On Friday, after Israel had passed its “basic law” that asserted Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people, Hamzeh Daoud, a rising junior at Stanford, stated on Facebook he would “physically fight zionists on campus next year.”
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The Weekly Standard reports that other Stanford undergraduates assert Daoud is an active member in the anti-Israel Stanford Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). One student told Adam Rubenstein of the Standard that Daoud “has been one of the most aggressive and prolific anti-Israel figures at Stanford. . . . Now, he’s calling for violence against pro-Israel students. He will be an RA in a dormitory next year, and this is unacceptable, as he could quite literally threaten the safety of the students in the dormitory.”
As Rubenstein noted, “The national arm of SJP—the group with which Hamzeh Daoud is affiliated—is linked in congressional testimony to some unsavory groups both at home and abroad.”
A few hours after his initial post, Daoud amended his original post, changing the word “physically” to “intellectually”:
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As Eugene Kontorovich noted in The Wall Street Journal of Israel’s “basic law,” the law “would not be out of place among the liberal democratic constitutions of Europe.” Kontorovich mentioned the Slovak Constitution, which begins, “We the Slovak nation,” and lays claim to “the natural right of nations to self-determination” as well as the Latvian Constitution beginning by stating the “unwavering will of the Latvian nation to have its own State and its inalienable right of self-determination in order to guarantee the existence and development of the Latvian nation, its language and culture throughout the centuries.”
Kontorovich also pointed out that ironically, the Israeli Supreme Court has ruled that Arabs are permitted to create residential communities in Israel that exclude Jews while a separate case denied a similar right to Jews. He adds, “In Jerusalem, the Palestinian Authority prescribes the death penalty for Arabs who sell land to Jews. The new Basic Law does not even negate either of those injustices; it merely creates a normative counterweight.”
Kontorovich also noted that even with the new “basic law,” Israel has no official religions, while seven European countries have constitutionally enshrined state religions.
For more on the consistent anti-Semitism found on the Stanford campus, see here.