Israel Under Attack at Boston College ... Again

Once again this year, in what is quickly becoming an ugly tradition, Boston College is being besieged by anti-Israel propaganda.  Maybe most alarmingly, placards decrying Israel litter our campus, as in previous years.  This bespeaks a problem not only at BC, of course, but throughout the West.  It is well-known that Israel has always been threatened—by its neighbors and now by pseudo-non-state actors like Hamas and Hezbollah—but the threat seems to have grown in recent years.  Today, putative "liberals" on college campuses—even our own—malign the tiny State of Israel with no sense of irony.  Those who claim to champion minority inclusion and minority rights find themselves in the absurd and untenable position of condemning the world's only Jewish-majority state.

Indeed, everything liberals claim to cherish—in politics and culture alike—is found in abundance in Israel.  Democracy flourishes there, not just for Jews, as is sometimes mendaciously said, but for all citizens of voting age, just like in the United States or any other consolidated democracy.  Similarly, and also contrary to the common lies, religious freedom is an established fact of life in Israel.  Christian churches and Muslim mosques proliferate there—as do, of course, Christians and Muslims themselves, attesting Israel's unending devotion to religious pluralism.

Other established facts of Israeli life include gender equality and, maybe more revealingly, gay equality.  It is simply incontestable that Israel is the most hospitable, tolerant state in the entirety of the Middle East for gay men and women.  Tel Aviv, in particular, has become a celebrated bastion of gay culture, renowned not just among Israelis, but throughout the world.  Last year, Tzipi Livni, a major political figure in Israel and likely a future prime minister, told a crowd at the annual Tel Aviv Pride Parade that "the protection of" gays and lesbians "is a matter of human beings respecting each other."  And the previous year, the current prime minster, Benyamin Netanyahu, stood before the United Nations and chastised the Iranian leadership's mistreatment of its gay population.

Ask yourself:  If you were gay, would you prefer to live in Iran or Israel?  Jordan or Israel?  Egypt or Israel? 

But none of this matters to the anti-Israel activists, whose ferocity seems to be matched only by their unwillingness to observe the relevant facts.  Instead of celebrating Israel, they work feverishly to malign it—all in the name, they say, of "justice."  This is an Orwellian use of the word indeed.  To be sure, those who would have the United States turn its back on Israel, or who would ask us to boycott Israeli goods, do not advocate "justice."  Quite on the contrary, they advocate no less than the abandonment of one of the world's great liberal democracies—and certainly the one facing the gravest threat, not only from its neighbors, but from the supposedly liberal West, too.    

It should go without saying that Israel has been threatened existentially for its whole life.  Let us not encourage this threat.  Instead, let us support the principles that we cherish in our own country—and on our own campus—by standing up for a free, prosperous, and secure Israel.    

Isaiah Zachary Sterrettel

GA&S ‘10