Yoni Michanie
If Oct. 7, 2023, will be engraved in the consciousness of Israelis for generations to come, the events that followed will similarly haunt the collective memory of Diaspora Jewry. Hamas’s vicious attack, in which terrorists killed 1,400 Israelis and took 240 people captive, is the worst tragedy to befall the Jewish people since the Holocaust.
Hearing chants of “Free Palestine, from the river to the sea” is not new for those of us who monitor the proliferation of antisemitic terror-apologists at North American universities. For years, administrators on many campuses have ignored or condoned the calls to “globalize the intifada.” Even as the Second Intifada was raging in Israel two decades ago, and more than 1,000 Israelis were being murdered in attacks, many by Hamas, on buses and in restaurants and nightclubs, the student council’s wall at Montreal’s Concordia University reportedly had signs in 2002 saying, “America is a Terrorist State” and “Globalize the Intifada.”
In 2004, Hatem Bazian, a Palestinian-American academic, currently a senior lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley’s Department of Near Eastern and Ethnic Studies and co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, spoke at an anti-war rally and asked participants: “How come we don’t have an intifada in this country?” In April 2004, the group Al-Aw, held its annual convention at Hunter College in New York City, where attendees marched to the Israeli consulate to protest the assassination of Abdel Aziz Rantisi, a Hamas leader. Signs waved by some in the crowd included “Globalize the Intifada.”
In 2005, at the University of California-Davis, anti-Israel protesters held a silent demonstration in which participants held signs with slogans such as “Long Live the Intifada.” During the Second Lebanon War in 2006, hundreds of protesters massed in front of the Israeli Consulate in Manhattan and called for a “Free Palestine.”
For years, we have urged policymakers and White House administrations to pause to understand the meaning of these calls. What we are witnessing today is the catastrophic result of these warnings going unheeded.
Hours after Hamas launched its devastating assault in southern Israel, tens of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets across the Middle East, Australia, Europe, Canada, and the United States. to celebrate the massacre. As Israel escalated its justified military campaign of self-defense in Gaza, extremists across major European, Canadian and American cities have revived these chants — but in what context?
As the attack began on Oct. 7, Hamas gunmen opened fire on a crowd of young people during a dance music festival in the southern Israeli kibbutz of Re’im, murdering more than 250 revelers. At Kibbutz Be’eri, Hamas terrorists killed more than 120 residents, including children, and kidnapped others, effectively wiping out more than 10% of the community’s population. Hamas militants set people’s homes on fire, and killed them as they tried to escape the heat and smoke. In Kfar Aza, babies and toddlers were reportedly found decapitated, and women were beaten and raped.
Hamas militants did not differentiate between civilian and military targets. They did not run polls to better understand the political preferences of their targets; whether they opposed or supported current Israeli governmental policies was inconsequential. By living in the land that Hamas perceives to be “occupied,” which entails all of sovereign Israel, Hamas deemed these “occupiers” to be legitimate targets. This, by the way, is the driving force behind the despicable action of tearing down posted fliers that highlight missing Israelis who were kidnapped by Hamas; being Israelis, they are “occupiers” who merit no empathy, no humanity.
Those chanting for a “Free Palestine” following the horrors of Oct.7 are not calling for a resumption of peace talks or negotiations; they are seeking to eliminate Israel. To understand how such a scenario would lead to the ethnic cleansing of Jews, look no further than Arab-majority states in the region and North Africa who participated in the ethnic cleansing of nearly 1 million Jews following the establishment of the State of Israel. In 1948, Syria had approximately 30,000 Jews, Iraq had 135,000, and Libya had 38,000 — today, after these countries were “freed,” fewer than 150 Jews can be found in them combined.
The shockwaves of Hamas’s barbaric attack reverberated around the globe. In a display of antisemitism in Sydney, Australia, anti-Israel protesters chanted “Gas the Jews!” Synagogues were attacked in Tunisia and the Spanish enclave of Melilla. In Arras, a city in northeastern France, a man fatally stabbed a teacher at a school in an attack authorities believed was linked to Israel’s war with Hamas. Across Germany and France, Jewish homes have been branded with the Star of David — a reminder that antisemitism remains vibrant on the European continent less than eight decades after the Nazis’ systematic extermination of 6 million Jews.
On U.S. college campuses, Jewish students have faced incomparable surging levels of antisemitism. At the University of Pennsylvania, hundreds of students and faculty staged a pro-Hamas walkout as donors said they would halt funding to Penn. At Stanford University, an instructor was suspended after ordering Jewish students to take their belongings and stand in a corner, telling them, “this is what Israel does to the Palestinians,” according to the director of the Chabad Stanford Jewish Center. On dozens of campuses across America, students called for “intifadas” and support of “the resistance.” At the University of Wisconsin and George Washington University, pro-Hamas protestors chanted “glory to the martyrs.”
In alignment with Hamas’s charter — which states its goal is to “raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine” — the calls to “Free Palestine” do not fall short of open support for the ethnic cleansing of over 7 million Israeli Jews. Similarly, support for the “globalization of the Intifada” must be recognized for what it is: calls to target Jews around the globe.
This is the disturbing reality Diaspora Jews have been enduring — from Dagestan, Russia, where in a pogrom-like fashion an antisemitic mob temporarily seized control of the Makhachkala airport and inspected passengers from a flight arriving from Tel Aviv to find Jews, to Cooper Union College in New York City, where Jewish students locked themselves in the library to protect themselves from an anti-Israel mob, which tried to break down the door.
Around the world, Jews are frightened but committed to overcoming this wave of hatred, just as we have withstood mass expulsions, genocide and terrorism for 2,000 years. All we ask is that you take at face value the words of those who seek to harm us. When they say they want us cleansed, removed and murdered, believe them.
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