Late last year, a group of Oberlin students delivered a list of demands to the Ohio college’s president and trustees. The demands were ostensibly meant to redress wrongs suffered by the college’s black students. (Oberlin’s president has just offered a thoughtful response, which can be read here.) The goals of the group include an “increase in Black students of color . . . from the Americas . . . the Caribbean and Africa,” “an increase in Black administrators and faculty,” and “exclusive Black safe spaces on campus.” The aggrieved students list some dubious methods to achieve these goals: they “DEMAND” (ALL CAPS decidedly theirs) the firing of various faculty and staff members, for example. But, at the very least, they are specifically pertinent to the lives of Oberlin’s black students.
Except for one, that is. Because tucked into the list of demands is a total non sequitur — a revealing one. In this document, which was allegedly drawn up with the goal of helping Oberlin’s black students, the authors demand that the college divest from Israel. Not Equatorial Guinea, not North Korea, not Cuba, and not Uzbekistan: Israel.
It’s evidence of the growing Europeanization of the Israel issue here in the States. Like in the UK and France, hostility to Israel is becoming, increasingly, part and parcel of standard-issue leftism. In a completely unrelated list of demands, student activists couldn’t resist taking a potshot at the only Jewish state.
