Jewish Campus Protesters Against Israel

By Walter E. Block

Are you ready for the latest missive from the New York Times, the newspaper that brought you Walter Duranty who assured everyone that Stalin, if not the prince of men, was at least on the side of the angels and greatly misunderstood?

In the same fallacious vein Peter Beinart now assures us that “Trump Doesn’t Want to Protect All Jewish Students — Just Those on His Team.”

Anyone with eyes to see has been greeted with the seemingly astonishing sight that amongst the campus radicals protesting the supposedly evil genocidal war criminal Israeli government have been male students with yalmicas and males and females with Jewish stars. Yes, there have been young Jews, also, excoriating Zionism, the IDF, Israel, alongside their pro-Hamas colleagues.

Truth be told, Mr. Trump is not exactly big fan of such students. Under his administration, they have been suspended and expelled from school and even upon occasion arrested for hooliganism.

Is our president biased against young people of the Hebrew faith? Perhaps he is, even, an anti-Semite? This is clear implication of Mr. Beinart’s essay. At the very least, President Trump cares only for the Jews on his “team.”

So, what are the “teams?” Who is on first base? On one side there are Jewish students who just want to go to class, or to the library. Many of them support the only civilized country in the Middle East; they certainly are not joining any protests against the only Jewish state in existence. On the other side we have Jews who are arm in arm with some of the worst anti-Semites on the planet. These are the type of folk who blamed Israel, entirely and solely, for the atrocious events of October 7, 2033. This was the Al Aqsa Flood, which murdered some 1200 innocent people and kidnapped another 250, many of whom subsequently were killed.

When a Jew tried to go about his lawful business on campus, he was accosted by this band of gangsters. They did not ask if he were Jewish. After all, there were Jews in this mob. Instead, they queried of their victim if he were a Zionist. If he admitted this sin, they fell upon him, brutalized him, Jews among the other supporters of Hamas’ slaughters.

There are, unhappily, precedents for this sort of thing. When a kidnap victim comes to support his captors, it is sometimes characterized as Stockholm Syndrome. There were actually Jews who took the side of their Nazi captors in concentration camps. These traitors to their community sometimes yearned to be treated more gently; there might have even been cases, in which some actually sided with the Nazis out of conviction. Primo Levi in his “The Grey Zone” “explores the taboo issue of ‘privileged’ Jews, those prisoners who were forced to cooperate with their Nazi captors in order to prolong their lives or the lives of their families.”

It would appear that these Jewish protestors are following in this tradition, along with their adult counterparts in groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace, BrownU Jews for Ceasefire Now, IfNotNow, and other anti-Semitic Jewish organizations.

So, yes, Donald Trump supports innocent Jewish victims vis a vis the other “team,” those Jews who will assault the former.

What explains the behavior of these turn coat Jews?

This can only be speculative, but here are some possible accounts. When their “brothers in arms” eventually turn against them, too, as they inevitably must, they will be able to plead for mercy. They can truly say, “Hey, we marched with you against the evil Israel in those campus protests.” They can plead: “We are the good Jews; we have mouthed just as much as you have: ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free.’”

In the event this collaborationist behavior will avail them nothing. The original Hamas covenant regards Jews, all Jews, no exceptions, as vermin. We have we heard that before? This Hamas document invokes this injunction among other such gems: “The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: ‘O Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.’”

This applies to “good” Jews like these campus protesters I favor of Hamas as well as bad ones who support Israel. On the chopping block are not only Jews in Israel; to be sure they will be the first to go if Hamas has its way. But no Jew anywhere in the world is safe from these fanatics.

That is with whom these campus Jews have aligned themselves. For shame.

Where oh where are the Arab students who join Jewish demonstrations in support of Israel? Nowhere, that is where. Why not? They would likely treated in the same manner as are gays in Arab countries. In sharp contrast, Zionist organizations behave in a civilized manner toward these renegade Hamas supporters.

June 1, 2025 | 1 Comment »

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  1. The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege is a 2005 book by Kenneth Levin, a psychiatrist with doctorate in history.[1] The book applies psychiatric insights to the Arab-Israel conflict by arguing that Israel’s reaction to perceived Arab hostility is a corollary of the Stockholm syndrome in which hostages come to identify and empathize with their captors.[2][3][4][5]

    Originally published in English, the Oslo Syndrome has been translated into Hebrew.[6]

    Synopsis
    According to Professor Ron Shleifer of Ariel University, Levin, a psychiatrist, compares the acceptance of the Oslo Accords by the Israeli public to Battered child syndrome, in which the victims “blame themselves and are convinced that if they would only behave better, their parents would cease to beat them, without knowing that they will continue to be beaten anyway because it is their parents who have a problem and not they.”[6]

    Jerold Auerbach, a history professor from Wellesley College, described the book as “comprehensive historical description and compelling psychological interpretation of the “delusions of a people under siege””[1]

    Iddo Netanyahu described The Oslo Syndrome “attempts to show how a whole country can suffer from wishful thinking. A great majority [of Israelis] thought the accords we signed with [Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser] Arafat and his people would bring peace. All it brought was more bloodshed.”[7]

    Excerpt from the book:

    “This phenomenon reveals great similarity, at the level of human psychology, to the response of children subjected to chronic abuse. Such children tend to blame themselves for their suffering.”

    Thus, he continues, “those segments of the Jewish community who live and work in environments hostile to Israel, commonly embrace the anti-Israel bias around them. And they often insist they are being virtuous by doing so.” This pathology is “no less delusional than that of abused children who blame themselves for the abuse they experience.” But, he concludes, the result is awful:

    “All too often such children doom themselves psychologically to lives of self-abnegation and misery. In the case of Jews indicting Israel for the hatred directed against it, the misery they cultivate goes far beyond themselves, and ultimately undermines Israel’s very survival.”[8] – Wikipedia

    The Oslo Syndrome
    Delusions of a People under Siege
    By: Kenneth LevinManchester, N.H.: Smith and Kraus, 2005. 571 pp. $35.
    Reviewed by: Edward Alexander
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    In this massively researched, lucidly written, and cogently argued narrative, Levin tells the appalling story of what has been called the greatest self-inflicted wound of political history: Israel’s embrace of Yasir Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization in the Oslo accords of September 1993 and its dogged adherence to its obligations under them even as its “peace partner” was blatantly flouting its own.

    The book has two parts. The first recounts Jewish political failure in the Diaspora, where Jews lived with a constant burden of peril; Levin presents this as the background for the self-deluding rationales that engendered Oslo. The second part traces the same perils in the history of Israel itself. Levin shows how a tiny nation, living under constant siege by neighbors who reject its very existence, was induced by its intellectual classes to believe that its own misdeeds had incited Arab hatred and violence, and that what required reform was not Arab dictatorship and Islamist Jew-hatred but the reform of (other) Jews. Reversing cause and effect, Israeli leaders blinded themselves to the obvious fact that it was Arab hatred and aggression that repeatedly led to Israeli occupation, not occupation that caused Arab hatred and violence.

    Although Levin argues strongly that Israeli leaders like Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak, and the ineffable Shimon Peres hallucinated moderation in a murderous enemy, his book is not a polemic that excludes all opposing points of view; on the contrary, we get the fullest possible account—and “in their own words”—of those Israelis (and their American-Jewish supporters) who deluded themselves into believing that Oslo would bring a new heaven and a new earth. When the accords were signed in 1993, Minister of Education Shulamit Aloni announced that “no more parents will go weeping after the coffins of their sons,” and Israeli novelist and peace activist Amos Oz said confidently that “death shall be no more.” And all this because Arafat had—not for the first time—promised to renounce terror and recognize Israel’s “right to exist,” that used Buick he had already flogged several times over. By autumn 2000, and as a direct (and in Levin’s view entirely predictable) result of Israel’s endless unreciprocated concessions to Arafat’s demands, the country was faced with intifada II, “the Oslo war,” in which all Israel became a battlefield and getting on a bus or going to a cafe or a disco meant risking your life.

    One of Levin’s most relentlessly pursued themes is the influence of Israel’s cultural elites on the governments of Rabin and Barak. In Israel (as in America) many intellectuals seem to subscribe to the motto, “the other country, right or wrong.” But if American leftist intellectuals are confined to universities and a few other institutions, in Israel they have come close to taking over the government. Israelis thus learned the hard way what Churchill said of England’s leading appeaser: “Mr. Chamberlain was faced with a choice between surrender and war; he chose surrender, and he got war.”

    https://www.meforum.org/middle-east-quarterly/book-reviews/the-oslo-syndrome

    The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege Paperback – January 1, 2005
    by Kenneth Levin (Author)
    4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars (26)
    See all formats and editions
    In the 1993 Oslo accords, Israel embraced Yasser Arafat as its “peace partner.” It then installed him in Gaza and the West Bank as head of a nascent Palestinian government, allowed him to bring with him some 7,000 of his loyalist gunmen, and provided the gunmen with weapons, even as Arafat continued to support terrorist attacks on Israelis and to assure Palestinians and other Arabs his goal remained Israel’s destruction.Why did Israel pursue the path of Oslo? Why did it persist on that path when, in the wake of the initial Oslo agreements, the Palestinians unleashed an unprecedented wave of anti-Israel terror? Palestinian leaders also routinely called for holy war against Israel and compared Oslo to the Treaty of Hudaibiya, which Mohammed had signed in 628 and abandoned when his forces became strong enough to overwhelm his adversaries. Arafat and his subordinates told Arab audiences that Oslo was a step in the PLO’s 1974 “plan of phases,” a strategy of acquiring whatever land could be won by negotiations and using that territory as a base for pursuing Israel’s annihilation. Yet Israel responded with additional concessions. What psychological, historical and communal forces spawned policies that undermined Israel’s security and even threatened its survival? Dr. Levin’s original and powerfully persuasive analysis relates Israeli diplomacy of the nineteen-nineties to psychological responses common among chronically besieged populations, whether minorities subjected to defamation, discrimination and assault or small nations under chronic attack by their neighbors. More particularly, he demonstrates links between the evolution of Oslo and the long history of Diaspora Jews being subjected to persistent abuse. The reaction of many enduring such abuse was to seek to improve their predicament by endorsing elements of the surrounding societies’ bigoted indictments and embracing delusions of salvation through self-effacement and concessions. This case study in the psychology of a community under chronic attack takes on broader significance at a time when even traditionally safe and secure societies such as the United States are confronting the psychological challenges posed by terrorist assaults.

    https://www.amazon.com/Oslo-Syndrome-Delusions-People-Under/dp/157525557X