The New Campus Fanaticism

If someone says, “This land, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, is all mine and only mine,” then he is out for blood. —Amos Oz, Dear Zealots

In early March the Tufts University student senate met to debate a series of proposals backing measures linked to the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions campaign, including the suspension of the university’s study-abroad programs in Israel. The measures, which also called on Tufts to divest from Israeli-owned businesses and to acknowledge Palestinian “genocide,” were sponsored by the Coalition for Palestinian Liberation, which comprises a number of student organizations, including the controversial advocacy group Students for Justice in Palestine.

The meeting was unsurprisingly contentious, marred by allegations of antisemitic outbursts and harassment, which Tufts claims are under investigation. A Jewish student reported being spat on by a pro-Palestinian student, and others reported verbal abuse. While the measure aimed at ending study abroad in Israel deadlocked, the others passed in a nonbinding vote.

President Sunil Kumar rejected the measures, pointing to their lack of nuance: “These resolutions do not allow for these [contradictory] views to coexist and, as a result, divide our community into opposing groups.” He also condemned the alleged antisemitic incidents as well as “Islamophobic actions.” Kumar’s condemnation was echoed by the executive director of Tufts Hillel, Rabbi Naftali Brawer, who highlighted the “false and dangerous dichotomy” that the student senate sought to codify.

Since the world learned of the horrific attacks by Hamas on October 7, reports of similar incidents at colleges have emerged with alarming frequency. In the immediate aftermath, word began circulating of statements by faculty members and student organizations — open letters, fliers, social-media posts, statements at public events and demonstrations — blaming Israel for the violence and expressing tacit or overt approval of the attacks. Jewish and Israeli students have reported verbal and physical harassment on several elite campuses, including Columbia, Stanford, Emory, and New York University. As Israel’s retaliatory campaign got underway and Palestinian casualties mounted in Gaza, the pro-Palestinian crowds grew, spilling onto the streets of major cities. The mood of the protests was often ugly, marked by acts of aggressive civil disobedience: obstructing rush-hour traffic including emergency vehicles; defacing fliers of kidnapped victims; exhibiting antisemitic symbols and slogans; harassing patients at a prominent research hospital. Meanwhile antisemitic incidents spiked on campus. Title VI complaints and lawsuits have been filed against dozens of institutions. There have also been high-profile incidents of Islamophobic violence, including the shooting of three college students in Vermont. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has crept seemingly into every corner of campus life, including student government, libraries, and dining halls.

Contrary to some media reports, many campus leaders are deeply troubled by the current climate and critical of its extremist tendencies, as evidenced by Kumar’s stance. At Harvard, the focus of much controversy since last October, the interim president, Alan M. Garber, strongly condemned the reposting on social media of an antisemitic cartoon from the 1960s by a coalition of pro-Palestinian groups, prompting a retraction and apology. But their sometimes-flailing efforts to uphold tolerance also have been regularly undermined by student and faculty activists. While both Jewish and Muslim students have voiced concern about censorship, harassment, and personal safety, administrators have often appeared lopsided in their sympathies. In many cases, colleges were wary of offending the sensibilities of pro-Palestinian activists and reluctant to respond to the concerns of Jewish students and organizations. (Columbia and Brandeis did suspend their chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine, and Columbia also suspended an affiliated organization, Jewish Voice for Peace, after they were accused of violating campus rules.) At the same time, colleges have largely refrained from endorsing the far left’s calls for divestment and severing ties with Israel. The spiraling controversy illustrates the difficulties faced by liberal institutions in confronting well-organized activist movements deeply committed to radical agendas shaped by illiberal worldviews.

What does the current spate of activism hope to achieve? Even assuming pro-Palestinian organizations can exert significant pressure on the opinions of students and faculty, resolutions passed by governance bodies representing these groups generally have nonbinding status. At private universities such as Tufts, presidents serve at the pleasure of well-heeled trustees and have a strong interest in keeping alumni and donors on board. Student protests generate negative publicity, but so do high-profile donor revolts; and these can be more costly, as shown by the fate of recently defenestrated college presidents Liz Magill and Claudine Gay. The impact of events on campuses on public opinion is similarly hazy. Media coverage of campus activism tends to have an unfavorable slant, focusing more on turmoil and disruptions than on examining the validity of the protesters’ demands. What is clear is that when college campuses become contested terrain at a confluence of contending social, generational, and ideological forces, we are dealing with a social phenomenon of real importance.

A striking characteristic of this wave of protests: Those most affected by them are other students and faculty on campus, who often seem to be their intended targets. Much of the post-October 7 activism has contained elements of exclusion and scapegoating, clear signals that members of certain groups are not welcome. Notes of vicious, juvenile taunting have entered their lexicon. (“Stinky, stinky,” one of the Palestine supporters at the Tufts student senate meeting allegedly said, in reference to a Jewish student.) Such statements are deeply troubling, as are the popular slogans, such as “From the river to the sea.” They suggest an intent to discomfit, ostracize, or humiliate while also evading accountability — eerily reminiscent of a very prominent right-wing figure in American politics. Such rhetoric pours unceasingly from chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine-affiliated groups across the country. Even more scandalously, several chapters of the organization proclaimed their endorsement of the massacres on the very day they occurred, before the terrorists attacking Israel had been repelled.

Colleges have become a proving ground for incendiary left-wing rhetoric and protest tactics unmoored from mainstream political reality and moral norms. In their elation over the attacks, pro-Palestinian advocates showed themselves indifferent to the reactions of even erstwhile allies who had qualms about murdering civilians, kidnapping, torture, and sexual violence. As details of the October 7 attacks have emerged, revealing unspeakable depravity, the calls for “liberation” of “historic Palestine” by “whatever means … necessary” have only intensified. This rhetorical escalation suggests that somewhere, somehow, a threshold has been crossed, a moral boundary that ought not to have been transgressed. While we cannot yet know what the full consequences will be, the implications are disturbing.

Dear Zealots, a collection of essays by the Israeli writer and peace activist Amos Oz, took shape in 2002 as a series of lectures titled “How to Cure a Fanatic.” It offers an account of ideological extremism that is both searching and deeply personal. Unfortunately, Oz’s reflections remain as timely now as when first delivered. Oz argues that fanaticism is not a feature of a particular ideology or religion but rather a universal human tendency. Writing during the searing waves of violence in the Middle East following the outbreak of the Second Intifada and the September 11, 2001, attacks, Oz notably refuses to demonize Islam or Arab Muslims as an exclusive or predominant source of radicalism. Rather he finds the seeds of fanaticism in the universal human desire to protect cherished convictions — in an attitude that confirms one’s own innocence and righteousness.

This view of fanaticism has intriguing parallels and antecedents. Reflecting on the unwillingness of many white Americans to acknowledge the full humanity of Blacks, James Baldwin reached an almost identical conclusion. In the essay “Stranger in the Village” (1953), Baldwin argued that moral maturity requires relinquishing a sense of innocence. “People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster,” he wrote. Racism, like religious or political fanaticism, is surely one of the monster’s many faces. For the left, the evil of racism is self-evident while the evil of religious or political zealotry often seems less clear. But as the French political theorist Raymond Aron warned sharply: “In any form of fanaticism, even one inspired by idealism,” there lurks another “incarnation of the monster,” a rough beast waiting to be born.

Fanaticism often surfaces in religious contexts. But Oz traces it to an impulse prior to religion:

Fanaticism dates back much earlier than Islam. Earlier than Christianity and Judaism. Earlier than all the ideologies in the world. It is an elemental fixture of human nature, a ‘bad gene.’ People who bomb abortion clinics, murder immigrants in Europe, murder Jewish women and children in Israel, burn down a house in the Israeli-occupied territories with an entire Palestinian family inside, desecrate synagogues and churches and mosques and cemeteries — they are all distinct from al-Qaeda and ISIS in the scope and severity of their acts, but not in their nature.

All such fanatics share a common appetite for violence nurtured by misplaced idealism and a sense of injustice. In their own eyes, fanatics are innocent of the crimes they commit because they see them as justifiable acts of retribution or redemption. As Oz reminds us, the fanatic resents complexity and refuses to tolerate competing viewpoints. With these reflections in mind, the fervor in response to the attacks by Hamas becomes still more alarming; their savagery cast profound doubts on the justice of a favored cause and the aims of a militant group some leftists have defended. Consequently many pro-Palestinian activists have engaged in a denialism characteristic of fanatical thinking. Recent years have witnessed similar conspiratorial patterns on the far right, inspiring a mob of Trump supporters to engage in violent insurrection.

In a 1977 essay, the celebrated anthropologist Margaret Mead also accurately perceived fanaticism as a “panhuman” phenomenon. As a social fact, Mead observed that fanaticism tends to arise in societies undergoing rapid transformation through contact with disparate cultures — as Western societies recently have under the pressure of migration. According to Mead, fanatics are virtually unknown “in relatively stable, isolated cultures” whose members seldom interact with outsiders. The rise of fanaticism relates closely to cultural discord. Indeed it is difficult to say which takes precedence, although Mead suggests that a disruption of stable expectations produces fanaticism in response. Consequently fanaticism thrives in settings like prerevolutionary Russia or Weimar Germany, where a myriad of new lifestyle options rapidly emerges alongside an underlying sense of instability as new elites ascend the socioeconomic ladder. Such societies percolate with ideological ferment, heaving up demagogues, each exceeding the last in fervor and radicalism. Mead’s examples — such as the Paliau Movement in Papua New Guinea — are less familiar to Westerners, but the model holds.

As Mead writes, “The conditions and state of fanaticism recur with the same manifestations: a closed mind, a refusal to entertain counter arguments, a willingness to destroy those who threaten the fanatically held belief, an attraction for disturbed individuals.” When reality undermines a cherished belief, the reaction is often outrage. The fanatic disguises shock with a kind of manic elation. Mead argues that in a dogmatic system a belief tends “to increase in strength as the belief becomes more untenable.” And she observes that fanaticism paradoxically thrives despite the failure of the very expectations it engenders, perversely drawing strength from disappointment:

The Trotskyite belief in the World Revolution, the renascence of Moral Rearmament in Africa, the believers in the ultimate reinstatement on the throne of Scotland of a royal Stewart, the rumors of the existence of the Russian Princess Anastasia, are all examples of the survival of members of a disappointed group who live on, sometimes with new roots, sometimes flourishing again in a new ground.

These various delusions all partake of a conspiratorial structure — like antisemitism, which in the case of the response to October 7 is overdetermined since the victims were mainly Jews. What is more, perhaps no cause in modern history has failed so continuously and tragically as that of Palestinian statehood. Failure, however, only fertilizes the soil in which fanaticism grows.

The charge of “genocide” also warrants scrutiny. The violence of the retaliation in Gaza by Israel’s right-wing government was indeed overwhelming: It provoked a hearing of the International Court of Justice in the Hague, which provisionally ruled that Israel’s military response had been excessive but had not amounted to genocide. Nevertheless, pro-Palestinian groups have ignored this finding, continuing to repeat the charge of “genocide” in ever more strident ways, including at the Tufts meeting. In their zeal they seem unconcerned with the meaning or history of the term they invoke. For one thing, historical instances of genocide have typically invoked flimsy pretexts and reversed the roles of perpetrator and victim. Both the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide involved such playacting and deception. In this instance, Students for Justice in Palestine and other activist groups appear to be cynically invoking online misinformation that the Hamas attack was staged by Israel or never happened, therefore denying Israel grounds for a military response.

Members of pro-Palestinian campus groups — however righteous their concern for civilian lives in Gaza — have shown a striking lack of interest in facts that do not support their preferred narrative. Tragically, this leads to the conclusion that the cause of Palestinian self-determination and statehood has been hijacked by fanatics, both in the Middle East and on campuses in the West. This unmistakably parallels the broader ideological transformation of campus progressive groups: They are keen to emulate the success of right-wing populist groups in advancing their preferred causes at the price of subverting a rules-based order.

Campuses have a fanaticism problem. Facing it effectively requires leaders to recognize that similar forces are at work today as during earlier episodes of violent activism. A policy of complacency and appeasement has not diminished radicals’ appetite for confrontation or their desire to rewrite the rules. The perspectives of liberal writers, such as Mead, Aron, and Oz, who challenged radical movements in the past, remind us of how to face this moment. Ideological frameworks that serve as vehicles of radicalization require scrutiny and critique. Faculty and students who engage in attention-seeking provocations deserve public rebuke. Campus leaders must be willing to enforce institutional rules, not bend them selectively, and to defend liberal principles forcefully and firmly, as Kumar and Garber have recently done. The reputation of higher education in this country will not fully recover until many others join them.