The anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian, and conflated pro-Hamas antisemitism on university campuses in America is astounding.  Spitting on, threatening, intimidating, and menacing Jewish fellow students is beyond unacceptable and symptomatic of a malignant antisemitic spiritual plague in America — a scourge that is emerging after festering in the political, social, and collective spiritual marrow of America for many decades.  The most shameful aspect of this is that universities are one of the roots.

The other political-social taproot of this American antisemitism is the subliminal and liminal anti-Israel messages of politicians like Barack Obama and the likes of radical leftist politicians of the Squad.  It might have helped our country and the world at the time if Barack Obama and the Squad had praised and promoted the Abraham Accords.

It is one thing to vigorously disagree with Israel policies.  But after the ghastly, evil attack of Hamas on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s declaration of war on Hamas, it is a pure expression of evil terrorism for a university student or other American to say, “I am Hamas” or to threaten more murderous attacks on Israeli citizens or American Jews.  American politicians’ silence or advocacy of moral equivalency on the Hamas issue says volumes.

What Are the Social-Psychological Origins and Dynamics of Student Antisemitism?

As a teenager, I vividly recall my rebellion against my parents’ rules, their authority, their strict religious beliefs, and the connection to rules about my dress and behavior.  I had adolescent heroes and antiheroes. None was ever an antisemite.

As a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, I have had some understanding of adolescent rebellion.  I studied Anna Freud’s work and admired her observation that adolescents can become enthusiastic about community activities at times and at other times long for solitude.  They can be submissive to a chosen leader or defiant to any authority.  They can be extremely self-absorbed or materialistic and simultaneously idealistic (Freud, A., The Ego And Mechanisms of Defense, 1936) — but not, in my experience...violently antisemitic in their rebellion!

In my own work, I observed that al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other terror groups exploited adolescents by an appeal to expand and magnify “normal” adolescent rebelliousness toward a search for independent identity, even an extreme negative identity as a terrorist (Olsson, P., The Making of a Homegrown Terrorist, 2014).  I hope Hamas infiltrators are not so using American university students today in America!

I can recall the violent university student rebellion against the Vietnam War, which grew deadly at Kent State and other locations.  I agreed with the rebellion and defiance, but never the violence.

I have studied the Holocaust and support the emotionally charged 1948 admission of Israel as an independent state to the United Nations.  I understand Natan Sharansky ending his recent essay in the April 26 Wall Street Journal, entitled, “The Fight for Freedom, From Exodus to Gaza,” with these arresting words:

Let us, then, persist in hope and pray for the freedom of all the enslaved, captured, tyrannized, and oppressed. Let us also not forget that freedom is a precious gift, and that we must rise up to secure it every single day, in every generation.

Israeli warriors are so doing against Hamas, just as Sharansky says.

Until Hamas’s beyond shameful and evil attack on Israel on October 7, I believed in the “Two-State Solution” of independent Israel and independent Palestine.  At this point in history, however, the only clear reality is that war exists between Israel and Hamas.  While there are the laudable Geneva Conventions, and those “just war theories,” in reality...war is hell, as Hamas surely calculated.  The horrors of war always hit innocent or not so innocent civilians and human shields.  Remember Hiroshima, Vietnam villagers, Dresden’s fire-bombed civilians?

Warriors of democracies at war do their best to spare civilians, but war is hell until it ends in surrender.  Then peaceful “two-state solutions” can be considered.  Then true and good students can discover means of preventing war.  They might begin their studies today by reading Trump’s and Kushner’s Abraham Accords, which Hamas so clearly despised!

Image via Pxfuel.