DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Shocked by the Jew-Hate on College Campuses? I Wasn’t.

What was taking place at Harvard was not unique, but a story that was unfolding on campuses across the nation. At Columbia, at Georgetown, and at other campuses across the country, Gulf countries had given millions of dollars to create academic centers, integrate faculty and visiting scholars into the university ecosystem, and to create “outreach initiatives” to spread their worldview.

For decades, this money has been swirling around the Ivy League and other elite schools. While the funding in and of itself did not originate antisemitism on campus, these countries rightly understood that the campuses were a powerful vessel through which to launch into the mainstream an anti-Western worldview that was once confined to the fringe.

This worldview is anchored by a toxic stew of postcolonialism, postnationalism, and postmodernism. These intellectual frameworks were first articulated in the humanities in the late 1960s and found fertile ground in area studies programs like Middle Eastern studies, gender studies, and ultimately disciplines like history and literature.

In the classroom, the language of “power” and “privilege” began to permeate formal instruction, and the organizational agenda of student groups and administrative policy. Transposed onto the paradigm of power was the idea of race. This crude ideology suggested those who are deemed to be “white” are “oppressors” while those with darker skin are “oppressed” and lack agency.

Jews and Israelis—never mind that the majority of Israelis are from North Africa and the Middle East—were whitewashed, perceived as beneficiaries of “white supremacy.” On campus, Jews were falsely labeled as being part of the white majority, which helps explain why they are left out of the vast DEI bureaucracies that now dominate campus life.

Over time, large swaths of academia began to adopt this “heroes and villains” worldview, which stipulates that Israelis are villainous colonizers and Palestinians are innocent victims. As unimaginable as it is for anyone with a conscience to imagine tearing down posters of children kidnapped by Hamas, if you have been steeped in a worldview that says that these children are part of racist state that does not have a right to exist, you can begin to understand how college-educated Americans are doing just that.

If you have heard “Israel is a colonial-settler state” (no, Israel is the indigenous homeland of the Jewish people dating back 3,000 years); or “Israelis are really Khazars, not Jews” (no, Jews are a Semitic people); or “Zionism is racism” (no, Zionism is the basic belief in the right of the Jewish people to self-determination); or “Israel is engaged in ethnic cleansing” (no, 20 percent of Israel’s population is Arab and the population of Palestinians both in Gaza and the West Bank has continued to increase); or “Jews are part of a powerful, white majority” (no, they are a tiny minority that constitutes 0.2 percent of the world’s population), you have encountered this worldview.

As Jonah Goldberg noted a couple of weeks ago, “There are more Arabs living in Israel today than there were Arabs living in all of so-called Palestine in 1948. In other words, if Zionism is the explicit practice of genocide against Palestinians, the supposedly uber-competent Israeli war machine is really, really, bad at genociding. They’re so bad at it that reasonable observers—in short supply these days—might conclude that they’re not actually interested in genocide.”