Antisemitism on liberal college campuses has now gained wide attention, the crescendo of which we all witnessed when three Ivy League presidents testified before Congress that calling for the genocide of Jews is not actually antisemitism and that it “depends on the context.” In reality, anti-Israel hate has been in place throughout academia since 1967, via the KGB's Operation SIG.
Though the Soviet Union was the first to recognize Israel’s sovereignty in 1948, within the span of a decade, Soviet attitudes toward Israel swiftly soured. The goal was for Israel to become a communist vassal state in the Middle East for the Soviet Union and to buffer Israel against the West. Several factors contributed to the strained relations: once Jews in Israel found out the extent of antisemitism within the Soviet Union, support for the communist regime waned, as did finding out the extent of the gulags and crimes against Soviet citizens. In 1956, during the Suez Canal War, Israel sided with the U.K. and France against Egypt, which was backed militarily by the Soviet Union.
Relations continued to unravel, with the Soviet Union insidiously arming all major Arab nations.
After Israel's stunning victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, the Soviet Union reacted by launching an antisemitic hissy fit, with the goal of positioning Israel to both the Arab world and any Western “useful idiot” as a “Nazi state” and a “colonizer.”
Operation SIG lasted from 1967 to 1988 and in those decades was successful. It was effortless to convince the Arab world of the lies that “Jews are from Europe” and came to Israel “as settlers,” that Israel “kicked out all the Arabs in 1948,” and of course that Israel is an “apartheid state.” We hear all those phrases at pro-Hamas marches today, and across liberal college campuses, and not just limited to the Ivies.
However, convincing the West of those lies proved a more difficult feat, as Israel was still seen an underdog. Even many Soviet citizens were impressed with Israel's military win. It showed the Soviet citizens that Jews are not weak. Another antisemitic lie, that Jews are weak and need others to fight for them, had been swirling around the Soviet populace since WWII. Never mind the fact that many Soviet Jews served bravely in the Soviet Army in both World Wars.
The KGB then, just as Islamists now, saw Western liberals as gullible and called them “useful idiots.” It was through the liberal academia that Operation SIG succeeded. All it took was simple propaganda images and the invention of the “Palestinian people,” when, historically, no such people exists. “Palestinians” was merely a colonizer term for Jews living in Israel from A.D. 136 up to the point when Jews freed 22% of the remaining Jewish homeland (78% had been stolen by Churchill to create Transjordan in 1922) in 1948. “Palestine” was a colonizer term for “Israel” for that same time period.
Suddenly, Arabs who came to Israel from 25 different Muslim countries became “Palestinians.” Interestingly, it took two years for Arabs in Israel to start calling themselves the false moniker, as the term “Palestinians” was so closely related to Jews that Arabs prior to 1948 had no desire to be called even “Palestinian Arabs.”
It was the same Operation SIG that had hired both Arafat and Abbas to be KGB agents, and hired 4,000 Arabs to spread antisemitic lies throughout the Muslim world.
Some use excuses such as “the U.N. uses that term” — as if the U.N. were some barometer of truth on anything related to Israel — or the just as comical excuse, “well it’s what they identify themselves as.” There is no one “they” — it is six different Arab groups, plus genetic Jews in parts of Judea and Samaria who were forcibly converted to Islam in the 11th century.
The Arab settlers in Gaza do not even come from the same countries as the Arab settlers in Judea and Samaria.
Just as Qatar these days is a major funder of numerous liberal universities in the U.S., so too was the Soviet Union over a two-decade period. That funding ushered in anti-Israel materials, hired anti-Israel professors, and spread the antisemitic lies to student groups well before the emergence of CAIR, J Street, JVP (Jewish Voice for Peace), and SJP (Students for Justice in Palestine).
As Goebbels famously said, “repeat a lie often enough, and it becomes the truth.”
What is the future for Jewish students on college campuses? Southern schools have seen a major uptick in Jewish applicants. Emory University, the University of Alabama, the University of Texas Dallas, Washing & Lee University, the University of South Carolina, Elon University, and the College of Charleston have been among the more popular picks.
Should Jews continue paying exorbitant fees to the Ivies, whose prestige in reality has been diminishing for a while, when Jewish safety is at stake?
Today, there are fewer Jews at the Ivies as a percentage of the student body population than at the height of the Jewish quota restriction laws, from the 1920s to the 1960s.
It would take decades to undo the damage from both pro-Islamist liberal and Soviet antisemitic propaganda. And, as the famous professor and thinker Gad Saad, himself a Lebanese Jew, recently said, even if a president of a university is ousted, his (or her) replacement will still come from the same infected pipeline.
Zionism education is what is actually needed on college campuses.
When I was at Columbia for grad school in 2013, I witnessed SJP’s “Apartheid Week,” in which images of dead Syrian kids were shown from the Syrian Civil War, pretending they were kids in Gaza. A tepid Jewish group was reacting with the slogan “Hummus Not Hamas.” But slogans do nothing. Actual and accurate Zionism education equips students with facts to push back on both the innocently misguided and the purposeful Jew-haters.
When I reported a swastika, on the same liberal campus, with a circle around it that said, “F--- Israel,” nothing was done. I contacted Columbia’s Hillel, and even back then, their Israel engagement director said that they cannot do anything because their own students are not pro-Israel. That their board refuses to fly the Israeli flag not just outside the building, but not even inside. And that many of their students were with J Street, and as awful as J Street was and still is, they were attempting to prevent them from joining JVP.
Contrast that with what I had seen at my undergrad, American University, in 2004, when there was a protest against Israel by the Muslim Student Association. Hillel at A.U. back then was strong, and within five minutes, representatives showed up to counter-protest and ended up shutting down the protest. Today, American University is just as problematic as any other liberal school. Therefore, complaining about anti-Zionism is not the answer. Educating ourselves and, consequently, our youth, about Israel, accurately, is the correct course of action...but only at schools that have not completely gone under the “useful idiot” spell.
Laureen Lipsky is the CEO and founder of Taking Back the Narrative (www.tbtnisrael.com), a Zionism education company.
Image via Pexels.
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