Claudine Gay, the first black president of Harvard University, was forced to resign after several weeks of pressure to leave the post, but everyone involved in the controversy has been left unscathed.
She was dismissed, allegedly for irregularities in her academic writings (mainly for failing to give credit to other academics whom she quoted almost verbatim in papers she had published), but this was discovered after she was accused of antisemitism and double standards. Asked by Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik whether students demonstrating “to denounce the genocide of the Jews violated Harvard’s code of conduct,” Gay replied that it “depended on the context.”
There is no doubt that if the question had referred to the genocide of people of the black race, there would have been no need for context, but Gay fell into a nasty trap. Stefanik had deliberately blurred the difference between denouncing genocide and supporting the Palestinian intifada (armed rebellion). The latter may involve violence, but not genocide.
The right-wing activists who helped oust Gay from office were also left in tatters. Under the leadership of Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute, they see Gay’s career as a symbol of unfair racial preference. Gay, for his part, accused them of being racist. Even if they are not, they are imitating the supposed progressives who seek to write off those who do not conform to their ideological attitudes.
Finally, Harvard’s wealthy donors, such as hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, were also left scrambling to mount a relentless public campaign against Gay. Giving money should not give the right to interfere in academic matters. Ackman also alleges that there was racism and claims that Harvard tolerates hatred against Jews.
America’s obsession with race is clearly one of the reasons for this unedifying disaster of accusations and counter-accusations. Still, Gay’s ouster—along with that of University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, who also fell for Stefanik’s trap—reveals something interesting about the shift in Jewish perception.
There is no evidence that Gay and Magill, or many of those who demonstrated in favor of Palestine on college campuses, are anti-Semitic (Hamas zealots are another matter). But the most fanatical defenders of the Palestinian cause are as enslaved to racial obsession as right-wing agitators in their opposition to “diversity, equity and inclusion” campaigns: they understand that the violence in Gaza and the Israeli oppression of Palestinians are an example of white supremacy.
From this perspective, Israelis are white people who brutally tyrannize people of color. That’s why pro-Palestinian protesters chant slogans like “the Israel Defense Forces and the Ku Klux Klan are the same!”, as if Israeli soldiers were the same as the hooded southern racists who once lynched the black It seems that the fact that most Israelis come from Arab countries and physically look like Arabs is irrelevant.
It is a view that represents a fundamental change with respect to the anti-Semitism of the past. Before the 19th century, Christians persecuted the Jews because, supposedly, they were the murderers of Christ; but when modern nation-states were founded and Jews became less religious and socially emancipated, new (false) biological differences were invented to justify the old hatred. Far from seeing Jews as part of the white race itself, European and American fanatics singled them out as an alien race.
What all anti-Semites shared, regardless of their political beliefs, was the conspiratorial suspicion that Jews were part of a world council that wielded enormous power behind the scenes. While right-wing anti-Semites saw Jews as Bolshevik conspirators bent on undermining the purity of nations, Communists saw them as capitalist plutocrats oppressing the working class.
The main reason Zionism was attractive to many Jews is that having their own State would finally free them from the persecution they suffered for being permanent outsiders (or “uprooted cosmopolitans,” as Stalin called them). In Israel they could finally feel rooted.
But as some critics of Israel early predicted, this would lead the country to adopt precisely some of the characteristics of the nations that had persecuted Jews in the past: notions of ethnic exclusivity, chauvinism, and military arrogance. Although Hannah Arendt was a Zionist in the 1940s, she came to criticize this idea when she saw that the state for Jews was becoming a Jewish state: instead of a safe place for persecuted refugees, in a country defined by ethnoreligious nationalism and the sense of moral untouchability based on a history of victimization.
The transformation took time, many of the first settlers were idealists of the left, but in the current Israeli Government there are ministers who are declared racists. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Minister of National Security, was found guilty of incitement half a dozen times.
For this reason alone, Israel is now much more admired by far-right politicians in Europe and the United States. In the 1930s, the members of the America First committee – such as Charles Lindbergh, the heroic pilot – were often anti-Semites who showed no small sympathy with Nazi Germany. Even today, Donald Trump and others who advocate “America first” are ardent admirers of the Jewish state, which explains why so many activists on college campuses compare the Israel Defense Forces to the Ku Klux Klan .
Antisemites used to associate Jews with the US because European nationalists saw both as symbols of uprooted cosmopolitanism. Now, pro-Palestine protesters associate Israel with the US because they see both countries as symbols of white oppression of people of color. Perhaps that was the context Gay mentioned when he tried to answer Stefanik’s tricky question. I wish it had been worded less bluntly and that the US, including its top educational institutions, would tone down its obsession with race, but at the moment it seems like a lot to ask.
Spanish translation by Ant-Translation. Copyright: Project Syndicate
