NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {I} n August 1806, five students at Williams College gathered to pray and discuss their grand vision for bringing Christianity to the world. A lightning storm prompted the five to take shelter under a haystack. Today, that haystack vigil is marked by a Berkshires-quarried marble obelisk topped by an orb, a symbol of the global missionary vision of the young Puritan men who huddled there — for whom neither New England nor the New World were sufficient.

In the decades that followed, thousands of Protestant missionaries were dispatched around the world. Some established missions in the Near East, most prominently in Beirut, where their religious zeal had to be tempered owing to Muslim and Christian sensitivities to proselytism. So the missionaries became teachers, and in 1866 the Protestant missionaries launched the American University of Beirut. The would-be preachers became professors. In time, their gospel message of liberation became political rather than spiritual.

In the 20th century, these missionary colleges, especially American University of Beirut (AUB), became hotbeds of Arab nationalism — an ideology of Arab unity and liberation from colonialism. Arab nationalism, however tenuous its secular principles and incongruent its constituencies, persevered by rallying to the Palestinian cause — which then as now meant little more than anti-Zionism. In that time, the foreign-born descendants of the missionary-professors became an influential class of U.S. diplomats known as “the Arabists.” (Robert Kaplan’s 1994 book The Arabists is required reading for anyone who wishes to understand the history of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East or the State Department’s institutional antisemitism.)

The story of the Arabists began with Puritan idealism, fell into orientalist romanticism, then Arab nationalist ideology, and ultimately tragedy. The enlightened missionaries, with their gospel of political liberation, in the end became the victims of the ideological fury they helped create. Malcom Kerr, the president of AUB, himself the descendant of missionaries and professors, was assassinated on campus in 1984 by terrorists during Lebanon’s civil war.

At State, Arabist influence had long since waned. Old Arabists resented the frequent insinuation that their anti-Zionism had been thinly veiled antisemitism. The term “Arabist” fell into disrepute and soon out of usage altogether. Some foreign-policy elites resented its pejorative connotations of going native. Their descendants could still be found throughout the State Department, though most of the rest of the department had forgotten their story and surnames. (In 2018, an elite-credentialed colleague detailed to Policy Planning entered my office and asked, “Do you have any books by some guy named Kennan? I need to quote him in a talk.” She became a senior director at the NSC the following year and busied the interagency with Libya.) Forgotten or not, however, the spirits of the Arabists are back and exacting a terrible vengeance.

Today, we see once again this nexus between anti-colonialist ideologies, Palestinian liberation, antisemitism, and terrorism — not on the distant campuses of missionaries in the Near East but American campuses and in streets across North America, Europe, and Australia. Israel is presumptively illegitimate — not so much for its conduct but for its Jewishness. According to a recent Harvard-Harris poll, just over half of Americans 18–24 believe that Hamas’s violence was justified and on campuses and in the streets parrot its Jew-hatred; a more sophisticated category of Americans are more subtle but also more united in their opposition to Zionism.

At State, the spirit of the Arabists is back. There are high-profile resignations and leaks about dissent cables, which today pass for courage among public-sector elites who are in a union, can’t be fired, and often employ domestic servants overseas. Staff who swear an oath to the Constitution denounce President Biden for supporting “genocidal” Israel. It’s as if a bias that had to be suppressed in the presence of an unwelcome guest could at last be uttered — as if a long-dormant atavism in the DNA of American diplomacy had resurfaced.

It’s fair to wonder whether antisemitism ever disappeared at Foggy Bottom. One might intuit it at State in a pregnant silence or subtle phrases or body language, in furtive cross-table glances that sought to detect Israeli sympathy or antipathy. But the latent antisemitism in “the Building” (the proper noun by which State employees refer to the headquarters complex in Foggy Bottom) more often found expression through substitute scapegoats. Some openly hurled scorn at Christians in places like Iraq and Syria.

Advocates for Middle East Christians were, it was supposed, the same Christians who supported Israel — the same mindless zealots. At a meeting I once even heard scorn heaped upon the poor Yazidis for their association with Iraqi Christians. “But Yazidis aren’t Christian,” I protested. “They aren’t ‘Peoples of the Book.’ They’re not even Abrahamic.” There was little interest in nuance and still less empathy: Yazidis were Christian-adjacent, targets of ISIS; apparently that was sufficient. Only later did it occur to me that I hadn’t even objected to their anti-Christian bigotry, which wasn’t merely permissible but de rigueur. In reviewing a journal I kept of my time on the seventh floor, one phrase recurs: “Hatred is the lifeblood of the Building.”

The Arabists have had their revenge these recent weeks — on campuses, in the media, at Foggy Bottom, and on the streets of the West and the Middle East. The old Arabists, long gone, would doubtless have objected to the violence and called on both sides to reach a just solution. But, leaning in, they’d doubtless add that the idea of a Jewish state in the Near East was always foolish, and politely refer to their cables that warned as much.

Back at Williams College, amid protests and antisemitic psychosis, the president issued a letter that recalled the importance of free speech and a liberal education. She suggested that college administrations ought not to weigh in on every tragic event in America or the world, and that a liberal education consists of teaching students how to think, not what to think.

That’s a humble vision for any elite American college today, perhaps especially for the one where Puritan idealists heard the call to bring Christianity to the world. She invited students to join a vigil. Whatever the grandiose visions of the young people gathering at prayer vigils today, one hopes their ideas and ideals don’t reap the harm that came, however noble the aspirations, of those who gathered beneath a haystack there in 1806.