At Yale the other week, Students for Justice in Palestine, one of the most aggressive and vicious supporters of Palestinian terrorism, conducted a stunt to dramatize their anti-Israel agenda. Members of the SJP put “Eviction Notices” under the dorm room doors of Yale students, which warned them that their rooms were going to be “demolished in three days” for no reason. According to a report of the action in the Yale Daily News, the Eviction Notices were designed “to raise awareness about the plight of Palestinians whose homes are being demolished by the Israeli government.” In a sane world such a claim would have zero credibility. Why would any government, let alone one as humane and democratic as the government of Israel, go around randomly demolishing people’s homes? What agenda would be served by that?
In fact the homes that Israel has demolished belong to terrorists who blow up Pizza parlors and buses and Passover services, hoping to kill as many innocent Jews as possible. It is all part of a 60-year unrelenting war Arabs and Muslims have waged against the existence of a non-Arab, non-Muslim state in the Middle East. This is a fact overlooked not only by terrorist support groups like Students for Justice in Palestine but by the editors of the Yale Daily News. Naturally, Yale students ignorant of this 60-year history and bombarded by Palestinian lies spread by left-wing faculty and student organizations to the effect that Israel is “occupying” a mythical entity called “Palestine,” Palestinians are oppressed by Israelis (rather than the Palestinian Authority and Hamas), Israel is an “apartheid state” and so forth – are unable to distinguish reality from fiction.
“I was really confused at first,” a Yale sophomore named Helen McCreary told the Yale Daily News, “but I think I understand why [Students for Justice in Palestine] did it. None of us have had our house randomly destroyed by the government.”
The SJP Eviction Notices explained to the credulous that they “were not meant to be an attack on Israel or Israelis, but rather on the actions of the Israeli state.” But as everyone knows, Israel is a democracy and its government reflects the sentiments and will of its people – including a million Muslim Arabs who are Israeli citizens with more rights than the citizens of Gaza or the West Bank under Palestinian rule. In short, this a distinction without a difference: the attack on Israel is an attack on Israelis and Jews. By the same token, 100% of the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza vote for terrorist organizations – either Fatah or Hamas. But if one were to draw the conclusion that Palestinians as a people support terrorism – that opinion would be banned from the pages of theYale Daily News and every other college newspaper as giving “offense” to an ethnic group — although there is no ethnic group “Palestinian.”
And how did Yale’s Jewish organizations respond to this malicious attack from a Hamas-supporting, Israel-hating campus group? According to theDaily News reporter, “a member of the Yale Hillel board and the co-president of Yale Friends of Israel criticized the fliers for being ‘counterproductive’ and disrespectful,” and also “hyperbolic” – as though the Israelis were only demolishing the doors on Palestinian houses for sport and not their entire dwellings.
The rationale for responding in such generalities which did not come close to identifying the outrage that had been committed was that Hillel did not want to even think of upsetting the Students for Justice in Palestine who, in fact, would like to see Israel destroyed and the Jews pushed into the sea. Too harsh? That is precisely what the SJP slogan, chanted on campuses across the country, promises: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” One glance at a map of the Middle East will show that the eastern border of Israel is the Jordan River and the western border is the Mediterranean sea. In other words, “Free Palestine from the river to the sea” means for the campus Nazis who chant it: the obliteration of Israel. As it happens, this is the explicit and formal goal of their favorite Palestinian party, Hamas, which has enshrined it in its charter: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam obliterates it.”
David Horowitz was one of the founders of the New Left in the 1960s and an editor of its largest magazine,Ramparts. He is the author, with Peter Collier, of three best selling dynastic biographies: The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty (1976); The Kennedys: An American Dream (1984); and The Fords: An American Epic (1987). Looking back in anger at their days in the New Left, he and Collier wrote Destructive Generation (1989), a chronicle of their second thoughts about the 60s that has been compared to Whittaker Chambers’ Witness and other classic works documenting a break from totalitarianism. Horowitz examined this subject more closely in Radical Son (1996), a memoir tracing his odyssey from “red-diaper baby” to conservative activist that George Gilder described as “the first great autobiography of his generation.”
