Michael Oren
Clarity with Michael Oren, Mar. 5, 2024
“How would the long-held Soviet dream of instilling doubt, divisiveness, and self-loathing in American society be posthumously realized?”
“I think it’s fair to say that I am not a Zionist.” So proclaimed the renowned professor of Modern Arab History before a class of Princeton University undergraduates. The remark was accompanied by an ironic smirk signaling understatement. He was, in fact, rabidly anti-Zionist and made no attempt to hide it. At the department’s weekly brown bag lunches, the professor would kowtow to representatives of Syria’s Assad and other tyrants, questioning them about economic, agricultural, and other anodyne policies while obsequiously avoiding anything controversial. The poor Israeli visitor, by contrast, was publicly impaled. “You’re a spokesman for Israel?” the professor once shouted. “If so, I pity you!”
I, too, was accused of being a spokesman, and not only by the professor. I had only recently returned to the United States from service in the IDF, as a Lone Soldier in the paratroopers, and fought in a war. Citing that background, some of my classmates refused to interact with me, accusing me of complicity in war crimes. For the same reason, my former Arabic teacher at Columbia, a person I once regarded as a close friend, would not recommend me for the Ph.D. program in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton.
Feeling isolated and beset, at the end of my first semester, I was ready to quit. I wanted to go back to Israel—even an Israel still at war—where my studies would be regularly interrupted by long stints in the reserves. The atmosphere on campus was simply too anti-Zionist to endure.
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