DEATH TO ISRAEL. INTIFADA NOW!

Early Monday morning, these words were smeared onto the steps of University Hall and The Rock, hours after I departed a traditional Passover celebration at Hillel. On my admissions tours, I refer to this area of campus, adjacent to Kresge, as “the epicenter of free expression at Northwestern.”

Among the symbols discovered on our university’s oldest building were a series of red handprints. Once painted on the homes of Jews in Baghdad before the Farhud pogrom in 1941, these hands were more famously pictured, bloodstained, after the lynching of two IDF reservist drivers during the Second Intifada in 2000. If you look up “Intifada Red Hands” and click “Images,” it is the first result.

The Daily Northwestern, perhaps the most reliable and respected source of news on campus, called these images “modern symbols of calls for a ceasefire.”

Calling for Intifada (“uprising” in Arabic) is, if not explicitly calling for violence, certainly condoning its inevitability — against supporters of Israel, but more importantly, the Jews who will be targeted by racial association.

The Second Intifada saw the deaths of thousands of Israelis and Palestinians. Supporters of Intifada do not see the end of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a two-state utopia. They see it as the destruction, not only of the Jewish state, but, in effect, the people who live there.

Many of the Jews who fled to Israel after the Holocaust first attempted to return to their homes in Europe, only to find them occupied while they were in the death camps. For many perceived as “colonizers,” Israel has always been home — there has never been any alternative.

Calling out the Israeli government for the suffering they have inflicted on Palestinians in recent years is not in itself antisemitism, as Trump officials would have you believe. Defying the Zionist orthodoxy that dictates Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s worldview is necessary — if the Jewish state is to endure as the only Westernized liberal democracy in its region.

But sentiments that advocate for violence against Israelis do target Jewish students. You may say that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. That the Israeli government, not Jews, have made the state illegitimate. But if you are operating in good faith, truly, then you must also understand the fine line between those two trains of thought.

Israel, its legitimacy and acceptance on the world stage, is fundamental to the Jewish religion as it has been practiced after the Holocaust. Whether or not Israel “speaks for you” doesn’t matter much when you’re Jewish — its flag is the only that bears our identifier, the Star of David.

Republicans have discovered a new way to practice antisemitism, no doubt — a manipulation of Jewish fears in pursuit of the unrelated goals of dismantling the freedoms and credibility of our nation’s top liberal universities. Many victims of this new form of antisemitism, friends of mine, have even been convinced to defect from the Democratic party entirely — if not in elections, then certainly in message and rhetoric.

I do not believe Democrats are antisemites. But it is time to admit that there has emerged a sense that, in modern progressive identity politics on college campuses, “Jews don’t count.”

The idea comes from British comedian David Baddiel who, in his book of the same name, frames the concept in the context of the UK Labour Party’s antisemitic history, calling out progressive movements for their differing standards on antisemitism relative to other forms of hate. Baddiel argues that due to existing prejudices against Jews, perceptions of wealth and skin tone, progressives seldom treat antisemitism as seriously as racism or sexism.

Last week, the Trump administration brought the question at the heart of Baddiel’s thesis to our campus, freezing $790 million in funding over the University’s response to antisemitism. The news sparked outrage from my professors and peers — it is a flagrant violation of the intellectual integrity and freedoms institutions like ours are built upon, and it was done blatantly to curtail anti-Israel speech protected by The Constitution.

The consequences of this freeze on research will be far-reaching as examined extensively by The Daily. It is likewise now the responsibility of Northwestern and other elite institutions to ensure that the critical research under threat of defunding continues to be conducted. News of continued funding for projects impacted by stop-work orders last week is promising, indicating that the University intends to defy at least the most blatant overreaches of Trump’s government.

But this Passover, my second at Northwestern, a kind of cognitive dissonance set in — between my free speech inclinations and the apathy toward antisemitism that exists in this campus community.

The awkward silence on this campus is striking. Perhaps because the graffiti was removed before anyone could see it, it’s almost like it never happened. I guess we must give the University credit here.

Today, I am articulating a sentiment that many feel they shouldn’t raise outside Jewish circles: something has happened at this university to make this place a target for antisemitism.

Nearly nine in 10 Jewish Americans reported an increase in discrimination since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attacks. Like those who inadvertently emboldened Trump by spending their time protesting Joe Biden and Kamala Harris last year, elite universities have let Trump win by failing to see what is right in front of them.

Doubling down on the rights of students to espouse antisemitism while failing to contain its inevitable violence — this is a lose-lose strategy, sans $790 million, in which Jewish kids are made to feel like collateral damage in a fruitless political maneuver.

To do everything in your power to prevent antisemitic vandalism is not to surrender to Trump. In fact, it would make the claims he levies against us all the more illegitimate.

I am not a single-issue voter on Israel. Like many of my peers who participated in the encampments last spring and continue protesting to this day, the endless slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza strikes at my very humanity. I desperately want the killing to stop and condemn the deportation of students who exercised their right to protest against it.

But if your humanitarian movement only condemns hatred when it is convenient to your cause, count me out.

This week, our campus was a victim of antisemitism. We wanted information, and our university hid it from us. Once we had it, our news sources gave it to us so devoid of historical context, it appeared whitewashed.

The breaking news story in The Daily should have been a photo gallery. The words on the steps in the subject line of President Schill’s email.

Today, we have a choice — to choose outrage over apathy. Outrage at how we’ve allowed the extremes to bully us. Outrage at those in our politics who seek to use these issues as leverage in a larger experiment in vengeance.

But outrage, first and foremost, at the way one particular minority group has been made to feel othered here. We must take the fight back from those who seek to co-opt it. If we choose apathy today, we will lose — electorally, wherever you stand, and, indeed, morally.

Aidan Klineman is a Medill sophomore. He can be contacted at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.