As the fall semester begins, colleges have appeared anxious to avoid last year’s vitriol around the Israel-Hamas war. They’ve enacted a wide swath of new policies about protests, encampments and hate speech to try and ensure a more peaceful campus environment.
These policies appear geared toward protecting Jewish, pro-Israel community members. But they’re actually good for everyone — especially pro-Palestinian students.
That’s particularly true when it comes to updated protocols from NYU and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign that ban studentsfrom targeting Zionists, whether by describing Zionist students as “pigs” or trying to prevent them from joining clubs. NYU’s move prompted backlash from pro-Palestinian groups, who claimed that the new code of conduct “criminalizes Palestine solidarity.”
But pushing back on the targeting of Zionists is an essential move for any institution that protects students’ right to advocate for self-determination, as pro-Palestinian groups themselves do. Bans on targeting Zionists recognize the dangers of reducing a broad national movement into a strawman of its most extreme elements. And they affirm a core value of a liberal arts education: that no student should be excluded from campus life for believing in a people’s right to autonomy.
Those new NYU hate speech guidelines remind students that the word “Zionist” has often been used as a “code word” that perpetuates antisemitic stereotypes.
There’s a longstanding history of that practice. For example, in 1979, Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the Iranian Revolution, said his movement would “distinguish between Jews and Zionists” and said that “if the Muslims overcame the Zionists, they would leave the Jews alone.”
But Khomeini also regularly conflated Israel, Zionism and Jews: In 1970, he told religious students that “the Jews (may God curse them) have meddled with the text of the Qu’ran.” The next year, he said it was Israel that “attempted to corrupt the text of the Qu’ran.” Khomeini once spoke in the same sentence of the Shah’s army being troubled by “subordination to Israel” and not wanting Iran to be “trampled by the boots of the Jews.”
Khomeini, according to his biographer, was also convinced that Jewish conspiracists wanted to emasculate Islam and take over. Or as Khomeini said : “the Jews and their foreign backers … wish to establish Jewish domination throughout the world.”
That’s not to say that campus protesters who condemn Zionism always echo Khomeini’s flagrant antisemitism, or that criticism of Zionism as a political movement is inherently antisemitic. It isn’t. But there are clear parallels between mainstream criticism of Israel and Khomeini’s use of the term “Zionist” to spread hatred toward Jews.
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After Oct. 7, some on the far left pointed to Hamas’ 2017 charter to argue that the group’s attacks had nothing to do with antisemitism. Hamas’ updated charter says it “affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion.”
But all that’s needed to prove that Hamas continues to be motivated by a hatred of Jews is to read the reports from Oct. 7 and its aftermath. When one Hamas terrorist called home to brag of his accomplishments that day, he told his parents: “Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews!” Released hostage Agam Goldstein-Amog, recalling her time in captivity , said “My Hamas guards hated me for being Jewish, so I was coerced into reciting Islamic prayers and made to wear a hijab.”
In the U.S., too, we’ve seen those who claim to simply be protesting the war dip into obvious antisemitism. In New York City, a protester called a woman a “murderous kike.” At Stanford University, from which I graduated two years ago, some students complained it was Zionist and disgusting to celebrate Hanukkah. They chanted “Zionists, Zionists you can’t hide. We charge you with genocide!” and also yelled “Go back to Brooklyn!” — sending a clear message: Jews don’t belong here.
It’s this all-too-common overlap between anti-Zionism and antisemitism that colleges are trying to protect against. As a new report by a Columbia University task force notes, critiques of Zionism on campus have frequently strayed into “traditional antisemitic tropes about secretive power, money, global conspiracies, bloodthirstiness, and comparisons of Zionists to Nazis or rodents.”
It would be wrong to pretend that this antisemitism is characteristic of the entire pro-Palestine movement. Many protesters are rightfully horrified by the devastation in Gaza.
But it would be equally wrong, for example, to assume that when Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich justifies denying food to hungry Gazans, that this cruelty characterizes the entire pro-Israel movement, or Jews as a whole. Just look at the hundreds of thousands of Israelis, many of my family members among them, who are protesting for an immediate hostage deal and ceasefire. Like me, they are horrified by Netanyahu’s war-hungry government.
When we recognize that anti-Zionism frequently crosses the line into antisemitism, especially in heated protest environments, we are acknowledging that attacks on a people’s quest for self-determination often lead to stereotypes about them.
Just as attacks on Zionism often end up unjustly vilifying all Jews, attacks on Palestinian nationalism often unjustly vilify all Palestinians. Just as we should refuse to let charges of Zionism act as a slur denigrating an entire people’s dreams of justice and security, we should deny the conflation between the terrorism of Hamas and the future aspirations of the entire Palestinian people.
Just as no one on campus should be blacklisted for believing in the existence of Israel, no supporters of Palestinians should be blacklisted only for believing that Palestinians deserve a better future than the present they have now.
More colleges and universities should follow in NYU and the University of Illinois’s footsteps and establish clear bans on the targeting of Zionists — and then lean on the same logic to protect Palestinians. No one who is genuinely dedicated to peace for both Israelis and Palestinians has anything to fear from such policies. Only reductive voices who demonize an entire people do.
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