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A STRATEGY FOR PRO-ISRAEL STUDENTS
By Gil Troy
The Jewish Week
September 16, 2006
Israel’s war against Hezbollah border incursions and Hamas rocket attacks have fed fears of a renewed wave of campus anti-Zionism. Such attacks on Israel would be triply unfortunate. Judging by the last six years, students would endure a manipulative disinformation campaign libeling Israel while soft-pedaling the evils of Islamicist terrorism in what should be centers of critical intelligence seeking truth, not distorting it. These lies would further alienate the Left from Israel, even as liberals should be championing democratic Israel against today’s greatest threat to liberty: the Islamofascists. And such tension would again hijack the Jewish agenda, forcing students to defend Israel rather than building community, celebrating Zionism’s many achievements or exploring Jewish spirituality, ideology and values.
This is the intellectuals’ intifada, the trendy posturing wherein coddled suburbanites fancy themselves edgy revolutionaries by bashing Israel and romanticizing Palestinian or Shiite terrorists rather than questioning their own assumptions or risking any creature comforts. Jewish students of all political stripes should learn how to refute the lies, transform the terms of debate and make some delicious, morally enriching, mind-sharpening kosher Zionist lemonade out of the anti-Zionist lemons metastasizing among Western elites.
Students must put today’s conflict in context. Critics forget that Hezbollah violated Israel’s internationally recognized border after Israel left Lebanon six years ago, just as Hamas attacks followed Israel’s Gaza withdrawal and Palestinian suicide bombings began after Israel started compromising with Palestinians under the Oslo Accords.
Pro-Israel activists must see the subtext — that in waving Hezbollah’s yellow flag, Israel’s critics are waving the banner of a genocidal terrorist organization that is an Iranian puppet, seeks the destruction of what it calls the “Zionist entity” and murdered 241 American Marines in Lebanon along with many Israelis. Israel’s friends should challenge the critics’ pretext, too, asking whether bashing Israel comes so easily because of anti-Zionist anti-Semitism, or ignorance of the Islamicist war on democracy and freedom. Israel advocates also need to debunk the illusion that fanatic groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas seek compromise or Western-style constructive governance, noting from sad experience that such assumptions reflect Western delusions and moral confusion.
Looming behind these debates about Israel’s military morality or Arab terrorists’ true character is Israel’s fight for survival. If more people accepted the Jewish people’s national right to build a country in the Jews’ historic homeland, more people would accept the Jewish state’s right to self-defense while rejecting the exterminationist agenda so casually echoed throughout the Arab and Islamic worlds. Furthermore, if more Westerners understood Islamicists’ challenge to central democratic tenets such as freedom of speech, religious tolerance, intellectual diversity and the rights of women and gays, they would not so sloppily ally themselves with Hezbollah, the pro-Iranian “Party of God” or Hamas, which literally means “zeal” or “courage,” while also serving as an acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement — or the ominously-named Islamic Jihad.
Not all Israel critics are anti-Semitic jihadists, but the rash of anti-Zionist anti-Semitism makes the critics morally responsible to distinguish themselves from the fundamentalist terrorists. Rather than fruitlessly defending Israel’s actions before biased judges, the pro-Israel community should ally with students who oppose the related evils of Islamicism, terrorism, anti-Semitism, intolerance and jihadism threatening modern life. More positively, students should celebrate Israel’s democratic diversity and its valiant efforts to build a just society in the world’s toughest neighborhood.
The academic epidemic of anti-Israel disdain indicts contemporary campus culture, not Israel or the Jewish community. Standing solidly for Israel’s right to exist — even while acknowledging the Jewish state’s imperfections — and against the Islamicist assault on Western freedom can provide a great gift to students, whether or not they are Jewish. By being politically incorrect, questioning the status quo, departing from the conventional wisdom and thinking independently, skeptically and critically, students will learn the most valuable lessons universities can teach. Just as supporting oppressed Soviet Jews decades ago helped many students recognize Communism’s evils before sophisticates did, supporting the oft-maligned Jewish state will help many students stand on the right side of history today.
People too easily forget that this summer the West was spared an appalling mass murder when heroic investigators uncovered an Islamicist plot to blow nine planes out of the sky simultaneously. We should be entering this school year relieved by that fundamentalist failure, and seeking to strengthen democracies against a global enemy that has declared war on Western ideas.
That five years after 9/11 many of the supposedly smartest Westerners cannot tell the good guys from the bad confirms popular doubts about intellectuals’ street smarts. The students entering college this month are the children of 9/11, having matured under the shadow of terrorism; some might have died had the planes exploded over the Atlantic. These freshmen have a golden opportunity to reshape campus culture, correcting many of their teachers and campus leaders. Pro-Israel students should be at the vanguard of this campus revolution, making universities hothouses of Western openness, independence and strength, rather than dens of decadence, double-think and defeatism.
Gil Troy is a professor of history at McGill University and the author of the updated edition of “Why I Am A Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today.”
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