An American flag hangs from the roof of Lisner Hall at the George Washington University Law School on May 3, 2024, in Washington, DC. (Photo by Kent Nishimura/Getty Images)

This month antisemitic pro-Hamas protests erupted on college campuses across the United States. These protests claim to oppose Israel but are ultimately anti-American. Watch Michael Doran, Tablet’s Liel Leibovitz, Columbia University Professor Ran Kivetz, and Scholars for Peace in the Middle East Executive Director Asaf Romirowsky discuss the sources of the protests and why they matter for US security.

Watch, read, or listen to the event here or see their key points below.

Key Insights

1. The nature of these protests goes against the core principles of a great institution of learning.

“Well, I think the first thing that really struck me is the complete and utter lack of commitment to what a great university ought to be, which is an institution dedicated to the free and unfettered exchange of ideas without fear of coercion, violence, or outbreak of bigotry. . . . Second of all, I think a certain kind of non-tolerance for the types of behaviors that we’ve seen on Columbia’s campus—which included. . . . calls like, ‘Jews, go back to Poland,’ blockage of classrooms so that Jewish students will not be able to enter, taking over buildings, including Hamilton Hall, in ways reminiscent of the ’60s demonstrations—all those should be completely and utterly anathema to a great institution of learning.”

— Liel Leibovitz

“The problem is professors, many professors, that have been brainwashing students for decades at Columbia and elsewhere, by telling students, for example, ‘Hezbollah is not a terrorist organization.’ But it’s listed by the US as a terrorist organization. But they tell students taking mandatory classes, year in and year out, hundreds, ‘It’s not a terrorist organization, it’s a resistance organization, it was founded by Israel.’ It is not tethered to reality. If you traded stocks this way, you’d lose your pants sooner or later. So if we seek some relevancy, as well as rigor, maybe there’s a chance, but we cannot do it on our own.”

— Ran Kivetz

2. The protests pose a national security threat.

“But what we have on our hands . . . isn’t just some kind of freak show; what we have on our hands, I’m sad to say, is a full-blown national security threat. . . . When you have a fifth of the undergrad population of a major American university going outright and chanting in support of a terrorist organization, chanting in support of America’s sworn enemies, in some cases, like in Michigan, distributing pamphlets that say, ‘Death to America,’ and when you could rest assured that these kids would very soon find their way into elite institutions—into high-ranking positions—you should be very, very, very worried. And the reason you should be very worried is . . . that this is only marginally about Jews, and only marginally about Israel, or Palestine, or anything else—this is about America.”

— Liel Leibovitz

3. Israel’s enemies are America’s enemies.

“For the axis of Iran, Israel is perceived to be, as all of us know, the small Satan. America is the large Satan. [Iran and its proxies] are tackling these institutions for the very reason that they were created. The [Palestine Liberation Organization], back in the ’60s, came to the conclusion that they may not be able to defeat Israel militarily, but they can do that through the use of, what we call in the social sciences, soft power, agents of influence, and that’s been the academy. I believe that knowing the problem, we also know what the solution needs to be: we need to help [those who] are looking for sanity within the institutions, but also, to find the right institutions that could basically bring us back somewhere to some kind of middle. We have lost any kind of sense of the compass.”

— Asaf Romirowsky

Quotes may be edited for clarity and length. 

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