Classroom Battlegrounds: Anti-Israel incidents on campus

This year a number of anti-Israel incidents have occurred on US campuses, ranging from vandalism to vitriolic speakers to anti-Semitic cartoons. Are the campuses ablaze or are these relatively insignificant brush fires? The answer depends on whom you ask.

Some pro-Israel advocates will not be satisfied unless no critics exist on campus and believe that virtually every anti-Israel speaker or incident merits a response. The establishment groups focus more on proactive than reactive programming. I continue to believe, and reports from campuses bear this out, that the overwhelming majority of campuses today have more serious problems with apathy than anti-Israel activity.

The militant advocacy faction will undoubtedly point to recent events at Berkeley to show how serious the anti-Israel situation is today on campus. There is no question that a number of troubling incidents have occurred there, starting with the vandalism of a pro-Israel sign and culminating most recently in a fistfight at a concert sponsored by a pro-Israel group.

Some perspective is useful. Vandalism is not acceptable, but it is usually only an occasional incident and rarely has any impact. Fisticuffs are unheard of. I can't remember a campus incident escalating beyond a rhetorical battle, and the case at Berkeley remains clouded with some evidence suggesting the Jewish students were at least partially at fault.

Berkeley also is a unique place, famed for its role in the anti-Vietnam War movement and its liberal student body, faculty and surrounding community. To give a sense of the environment, protestors spent 21 months living in oak trees on campus to prevent them from being cut down by the university. When I attended graduate school there more than 20 years ago, I used to put out a table with pro-Israel materials next to the Muslim Students Association, which was handing out highlights of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Berkeley really is sui generis and should not be used to generalize about campus conditions.

Another example of seeing the campus glass half empty or half full was a report earlier this year that an undergraduate debating society at Yale University voted 44-25 in favor of ending America's special relationship with Israel. The vote at the Yale Political Union came after a debate between students and University of Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer, author of the notorious screed about the Israeli lobby.

Is this a serious instance of anti-Israel activity on campus? Obviously, I'd prefer that Yale students unanimously vote to support the US-Israel relationship, but should anyone care that 44 ill-informed young adults feel differently? Fewer than one-third of the students who attended the debate bothered to stay for the vote, and they represent less than one percent of the student body of 12,000. Now you might argue that five US presidents as well as other policy elites graduated from Yale, and perhaps one of those 44 critics of Israel will be a future leader. It's more plausible, however, given American political history, that decision makers will emerge from the 25 who supported Israel.

Nefarious influences inside the classroom are also a concern and difficult to assess because students fear reprisals for reporting on their teachers' professional misconduct. Some professors advancing personal agendas in their classrooms are well-known, but others, especially in smaller schools, attract little or no attention

We also do not know how many professors have incorporated the flawed and biased book on the Israeli lobby by professors Walt and Mearsheimer to their syllabi. How many students will be assigned the book and assume that it therefore must be a scholarly treatment of the subject and leave class and their university with a distorted view of Middle East policy making?

We do know that Arab governments and individuals have spent tens of millions of dollars to fund chairs and centers aimed at influencing American attitudes toward the Middle East and Islam that typically portray authoritarian Arab/Muslim regimes in a favorable light, minimize the threat of Islamists and condemn Israeli policies.

One of the signs of maturity of pro-Israel advocates on campus in recent years has been the growing ability to distinguish between anti-Israel activities that have an impact and those that do not. I'm reminded of the story Robert Fulghum told about how he had a summer job as a youth and would pester an elderly night watchman every day with complaints about what the boss gave him to eat. One day the old man told Fulghum he had to learn the difference between a problem and an inconvenience. The man had a number tattooed on the inside of his forearm.

Dr. Mitchell Bard is the Director of the Jewish Virtual Library and author of Will Israel Survive? (Palgrave) and 48 Hours of Kristallnacht: Night of Destruction/ Dawn of the Holocaust (Lyons Press)