This past May, students at the University of California at Davis were greeted by over 200 cardboard tombstones blanketing the main quad. Each tombstone bore the name of a Palestinian killed during the Intifada. In November, the campus was again transformed for a day as pro-Palestinian student activists sectioned off a portion of campus with duct-tape to create a mock Israeli checkpoint. Passersby were subjected to a choreographed fight between Palestinian children and Israeli soldiers. Just one example, the organizers claimed, of a day in the life of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation.
It’s a tough act for a pro-Israel activist to follow. And this sort of scenario is being repeated at schools across the country. Meanwhile, both pro-Israel students on campus and the organized Jewish community that supports them have been caught off guard.
Aggies for Israel, the pro-Israel student group at UC Davis, had one day to mobilize for the November protest. Their response? “We had two tables on the side of the quad where the demonstration took place,” says Hadar Cadouri, a second-year student who heads the group. “We just wanted to have a presence, to show another side. They had megaphones and a script and everything, and people were definitely interested in what was going on.”
Since the onset of the latest round of violence in the Middle East, the organized Jewish community has largely failed to provide satisfactory assistance to pro-Israel students. And as anti-Israel activism grows in popularity among young activists searching for a cause to support, pro-Israel students are left to fend for themselves, and some are learning a lesson in self-reliance.
Many Jewish students do have a passion for Israel, but even a lifelong affinity for the Jewish State doesn’t necessarily qualify someone to debate the issues at stake in the Arab-Israeli conflict, let alone counter the harsh anti-Israel rhetoric that has become commonplace in the public relations war being fought on campus.
“Our school is wallpapered with propaganda, like signs that say ‘Israel is an apartheid state’ and ‘Zionism is racism,'” says Cadouri.
“Just because Israel is a big part of our identity, that alone can’t help us promote a good name for Israel on campus,” says Josh Horwatt, a UC Davis senior. “[Pro-Palestinian activists] have got some good points, and a lot of Jewish students don’t know how to argue effectively, which can just make it worse.”
Pro-Israel campus activists rely on organizations such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and, in Northern California, the San Francisco Jewish Community Federation’s Israel Center to provide them with resources to confront pro-Palestinian activists. “We [students] have to be the ones out there manning the tables, and running the events, but we need help in so many other ways,” says Cadouri. But the process of communication between students on campus and the organized Jewish community sometimes needs improvement, according to Cadouri, who cites as an example a request his group made to the Israel Center for informational materials. “We wanted the information to arrive two weeks before [the anti-Israel demonstration] so we could review it, and it came two days before. And I put in my request early too,” says Cadouri. “To be honest, I would want them to take us more seriously.”
But Avner Even-Zohar, director of the campus division of the Israel Center of San Francisco, claims that his organization is working at its maximum capacity, noting that it deals with tens of schools scattered across a wide geographic area with only a two-person staff. “Our goal is to bring Israel to college campuses. I admit, we can always do more,” Even-Zohar says. Part of the problem, he explains, is the “propaganda machine” that pro-Israel students are up against. “I would even guess that states such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, or the Emirates are helping sponsor student organizations on campus that are producing these high-quality flyers and booking various speakers,” he says. According to Even-Zohar, the budget for his division receives “decent resources” to provide assistance to students, but counteracting anti-Israel propaganda is not the only kind of work that the Israel Center does and is certainly not its only priority.
Nor is the failure of Jewish organizations to provide adequate support to students confined to a single geographic area. Speaking at the World Zionist Organization’s “Do the Write Thing” program for Jewish student journalists, Orly Gil, the Israeli consul for academic affairs in New York, admitted that the organized Jewish community as well as the Israeli government need to improve the support they are giving students who are struggling to convey a positive image of Israel on campus. “Frankly, this is a major problem that we’re dealing with,” she said. Gil conceded that the caliber of pro-Israel speakers sent to campuses in the past has often paled in comparison to the dynamic personalities brought to campus by pro-Palestinian groups: “We’ve been aware of this problem for a while.”
With the organized Jewish community lagging, pro-Israel student activists have realized that they have to take matters into their own hands. At the University of Michigan, David Livshiz and Jeremy Menchik, two fourth-year students involved with Hamagshimim, a national Zionist campus movement, decided that students needed to do more than just react to anti-Israel activism.
With support from national Hamagshimim, Livshiz and Menchik created a fellowship for a select group of students interested in learning about advocacy techniques, opinion writing, and the historical background of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Nine students were selected and spent three hours each Sunday for six consecutive weeks listening to presentations by debate coaches, journalists, and academics, in order to fine-tune their advocacy skills. By the end of the fellowship, three of the participants ended up on the editorial board of The Michigan Daily, the campus newspaper, and three others took leadership positions in other Israel-related campus groups.
Across the country, in the San Francisco Bay Area, pro-Israel students have similarly decided to take the initiative on their own. Just over a year ago, the University of California at Berkeley, San Francisco State University, and Stanford University all experienced surges of anti-Israel activity. In response, Tomer Altman and Ehud Nuri, both students at UC Berkeley, organized what Altman calls “a mutual defense pact” for pro-Israel student groups in the San Francisco Bay Area. They called their alliance “Jewish Students for Peace” (JSFP). “Our original purpose was to encourage local campuses to cluster together so they could support each other,” explains Altman, a third-year student at UC Berkeley.
“We would all come to each other’s aid. If one school was having a rally, we’d all pile in a car to go and support our friends on that campus,” says Altman. “We started an e-mail list where we’d share daily updates, give talking points, forward each other articles, and just share information.” That e-mail list has since expanded to a group of nearly 120 student leaders at over 40 college campuses nationwide, as well as two universities in Canada, and two in Israel.
“Students have a lot of passion and are ready to defend Israel, but they don’t know how to bring across their message the right way,” Altman says. And so JSFP seeks to equip students with the information and the techniques that will enable them to advocate for Israel intelligently, not simply emotionally. Altman adds that pro-Israel students at “some of the smaller schools just don’t have the same organization and support as larger schools, and so we’re there to give them that support.”
Altman notes that JSFP’s services have been received with both gratitude and skepticism. Students in need of support have been grateful for the as
sistance provided, including pro-Israel students at UC Davis, where Altman visited last spring for a night of advocacy training. Other students have been suspicious of the idea of another pro-Israel group and questioned whether a new group will be any more effective than the established campus groups. “We’re not trying to step on anyone’s toes, nor are we trying to compete with or replace organizations like AIPAC,” says Altman. “It’s just that in a perfect world, outside organizations could handle all this, but many Jewish community organizations have their hands full already.”
The organized Jewish community has received some criticism for its failure to provide adequate support to pro-Israel students on campus. In early September, an editorial about the situation on campus in the Forward, a national Jewish newspaper, accused Jewish organizations of having spent the previous year “dithering, talking about the problems and waiting for someone to solve them.”
There are some indications that Jewish organizations are starting to wake up to the problem. The Jewish Agency, a quasi-governmental organization headquartered in Jerusalem and focused on Israel-Diaspora partnerships, recently dispatched a special emissary from Israel to work at the international headquarters of Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life in Washington, DC. The emissary’s job is to develop Israel-focused programming and arrange speakers to visit campuses nationwide.
Partnerships between students, Jewish organizations, and the Israeli government have also taken root in some regions. When Brett Schor assumed his new position as the officer of public affairs and education at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC in late November, he arranged a meeting with student activists in the area to ask them what assistance they needed. Shortly afterwards, in early December, two student groups at George Washington University collaborated with the Israeli Embassy, Hillel, and AIPAC in hosting an Israel Solidarity rally in the aftermath of two suicide bombings in Israel that over 250 students attended.
But students are looking for more than just organizational support. Cadouri says students also want to feel confident about arguing the finer points of the issues. But at an AIPAC conference earlier this year, he says he was advised to stick with short slogans like, “Israel wants peace but has no partner,” as a way to counter some of the arguments pro-Israel students faced on campus. Cadouri, however, felt that these slogans “sounded more like patronizing than spreading information.” Repeating a sound bite can turn a few heads in the right direction, but it needs to be followed up with substance.
Recognizing that if students are to effectively stand up for Israel on campus they need to be armed with knowledge, philanthropist Leonard Abramson, Hillel, and Tel Aviv University collaborated to found a new initiative called Education for Middle East Truth (EMET) last year. This summer, EMET hosted a special three-week educational program at Tel Aviv University for a select group of pro-Israel student activists. These EMET Fellows received a crash course in the history and politics of the modern Middle East, relations between Arab states and Israel, and the strategic threats facing Israel, among other topics. There are now 39 students from 27 universities in North America who have participated in EMET. The hope of EMET’s organizers is that the program’s student participants will return to campus better prepared to debate the hot issues in the conflict and defend Israel.
As the Jewish community waits to see what results initiatives such as EMET will yield, year two of the Intifada is well underway, and Tomer Altman and his crew are busy assembling press kits and uploading flyers to the JSFP Web site to share with students across the country. “Students don’t need to reinvent the wheel; we can provide accessible resources for them,” says Altman. “But they do need to know enough to know that ‘Zionism’ is not a bad word.”
