Claudine Gay, the first black president of Harvard University, was forced to resign after weeks of pressure to leave office, but everyone involved in the controversy was left in the dark.
She was dismissed, supposedly, for irregularities in her academic writings (mainly, for not having given credit to other academics whom she cited almost verbatim in works she had published), but this was discovered after she was accused of anti-Semitism and double standards. . When asked by Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik whether students demonstrating “to denounce the genocide of the Jews violated Harvard’s code of conduct,” Gay responded that “it depended on the context.”
There is no doubt that if the question had referred to the genocide of black people, no context would have been needed, but Gay was falling into an unpleasant trap. Stefanik had deliberately blurred the difference between denouncing genocide and supporting the Palestinian intifada (armed rebellion). The latter may imply violence, but not genocide.
The right-wing activists who helped oust Gay from office were also left in a bad light. Under the leadership of Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute, they see Gay’s race as a symbol of unfair racial preference. Gay, for his part, accused them of being racist. Even if they are not, they are imitating so-called progressives who seek to cancel those who do not conform to their ideological positions.
Finally, wealthy Harvard donors, such as hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, also came to grief for mounting a relentless public campaign against Gay. Donating money should not give the right to interfere in academic matters. Ackman also alleges racism and maintains that Harvard tolerates hatred against Jews.
America’s obsession with race is clearly one of the reasons for this unedifying mess of accusations and counter-accusations. Still, Gay’s ouster—along with that of University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, who also fell into Stefanik’s trap—reveals something interesting about the changing perception of Jews.
There is no evidence that Gay and Magill, nor many of those who demonstrated for Palestine on university campuses, are anti-Semitic (Hamas enthusiasts are another matter). But the most fanatical defenders of the Palestinian cause are as slaves to racial obsession as right-wing agitators in their opposition to “diversity, equity and inclusion” campaigns: they understand that the violence in Gaza and Israeli oppression of the Palestinians are an example of white supremacy.
From that perspective, Israelis are whites who brutally tyrannize people of color. That’s why pro-Palestine protesters shout 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 Palestinians. blacks. It seems that the fact that most Israelis come from Arab countries and are physically the same as 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 bigots 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 global cabal that wielded enormous power behind the scenes. While right-wing anti-Semites saw Jews as Bolshevik conspirators determined to undermine the purity of nations, communists understood them to be capitalist plutocrats who oppressed the working class.
The main reason Zionism was attractive to many Jews was that having their own state would finally free them from the persecution they suffered as permanent outsiders (or “rootless cosmopolitans,” as Stalin called them). In Israel they could finally feel rooted.
But, as some critics of Israel soon foresaw, this would lead the country to adopt precisely some of the characteristics of 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 that 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 early settlers were left-wing idealists, but in the current Israeli government there are ministers who are avowed racists. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security, was found guilty of incitement half a dozen times. For that reason alone, Israel is now much more admired by far-right European and American politicians.
In the 1930s, members of the America First committee – such as Charles Lindbergh, the heroic pilot – were often anti-Semites who showed no little sympathy with Nazi Germany. Even today, Donald Trump and other “America First” advocates are ardent admirers of the Jewish state, which in turn explains why so many activists on college campuses compare the Israel Defense Forces to the Ku Klux Klan.
Anti-Semites often associated Jews with the US because European nationalists saw both as symbols of rootless cosmopolitanism. Now, pro-Palestine protesters associate Israel with the US because they see both countries as symbols of white oppression of people of color. Maybe that was the context Gay mentioned when she tried to answer Stefanik’s trick question. She wishes he had expressed himself less awkwardly and that the US, including its most important educational institutions, would temper its obsession with race, but, for now, it seems like a lot to ask.
Translation into Spanish by Ant-Translation. Copyright: Project Syndicate