If we are honest, much of it is directly connected to
Israel’s defensive war in Gaza. Whatever one thinks of Israel’s conduct of the
war, the images coming out of Gaza are undeniably powerful. News reports show
large numbers of civilian deaths, destroyed homes, displaced families living in
makeshift conditions… and shortages of food and other necessities. For someone
seeing these images day after day, it is not difficult to conclude that Israel
is committing atrocities. Or even genocide.
What those images often fail to convey is the larger
context. Israel did not enter Gaza simply because it wanted to. Hamas’s October
7th attack, in which civilians were deliberately murdered and
hostages were taken on a scale not seen since the Holocaust, fundamentally
changed Israel’s calculations.
Israel concluded that Hamas could not be allowed to retain
its capability to repeat such an attack. Nor is the nature of Hamas always
adequately explained when the suffering in Gaza is reported. Hamas deliberately
operates within a civilian environment, making it extraordinarily difficult to
separate the military from the civilian population.
This is old news. And yet almost completely ignored by the
media.
None of this diminishes the suffering of innocent
Palestinians. Their suffering is real. But a news narrative that presents
Palestinians primarily as victims of an unprovoked Israeli assault, while
minimizing the actions and ideology of Hamas that precipitated the war, and
adds to the carnage of their own people for their own PR - inevitably produces
a distorted understanding of the conflict.
There is another factor at work, particularly on college
campuses: ideology.
Much of academia has become deeply influenced by a
progressive and socialist ideology that permeates academia. Many in this
intellectual class view socialism as the most humane form of government,
emphasizing social justice, economic equality and the redistribution of wealth.
Capitalism, by contrast, is often portrayed as a system in which the wealthy
exploit the oppressed poor for personal gain. A system by which they see the
Jewish state being governed.
This worldview shapes the way international conflicts are
understood. The world is divided into oppressors and oppressed, colonizers and
indigenous peoples, the powerful and the powerless. Once that framework is
adopted, Israel is easily cast as the quintessential oppressor: a supposedly
colonialist state occupying the land of an indigenous people.
The October 7th attack then becomes, in the
minds of the socialist - not an act of terrorism but an understandable if not
an entirely justifiable response to oppression.
That is a profound moral distortion completely ignored by
the socialist mindset of academia.
It is therefore hardly surprising that younger,
college-educated Americans are more likely to express anti-Israel views than
the population as a whole. The more one is immersed in an academic culture
dominated by this ideological framework, the more likely Israel is to be viewed
through it.
Of course, being anti-Israel does not automatically make
someone antisemitic. Legitimate criticism of Israeli policy is perfectly
acceptable.
But when a Jewish state is singled out for criticism by
socialist ideologues it is not too much of a leap from there to hold Jews
everywhere responsible.
The reasoning is remarkably simple…
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