If an article appears in the newspaper with the words “Israel” and “campus” in the title, you can typically expect to read some horror story about the hostile climate Jewish students face at colleges and universities.
You probably haven’t seen many such articles this year because pro-Israel students have taken back the campuses, and they have begun to turn its resources to Israel’s advantage.
Besides the dearth of Israel scholars and plethora of anti-Israel faculty, the situation on campus was never as bad as it was portrayed. Anti-Semitic and anti-Israel incidents were relatively rare and tended to be concentrated on the same few colleges every year.
Moreover, while annual events such as the Palestinian Solidarity Movement conference attracted attention and generated angst, the dozens of conferences attended by thousands more pro-Israel students were having a much greater effect on far more campuses.
Thanks in large measure to the efforts of all the major organizations that work with students under the umbrella of the Israel on Campus Coalition, pro-Israel students have been energized, educated and empowered.
The ICC recently launched an “Israel Starts with I” campaign to deepen connections between U.S. academic institutions and Israel. This project offers almost limitless opportunities for students to develop creative ways to introduce their classmates to Israel.
For example, a new Graduate Students’ Israel Education Initiative at the University of Wisconsin-Madison consists of a cross-departmental lecture series to increase Israel awareness among graduate students, and to enhance Israel’s exposure in specific graduate departments that are vulnerable to anti-Israel sentiment.
Students around the country are also actively working to restore programs to study in Israel that had been cancelled during the Palestinian war, and to encourage participation in other programs such as birthright.
Setting the tone
The fall is typically a slow time for pro-Israel students as they get acclimated to school and plan for events in the winter and spring.
Historically, the anti-Israel organizations have set the tone early by immediately organizing protests and using the Nov. 29 anniversary of the United Nations partition vote as a pretext for bashing Israel.
This year, however, approximately 30 campuses have staged or are about to hold large pro-Israel events, which range from a concert at Michigan to an Israel advocacy conference at UW-Madison to a cultural festival at Rutgers.
These events are creating a positive atmosphere that introduces the college community to an Israel most have never seen before, the Israel we all know and love — beautiful, innovative, and exciting — rather than simply a place of conflict.
ICC members also continue to offer students the Israel advocacy training they desperately need to understand the Arab-Israeli conflict and respond to the attacks they still encounter inside and outside the classroom.
While it is valuable to talk about Israel “beyond the conflict,” you can’t ignore politics because the first time you tell a classmate that their laptop runs on a Pentium chip developed by Intel Israel, they are likely to say, “That’s nice, but why doesn’t Israel stop persecuting the Palestinians?”
Students still need to know the aleph-bet of Israeli political history so they can distinguish between myths and facts about the conflict, and they need to understand how to make the case for Israel effectively.
Even before the ICC developed its initiative, many colleges had strong ties to Israel through a broad range of cooperative endeavors that brought American and Israeli scholars together to take advantage of their mutual interests and skills.
For example, the Binational Science Foundation (BSF) has for more than 30 years promoted research cooperation between scientists from the United States and Israel. It has awarded more than 3,000 grants, involving scientists at more than 400 institutions.
Similarly, the Binational Agricultural Research and Development Fund (BARD) has funded more than 800 projects that have led to new technologies in drip irrigation, pesticides, fish farming, livestock, poultry, disease control and farm equipment.
Universities also frequently sponsor conferences to tap Israeli expertise. For example, the University of Georgia and Hebrew University formed a partnership to study the effects of terrorism on children and held conferences in Jerusalem and Athens.
The situation is by no means ideal. Incidents still occur from time to time, nefarious new groups such as Sabeel have emerged, and anti-Israel faculty members remain a serious problem.
But it is time to see colleges as assets to promote the U.S.-Israel relationship and educate the next generation about the real Israel.
Mitchell G. Bard, Ph.D., is director of the Jewish Virtual Library and coauthor of “1001 Facts Everyone Should Know About Israel.”
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