Northwestern's missed opportunity to fight antisemitism

Some students at my university, Northwestern, have been protesting and refusing a requirement that they watch a training video about antisemitism. They say it is biased in favor of Israel. But those who do not watch it cannot register, and so they risk their jobs, visas, stipends and health insurance.

Sixteen students are thus affected, although it is not clear how many of them are among the protesters. A federal judge recently refused to block their being disciplined. 

This sorry episode involves performative virtue-signaling on both sides. No Palestinian is helped by students harming themselves in this way, but the students have a point. The video is tendentious and biased. It is a wasted opportunity for education in an area where ignorance is rife.

The standard technique nowadays for dealing with prejudice in school and the workplace is a training video. Such trainings are, as Northwestern’s president recently acknowledged, generally useless, or worse.  

When the Trump administration presents antisemitism as a pretext for attacking universities, the pressure for such empty gestures is understandable. The gestures should at least do no harm. They might even be redesigned to do some good, by offering truthful information without telling people what to think. 

Northwestern’s anti-antisemitism video, prepared by the Jewish United Fund, does say that Jews are a tiny minority, about one-fifth of one percent of the people in the world. It explains that Jews have often been persecuted and are the most frequent victims of religion-based hate crimes, and it reviews some of the nasty stereotypes. All true.

But it also takes up the fraught issue of Zionism in hectoring and uninformative ways. It accurately defines Zionism as “the belief in the Jewish right to self-governance or self-determination in some part of their ancestral homeland,” and notes: “It does not prescribe specific policies or borders.”

The video might have explained that Zionism takes many forms, with wildly different political implications — that it ranges from a peaceful two-state solution to the Israel conflict to (what most Jews regard with revulsion) the ethnic cleansing contemplated by some factions of Benjamin Netanyahu's governing coalition.

Instead, the video declares that “most” forms of anti-Zionism (unhelpful unless you explain which ones) “are antisemitic because they work against Jewish human rights.”

“While there are Jews who do not identify as Zionists, the vast majority of Jewish people do. Remember what Zionism is, and that it is a core part of most people’s Judaism. ... Comments that denigrate Israel or Zionists are antisemitic."

It juxtaposes quotes from unnamed "anti-Israel activists" with those of Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, observing that “The fact that you can’t tell the difference is terrifying.” 

Here is one of those “activist” quotes: “First and foremost, I condemn the conflation of Zionism, a political identity and Judaism, a religious identity. The state of Israel has attempted to conflate both in order to garner support for its apartheid policy.”  

But the video itself observes earlier that not all Jews are Zionists, and that it is “not antisemitic to criticize the policies, practices or members of the Israeli government.” The accusation of “apartheid policy” (with which many Jewish Israelis agree) is directed at that government. 

Netanyahu does routinely invoke antisemitism to justify his actions. Some who say this kind of thing are indeed antisemitic. But one would need more than just the words in order to know. 

Some opponents of Zionism hope for a one-state solution, in which the entire territory now controlled by Israel becomes a unitary, binational state with no special political status for Jews. 

That makes intuitive sense to many Americans, including some American Jews. The U.S. has centuries of horrible experience with ethnicity- and religious-based politics, so it’s easy to view Zionism as a kind of racism. But this is ignorant and naïve. 

A one-state Palestine would be a disaster. If (a big if) it held elections, Jews would become an oppressed minority in a fundamentalist Islamic state. That would probably end with mass murder. All antisemitism is stupid, but not all stupidity is antisemitic.   

At the same time, quite a lot of anti-Zionist rhetoric does traffic in vile stereotypes and apologetics for Hamas, an organization that aims at maximizing Palestinian deaths (because they turn world opinion against Israel) and the deaths of Jews (because they just like killing Jews). 

Capturing these complexities is hard. But education must begin somewhere. A training video could offer a skeletal outline of the conflict, which has become tightly connected with the status of Jews in America. It could end with suggestions for further reading. 

College students are scandalously ignorant of the history of Israel. Most pro-Palestinian protestors who chanted “from the river to the sea” didn’t even know which river and which sea. As educators, we take ignorance for granted. Our job is to remedy it. We should do our job.   

Andrew Koppelman, the John Paul Stevens Professor of Law at Northwestern University, is the author of “Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed.”