Students were expelled for protesting my Columbia class on Israel. Here’s what they taught me

As an Israeli historian specializing in the history of Zionism and Israel, I arrived in New York at the start of January to teach a course on the history of modern Israel at Columbia University — and, without knowing it at the time, to become part of this year’s first major campus uproar over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

During my first class, I noted that when it came time to cover the 1948 war we would study both narratives: The Israeli one, of a war of Jewish independence after the Palestinians rejected the partition plan and Arab armies invaded, and the Palestinian one, which emphasizes “the Nakba,” the catastrophe of displacement. At that exact moment, pro-Palestinian demonstrators burst into the classroom. They brandished posters calling for the eradication of Zionism, and shouted various things about “genocide in Gaza.”

Now, two of those protesters, both seniors at Barnard College, have been expelled. But the implications of the incident go far beyond the American campus politics that have characterized stateside impressions of the Israel-Hamas war. It made me feel like a Jew in a way I had never felt before — and also, crucially, demonstrated to me the differences in how an Israeli Jew perceives such events compared to an American Jew.

I arrived in New York after a terrible year in Israel. The Oct. 7 massacre was followed by constant sirens and missiles from all directions, alongside daily accounts of the horrors experienced by the hostages. I was shocked by the protesters, in a visceral way. In the very first seconds after they entered with their faces covered, my immediate association was with terrorists. That is how terrorists appear in Israel.

But coming, as I did, from an environment of constant threat and terror, I ultimately saw their intrusion into the classroom not as a threat to my existence, but rather as harassment.

But for my Jewish students — and not all students in the class, it bears noting, are Jewish — that intrusion, and the wave of campus protests it symbolized, appeared to undermine their sense of home in the United States. The very fact that someone would dare to threaten or harass a Jewish student solely because of what Israel does struck them as a fundamental imperiling of their future existence in their country, an antisemitic act with implications for all Jews.

To my eyes, it is clear that the demonstrators at the very least hold a different attitude toward Jews than toward other groups. Otherwise, it is hard to understand why their moral outrage was not directed, for example, at the study of Russia following the war in Ukraine, among many other injustices unfolding today. They struck me, clearly, as narrow-minded individuals who, at best, have an overly one-sided view of reality.

I saw the impact of their protest right away. After the incident, one of my female students even requested to switch to studying via Zoom. American culture is rooted in politeness and equivocal speech, whereas in Israel people tend to bluntly impose their opinions on one another; this division also reflects the difference, I think, in how Israeli and American Jews perceive such protests.

In other words, for my American Jewish students, this kind of outburst is an aberration, far removed from their normal day-to-day existence. It’s a chilling reminder that they are minorities in this country, whereas when an Israeli is attacked, he still feels that he is part of the majority in his own country.

I visited Columbia for the first time about a month after the war broke out, when I participated in a panel discussing the Oct. 7 attack. That visit took place amid an early peak of the anti-Israel protests that marked the first year of the war. This year, matters are somewhat calmer, and it is evident that the university is trying to remedy the situation — in part by increasing the number of courses, like mine, that deal with the history of Israel and the conflict, taught by historians who are experts on the subject.

Hence the great irony of the intrusion: These students were protesting for the exact same reason I was at Columbia in the first place, which is, a massive Middle Eastern disruption has made many people feel deeply invested in a conflict about which they know very little. These protesters believe there is only one true narrative of the story of this disruption, but a good historian cannot simply present one side of the story. When the conflict is studied in depth, it becomes clear that placing one-sided blame on Israel is a move profoundly divorced from reality.

If anything, what the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack has shown me most clearly is that the very way we understand reality fluctuates with history. Since that horrific day, I have seen most Israelis I know internalize concepts that have long accompanied Jewish history — persecution and unjust isolation, just to begin with — as if they are unfolding in the present. In other words, Israel has become more Jewish in its perception of reality.

For instance, the violence that erupted last November in Amsterdam against Maccabi Tel Aviv soccer fans was described by many in Israel as a “pogrom.” The violence against Maccabi fans — in a place where Anne Frank hid during the Holocaust — was indeed shocking, and, I believe, clearly characterized by antisemitic motives. However, the use of the term “pogrom” is not historically accurate, and may distort the understanding of the situation in Israel and abroad.

A pogrom is an attack against a minority — religious or national — that finds itself defenseless because authorities allow or even encourage the disturbances. In this case, the Israelis who were brutally attacked are not living as a minority in the Netherlands, and the authorities, even though they did not perform their duties properly, essentially sided with the victims.

But sometimes historical precision is less relevant than the dreadful feeling an event evokes. During the infamous Kishinev pogrom of 1903, there were Jews who defended themselves and fought back against the attackers. But collective memory largely excluded their stories, in part because of the poem “In the City of Slaughter” by Chaim Nachman Bialik, who when sent to Kishinev to report on the events chose to focus only on helplessness and ignore attempts at self-defense. Thus, the myth of the antisemitic pogrom against helpless Jews was entrenched.

Those collective memories are still a burden on Jews, in America and Israel. I see the weight of that memory on Israelis, back at home. I see it in my students, after the January protest.

The war and the events surrounding it have proven that regardless of one’s level of sympathy or criticism toward the Israeli government, if you are Jewish, you have almost certainly felt that your experience in the last year was different from that of non-Jews because of what is happening in Israel. That truth indicates, in a way, a failure in the Zionist strategy. The Zionist idea arose from the desire for normalcy that would provide a home for Jews in their historical homeland and enable the existence of Jews in other states in the world as equal citizens. The fact that many places in the world become dangerous or unpleasant precisely when Jews have their state shows how that idea remains, in many ways, an ideal.

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