Campus protests: Pro-Palestinian or anti-Israeli?
The executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation says many campus protests have ceased making a distinction between what is pro-Palestinian and what is anti-Israeli. In an interview with DW, Robert Williams also urged against the misuse of the term "genocide" and called for a broader discussion on what constitutes antisemitism.
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00:00 [MUSIC]
00:05 30 years ago, filmmaker Steven Spielberg created the Shoah Foundation,
00:09 shortly after his movie Schindler's List had brought the Holocaust to the big screens.
00:14 He wanted to preserve the testimonies of genocide survivors.
00:18 To this date, the Shoah Foundation has recorded more than 56,000 testimonies.
00:25 DW was able to speak to its executive director, Robert Williams, at a time when
00:30 anti-Semitism is on the rise globally. >> Robert Williams, executive director of
00:36 the USC Shoah Foundation. Welcome to DW. You came here to Berlin from the United States,
00:44 where we have seen a lot of protests at US campuses lately in the past weeks.
00:51 How have you been experiencing those pro-Palestinian protests? Joe Biden,
00:58 the US president, has called them anti-Semitic. Do you agree with this description?
01:04 >> I take issue with one aspect of the way that you characterized it. I think the notion that
01:12 they are pro-Palestinian creates a false assumption that the other side is anti-Palestinian. I think
01:19 those of us who care about anti-Semitism and peace in the Middle East certainly want the Palestinian
01:24 people to live in peace. I would characterize these protests as anti-Israeli and at times
01:30 anti-Semitic. There are always valid reasons to protest the actions of any government.
01:37 More often than not, as of late, we've seen those protests, when they're directed at the
01:43 state of Israel, devolve into anti-Semitic rhetoric, the use of anti-Semitic images.
01:50 And yes, it has opened the door to the normalization of anti-Semitism in parts of my
01:56 country. >> The protesters, though, the students, say that there is not enough pressure on Israel
02:03 to end the war that has already killed more than 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza. And this is why
02:11 they asked their universities to divest from Israeli companies and companies with connections
02:16 to Israel or to the military. Are these not legitimate demands, in your opinion?
02:22 >> Asking for a cessation of civilian deaths in a military conflict is always a concern.
02:30 I think there is a lack of critical thinking at play, in part. The number of civilian deaths,
02:37 as reported by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, has not shifted significantly over the past couple
02:43 of months. The fact that the information is coming to us from a known terror organization
02:49 automatically makes some of those numbers suspect. We certainly know that civilians have died,
02:55 and that's tragic. But in terms of the scale of civilian deaths, by percentage, it's lower than
03:01 any other more recent case of urban warfare, including some of the U.S. military's incursions
03:08 into Afghanistan and Iraq. The notion that U.S. universities are somehow actively complicit in
03:18 this at a leading level is also very suspicious. The idea of boycott as a form of protest has a
03:26 long lineage. But to single out Israel and call for a complete boycott and divestment of Israeli
03:32 goods and Israeli products at the same time you have so many other military conflicts,
03:38 so many other human rights abuses happening in other parts of the world where nobody talks about
03:43 boycott or divestment is suspicious. That is in part why we're concerned about rising anti-Semitism.
03:49 - Because you mentioned the numbers of casualties in Gaza, the reason why also we use these numbers
03:58 is that they have proven quite correct in past conflicts, actually, even though it's correct
04:03 to stress that these are numbers provided by the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza, but they are
04:09 widely used also by the UN. - Correct.
04:11 - Let us have a closer look at what is legitimate criticism of Israeli politics
04:19 and when it becomes anti-Semitic rhetoric. You're an advisor to the International Holocaust
04:26 Remembrance Alliance, in short, AIRA. So where do you draw the line?
04:31 - Well, it's important to note that when it comes to criticism of Israeli government policies,
04:38 no community is more critical than the Israeli public itself. We often forget that prior to 7
04:44 October, hundreds of thousands of Israelis were in the streets. I've witnessed a few of those
04:49 protests in Jerusalem last summer, and they're back on the streets voicing concern about the
04:56 direction their country is taking, the actions of their government, the need to release the
05:03 hostages. Civil discourse and civil disobedience have a role in this, but we have seen from time
05:11 to time certain use of phrases and words that play on old anti-Semitic stereotypes in the context of
05:20 these protests. Obviously, if you are blaming the entire Jewish diaspora, Jews around the world,
05:27 for the actions of the Israeli government, that is a form of anti-Semitism. If you are using images
05:35 that show Jews as somehow particularly murderous or preying upon children in particular, those are
05:43 playing on medieval anti-Jewish stereotypes that have been with us for almost a full century. That
05:50 is a form of anti-Semitism. If you are, quite honestly, singling out the state of Israel and
05:58 calling for its complete destruction because of putative charges leveled against it, but not
06:07 calling for the destruction of other countries that also have their set of problems, it may not
06:13 be anti-Semitism, but it's certainly suspicious. We have seen a rise in anti-Semitism since October
06:22 7th, but already before in Europe, in the US, and elsewhere. How concerned, how alarmed maybe
06:30 are you? I'm extremely concerned and beyond alarmed. In countries that have taken anti-Semitism
06:37 very seriously, like the Federal Republic of Germany, it's still frightening to see that there
06:42 has been more than an 85% increase in anti-Semitic incidents over the course of the last 10 years.
06:49 Now, I think the reason we know that is because Germany has taken the issue so seriously and
06:55 monitors it. In countries that take it less seriously than Germany, elsewhere in the EU,
07:00 we've seen rises of more than 100%. And it's not particularly Eastern Europe or Northern Europe,
07:08 this is something that's found across the continent. How concerned are you about the
07:12 rise of far-right parties in Europe? Also in Germany. And North America. Yes, everywhere in
07:20 the world. But even if we look at Germany, where many people, I think, thought that far-right
07:26 parties had no chance in Germany, and now we can see that far-right parties like the AfD are
07:33 gaining popularity. What do you think about that? It's always been in the quiet underbelly of
07:41 post-war Germany, including in the former Dadao, where you had nationalist parties,
07:47 at least in certain contexts, accepted as part of the norm. So it's not as though it's come
07:53 completely out of the blue. But the rise of certain movements over the last several years,
07:58 beginning with Pegida and now AfD, it is a concern. But Germany is not the only former
08:05 Axis country that has had to deal with the rise of far-right politics. Romania wrestles with this
08:12 on occasion. Hungary, we know the current state of politics in Hungary. It's a challenge that all
08:19 of our countries have. The best way to counter it is to try to shore up our liberal democratic
08:27 values. The same is true of the United States. We have seen the rise of a form of populist politics
08:33 that was never fully absent from the American political scene, but also not something that's
08:39 been accepted on such a broad scale over the last few years. This is a real danger. It's a danger
08:48 for the sake of fighting anti-Semitism as well, because what we've seen in the case of some of
08:53 these far-right parties is a tendency to project themselves as, at the very least, pro-Israel,
09:00 if not pro-Jewish. And why are they doing this? They're not doing it out of a love for the Jewish
09:05 people. More often than not, they're doing it in order to excuse other policies they have that are
09:12 biased against other groups, including Muslim communities that are coming in. All this does
09:17 is separate communities, which is going to lead to more tension. It's the responsibility of good
09:23 politicians, of which there are too few, to try to reunite our communities rather than pull them
09:31 apart. I would like to speak about October 7th, because I know that right after the brutal terror
09:39 attacks on Israel, you have started conducting interviews with survivors of October 7th. What
09:47 is the significance of this day also for the Shoah Foundation? Why did you start doing these
09:53 interviews? So the reason we took the testimonies so quickly is in part based on my experience as a
09:59 historian of the Holocaust. There were very few attempts at the end of the war to take testimony
10:05 of Holocaust survivors. One large exception actually happened at Buchenwald, when the US
10:10 Army interviewed survivors of that camp to take their testimonies for something that became known
10:16 as the Buchenwald Report. And when you look at these written testimonies from 1945 and 1946,
10:22 you see a high degree of historical accuracy, but also a tendency for the fresh trauma to obscure
10:30 some of the memory. Then if you go ahead, in this case 40 to 50 years, and you look at the
10:37 testimonies given by Buchenwald survivors in the 1990s, you see that they remember some of the
10:43 facts. But they've also rediscovered things that they hid in their dark recesses of their psyche,
10:50 as well as they have a better grasp on the emotions that they felt on those days. So what
10:56 we've been doing with these 7 October survivors, we took 400 within the first few months of that
11:02 attack, but we're going to return to them in 2, 5, 10 years, whenever they've had a moment to process
11:08 their trauma, for another set of interviews. This will help us from a scientific perspective
11:14 understand how to take better interviews over time, but we hope it will also contribute to a
11:19 sense of healing across Israeli culture and across the world, where we're still trying to process
11:25 what exactly happened on that day. - And you are still looking for Holocaust survivors
11:32 to give their testimonies. And still we know this is a race against time. Soon there won't be any
11:39 Holocaust survivors to tell us first-hand about what they had to experience. What can you do
11:46 to actually give these testimonies to future generations, to make it accessible for them to
11:53 kind of meet a survivor? - There are about 245, 246,000 Holocaust survivors still alive today.
12:02 Their average age is more than 86 years old. And the vast majority of those survivors
12:08 experienced the Holocaust in the states of the former Soviet Union, in Eastern Europe,
12:15 and in North Africa, regions that most of us actually did not take testimony from in the 1990s.
12:21 So in order to build a more complete collection for historians, scholars, and family members down
12:28 the road, we have to take those testimonies before it's too late. - I would like to ask one question
12:34 that goes a bit further, because I know that the Shoah Foundation is not only doing interviews
12:41 with survivors of the Holocaust. I mean, you already told us about October 7th, but also about
12:46 with survivors of other genocides. Now, this term genocide is highly being debated at the moment,
12:52 also in regards to Israel, even in front of the International Court of Justice.
12:58 What's your take on this term of genocide in regards to Israel? - Oh, in regards to Israel?
13:05 In regards to Israel, I think the current conflict fails to meet the threshold of the 1948
13:11 UN Genocide Convention. Now, does that preclude the possibility of other crimes having happened?
13:18 No, of course not. We know that the Israeli military is investigating several cases of
13:24 excessive use of force in this conflict. But from the perspective of a scholar of the Holocaust
13:31 and of genocide, it does not meet that international legal standard. There's a second
13:36 part to the question, though, that I think is also worth noting. The term genocide has a
13:42 particular political value that has forced so many other atrocity crimes to try to claim the
13:51 mantle of genocide. From the perspective of a survivor of any of these incidents,
13:57 does it really matter if you were the survivor of an act of ethnic cleansing, or a mass atrocity,
14:03 or a war crime, or a genocide? Not really. Ultimately, these terms end up becoming used
14:10 as political tools that inhibit global peace. - Thank you so much for the interview.
14:17 Thank you.