StandWithUs Nederlands organized a four-city Dutch lecture tour for me this week. With flights from Tel Aviv canceled, I addressed three university audiences remotely. At Delft University of Technology, Palestinian hooligans tried intimidating me and shutting me down\u2026 via Zoom.<\/p>\n
They failed.<\/p>\n
Trying to shut down a Zoom lecture feels particularly pathetic and cowardly. It\u2019s as anti-intellectual as razoring out a page from a textbook. It shows a fear of the ideas themselves.<\/p>\n
Denouncing my invitation, anti-Zionists smashed over 25 plate-glass windows in two nights of vandalism. Their graffiti proclaimed: \u201cStop your Zionist war propaganda\u201d and \u201cstop zios.\u201d \u00a0They spread butyric acid \u2014 a slimy substance smelling like vomit \u2014 on two buildings. They\u2019re engineers, after all. StandWithUs changed the location. I began my lecture \u201cAnti-Zionist Rhetoric on University Campuses: An Academic and Zionist Response,\u201d empathizing: \u201cIt\u2019s hard to be a Jew on campus. It\u2019s hard to be a Palestinian on campus, too.\u201d I added that I never characterize \u201cthe\u201d Palestinians \u2014 demonizing people. Instead, I criticize actions, political culture, charters, rhetoric, terrorism.<\/p>\n
To inspire, I told a story of another student at a top technical university, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. In 1967, nineteen-year-old Anatoly Shcharansky noticed the anti-Semitic jokes targeting him change in six days. Instead of calling him weak and cowardly, Jew-haters called him a bully\u2026 following Israel\u2019s Six Day War victory. Curious about how a country 2,700 kilometers away so affected him, he launched his Jewish and Zionist journey. In discovering his identity, he discovered his freedom, becoming today\u2019s Zionist activist and human rights warrior, Natan Sharansky.<\/p>\n
The \u201canti-Semite doesn\u2019t make the Jew,\u201d I explained. The Jew, the Zionist, makes the Jew. Beyond explaining how anti-Zionists \u2013 particularly mainstream Palestinian nationalists \u2013fortified their anti-Zionism with traditional anti-Semitism, I wanted to end by celebrating Zionist empowerment, and liberal-democratic nationalist optimism, for Jews and non-Jews alike.<\/p>\n
Air-raid sirens wailed in Jerusalem just as I began.<\/p>\n
I was in my basement office. Although, it may not have been my most prudent decision, I kept lecturing. I\u2019m an educator. I didn\u2019t want to miss a thoughtful campus conversation about these issues.<\/p>\n
Ultimately, the sirens weren\u2019t what bothered us.<\/p>\n
Within minutes, seven keffiyeh-masked hooligans intruded, to disrupt the event. Campus security watched haplessly \u2013 this university doesn\u2019t remove protesters menacing speakers. The browbeaters condemned StandWithUS as \u201cZionist\u201d \u2014 God forbid. \u201cWe will not allow fascists, we will not allow Zionists, we will not allow racists, nobody that comes to spread hate in our university is allowed in this campus\u2026\u201d the ringleader said, \u201cbecause Gil Troy, and I quote\u2026. has called the Palestinians \u2018Morally Bankrupt\u2026 bloodthirsty\u2026 and Jew-hating.\u2019 This is deeply offensive and harmful language that promotes hatred and the dehumanization of an entire group\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n
University of Ottawa demonstrators spewed the same misquotations at me last February \u2014 for anyone doubting the movement\u2019s mass manipulation globally. But anyone paying attention could see the contrast between my professorial attempts at nuance and their menacing close-mindedness. \u201cHe just said it\u2019s hard to be a Jew in the university\u201d \u2014 and a Palestinian \u2014 the organizer said, inviting them to participate.<\/p>\n
Instead, they chanted, often reading off an iPhone: \u201cSay it loud, say it clear: We don\u2019t want any Zionists here.\u201d They yelled \u201cWe don\u2019t want any Zionist teachers,\u201d and that perennial favorite, \u201cFree Free, Palestine.\u201d I couldn\u2019t respond effectively via Zoom to this surreal, impotent, attempt at long-distance intimidation. The other students seemed unruffled by this empty, performative gesture. Somehow, StandWithUS found another room quickly and I finished with no further interruptions.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s when I got depressed. Even worse than the Palestinian Ku-Klux-Klanners cowering behind their keffiyehs, were the robotic questioners who sat quietly through the lecture. Their questions broadcast the affectless, programmed zealotry of Soviet Commissars. Their questions \u2013 actually accusations \u2013 came straight from the Palestinian propaganda playbook, obsessed with delegitimizing Israel because of its supposed original sins in 1948. It\u2019s Palestinian Perseveration, \u201cthe uncontrollable, repetitive continuation of a behavior, speech, thought, or emotion long after the original stimulus has ended.\u201d Anti-Zionist automatons have been emitting the same biased nonsense for decades, worldwide.<\/p>\n
I try to be respectful \u2013 with limits. I listened to every question \u2013 but cut off abusive libels alleging \u201cwhite supremacy,\u201d that Jews treat \u201cgoyim \u2026 like cattle\u201d and that Israel \u201cpoisoned Palestinian water.\u201d When one questioner prefaced a more-substantive critique calling me racist, fascist, and an academic disgrace, I said I\u2019d answer the second half despite the insults.\u00a0 When another student called me a fraud because \u201cnations don\u2019t have the right to exist, only people\u2019s do,\u201d I invoked my Quebec years where French Canadians, like Palestinians, and dozens of other peoples, have a national consciousness and aspriations but no state. While patiently \u2013 not defensively \u2013 debunking the worst lies, I kept going meta. I wondered if they subjected any other nation to such a one-sided indictment, or harped on long-ago sins to doubt their own country\u2019s legitimacy. I asked if they criticized any Palestinian actions,\u00a0ever<\/em>. I also invoked historical analogies including India-Pakistan circa 1948, while rejecting this obsession with trying to pivot all of history and politics today around your one particular favorite date.<\/p>\n When teaching in person, I scan, seeing who is open to listening, while relating to the unreceptive interrogator. It\u2019s harder to do when you\u2019re Zoomed into a lecture hall.<\/p>\n I like to think I raised some issues and offered framings people hadn\u2019t considered before. But the evening\u2019s Legion of Unfair Accusers hijacked the evening far more effectively than the disrupters did.\u00a0 They set the Q-and-A\u2019s tone, negating my talk\u2019s focus, substance, romance, optimism, and nuance. They came to play Zionist Whac-a-mole, wielding the most cliched mallets.\u00a0 It was like only being asked about Southern slavery after lecturing about America\u2019s New Deal. This experience should clarify two debates roiling the Jewish world. First, some thoughtful intellectuals treat \u201cAnti-Zionism\u201d as a philosophy, an intellectual movement, distinct from anti-Semitism. They see anti-Zionists reacting to various Western challenges or expressing particular jealousies regarding Israel\u2019s ideological strengths.<\/p>\n Although I enjoy reading these insights, and object when Woke psychologists pushing \u201cde-colonizing therapy,\u201d mislabel Zionism as \u201ca root cause of mental illness,\u201d these obsessive anti-Zionists often broadcast psychological distress, transcending the philosophical. The masked bullies present as rageaholics addicted to hounding Zionists \u2013 and Jews, wherever and whenever possible. The tunnel-vision propagandists hooked on their 48-fixation present as flailing zealots ordering their increasingly-chaotic worlds around this one obsession. More important, such encounters are warning flares. Beware, anti-Zionists feed off Diaspora Jewish insecurities.\u00a0 Many American Jews especially, fear being outflanked on the left, becoming unpopular, exposed as un-hip.<\/p>\n Many of us have invested decades in updating, debating, refining, redefining, reviving, Zionism and the Zionist conversation globally \u2013 with pride and not abject apologetics. That mission includes engaging those, old and young alike, troubled by Israeli policies, personalities, actions, and history, yet still open-minded and open-hearted. Investing even one Jewish communal dollar in wooing \u2013 or demonizing \u2013 Ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionists (distinct from anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox Jews), is worse than a waste of money. It risks empowering fanatics to prey on too many communal insecurities. And it will, inevitably, hijack the important, substantive, constructive, and lovingly-patriotic-even-if-critical conversations about Zionism, Israel, Judaism, and the Jewish people, most Jews worldwide still seek \u2013 and deserve.<\/p>\n