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Source: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/pro-hamas-students-arent-the-source-of-campus-antisemitism-5f7cf53a
Pro-Hamas Students Aren't the Source of Campus Antisemitism
(Wall Street Journal) John Ellis and Tammi Rossman-Benjamin - Students who set up encampments, barricade buildings, chant "from the river to the sea," harass and threaten Jewish students, celebrate Hamas's Oct. 7 massacre, and disrupt pro-Israel events are merely the symptom, not the cause, of campus antisemitism. The real driver is institutional. Politicized academic departments and programs are using official school platforms - courses, events and announcements - to confer academic legitimacy on hatred of Israel and harassment of its supporters. Students are the foot soldiers, but the academic departments train and deploy them. Over the past few years, departments on more than 100 campuses have issued statements swearing fealty to the Palestinian cause, many of them explicitly endorsing anti-Zionist activism and anti-Israel boycotts. Even among the schools most popular with Jewish students, more than half hosted events, sponsored by academic departments, that featured pro-boycott speakers last year alone. The worst offenders included Harvard (44 events), Georgetown (43), Columbia (36), UC Berkeley (25), New York University (22) and the University of Chicago (22). If you work at a university, you're likely to see a constant stream of anti-Israel vitriol from academics. At our own campus, the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), all of the 28 events that some 20 departments have sponsored since the Oct. 7 massacre featured speakers bitterly hostile to Israel. Earlier this year, UCSC's education department held a colloquium urging prospective early-childhood teachers to bring "an anti-Zionist commitment" to kindergarten classrooms. Our campus, like so many others, has permitted scholarship to be abandoned for political campaigns, paid for with taxpayer dollars and sanctioned by institutional authority. Jewish students must endure a campus climate deeply hostile to their participation in coursework and in campus life. A serious survey of the Israel-Palestinian conflict would be highly beneficial to everyone, but it would have to examine arguments made by both sides - that's the difference between real academic instruction and political crusading. And it would have to look at all the relevant historical facts, not just those relied on by one side. But that isn't what students are getting; they hear only a stridently political narrative. They hear why the state of Israel is illegitimate. They hear of violence against Palestinians but not of violence against Israelis - or if they do, it's celebrated. When are campus administrators going to confront the faculty whose grossly unprofessional behavior is the real source of their antisemitism problem? Mr. Ellis is a professor emeritus of German literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Ms. Rossman-Benjamin, executive director of the AMCHA Initiative, dedicated to combating antisemitism at colleges and universities, is a former faculty member at UCSC.