The scale of support on college campuses for militant antisemitism and even for Hamas barbarism has alarmed most Americans, but there’s something else here that ought to trouble us, too: a startling ignorance of the most basic facts of Middle Eastern history. These are college students being educated on renowned campuses—yet they know virtually nothing about the matter they are protesting.
How can that be?
Let’s begin by asking what a serious education about the conflict in the Middle East would look like. At a minimum, we would expect students to have a basic grasp of the case made by each of the two sides. They should be able to evaluate both sets of claims, but that would require knowledge of the major historical events that each side appeals to when justifying its position.
Professors are withholding anything that might interfere with their radical ideology, which means keeping students ignorant.A grasp of both sides is education; exposure to only one is propaganda.
Unfortunately, propaganda regarding Israel is now routine on our campuses. College teachers are withholding from their students anything that might interfere with their radical ideology, which really means keeping their students ignorant of what they’re supposed to be teaching.
Consider a few examples of the huge gap between the slogans that students have been taught to chant and the facts of Middle Eastern history.
A constant refrain of the students is that Israelis are “settler colonialists,” that is, people without any intrinsic connection to the area. But Hebrew and Arabic are closely related languages that both originated in roughly the same area. Hebrew probably arose in what is now Israel, Arabic in what is now Syria. Of the two, Hebrew actually has a much longer recorded history in the area. Despite periods of forced exile, Hebrew speakers have had a verifiable presence there for more than 3,000 years, over 1,000 years longer than Arabic.
One professor among many who repeat the nonsensical “settler colonialist” line is Columbia University’s Joseph Massad. After the October 7 attacks on unarmed citizens in Israel, he expressed his approval, saying that Hamas’s attacks were justified as resistance to “settler colonialism.”
Furthermore, the union that represents the entire professoriate of the City University of New York recently issued a statement that repeated this charge.
Next, undergraduates are ignorant of the status of the area in dispute. “Palestine will be free,” chant the students. But there never was a nation state called “Palestine.” The area was part of the huge Ottoman empire for four centuries, and, when that empire collapsed following the First World War, territory including what is now Jordan, Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, containing both Arabs and Jews, was placed under temporary British stewardship as the “Palestine Mandate.” Eighty percent of that territory was soon given to the Arabs to form what is now known as Jordan, and the rest was later divided by the United Nations between Arabs and Jews.
“Palestine will be free” suggests that Israelis invaded and occupied a country called Palestine, where only Arabs had lived—rather like what Germans did to France in the Second World War. None of this is true, but that did not stop Professor Marc Lamont Hill from demanding a “free Palestine from the river to the sea” in a speech he gave at the United Nations. The students evidently don’t know enough to understand that what they think of as a call for justice is actually cheer-leading for murderous tribal aggression. The real meaning of the slogan is: “no compromise—we want everything.”
One historical fact immediately disposes of several of the student chants: It is that Israel has always been on a wartime footing since its founding in 1948. It has been invaded several times and has repelled the invaders, and when fighting stopped the defeated invaders always vowed to continue it at some later date. The students call Gaza an “open-air prison,” because Gazans are denied freedom of movement across their border into Israel. But when did any country ever allow free movement throughout its territory to people who are in a permanent state of war with it?
How could students not know that the people they champion want nothing to do with their humane values?Sadly, very few students have been taught the history of this conflict.
The charge that Israel is an “apartheid state” similarly ignores Israel’s permanent wartime footing. Arab Israelis enjoy virtually full civil rights, but Israel is wary of Arabs serving in its military. They can volunteer but are not required to serve as Jews are. But how could Israel not be wary given the permanent state of war with its Arab neighbors? What is even more absurd about the “apartheid” accusation is that the Arabs who live in Israel have more civil rights than they do anywhere in the Arab world. And it’s beyond question that Arabs in Israel are better treated than are Jews in the Arab world.
Do the students who make their chant know anything about the state of human rights in Israel or the Arab countries? Their professors eagerly brand Israel as a terrible human-rights violator without saying anything about the high degree of tolerance and respect for difference that exist in Israel.
Perhaps the most foolish of all the student chants are those that criticize Israel’s conduct of the war as genocide, as well as slaughter of innocent civilians. How could students not know that the people they are championing want nothing to do with the humane values that they invoke here?
On the contrary, they are enthusiastically in favor of genocide and the murder of civilians. They routinely launch rockets at civilian areas of Israel and have been doing so for years. They make no secret of the fact that they want to annihilate all Jews. Do the students even understand what genocide means? The October 7 attack on Israeli civilians was only a more successful version of what Hamas and Hezbollah have long been trying unsuccessfully to do with their rockets.
Israel’s enemies don’t have their formidable defenses, and so Israelis could easily kill large numbers of “innocent civilians” if they wanted to—but they don’t. They are children of the European Enlightenment, which their adversaries are not. So why do the students parrot Enlightenment values on behalf of people who have complete contempt for them?
Why are college students, of all people, so ignorant of simple historical facts that make nonsense of their slogans?
Short answer: That’s the way their radical teachers want them. The point of higher education has always been to turn out students who were better informed, more thoughtful, and with a more humane outlook than they would have been without it. But higher education now produces students who are more narrow-minded, more ill-informed, and more foolish than they would otherwise have been—and that’s true about much more than Israel.
For radical professors it’s more important to create angry zealots for a poorly understood cause than to produce educated people.
John M. Ellis is a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of California-Santa Cruz, chair of the California Association of Scholars, and the author of several books, including, most recently, A Short History of Relations Between Peoples: How the World Began to Move Beyond Tribalism.
This article was originally published at www.jamesgmartin.center
