Yousef Munayyer: ‘This is a ginned-up hysteria deliberately promoted by the government of Israel’

The US Congress, Ivy League universities and other centers of power have been gripped by a ginned-up hysteria aimed at silencing, intimidating and interrogating people and institutions for not being sufficiently pro-Israel. The absurd nature of the allegations being thrown around – including the performative outrage and cynical grandstanding of Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, who recently berated the heads of several Ivy League schools for ostensibly tolerating antisemitism on their campuses – will surely generate analogies to McCarthyism and the Second Red Scare.

But there are important differences about this moment. Unlike the Second Red Scare, which was a particularly American phenomenon, the intensifying repression against Palestine advocacy isn’t limited to the US but is happening in Canada and across Europe as well. That’s because this hysteria is not a reaction to the debate on American college campuses but rather the product of a calculated and global transnational strategy backed by the Israeli government since 2015.

The Israeli government, having realized that it was failing to deal with growing dissent in global civil society over Israel’s oppression of Palestinians, opted for a securitized policy response that would “go on the offensive”. This included a strategy of working with like-minded partners to exact repressive outcomes in countries in Europe and North America that included the passage of anti-BDS laws, lawsuits aimed at NGOs, smear campaigns and the proliferation of speech codes in the guise of combating antisemitism. Israel realized that its vision of apartheid wasn’t going to win the debate so instead sought to shut the debate down entirely.

Yousef Munayyer is head of the Palestine/Israel program at the Arab Center in Washington DC