Unis’ free pass for anti-Semitism

For all the weasel words of university leaders about their commitment to respectful free speech, where is the respect in calls across campuses for the destruction of Israel? And how do chancellors and vice-chancellors explain how it came to this, that calls for another Holocaust are now routine at universities? Because that is what the chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” means. It was the impetus for Hamas to slaughter Jews on October 7 last year – the terror raid was not a military operation, with a specific tactical objective or political goal; it was about murdering as many innocent, unarmed people as possible and taking hostages to use as bargaining chips.

University of Sydney vice-chancellor Mark Scott tried to appear even-handed on ABC Radio National on Friday, pointing out that “From the river to the sea” had been used for decades and to discipline anybody on campus for using it “is very difficult”. This was upsetting for some Jewish staff and students, he said, but “that is the way we are engaging with it at the moment and we hope in a respectful listening environment where we are trying to learn from each other that such provocative phrases would not be used”. Vicki Thomson, chief executive of the elite Group of Eight university lobby, said on Friday: “These phrases (including ‘river to the sea’) are deeply offensive, hurtful and distressing, and we would prefer that they were not used. But the fact remains that they are not unlawful … (we) call upon those using this language to reconsider using phrases that are demonstrably hurtful and distressing.”

As free passes for anti-Semitic enemies of Israel at universities, those statements are hard to beat. Professor Scott and Ms Thomson did not even bother to give full-throated support for Israel’s right to exist. That they did not explains a great deal about the power of activist opinion at universities. Left-wing academics have long abandoned arguing for redistributing wealth to help underprivileged people. The orthodoxy now is that economics matters less than individuals’ hereditary or adopted identity, that the world is divided between oppressors and the oppressed.

For many activists, all Western democracies are the former and terrorists such as Hamas and their paymasters in Iran are among the latter. Such illogical, muddle-headed ideas come from the theory of settler colonialism, that colonial powers invade other nations and steal land from indigenous owners to give to immigrants, and that undoing now what happened in the past is the cause that matters most. Ignoring millennia of wars and migration all over the world, not to mention recent invasions and occupations by Russia and China, academic fashion holds the West guilty now for evils of settler colonials past and present.

And Israel is presented as the definitive settler-colonialist state, despite the obvious fact Jews have always, always, lived in what is now Israel, and despite the fact the Jewish state and Arab neighbours now coexist peacefully. As a theory, settler colonialism has appeal on comfortable campuses where what is believed to be morally right trumps reality. But it is utterly divorced from the need for people of all ethnicities and faiths to coexist in nations and across borders, now – regardless of where their ancestors lived. We are watching the appalling harm that applying settler colonialism does to ordinary people, both Israeli and Palestinian. That it is common on Australian campuses poses another question for university leaderships: How is it that academic orthodoxy has become so intellectually shoddy?