One may wonder why the Delegate Assembly of the PSC union was moved to subvert the principle of academic freedom in its call to boycott the only state in the Middle East with a tradition of academic freedom? Why is it that the PSC union joined Hamas in targeting Israel, though it was Hamas which purposefully compelled Israel to respond to the thousands of missiles it launched at Israel, while Israel, for its part, used the minimum force needed to stop the barrage of missiles.

No one should object to fair criticism of Israel, which itself is a robust and raucous democracy. But those who support resolutions such as those of the PSC union, with mischaracterizations worthy of the Islamic terrorist organizations that nurtured the myths upon which they are based, project the age-old animus against the Jewish people into our time. It does not seem to matter to them that such resolutions serve to embolden terrorists and corrupt leaders to prepare for the next attack and neglect the wellbeing of their people. At home, the movement to boycott of Israel erodes well-established notions of academic freedom and free speech [1].

The campaign to boycott Israel and demonize it for defending itself betrays the willingness of its supporters to:
• believe every lie about Israel,
• never to question the annihilationist incitement and actions of its adversaries
• twist the plain meaning of words • subvert dialogue by warping basic rules of logic

This campaign takes every ideal shared by people of good will, constructs their grotesque polar opposites, and then applies them to Israel [2]. Instead of academia being the last line of defense against efforts to limit free speech, it often takes the lead in surrendering precious freedoms in the name of isolating Israel. This is reminiscent of the swiftness with which faculty German universities dismissed Jews and liberals from their posts in 1933 [3], and of the attacks on faculty at Palestinian universities who acknowledged the humanity of Jews [4].

The aim of the proposed consideration of the boycott of Israel is not to deepen the understanding of the Israel/Palestinians conflict, but to place Israel beyond the pale and to end the free exchange of ideas about Israel once and for all. There is no need to mention the object of the Boycott, Divest, Sanction (BDS) movement. It is of course the nation singularly called out as the source of all evil—Israel—the home of most of the world’s Jews. On some CUNY campuses, a discussion of the boycott of Israel would be reminiscent of Soviet show trials of rootless cosmopolitans; the defense could not confront their accusers who have generally refused to appear in the same event with supporters of Israel. The hope of the union leadership is that, when push comes to shove, conformity rather than independence of thought will win the day. This represents a revival of historic racism and bullying within a community that officially rallies against both.

The parallels between the present campaign for the academic boycott of Israel and medieval blood libels is instructive. The libel that Christian children are murdered by Jews so that their blood can be used to prepare matzos for Passover was promulgated by the educated classes who could read, write and create iconography around children martyred by Jews. The biblical prohibition against consuming blood mattered little. So today, for many academics, the facts are immaterial when it comes to Israel. The echo of the defense of the blood libel by Polish priest, Stefan Żuchowski, “Who should one believe, the Rabbis or the Doctors of the Church [5],” can be heard today on university campuses.

Language and logic are routinely mangled once Israel is the topic [6]. Consider, for example, the charge that Israel is carrying out a genocide of the Palestinian People [7]; a particularly abhorrent accusation since Jews have suffered genocide within living memory. It does not seem to matter that there is no genocide of Palestinian—no crematoria, no killing fields, no reliable eyewitness accounts, and the statistics show dramatic population increases among Palestinians.

Despite the continuing conflict, Israel’s vigorous push to improve the health of Palestinians where possible has borne fruit in the dramatic improvements in infant mortality and life expectancy, which are now on a par with those in first world countries. Within Israel, Palestinian doctors are more than proportionately represented in the medical profession and are part of a unified effort to improve the health of all of Israel’s citizens. In the West Bank and Gaza rate of population growth is among the highest in the world, outside of Africa. The population grew from 1.1 million in 1968 to 5.3 million at present [8].

The discourse around the morality war and the rules of rhetoric are systematically reimagined when it comes to Israel. Whereas having lower casualty levels than one’s adversaries is a putative goal in other conflicts, when it comes to Israel, it is treated as the willful obliteration of helpless victims. This is a distinctive feature of hostility to Jews. Following the attack on the World Trade Center, it was widely believed in the Middle East that it was the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence unit, that brought down the towers, since the number of Jews killed was below what people in the region expected since Jews are believed to control world finance. Similarly, Jews were accused of poisoning the wells in the Middle Ages because it was believed that Jewish deaths in the plague were relatively low. Jews suffered the consequences in massacres across Europe. The situation is different today—Israel has an army.

There is only one nation, Israel, for which an industry of lies is spawned, but when the lack of moral seriousness of those who rail against Israel is demonstrated by pointing out, for example, their disinterest in the hundreds of thousands of civilians slaughtered in neighboring Syria by the Syrian government and by Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah, this only elicits rehearsed dismissals that this is engaging in “whataboutism” or “you have to start somewhere.” One cannot imagine such a response to false accusations made against any other country.

Throughout the history of the West, new ideas have gained purchase by showing that they are the path to breaking the invented control of the Jews. Until very recently, the church attacked the Jews for holding to their own interpretation of the Bible and accused the Jews of deicide, so that redemptive hatred of Jews became a religious duty. Marx might have used his critical skills to expose the baseless antisemitism of the time which, following Luther, placed the blame for economic inequality on Jews, a small people largely impoverished by the social, economic and religious strictures directed against them. Instead, Marx followed the conventional assignment of guilt to Judaism and identified redemption with its downfall, arguing that alienation will disappear with the “emancipation of mankind from Judaism [9].

The enmity towards Jews was propagated in the 20th century under both National Socialism and Soviet socialism. In the Soviet Union, Jewish culture was crushed as Jews were forced to identify as Jews but not allowed to live as Jews. With the failure of the Soviet-backed effort of Arab states to defeat Israel on the battlefield, the Soviets advanced their standing at home and within the Arab world by introducing the infamous Zionism-is-racism resolution at the UN.

The powerful authoritarian states of the 20th century have disappeared, but the canard of malignant Jewish power remains on the extreme right and left. The present-day hostility towards Israel follows a familiar pattern of imputed characteristics to Jews evolving in order to fit the needs of the time [10]. In the latest installment, Jews are transformed from unassimilable Middle Eastern Semites in Europe to white settler-colonialists in the Middle East.

At present, there is a single state—Israel—the Jew among the nations—whose right to exist is questioned. Just as polls in the US during the years of the Holocaust in WWII showed that more Americans chose the Jews rather than Germany or Japan as the greatest threat to the United States [11], so today, among those who claim to be on the front lines in the fight for social justice, it is Israel which is seen as the greatest threat to mankind. It is this historical stain that lies behind the condemnation of Israel by the PSC union and its call for show trials across CUNY with Israel in the dock. The influence of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forgery from the Czarist era and a perennial best seller in the Arab and Muslim worlds [12], is evident in a seminar series at CUNY reinventing Israel as the master engineer of oppression around the world [13].

But the reality is that Israel is a refuge for Jews from the British Mandate of Palestine, and from the broader Middle East, Europe and Africa. The refugees who were expelled from Arab lands now make up half of Israel’s Jewish population. Though it is surrounded by neighbors committed to destroy it, Israel has remained a democracy with full rights for all its citizens. Still, Israel struggles to achieve de facto as well as de jure equality for all segments of its population. Nonetheless, Israeli Arabs participate in all spheres of Israeli life. They serve in the supreme court and hold the balance of power in Israel’s parliament. In contrast, the Palestinian leadership insists that just as there are no Jews living in Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, and Syria, Jews cannot be allowed to live in the West Bank. The accusation by anti-Israel activists that Israel engages in ethnic cleansing is thus the projection onto Israel of behavior they themselves advocate: the ethnic cleansing of Jews from the West Bank, and, for some, from the river to the sea.

There are pressing inequities and hardships that emerge from the Israeli/Palestinian conflict; the divisions are deep and cannot be papered over. But this is precisely why people must strengthen contacts across the divide rather than vilifying the “other side.” Just as all other refugee crises created in the wake of World War II involving tens of millions of displaced persons around the world were resolved by settling refugees, the plight of Palestinian refugees can be resolved. The difference here is that many Palestinians displaced in the conflict have been marginalized in their host societies with similar cultures and language in order to keep the conflict alive. The differing attitudes towards refugees points to the singular complexity of this conflict—the militarily weaker side insists that there can be no solution that leaves the stronger party intact.

Any approach to a solution must start with respect for the yearning of both Israelis and Palestinians for sovereignty in a viable homeland and with the understanding that both sides are here to stay. Under the British Mandate, Jewish Palestinians and Arab Palestinians each had limited sovereignty. It is Israel’s success, especially after the genocide of European Jews, that has so rankled its foes. This has upended the eschatological beliefs of otherwise divergent world views that the salvation for mankind would be heralded by the disappearance of Judaism. Thus, for many, Israel’s achievements are a scandal. Its natural granting of equal rights to the LGBTQ community and to women are berated as pinkwashing, while its developments of sustainable approaches in agriculture, technology and water management are labeled as greenwashing, and the defense of its citizens is condemned as genocide.

In much of legacy and social media, transmitting a negative narrative about Israel has triumphed over providing the information needed for people to form their own opinions. Finding fault with Israel, while obscuring its human achievements and the unique challenges it faces is so pervasive that most Americans do not know that it was the Palestinians, not the Israelis, who rejected every plan for partition and peace… in 1937, 1947, 1967, 2000 and 2008. Similarly, it is little known that the Palestinian standard of living rose rapidly, and Israel was accorded the highest marks in polls of Palestinians of democracy around the world, until Palestinian regions came under control of leaders who prioritized incitement against Israel over improving the lives of their people [14,15].

Over time, this curated narrative has transformed a dot of democracy in the Middle East into the monster of the PSC’s anti-Israel resolution. One might ask, for example, why the media, which couldn’t spare the ink to write about the extermination of the Jews of Europe [16], has spilt rivers of ink misrepresenting Israel as a remorseless oppressor.

We call on our colleagues and the public to critically assess skewed media reports about Israel and the Palestinians. Both errors of commission and of omission must be considered [17]. The same goes for reports from human rights organization. Though they address critical human needs around the world, they consistently misrepresent the facts when it comes to Israel claiming to be neutral arbiters and authoritative judges on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict [18-21].

Disinformation about Israel thrives in an echo chamber of fabricated facts, double standards, and ahistorical vilifications of Israel stripped of essential context. The alliance of the global anti-Israel movement and Islamic fundamentalists leaves no room for understanding and reconciliation and only serves to lock the Middle East into endless conflict.

The PSC union was formed to work for the collective good of its members and for the betterment of society but has now has set itself the task of building universal solidarity by demonizing and seeking to boycott Israel. This disgraces the union and subverts serious efforts to achieve peace through constructive engagement that reckons with the actual as opposed to an invented past and present. We advocate for mutual respect as the foundation upon which the aspirations of Israelis and Palestinians for sovereignty, security, and peace can be fulfilled. We stand with heroic Arab leaders throughout the Middle East who have opposed the demonization of Israel and support the recent public demand by Wisam Al-Hardan and 300 fellow Iraqis for Iraq “to enter into relations with Israel and its people. … We have a choice: tyranny and chaos, or legality, decency, peace and progress. … The answer is clear [22].”

Because of pervasive anti-Judaism, however, these efforts represent an historic struggle that must be supported against efforts to keep this conflict going. Progressive opponents of Israel in the West declare they are not antisemitic, simply anti-Israel. But one may then ask what it means to be anti-Israel since there is no comparable world-wide movement opposing the existence of a specific foreign country; there is no anti-Bolivia, or anti-North Korea movement. The anti-Israel movement has a distinctive ideation with a cohesive set of behaviors. Given the embedded anti-Judaism of the West, singularly committed individuals and groups expressing triumphalist contempt for Israel can have a huge impact in swaying their peers to advocate for the elimination of Israel as the first step towards a better world. Even some Jews seek comfort by joining in the calumny of Israel [23].

Civil society is precious but fragile. It rests on shared truths and can come apart when engagement with those with whom we disagree is banished. If academic freedom is cast aside, society is left exposed to the power of repeated lies and the illusive cohesion that rests on selective exclusion. Our union and intersectional movements that support and bind together vulnerable groups cannot meaningfully stand against racism if they systematically exclude Jews who support Israel. We must stand together to end facile hatreds and create international solidarity around addressing inequalities, abuses of human rights, and conflicts at home and abroad, while vigorously engaging with those with whom we may disagree.