Students, Administrators and Faculty Respond to Campus Protests Against Israel: The Case of John Huntsman, the Former Governor of Utah, and a Major Donor to the University of Pennsylvania

The current campus protests reflect the limits of the more bonded relationship that students and universities have forged. Presidents beholden to wealthy donors have in many instances been urged by them to stand unequivocally for Israel. This week, John Huntsman Jr., the former governor of Utah and a major donor to the University of Pennsylvania, announced that he and his family would cut their funding because, in his view, the school had not done that. Students, in so many instances, have sought something different. They want to know if their ideas are valid. They have rarely experienced the alternative.

In nearly every case, the university itself has stood as co-defendant — an adversary by way of its complicity in whatever injustice, through its morally compromised research or financial investments.

The response from the dean of the law school and Linda Mills, president of N.Y.U., was strongly condemned by the students, even though letters were sent to the community. I handed over the flyer to the two students at the rally because of the abduction of the 8-year-old Israeli girl. One of them, a junior at Stern, N.Y.U.’s business school, identified himself as an Orthodox Jew whose great-grandparents had been imprisoned at Auschwitz and whose parents were in Israel at the beginning of the attacks and found themselves in a bomb shelter.

The campus protests of the late 1960s sought in part to dismantle the in loco parentis role that colleges and universities had held in American life. But the past two decades have been shaped by a reversal of that, as institutions have sought to reconstruct this role in response to what students and parents paying enormous sums for their education have seemed to want. According to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, during the 2020-21 fiscal year, private four-year colleges spent 40 percent of their budgets on student support services. The dollar amount has tripled over the past 20 years.

The president of the New York University pointed out that their student affairs division reached out to all students from the affected areas with offers of support and help. In this challenging moment, that didn’t seem enough.

Students, administrators and faculty, at least at places like N.Y.U. and Columbia, shared an antagonism to the Trump presidency and to the police abuses at the heart of the Black Lives Matter movement. Ten years ago, when the former New York City police commissioner, Ray Kelly, was invited to speak at Brown University, students objected. When the administration had him come anyway, protesters interrupted his talk so formidably that the event was shut down.

New Israel Fund: Indoctrination of a Partheid State When You Destroy the United States During the March of Hamas

Still, cracks have begun to emerge among the Democratic coalition. Younger and more liberal voters are more interested in the Palestinian cause than older generations, a split that accelerated during the Trump administration. Among them are many American Jews who are far more critical of Israel than their forebears and have flocked to groups like IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace, which staged a protest in the U.S. Capitol calling for a cease-fire and has repeatedly accused Israel of planning genocide in Gaza.

In Los Angeles, Rabbi Sharon Brous, a well-known progressive activist who regularly criticizes the Israeli government, described from the pulpit her horror and feelings of “existential loneliness,” her voice breaking. “The clear message from many in the world, especially from our world — those who claim to care the most about justice and human dignity — is that these Israeli victims somehow deserved this terrible fate.”

And as the Hamas attacks in Israel were still underway, leaders of the New Israel Fund, which supports progressive Israeli and Palestinian groups, fielded calls from American supporters demanding that the organization label Israel an “apartheid state” — even as they waited to learn if colleagues in another organization, hiding in Israeli bomb shelters, had been killed.

In the immediate aftermath of the massacre of Israeli civilians, progressive groups moved quickly to justify the attack, and many of the most inflammatory comments came on social media.

And many protests have included chants of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” a slogan that leaves no place for the state of Israel to exist in its own land.

“I am in such a state of despair — in my generation, we have been warned how quickly people would turn on us and we just thought no way,” said Nick Melvoin, 38, a member of the Los Angeles Unified School Board who is now running for Congress and keeps a framed picture of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marching with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his office. This is how it happens when you dehumanize the group. This indoctrination that many of us have been warned about hit us like a ton of bricks.”

The most rattling episodes have occurred on college campuses or on social media, where statements from small organizations have been amplified across the globe. During a worldwide conflict, those statements have become totemic and are raising suspicions that they are a sign of a more dangerous future for Jews in America.

A lawyer and producer in Los Angeles who has also served on the municipal boards was incensed by the protest that was promoted by the Democratic Socialists of America after the attack. He urged Los Angeles officials to label the organization a hate group in hundreds of letters. The D.S.A. apologized for not making their values explicit in order to back away from the protest.

Mr. Spiegelman said that he was a member of a political group that believed inaffordable housing, raising the minimum wage and the wholesale murder of Jews. Two out of three is pretty good.

Eva Borgwardt, the political director of IfNotNow, said in an interview that anyone who dehumanizes Israelis has no representation in the US government, while federal officials have dehumanized Palestinians for decades.