The 10-campus University of California system is a “Jurassic World” all its own. The UC Regents are even now threatened with a raptor attack if they follow the lead of UC President Janet Napolitano by reducing political correctness through administration of a dose of political courage and honesty regarding campus anti-Semitism.
Jewish campus groups want the Regents at a meeting this July to adopt the U.S. State Department’s definition of anti-Semitism which extends the concept to “anti-Zionism.” This means words and acts demanding the suicide—or murder—of the Jewish state, while also threatening Israel’s defenders on campus. On the other side of the debate, anti-Zionists essentially agree with Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass who says that a word “means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less. . . . The question is which is to be master—that’s all.”
The real question at UC is whether those who want to end Israel and silence its friends should be allowed to continue their current veto over defining what is and is not anti-Semitism.
Combatting “microaggressions” against virtually everybody else but Jews is a current campus fad. For example, a new UC faculty training seminar tells professors not to lecture that “America is the land of opportunity” because the statement might aggress against those with racial or gender grievances.
Those concerned with “microggressions” against gay or lesbian or transgender students, for example, have a point: words can and do hurt. This is not to say that obnoxious or insensitive words or ideas should be banned from campus by the transformation of universities into hurt-free “safe zones.” But why is it not a “microaggression” to accuse Jewish students of complicity in genocide of Palestinians or to equate Jewish students with Apartheid’s storm troopers or even Hitler’s SS, as is being done on American campuses?
And why is it out of bounds for defenders of Israel, and of Jewish rights and identity on campus, to call out members of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) or proponents of the Boycott, Sanctions, and Divestment (BDS) Movement? Many zealots have crossed the line into anti-Semitic language and, sometimes, actions like setting up anti-Israel “checkpoints” on campus or targeting Jewish dorm students for “eviction.”
The Daily Forward newspaper is about a month behind the Journal in publishing Jared Sichel’s recent story on the UC dispute. Unlike the earlier Journal piece, the story in the Forward is one-sided and slanted in favor of BDS activists. It lionizes those with the chutzpah to condemn anyone who speaks out against campus bigots employing incendiary language to demean, intimidate, and silence Jewish students. Courageous Jewish students and their allies are accused of threatening the freedom of speech of Israel haters and aligning Israel lovers with the Israeli death machine!
The lethal history of anti-Semitism reads in some respects as if it were written by a literary ironist. In the 1870s in The Victory of Jewry over Germandom, a Jew-hating propagandist, Wilhelm Marr, coined the term, anti-Semitism, to galvanize a movement around the theory that Jews were not part and parcel of Europe’s population, but an alien, noxious import from the Orient. Rather than avoid the label “anti-Semites,” Marr’s new anti-Semites reveled in it.
Now, those who hate Israel and want it destroyed for alleged sins against Palestinians are indignant when they are called “anti-Semites.” After all, aren’t the Arabs also “Semites”—so how can those who want to bury Israel be “anti-Semites”?
It’s time to end this sophistry and masquerade. Anti-Zionism is criticism of Israel carried to the extreme of targeting it for destruction. The UC Regents can and should adopt this definition without silencing campus free speech.
So far as we are concerned, haters of Israel and of Jews can continue to market their vile wares in “free speech zones” on and off campus. But we—and the UC Regents—have a right to define what these bigots advocate as anti-Semitism.
Some may think that for that for the UC Regents to recognize the ideological link between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionist extremism is inadvisable—even illegal. The advisability of adopting the State Department’s definition is going to be debated by the Regents who can make their up own minds. But the general public as well as UC’s governing body should know the know truth about the Regents’ right to define anti-Zionism as an anti-Semitic creed.
Contrary to what many believe, leading constitutional scholars have indicated that a government entity like the Regents “is entitled to say what it wishes.” The line of cases runs from the U.S. Circuit Court ruling in Rosenberger v. Rector in 1995 to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Pleasant Grove City v. Summum in 2009. Basically, the courts have ruled that university Boards like the Regents have extraordinarily wide discretion when it comes to making policy declarations. If a university governing body goes too far in what it declares, it is ultimately “accountable to the electorate and the political process for its advocacy.”
We are not asking the Regents and UC administrators to act against instances of campus bigotry that they would not already act against under existing policies. We are asking that they make a statement of moral conscience.
If the UC Regents follow the U.S. State Department, President Napolitano, and most recently President Obama in condemning anti-Zionist extremism as a form of anti-Semitism, the BDS movement can try to convince the legislature and people of the State of California that anti-Zionism is as wholesome as mother and apple pie, and that the Regents should be rebuked for declaring otherwise.
We wish them luck.
Historian Harold Brackman is a consultant for the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
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