Among the organizations that promote good will toward Israel at U.S. colleges, the David Project stands out for having an advocacy plan that is particularly audacious in its scope.
The Boston-based group’s new strategic plan is also exceptionally subtle in its means. Rather than focus on countering attacks on Israel, it assumes that students’ attitudes toward Israel are generally positive and offers ways to use quiet diplomacy to keep them that way, based on a long view of academic trends and a sophisticated understanding of which students most influence others.
The David Project published its strategic plan in February in a report, “A Burning Campus? Rethinking Israel Advocacy at America’s Universities and Colleges.” It calls on Israel’s supporters on campuses to forge alliances with ethnic groups that might be sympathetic to their cause, to seek leadership positions on student publications, and to identify and win over those students who influence others through leadership positions or through prominence derived from their accomplishments or charisma.
It also urges supporters of Israel to seek to take advantage of the decline of certain academic fields in the humanities and social sciences, which it describes as hotbeds of anti-Israeli sentiment, as well as of the growth of fields in business and the hard sciences in which faculty members appear more favorably predisposed toward Israel.
The biggest threat to support for Israel on American campuses, argues the report, does not come from pro-Palestinian advocacy campaigns that accuse Israel of maintaining an apartheid state or call for economic sanctions against it. Such efforts “are unlikely to significantly shift campus opinion,” the report says, because people on campus “are often put off by the militant rhetoric of many anti-Israel groups.”
Much more threatening to Israel, it says, is the erosion of positive feelings toward Israel on some campuses stemming from the influence of Middle East-studies departments, leftist faculty members and graduate students, and international and human-rights organizations with histories of directing criticism toward Israel and its policies. Campus support for Israel must be shored up, it argues, if both the Republican and the Democratic parties are to remain supportive of Israel in the long term.
“Our primary task on campus is not to fight the anti-Israel voices, but it is to build pro-Israel support,” the report says. “It is not to teach young people how to debate, but how to make friends.”
Shift in Tactics
The report reflects a shift in thinking at the David Project. Established in 2002, it was at first like other pro-Israel organizations, such as Stand With Us and the Israel on Campus Coalition, in its reliance on publications, guest speakers, and vocal opposition to Israel’s critics. In contrast to its current approach, it had a reputation for hardball tactics, which included producing a controversial 2004 documentary, Columbia Unbecoming, that accused professors at Columbia University of intimidating Jewish students.
Since the release of Columbia Unbecoming, the group’s leadership has changed. David L. Bernstein, who became its executive director in 2010 after 13 years at the American Jewish Committee, says the group has “gone from a more aggressive, take-no-prisoners approach to advocacy to a much more positive, long-term approach.”
The report’s authors surveyed students, interviewed more than a dozen faculty members, and solicited the views of 15 representatives of other Jewish organizations.
Cary Nelson, president of that American Association of University Professors, has been critical of the David Project’s work in the past. But he praised the recent report as offering a realistic assessment of the campus environment for Jewish students and a reasonable approach to pro-Israel advocacy. A similar view was offered by Zachary Lockman, chairman of the Middle East Studies Association’s committee on academic freedom in North America, which often has defended scholars in that field from charges of bias against Israel or Jews.
However, both Mr. Lockman and Mr. Nelson say the David Project’s recommendations regarding some faculty members who criticize Israel may threaten academic freedom.
“In the long term,” that section of the report says, “efforts must be made to limit the ability of faculty members to use their positions to propagandize against the Jewish state.” In the short term, it says, a more effective tactic might be to accuse faculty members who propagandize against Israel of “academic malpractice,” because “the current campus atmosphere is much more sympathetic to charges that teachers are not satisfactorily teaching their subject than to complaints of anti-Jewish bias.”
Also critical of the report is Charles Jacobs, a co-founder of David Project, who left in 2008 to establish Americans for Peace and Tolerance, a group focused on fighting what it regards as radical Islam. He calls the report’s recommendations “necessary but insufficient” because they fail to take into account how little power individual Jewish students have when confronted with academic chairs or programs financed by Arab governments, professors who are radically opposed to Israel, and college administrations that are afraid of stopping anti-Israel propagandizing for fear of being accused of trampling academic freedom.
Finding Allies
Among its recommendations, the report calls for pro-Israel campus activists to seek leadership positions in student government, or to at least to forge ties with student-government leaders “to limit or eliminate the impact of anti-Israel resolutions being passed by these bodies.”
In recommending that pro-Israel students build coalitions with other ethnic groups, the report argues that Indian-Americans “have a potential for natural affinity” with Jewish groups, because they are a similarly successful minority group, and because both Israel and India are dealing with Islamist terrorism and border disputes with Muslim countries. The report points to evangelical Christian and Chinese students as also likely to have warm feelings toward Israel.
Supporters of Israel, the report says, should be wary of staging major events, which can generate protests and end up being counterproductive. A better route, it says, might be to hold smaller events, such as dinners, and invite people regarded as influential.
Israel advocates might also consider holding events that are not focused specifically on Israel but nonetheless get a point across, such as discussions of gay rights in the Middle East. Such a tactic, the report says, “will allow Israel supporters to ‘go negative’ in a manner unlikely to generate the strong backlash common when direct and legitimate accusations of human-rights abuses are made against Israel’s enemies.”
