The anti-Israel climate on U.S. campuses today derives from a combination of 1960s moral relativism and antisemitic Soviet propaganda, David Bernstein, founder of the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values, said in an extensive interview with Breitbart News.
Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs “indoctrinated a generation of young people in this oppressor-oppressed ideology,” he told the publication.
“They created a new field called ‘Zionology’ and had best-selling books written that reached hundreds of thousands of people, and that placed Zionism front and center in the post-colonial narrative,” he said.
By 2020, when George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer, “we really began to deal with the university that was fundamentally illiberal, hostile to multiple points of view, and perhaps a powder keg on the issue of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict,” Bernstein added.
Bernstein recommended three steps for countering the anti-Israel ideologies: ban DEI programs or “transform” them “to the point where they’re not ideological indoctrination centers”; cut foreign funding to universities; and encourage universities to “create centers for open inquiry that allow academics with different points of view to teach in an intellectually open way.”