Hardly a day goes by without another anti-Semitic protest in general, and at college campuses in particular.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, since the Hamas-led attacks butchered over 1,200 innocent Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, there has been a “massive spike” in anti-Semitic instances.
In fact, in 2024, there were 9,354 such hateful incidents, representing a 5 percent increase from the previous year, a 344 percent rise over the past five years, and an 893 percent increase over the last decade.
And last year, the 1,694 anti-Semitic events on college campuses, representing an 84 percent increase and almost 20 percent of all cases nationwide over a year earlier, rose more sharply than all other locations.
Thus, at putative institutions of higher learning, student demonstrators justifying anti-Semitic violence as “resistance” have become commonplace.
But while such insanity is almost a daily certainty, its causes are equally irrational. And that is, such behavior would be unlikely without a profound ignorance of Arab-Israeli history reinforced by the emotional gratification of the bandwagon effect.
It doesn’t take an advanced degree in psychology to realize that there is immense social pressure to embrace what is perceived as a popular movement. Doing so provides relief from personal insecurities and fears of exclusion by “fitting in” to a gathering that, over time, becomes closed to all debate and dissent.
Like an emotional game of musical chairs, the fear of being the odd one out is a powerful force impelling people to join what are perceived as popular, often malignant groups, even if doing so overrides one’s sense of morality.
In fact, when adopting an “us versus them” mindset, members of such groups will believe virtually anything to remain part of what they’ve been manipulated into accepting as a positive association.
Additionally, this drive for conformity, known as the bandwagon effect, provides relief from self-doubts about “doing the right thing,” as popular movements suggest that if many others apparently believe something, then it must be good, true, and worthy of support.
But the bandwagon comfort of unity in joining a group, such as those anti-Semitic gatherings on college campuses, has an enormous cost. That is, in looking to blind faith standard-bearers for what to believe and how to behave, the bandwagon effect, as a cognitive bias, eliminates competing realities by undermining the critical thinking necessary for objectively evaluating right and wrong.
And currently, the best examples of this “deal with the devil” exchange of thoughtful decision-making for the cultish comfort of belonging are the anti-Semitic protests on college campuses by those caring little about its safety and security impact on Jewish students, and less about fair-minded Arab-Israeli history.
Other than the absurdly horrific focus of those supporting “from the river to the sea” annihilation of Israel, the more reasoned desire for a Palestinian homeland has been repeatedly expressed by college students and others.
However, what such protesters don’t realize is that Israel, barely the size of New Jersey and occupying less than .2 percent of the Arab world, has already offered Palestinians territory for a state of their own on five separate occasions.
The first two-state solution proposal emerged in 1937, with a British plan for roughly an 80-20 split of territory, favoring the Arabs. Israelis accepted the division, but their approval was rejected and followed by a violent Islamic rebellion.
Ten years later, the British asked the newly formed United Nations to author a new land-division solution, which the Israelis again endorsed, but were again refused.
This was followed by Palestinian suicide attacks and an all-out genocidal war between the nascent Jewish state and a coalition of five Muslim nations.
Having won that conflict, 20 years later, the Six-Day War erupted when Egypt, Syria, and Jordan again sought Israel’s destruction, but were again defeated.
In its stunning victory, Israel gained Jerusalem, the West Bank of the Jordan River, and the Gaza Strip.
Shortly thereafter, the Arab League announced that there would be no peace with Israel, no recognition of its lawful existence, and no negotiations with its leaders. This prompted Israel’s UN ambassador to respond that this was “the first war in history with the victors suing for peace and the vanquished calling for unconditional surrender.”
The fourth rejection of a two-state solution occurred in 2000, when Israel offered to relinquish all of Gaza and more than 94 percent of the West Bank.
Predictably, this proposal was again rejected, followed by President Clinton saying that when negotiating, the Palestinian Liberation Organization chairman “was here 14 days and said no to everything.”
And lastly, in 2007, Israel sought peace again by sweetening its earlier offer with additional land, but was again rebuffed.
So, in dispassionately reviewing Middle East history, it is impartially impossible to say that Israel has not repeatedly made good-faith efforts to broker peace with its Arab neighbors.
Moreover, in offering Palestinians statehood in 1937, 1947, 1967, 2000, and 2007, it is equally inconceivable to seriously claim that Israel has made the Palestinians stateless when clearly, the Palestinians have done that to themselves.
And yet now, after Hamas’s monstrous attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, and the understandable Israeli military response in Gaza, protests demonizing Israel on college campuses have become widespread, and anti-Semitism targeting American Jews 6,000 miles away from the conflict has increased as well.
But the genesis for blaming Israel for the tragic yet unavoidable damage to Gaza and its blameless civilians is a failure to appreciate not only its aforementioned attempts at a two-state Palestinian solution, but also its humanitarian steps taken to limit such harm.
Despite the claims on college campuses inflating a narrative of Israeli-induced Palestinian misery, Israel has taken unprecedented steps to ease civilian hardships. Of course, when Hamas uses non-combatants as human shields and places its leadership and armaments in hospitals and schools, injuries and deaths to innocents are unavoidable.
But instead of praising Israel for targeting only Hamas fighters and their supporters, for giving adequate warning before an attack, and providing unparalleled humanitarian relief to Gaza residents, students mindlessly criticize Israel for its understandable military response to the depravity of Oct. 7.
However, student cluelessness extends far beyond the current situation in Gaza. Their shocking lack of context is in not realizing that the state of Israel was born in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, in which more than six million Jews were killed. As refugees fleeing the horrors of Nazi Germany and denied asylum elsewhere, their only hope for survival was their ancestral homeland.
So to mindlessly blame Jews for fleeing to safety from an untenable situation some 80 years ago, and to attempt to eliminate those seeking to repeat that horror today, is absurd.
For if one’s home is on fire, and if by jumping out a window, an innocent passerby is unavoidably injured, isn’t whoever deliberately set the fire at fault, and not the jumper? And even more obviously, who could blame anyone for saving themselves from such a situation?
Yet, although we all should know the self-evident answers to those questions, there are exceptions. And today, those bandwagon-riding exceptions are found not only in Hamas terrorist bunkers but, sadly, far too frequently on college campuses.
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