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… via Zoom.
They failed.
Trying to shut down a Zoom lecture feels particularly pathetic and cowardly. It’s as anti-intellectual as razoring out a page from a textbook. It shows a fear of the ideas themselves.
Denouncing my invitation, anti-Zionists smashed over 25 plate-glass windows in two nights of vandalism. Their graffiti proclaimed: “Stop your Zionist war propaganda” and “stop zios.” They spread butyric acid — a slimy substance smelling like vomit — on two buildings. They’re engineers, after all.
StandWithUs changed the location. I began my lecture “Anti-Zionist Rhetoric on University Campuses: An Academic and Zionist Response,” empathizing: “It’s hard to be a Jew on campus. It’s hard to be a Palestinian on campus, too.” I added that I never characterize “the” Palestinians — demonizing people. Instead, I criticize actions, political culture, charters, rhetoric, terrorism.
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… following Israel’s 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’s Zionist activist and human rights warrior, Natan Sharansky.
The “anti-Semite doesn’t make the Jew,” I explained. The Jew, the Zionist, makes the Jew. Beyond explaining how anti-Zionists – particularly mainstream Palestinian nationalists –fortified 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.
Air-raid sirens wailed in Jerusalem just as I began.
I was in my basement office. Although, it may not have been my most prudent decision, I kept lecturing. I’m an educator. I didn’t want to miss a thoughtful campus conversation about these issues.
Ultimately, the sirens weren’t what bothered us.
Within minutes, seven keffiyeh-masked hooligans intruded, to disrupt the event. Campus security watched haplessly – this university doesn’t remove protesters menacing speakers.
The browbeaters condemned StandWithUS as “Zionist” — God forbid. “We 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…” the ringleader said, “because Gil Troy, and I quote…. has called the Palestinians ‘Morally Bankrupt… bloodthirsty… and Jew-hating.’ This is deeply offensive and harmful language that promotes hatred and the dehumanization of an entire group….”
University of Ottawa demonstrators spewed the same misquotations at me last February — for anyone doubting the movement’s mass manipulation globally. But anyone paying attention could see the contrast between my professorial attempts at nuance and their menacing close-mindedness.
“He just said it’s hard to be a Jew in the university” — and a Palestinian — the organizer said, inviting them to participate.
Instead, they chanted, often reading off an iPhone: “Say it loud, say it clear: We don’t want any Zionists here.” They yelled “We don’t want any Zionist teachers,” and that perennial favorite, “Free Free, Palestine.”
I couldn’t 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.
That’s 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 – actually accusations – came straight from the Palestinian propaganda playbook, obsessed with delegitimizing Israel because of its supposed original sins in 1948. It’s Palestinian Perseveration, “the uncontrollable, repetitive continuation of a behavior, speech, thought, or emotion long after the original stimulus has ended.” Anti-Zionist automatons have been emitting the same biased nonsense for decades, worldwide.
I try to be respectful – with limits. I listened to every question – but cut off abusive libels alleging “white supremacy,” that Jews treat “goyim … like cattle” and that Israel “poisoned Palestinian water.” When one questioner prefaced a more-substantive critique calling me racist, fascist, and an academic disgrace, I said I’d answer the second half despite the insults. When another student called me a fraud because “nations don’t have the right to exist, only people’s do,” 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 – not defensively – 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’s legitimacy. I asked if they criticized any Palestinian actions, ever. 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.
When teaching in person, I scan, seeing who is open to listening, while relating to the unreceptive interrogator. It’s harder to do when you’re Zoomed into a lecture hall.
I like to think I raised some issues and offered framings people hadn’t considered before. But the evening’s Legion of Unfair Accusers hijacked the evening far more effectively than the disrupters did. They set the Q-and-A’s tone, negating my talk’s focus, substance, romance, optimism, and nuance. They came to play Zionist Whac-a-mole, wielding the most cliched mallets. It was like only being asked about Southern slavery after lecturing about America’s New Deal.
This experience should clarify two debates roiling the Jewish world. First, some thoughtful intellectuals treat “Anti-Zionism” 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’s ideological strengths.
Although I enjoy reading these insights, and object when Woke psychologists pushing “de-colonizing therapy,” mislabel Zionism as “a root cause of mental illness,” these obsessive anti-Zionists often broadcast psychological distress, transcending the philosophical. The masked bullies present as rageaholics addicted to hounding Zionists – 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. Many American Jews especially, fear being outflanked on the left, becoming unpopular, exposed as un-hip.
Many of us have invested decades in updating, debating, refining, redefining, reviving, Zionism and the Zionist conversation globally – 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 – or demonizing – 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 – and deserve.
The writer is an American presidential historian and Zionist activist born in Queens, living in Jerusalem. Last year he published, To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream and The Essential Guide to October 7th and its Aftermath. His latest E-book, The Essential Guide to Zionism, Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism and Jew-hatred was just published and can be downloaded on the website of JPPI – the Jewish People Policy Institute.
