“O What is happening on college campuses in the United States is horrible. Anti-Semitic mobs have seized major universities,” Netanyahu said in a video message recorded in English.
For several days now, some of the major North American universities, such as Columbia, in New York, Berkeley, in California, and Yale, in Connecticut, have been the scene of protests and gatherings with tents that call above all for a change of course in Washington’s policy toward Israel.
Netanyahu said the current demonstrations were reminiscent of “what happened in German universities in the 1930s”, where the number of Jewish students was restricted.
“We are witnessing this exponential rise in anti-Semitism in the United States and Western societies, as Israel tries to defend itself from genocidal terrorists who hide behind civilians,” he said.
The Israeli leader also warned that anti-Semitic incidents usually precede “larger conflicts, which involve the entire world.”
At least 34,200 people died and more than 77,000 were injured in the war that Israel launched in the Gaza Strip on October 7, in retaliation for the attack on the same day carried out by the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas on Israeli territory, which killed 1,163 people, most of them civilians. , and 250 hostages, around 130 of whom remain in captivity and 34 have since died, according to the most recent report by Israeli authorities.
The conflict, ongoing for more than six months, has also displaced almost two million people, plunging the overpopulated and poor Palestinian enclave into a serious humanitarian crisis, with more than 1.1 million people in a “situation of catastrophic hunger” that is causing victims – “the highest number ever recorded” by the UN in studies on food security in the world.
Columbia University, the epicenter of the campus protests, reached a last-minute agreement with activists on Tuesday night to reduce the scope of their protests.
That agreement, which avoided a midnight police dismantling, gave campers 48 hours to limit their protests by meeting certain conditions: reducing the number of tents, expelling non-university activists, banning “discriminatory language” and complying with orders of the police in matters of security.
This measure protects the right to freedom of expression and, at the same time, responds to complaints about the lack of security represented by the presence and activity in dozens of tents on half of the main campus, or the allegedly anti-Semitic behaviors of some of the campers in relation to other Jewish religion students.
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