Pro-Israel Revolution on Campus

From INN

I, like many others have been following the on going drama that has been going on at the University of California at Irvine (UCI). For years the Muslim Student Union has created an atmosphere of anti-Semitism and hatred towards Jews and Israel. Now there is a group that is starting to fight back.

Over the last couple of years, the Zionist Freedom Alliance has been slowly taking American college campuses by storm with a message of Jewish rights not heard for many decades. Led by veteran IDF soldiers and activists in Israel, the ZFA presents Zionism to the youth as a revolutionary struggle for national liberation.

Unlike most pro-Israel advocacy organizations that present Israel as a democracy or focus on the Jewish state’s willingness to surrender territory, ZFA speaks of Israel as a Middle Eastern nation with a legitimate moral and historic right to its land. “We tell young people about the fight for freedom from British rule,” says ZFA leader Yehuda HaKohen. “And we explain how we are still fighting against nearly the entire world for our right to live freely in the whole of our country. Educating young people to the history of our struggle creates a paradigm shift in how they view our situation today. If people know two basic facts – that this really is our country and that we fought the British Empire to free it – their understanding of the Middle East conflict is revolutionized. Suddenly the Jewish people are the natives in the story and international pressure to shrink our borders is an act of Western imperialism against an indigenous population.”

HaKohen currently lives in Jerusalem but grew up in New York City and often travels to the United States to organize ZFA activities. While some mainstream Jewish groups focus on Israel's security needs, HaKohen's message to campuses is one of Jewish rights. “We must make the world understand that the Jewish nation, like any other nation on the planet, has a right to self-determination in our country. Not in half of our country, but in our whole country. We have nothing against any other peoples, but the world today has no shortage of Arab states. 77% of Palestine (the territory east of the Jordan River) was made into an Arab state, and we are at least entitled to the remaining 23% that was left us by international law to be a Jewish state. No power on earth has the moral authority to rob us of our land.”

Many ZFA programs, including the “Israel Liberation Week” event, is geared towards promoting Jewish rights on college campuses and educating the general student public to the justice of the Zionist struggle. “Israel Liberation Week” includes a hip hop concert (featuring Jewish and non-Jewish artists), speeches, information campaigns, historical films and an art exhibit honoring the Jewish underground fighters who were executed by the British administration during the struggle for Jewish statehood. By securing strong support from non-Jewish students on many campuses, the ZFA makes it socially acceptable and desirable for Jewish students to support the Zionist cause.

“History is full of great revolutions. And although many of these revolutions have succeeded in impacting the future course of world history, all of them pale in comparison to the Zionist revolution,” HaKohen argues. “Only the Zionist revolution aspires to ingather a scattered nation from the four corners of the earth, to revive a dead language to everyday use, to liberate a homeland from under a mighty world empire and to create a moral society that will serve as an example to the human race. Zionism is the greatest revolution in the history of man, and the ZFA sees it as our mission to drive the revolution forward.”

History is also full of people who are tired of being the world's escape goat for its problems. And on American campuses Jews are the escape goat for the liberal mindset that is prevalent on campuses.

This has gotten to a point where the administration of many Universities have basically put up a sign saying: No Jews Need Apply. This is especially true of UCI, where an atmosphere of hatred and bigotry exists, encouraged by the Administration, the Regents and thus by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The right to a college education free from harassment and bigotry is law in this nation.

And until those in power at and over UCI clean up this little ground of hatred and anti-Semitism, the law is being spit in the faces of Jews all over the US and the world.