Orian 21: Students criticize the collusion of American universities with Israel Policy

American students, even within the Jewish community, are mobilizing en masse the likes of which no one has heard since the 1970s, despite accusations of anti-Semitism and oppression. They are demanding that their universities be stopped from being funded by arms dealers that are used to kill Palestinians, in massive protests to the point that US President Joe Biden was forced to threaten Hill. Tel Aviv suspends some arms shipments.

With this introduction, the Orian 21 website opened – an article written by Sylvain Siebel – in which it began with the worried question of Israeli journalist Shani Littman, “Where are the Israeli students protesting against the war in Gaza?” Pointing out that the only demonstration on campus came to demand the expulsion of professors who do not agree with the orientations of the university. The settlement movement it organized.

At a time when American universities are on fire, and Israeli professors worry about the growing threat of boycott, Litman believes that Israelis would be better off worrying about what is happening in Gaza and mobilizing “as is the case at Columbia and Yale,” otherwise “the academy will remain tied to the Israeli government and its destructive policies.” “.

Major American industries

The writer explained that the mobilization against Israel in American universities was unprecedented since the one against the Vietnam War in the seventies, with a clear difference, which is that the mobilization at that time was against the danger of American youth falling into the war zone, but today it is against a political background. Purely, since Israel appears to the student demonstrators as an “anachronism,” a country from another time based on ethnicity and colonialism, they are therefore rebelling against what is happening in Gaza.

The demonstrators are demanding “ethical management” of university assets, especially wealthy universities such as Columbia, which has an endowment available in 2023 of $13.64 billion, and a large portion of this money is invested in companies that manufacture weapons and other supplies that participate in Israeli settlement.

Large groups in the “military industrial sector”, such as Boeing and its sister companies, are among the main donors to universities, and they provide jobs for their laboratories, and therefore academic institutions are directly interested in the continued delivery of weapons free of charge to Israel, in exchange for 4.2 billion dollars annually.

Therefore, one of the first student marches in support of the Palestinian cause at New York University focused on two demands: severing the university’s financial relationship with the manufacturers of weapons used by Israel in Gaza, and closing its open campus in Tel Aviv, due to its links to the colonization of the Palestinian territories.

Jewish Americans without a connection to Israel

Among the reference slogans that students often use are the subject of racial discrimination in the United States, which was abolished in 1965, the Vietnam War, which America lost in 1975, apartheid in South Africa, which was abolished in 1990, and similar situations in which the colonial alliance and supremacy were defeated. Racist, and the State of Israel appears to them as a backward and unacceptable embodiment of racial superiority implanted in primitive colonialism.

The writer believes that these protests come within a movement aimed at keeping young people away from this country, which began in the first decade of the 21st century, and in which Jewish youth played an important role, as this divergence grew along two lines, the first of which was political, radically hostile to the colonial character of the Israeli state, while the other was more Sectarian, it emphasizes the desire to live as “Jewish Americans,” without interference from or submission to Israel.

Both of these lines – according to the writer – appeared to the leaders of Tel Aviv as a threat to Zionism, which always aspires to be the sole representative of all Jews in the world, especially since anti-Zionist organizations have witnessed a huge increase among young American Jews, and there is no clearer evidence of this than the case of the Jewish Currents magazine that he runs. Peter Beinart, an academic with a Zionist background who publicly broke away from this ideology in 2020. It had 34,000 subscribers last fall, and in 7 months their number rose to 300,000.

Beinart wrote an article on April 28 in defense of American students, for which he chose the title “Protests on campus are not ideal, but we urgently need them,” because the essence of the ongoing movement is to demand an end to the university’s and the American government’s complicity with the Israeli system of oppression, which amounts to Its culmination today is the horrific massacre of the people of Gaza.

Media is evolving

Sylvain Siebel pointed out that almost all major American media outlets turned to pro-war discourse in the period following the attack of October 7, 2023, explaining that it developed over the course of the most horrific crimes committed by the Israeli army, and when the movement to defend the Palestinians was launched on campus, The media reaction was again, generally very hostile.

The idea that Tel Aviv supporters systematically promoted to counter the student protests was anti-Semitism. It was widely circulated, but over time, it slowly disintegrated. The esteemed magazine The New Republic recently denounced “the shameful media coverage of the anti-war protests in Universities.

We are now witnessing – as the writer says – a clear decline in the ability of Israel’s supporters to silence any discussion about the fate of Gaza, because the argument that equates defending the Palestinian cause with anti-Semitism has become increasingly ineffective, and is seen as a miserable fig leaf aimed at concealing crimes. The massive ongoing Israeli.

We are now witnessing a clear decline in the ability of Israel’s supporters to silence any debate about the fate of Gaza, as the argument that equates defending the Palestinian cause with anti-Semitism has become increasingly ineffective, and is seen as a miserable fig leaf intended to hide the massive ongoing Israeli crimes.

The writer mentioned that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu established a Ministry of Strategic Affairs with large financial resources, whose sole goal is almost to combat the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement in American universities, to lead the battle with the help of local associations often linked to Israeli settlement circles in the West Bank. But it ended in disaster, and instead of disappearing, the boycott movement has become stronger today.

Today, the weight and weight of a large number of anti-settlement student associations, including Jewish student associations who claim to be anti-Zionist, has increased amazingly, both in terms of the number of members and the number of affected universities, and an increase in 10 years from a few dozen to several hundred now.

The war on Gaza contributes to the distancing of academic circles from Israel, and the most recent example of this – according to the author – is the demand of the camp of scholars against genocide at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to put an end to the Israeli Ministry of Defense’s investment in their “war-related research,” under the pretext that the institute “does not receive funding from Any other foreign army,” under the pretext of ending its academic cooperation with a Russian technological institute after the Russian war on Ukraine.