My Day with Cornell Protestors: Antisemitism, Denial, and Ignorance

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As I walked around taking photographs of the Anti-Israel encampment at Cornell University, one of the participants kept calling after me — “Julie! Julie, right?  Haven’t we met before?”  

It was one of the appointed mediators for the student activists.  She wore a yellow vest, carried a walkie-talkie, and used any pretense she could think of to strike up a conversation with non-students to quickly discern their intentions.

A week before I visited, twenty-two students and two staff members had been arrested for staging a sit-in in Day Hall, the administrative center for Cornell.  Shortly before that, multiple suspensions had been handed down to students for participating in protests, which included an encampment set up on the well-known art quad.  School administrators had met with activists to request they move to a less disruptive part of the campus — they’d refused.

And so they stayed in the art quad where statues of two great Americans — Cornell cofounders Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White — stared silently down at a campus obsessed with the latest political statement and fashion fad — the black and white keffiyeh.

There are many who still associate the black and white keffiyeh with former Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) head Yasser Arafat.  It’s a statement of solidarity that’s hard to stomach when transposed onto American campuses; especially for those of us old enough to remember it’s long history of turmoil and terrorism.

Academy award winning British actress Vanessa Redgrave (well-known to American audiences by the 1970s) may have been the first celebrity to add the keffiyeh scarf to her wardrobe not long after funding, producing and narrating the 1977 documentary, The Palestinian.

After a lengthy interview with Yasser Arafat, the documentary shows Miss Redgrave dancing with a rifle as she gleefully celebrates her visit with the self-professed “freedom fighters.”  It had been less than three years since Arab forces — led by Syria and Egypt — had led a surprise attack on Israel during their holiest day – Yom Kippur.

The following year she helped take antisemitism mainstream with an Academy Awards acceptance speech in which she referenced “Zionist hoodlums.”  The flawed ideology of that speech posited that one could oppose antisemitism if one wasn’t talking about those Zionist hoodlums that have the chutzpah to claim a right to their homeland – which basically means everyone in Israel.

Nearly fifty years on, everyone’s favorite contemporary activist, Greta Thunberg, has similarly been filmed chanting “crush Zionism,” and was recently detained for protesting Israel’s participation in a European song competition while wrapped a keffiyeh that’s almost larger than she is.

Back at Cornell, I’m watching similarly deluded ivy league college students dancing and laughing as they adjust their keffiyehs and fervently pound nails into a large “Hands off Rafah” sign they’ve been building.

I ask one of the leaders of the group if she knows where Rafah is; I can tell by the confused look on her face that she doesn’t have a clue.  The only thing she can tell me is that “they’ve evacuated innocent Palestinians there and Israel is going to attack it and kill them.”

Obviously these students are ignorant or don’t care that Rafah is considered the final outpost of Hamas; it’s where the terror masterminds are suspected to be holed up with their fighting brigades, and where the remaining hostages (including Americans) – both alive and dead – are believed to be held.  (Hope Forum, a group which represents some of the hostage families, has criticized Prime Minister Netanyahu for his delay in “conquering Rafah and rescuing [their] loved ones…”)

It’s clear that Israel cannot win the war without going into Rafah.  And sadly, that’s a fact that President Biden knows too, so why would his administration decide to stop sending weapons to the Jewish state?  Esteemed Israeli journalist Caroline Glick wondered the same thing as she concluded that Biden’s recent actions were symbolically saying: “I have totally betrayed Israel and I am totally betraying the Jews.”  She added, “It also tells all of the antisemitic rioters on campus that violence pays … not only will you not be punished for it you will be rewarded.  I am going to answer your demands that the United States betray Israel and stand with the people who massacred [on October 7].”

As I sat under a tree by the Cornell anti-Israel encampment, I watched the ebb and flow of students wearing (mostly black), green, red and white clothing in support of the Palestinian flag that proudly took center stage.  The only American flag to be seen was on my own shirt.  I hadn’t worn it intentionally, but I immediately became aware that it wasn’t acceptable attire.  Only later did I learn that a man that dared to carry an American flag onto the City University of New York (CUNY) campus claims to have been physically attacked and forced to leave.

As I walked by the young student protestors singing and chanting, I couldn’t help but think of the similar young innocents at the Nova Music Festival, celebrating being young and alive just before their sudden and gruesome deaths.  I recall the footage of the Hamas paragliders, possibly drug-fueled, swooping down to rape, torture and kill.  I think of the young woman being abducted by terrorists as she screams, “Please don’t kill me!”  I think of another woman who’s pants were so soaked with blood that everyone was afraid to say out loud what they suspected had happened to her.  And what about the broken body of a 23-year-old German-Israeli woman – paraded through the streets and thrown in the back of a truck and spit on like trash?  What of terrified people begging for their lives and being burned alive; what of the slaughtered children and babies?  These stories are just a fraction of a ghastly narrative that is historic, collective, unprecedented, and overwhelmingly evil to anyone with a soul. (Disturbingly, one Cornell protestor openly wore a shirt that read “The power of evil and curse.”)

The Cornell encampment shamefully paid no tribute to Israel’s tortured dead or damaged living. Instead, they’d only painted a large mural depicting Palestinian facts and figures that no one can verify.

How can so many take the side of Hamas terrorists — including believing whatever flawed casualty numbers they decide to throw out to the world?

The answer of course lies in the rise of antisemitism.  As Franklin Graham said recently:  “[T]o watch what’s happening on our college campuses — that antisemitism after 80 years has come back, the evil, the hatred that’s in the human heart … As we watch what’s happening on these college campuses … We have spent billions of dollars for the Department of Education to educate our young people, and all we’ve done is educate them to hate and it’s sad to see what’s happening in our country.”

Worse yet, one thing we never thought we’d see in America is the rise of antisemitism on the right.  As American journalist Jonathan Tobin pointed out, with conservatives like Candace Owens “who has essentially mainstreamed antisemitism in her own way” and Tucker Carlson “who seems to be willing to platform Israel haters” — we are entering uncharted and dangerous territory.

Libs of Tiktok founder Chaya Raichik summed it up best when she said, “The lack of moral clarity on this issue is really terrifying … The difference is that on the left [antisemitism] is institutionalized, whereas on the right it‘s not — yet.”

Susan D. Harris can be reached at www.susandharris.com

Images: Susan D. Harris, by permission