Tel Aviv University Expert: Antisemitism on U.S. Campuses Begins with Hating America

TEL AVIV, Israel — Antisemitism on university campuses in the U.S. began with hatred of America, not specifically with the hatred of Israel.

That’s the view of Tel Aviv University vice-rector Eyal Zisser, who is also an expert on the Middle East.

“It’s not sudden,” Zisser told Breitbart News on Sunday, reflecting on the explosion of radical anti-Israel sentiment, and even outright antisemitism, at American universities.

He also says that the problem is more prevalent in the social sciences and the humanities, which are in decline globally: the natural sciences have less time for politics, and are therefore less radical.

Zisser says that the problem emerged more than two decades ago, in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. He recalls hearing some scholars within the field of Middle East studies complain that no one in the U.S. was listening to them. “Nobody listens to you,” he recalls thinking, “because you hate America.”

He observes wryly that while it was once difficult for a Marxist to find a job at a German university, because Germans were aware of the problems of East Germany, it was difficult to find a job at an American university unless you were a Marxist.

Debates about Israel on campus were not about truth or facts,  Zisser observed, but about “some sort of ideological belief, a religion, anti-West.” Israel, as such, was identified with the United States; so, too, were Jews, who also found themselves in the bizarre position — on campus, at least — of being lumped in with white supremacy.

So what do you do? “Fight it,” Zisser says.

That means debating hostile voices on campus; it also means shutting down, or cutting off funding, to groups and departments that support terrorism.

He also noted the irony of people in the Middle East saying that they hate America, but then trying to emigrate to America. While that did not mean that everyone who emigrated held that view, it meant that the U.S. was importing populations who held ideological perspectives that were hostile to their new home country.

That does not mean Zisser is pessimistic about Israel’s own future. While the terror attack of October 7 was a “setback,” he says, it is noteworthy that no Arab nation that had previously had diplomatic relations with Israel had decided to break those relations.

As for Lebanon — one of the countries about which Zisser has written extensively — it was also noteworthy that Hezbollah had not launched a more aggressive war against Israel. It was “playing with fire,” largely as a show of support for Hamas in Gaza, but the leadership of Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed terror group, seemed to have been deterred, for the moment, from a bigger conflict.

Zisser is optimistic about Israel’s future because, he says, Israeli society had united in response to a threat. And while the attack of October 7 had been a military and intelligence failure, it might encourage Israel to be more humble, or realistic, about the region. Israel’s value as an ally to Arab nations depended on being reliable and strong, he said.

And — in an echo of Golda Meir’s famous dictum about “nowhere else to go,” — Israel would succeed in its conflict with Hamas, he said, because “there is no other way.”

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.