Advocacy Group Devises ‘Make Friends’ Plan
to Buttress Campus Support for Israel
applies.” It is time, they said, to stop being
“frightened Jews of the previous generation
and start strongly speaking out.”
Continued From Page A4
Defining Lines
The pressure on colleges to curb anti-Semitism has grown as campus protests against Israel’s policies have spread. Moreover, the civil-rights office’s pledge to more aggressively
fight anti-Semitism followed statements by
the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the
U.S. State Department defining as anti-Semitic much speech against Israel that is often
regarded on campuses as fair game.
Kenneth L. Marcus, who is unrelated to
the Rutgers student, directs the new Louis
D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, which is devoted to fighting anti-Semitism on campuses and, he says, monitors
“dozens of campuses” as potential targets of
lawsuits. In his former position as a lawyer
for the Institute for Jewish and Community
Research, Mr. Marcus helped persuade the
Education Department’s civil-rights office,
which he had previously led, to take a more
aggressive stance against anti-Semitism.
When the office announced its new position,
he declared that the “elephant in the room”
was the question of how it would distinguish
between anti-Semitism and legitimate criticism of Zionism or Israel.
DANNy GHITIS FOR THE CHRONICLE
Aaron Marcus, a senior at Rutgers, says he
has encountered several incidents that crossed
the line from anti-Israel to anti-Semitic.
The Zionist Organization of America cites
the policies of the U.S. Commission on Civil
Rights and the State Department in arguing
that criticism of Israel should be regarded as
anti-Semitic if it demonizes Israel, argues
that Israel has no right to exist, or invokes
Nazi Germany and the Holocaust in criticizing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Most
colleges, including Rutgers, have refused to
take as broad a view.
Many Jewish activists argue that colleges are experiencing a wave of anti-Semitism
as a result of the international “Boycott, Divest, and Sanction” campaign against Israel
and related efforts to liken Israel to South
Africa under apartheid. The lawsuit against
Berkeley accuses administrators of exposing
Jewish students to anti-Semitism and denying them equal protection by tolerating fake
checkpoints and walls purporting to expose
Jews and other students to the conditions un-
By Peter Schmidt
AMONG THE organizations that pro- mote good will toward Israel at U.S. colleges, the David Project stands out
for having an advocacy plan that is particularly audacious in its scope.
The Boston-based group’s new strategic
plan is also exceptionally subtle in its means.
Rather than focus on countering attacks on
Israel, it assumes that students’ attitudes toward Israel are generally positive and offers
ways to use quiet diplomacy to keep them
that way, based on a long view of academic
trends and a sophisticated understanding of
which students most influence others.
The David Project published its strategic plan in February in a report, “A Burning Campus? Rethinking Israel Advocacy
at America’s Universities and Colleges.” It
calls on Israel’s supporters on campuses to
forge alliances with ethnic groups that might
be sympathetic to their cause, to seek leadership positions on student publications, and
to identify and win over those students who
influence others through leadership positions
or through prominence derived from their
accomplishments or charisma.
It also urges supporters of Israel to seek to
take advantage of the decline of certain academic fields in the humanities and social sciences, which it describes as hotbeds of anti-Israeli sentiment, as well as of the growth of
fields in business and the hard sciences in
which faculty members appear more favorably predisposed toward Israel.
The biggest threat to support for Israel on
American campuses, argues the report, does
not come from pro-Palestinian advocacy
campaigns that accuse Israel of maintaining
an apartheid state or call for economic sanc-
tions against it. Such efforts “are unlikely to
significantly shift campus opinion,” the re-
port says, because people on campus “are of-
ten put off by the militant rhetoric of many
anti-Israel groups.”
Much more threatening to Israel, it says,
is the erosion of positive feelings toward Is-
rael on some campuses stemming from the
influence of Middle East-studies depart-
ments, leftist faculty members and graduate
students, and international and human-rights
organizations with histories of directing crit-
icism toward Israel and its policies. Campus
support for Israel must be shored up, it ar-
gues, if both the Republican and the Demo-
cratic parties are to remain supportive of Is-
rael in the long term.
“Our primary task on campus is not to
fight the anti-Israel voices, but it is to build
pro-Israel support,” the report says. “It is not
to teach young people how to debate, but
how to make friends.”
Shift in Tactics
The report reflects a shift in thinking at
the David Project. Established in 2002, it
was at first like other pro-Israel organiza-
der which many Palestinians live. At Rutgers,
students last year similarly protested Israel’s
policies with an “apartheid wall.”
“There is no question that there are coordi-
nated international efforts to delegitimize Israel
using Western college campuses as a key battle-
field,” says Mr. Marcus, of the Brandeis Center.
An Israeli advocacy group, Shurat HaDin, the Is-
rael Law Center, last year sent the presidents of
more than 150 American colleges letters warn-
ing they may be subject to civil and criminal lia-
bility and “massive damages” if they did not pro-
tect the rights of Jewish and Israeli students.
COURTESy DAvID BERNSTEIN
David Bernstein has led the David Project to
change its “take-no-prisoners” advocacy to
“a much more positive, long-term approach.”
director in 2010 after 13 years at the Ameri-
can Jewish Committee, says the group has
“gone from a more aggressive, take-no-pris-
oners approach to advocacy to a much more
positive, long-term approach.”
The report’s authors surveyed students, in-
terviewed more than a dozen faculty mem-
bers, and solicited the views of 15 represen-
tatives of other Jewish organizations.
Cary Nelson, president of that American
Association of University Professors, has
been critical of the David Project’s work in
the past. But he praised the recent report as
offering a realistic assessment of the campus environment for Jewish students and
a reasonable approach to pro-Israel advocacy. A similar view was offered by Zach-ary Lockman, chairman of the Middle East
Studies Association’s committee on academic freedom in North America, which
often has defended scholars in that field
from charges of bias against Israel or Jews.
However, both Mr. Lockman and Mr.
suit that two students filed against the University of California at Berkeley was dismissed
in December, on the grounds that most of the
harassment it alleged, such as encounters with
fake police checkpoints, amounted to protected
speech. (One of the plaintiffs also claimed that
a student supporter of Palestine rammed her
with a shopping cart.) The judge allowed the
students to file an amended complaint offering
different accusations of administrative inaction,
however, and the dispute has been referred to a
magistrate judge for settlement.
The federal complaint against the University
of California at Irvine, alleging that Jewish stu-
dents were harmed by hateful e-mails, offensive
Nelson say the David Project’s recommen-
dations regarding some faculty members
who criticize Israel may threaten academic
freedom.
Finding Allies
Among its recommendations, the report
calls for pro-Israel campus activists to seek
leadership positions in student government,
or to at least to forge ties with student-gov-
ernment leaders “to limit or eliminate the
impact of anti-Israel resolutions being passed
by these bodies.”
In recommending that pro-Israel students
build coalitions with other ethnic groups, the
report argues that Indian-Americans “have
a potential for natural affinity” with Jewish
groups, because they are a similarly success-
ful minority group, and because both Israel
and India are dealing with Islamist terrorism
and border disputes with Muslim countries.
The report points to evangelical Christian
and Chinese students as also likely to have
warm feelings toward Israel.
Supporters of Israel, the report says,
should be wary of staging major events,
which can generate protests and end up being counterproductive. A better route, it
says, might be to hold smaller events, such
as dinners, and invite people regarded as influential.
Israel advocates might also consider hold-
ing events that are not focused specifically
on Israel but nonetheless get a point across,
such as discussions of gay rights in the Mid-
dle East. Such a tactic, the report says, “will
allow Israel supporters to ‘go negative’ in a
manner unlikely to generate the strong back-
lash common when direct and legitimate ac-
cusations of human-rights abuses are made
against Israel’s enemies.”
anti-Israel protests, and other actions by Muslim
and Arab students, was initially dismissed but
is being reconsidered based on the civil-rights
office’s changed stance on anti-Semitism.
