5yRYpzMAQ5vdCUCyICZmRmBVbP2qMG9QDvwVGmA_aem_AbKn8a8wD3ye-Xi8eXcjYnlnSKeRqjoUd3SVKv2DI-TycWY2-_3qb43pe5qZ-0h544cN-kZlv5zimqZg_GK927QW”>Victor Davis Hanson:
Of course, after the October 7 IDF entry into Gaza, the demonstrations became far bolder and more numerous, but not really different in their aims and rhetoric. More often, Jewish students were chased and assaulted. Few if any protestors asked whether supposedly identifiable Jewish students were pro- or anti-Israel, but simply harassed any who seemed Jewish.
Why did the patently illegal occupation of campus property spread? Why the escalation to medieval anti-Semitic threats to Jews and various takes on the “Final Solution?”
One, throngs of poorly educated American students—many of them part of the diversity/equity/identity movement—saw Gaza as fuel for their Marxist-themed binary of oppressed versus oppressors. So they eagerly plugged Israel into the tired role of a white, interloping, neo-colonialist, and “settler” state—on the correct assumption that they had grown up with the assurance that smearing whites in racist fashion was not only tolerated but encouraged as a blow against white “privilege,” “supremacy,” or “rage.”
These settler and colonialist smears were ahistorical. Jewish “settler” culture and civilization date before 1200 B.C.—some 1800 years prior to the Arab invasions that displaced Byzantine control of the Middle East. But then again, remember, we are dealing with the supposed moral and intellectual elite of America who have no idea what “Palestine” means or where it came from and certainly could not identify Gaza on a map. They often charge America with genocide, but otherwise they were not too bothered by the medieval-style beheadings, rape, and mutilations of October 7.
The students also know little of the “Final Solution” or what their prompters meant by “Go Back to Poland” (again, the ovens of Auschwitz). Instead, clueless, indulged students provide the American-citizen fodder for the protests. They know how campus unrest unfolds and the predictable Munich-like responses of campus administrators and blue-city mayors and governors.
At 11 million, Israel’s population is vastly outnumbered by some 500 million Arab and Muslim neighbors, many of whom are existentially hostile. So the idea of an imperial overdog or colonialist oppressor Israel is absurd. Most of the hatred in the Arab world and its expatriates on Western campuses toward Israel is driven by envy and frustration that Israel is a humane, free, prosperous, and lawful constitutional state in a way most Arab nations are still not. Add that the Arab world has prompted five or six serial wars against Israel, lost them all, and on spec resorted to terrorism to gain what their militaries could not—and yet Israel still prospers while its neighbors do not since that would mean to dismantle autocracy, tribalism, gender apartheid, religious intolerance, anti-Semitism, and inert socialist economies….