Discovering the Ignorance Level Among College Students
Regarding Israel and the Palestinians
Protesters against Israel today are mainly the young, the college students who have turned our campuses into such unpleasant and even dangerous places for their Jewish classmates. Are they morally superior to the rest of us? What explains their reaction to events in Gaza? For the non-Muslim and non-Arab students who are inveigled into joining these protests, it is ignorance more than malice – though there is plenty of that, too, which reveals itself when anti-Israel sentiments reveal themselves to be naked antisemitism — that explains those young people who are chanting their anti-Israel slogans on American campuses today.
I wanted to find out for myself what level of ignorance students have about Israel and the Palestinians. So I asked a relative of mine who attends a nearby university to see if he could engage in conversation some of those who had taken part in a pro-Palestinian protest recently held on the campus, and to report to me on his findings. He talked to five students, one on one. His findings were depressing, but not surprising. Asked about how long Jews had lived in the area of present-day Israel, one said they arrived in the area after World War II, three said “thousands of years ago, but for many hundreds of years the Palestinians have been living in ‘Palestine.’” No one knew what the League of Nations was. Only one of them had ever heard of the Mandate for Palestine, and seemed to think it recognized the “right of the Palestinian people to live in ‘Palestine.’” No one knew when Jordan was established, or why, and of course they had no idea that Jordan was created on land that originally was supposed to be part of the territory to be included in the Mandate for Palestine. They all thought that Israel had started the 1948 war and “caused the nakba” by kicking out the Palestinians and occupying the whole of Palestine, “from the river to the sea.”
There was disbelief when they were informed that five Arab armies had attacked Israel first, on May 15, 1948. None of them knew that 750,000 Jews had been expelled from Arab countries in the years following the 1948 war. Four of the five recognized the name Gamal Abdel Nasser, but two weren’t sure what country he was from. No one knew that Israel had taken possession of the West Bank in the Six-Day War; some thought Israel had “seized” it in 1948. None knew that the West Bank had been assigned to the Mandate for Palestine, and had been intended by the League of Nations to form part of a future Jewish state, but Jordan had taken possession of it in the 1948 war. They all knew that the Sinai was part of Egypt, but did not know that Israel had returned it to Egypt after the signing of the Camp David Treaty (which was also unknown to them). None of them had heard of UN Security Council Resolution 242. Asked to estimate the size of Israel, they guessed it was about the size of Maine (Maine is 3.6 times the size of Israel). None of them knew that there are already 22 Arab states – they guessed there were “about ten” — with a total land area of five million square miles. When asked to guess the size of those Arab states compared to Israel, their estimates ranged from 20 to 50 times. In fact, the Arab states are 632 times the size of Israel.
They all believed that Israel was guilty of “ethnic cleansing.” When asked to give an example of that “ethnic cleansing,” they all said that Israel had kicked out 800,000 Arabs during the “Nakba.” When they were told that 160,000 Arabs remained in Israel after the 1948 war, and that now there were two million Arabs living in Israel, they had nothing to say. When asked to estimate the population of Israel, they guessed it was about 25 million. When asked to estimate the population of the 22 Arab states, their average guess was 150 million. The real number is 475 million. When asked to explain what would happen to the Jews of Israel if a Palestinian state were to be established from the river to the sea, three said they should be allowed to stay if the Palestinians agree to it, and two said the Jews should be sent back “to the countries they came from.”
After such ignorance, what forgiveness?
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