American University leaders are the product of “decades of brainwashing” according to Israeli President Isaac Herzog.

Speaking in an exclusive interview with the New York Post in Jerusalem Thurday he denounced these people as being on the wrong side in “a clash of civilizational values.”

The Israeli President was reacting to the shocking testimony in Congress earlier this week which saw the presidents of Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania all fail to denounce calls for genocide against Jews.

The testimony of Claudine Gay, Sally Kornbluth and Elizabeth Magill stunned members of Congress and angered the American public. But it had an effect in Jerusalem too.

The 63-year old Herzog sits in the official headquarters in Jerusalem where his father sat before him.

President Herzog grew up in the centrist movement in Israel.

His father, Chaim, was President of Israel from 1983-1993. He himself is a former leader of the left-wing Labor party.

So the current President Herzog knows a thing or two about the left.

But even so he is clearly shocked to see the state of part of the modern American left. Especially in academia.

“Wasn’t 9/11 supposed to be a wake-up call?” he asks. “How can the progressive left in America be so indifferent? And doesn’t it understand that after 9/11 this is the threat? It has nothing to do, believe me, with settlements, with borders, or questions like that of the two-state solution in a teeny-weeny corner of the earth.

“It has to do with a big ideology — like ancient, old ideologies — that want to swarm in and get everybody off the face of the earth. Christians definitely included. And all Democrats, and peace lovers and Muslims who are peace lovers, and Muslim nations who are making peace are all included.”

President Herzog throws out the same challenge about the response to the October 7th massacres.

A quietly spoken man, he describes the events of that day with great force as “A test to the world. It’s a test to all human beings who have to decide between evil and good.”

What happened that day, he says, was “a heinous atrocity, which the world hasn’t seen for a long, long time.”

This “test” involved “taking thousands of people and giving them hell and showing the world what hell could be. And therefore the test is that each person has to look in the mirror and say Am I in any way saying that this is justified?”

He knows that many people — especially on the American left — are trying to dodge exactly that question.

As we were reminded this week, since October 7th, America and Europe have seen huge increases in anti-Semitism. Not least on American campuses.

These are places where professors and students have spent years talking about “micro-agressions.” Only to turn out to be very aggressive indeed in their hatred of Jews.

People who have said that speech is violence and that even “silence is violence” have had nothing to say about the mass killing of Jews.

People who have spent their lives boasting about their feminism have had not a word to say about the mass rape of their Jewish sisters.

The walls of Herzog´s office are adorned with photos of his predecessors, including his late father.

And it is clear that the weight of this history and this historic moment hangs heavily on him. But he is up to the challenge.

Asked whether Israel is achieving its war aims he says “Absolutely” it is.

“It is uprooting, eradicating and breaking apart a huge infrastructure of terror. The world has to understand this is the biggest city of terror that has been unravelled in history.”

An underground superstructure has been built “with smuggling of funds from Tehran and by all the resources that Hamas has taken that were given by the international community to help the people of Gaza.”

That includes the billions of dollars that American taxpayers, among others, have given. All of which have gone “into the ground” to build “a city of terror.”

It is a painful thing to admit in Israel, too.

Herzog remembers when almost his whole political generation agreed that this situation in Gaza could be solved by pulling out every last Jew from the Gaza strip and handing it over to the Palestinians.

“I was a member of the coalition then” he says. “My friends said we would pull out of there and it will be the Hong Kong of the Middle East.” Instead the Palestinians “placed an evil regime on top of it and turned it into a war base.”

He says it is now Israel’s job to “eradicate” Hamas.

In quick order I put to him the advice and accusations which now come in regularly from American politicians and others.

Of a “ceasefire” he says: “And then what happens? Suppose we go to a ceasefire. Remember we have 150 hostages still there. Old people, young women, all under huge torture and suffering. If we don’t finish Hamas’s military capabilities we will simply go back to the same old stuff. Why can’t we offer the Gazan people some better hope? Why can’t we offer Israelis better hope?”

Of claims that Israel is committing “genocide” he says, “It’s a terrible remark. The genocide was applied on us [on October 7th]. It was a clear genocidal attack of thousands and thousands of people and thousands and thousands of innocent civilians.”

He defends the care of Israel’s operations in Gaza stating if someone comes into your home with missiles, guns and grenades “I have the full right to go and catch you and kill you.”

He points out that the Israeli forces phone Gazan civilians, leaflet them, text them and more to warn them when Israel comes to catch “the thugs and the villains and the bad guys.” Afterwards the Gazans will be able to go back and rebuild. “This is all in accordance with international humanitarian law.”

As for the insistence of many American Democrats — among others — that this is the exact moment to double-down on the two-state solution, Herzog has a message for them.

“This is all premature. OK you have a vision of how we live in peace. It makes sense. But right now it’s totally detached from the reality, because the reality requires us to deal with the pain, fear and trauma. Our nation has gone through huge trauma. Why would any Israeli accept under such circumstances the notion that five to 10 minutes from here there could be a hostile army all of a sudden doing the same?”

“We tried every possible avenue for peace when we pulled out of Gaza. We signed a bilateral agreement. Every time we tried we got more terror.”

He relates how workers from Gaza, brought into Israel by well-meaning left-wingers in the south of Israel, turn out to have acted as spies for Hamas. It is these Palestinians who made possible “the raping and burning and chopping. We’ve seen families bonded together in one wire and burned. Unbelievable.”

Does the President believe peace will come in his lifetime? He points to the success of the Abraham accords and then — looking wistful — he says, “You have to believe, you know. We must dream. My dad wrote in his book — in his memoirs — we must dream. And I believe in it. And actually you had examples in history that following terrible, terrible atrocities and wars, people find a way to build a better future.”

In the meantime, he has a parting word for all those people in American academia and elsewhere who have excused the violence that has been brought on the Jewish nation exactly two months ago to the day.

“Those who say [that those] crimes are justified will be judged by history.” They will be forever remembered as “People who were accomplices in thought to one of the worst crimes in humanity.”

Perhaps the presidents of America’s Ivy League universities could do with reflecting on that?