JEWISH GROUP:The Intifada at MIT
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Yossi Sheffi, a professor of engineering, has produced his own report, “Unsafe at MIT,” which he self-published Tuesday. Mr. Sheffi, born in Israel in 1948, has taught at MIT for 48 years and has no plans to retire.
The book’s early chapters remind us of a fact noted often in these pages but easily forgotten, namely that the anti-Israel campus protests didn’t arise in response to the war in Gaza but to Hamas terrorists’ murdering, maiming, raping and abducting thousands of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7. The agitators didn’t demand a return to Israel’s borders in 1967 or a “two-state solution” but the Jewish state’s eradication.
Mr. Sheffi has interviewed scores of Jewish and Israeli students and recorded their heartbreak. Overnight many of their peers, professors and advisers turned into adversaries. Ms. Kornbluth (MIT President), in a statement published Oct. 10, 2023, said that “in my opinion, such a deliberate attack on civilians can never be justified” and lamented the “conflict that will also gravely harm or kill many innocent Palestinians in Gaza”—this long before Israeli forces entered Gaza.
“Many students and postdocs lost friends and illusions that week,” Mr. Sheffi writes. “The Infinite Corridor”—the school’s main passageway—“now sprouted rows of folding tables draped in Palestinian flags; chalked slogans appeared on walkways and walls. Keffiyehs became the accessory of choice across classrooms, laptop covers were suddenly plastered with red-green-and-black stickers, often in the shape of the map of Israel, and bulletin boards bristled with libelous denunciations of the ‘Zionist State.’ ”
The book lives up to its title. Mr. Sheffi relates stories of students blocked from campus thoroughfares, targeted by name as “Zionists” in online forums, taunted outside their locked office buildings, and screamed at by outside agitators—all in flagrant violation of school policy and, in many cases, of federal law. Meanwhile the administration caved in to the demands of protesters, punished few if any for flouting campus rules, and pretended not to know the meaning of intifada and red handprints—the latter an allusion to a Palestinian proudly brandishing his bloody hands after the lynching of two Israeli reservists in 2000.
If any other minority had been treated as Jews and Israelis were on America’s finest campuses two years ago, we would have seen National Guardsmen patrolling their leafy quads.
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