Weekly Briefing: Claudine Gay was brought down by the Israel lobby

The biggest Gaza-related story in the U.S. this week was the resignation of Claudine Gay as Harvard president after just six months on the job because she had failed to condemn pro-Palestinian protesters strongly enough. The story has many layers: Gay was the first black female president of Harvard, and subject to racist threats; and academic misconduct charges related to her writings played a role too.

But I wish to focus on the role of the Israel lobby. It is plain that Gay and Liz Magill, who resigned as president of Penn last month, were targeted by pro-Israel forces, including major donors to the schools, after they were insufficiently critical of Palestinian solidarity activists’ comments on Gaza– thus making Jewish students allegedly feel unsafe, according to the charges.

The main reason these execs resigned was they had crossed the lobby during Israel’s war. That signal has gone far and wide and surely helps explain Joe Biden’s passivity too in the face of Israeli war crimes.

This executive drama unfolded with the backdrop of Palestinian genocide, mind you. All this happened during a time when Israel has obliterated much of Gaza, expelling millions, and killed over 21,000 people, mostly women and children, and caused mass starvation. At a time when Palestinians feel very unsafe indeed– the focus is on supposed threats to Jewish students here. A grotesque inversion of reality.

The role of the Israel lobby was clear early on at both Penn and Harvard, in the person of major donors upon whom the modern university is hugely dependent.

At Harvard, Bill Ackman, a donor said to have given many millions to the school, demanded Gay’s resignation because she did not issue a condemnation of a statement signed by dozens of left-leaning student groups at the school shortly after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel that placed the blame for the attack on Israel itself and its policies toward Palestinians. The signatories were anonymous, and Ackman, a hedge fund manager, demanded their names so that these students would be unhirable.  

“One should not be able to hide behind a corporate shield when issuing statements supporting the actions of terrorists,” Ackman said in a post on X.

The ADL—a leading Israel lobby group– also pushed for the naming of the student groups.

Ackman – a Jewish billionaire (according to Calcalist) who is married to an Israeli and had supported Gay’s appointment— would go on to denounce the political culture on campus that supposedly tolerated anti-Jewish speech.

I came to learn that the root cause of antisemitism at Harvard was an ideology that had been promulgated on campus, an oppressor/oppressed framework, that provided the intellectual bulwark behind the protests, helping to generate anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment.

I’d point out that the oppressor/oppressed framework is actually widely held among the young. Large majorities under the age of 25 regard whites and Jews as members of an oppressor class, according to a respected poll. The numbers flip in older cohorts.

A very similar process took place at Penn. There, a major donor named Marc Rowan, a Jewish supporter of Israel who has helped Zionist organizations raise money for Israel, was enraged that Penn had hosted the Palestine Writes festival in September with appearances by Roger Waters and Susan Abulhawa, among others. Both figures are highly critical of Israel (and friends of mine), and the festival was a celebration of Palestinian culture. But Rowan, who chairs the Wharton school advisory board and gave $50 million to Penn in 2018, argued that statements of Palestinian solidarity, including the idea that Zionists are “settlers,” are hate speech that should not be allowed on campus.

Rowan said there was a connection between such speech and the October 7 attack on Israel. Rowan is a big player on Wall Street, and got in touch with “half of Wall Street” to discuss ways major donors can utilize their influence to try and bring about leadership changes at top schools,” CNBC reported.

Rowan was in touch with Ackman at Harvard, in texts and private calls, CNBC said, in a story titled, “Wall Street titans helped to fuel Ivy league donor revolt.”

Rowan took part in a Zoom call Oct. 23 with dozens of wealthy donors to other Ivy League schools, including Yale University and Harvard University, according to those familiar with the call. One of the things they discussed was pausing their financial support for the schools, these people explained.

Rowan suggested that Magill had aided the attacks in Israel by allowing the school to host the Palestine Writes festival. “Her failure to condemn this hate-filled call for ethnic cleansing normalized and legitimized violence that ranged from the targeting of Jewish students and spaces here at UPenn to the horrific attacks in Israel,” Rowan said in an Op-Ed.

Rowan called on his fellow Penn alumni to “close their checkbooks” and give $1 to the school till Penn’s president and chairman of its board of trustees stepped down, Fortune reports.

This was a frank call for boycott. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell praised Rowan, per CNBC:

“At Penn, one alumnus’ call to boycott the school has spread like wildfire, precipitating a crisis that by one account could put a billion-dollar hole in the University’s books,” said McConnell.

Another financier motivated to demand Magill’s ouster was Steve Eisman. Jewish and highly supportive of Israel, he said he had asked the school to remove his family’s name from a scholarship the Eismans had funded.

On November 2, he told CNBC that the call to “Free Palestine from the River to the Sea” is a call for genocide against Jews. And anyone who says this should be expelled:

Their slogan is Free Palestine from the river to the sea… That means get rid of all the Jews. The Nazis had a different way of saying it, judenrein– no Jews… Dressed up in the clothing of progressivism is pure hatred of Jews. My view is that any student who holds up a sign that says free Palestine from the river to the sea should be expelled. That’s not freedom of speech, that’s calling for murder.

Eisman’s demand was prescient. Weeks later, on December 5, Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik questioned Magill and Gay about their failure to condemn supposed calls for the genocide of Jews on campus. The calls were the words “intifada” and “free Palestine from the river to the sea.” The presidents’ neutral responses to the genocide question became a huge story, of course, leading ultimately to their resignations. (In Gay’s case, the academic conduct questions were the last straw.) 

Scott Bok, chair of the Penn board of trustees, also resigned. He was temporarily replaced by Julie Platt– the head of the Jewish Federations of North America, which is an ardently-pro-Israel organization that has raised over $700 million to support Israel since the October 7 attack.

These resignations have all catalyzed an important debate over academic freedom and the role of huge donors on campus. And Rowan and Ackman, financiers who support Israel, have appointed themselves overseers of academic culture in service to the rightwing/conservative efforts. Ackman says that antisemitism “exploded” at Harvard out of the culture of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion that took root after the murder of George Floyd, and that the university was fostering “discrimination.” For his part, Rowan sent an email to the Penn board of trustees last month titled “Moving Forward,” the Daily Pennsylvanian reports, in which he denounced a “culture” on Penn’s campus that “distracted from UPenn’s core mission of scholarship, research, and academic excellence.” He called for new policies on admission of faculty and new rules on hate speech.

But again, let me insist on my focus here. We see nakedly the influence of pro-Israel donors. These universities have become major corporate players in their respective cities, due in large part to alumni donations. So, a rebellion among the donors over criticisms of Israel is an existential issue; and that’s why Gay and Magill are gone.

And the donors’ boycott is completely legitimate in our media. But any effort by progressives to boycott Israel over its human rights atrocities, including the crime of apartheid, is termed antisemitic by leading Democratic politicians and liberal Zionists.

The young clearly do not like Israel. And the American people overall overwhelmingly want a halt to Israel’s destruction of Gaza that the U.S. is sponsoring.

But donors to liberal institutions care about Israel. That is the lesson that Joe Biden also hearkens.

Nathan Thrall wrote of the opposition of Democratic progressives and Jewish donors in the New York Times in 2019.

Despite pointed critiques of American support for Israel by representatives like Betty McCollum of Minnesota, [Rashida] Tlaib and Omar, there is little willingness among Democrats to argue publicly for substantially changing longstanding policy toward Israel. In part, some Hill staff members and former White House officials say, this is because of the influence of megadonors: Of the dozens of personal checks greater than $500,000 made out to the largest PAC for Democrats in 2018, the Senate Majority PAC, around three-fourths were written by Jewish donors. This provides fodder for anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and for some, it is the elephant in the room. Though the number of Jewish donors known to prioritize pro-Israel policies above all other issues is small, there are few if any pushing in the opposite direction…

And as Obama’s aide Ben Rhodes said, when Obama tussled with Netanyahu a year before his own reelection campaign, Rhodes had to call “a list of leading Jewish donors . . . to reassure them of Obama’s pro-Israel bona fides.”

The New York Times will not tell you this now. Its coverage of Gay says the corporate board that forced her out was concerned with academic misconduct allegations and supposed tolerance of hatred toward Jews on campus. Its latest report says Harvard has been “racked with protests that disrupted classes and left Jewish students feeling unsafe.”

So to repeat: Our leading universities are caught up in a giant drama over whether pro-Israel students feel unsafe when they hear the words, From the river to the sea – even as Israel is undertaking an actual genocide of Palestine, in which millions of Palestinians are threatened by bombs, starvation, homelessness, and cholera. And, of course, progressive students are protesting.

Why this complete distraction? Because of the role of the Israel lobby in the establishment. It’s that simple.