Recently there was an important event at Columbia Law School. The school’s law review published a piece on a sweeping legal theory of the Nakba by Harvard law student Rabea Eghbariah — and the board of the law review stepped in in unprecedented fashion to shut down the publication online. After the Intercept reported that the website had been “nuked,” the authoritarian move became an embarrassment; and the piece was restored. Though students obviously feel chilled.
This story reminds us that the U.S. establishment is firmly and blindly pro-Israel. The board that squashed the students included operators of the highest order: professor Gillian Metzger, who also serves in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel; Justice Department senior counsel Lewis Yelin; and Ginger Anders, a former assistant to the U.S. Solicitor General.
We used to call people like this the ruling class. These high appointees understand what American values are, and today American values are standing by Israel even as it massacres thousands of children. These values surely have to do with the importance of Zionist donors to Joe Biden and universities, but they go beyond that to the makeup of the U.S. establishment. Pro-Israel voices — including Jewish Zionists — are a significant element of corporate culture. They are a generational force. Young progressives and young Jews are rejecting Israel. But they aren’t in the power structure.
One of the most telling stories about the establishment came and went last November. Two dozen leading law firms sent a letter to the leading law schools, including Harvard and Columbia, saying that they would not hire students from law schools that failed to crack down on antisemitism. And one of those firms, Davis Polk, rescinded job offers to three students who had taken part in pro-Palestinian protests. The letter said:
“We look to you to ensure your students who hope to join our firms after graduation are prepared to be an active part of workplace communities that have zero tolerance policies for any form of discrimination or harassment, much less the kind that has been taking place on some law school campuses.”
A partner at Sullivan & Cromwell told the New York Times that Jewish students feel “actually scared,” “threatened,” and “betrayed.”
The letter was a shot across the bow of prestige schools well before Congress brought down the boom on the Harvard and Penn presidents in December. After all, the function of these schools — the reason young people clamor to get into them — is to gain employment in prestigious jobs upon graduation.
Just a week after the letter — shockingly — Columbia suspended the Palestinian solidarity groups Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP).
The law firms’ letter was “spearheaded,” the firm Paul, Weiss bragged at the time, by two Jewish chairs at two white-shoe firms (Joe Shenker, former chair of Sullivan and Cromwell, and Brad Karp, current chair at Paul, Weiss).
The letter was published at a time when many corporate leaders were issuing condemnations of the Hamas attack on Israel. Paul, Weiss chair Brad Karp explained to the Times that he was disappointed that more leaders weren’t doing so — and that being for Israel was no different than other great progressive causes, civil rights and women’s rights included.
Hellbound and Down 
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