Israel targets southern Gaza with airstrikes after cease-fire with Hamas collapses

The chairman of the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center
in Jerusalem, whose mandate is to use the example of the systematic genocide of millions of Jews by the Nazis in World War II as a teaching point to prevent such mass atrocities from happening again, believes that the rampant rise in antisemitism and anti-Zionism in the U.S., and around the world, stems from the inaction of administrators at Ivy League colleges and other institutions of higher learning.

Yad Vashem Chairman Dani Dayan, speaking to Fox News Digital after a weeklong trip to the U.S. where he met with presidents, provosts and deans from East Coast colleges, including Columbia University, University of Pennsylvania, New York University and Queens College, said that in many of these distinguished institutions, where there has been a sharp rise in incidents of antisemitism, there were academics peddling inaccurate theories about Israel.

“In Ivy League colleges across the U.S. … there are groups of academics, not all of them, but important academics, especially in the humanities and social sciences, that are meticulously, stone-by-stone and step-by-step, building pseudo-academic, pseudo-scientific, pseudo-intellectual theories justifying the elimination of the Jewish state,” he said.

“Violent demonstrations with students calling ‘from the river to the sea’ or for a ‘global Intifada’ are, of course, extremely disturbing,” said Dayan, a former Israeli consul general in New York. “But in some sense, these are just a symptom.”

“With all those academic buzzwords about the ‘ethnic-nationalistic,’ ‘settler colonial,’ ‘colonization of Palestine’ and ‘apartheid,’ they are building slowly yet constantly, a pseudo-scientific truth of academic theories,” he said, adding that “first it’s the demonization of Israel and then justification, after that they are actively advocating for the elimination of the Jewish state, and that is terrible.”

Dayan said that calling for the elimination of the world’s only Jewish state is “a terribly antisemitic thing to do.”

Fox News Digital’s Ruth Marks Eglash contributed to this update.