OPINION: Banks letter to Whitten isn't about anti-Semitism. It's about political posturing

On Nov. 15, Republican Congressman Jim Banks sent a letter to Indiana University President Pamela Whitten. Posted at Bank’s website, it expressed concern about anti-Semitism on IU’s Bloomington campus and demanded answers to six questions “no later than December 1, 2023.”

On his website, Banks went further, announcing a “probe” of campus anti-Semitism, and concluding with a very threatening reminder: “As a lawmaker, I would note that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act prohibits anti-Jewish and antisemitic discrimination. If IU administrators condone or tolerate campus antisemitism, the university could lose access to federal funding.”

Banks might appear to be a concerned public official who supports civil rights and is sincerely concerned about campus bigotry.

But appearances can be deceiving.

IU profs: Jim Banks' letter alleging antisemitism on campus aims at 'heart of democracy'

Banks’s current crusade against “anti-Semitism” coincides rather suspiciously with his Trump-endorsed campaign for Indiana’s U.S. Senate seat. While support for Israel — something he shares in common with many evangelical Christians, including Mike Pence — surely plays a role in his motivation, Banks’s active participation in the culture wars being promoted by the Republican far-right, which target educators, libraries, and universities, surely plays a bigger role. And so, like many GOP politicians looking ahead to 2024, Banks presents himself as a savior of Jewish students victimized by a university system that supposedly cares about “wokeism” but not them.

The cynicism of this move is betrayed by the simple fact that Banks’s own letter offers no evidence that there has been any Jew-hatred, violence against Jews, or anti-Semitism more generally on the Bloomington campus in the wake of the Oct.7 Hamas attack on Israel.

Banks offers three examples of “antisemitism,” based on news reports:

• Students at a Palestinian Solidarity Committee rally on Oct. 9, two days after Hamas’s attack, claimed they were there to support “our brothers and sisters being mass-murdered, tortured, killed and raped in Israel.”

• Students associated with the Palestinian Solidarity Committee also participated in a protest calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. In Banks’ words: “One protestor held a sign reading ‘Colonialism, Apartheid, Genecide [sic],’ and, according to the Bloomingtonian, an IU student smeared Israelis as ‘occupiers.’"

• Two Jewish members of the IU student government recently resigned, claiming that the student body president “is anti-Semitic,” and also alleging that another student government official said “[a]ntisemitism is not an issue on campus.”

That’s the evidence.

Banks’s own description of the first two “incidents” makes clear they involved pro-Palestinian activism, not “anti-Semitism”; indeed, these events also involved members of Jewish Voices for Peace, a Jewish student group that promotes Palestinian rights.

It is not anti-Semitic to claim that Israel is a colonial or apartheid state, and many Jews have been arguing this for years, in support of a single, secular democratic state in Israel-Palestine. And while some Jewish American students might not like hearing Israelis described as “occupiers,” Israel has indeed occupied the West Bank and Gaza since 1967, and Israeli settlers have recently been attacking West Bank Palestinians and seizing their land.

The website of B’tselem, the respected Israeli human rights group, says this: “Israel’s regime of apartheid and occupation is inextricably bound up in human rights violations. B’Tselem strives to end this regime, as that is the only way forward to a future in which human rights, democracy, liberty and equality are ensured to all people, both Palestinian and Israeli, living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.” Does this make B’tselem an “antisemitic hate group?”

Raz Segal, an Israeli Jewish expert on the Holocaust, claims that the current IDF bombing of Gaza is “a textbook case of genocide,” as he explained in Jewish Currents, a Jewish journal that publishes critiques of Israel written by Jewish people who actually identify with it. Is Segal an antisemite? Is Jewish Currents an antisemitic publication?

The third incident Banks notes — the Jewish student leaders who allege that some other student government officials are “antisemitic” — is simply hearsay, and constitutes no evidence of anything except what the two students think.

As a Jewish native New Yorker who has lived in Bloomington, Indiana, for the past 36 years, has taught many thousands of Indiana students, and has raised two Jewish children who attended public schools here, I can attest that antisemitism exists in southern Indiana. But its primary sources are general ignorance and the presence of far-right groups, such as the so-called “Traditionalist Workers’ Party” and its offshoots, organized out of Paoli, Indiana, by neo-Nazi and Jan. 6 insurrectionist Matthew Heimbach. As far as I know there have been no sightings of Hamas or ISIS in these parts.

Antisemitism is awful wherever it occurs. Threats like those recently made against Jewish students at Cornell University, referenced by Banks in his letter, deserve to be condemned and punished — as do similar threats made against Islamic or Arab students, which Banks simply ignores.

But no such threats have surfaced on the Bloomington campus as a result of Oct. 7, and indeed most of what is currently being condemned as “antisemitism” is not bigotry against Jews but opposition to the Israeli government and support for Palestinian activism — things that are protected by both the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment and the basic principle of academic freedom.

That is why over 125 Indiana University Bloomington faculty have come together to sign an open letter criticizing Rep. Bank’s letter for the way its content and tone, combined with its barely veiled threat, endangers academic freedom and the free play of ideas that is central to higher education.

There are legitimate debates to be had about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These debates are challenging, fractious, and sometimes triggering. But they are debates and arguments, and not acts of bigotry. Efforts to police them, on campuses or in the broader society, run counter to the basic values of a democratic society. And efforts to exploit them for political gain represent acts of cynicism unbecoming of anyone who seeks to earn the public’s trust.

Jeffrey Isaac is the James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science at Indiana University.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: Columnist argues Rep. Jim Banks has no evidence of anti-Semitism at IU