A vice cannot be engaged. Evil cannot partake in a scholarly debate. You must under no circumstances “normalize” your relations with it. Anti-Israelists don’t want to hear what the other side says at all, nor let anyone else hear it, because to them there simply is no other side: they seek not to study or understand the lone Jewish state in the world (as scholars might do) but to destroy it.

Ismael Khoufaify, Director of Advocacy of the Governance Council of Minority & Marginalized Students at New York University, recently had a rough week. Swastikas had again been discovered in a campus building; someone in the dining halls marked Black History Month by serving watermelon kool-aid; some pro-Israel students expressed polite disagreement at a Jewish Voice for Peace anti-Israel hatefest. Khoufaify wrote on Facebook: “The last few days have sent me spiraling into a deep state of reflection. In the last week our NYU community has gone through hell and back. From swastikas, to kool-aid, to Zionism.” For Mr. Khoufaify, Nazism, racism, and Zionism were equally egregious.

Campus anti-Israel activists like to claim there is a “Palestine exception” to free speech, but from where we stand, Khoufaify’s flippant, arguably antisemitic, remark reflects what is really occurring on campuses all over the globe. Here are just a few more examples. Last week a University of Virginia panel featuring Israeli military reservists was forcefully disrupted, apparently violating multiple campus rules. Several days earlier, at the University of California at Berkeley, there was an antisemitic death threat against a Jewish professor. A week prior to that, students wishing to hear the moderate Israeli former minister Dan Meridor at London’s Kings College were confronted with a menacing mob of screaming demonstrators. At Princeton University in November the local Hillel chapter cancelled at the last minute a talk by Israel’s deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely in response to pressure from “pro-peace” students. In January 2017 the School of Oriental and African Studies student union passed a resolution banning anyone affiliated with Zionist ideology from speaking on campus on any topic whatsoever. Other veritable mob scenes have also occurred in recent years, in some cases (the University of California at Irvine, University College London) requiring police intervention to escort audience members or speakers out of the venue.

Those complaining about the “Palestine exception” in fact are making themselves heard, and loudly—as they increasingly silence the Israel-friendly voice on campus and in the global “republic of letters.”

As such, campus anti-Israelism isn’t merely an attack on Israel, or on Israel-friendly members of the campus community, or even Jews in general. It is an attack on the very norms and values of the university—and with it, on the norms and values at the heart of Western civilization…

Read More: The Tablet