnam war in the 1960s, making no mention of today's blatant antisemitism. That same day, The Washington Post ran its own article analyzing the similarities of today's student protests and those that occurred during the Vietnam War. Once again, there was no mention of antisemitism.

Major newspapers and TV reporters have also taken pains to point to the "many Jews" who've joined the protests. While there are Jewish protesters, they represent a fringe minority of the Jewish community. A December poll by the Washington, D.C.-based Schoen Cooperman Research found an overwhelming majority of American Jews support Israel's current military operation to defeat Hamas.

To be sure, it's only human to react with emotion to the horrifying images of death and destruction in Gaza that bombard us on TV. The realities of any war are gruesome, but the causes of this one are gravely misunderstood. And much of the blame for that lies with elite college professors.

Columbia University has pioneered anti-Israelism for several decades. It goes back to 1963, when the school hired Edward Said, a Palestinian-American professor who openly sought to delegitimize Israel and erase Jewish culture and history, partly by portraying Israel as an extension of European colonialism. Said, who died in 2003, was known for being one of the founders of post-colonial studies. His books and articles are required reading for many Columbia courses.

Other professors involved in antisemitic scandals over the years, including George Saliba, Hamid Dabashi, and Joseph Massad were either students of Said or rely heavily on his teachings. Dabashi said in 2018 that Israel was a "key actor" in "every dirty, treacherous, ugly and pernicious act happening in the world." Massad called the Oct. 7 massacre "awesome."

As an undergrad at Columbia, I was a constant witness to the demonization of Israel. My professors portrayed the Jewish state as opposed to any issue important to today's left-wing youth, whether it be climate change activism, anti-racism, feminism, or LGBTQ equality. Fellow students informed me that that Israel had trained U.S. police in chokeholds used on unarmed black people, subjugated Palestinians to "climate oppression" and promoted rape culture and Jewish supremacy.

The fact that Israel is the most green, tolerant, pro-feminist, and multicultural society in the Middle East is used against it. Students are taught that Israel is only tolerant and concerned about climate change in order to "pinkwash" and "greenwash" its crimes against Palestinians. For example, Professor Lila Abu-Lughod, whose course was a requirement during my time at Columbia, often brought up Israel's "pinkwashing" efforts while minimalizing the treatment of LGBTQ people in the Muslim world.

In an age where White racism and imperialism are considered the pinnacles of evil, Israelis and Zionists are painted as evil white people seeking to oppress disenfranchised brown Palestinians.

The blatant bias of so much of the elite college's faculty helps explain why so many students ardently believe they are on the side of justice in demanding divestment from Israel and disrupting classes to call for a ceasefire. Post-Marxist doctrine teaches that in the pursuit of justice, the ends always justify the means. That's why many have taken the appalling step of justifying, even celebrating the Oct. 7 massacre, which caused the deaths of 1,200 people in Israel, along with mass rape and hostage-taking.

In a recent survey by Generation Lab of two- and four-year college students, 27 percent said they believed Israel deserves blame for the attack. Twenty percent said the attack by Hamas was justified. Only 41 percent said Hamas deserves blame.

Colleges are supposed to promote critical thinking, but they've clearly failed if students can't weigh the evidence in this situation. Hamas has stolen billions of dollars in international development aid to turn Gaza into an armed camp rather than a prospering hub. Its fighters hide behind their women and children, building tunnels under churches, mosques, hospitals, and schools. No one who cares about peace or the well-being of Palestinians could ever support such a group.

But the fault cannot only be ascribed to the students protesting. Most are naïve, rich kids without any real-life experience who feel the need to rebel. It is the universities that have failed them. The professors who have saturated them with an ideological hatred for the Jewish state and the university administrations who have tolerated it for too long.

Joseph Epstein is the director for legislative affairs at the Endowment for Middle East Truth (EMET) and a fellow at the Yorktown Institute.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.