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| [Tel Aviv U] Rafi Greenberg and colleagues lead a strugle to take “City of David”, most important archeological site, out of the hands of Jews |
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Needless to say, the excavations run by Elad and the IAA violate professional rules of ethics concerning "equitable partnerships and relationships" between archaeologists and indigenous peoples (as stipulated by the World Archeological Congress) as well as the universally accepted convention on excavation, including excavating in occupied territories (the New Delhi Agreements). That science is being sacrificed to serve a narrow political agenda can be seen from the fact that not one of the historical Muslim buildings in the national park has been preserved, and some were not even documented.
Many Israeli archeologists are unhappy with this situation, though most of them are unwilling to openly criticize the IAA, their main source for jobs and funds. Still, a small group of Israeli archeologists led by Dr. Rafi Greenberg (Tel Aviv University) has established ties with the residents of Silwan and has been lobbying for Elad’s removal from the site. Renowned scholars throughout the world, including many senior historians and archaeologists, have signed a petition to the same effect. |
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| [TAU, Liguistics] Prof' Rachel Giora: Milestones in the history of the Israeli Boycott, Divestment & Sanction (BDS) movement: A brief chronology |
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The emergence of the Israeli boycott, divestment, and sanction (BDS) movement has been influenced by a number of factors. In essence, however, the movement in Israel has been basically reactive - a response to (a) international calls following traumas, and to (b) ideas, primarily those introducing the South African
model into the international and Israeli discourse; and perhaps most significantly, it has evolved in response to (c) calls by Palestinians to the international community to boycott Israel, divest and disinvest from it, and sanction it.
Although the history of the BDS movement in Israel is reviewed here chronologically, the assumption is that all these factors have worked interactively and in tandem to influence the development of the BDS movement worldwide as well as in Israel.
The major role of the Israeli BDS movement has been to support international BDS calls against Israel and legitimize them both as clearly not anti-Semitic, as not working against Israelis but against Israeli governmental policies, and as supporting a legitimate nonviolent means by which Palestinian civil society can
reclaim and re-own its people’s rights and freedoms. Alongside solidarity with the Palestinians, the driving force behind the Israeli BDS movement has been the realization that the criminal occupation and repression of the Palestinian people,
as practiced by Israeli governments, will not be redressed without significant international pressure. |
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| [TAU, Philosophy] Dr. Anat Matar: "Supporting the Boycott on Israel: A View from Within", lecture at SOAS Palestine Society, 17th February – 7pm |
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Gaza: Our Guernica – A series of events to commemorate Gaza one year after Israel’s attack
10 January, 2010
Gaza: Our Guernica organized by the Palestine Societies at SOAS
University College London
Imperial College
Kings College
Goldsmiths
University of Westminster
Wed 17th February – 7pm
***Supporting the Boycott on Israel: A View from Within***
Dr. Anat Matar (Tel Aviv University)
SOAS – Room tbc
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| [TAU, Sociology] Yehouda Shenhav: Israeli TV confrontation a metaphor of the moral crisis in Zionism...the liberal Israeli becomes domineering and racist |
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This drama reveals the sting of the conflict and which demonstrates how the gap between liberalism and racism is hair thin. At the moment of truth, the liberal Israeli becomes domineering and racist. This is a glaring product of the nationalistic model called a “Jewish and Democratic state” and one that keeps the skeleton of 1948 hidden in closet.
Especially, since for the majority of Palestinians inside and outside the Green Line, the war of 1948 is not over yet. The “Jewish Democratic” model is based on the denial of history.
In the new anthology of Hebrew poetry about the Nakba, the periodical “Sedek” [crack] published by the editor Professor Chanan Chaver one can find solid testimony of what happened in 1948 from the mouths of Jewish poets. That is the skeleton in the closet, if it is discovered it will threaten the morality and justness of the State of Israel.
The meeting between MK Zahalka and Margalit is a metaphor of the moral crisis in which Zionism is found today. Zahalka dared in his “impudence” to point out the skeleton in the closet, the same one that Margalit is trying to hide. As in totalitarian regimes, Margalit wants to aid the regime in hiding the secret and employs symbolic violence. Margalit’s position is dangerous to the future of the Jews because it seeks to ensure the rights and security through the perpetual use of tanks, instead of opening the conflict up [and getting to the bottom of it]. |
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| [TAU, Cohn] Yossi Schwartz, part 2: The Israeli education system is sending us 1000 faschists per year. My kids, I am very proud, didn't do military
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Yossi Schwartz Lectured on 06 November 2009 in Berlin
A talk with Yossi Schwartz, professor of history at the Tel Aviv University and others,
...But my concern today is not as much the government but the Israeli youth. An Israeli general asked: What do you want from us? The Israeli education system is sending us 1000 faschists per year. My kids, 18 and 20 years old, I am very proud that they did not join the military. They were the only ones from their class. From this one can predict that the situation in 20 years will be worse. The destruction of the Israeli society from inside in general is not as fast as one may think. The last 30 years was spoken about it once and again. The question is, what will happen to the absurd situation of the millions of Palestinians without civil and human rights. Two States solution necessary. Israel would never have had the opportunity of 40 years of occupation without the support of USA and Europe. All the money from Europe has gone to Israel only. Israel is privileged.
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| [Tel Aviv University, Director of Cohn Institute] Dr. Yossi Schwartz lectures in Berlin: "Zionism, Colonialism and Apartheid". 6th November, 2009 |
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| Zionists themselves declared their project as a colonialist project, sometimes with a very positive meaning. Israeli apartheid in some aspects is worse than the Southafrican (26:15). The South Africans who were fighting against apartheid find this today, like Richard Goldstone, a good pro-Israel Zionist, who gave his report about it. In Israel there is no territorial apartheid, like it was in South Africa, but the Jews living in Nablus, Bethlehem etc. are concerned, there are existing separate streets for jews and Arabs. Pro-Zionist would never accept my arguments. |
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| [Tel Aviv U] Anat Biletzki: Jerusalem...this heart of Israeli consensus is just as consensually illegal, consensually immoral, consensually Occupation. "Jerusalem – An Inexorable Trajectory" |
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For forty-two years the relentless course of the Jewish urban takeover of greater Jerusalem has suffered a minimum number of setbacks and is now enjoying a predictable triumph. The name of that triumph is “the heart of the consensus.” Jerusalem – all of it – is in the heart of Israeli consensus.
Poignantly, we are launching the Jerusalem2050 website at the same time that Jerusalem has come to the fore with the brouhaha over the Gilo plans for expansion. But notice the point of upset, the source of rancor. This is not, say the almost unanimous defenders of the plans, an outpost, not a settlement, not a contested “new” neighborhood (at one point, every single one of these neighborhoods was new) where Palestinians are being ousted from their houses. This is Gilo, a suburb of Jerusalem, in the heart of Israeli consensus. On the other side, however, on the Palestinian side, and in the international discourse, this heart of Israeli consensus is just as consensually illegal, consensually immoral, consensually Occupation. |
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| TAU Professor Yossi Schwartz co-chairs the Board of the Alternative Information Center: The Complicity of Academic Institutions in the Occupation |
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Through this report, however, the Alternative Information Center (AIC) aims to inform and empower the debate on an academic boycott by giving information not on Israeli violence and violations of international law and human rights, but on the part played in the Israeli occupation by the very academic institutions in question. The report demonstrates that Israeli academic institutions have not opted to take a neutral, apolitical position toward the Israeli occupation but to fully support the Israeli security forces and policies toward the Palestinians, despite the serious suspicions of crimes and atrocities hovering over them. Any who argue either for or against an academic boycott against Israeli institutions, we believe, should know and consider not only facts regarding the situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), but also the ways in which the Israeli academic institutions make political choices and actively take sides in the ongoing conflict.
This report deals with relevant facts about the connections between Israeli academic institutions and the occupation. It is doubtful that in the process of researching this report all facts relevant to the subject were uncovered, especially since some of the economic connections between academic institutions and private companies are actively hidden by the parties involved. The involvement of Israeli academic institutions in the occupation takes many forms and scopes, and not all Israeli academic institutions can be said to be involved on the same scale. However, all main Israeli academic institutions are involved in the occupation. Indeed, all major Israeli academic institutions, certainly the ones with the strongest international connections, were found to provide unquestionable support to Israel’s occupation. Some of the details depicted in this report are evidence of blunt and direct support to the occupation while others are more minor details, which, nonetheless, provide a clear indication of the political stance taken by academic institutions. |
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| [Tel Aviv University, Philosophy] Anat Biletzki's lecture, October 19, 2009 at UMASS Boston "Palestine, Israel and Human Rights" |
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Israelis who fight for HR’s for Palestinians are considered to be “treasonists” Those working for these HR’s for Palestinians want Israel to be a just society and treat others fairly. HR’s are not universal and are unique to the beliefs, customs and traditions of each separate state.
There are many HR organizations that are working for the HR’s of the Palestinian people.
1989- B-Tselem was established as the information center regarding HR’s in the occupied territories. The organization has operated as a legal but non-political organization. Humanitarian law says that occupying powers cannot move their own people in to occupied territories. Violated rights of movement, to property and education. Have built roads that only Jews can travel on forcing non-Jews to travel many miles out of their way to get from one place to another, even to their workplace.
A security barrier has been constructed but the reason for the “wall” is questionable. Is it really a barrier to secure against such acts as suicide bombers or is it a method to ensure further Israeli expansion?
The Israeli/Palestinian situation has been equated with South African apartheid where the black population had not shared in the equal rights afforded to the white population. |
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| [TAU] In his lecture, the first Arab Chair of Political Science Dept., Dr. Amal Jamal presented the contradiction of Israel as both Jewish and democracy |
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so i had to write a paper for my exploration seminar to israel. ive been working on it a while and just finished, so i decided to post it for anyone who wants to read it.
My principle argument in the paper is that the notion of israel as a “jewish and democratic state” is untrue (as opposed to a paradox, as many others claim). the paper explains why.
Democracy in a Jewish State: a Paradox Not Yet Realized
On one of the first days in Israel, our group visited Tel Aviv University for a series of lectures concerning Israeli economy, the Israeli Arabs, and Israeli Security. During the lecture discussing the Israeli Arabs, Dr. Amal Jamal, the first Arab to be Chair of the Political Science Department presented to us the paradox of Israel as both a Jewish state and as a democracy, which is discussed commonly in the literature. He acknowledged with a smile the contradiction that this phrase brings to mind. How can a state that is a self-declared proponent of the interests of a single ethnic/religious group at the same time be a democracy? |
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| [Tel Aviv University, History] Watch Shlomo Sand on Al-Jazeera English - Changing perspectives on Israel |
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| The founding of the state of Israel was based on firmly-held views of Jewish history but new research questions some of its most fundamental principles. Do new perspectives on Israel's past require a new vision of its future? |
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| [Tel Aviv University, Branco Weiss Research in Education] Prof' Daniel Bar-Tal: The psychological implications of the occupation on the occupier |
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| Even though long occupation of peoples and societies in not uncommon in our time, it is possible to say that in some cases where it occurs, there is severe implications on all participating sides. The lecture will analyze the psychological implications of the occupation on the perceptions and beliefs of the occupier - The Jewish society in Israel. Will be described a mechanism of large segments of the occupying society develops in order to refrain from the psychological hardships that those challenges evoke: Dynamic psychological mechanism and a psychological sociological mechanism, centered by mechanism of sociological beliefs. At the end will be presented thoughts on the relations between those mechanisms and the strive to end the occupation. |
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| [TAU, Philosophy] Anat Biletzki is on the board of 'Israeli Occupation Archive': Occupation must be opposed, attacks on Palestinians are violations of law |
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The Israeli Occupation Archive was founded on the belief that any occupation is morally wrong and must be opposed. The takeover of a land, the denial of equal rights to its inhabitants, and their forcible eviction, are all fundamentally unacceptable and must be rejected.
It is also our conviction that punitive actions carried out by the state of Israel against native Palestinians over the years, such as the bombing of civilian population centers, cannot be justified under any circumstances. Such actions are in direct violation of international laws and conventions set out after World War II, and fall under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.
The Israeli Occupation Archive is grateful to the members of its Advisory Board for their invaluable support and guidance.
Members of the Advisory Board
Anat Biletzki
Anat Biletzki is a professor of philosophy at Tel Aviv University, and an Israeli peace and human rights activist for many years. She was the chairperson of the board of B’Tselem – the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories (2001-2006). |
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| TAU's New nasty book: Adi Ophir editted "Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of the Israeli Rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories" |
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Well into its fifth decade, the Israeli occupation in the Palestinian territories can no longer be considered a temporary aberration. In the shadow of the Oslo process, the second Intifada, and the “disengagement” from and recurring assaults on Gaza, Israel’s control over Palestinian life, society, space, and land has become firmly entrenched, while acquiring more sophisticated and enduring forms.
The Power of Inclusive Exclusion analyzes the Israeli occupation as a rationalized system of political rule. With essays by leading Israeli and Palestinian scholars, a comprehensive chronology, photographs, and original documents, The Power of Inclusive Exclusion calls into question prevalent views of the occupation as either a skewed form of brutal colonization, a type of Jewish apartheid, or an inevitable response to terrorism |
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| [TAU, Law] Aeyal Gross joins HRW |
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(Jerusalem) – In the face of intense criticism of its Middle East activities, Human Rights Watch has expanded its Middle East and North Africa (MENA) advisory board with the addition of ten members, largely based in the Middle East. While some are human rights activists in their own countries, (Iran, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, etc.), including woman’s rights, many also contribute significantly to targeting Israel through the language of human rights.
In particular, the addition of Ms. Asli Bali, and Aeyal Gross, who is known as an opponent of Israeli policies, will reinforce the political agenda of MENA heads Sara Leah Whitson and Joe Stork, as documented in NGO Monitor’s detailed analysis, “Experts or Ideologues?”....
Aeyal M. Gross, law professor Tel Aviv University, official of a number of Israeli NGOs active in campaigning against government policies, such as Gisha, ACRI; often places exclusive blame for the conflict on Israel; accuses Israel of “widespread killing of Palestinian youth”; claims that the Goldstone report reveals Israel's “great wickedness towards civilians”; supported a 2009 divestment campaign in Norway. During the 2009 York University “one state” conference controversy, Gross distorted the criticism of those who exposed the academic facade, falsely labeling them “hypocritical”. |
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| [Tel Aviv University, Department of Psychology] Uri Hadar: Burning memories: sacrifice and the historical unconscious |
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For an Israeli Jewish psychotherapist, the attack on Gaza has precipitated a painful rethinking of the Shoa as part of a history of sacrifice and victim conversion – not least because of what it might portend for the future
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| Shlomo Sand interviewed with Avi Shlaim, BBC & JC |
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*Avi Shlaim in conversation with Shlomo Sand
*Top BBC presenter hosts eulogy to author who argues that the Jewish people do not exist, as UK anti-Zionist discourse hits another low
*Diaspora Jews are descended from converts and have no historical connection with Israel. That’s just one of the claims made by a Tel Aviv University professor who’s shaken the Jewish world. |
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| [Law, Ono Academic College & Tel Aviv University] Radical activist Dr. Amir Paz-Fuchs publishes a study: Israeli employers prefer not to hire Arabs |
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Israeli employers prefer not to hire Arabs, Ethiopians and Haredis - even those holding at least an undergraduate degree, according to a study published on Monday.
More than 83 percent of employers are repelled by the idea of hiring an Arab without a university degree, found the study conducted by the Kiryat Ono Academy. |
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| Tel Aviv U, Cohn Institute] Yossi Schwartz's AIC behind Arab students call in support of the proposed academic boycott by Trondheim University, Norway |
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We are Arab students at the Israeli universities writing to you in support of the proposed academic boycott of Israeli academic institutions. We believe that the boycott is timely and hopefully will help in upholding moral values of fairness, justice and equality which have been sorely missed in our region.
While the reason for the boycott is rightly what has been going on in the 1967 occupied territories, we propose another angle which affirms the need for boycott, namely our daily experience as Arabs in Israeli institutions. We are the lucky ones who have been able to pursue our studies in institutions of Higher Education, to which we arrived against great odds. Only very few among our generation have been qualified to attend universities due to the State’s discriminatory policies. Our schools mostly lack the basic facilities needed for education, and the curriculum is structured to serve the State’s goal in socializing the pupils for self-estrangement. It contains very little, if any at all, on our history and culture. Additionally, it aims to erase our historical memory and promote the official policy line of divide and rule. In short, it is modeled on curriculums that dark regimes, like Apartheid South Africa, have used to indoctrinate rather than educate. We arrive to universities with this “educational” baggage. |
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| Haaretz: Tel Aviv students afraid to challenge leftist professors |
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Tel Aviv University students are hesitant to express their political
views in class, lest lecturers perceived to have left-wing political
views penalize them with lower grades, the head of TAU's Department of Curriculum and Instruction wrote in an internal memorandum last month.
Prof. Nira Hativa's comment in the faculty memo ignited controversy among professors, with some declaring that her sentiments should not be made public.
Hativa wrote: "There are no small number of students of lecturers with left-wing views who complain bitterly that they are extremely offended by the presentation of materials that oppose their views, but are fearful of expressing contrary viewpoints in class, lest it harm their grades." |
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| [Tel Aviv U] Moshe Zuckermann: "Israel-a democratic state for all its citizens?" & "Call for Israelis and Palestinians to composite a bi-national structure" |
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| The Israeli historian Moshe Zuckermann put on 15 April 2009 before the agf-Ladengalerie his new book: "Sixty years of Israel - the genesis of a political crisis of Zionism." Moshe Zuckermann is concerned with the genesis of the historical juncture, before the faces of the State of Israel posed today and demanded he give up the decision, which will determine its future existence of most serious: the occupation of the territories occupied in 1967 war, with the risk summon by this act, an Israeli civil war. Or, to maintain the occupation regime and continue to wage a permanent war, with the certainty, and thus a call for Israelis and Palestinians composite bi-national structure of an objective in life. Every decision could bring out one's own reasons, the entire Zionist project to falter. |
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| [Tel Aviv University, Law & Harvard, Human Rights Program] Aeyal Gross: Israel is "a society where shooting at children of the “other” is the norm" |
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| Can we speak of a free society and continue to rule millions of dispossessed Palestinians? And are the two issues unrelated? Clearly, there are important distinctions between different forms of oppression, and between oppressions under different circumstances, and these differences should not be ignored. And homophobic murders occur in other countries, where political circumstances are very different. Still, the obvious question is whether in a society where shooting at children of the “other” is the norm, we should be surprised that GLBT children become the target of similar violence. Do rallies of the sort held in Tel-Aviv allow not only the cabinet ministers who participated, but also the general public which came to offer its support, to feel enlightened and liberal, while it is in fact indifferent or worse to Israel’s widespread killing of Palestinian youth? |
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| Bureaucracy, Governmentality and Human Rights: Prof. Yehouda Shenhav TA: Adv. Yael Berda Guest lecturer: Adv. Michael Sfrad |
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The course will discuss managerial theory and practice, with an emphasis on control mechanisms that developed in the context of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. We will examine the historical sources of these mechanisms and attempt to situate them within the colonial context, particularly the British and French. We will then demonstrate how the occupation is reflected, within the spaces of sovereignty it creates, in the administrative practices of law enforcement agencies and
executive authorities. In addition, we will demonstrate how the occupation creates lawless spaces, where people's lives become exposed to violence or the threat thereof.
...The course is a seminar combining theory and practice. In addition to Prof. Shenhav's lectures, Adv.
Michael Sfrad, the legal advisor of "Yesh Din" will accompany the course as a guest lecturer. Every two weeks, the students will take part in Yesh Din's project of observers of military courts, and in Machsom Watch's project of assistance at the District Coordination Offices in the Palestinian territories. Under the direction of these organizations, the students will be involved in documentation, advocacy and coordination while maintaining a journal documenting their activity. The students will be
guided by Adv. Yael Berda, both individually and in groups. Students will receive transportation expenses and a yearly scholarship of NIS 1450.
At the end of the year, each student will submit an article based upon her activities and experiences, with reference to the course's theoretical content. Some of the articles will be collected in a book edited by Prof. Shenhav, Adv. Sfard and Adv. Berda, in cooperation with the organizations. |
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| [Tel Aviv U, Sociology & Anthropology] Matan Kaminer, radical anti-Israel activist, is a teaching assistant to Dr. Ofra Goldstein-Gideoni |
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1) Short descriptions in Hebrew of a course taught by Dr. Ofra Goldstein-Gideoni in Tel Aviv University showing Matan Kaminer as her teaching assistant.
2) Anti-Israel English writings and activities of the refusenik Matan Kaminer. |
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| [TAU, Sociology, assistant to Prof. Shenhav] Yael Berda speaks in NY: Bil'in nonviolent resistance to the Israeli occupation & theft of its land |
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activist Yael Berda. Village of Bil'in in the West Bank is being
divided by the Israeli security wall; more than half the village will
be absorbed by a neighbouring Jewish settlement. Bil'in has been
successfully leading creative, nonviolent resistance to the Israeli
occupation & theft of its land for 5 years. |
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| [TAU, Psychology] Uri Hadar: "Full-blown Palestinian Holocaust being part of an unconscious Israeli itinerary" - Psychoactive against Israel |
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| Memory of historical events is necessarily collective, but acquires personal characteristics that are of the same nature as individual memory in general. This idea is illustrated through memories of holocaust survivors as they construct themselves in a particular biography of an Israeli child. Holocaust memories are then connected to the ethos of military strength in Israeli society, which ethos undertakes to transform the historical marking of the Jews as victims, sacrificed by the nations on the altar of ethnic power. This is where the Palestinians enter the unconscious Israeli narrative, allowing the movement of the Jew away from the position of the sacrificed. The theme of sacrifice conversion marks itself in historical events such as the Naqba and the recent attack on Gaza. The talk examines the manner in which these themes feed into personal memory systems and reconstructs the workings of memory through the entire historical cycle. |
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| 1) Anti-Semitic Khalil Bendib interviews Shlomo Sand. 2) Shlomo Sand’s dreadful book in "Jewish Peoplehood Denied, While Israel’s Foes Applaud" |
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And yet the embarrassment of Jewishness has always made certain Jewish intellectuals not the last, but the first, to seek to discredit the idea of Jewish peoplehood. From the age of the French Revolution, a time at which few European gentiles doubted for a moment that the Jews were a separate people (and on the whole, a heartily disliked one), there were plenty of Jews who insisted that they were really just Frenchmen or Germans or Englishmen of “the Mosaic faith,” with no national ties to other Mosaicists living elsewhere. And by the same token, in the 1940s, when Hitler and his legions were confident that they were exterminating a people and not a mere religious profession, the so-called Canaanite movement, born in the bohemian cafés of Tel Aviv, made similar claims for the Jews of Palestine — who, it was said, were proud, sun-bronzed “Hebrews,” not to be confused with the pale-skinned juifs, Juden and zhidi of Europe then meekly trooping off to the gas chambers.
Shlomo Sand is in this tradition, a post-modernist Canaanite who need not, he thinks, suffer the indignity of belonging to the Jewish people because — what a relief! — no such people exists. No doubt, not a few of the thousands of Israelis who helped put Sand’s book on the best-seller list in Israel experienced a similar epiphany upon reading it. Even in a Jewish state, we now know, there will always be Jews who would rather be something else. You can, to paraphrase an old Zionist witticism, take the Jew out of the non-Jewish environment into which he dreams of assimilating, but you cannot take the assimilationist out of every Jew.
Unfortunately, there are even larger numbers of non-Jews who will be happy to believe Sand’s nonsense. Once upon a time, antisemitism consisted of the belief that the Jews were an incorrigible and pernicious people who could never be absorbed by other peoples. Today, it is trendy to hold that they are a non-people masquerading as a people in order to justify stealing another people’s homeland. Le plus ça change, le plus ça reste le même chose. As discouraging as it is to see Jewish intellectuals like Shlomo Sand aiding and abetting their people’s enemies, this too is not new under the sun. |
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| [Tel Aviv University, History] Inventing Israel: Historian Shlomo Sand in his newly translated book argues that ‘Jewish peoplehood’ is a myth |
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The key assumptions about Israel and the Jews are indelible. Forced from Jerusalem into exile, the Jews dispersed throughout the world, always remaining attached to their ancient homeland. Psalmists wept when they remembered Zion. A people were sustained by an unflagging determination to return to their native soil. “Next year in Jerusalem!” The triumph of Zionism—the founding of Israel—is the fulfillment of that ancient vow. The Israeli Declaration of Independence states it plainly: “Eretz Yisrael was the birthplace of the Jewish people… After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people remained faithful to it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom.”
Now suppose that none of it is true.
That’s the thesis of a new book, The Invention of the Jewish People, by Tel Aviv University historian Shlomo Sand, who argues that the Jews were not in fact exiled from Israel, and that the bulk of modern Jewry does not descend from the ancient Israelites Rather, he claims, they are the children of converts—North African Berbers and Turkic Khazars—and have no ancestral ties to the land of Israel. Zionism is not a return home, Sand writes, it is the tragic theft of another people’s land. As such, Israel is not the political rebirth of the Jewish nation—it’s a complete fabrication. |
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| [Tel Aviv U] Anat Matar and Rachel Giora: 'Abbas's decision to withdraw support from the Goldstone report, "a betrayal of the Palestinian struggle" |
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We are a diverse group of Palestinians, solidarity activists, and supporters of human rights and international law. We write to join the Palestinian political parties, civil society groups, trade unions, and citizens that have condemned the recent decision at the UN Human Rights Council to withdraw Palestinian support for a resolution endorsing the report of the "UN Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict," led by Richard Goldstone.
We consider this decision a betrayal of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination and of broader efforts to promote human rights and a just international system.
Although we have no illusions that the Goldstone report would have guaranteed accountability for the atrocities committed in Gaza, we recognize it as an important tool in mobilizing the world community for the cause of peace and justice in the region. |
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| [Ex-Sociology Dept. Tel Aviv University] Nadim N. Rouhana: The Nakba and the ethnic cleansing are caused by the establishment of Israel |
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| The acts of commemorating 1948, the starting point of this continued Nakba, should also be a time for reflection upon finding a way to finally create its endpoint, in a manner that guarantees dignity, equality, democracy, and security to all Palestinians and all Israelis. The process of asking these questions should also be reversed - instead of beginning by asking how to achieve two states or one state, the question’s starting point should be one of identifying what specific political arrangements are necessary to build and sustain a future in which all Palestinian refugees who wish to return to their homeland will be able to do so, and allow all Israelis and Palestinians to live in equality, dignity, democracy, and not least of all, security. How can we change the current condition under which privileges are granted by the State to Jews living anywhere in historic Palestine (or indeed to any Jew in the world who wishes to emigrate to Israel or the West Bank) over any Palestinian in any place in historic Palestine (or any Palestinian living in exile who wishes to return to their homeland)? Our intellectual and political efforts should take these questions as the point of departure. And it is likely that once we do so, it will become clear that a two state solution in the way it is being discussed in the high echelons of power is incompatible with equality, democracy, return of refugees, and historic reconciliation, and therefore, with long-term stability. |
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| [Psychology, Tel Aviv U] Uri Hadar participates a pro-Palestinian conference "Psycho-Political Resistance in Israel-Palestine", Birkbeck Institute |
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Themes:
*Survival and Non-Violent Resistance in Gaza and the West Bank
*Psychoactive Political Resistance in Israel.
*Possibilities and Limitations of Therapeutic Approaches to Conflict Resolution.
*The Politics of Apology and other forms of Acknowledgement
*Denial in the Face of Atrocity
*Mental Attrition of Activists
* Diasporic and all other forms of Support for Peace from Afar.
Speakers:
Mohamed Altawil; Nissim Avissar; Jessica Benjamin; Tova Buksbaum; Bea Campbell; Stan Cohen; Yasmeen Daher; Stephen Frosh; Uri Hadar; Seamas Heaney; Maureen Hetherington; Samah Jabr; Ghada Karmi; Keith Kahn-Harris; Adah Kay; Yehudit Keshet; Richard Kuper; Elana Lakh; Moshe Landsman; Tony Lerman; Sheila Melzak; Mohamad Mukhaimar; Rateb Abu Rahmeh; Jacqueline Rose; Jihan Salem; Andrew Samuels; Eyad el Sarraj; Lynne Segal; Felicity de Zulueta. |
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| The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) invites Moshe Zuckermann [Cohn Institute, Tel Aviv University] to speak on Israel |
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NTNU, a prestigious Norwegian university, is this autumn offering a series of seminars on the Middle East. Seeing as how it’s NTNU one would normally expect only the best. Yet the series of seminars as a whole appears rather unbalanced. Clearly we will hear the Palestinian narrative, but who is there to provide the audience with Israel’s perspective? The fact that Ilan Pappe is jewish is certainly no guarantee....Another is Moshe Zuckermann, who on German radio has claimed that 400 000 people were killed during Cast Lead. Read more here. Notice that although Zuckermann afterwards claimed he had made a mistake, the German radio channel refused to alter the recording.
Fact-based? Aye, one of Norway’s most foremost universities is fact-based all right. So fact-based in fact, they will only examine one side of the story. |
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| [Tel Aviv University, Linguistics] Boycott Israel caller Rachel Giora supports Neve Gordon and responds to Rivka Carmi: "A modest proposal" |
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These students will certainly ultimately realize that the existence of research universities in Israel depends on those who have money to give them, and thereby also the ability to dictate the subjects of research and the limits of freedom of thought and expression.
Students, you are our future, and I have a modest proposal for you: Stay in the ivory tower. Try not to see reality as it is. And certainly do not describe it with pejorative words like "apartheid" or try to change it. Try to understand, in practical terms, what is worth studying and what you are better off not publishing, since your future depends mainly on the degree of flexibility you can display and on your ability to toe the line. Above all, you must remember that to adapt is to survive. See the Carmi case. |
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| [Tel Aviv U, Philosophy] Anat Matar: Israeli academics must pay price to end occupation |
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Several days ago Dr. Neve Gordon of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev published an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times. In that article he explained why, after years of activity in the peace camp here, he has decided to pin his hopes on applying external pressure on Israel - including sanctions, divestment and an economic, cultural and academic boycott.
He believes, and so do I, that only when the Israeli society's well-heeled strata pay a real price for the continuous occupation will they finally take genuine steps to put an end to it.
Gordon looks at the Israeli society and sees an apartheid state. While the Palestinians' living conditions deteriorate, many Israelis are benefiting from the occupation. In between the two sides, Israeli society is sinking into complete denial - drawn into extreme hatred and violence. |
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| [Tel Aviv University, Philosophy, Cohn Institute] Adi Ophir speaks about Israel's "Apartheid" in "Israeli Utopianism Today: Interview with Adi Ophir" |
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Today, to speak about an Occupation is no longer adequate, because the domination of a whole people devoid of rights over such a long period (a period that is now longer than the time passed from the Balfour declaration to the establishment of Israel) has created a new regime in Israel-Palestine, a Jewish form of apartheid. It is not that Israel is a democracy with a certain problem called the West Bank and Gaza: it is rather the case that the Israeli apartheid regime contains a Jewish-democratic enclave.
One cannot simply put an end to this situation with a series of political decisions. The entire regime must be deconstructed. |
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| [TAU, Cohn] Merav Amir takes part in international Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Campaing against Israel |
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The reason why the Livnat Family´s AHAVA and other Israeli companies choose to hold their factories in the Occupied territories and not in Israel proper, says Merav Amir of Who Profits? Is because of government incentives.
AMIR, MERAV WHO PROFITS: There is a considerable reduction in real estate prices when you move to the Territories, most of the area in the West Bank is considered, “Priority Area A” which means there are very significant tax reductions there and different benefits they get from the government. They get a significant tax reduction, for the employees and the businesses themselves. Although businesses in the West Bank were supposed to pay taxes, they were never collected. In 2002 there was a report by the internal critic of the government and in the report they exposed that the tax revenues weren’t collected in the West Bank, but now they have to. The third thing that makes opening in the West Bank very attractive is that although there are different kinds of regulations, such as environmental regulations, there is very lax implementation of these regulations. Many times businesses move to the West Bank because they won’t get objections from their neighbors because if you are in an area which is populated by Palestinians, they have no say about who can open a business around their houses. An additional incentive for many businesses is having access to very cheap labor by the Palestinians. |
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| [Tel Aviv University, Lingustics] Prof' Rachel Giora leads a call for cultural boycott against Israel |
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According to Tel Aviv University Prof. Rachel Giora, a member of the group, the organization is also encouraging Israelis to boycott Madonna's performance, "to let Israel's government know how they feel... thereby hoping to encourage the Israeli government to reconsider its policies."
"A performance here would imply that Israel is behaving in an acceptable manner, and would be interpreted by Israelis as moral support for the illegal and inhumane policies, described by many as war crimes and crimes against humanity," Giora said in the letter. |
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| [Tel Aviv U, Anthropology] David Wesley incites Arabs against Israel on his US Tour: "Scholar David Wesley Reveals Israel’s State Practices..." |
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Wesley discussed two images of Zionist discourse: Arab territorial threat and Arab traditionalism.
In the first example, he explained, Zionists feared the expansion of Arab towns due to population growth. In the upper Galilee, Israel expropriated Arab land to establish Jewish centers that would drive a wedge between Arab communities.
Using tradition as an excuse, Zionists said Arab residents of Nazareth should rely on tourism, whereas the new Jewish communities needed more government funds to develop high tech industrial parks. |
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| SOAS Palestine Society report: "Tel Aviv University – A Leading Israeli Military Research Centre" |
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Tel Aviv University (TAU) is Israel’s largest university. Like any large university, TAU hosts an extensive range of well regarded research and teaching programmes in almost every discipline. Unlike most large universities, TAU is also heavily and openly involved in military research and development (R&D), deeming the pursuit of state security prerogatives and academic research to be harmonious enterprises at the centre of its institutional mission. The following pages offer a brief and necessarily incomplete description of just some of the current work being
conducted in the dozens of TAU departments presently collaborating with the military. Nothing is said here of the
many professional links between TAU’s senior management and the army; nothing is said of the university’s discriminatory housing, scholarship, and access practices privileging demobilized Jewish soldiers over Palestinian citizens; nothing is said of TAU’s discriminatory mission of serving first not the citizens of the state but of being rather a definitionally ‘Jewish university’; and nothing is said of the university’s historic role in illegally transforming depopulated post 1948 Palestinian land into a state resource. While these are all necessary components in arriving at an understanding of the full extent of TAU’s deep involvement in the pursuit of exclusivist and violent nationalist goals, space prevents their being treated fully here. Instead, this document examines only the most direct and immediate aspects of TAU’s instrumental contributions to the state’s ongoing
military projects; it highlights the explicit institutional culpability of TAU in the design and execution of war crimes and in the subjugation of a people. This is, remarkably, an aspect of TAU’s investment in nationalist projects which has received too little attention and yet which most vividly reveals the human consequences of international acquiescence in the militarization of academic institutions in Israel. What follows then is a brief survey of the types of institution and programme which are currently bringing together scholars and soldiers in the laboratories, clean rooms, and classrooms of one of Israel’s premier security research establishments – Tel Aviv University. |
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| [Senior lecturer of philosophy at Tel Aviv University] Dr. Anat Matar: Israeli officer promotes war crimes at Harvard |
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Further, the Israeli army used heavy artillery and white phosphorus munitions in densely populated areas of Gaza, against the UNRWA's headquarters and a UN school in Beit Lahiya. As reported by Judge Goldstone, Gazans trying to relay their civilian status were also hit. Even though the Israeli military tried several times to deny its use, the Human Rights Watch (HRW) report on white phosphorous use in Gaza quotes an unnamed Israeli official: "at least one month before [white phosphorus] was used a legal team had been consulted on the implications." HRW found that "in violation of the laws of war, the [Israeli army] generally failed to take all feasible precautions to minimize civilian harm" and "used white phosphorus in an indiscriminate manner causing civilian death and injury."
Such reckless disregard for the lives of civilians and pathological cover-ups of military operations are recognized by many Israelis within the system itself. According to one Israeli jurist speaking to the Israeli daily Haaretz, the ILD is considered "more militant than any other legal agency in Israel, and willing to adopt the most flexible interpretations of the law in order to justify the [Israel army's] actions." Although the ILD personnel "are now very proud of their influence upon the combat" in Gaza, human rights groups have stated that "residents weren't advised then as to which places were safe, and the roads by which they fled were bombed and turned into death traps." |
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| [Tel Aviv University, Literature] Ran HaCohen claims Israel is Fascist, in "Fascism Needs an Enemy" |
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| The attack on Israel’s Palestinian minority has deep ideological roots in extreme nationalistic purism, but it is mainly politically motivated. The Israeli Arabs, despite six decades of discrimination, have been an incredibly loyal minority. The Israeli right-wing clearly wishes to put an end to this loyalty, hoping the incitement will lead Israeli Arabs to some form of violent resistance, from street violence to terror attacks. This would create the desired atmosphere of suspicion, fear, and hatred that fascism always needs in order to flourish. An Arab-Israeli Intifada is the wet dream of many Israeli right-wingers: nationally and internationally, it would enable them to present Israel once again as a threatened victim of Arab/Muslim/Gentile persecution, not as the rogue colonialist regional power it actually is. |
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| [Tel Aviv University and Ono Academic College, Law] Dr. Amir Paz-Fuchs collaborates with the Palestinians in their war against Israel |
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In its current approach, Israel is not only violating international law and shirking its obligations to the U.S. administration under the road map. One cannot fully understand the "natural growth" of settlements without realizing the impact it has on the Palestinian villages that are its victims. To allow for such expansion, Israel forcefully and effectively limits Palestinian development in the West Bank. This is achieved by treating the whole of Area C - the 60 percent of the West Bank defined by the Oslo Accords as coming under full Israeli jurisdiction - as reserved
for Israeli purposes exclusively. In particular, Israel employs several complementary policies in Area C.
First, in addition to the 30 percent of the West Bank Israel has defined as "state land," it has declared an additional 10 percent "survey lands," on which Palestinian development is prohibited.
Second, even in areas under partial Palestinian control, Israel severely restricts Palestinian construction and engages in aggressive demolition of houses. Over the past few years, the Civil Administration has, on a monthly average, issued 60 demolition orders, demolished 20 structures, and has
granted one permit for construction. And because the Civil Administration refuses to prepare master plans that meet the needs of the population, Palestinians have no choice but to meet their "natural growth" by engaging in illegal construction.
Third, Israel continues to build roads that allow limited or no Palestinian use. The separation barrier and other security measures implemented at the behest of the settler population have the additional effect of severely restricting Palestinians' access to their lands.
Israel would be wise not to continue to obfuscate the reality that is becoming increasingly clear with every passing day. If it continues its current practices and rhetoric, it will suffer the fate of double punishment familiar to quite a few politicians: first for its acts, and
then again for deceit |
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| [Tel Aviv University, Sociology with Prof. Yehouda Shenhav] Adv. Yael Berda: The Erotics of the Occupation |
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The perverse relationship between Israelis and Palestinians is a depressing B movie that the entire world daily watches. Many actors, spectators, and producers take part in the Mis-en-Scene: soldiers, civilians, international observes, humanitarian organizations, to name few. Despite the attraction to the action, not many realize that the Israeli occupation is all about the body: sweat, heavy breathing, desire. There are several principles to the erotics of the occupation, such as stripping and searching.
The Israeli authorities look for war in your handbag. They ask for your identification papers. They strip and search you with a metal detector, and put you through a screening machine. If they say hello to you, at the entrance to a bus station, for instance, they just check your accent. Airport interrogations may take hours and they are all about intimate knowledge. The Israeli authorities want to know who did you come to visit, and where do you work, and where do you sleep, and with whom, and what are you looking for in wherever it is you are going to. National security is obsessed with inspecting, identifying, examining, searching and stripping the body. |
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| Tel Aviv University scholar Shlomo Zand's (or Sand) Controversial Bestseller Shakes the Foundation of the Israeli State. By The Palestine Telegraph |
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A logical conclusion of Zand's work exposing Israel's founding mythology may be the restoration of the idea of a one-state solution to a legitimate place in the debate over this contentious region. After all, while it muddies the waters in one sense -- raising ancient, biblical questions about just who the "children of Israel" really are -- in another sense, it hints at the commonalities that exist between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. Both groups lay claim to the same crust of earth, both have faced historic repression and displacement and both hold dear the idea that they should have a "right of return."
And if both groups in fact share common biblical ties, then it begs the question of why the entirety of what was Palestine under the British mandate should remain a refuge for people of one religion instead of being a country in which Jews and Arabs are guaranteed equal protection -- equal protection under the laws of a state whose legitimacy would never again be open to question. |
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| Machsom Watch indoctrinates TAU students |
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| A tour for students from the Tel Aviv University in the West Bank in May 2009, organized by Machsom Watch. |
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| Report of PsychoActive conference, TAU, June 28, 2009 |
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Riva Bachrach of Machson Watch opened the conference by praising the women who took photos of the violent, aggressive IDF soldiers manning the checkpoints to expose their acts of humiliating the Palestinians. She continued that her work was to make Israeli society aware of the negative psychological effects on Arabs and on Israeli soldiers because of their service in the occupied territories. She said that Israelis do not want contact with the territories. She also praised “Atrocities of Occupation” a collection of photos Israeli soldiers took in June 2004 of IDF violence in Hebron and claimed that their service caused them to become hostile. She claimed that occupation is jeopardizing the rights of the occupied and affecting the values of he occupier and that Israel ignores the Arab’s suffering. Her stated goal was to create a dialogue to discuss differences of opinions.
My comments: Bachrach set the tone for the conference. It was to be an emotional exercise, based primarily on old and previous publicized information, to demonize the Israeli soldier serving in Yosh and express sympathy for and indentification with the poor, oppressed Arab who is so mistreated and misunderstood by many Israel soldiers and the terrible, violent settlers. The amount of information regarding the treatment for IDF soldiers experience PTS or other mental problems relating from his service was almost nil. In addition ‘push button’ labels, i.e. occupation, settler was used. |
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| [The Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel Aviv University]
From Roy Wagner |
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| For over half an hour slogans were chanted and speeches made against the separation wall and in favour of Palestinian freedom. After absorbing a dangerous overdose of Palestinian sun the demonstration dispersed without conflicts. |
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| [Tel Aviv law professor] Neta Ziv, who signed a petition against Israel is recipient of Human Rights prize |
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| What that description does not say is how Neta Ziv seems to feel human and civil rights do not apply to Jewish Israelis, only to Arabs, and particularly those ones with a desire to dispossess the Jews in Israel of the same property rights they like to constantly claim they are denied. To Neta Ziv, Jewish Israelis are the majority “oppressing” the Arab minority (there’s that old “social justice” mantra again). While it’s true there are more Jews in Israel behind the green line and in the territories than Arabs, the entire Arab and Muslim world that calls for the end of Israel’s existence numbers 250 million to Israel’s 4 million Jews. A case in point is the legal precedent set in the case of an Israeli Arab named Qa’ adan who wanted to reside in a community set aside by the Jewish agency for the settlement of Jews in Israel that was handled by Professor Ziv’s cronies in the ACRI. It was argued that Qa’adan, an Israeli Arab citizen, was denied equal rights because he wanted a home in an exclusive Jewish community that was set aside for Jewish settlement. ACRI and its intellectual acolytes in the judiciary ruled that Qa’adan had the right to live there too. Whereas some would call the establishment of a neighborhood for Jews in a region where Jews have been murdered for two millennia might be considered Jewish “affirmative action” (social justice types in America love “affirmative action”), Professor Ziv considers it a denial of human and equal rights. Money talks when it comes to leasing land in Israel, so why didn’t Qa’adan ask some of his Arab oil brothers to do some affirmative action for him and other Israeli Arabs by providing enough money to buy property? After all, they spend untold amounts of money to pay for weapons to kill Jews. |
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| Raphael Greenberg, an archaeologist from Tel Aviv University is the one behind the Palestinian archaeology site in Silwan |
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This characterises this present stage of archaeology here in Silwan, which is archaeology behind fences and it seems they want to keep things under wraps, to prevent people from peering in," says Raphael Greenberg, an archaeologist from Tel Aviv University.
"I can't get into any of these sites. I'm barred from visiting them. It seems that the Antiquities Authority doesn't want criticism of their work."
One reason why the Antiquities Authority may be sensitive is because it has handed over some of the sites to El Ad, a private, right-wing organisation run by Israeli settlers.
So it is the settlers who collect the entrance fees and it is the settlers who put their spin on what is displayed inside. |
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| [Faculty of Law,Tel Aviv University] Eyal Benvenisti who appeased the Palestinians in his article "The Right of Return Myth", is candidate for supreme court judge |
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| Benvenisti, a most esteemed professor of international law, uses the most astute legal arguments to assure us that the Arabs could not possibly intend for the Palestinian refugees to return to Israel, since that would be contrary to international law and to the provisions of General Assembly Resolution 194 as he interprets them. |
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| [Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University] Chaim Gans: Palestinians were made to pay an unfair price |
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I am speaking about the price paid by the Palestinians not only for the patently unjust elements of Zionism (the expulsion of 1948, the inequality between Jews and Arabs in Israel and the ongoing torment of Palestinians in the form of the settlements); I am speaking about the price paid for its just elements: the establishment of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel.
The Zionist movement based its justification of the aspiration to establish such a state on the right of every nation to self-determination, on the Jews' historical connection to the land of Israel and, as the tipping point, the persecution of the Jews in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is clear from the components of this justification that it was not the Palestinians who should have paid the full price for the realization of this aspiration.
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| Tel Aviv University's anti-Israel conference: "The Psychological Influences of Service in the Territories" - June 28th |
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Israeli society imposes on its soldiers serving in the army the role of control over another nation - the Palestinian people living in the Territories; these soldiers serve as the almost exclusive contact between Israeli society and Palestinian society. In this conference we will examine the psychological influences of the army service in the occupied territories, both on the soldiers themselves and on the Jewish society in Israel, that avoids direct contact with the Palestinians in the Territories, but sends and receives back its sons and daughters in their army service there. We will examine how open these influences are and how they are spoken about in our society, army, and mental health personnel.
Convention and Registration
09:00-09:30 Greetings on behalf of Tami Shteinmetz Center: Ephraim Lavi
Machsom Watch: Reva Bachrach - psychoactive.
09:30-11:30 First Session: Witnesses.
Reva Bachrach - Machsom Watch Chairman – psychoactive: Barrier - salt of the earth? Soldiers' atrocities in the Intifada: Perspectives from the soldier, the company, the army and society.
Yoel Elitzur - Hebrew University: "To See if I'm Smiling" segments from Tamar Yarom's film.
Tal Ben Sira-Morag - one of the film's participants.
The cruelty of Givati, and Liberal Morals |
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| [Department of Philosophy, Tel Aviv University] Anat Matar: "Israel's Internal Matter: The Palestinian Prisoners of Zion" |
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| The refusal of honest, open, and political people such as Tzoref and Paz to include the Palestinian prisoners who are citizens of Israel among the Palestinian prisoners who are subjects of the occupation troubles me; but not because it undermines the imaginary peace process. It troubles me because it exposes another facet, a very painful facet, of Zionism. I have no doubt that these two people support fair and non-discriminatory treatment of "security" prisoners who are citizens of Israel: individual treatment, as is customary in the case of criminal prisoners. After all, excluding the occupation, it is a democratic and properly administered state! It is precisely this view of the democratic and civilized nature of Israel that exposes the complete blindness with regard to the fear and patronizing arrogance that are so fundamental to Zionism and which underlie the refusal to recognize the Palestinianness of the prisoners we are discussing. The required re-evaluation of Palestinian prisoners who are citizens of Israel is much more radical than that which is cited in the letter of the prisoners to the IPS commissioner. It is no wonder that their letter received no attention. The State of Israel is incapable, at this stage, of relating to them as citizens with equal rights or as members of the Palestinian people, just as it is unable to regard all of its Arab citizens in these ways. |
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| Dr. Anat Matar of Tel Aviv University was responsible for distributing picture of a soldier and accusing him of murder. Police will probe the incident |
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The Israeli Indymedia website is facing an investigation after publishing a soldier's picture and accusing him of murder. Deputy State Prosecutor Shai Nitzan has asked police to probe the incident.
Nitzan said the site may be guilty of slandering a public official.
The affair began when Indymedia put up a picture of a soldier under the caption “Murderer.” A subheading accused the soldier in the photograph of killing a Palestinian Authority Arab man, Basam Abu-Rahma, on Friday, April 17.
... Police to probe Dr. Anat Matar of Tel Aviv University as well. Matar denied creating the image in question, but admitted to posting the picture on an email list. |
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| Rachel Giora, Professor of Linguistics at Tel Aviv University, calls for boycott against Israel |
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A message to BRICUP’s pre UCU Congress 2009 meeting from Rachel Giora,
Professor of Linguistics at Tel Aviv University
Tel Aviv
20.5.2009
Dear Colleagues,
I am writing to express my support of your actions toward helping the boycott movement become engulfing and effective. By responding to the Palestinian call to boycott Israel, you emerged as the pioneers of the boycott movement against
Israel and I hope you will be able to witness its impact on redressing injustices and on changing the face of the world.
Thanks to you, the boycott movement against Israel is now gaining force. |
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| [TAU, The Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas] Merav Amir in Amsterdam: "Video Activism at the Checkpoints" |
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LIFE IN FRAGMENTS
‘video activism’ from the Israeli occupation
12-14 June 2009, De Balie, Amsterdam
Screenings Discussions Exhibitions
Saturday 13th June 2009
20:00 – 22:30 Roads of Separation
Film: Checkpoint Time: Beit Furik (Hadass Shuve & Merav Amir)
Q&A with Merav Amir: A Counterview: Video Activism at the Checkpoints
Compilation of activist videos
Q&A with Hilla Dayan on The daily life under a regime of separation. |
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| [Tel Aviv University, Ethics, MA candidate] "Boycotts work": An interview with Omar Barghouti |
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| Omar Barghouti: We don't have to prove that Israel is identical to apartheid South Africa in order to [justify] the label "apartheid." Apartheid is a generalized crime according to United Nations conventions and there are certain criteria that may or may not apply to any specific situation -- so we judge a situation on its own merits and whether or not it fulfills those conditions of being called an apartheid state. According to the basic conventions of the UN defining the crime of apartheid, Israel satisfies almost all the conditions to be granted the label of apartheid. Other than the clear racial separation in the occupied West Bank between Jews and non-Jews (indigenous Palestinians) -- separate roads, separate housing, separate everything -- apartheid is also alive and well inside Israel despite appearances [to the contrary]. Unlike South Africa, Israel is more sophisticated; it's an evolved form of apartheid. South African apartheid was rudimentary, primitive, so to speak -- black, white, clear separation, no rights ... The Palestinian citizens of Israel (the indigenous population) have the right to vote, which is a huge difference from South Africa. However, in every other vital domain, they are discriminated against by law, not only by policy. Therefore, it is legalized and institutionalized racism and that's what makes it apartheid |
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| ANAT MATAR, TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY LECTURER ACCUSED A SOLDIER OF KILLING A PALESTINIAN AND PUBLISHED HIS PICTURE |
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Dr. Anat Matar, senior lecturer, philosophy, publicized a soldier's picture, claiming he killed Bassam Abu Rachma in Bilin, and asked viewers to identify him. Matar: "I regret having sent the mail since I'm not sure the specific soldier was the killer".
Dr. Matar, a senior lecturer in philosophy at Tel Aviv University, subsequently decided that her impression was like the determination of a judge at the end of a trial.
Matar publicized mailings containing a large picture of an IDF soldier - whose face is exposed - called him a murderer, and asked the viewers to provide details about him. |
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| [TAU] Rachel Giora: Sign a letter to Barcelona Department for International Cooperation, about the inhuman, immoral, and unlawful Israeli actions |
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As Jews, Palestinians, Israeli citizens who are horrified by the
inhuman, immoral, and unlawful actions of the Israeli government
towards the Palestinians, we urge you to cancel the twinning agreement between Barcelona and Tel Aviv
Keeping up the business as usual charade will only encourage Israel to proceed with its illegal, atrocious, and unjust practices that have been going on for the past 42 years |
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| Roy Wagner [Math, Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel Aviv U] and his friends in an outrageous and ridiculous letter |
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| In accordance with the Palestinian call to sanction Israel until it ends the occupation, sieges and apartheid, dismantles the separation wall and allows the return and compensation of dispossessed Palestinians, we further uphold that Israel should have been banned from participating in this conference from the outset. |
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| [Tel Aviv U, Philosophy] Anat Matar: The soldier in the picture had murdered Abdallah Abu Rahma. The Israeli army allows him to avoid responsibility |
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The soldier in the picture had murdered Abdallah Abu Rahma by direct shooting of a gas canister in Bilin on April 17.
The Israeli army allows him to avoid responsibility.
Do you know his name or any other details? know anyone else that had commited a crime in Palestine?
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| [Tel Aviv University] Anat Biletzki Invites for an event dedicated to Ariella Azoulay’s books - Photography, Citizenship, Occupation. Sunday, May 24 |
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from Anat Biletzki
Please see attached invitation for an event dedicated to Relly Azoulay’s books –
Photography, Citizenship, Occupation
Sunday, May 24th, 16:15-19:30, Gilman 496 |
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| Senan Abdelkader [School of Architecture, FACULTY OF THE ARTS, Tel Aviv University] is a participating architect in "Decolonizing Architecture" |
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The exhibition is curated by Lieven De Cauter and coordinated
by Iwan Strauven. Participating architects: Senan AbdelKader,
Nasser Abourahme, Nora Akawi, Yazid Anani, Saleh
Hijazi, Rana Shakaa, Omar Yusuf.
This article is a reflection on the project Decolonizing
Architecture directed by Hilal, Petti and Weizman and
concerned with the potential future transformation of Israeli
Colonies and Military Bases. The project is sponsored and produced by Eloisa Haudenschild and Steve Fagin
partners in spareParts, a division of the haudenschild- Garage. |
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| [Tel Aviv Academic College and Mathematical Sciences, Tel Aviv University] Roy Wagner supports Palestinian Right of Return |
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| About 10 internationals and 15 Israelis joined several dozens of Palestinians for the weekly demo in Bil'in, which marked the 61st memorial day of the Nakba - the expulsion of Palestinians from Israel during israel's war of independence. The demonstrators carried an oversized cardboard key as a figure for the keys of the homes left behind, which many Palestinians still hold on to, and which symbolize the Palestinian right of return. |
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| Omar Barghouti, Tel Aviv University student, on the university's refusal to expel him |
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The anti-boycott lobby will now jump to use this as a weapon in their increasingly desperate attempts to fend off the growing threat of academic boycott of Israeli academic institutions, arguing that these institutions respect the academic freedom "even" of boycott advocates.
Other than the evident trivialization of academic freedom implied in such a claim (ignoring all the arguments about suppression of real academic freedom in doing academic work on "problematic" topics, as Oren Ben-Dor, Ilan Pappe, Tanya Reinhart and many others have argued), it misses the point completely on why PACBI, BRICUP, USACBI, among many other small academic boycott groups in France, Spain, Belgium, Norway, Australia, South Africa, etc., have called for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. The well documented complicity of Israel's academic institutions in the state's colonial and racist policies remains THE main factor standing behind the boycott call. Whether TAU expels me or not, this compelling factor remains true. Expelling me would have added just a bit more fuel to an already blazing fire! |
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| [TAU, Arts] Ariella Azoulay: Constituting Violence 1947-1950. A visual genealogy of a regime “and a catastrophe from their point of view” |
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Constituting Violence 1947-1950
A visual genealogy of a regime “and a catastrophe from their point of view”
Research and Curating: Ariella Azoulay
Research Assistance and Curating: Hadas Snir
Exhibition Design: Michael Gordon
Fourth Meeting: Creating a Jewish political body and deporting the country’s Arab residents
For the coming international Nakba Day Zochrot is organizing a tourist bus in Tel Aviv to visit the Palestinian villages in the city up to 1948. Meeting point at 3:00 pm at Manshiyyah, by The Irgun Museum. From ther we'll travel to Salama and meet by the mosque of the village at 4:30. From there we'll travel to the center of Tel Aviv and pass by Summayl, Jammasin al-Gharbi and Shaykh Muwannis. We'll end the tour at the cemetery at Haa'tzmaut (the independence) garden, next to Hilton hotel at 6:15. Ending time around 7:00 pm.
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| [TAU] Prof. Rachel Giora and Dr. Anat Matar in a letter to the EU call to suspend existing trade agreements with Israel and blame Israel for Gaza war |
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We are Jews, Palestinians, Israeli citizens who aspire to live in peace, are disturbed by our government's attempts to bully European states into silent complicity with its utterly unacceptable and illegal conduct. The latest attempt by the Israeli government to cynically silence criticism from the EU is in opposition to democratic principles, from freedom of speech to standards of international relations.
We applaud the European Parliament and the European commission who have taken steps to freeze the upgrade of the trade agreements with Israel since the criminal Israeli assault on Gaza. This course of action is the only one consistent with the admirable principles on which the European Community was set up.
Considering the deteriorating state of the rule of law in Israel, the growing disenfranchisement of many Israelis - who after years of conflict are quickly and dangerously losing faith in their country's democratic institutions - we feel that the greatest danger facing Israel today is the specter of impunity. If allowed to continue our state's policies of ongoing war crimes against the Palestinian people, including the murderous siege of the Palestinian population of Gaza, the on-going home demolitions in occupied East Jerusalem and the settlement expansion through out the west bank will kill any chance for peace. |
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| PACBI Statement on the McCarthyist Campaign against Omar Barghouti
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The impressive growth of the Palestinian civil society campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel, particularly after its criminal war of aggression on the occupied Gaza Strip, is testimony to the morality and consistency of ordinary citizens and civil society organizations around the world concerned about restoring Palestinian rights and achieving justice for Palestinians.
The most recent achievement of the Israel boycott movement was the adoption of BDS-- nearly by consensus -- by the Scottish Trade Union Congress, following the example set by the Congress of South African Trade Unions, COSATU and the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, ICTU.
In despair over their evident inability to stop or even hold back the growing tide of BDS across the globe, Israel apologists have resorted to an old tactic at which they seem to excel: witch hunts and smear campaigns. A self-styled McCarthyist academic monitor group in Israel has launched a petition calling for the expulsion of Omar Barghouti, a founding member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), from Tel Aviv University, where he is enrolled as a doctoral student. The Israeli campaign urges the university administration to expel Barghouti due to his leading role in the BDS movement that calls for boycotting Israel and all institutions complicit in its occupation and apartheid
To date, more than 65,000 persons have reportedly signed this right-wing Israeli petition that depicts Barghouti as an “especially strident and persuasive voice” against Israeli colonial and racist policies. Several media columns by Zionist journalists in Israel and the United Kingdom, among others, have tried to use the “revelation” that Barghouti, “now enrolled” at an Israeli university, is politically inconsistent for calling for the boycott of all Israeli academic institutions while he is a student at one of them. Other than the clear dishonesty and underhandedness of these same media in presenting the case as if Barghouti has just -- or recently -- enrolled in an Israeli university despite themselves having reported years ago that he was already enrolled then, the reports have made some glaring omissions about the Israeli apartheid context, the widely endorsed criteria of the PACBI boycott, and the system of racial discrimination in Israel’s educational system against the indigenous Palestinians. |
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| Zvi Galil, the President of Tel Aviv University clarifies the University’s standing on the recent debate regarding Omar Barghouti |
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In response, therefore, to the petition calling for the expulsion of Mr. Barghouti that will be submitted to us in the near future, the University cannot and will not expel this student based on his political views or actions. He will be assessed only on the basis of
his academic achievements and excellence. |
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| The Petition against Omar Barghouti |
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Dear Reader,
It is confirmed Omar Barghouti is a Master's student at Tel Aviv University and not PhD.
Our Hebrew petition against Barghouti has reached over 65,000
and our English petition has reached over 800
IAM is scheduled to deliver hard copy of the petitions to Danny Leviathan the Tel Aviv University Rector in May 10.
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| [TAU, PhD candidate] Omar Bargouti interviewed "The South Africa Moment in Palestine" |
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| Omar Barghouti is an activist and writer based in Palestine. He was one of the early advocates of a Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions strategy against Israel's occupation and apartheid policies. He was one of the headline speakers of Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) 2009. |
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| [Tel Aviv University] Adi Ophir and Nadim Rouhana participating a Palestinian conference in South Africa calling Israel an Apartheid state, June 11, 2009 |
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Talk: STEVEN FRIEDMAN - South Africanising the Struggle?: The Palestinian BDS campaign and the
Fight against Apartheid
14:30 PLENARY II: Identity and Democracy: Re-imagining the National Project
1. NADIM ROUHANA – Theme Keynote: Democratic Transition & Re-inventing Palestinian & Israeli
Identities
2. ADI OPHIR – Co-existence of Democracy and Occupation in Israel-Palestine
3. FOUAD MOUGHRABI – Changing Modes of Resistance
5. STEVEN FRIEDMAN – Those Whom History Wishes to Destroy It First Makes Rich: Identity,
Economics and the End of Apartheid |
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| [Tel Aviv University, Arts] Ariella Azoulay: Constituting Violence, 1947-1950 A visual genealogy of a regime |
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| Between 1947 and 1950, the institutions of the Jewish Yishuv were transformed into the apparatus of a Jewish state. They were tasked with Judaizing the region they had conquered. They applied their logic to all areas of life in a territory which still had no permanent borders. The exhibition follows this process through some two hundred photographs, most of which come from various Yishuv and state archives. The apparatus of the new state was shaped during the process of destroying Palestinian society by killing, dividing, expropriating, expelling and preventing those expelled from returning. Nor was that enough. In order for this apparatus to be stabilized and maintained, it was necessary to transform the catastrophe imposed on the Palestinians into what I shall characterize as “catastrophe from their point of view” – “their,” of course, referring to the Palestinians. |
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| Rahela Mizrahi is completing her 2nd degree in Arts at Tel Aviv University: "Emergency appeal to UNESCO to exclude Israel from its membership" |
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| The crimes of 1948 are not a finished chapter in the history books, but an ongoing reality that has been unfolding for at least 60 years and continues to unfold today: ongoing theft and expropriation of the remaining Palestinian land and water, demolition of thousands of homes, the making of the Gaza strip and Palestinian cities in the West Bank and Gaza strip into concentration camps surrounded by an eight-meter-high cement wall and electrical fences, inside which reign unemployment, poverty, and hunger and despair, in addition to the mass incarceration of three generations of Palestinians (currently above 12,000). On the flip side of the steady decimation of the indigenous Palestinian people, Israel, with U.S. and European support, imported to Palestine one million immigrants, mostly Europeans, during the nineties. Land theft and colonization were carried out under a fake discourse of peace, promoted by a fake Israeli peace movement and NGOs financed by U.S. and E.U., using the Oslo agreements as tools for the complete elimination of Palestine from the map. |
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| Shlomo Sand, the Tel Aviv U history professor and author of a controversial book on the genetic origins of the Jews, received a top critics prize |
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Professor Shlomo Sand, the Tel Aviv University history professor and author of a controversial book on the genetic origins of the Jews, this week received a top critics prize from French journalists. Sand, whose book "When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?" ignited controversy in Israel and in Jewish circles, is the recipient of the Aujourd'hui Award, which is given to the best non-fiction political or historical work.
The book, which was published by the Resling imprint, spent 19 weeks on the bestseller list in Israel. Though it has been in bookstores for just six months in France, it has thus far sold 25,000 copies, good enough to remain on the bestseller list. |
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| Prof' Moshe Zuckermann, Tel Aviv U, signs a petition calling Israeli occupation, settlements and blockade of Palestinian territories to come to an end |
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Out of a sense of shared responsibility and in the spirit of Jewish tradition - because the occupation is destroying the lives of the occupied and the souls of the occupiers.
Appeal to the Israeli government:
We the undersigned Jews want the Israeli occupation, settlements and blockade of Palestinian territories to come to an end. We call for humane living conditions and security for all the people in Israel and Palestine. |
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| [Tel Aviv University] Adi Ophir and Michal Givoni's new book: "The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli Rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories" Essays in views of the occupation as brutal colonization, a form of "Jewish Apartheid" |
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| This collection of essays by leading Israeli and Palestinian scholars, The power of Inclusive Exclusion, accompanied by a comprehensive chronology, photographs and documents, is a groundbreaking attempt to analyze the Israeli occupation as a rationalized system of political rule. It features a comprehensive range of inquiries that address some of the fundamental dimensions of the occupation regime in its current phase – the unpredictable bureaucratic apparatus, the fragmentation of space and regulation of movement, the intricate tapestry of law and regulations, the discriminatory control over economic flows and the calculated use of military violence. Employing a variety of disciplinary and intellectual perspectives, the essays in the volume go beyond prevalent views of the occupation as either a skewed form of brutal colonization, a form of "Jewish Apartheid" or an inevitable piecemeal and improvised response to "terrorism". Pretending neither to blur Israel's responsibility for the Palestinian predicament nor to portray the occupation as a premeditated and coherent project, the essays uncover the structural logic that sustains and reproduces the occupation regime and thus delineate the stakes for an informed opposition to it. |
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| Dr Aeyal Gross [Tel Aviv University, Law] spoke in a pro-Palestinian event organized by The Association of the Palestinian Community, London |
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The Israel – Palestine Conflict: The Case of the War on Gaza - where do the legalities lie?
Date: 1 March 2009
Venue: Brunei Gallery
13.30-15.00
Panel III on Humanitarian Law Issues (jus in bello)
This would examine issues in relation to the conduct of the conflict.
Chair: Dr Rosemary Hollis (City)
Panel members: Prof Françoise Hampson (Essex), Prof Steven Haines (Geneva Centre for Security Policy, by telephone),
Dr Aeyal Gross (Tel Aviv University)
...an academic centre at SOAS, the Sir Joseph Hotung Programme in Law, Human Rights and Peace Building in the Middle East, appears to lack balance in its coverage of Israeli-Palestinian issues. In October 2004, they cosponsored, along with the SOAS Palestine Society and others, a memorial conference for the Palestinian intellectual Edward Said titled "A Continuing Legacy." In November 2004, they invited the Palestinian advocate Dr. Hanan Ashrawi to present the annual Hotung Lecture.
In January 2005, following the International Court of Justice's (ICJ) ruling against Israel's security barrier, Prof. Iain Scobbie, head of the Hotung Programme, spoke at three different events at SOAS regarding the alleged illegality of the barrier. One of these events at which Scobbie lectured, along with Arab Member of Knesset and fierce critic of Israeli policy Dr. Azmi Bishara and others, was held at the Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre, the largest venue on the SOAS campus. The overall event was titled "Sealing Their Fate: The Wall's Implications for Palestinian life" and was presented by the Friends of Birzeit University, the SOAS Palestine Society, and the London Middle East Institute at SOAS. |
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| Prof. Daniel Bar-Tal, Tel Aviv University in "ISRAEL: Slowly Beating Back the Persecution Psyche" |
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| Many Israelis do not want to acknowledge or recognise their own misdeeds or atrocities, says Bar-Tal. "They prefer not to admit facts that put them in a negative light. Therefore the collective memory becomes a black-and-white story, made up to glorify their own side and to blame and de-legitimise the other side." |
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| Judd Ne'eman [Dept. of Film and Television, Tel-Aviv University] who signed petitions against Israel will be awarded 2009 Israel Prize by Yuli Tamir |
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Israel's destructive criminal policy will not cease without a massive intervention by the international community. However, except for some rather weak official condemnation, the international community is reluctant to intervene,. The United States openly supports the Israeli violence and Europe, although voicing some condemnation, is unwilling to seriously consider withdrawing the “gift” it handed Israel by upgrading its relations with the European Union.
In the past the world knew how to fight criminal policies. The boycott on South Africa was effective, but Israel is handled with kid gloves: its trade relations are flourishing, academic and cultural cooperation continue and intensify with diplomatic support. ...
Sincerely,
The Undersigned
175. Judd Ne'eman [Department of Film and Television at Tel-Aviv University] |
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| [Tel Aviv University, Philosophy] Please sign the Petition against Omar Barghouti, PhD Candidate |
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Literally thousands of people all over the world are working very hard to demonize and delegitimize Israel. An especially strident and persuasive voice is that of Omar Barghouti, whose devastating accusations against Israel can be found on dozens of internet sites, newspapers all over the world and even at international conferences. What makes his work especially repugnant is his wide use of half-truth, selective omission and outright lie. He is clearly an enemy of Israel.
We recently learned that he is a doctoral student at the Tel Aviv University. If this is indeed true, it is quite incredible because Omar Barghouti is a founding member of The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel and has personally called on countless occasions, for an international boycott of all Israeli universities as well as trade and cultural ties. |
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| Anat Biletzki and (late) Leon Sheleff, Tel Aviv University professors from B'Tselem who advocate for Palestinian Right of Return |
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My second story is the story of the refugees, or, to be more precise, the story of the board’s discussion on addressing the refugee problem. The debate was not about the
right of return per se – yes or no – but rather about the question of
B’Tselem’s obligation to investigate and report on the question of
refugees. This was a question posed, in general, to any human rights organization and in particular to an Israeli human rights organization such as B’Tselem; it was, and is, a loaded question having to do with a political agenda. It was, and is, a complex question needing sensitive answers. Leon’s words at that board meeting were so typical of him:
“…This is really one of the most embarrassing subjects because it may harm the political process. Let me remind us all that one of the arguments aired [at our previous meeting] was the political situation and its relationship to the human rights aspect of the problem.” Leon continued, emphasizing the ambivalence in us all, the gap between the moral and the pragmatic:
“Each of us here is acting on two levels – the level of politics and
the level of human rights…There are expulsions all over the word, but the injustice cannot be ignored. I think this is the type of work that B’Tselem can and is capable of doing.” His final, “decisive”,
words were so Leon-like: “To say that we won’t touch the issue because it is politically sensitive – that doesn’t seem right to me.” |
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| [Tel Aviv U, Education] Daniel Bar-Tal: "Hamas provides welfare, health and education to the Palestinian people" |
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The psychological analysis of the situation illustrates the selective,
biasing and distorting transmission and dissemination of information by the Israeli channels of communication. It does not mean that the alternative information does not exist in Israel but very few are interested in knowing what is really happening. Thus, most of the Israeli Jews do not know what Israel perpetrated through the decades of occupying Gaza; most of the
Israeli Jews do not know that originally Hamas was founded by the Israeli authorities to provide an alternative to the national movement of PLO; most of the Israeli Jews do not know that Hamas is a religious–fundamental movement that also provides welfare, health and educational services to the Palestinian people; most of the Israeli Jews do not know that Hamas was elected democratically (with the insistence of USA) to lead the government of the Palestinian authority because of Fatah corruption, and mostly because of the fruitless negotiations with Israel which did not provide any political solution of the conflict; most of the Israeli Jews do not know that the policy of the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon about ‘No Palestinian Partner’ led to unilateral disengagement from Gaza without negotiation with the Palestinian Authority. This act was done in order to delegitimize Palestinian Authority and in attempt to keep control over the
West Bank. Moreover, the disengagement did not free Gaza but turned it into one big prison. Israel controls the entrances to Gaza and controls every aspect of human life in Gaza. |
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| Anat Biletzki and Anat Matar from Tel Aviv University support Hampshire College divestment from Israel |
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Hampshire College in Amherst, MA, has become the first of any college or university in the U.S. to divest from companies on the grounds of their involvement in the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
This landmark move is a direct result of a two-year intensive campaign by the campus group, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). The group pressured Hampshire College's Board of Trustees to divest from six specific companies due to human rights concerns in occupied Palestine. Over 800 students, professors, and alumni have signed SJP's "institutional statement" calling for the divestment.
The proposal put forth by SJP was approved on Saturday, 7 Feb 2009 by the Board. By divesting from these companies, SJP believes that Hampshire has distanced itself from complicity in the illegal occupation and war crimes of Israel.
Support From:
--Tarun J. Tejpal, Internationally Acclaimed Author, Editor of the Magazine Tehelka
--Adam Keller
--Beate Zilversmidt
--Hava Kelleradam, Members of Gush Shalom, (‘Peace Block’)
--Anat Biletski, Tel Aviv University
--Anat Matar, Tel Aviv University |
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| Tel Aviv U's B'Tselem, an Extreme-Leftist Group Disguised as “Keeper of the Gate of Universal Human Rights” |
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| When I read and hear all the lies that are thrown and heaped on the Jewish people and their country, the State of Israel, by the Fascist Left with its Israeli Fifth Column – comprised by many academicians beside other “good souls” among us, and the inhuman Communist Biletzki among them – in the lead, I am not surprised. |
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| [TAU] Daniel Bar-Tal: Israeli Jews' consciousness is characterized by victimization, a siege mentality, blind patriotism, dehumanization of the Palestinians. In: "Is an Israeli Jewish sense of victimization perpetuating the conflict with Palestinians?" |
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A new study of Jewish Israelis shows that most accept the 'official version' of the history of the conflict with the Palestinians. Is it any wonder, then, that the same public also buys the establishment explanation of the operation in Gaza?
A pioneering research study dealing with Israeli Jews' memory of the conflict with the Arabs, from its inception to the present, came into the world together with the war in Gaza. The sweeping support for Operation Cast Lead confirmed the main diagnosis that arises from the study, conducted by Daniel Bar-Tal, one of the world's leading political psychologists, and Rafi Nets-Zehngut, a doctoral student: Israeli Jews' consciousness is characterized by a sense of victimization, a siege mentality, blind patriotism, belligerence, self-righteousness, dehumanization of the Palestinians and insensitivity to their suffering. The fighting in Gaza dashed the little hope Bar-Tal had left - that this public would exchange the drums of war for the cooing of doves.
"Most of the nation retains a simplistic collective memory of the conflict, a black-and-white memory that portrays us in a very positive light and the Arabs in a very negative one," says the professor from Tel Aviv University. This memory, along with the ethos of the conflict and collective emotions such as fear, hatred and anger, turns into a psycho-social infrastructure of the kind experienced by nations that have been involved in a long-term violent conflict. This infrastructure gives rise to the culture of conflict in which we and the Palestinians are deeply immersed, fanning the flames and preventing progress toward peace. Bar-Tal claims that in such a situation, it is hard even to imagine a possibility that the two nations will be capable of overcoming the psychological obstacles without outside help. |
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| Olmert responded to opposition to the appointment by Tel Aviv University: Israel won't fund institutions that discriminate against former IDF officers |
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Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Sunday responded to opposition to the appointment by Tel Aviv University of an Israel Defense Forces Colonel Pnina Sharvit-Baruch to its law faculty, saying Israel will no longer support institutions that discriminate against IDF officers because of their military service.
"In my opinion, any university that takes part in the disqualification of lecturers on such grounds before an examination [of their service] has finished, will be an institution not suitable for funding from the Israeli government."
Olmert dismissed the protestors who opposed her appointment as "a number of self-righteous, sanctimonious, arrogant hypocrites that chose to make an exception out of the military service of the IDF Advocacy General without determining if she is guilty [of crimes]." |
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| Controversial Bestseller by Tel Aviv University scholar Shlomo Zand (or Sand) Shakes the Foundation of the Israeli State |
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A logical conclusion of Zand's work exposing Israel's founding mythology may be the restoration of the idea of a one-state solution to a legitimate place in the debate over this contentious region. After all, while it muddies the waters in one sense -- raising ancient, biblical questions about just who the "children of Israel" really are -- in another sense, it hints at the commonalities that exist between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. Both groups lay claim to the same crust of earth, both have faced historic repression and displacement and both hold dear the idea that they should have a "right of return."
And if both groups in fact share common biblical ties, then it begs the question of why the entirety of what was Palestine under the British mandate should remain a refuge for people of one religion instead of being a country in which Jews and Arabs are guaranteed equal protection -- equal protection under the laws of a state whose legitimacy would never again be open to question. |
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| Chaim Ganz and Anat Matar from Tel Aviv U, protest a decision to appoint IDF officer who justified Gaza strikes, as a lecturer for the Faculty of Law |
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Leading the protest against Sharvit-Baruch's appointment is Professor Chaim Ganz of the university's Minerva Center for Human Rights.
Ganz wrote a letter to Professor Hanoch Dagan, the dean of the law faculty, claiming that Sharvit-Baruch's interpretation of the law during Israel's Gaza offensive allowed the army to act in ways that constitute potential war crimes. Ganz also said that Sharvit-Baruch harms Israel's values system.
Dr. Anat Matar, a lecturer at Tel Aviv University's philosophy department, said, "I was shocked to learn that half of the second-year law students will learn the foundations of law from someone who helped justify the killing of civilians, including hundreds of children." |
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| Israeli Defense Minister canceled his visit to Tel Aviv University's Law Department, after a graffiti on the walls called him a 'murderer' |
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| Barak canceled his visit to Tel Aviv University's Law Department, after a graffiti sprayed on the walls of the building called him a 'murderer' The graffiti was drawn on the entryway to the Law Department ahead of the defense minister's visit. |
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| [Professor of Philosophy at Tel-Aviv University] Anat biletzki's latest anti-Israel activism: Grieving Over Gaza, Reigniting Violence: How Do Ceasefires End?,
Conference: THE SECOND NORTH AMERICAN CONFERENCE ON JUDAISM AND HUMAN RIGHTS |
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I write as an Israeli. Some of us, as Israelis, are grieving over what we have become. Blaming the other side with a roster of rehearsed clichés cannot mitigate the grief.
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| Moshe Zuckermann [Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Idea,TAU]: In Gaza “More than 400,000 dead victims” |
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Some Israel-hating Israelis are to be found in Israeli academia. And some of them are the cherished interviewees of the state owned German radio. Today, the journalist Birgit Kolkmann interviewed Prof. Moshe Zuckermann of Tel Aviv University, who said, about the conflict in Gaza:
“Time and time again civilians are affected. Also this time about 25 to 30 percent of the victims - one speaks in the meantime about more than 400,000 dead victims - are civilians.”
(In the German original: “es sind immer wieder Zivilisten in Mitleidenschaft gezogen. Auch diesmal waren ungefähr 25 bis 30 Prozent der bislang Umgekommenen - man redet mittlerweile von über 400.000 Todesopfern - Zivilisten.”
I’ve listened to the original broadcast, and there is no mistake: Zuckermann really did speak about 400.000 dead victims. (However, in the transcript of the interview, someone has corrected the number - it is perhaps easier to deceive the ears than the eyes.) |
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| [TAU, Law] Aeyal Gross’s Gaza notes - "On Gaza’s (non-existent) health system": The occupying power must bear responsibility |
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The current attack found the health system in Gaza in a state of near-collapse due to the blockade imposed upon it for the past year and a half, as well as previous closures. Even before this crisis the system was working in a severely restricted manner. Now it must handle wounded people who are in need of complex care by expert professionals, which in the current situation it cannot provide.
Targeting of civilians and/of medical facilities is a breach of international humanitarian law. The targets chosen by the Israeli military include also clearly civilian installations.
As occupying power currently in effective control of the area, Israel, which is currently carrying out a massive military operation in the Gaza Strip, must bear responsibility for the wounded of the attack, enable their access to hospitals able to care for them, respect medical neutrality of related facilities and allow entry of all necessary medical supplies for hospitals to be able to handle the wounded people. |
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| [TAU, Law] About Eyal Benvenisti and his "Right of Return Myth" |
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The Arab Peace Initiative was designed to sow confusion in the ranks of the enemy, and that is what it has done. The promise of "peace" is so tempting, and the conditions so vague, that they can, and do, invite support from every well meaning and not-so-well-meaning analyst and adviser. The transition to a new president in the United States seems to many to be the ideal time to push for United States adoption of the Arab Peace Initiative. Surprisingly, not only Arabs, but Israelis and Zionists have jumped on this bandwagon. The latest to push for Israeli acceptance of the Arab Peace Initiative is Eyal Benvenisti. His article is entitled The Right of Return Myth. Benvenisti, a most esteemed professor of international law, uses the most astute legal arguments to assure us that the Arabs could not possibly intend for the Palestinian refugees to return to Israel, since that would be contrary to international law and to the provisions of General Assembly Resolution 194 as he interprets them.
...How can anyone seriously advocating support for a document or a policy when nobody knows what it means? Are the Arab states going to take it upon themselves to announce that Eyal Benvenisti will arbitrate all disputes about the meaning of Resolution 194? |
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| The right of return myth / By Eyal Benvenisti |
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| There are those who are saying that the Beirut Declaration adopts the Palestinian reading of Resolution 194. This claim is untenable for a number of reasons, among them the recognition of the need for Israeli agreement and the statement that the Palestinians will not be resettled in Arab countries in which special circumstances prevent this. That was a promise to Lebanon, which understood that the declaration relinquishes the demand for return and therefore hastened to defend its fragile demographic balance. However, even if the claim that the Beirut Declaration adopts the Palestinian interpretation is true, in light of the correct interpretation of Resolution 194, Israel's acceptance of the initiative would not constitute recognition of the right of return. |
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| [TAU, International & Regional Studies] Efraim Davidi: "Demo against the massive murder in Gaza" |
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Tonight: a demo against the criminal Israel military op in Gaza
Stop war crimes
Hadash (the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality - Communist Party of Israel) invites you to a demo, tonight (Saturday, December, 27) at 7:30 p.m. from the Cinemateque Square in Tel-Aviv |
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| [TAU, Psychology] Uri Hadar / The siege without and the Siege within: An Israeli perspective |
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| Yet, despite the hostile atmosphere in the Israeli public and leadership, we have managed to stage some very powerful actions in the past year, as the siege policies became increasingly tight. Thus, last winter, there was a relatively large 'Break the Siege' demonstration, held jointly in Erez and Gaza, in collaboration with the Gazan Coalition to End the Siege. Tens of cars drove along busy Israeli traffic arteries- from Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem- carrying banners that called to stop the siege on Gaza. At the end of the protest cavalcade, a few thousand demonstrators gathered just outside of the Erez crossing and heard speeches against the siege. In addition, we transferred truck-loads of goods provided according to a list we received from our Gazan partners, a transfer that involved much negotiation with the Israeli authorities. In another action, a boat carrying peace activists from around the world entered Gaza: its passengers held a demonstration and conducted press conferences in Gaza city. |
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| BREAKING THE SILENCE and TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY REFUGEE PROGRAM win ACRI (Radical-leftist) AWARD FOR 2008 |
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Breaking the Silence, a group of former IDF soldiers, provides other former soldiers with the platform to give anonymous testimonials about human rights violations they encountered during their service in the Occupied Territories. The testimonials then serve to highlight the moral faults of the Occupation in the public sphere.
The Tel Aviv University Law Clinic's Refugee Rights program has been a leader in the struggle to obtain fair and legal treatment for refugees and asylum-seekers in Israel, one of the country's most trying human rights issues. Despite Israel's legal obligations to accept refugees, it is sending many of them straight back to Egypt and their countries of origin where they face imminent danger, without implementing the proper procedures for determining their status. |
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| [TAU, Law] Amir Paz-Fuchs / Bearers of ill tidings |
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First - the "security" barrier. Since work on the erection of the security barrier began, government officials lied to the Supreme Court on several occasions, disguising their real motivation - settlement expansion - with security rhetoric. Moreover, when their lies were exposed, and the Court ordered a change in route (as in the Bil'in case), they have simply ignored the judgment. This is relatively well known. But there are other examples, no less significant for the future of the region: A recent Bimkom: Planners for Planning Rights report shows how Israeli planning policy in Area C has effectively fragmented the West Bank to allocate land almost exclusively for Israeli use.
As Yesh Din reports, civilian settler militias act violently against the Palestinian population, and with total impunity. In 90 percent of the cases filed from the onset of the Second Intifada until 2007, no investigation followed the complaint. Gisha has demonstrated how the long-term closure of Gaza has led not only to dire famine and poverty, but has also made Hamas an attractive supplier of energy, food and basic supplies. |
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| Merav Amir [The Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel Aviv U] speaks of the "Illegal Occupation" |
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"Companies have a social as well as a legal responsibility and must therefore take no part in the illegal occupation," Merav Amir of the Coalition of Women for Peace (CWP), told IPS. "In order to comply with international human rights law, companies should make sure that their businesses have nothing to do with the occupation."
CWP is an Israeli feminist peace organisation that carries out grassroots research, and has built a database with information about companies in industrial zones within the occupied territories. An IPS investigation revealed that Vileda appeared in both that database and the list of U.N. Global Compact participants.
Amir says companies located in the territories benefit from reduced taxes, little or no enforcement of labour laws, a captive labour market, very cheap real estate prices and lax enforcement of environmental regulations. |
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| [TAU, Comparative Literature] Ran HaCohen involved in a new boycott call against Israel |
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We in Holland –by ‘we’ is meant: A Different Jewish Voice, Amsterdam- read about the laudable call by twenty two human rights, humanitarian and peace organizations upon the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to place human rights conditionalities on Israel within the framework of Israel's accession to the OECD.
We would like hereby to ask your attention for another important and wholly independent argument concerning the matter of Israel’s admittance to the OECD that we missed it in the arguments already put forward.
It is about mentioning the fact that Israel is breaching each and every principle of "free market" economy in the OT – and this is what the OECD is supposed to promote.
It was the Israeli academic Ran HaCohen from Tel Aviv University who succinctly pointed to this argument in his article Keep Israel out of elite economic club The Electronic Intifada, 17 June 2008
...
We would appreciate if this important argument -about ‘free economy’ made a farce by Israel in its treatment of Palestinian territory, society and economy- could be added to your campaign.
If judged useful you can reach Mr. Ran HaCohen by email: hacohen@post.tau.ac.il He is informed that we bring this to your attention. |
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| [TAU, History] Shlomo Sand's latest "academic" work has spent 19 weeks on Israel’s bestseller list
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It is not taught in Israeli schools but most of the early Zionist leaders, including David Ben Gurion [Israel’s first prime minister], believed that the Palestinians were the descendants of the area’s original Jews. They believed the Jews had later converted to Islam.”
Dr Sand attributed his colleagues’ reticence to engage with him to an implicit acknowledgement by many that the whole edifice of “Jewish history” taught at Israeli universities is built like a house of cards.
The problem with the teaching of history in Israel, Dr Sand said, dates to a decision in the 1930s to separate history into two disciplines: general history and Jewish history. Jewish history was assumed to need its own field of study because Jewish experience was considered unique.
“There’s no Jewish department of politics or sociology at the universities. Only history is taught in this way, and it has allowed specialists in Jewish history to live in a very insular and conservative world where they are not touched by modern developments in historical research.
“I’ve been criticised in Israel for writing about Jewish history when European history is my specialty. But a book like this needed a historian who is familiar with the standard concepts of historical inquiry used by academia in the rest of the world.” |
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| [History, TAU] Yossi Schwartz / Tired but Satisfied: Israel's Strategies in the Demographic War Against the Palestinians from 1948 to the Present |
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| The ability of the Jewish-Zionist colonial project to grab control over more and more land in the Middle East was connected throughout the years to a combination of internal and external factors... |
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| [Tel Aviv U, French] Prof' Yehuda Kupferman to speak on 7 October about implementation of the right of return |
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Discussion :
From the Right of Return to One State Raja’a Omari and Yehuda
Kupferman will argue that the bloody conflict which has split the
country since 1948 will end only if its cause – the nakba
– is addressed, and the right of the refugees and the expellees
to return is recognized. Implementation of the right of return will
reunite the Palestinian people in their land, and point the way to its
reunification. This will lay the foundation for a state whose members will not be defined by their ethnic identification, but simply as citizens. Raja’a Omari is active in "Abnaa al-Balad (The sons of the Land), the Committee for a Secular Democratic Republic, the Haifa Conference Forum and "Ajras al-Awda" (Bells of Return). Yehuda Kupferman is active in the Committee for a Secular Democratic Republic and the Haifa Conference Forum. Tuesday, 7 October 2008, at 20:00. |
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| Professors at Tel-Aviv U, Dan Jacobson and Izhak Schnell speak in al-Quds Conference which aims to undermine Israel, under the guise of "Peace" |
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The conference will bring together political decision-makers, international academics, and civil society leaders. Participants will discuss existing policy proposals (to be distributed in advance), and draft a collective policy paper, to be presented to Israeli and Palestinian political leaders, the new US administration, the European Union, United Nations, Russia, and
the Quartet representatives....
a genuine peace agreement based upon: the Arab Peace Initiative and the previous agreements signed between the two sides; the implementation of UN Security Council Resolutions 242, 338 and 1397; a fair agreed-upon solution to the Palestinian refugees problem in consideration of General Assembly Resolution 194; the end of the Israeli occupation; the evacuation of all Jewish settlements from within the final borders of the State of Palestine;
and a solution for Jerusalem based upon keeping it as one city but establishing it as the capital of the two states: Palestine and Israel. Such an agreement should have a timetable and a mechanism for implementation, and be conducive to the establishment of an Independent, sovereign Palestinian state within the borders of the 4th of June 1967, with limited mutually agreed-upon 1:1 swaps to meet the vital needs of the
two states. |
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| [TAU, History] Shlomo Zand's fiction continues in Le Monde diplomatique "Zionist Nationalist Myth Of Enforced Exile"
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Sixty years after its foundation, Israel refuses to accept that it shouldexist for the sake of its citizens. For almost a quarter of the population,who are not regarded as Jews, this is not their state legally. At the sametime, Israel presents itself as the homeland of Jews throughout the world,even if these are no longer persecuted refugees, but the full and equal citizens of other countries.
A global ethnocracy invokes the myth of the eternal nation, reconstitutedon the land of its ancestors, to justify internal discrimination against its own citizens. |
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| [TAU, Law] Eyal Benvenisti: "the so called "disengagement" from the Gaza Strip in 2005", in his article:"The Law on the Unilateral Termination of Occupation" |
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| In our collective memory, the termination of occupation is associated with the joy of liberation. We tend to view this period as one of enormous excitement, of self- and collective fulfillment. But there may be different scenarios, especially in times when occupants experience the severe costs associated with their position. Unilateral withdrawals can be events as painful as other situations of political transition in which the protection of individual rights is particularly important. Probably given the rather idyllic connotation, the law of occupation has so far failed to seriously address the occupant’s obligations in anticipation of and during the transitional period at the end of the occupation. It is time to fill this gap |
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| [TAU, Comparative Literature] Ran HaCohen spreads poison in "Occupation by Another Name" |
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| The Israeli proposal – as its "security arrangements" reveal – proves once again that Israel is no partner for peace. On the ground, all that Israel seeks is time to expand the settlements and strangle Palestinian society, hoping the "Palestinian problem" will eventually disappear. On the discourse level, however, things are just as bad. Despite the false contrary impression cultivated by the Israeli propaganda machine, Israel clearly rejects the notion of an independent Palestinian state, other than a Bantustan under total Israeli control. If you wonder why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains unresolved, this is the simple answer: the two-state solution, proposed by the UN 60 years ago and endorsed by the Palestinians 20 years ago, is still unacceptable to Israel's military and political leadership. |
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| [Ex-TAU, head, History Dept.] Shlomo Ben-Ami: "Refusing to admit that the noble Jewish dream of statehood was stained by the sins of Israel's birth"
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For 60 years, both the Israelis and the Palestinians have used the
past to illuminate the present and confer legitimacy on their nations'
respective founding myths. Of course, Zionists and Palestinian
nationalists were not the first to embellish the stories of their
nations' births or make excuses for their tragedies. Throughout
history, nations have been born in blood and frequently in sin. |
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| [Psychotherapy] Dr. Ruchama Marton, PHR: Israel presses Gaza sick to become informers |
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"It is no less than torture, what the Shabak (GSS) is doing at Erez
crossing," Dr Ruchama Marton, the founder of PHR-Israel said. |
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| Comparing Raphael Falk to [TAU] Shlomo Zand |
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We saw one such effort, in the hands of an amateur, when we considered the theories of professor Shlomo Zand about the origin of the Jews. Zand is primarily an ideologue, and invented facts to fit his fancy. He wove a fairy tale that can be believed by the ignorant to support intellectual impudence.
The book before us is of an entirely different caliber. Raphael Falk is an acknowledged expert in human genetics and a reasonably careful scientist. His careful reasoning brings sanity, logic and decency to counter the demagoguery of political argumentation. It is not a perfect book, but Hebrew readers will find it entertaining, informative and insightful. What a pity that Zand's book, but not this one, is being published in English! |
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| [Comparative Literature] Ran Hacohen: "Keep Israel out of elite economic club" |
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| Israel's ruling elite now has a major aspiration: to join the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) as a member country. For the sake of the Israelis and of their neighbors, this aspiration should be thwarted by an international campaign of all supporters of peace; and, in fact, by supporters of the free market as well. |
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| (Theatre) "Art and Occupation" - A public seminar with Freddie Rokem |
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| Analyzing this image I will first discuss the historical associations of the image, arguing that the associations with the Holocaust are actually a way to minimize the pain and suffering of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation rather than highlighting them in a broader universal context. Another aspect of this image is connected to the technologies of creating and disseminating images of conflict/occupation and how they affect the ethical discussions surrounding this incident. In my conclusion I will argue that historical associations and technological innovations can create conflicting and even contradictory constellations which tend to obscure rather than sharpen the ethical dimensions of images like the Palestinian violin player at the check point. |
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| Dr. Anat Matar and Tirtza Tauber participate in a "Right of Return" Conference |
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Palestinian speakers from the post-1967 occupied territories and the Diaspora
Dr. Anat Matar
Prof. Bhim Singh from Kashmir
Greetings to the Haifa Conference. |
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| [Political Psychology] Daniel Bar-Tal speaks of Israeli discrimination and of "failure relates to the continuation of the occupation " |
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The Ruthless Outcomes of Occupation
In my view the most salient sign of the democratic and moral deterioration of Israeli Jewish society is the lasting occupation. During the years of the Israeli occupation, a deep-rooted system of dual sets of legal norms developed in the West Bank: one for the Jewish settlers and one for the Palestinian population. These dual sets enabled the establishment of a system of segregation, discrimination and control on ethnic grounds in the
occupied territories, with all the negative implications. |
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| [TAU Medical School Institute for Psychotherapy] Anti-Israel Dr. Ruchama Marton interviewed on Israeli TV, blames Israeli security forces and supports Palestinian claims. |
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We march in order to protest against Israeli policies of exclusion towards refugees and asylum seekers·
We march in order to demand social rights for refugees – health, welfare and education |
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| Ex-TAU Literature Dept., Yitzhak Laor in: "counter-celebration of Israel's 60th anniversary" |
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Since it is now a core belief of academic "progressives" that Israel is the world's most wicked country, responsible for all the globe's miseries except (perhaps) avian flu, it's hardly surprising that the very day of that country's sixtieth birthday should, in an act of depraved malevolence, have been marked
at UW by the appearance, courtesy of the Simpson Center and the Graduate School, of two Israel-hating lecturers. We were treated to both Norman Finkelstein, the failed academic and beloved dream-Jew of all the world's antisemites, and Yitzhak Laor, a second-tier poet who specializes in depicting
Israel as the devil's experiment station.
Laor delivered the (once prestigious) John Danz Lecture.
A few people at UW may remember that the Danz lectures were founded to deal with "the role of science in society and in understanding a rational universe." |
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| The law of military occupation, a course at the Law faculty of TAU |
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PRACTICAL APPROACHES TO INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL LAW
Judging war criminals: War crimes trials - from theory to practice Adv. Sharon Weill
The course aims to introduce the international criminal legal system and to examine the different options available for repressing war crimes. Examples of war crimes trials in different conflicts will be presented, as well as other options, such as truth commissions, while focusing on the Palestinian-Israeli context of international criminal law. The course is open for legal, civil and
media activists with keen interest in human rights.
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| Philosophy] Anat Biletzki: Letter to the president of Tel-aviv U for commemoration of the village of Sheikh Muwanis on campus |
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| We, students and employees of Tel Aviv University and their supporters, hereby request that you take action to commemorate a chapter in the history of our institution which has heretofore been silenced – the fact of its erection on the lands of the Palestinian village of Sheikh Muwanis, which was destroyed in 1948 and its residents forced to become refugees. |
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| [School of Economics, Tel Aviv U] Ariel Rubinstein "identifying with those who are occupied, and despising the occupier in: '30 years of Peace Now' |
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| Peace Now's focus on the issues of the occupation and settlements was not a political caprice, but rather an expression of a worldview that sees the Jewish people as fundamentally identifying with those who are occupied, and despising the occupier and oppressor. For us, ruling over another people is akin to being "Terefah." |
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| A question of when, not if Mental disorders of the academic Left
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| Zand’s work appears to be another manifestation of mental disorder in the extreme academic Left in Israel, similar to the completely insane thesis that the IDF’s failure to rape Arab women is a racist phenomenon. |
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| Are the Jews a people? The Zand controversy
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Peoplehood is based on personal and collective identity, which is a f'unction of personal choice, not genetics. If people believe myths or facts about flying horses, converted "Berbers," Joshua and the walls of Jericho or other myths, it is because they choose to believe them, as they reinforce their identity and the choices they have made, and not the other way round. Israeli democracy is problematic. The political systems of neighboring states are certainly no less problematic. Jewish criteria for deciding who is a Jew based on maternal inheritance and Israeli criteria that are based on a Jewish grandparent are equally arbitrary and
capricious. However, the way to correct all these problems is not to erase 3,000 years of history or to deny the right of self determination to the Jewish people or the Arabs of Palestine. The secular democratic Zandinista Yiddishist state of all its citizens will put all its citizens in a miserable state. Injustices cannot be corrected by falsehoods and worse injustices. |
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| About Shlomo Sand (Zand) in 'Shattering a 'national mythology' |
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"To my mind, a myth about the future is better than introverted
mythologies of the past. For the Americans, and today for the Europeans as well, what justifies the existence of the nation is a future promise of an open, progressive and prosperous society. The Israeli materials do exist, but it is necessary to add, for example, pan-Israeli holidays. To decrease the number of memorial days a bit and to add days that are dedicated to the future. But also, for example, to add an hour in memory of the Nakba [literally, the "catastrophe" - the Palestinian term for what happened when Israel was established], between Memorial Day and Independence Day." |
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| Shlomo Zand tour to the destroyed Palestinian village of Tel Aviv University and lecture: "When and How was the Jewish People Invented? |
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In conjunction with Israel's 60th anniversary
You are invited for a tour in the destroyed Palestinian village Sheikh Mounis
Wednesday 26.3. at 12:00
What is between the destroyed village and Tel Aviv University which was built on its lands? |
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| Tel Aviv university historian, Shlomo Zand: An invention called 'the Jewish people |
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| Israel's Declaration of Independence states that the Jewish people arose in the Land of Israel and was exiled from its homeland. Every Israeli schoolchild is taught that this happened during the period of Roman rule, in 70 CE. The nation remained loyal to its land, to which it began to return after two millennia of exile. Wrong, says the historian Shlomo Zand, in one of the most fascinating and challenging books published here in a long time. There never was a Jewish people, only a Jewish religion, and the exile also never happened - hence there was no return. Zand rejects most of the stories of national-identity formation in the Bible, including the exodus from Egypt and, most satisfactorily, the horrors of the conquest under Joshua. It's all fiction and myth that served as an excuse for the establishment of the State of Israel, he asserts. |
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| [Psychology Dept.] Kim Yuval emails fellow-activists in search for Israelis and internationals willing to get wounded in Al-Khader (a village west of Bethlehem) at a demonstration against the separation wall, on Friday, March 7th 2008 |
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Friday, March o7th 2008: Al-Khader Popular Committee against the Wall and Settlements with Al-Khader community invite you to join us in the weekly demonstration that will take place at the southern side of the village near the bypass, route 60.
The motto of this demo is:
Free Palestine, Free Women, Freedom for all the Oppressed |
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| [Literature] Aharon Shabtai: Israel, “Guest Of Honour” In Paris And Turin, Does Not Deserve To Be Invited
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| Israel violates all international laws. Not only the Geneva Convention. The Hague International Court of justice condemned the illegal wall that Israel has built on confiscated Palestinian land. The book event, or any other kind of exhibition in which the Israeli State is invited, is not a way to promote peace in the Middle East, and not a way to bring justice to the Palestinians, but only propaganda to give Israel an image of being a liberal and democratic society. A State which maintains an occupation and commits daily crimes against civilians does not deserve to be invited to whichever cultural week. We cannot accept to be part of that. Israel is not a democratic State but an apartheid State. We cannot support that State at all. |
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| [TAU] Adi Ophir: "Ethnic cleansing would spell the end of the occupation", Palestine Center’s annual conference, Washington
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Dr. Adi Ophir said the two ways Israel maintains control in the occupied territories are submission and separation. Ophir explained that submission and separation are working in opposite directions; submission requires constant contact, best illustrated by the checkpoints, whereas separation requires a lack of contact. This is why, he argued, submission and separation are in constant flux to balance each other out. When new lines of separation are drawn a new form of submission is needed, and visa versa. This is why, Ophir argued, there are two possible outcomes; ethnic cleansing, or a political resolution. Ethnic cleansing would spell the end of the occupation, and the end of the need for both separation and submission. A political resolution, on the other hand, would have to end submission to create two states and eliminated the need for separation.
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| Ex Tel Aviv U professor who signed a letter labeling Israeli policy "the occupation and oppression of another people" is a new director of the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, Columbia University
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Officials at a Columbia University department established in 2005 to balance an anti-Israel tilt in Middle Eastern scholarship at the university have appointed as its director a professor who signed a letter labeling Israeli policy "the occupation and oppression of another people."
Supporters of Israel on campus say they are disappointed about the appointment of Yinon Cohen as the new director of the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, in light of his previous statements. |
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| TAU Medical School Institute for Psychotherapy] Ruchama Marton lectured in Israeli Apartheid Week in London
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Dr. Ruchama Marton, the founder and president of PHR-Israel, gave a lecture in Israeli Apartheid Week in London about the unrecognized villages in the Negev.
The aim of IAW is to contribute to the chorus of international opposition to Israeli apartheid and to bolster support for the boycotts, divestments and sanctions (BDS) against apartheid Israel |
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| Israel Says 'No / by Ran HaCohen
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| the true reason not to seriously negotiate – Israel already says the end of the year is much too early to strike a deal even with Abu Mazen! – is that Israel is unwilling to end the occupation. Not only land and water are at stake, but, as Meron Rapoport of Ha'aretz recently reminded, more than 6 percent of all Israeli exports (excluding diamonds) go to the occupied Palestinian market, about $2 billion a year, more than to France and Italy combined: fruits and vegetables, medicines and hospital equipment, water and electricity, steel and cement. A captive market, where products not good enough for the Israeli customer can be dumped for good money (from the donor countries). A precious asset in a competitive capitalist world. |
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| TAU, Philosophy] Anat Biletzki speaks about Israel's 'Apartheid Roads' and claims Human Rights activism is not political
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Anat Biletzki and the group B'Tselem have conducted painstaking studies of how Israel’s longstanding agenda of allowing its civilians to settle on Palestinian occupied land constitutes an infringement of the Palestinians’ basic equality, property rights, freedom of movement, their very “right to self-determination.” The settlements were given a “cloak of legality,” sanctioned as they were by one Israeli government after another.
Geographically, the settlements break up what might have been a contiguous Palestinian state.
Biletzki ties the settlements together with other work by the Israelis conducted in the name of security to demonstrate the existence of a forbidding, two-tier society : a system of roads off limits to Palestinians in the occupied territories, or permitted only via carefully guarded checkpoints; the wall (or separation barrier), which runs through Palestinian land; and the total control of Gaza, from the economy to communications, which increasingly makes it “a big prison.” This barricading of Palestinians has become a “routine phenomenon” –and not worthy of the headlines, in the way bombs and torture are, says Biletzki. She insists that “our political conversation must become a human rights conversation,” and hopes that she can make an impact on American Jews and policy makers, who don’t believe in the possibility of making a deal with the Palestinians: “If we give them the land, they’ll throw us into the sea |
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| Kim Yuval (Psychology, TAU) invited naive Israelis on behalf of a
Palestinian organization for a violent anti-Israel demonstration where six people were injured |
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| Bethlehem – Palestine / Friday February 8th, 2008 - The Popular Committee against the Wall and Colonization in Al-Khader is organizing a nonviolent demonstration to protest the construction of the annexation wall in the town of Al-Khader, located south of Bethlehem. The protestors will also call for an end to the killing of children, thousands of whom have fallen victim to the 40 year old Israeli Occupation of the Palestinian Territories. |
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| [TAU, Literature] Aharon Shabtai refused to attend Turin Book Fair because the guest of Honor is Israel and its 60th birthday |
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| There are some courageous Israeli critics like Aharon Shabtai, Amira Hass, Yitzhak Laor and others who will not permit their voices to be muffled in this fashion. Shabtai refused to attend this fair. |
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| Daniel Breslau calls for boycott and sanctions against Israel
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| The Palestinians living under occupation must resist. When Israel, the U.S., and the international community does not take notice of nonviolent resistance, when only the horrors of violence focus the attention of the world on the horrors of occupation, the outcome should not be a surprise. Condemnation of violent tactics is hollow when not linked with active support and participation in all the available nonviolent methods: protest, civil disobedience, lobbying, boycotts and sanctions. |
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| [French TAU] Yehuda Kupferman invites Ramallah activists for a meeting in his home
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Joint meeting Tuesday evening
from Dorothy
toJudith Harel ,
Sam Bahour ,
Rima Merriman ,
Rasha Muqbil Jawabri ,
Micky Fisher ,
ICRR , |
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| Dor, Daniel (2005): The Suppression of Guilt. The Israeli Media & the Reoccupation of the West Bank. London: Pluto Press. |
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| Dor argues that media outlets present what their consumers want to perceive, in order to “maintain their own imagined communities.” Their goal is thus not to be liked by the audience, but rather to maintain the special role of media institutions in Israeli society. |
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| About Kim Yuval (Psychology, TAU) and his brother Yani, who was shot while confronting the army last month
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Part of the "Joint Struggle against Israeli Apartheid "
'The solidarity between the Palestinian residents of Bil'in village, internationals and the anti-occupation and anti-Zionist Israelis who each week trekked to the village has become an inspiring model for joint popular struggle....The solidarity between the Palestinian residents of Bil'in village, internationals and the anti-occupation and anti-Zionist Israelis who each week trekked to the village has become an inspiring model for joint popular struggle, not only in Palestine but also around the world.' |
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| Elad Orian [Physiology and Pharmacology, TAU], engaged in mutiny and insurrection among Israeli soldiers, co-stars in the anti-Israel propaganda film Bil'in Habibti |
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| 'The best part was to have a real refusenik (Israeli former soldier who joined the peace demonstrations and refused to serve further) Elad Orian there, he gave many intersting tales about his experience, such as going for the first time with sniper mentality among palestinians shouting allah ho akbar, his experiences with army and how once arrested the soldiers could talk to him freely, how some sent secret text messages expressing support during the demonstration, how Israeli society has largely come to conclusion that the occupation isnt sustainable (mentality is something like ok one way or other lets keep palestinians out so build wall, or else their population grows and jewish majority cant exist) so peace movements has many supoorters so the film was also quite popular but its big step to actually be an activist supporting their cause, to be on the "other side".' |
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| Avi Shlaim, Israeli extremist from Oxford who wants Israel to be annihilated, to be honored at Tel Aviv University |
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The University of Tel Aviv is hosting the Iraqi-Israeli-British new historian for a lecture on King Hussein and Israel. Will he tell them what he wrote on page 8 of his new book? That the Balfour Declararion calling for a jewish Homeland was an Atrocity?
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| Sociology Professor Hanna Herzog teaches that Israel is Racist |
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| Herzog: 'Our central argument is that racism, as a signifier of policy, can be located in the dialectic between denial and affirmation of the category of race, while we link the scope and meanings of practices marked by the media as 'racism' to contingent cultural, social and historical conditions. The article proposes the periodization of the relevant discourse into three primary phases: from 1949 to the late 1970s, when the category of racism was 'prohibited' in Israeli discourse in the aftermath of the Holocaust; the mid-1980s, when this taboo was broken and the phenomena included in the category of racism expanded accordingly; and the 1990s to 2000, during which racism became an institutionalized, all-encompassing discursive term.' |
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| For Tel Aviv law professor Neta Ziv, it’s all “academic” (even if it kills Jews and destroys Israel) |
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| Professor Ziv is the embodiment of how the abstractions of academia can ultimately lead to the opposite of what the academy was meant to do: to enhance society through the application of scholastic study and scientific inquiry to arrive at truth. This is clearly present in her applications of American jurisprudence to Israel’s situation as a tiny democratic country surrounded by a sea of Arab nationalist and Islamic dictatorships calling for the state’s destruction. Ziv defines her activities as preserving human rights; others might define them as enabling the enemies of Israel to destroy the Jewish state. As an educator, she promotes developing what could be considered “cause lawyers” who use the courts to promote a radical agenda against the state in time of war. |
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| Philosophy Professor Anat Biletzki’s “philosophy” is to smear Israel abroad |
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| Professor Biletzki’s analytical philosophy is to smear Israel abroad politically at anti-Israel symposiums and events on college campuses and elsewhere that are fundamentally organized by Arab irredentist groups that frequently use the words “human rights” and “peace” as a deceptive cover to destroy the Jewish state. As an expert in the philosophy of language, Professor Biletzki of all people should understand how language is used to mask real intent, particularly by Arab propagandists. Despite this, she speaks frequently to and is quoted extensively by members of the International Solidarity Movement who claim to be “nonviolent human rights advocates” in one breath, then endorse violence against Israelis as “legitimate resistance” in the next as they act as human shields for terrorists |
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| Carlo Strenger, Psychology, Tel Aviv University thinks Israel deserves to be boycotted
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Carlo Strenger wants to see Israel boycotted, Israel is the cause for terrorism.
'Israel's way of dealing with the Palestinians and Lebanon in the last few decades has led to a long-term process in which the Western world is beginning to see Israel as a pariah state that has no true affinity to Western values. Hence, it is not on the 'right' side of the clash of civilizations, as was reflected in the French ambassador to Britain calling Israel "that shitty little country" not long ago.'
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| Yigal Bronner, South Asian Studies lecturer, struggles on behalf of Palestinian Victory |
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'Yigal Bronner is one of over 600 signers of the Courage to Refuse statement (www.seruv.org) and one of over 1600 Israeli soldiers (www.refusersolidarity.net) who refuse to serve in the occupied territories. For his conscientious objection, Bronner served a jail term in Israel. Bronner has worked extensively with Ta’ayush, the Arab-Jewish Partnership (www.taayush.org), a groundbreaking activist organization that fosters Israeli-Palestinian cooperation to challenge policies of occupation.
In addition, he has been one of the leading voices in the campaign against the Israeli Separation Wall, currently under construction in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Using maps and statistics from the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, Bronner’s presentation will examine the location and construction of the barrier, as well as its social, economic, and political impact. Bronner teaches South Asian Studies at Tel Aviv University and the University of Chicago.' |
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| Tel Aviv University faculty tell the "Palestinian Narrative" to US audiences |
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FairPlay Media, the creative arm of Strategic Assessments, connects the personal to the political by developing and delivering sophisticated entertainment content to a variety of US based media platforms. With the primary mission of transforming U.S. popular conception of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict while asserting the cultural identity and fundamental rights of the Palestinian people, FairPlay Media leverages the most effective forms of communication in the marketplace.
Think Tanks: FPM co-sponsored and produced three content development Think Tanks with Israeli and Palestinian historians, authors, and filmmakers.
Tel Aviv University: Tom Segev, Sami Michael, Salman Natour, Salem Jubran, Nurit Gertz, Dafna Golan, Eli Amir, Freddie Rokem, Dan Rabinowitz, Dorit Rabinyan
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| Carlo Strenger, psychology lecturer, denounces the "religious"
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Strenger: 'A religious outlook has inhumane and disastrous consequences, we must not forget that a great many Israelis live by these precepts. '
...
We can hope Israel finally is heading toward ending the occupation that has destroyed our society's ethical backbone and has turned us into a pariah among the cultured nations. |
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| Marxist Sociology Professor Yehuda Shenhav endorsing the "Palestinian Right of Return"
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Shenhav: 'Israel has used the Arab-Jews, and the population exchange theory, to abdicate its responsibility for the expulsion of the Palestinians from Palestine in 1948 and 1967, to alleviate demands to compensate the Palestinian refugees for their
property confiscated by the Israeli government, and to serve as a bargaining chip against the right of return. For all practical purposes, the population exchange initiative was used in the political discourse to legitimize Israel’s wrongdoing with regards to the transfer of the Palestinian refugees in 1948. However, Israel has used the theory vaguely and ambiguously throughout the 54 years of its existence. It has used quasi-governmental organizations such as the Jewish Agency and the World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries to blur its practices and at the same time act upon them. ' |
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| Law School's Neta Ziv battles "Racism" in the Jewish National Fund |
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It's a very burdensome bureaucratic move to actually change the title," said Neta Ziv, director of the Human Rights Clinic at Tel Aviv University and the attorney in the landmark Ka'adan case, in which an Arab family appealed to the High Court after being prevented from purchasing land in a new community intended exclusively for Jews. "Land swapping is not something that you do overnight," Ziv said. "Many times Arab buyers back off the deal because it got complicated, so they kind of gave it up. It doesn't really work."
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| Daniel Bar-Tal, School of Education, Tel Aviv University, finds some racism and bigotry - only among Jews! |
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Bar-Tal: 'Israeli school textbooks as well as children's storybooks, according to recent academic studies and surveys, portray Palestinians and Arabs as "murderers," "rioters," "suspicious," and generally backward and unproductive. Direct delegitimization and negative stereotyping of Palestinians and Arabs are the rule rather than the exception in Israeli schoolbooks. Professor Daniel Bar-Tal of Tel Aviv University studied 124 elementary, middle- and high school textbooks on grammar and Hebrew literature, history, geography and citizenship. Bar-Tal concluded that Israeli textbooks present the view that Jews are involved in a justified, even humanitarian, war against an Arab enemy that refuses to accept and acknowledge the existence and rights of Jews in Israel.
"The early textbooks tended to describe acts of Arabs as hostile, deviant, cruel, immoral, unfair, with the intention to hurt Jews and to annihilate the State of Israel. Within this frame of reference, Arabs were delegitimized by the use of such labels as 'robbers,' 'bloodthirsty,' and 'killers,'" said Professor Bar-Tal, adding that there has been little positive revision in the curriculum over the years. |
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| Yuli Tamir, Professor of Education, wants Palestinian propaganda taught in Israeli schools |
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History textbooks for Israeli Arab students this year will, for the first time, present the Palestinian version of Israel's creation as a "catastrophe," the education ministry said Sunday.
"For these types of events, both the Israeli and Palestinian versions have to be presented," education minister Yuli Tamir said in a statement |
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| Ariel Handel, history, rationalizing Palestinian violence and crime |
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The outcome is that the ordinary Palestinian cannot have clear knowledge which way is passable and which is forbidden as well as what is the sanction for the lawbreaker. Thus a spatial chaos is produced minimizing movement to the level of life maintaining
activities on the one hand – and creating a-priori guiltiness on the other hand (since nearly every movement is restricted and most of Palestinians are therefore movement criminals).
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| TAU History Professor Gadi Algazi denounces Israel as criminal colonialist entity
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| Algazi: 'But the reality of the conflict is a colonial – one that is determined, first and foremost, by the facts on the ground, by bulldozers and fences. Colonialism does not exhaust itself in diplomatic maneuvers or spectacular acts of violence. It is a social and economic process that changes nature itself, the fabric of social life, reallocates resources and leaves people dispossessed. Its results are always in a sense irreversible: social reality cannot be simply restored to its pristine state; one can – and should – confront its evils, but this is a long and painful struggle against a new social and economic reality.' |
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| Ran HaCohen (comparative literature) cheers the Hamas victories over the Fatah |
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| Hacohen: ' Fatah's hysteria should now turn it into an Israeli proxy, dependent on Israel to survive, serving Israel's interests, and using ever more violence against the Palestinian opposition, which happened to win the democratic elections. Forget removal of roadblocks, let alone of outposts and settlements; forget work permits in Israel; forget freedom, of movement or otherwise; forget a Palestinian state. The occupation is here to stay.' |
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| Professor of Psychology Daniel Bar-Tal finds some "Supremacism and Racism" in Israeli School Textbooks, not in Arab books |
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In the article "The Arab Image in Hebrew School Textbooks" by professor Dan Bar-Tal of the Tel Aviv University makes a study of 124 textbooks used in Israeli schools and reports that "over the years, generations of Israeli Jews were taught a negative and often delegitimizing view of Arabs." The two main traits of Arabs in the textbooks are "primitiveness, inferiority in comparison to Jews" and "their violence, to characteristics like brutality, untrustworthiness, cruelty, fanaticism, treacherousness and aggressiveness."
Such demonisation appears reminiscent of what one would expect to find in Nazi Germany. In fact after reading the following, one could easily conclude that Israeli textbooks present the Arabs as the 'Untermensch' of Palestine.
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| Economics Professor Ariel Rubinstein on Israel's 'criminal occupation': "Let's get acquainted with occupation" |
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| There are many people in this country who viewed the occupation in horror while serving in the territories during their standing or reserve army duties. For some, the occupation scraped their conscience. From those troops emerged the voice calling for refusal to serve in the Territories. Thanks to them, the majority of the population has internalized the idea that ruling over another people until the end of time does not garner respect and security for Israel. |
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| ANAT MATAR (TAU, linguistics): WHY I BACK A BOYCOTT of Israel |
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"Israel is regarded by its Western allies as an open, liberaldemocracy. It is not," she said. "For more than two thirds of itsexistence, Israel has been occupying the Palestinian territories and,in recent years, the severity of this occupying regime has been greatly intensified."
...
She adds: "An objection to the academic boycott we often hear is that Israeli academics are liberal and oppose the occupation, hence it would be unjust to boycott them. This is simply not true." |
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| Rachel Giora calls for Boycotts of Israel on "Politics" on Channel One TV |
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Finally the panel featured Prof. Rachel Giora, one of the most extremist and battiest Israel-haters at Tel Aviv University. Giora, whose discourse on the show was so amazingly arrogant and irrational, went on at length about why she supports the boycott and how the anti-Semites in Britain calling for the boycott are the true friends of Israel . the proof being that many of the leftists there boycotting Israel are themselves British Jews. Some proof.
Part of the TV debate wandered off topic and developed into an argument of Right vs. Left in Israel. But other than the ultra-extremist Giora, all accepted the proposition that debate over Israeli defense and national policy is properly conducted among Israelis and that it is anti-democratic to drag in hostile foreign organizations. |
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| Carlo Strenger (psychology) wants Israel to "Apologize," Accept Palestinian "Right of Return" |
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Carlo Strenger is a psychology professor at Tel Aviv University. The department of psychology at Tel Aviv University is home to quite a few leftist extremists and runs anti-Israel one-sided indoctrination courses as part of its curriculum (see this for details). Strenger is moderate in comparison to some of the ultras at Tel Aviv University. He has published papers claiming that Israel is a racist bigoted anti-Sephardic place and, more generally, that Israeli "prejudice" is what drives the Arab-Israeli war.
He claims to be an expert on terror, at least its psychological aspects, and is part of a panel on terror of the World Federation of Scientists (WFS). Not surprisingly, these are people who think that terror is caused by "grievances" and can be contained by redressing those grievances. |
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| Yoav Peled, political science, denounces Israel for its "crimes" |
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| There could be no more apt manifestation of the demise of Israel's social democracy after 40 years of occupation. As prophesied, the occupation--in addition to its effects on the Palestinians--has brought about the moral and political bankruptcy of the Israeli state. |
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| Ex-professor Norman Finkelstein's likes Eyal Benvenisti, law professor; cites him with approval |
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In fact, Israel's refusal to abide by this longstanding international consensus apparently puts its occupation squarely in the same category as Iraq's illegal occupation of Kuwait. "[A]n occupation regime that refuses to earnestly contribute to efforts to reach a peaceful solution should be considered illegal," Tel Aviv University law professor Eyal Benvenisti opines: Indeed, such a refusal should be considered outright annexation.
The occupant has a duty under international law to conduct negotiations in good faith for a peaceful solution. It would seem that an occupant who proposes unreasonable conditions, or otherwise obstructs negotiations for peace for the purpose of retaining control over the occupied territory, could be
considered a violator of international law |
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| Ran HaCohen, comparative literature, denounces Israel's security checkpoints, with no mention of the terror that makes them necessary |
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Who would bother to remind us that all this is nothing but a lie? The abused Palestinians haven't felt any relief whatsoever, but have been cynically cheated once again. And all of us media consumers have been duped along with them
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| Ran HaCohen, comparative literature, claims Israel is "starving" the Palestinians
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| The Israeli reactions to the Palestinian suffering for which they are morally responsible, especially when set against the background of their ostensible concern about world hunger, show how pervasively inhumane the Israelis have become. A well-oiled propaganda machine turns them from compassionate human beings into heartless parrots of state demagoguery, ready to ignore, excuse, and even support the starvation of the other nation with which they share the same land. The dehumanization of the Palestinians by Israel has dehumanized the Israelis themselves. |
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| Palestinian Organizations Mourn Israeli Academic Tanya Reinhart's Death, Calling her "a Great Indefatigable Activist" |
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The coalition of six Palestinian organisations described Reinhart as "not only a great indefatigable activist against the policy of the Zionist government of Apartheid Israel towards us, Palestinians, but also a fighter for human rights denouncing injustices committed everywhere, whether in Palestine or Iraq. She took part in all the battles against the colonization and the occupation of Palestine, and was one of the most lucid analysts of the criminal policy of her government."...The coalition also specifically praised Reinhart for her support of a boycott of Israeli academia. "Tanya was also one of the rare Israeli opposition personalities to support the boycott of her country's
institutions, especially the Universities," the coalition writes |
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| Freddie Rokem celebrates anti-Israel Palestinian "Graffiti" |
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| Dr. Anat Matar (Philosophy TAU) insists there are no Arab terrorists, only "political prisoners"!! |
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Denying the political nature of these prisoners and referring to them collectively as "security" prisoners strips them of their humanity on both of the levels noted earlier by rejecting their individuality and their political nature. It is important to note here, however, that the latter – their politicization – is not individual. Rejecting the Palestinian political prisoner's political essence is a rejection that goes beyond denying his particular act of resistance; it is necessarily a rejection of the entire
Palestinian political experience,...the entire Palestinian struggle is denied via the "security" label. The entire political existence is fossilized and turned into a type of dangerous object for the "only individual subject" in its proximity. Thus, their resistance is not |
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| The late Tanya Reinhart made a career out of defaming Israel, and got a TAU salary for it! |
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| While Reinhart focused more on the anti-apartheid model of resistance, her lecture lacked Massad's organization. While initially criticizing international demands on the Palestinians to renounce violence and recognize past accords, Reinhart eventually lauded the South African model of anti-apartheid resistance through divestment and sanctions. She considered it the preferable, nonviolent alternative to wiping Israel off the map, the plan Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has endorsed. |
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| Chen Alon, Faculty of the Arts, Tel Aviv University, and his anti-Israel theatrics |
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| Chen Alon will present his research and practice adapting Augusto Boal's "Theatre of the Oppressed" within the Israeli-Palestinian political context. Alon's work expands on the ethodology developed at Tel-Aviv University within its community theatre program, connecting students with state prisons and drug addiction-homeless rehabilitation centers.... |
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| Yehuda kupferman, Department of French, Tel Aviv University, finds some "ethnic cleansing" --- by Israel! |
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Within this trap laid down by the occupying power, thousands of
Palestinian families who wish to remain together are condemned to emigrate. This new policy is intended to throw out masses of people. It is a policy of ethnic cleansing. |
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| Meretz Professor Knows Treason When He Sees It - Amnon Rubinstein (founder of TAU Law School) Denounces Treasonous Faculty in TAU Law School |
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At the Tel Aviv University conference, Rubinstein noted, the speaker who received the greatest applause was Tali Fahima, a Jewish woman recently released from prison who had assisted her Palestinian boyfriend in planning terror attacks. Another featured speaker at the event was a Palestinian terrorist who had been imprisoned for his crimes (which included throwing a Molotov cocktail at a civilian bus) by Israel for 27 years.
Rubinstein pointed out that the people who run TAU law school never even considered balancing the presence of terrorists with victims of Palestinian terror. At Tel Aviv University, murderers and terrorists of Jews are entitled to “civil rights” – but not Jewish civilians. |
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| Prof. Amnon Rubinstein, founder of TAU Law School, warns of seditious extremist faculty members in the same school today (Jerusalem Post) |
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Tel Aviv University's Faculty of Law held a conference on January 8 entitled "Security prisoners or political prisoners?" According to the original plan, all the scheduled speakers were from the Left, with some coming from the extreme, anti-Israeli Left. When this triggered an outcry, the faculty heads hurriedly added a couple of speakers representing mainstream Israel and its institutions.
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| Rachel Giora complains to the Euros about Israeli "Mistreatment" of foreign Palestinians - inhumanely required to have visas! |
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Dear Rachel Giora,
thank you very much for your e-mail.
As Head of the Legal and Consular Department in the German Embassy I am dealing with the topic of "Entry of EU nationals to the OccupiedTerritories".
I would be glad to meet with you in order to discuss the topic.
Would you please call me at 03-6931 319 in order to set up an ppointment.
The Ambassador of Greece Mr. Nicholas Zafiropoulos has agreed in principle to your request for a meeting.
Kindly contact me to coordinate a suitable date.
Giselle Cohen
PA to the Ambassador
03-6951088 |
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| The Latest Wave of Treason at Tel Aviv University |
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| The basic theme of the conference, sponsored in part by the Tel Aviv University Law School (a bastion of pro-terror), was that Palestinians who blow up pregnant women and their children and then get imprisoned are "political prisoners". Yemini in his column points out that "rights discourse" is now little more than a weapon being used to destroy Israel by Israel's enemies and by the enemies of human freedom. He mocks "progressives" who rationalize the murderous behavior of terrorists as part of "understanding the Other". |
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| Daniel Breslau, Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University, claims Israel is an apartheid regime because of security roads
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Protesting an apartheid road:
On Saturday, 23 December, over two hundred Palestinians, Israelis, and internationals, marched in protest of a new settler-only road in the occupied West Bank, that will connect the Etzion settlement bloc with the settlement of Kiryat Arba. The road will be 10 kilometers long and 165 meters wide, and will confiscate 1300 dunums of land from the village of Halhul. The road will also result in the theft of grape and citrus farms, and the demolition of greenhouses belonging to the al Arub agricultural college in Halhul.
Present at the demonstration were the mayors of both Halhul and Beit Omar villages who spoke of the danger of the road and called on the Palestinian people and authorities to halt its building. The march, and rally at the agricultural college, was the largest joint Palestinian-Israeli-International action in the area to date. |
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| Ran HaCohen (comparative literature) wants Israel boycotted as "apartheid" entity
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'Julius and Schama know very well why Israel is likened to apartheid South Africa: not because of minorities within it discriminated as they are), but because of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza....
"This is not the first boycott call directed at Jews." What a manipulation. Berger's is indeed not the first boycott directed against Jews: it's not a boycott directed against Jews at all. It is directed against Israel, not against Jews.' |
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| On-campus anti-Israel political indoctrination has entered a new phase at Tel Aviv University |
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| On Jan 8 the Law School at TAU will be conducting a conference dedicated to the proposition that jailed Arab murderers and terrorists who have perpetrated mass atrocities against Jewish civilians are "political prisoners". Co-sponsored by the Law School, the "Minerva Center" (a far-leftist group pretending to be a human rights watchdog), and "Adalah", a radical Arab NGO, the conference is titled "Security Prisoners or Political Prisoners?" and the answer that the conference will give to that question is obvious from the roster of speakers. |
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| Hannah Naveh and Orly Lubin bash Israel at Dartmouth |
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| Two Anti-Israel Israeli Academics teaching a course on the Holocaust together with Dartmouth College |
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| Ran Hacohen justified lynching of two IDF soldiers in: "Who Makes the Middle East?"
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The Ramallah Lynching Revisited
...Tthe Israeli propaganda machine, followed by the Western media, portrayed the event as that of two innocent Israelis abused and killed by a Palestinian mob, their corpses thrown out of a window in Ramallah – we all remember the pictures. The Palestinian side of the story was left unheard: the two uniformed Israeli soldiers entered the autonomous Ramallah during the mass funeral of a Palestinian child, whose body was found in an Israeli settlement a day before: that's why so many media teams happened to be in Ramallah at the time. Rumors spread that the soldiers invaded Ramallah in order to spill even more Palestinian blood. This does not excuse their killing, but two uniformed occupier's soldiers violating Palestinian autonomous territory during a funeral of a murdered child is a very different story from the one that stayed in the Western collective memory – namely, as yet another instance of the eternal framing "They are killing innocent Jews" (file under anti-Semitism, Holocaust, etc.). |
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| Marxist Sociologist Yehouda Shenhav on "Total Struggle" against Israel |
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| The struggle against the occupation must be total. It must be an anti-colonial struggle that will connect between external colonialism and internal colonialism. It cannot separate issues of inequality from issues of political justice, or the opposite. It means boycotting companies that produce goods for perpetuating the occupation, such as those companies which produce goods while oppressing their workers in Israel or outside of it. It is a struggle which understands the occupation in its totality. Not a separation between here and there, not a separation between state and society, not a separation between politics and culture, but an outlook which sees the occupation as an inseparable part of the imperial history in the Middle East. |
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| TAU History Professor Gadi Algazi in Marxist journal denounces "Offshore Zionism"
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| The New Center for Iranian Studies under assault by Anti-American TAU Radical Faculty Members |
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| Ran HaCohen (comparative literature) thinks that terrorist gains in Gaza are Good News
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Typically, the propaganda quotes just one side: the army, the soldiers, i.e., the perpetrators. Not a single victim is interviewed: we don't know under what circumstances they were kidnapped, we don't know if a single word of the soldiers is true, we don't know what the arrestees have to pay for their release (collaboration, as usual?). Even the fact that children are kidnapped doesn't arouse any question on the part of the "journalist" or his editors in the "free press."
And, to be on the safe side, this pure propaganda doesn't leave out the inevitable comparison between Israel – the regional power that strangulates Gaza, kills and wounds its citizens, men, women and children, by conventional and satanic experimental weapons, and abducts them arbitrarily to its camps – and the Palestinian side, which abducted one Israeli soldier and harasses the Israeli civilians living around Gaza by primitive missiles. That's what the distorted comparison between victims and perpetrators looks like:
"It is sad that on the other side respect to human life in not as such, as they use children as human shields and an innocent population is under constant threat because of terror groups." |
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| Dr. Yossi Schwartz (law) -Israel is agent of the "imperialist order" -
Marxism in the Law School of TAU |
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The root of the problem is that the entire imperialist order based on decaying capitalism is an obstacle to the development of the productive forces, an obstacle that keeps the majority of the population in the region in dire poverty. This contradiction id destined to get bigger. The only way out is for the working class to place itself at the head of the masses in the struggle to solve the democratic tasks. Only if the working class takes power into its own hands will there be any hope of a solution. The contradictions within the present socio-economic order to not allow for any long-lasting "peaceful" solution. The underlying contradictions will come to the surface again and again. That is why genuine socialist in the region must join together in a common struggle for socialist
transformation of the entire region. And this can only take place as part of the common struggle of workers in all countries for the socialist transformation of the world." |
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| Anat Biletzki (philosophy) denounces Israel as aggressor and warmonger
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Writ minutely, but no less perniciously, i(Israel) has violated rights galore—the right to marry and found families, freedom of movement, the right to education, the right to earn a living, the right to health, to property, and on and on and on. Headlines scream out atrocities, but tell little of humdrum wickedness, of banal and routine evil. So when a pregnant woman dies at the checkpoint, or when a violinist is made to play there, when a family is murdered on a beach, or a girl is run-over by a bulldozer, we are treated to the details of the horrors. But the everyday of Occupation, the crippling and dismantling of the very marrow of a society, never makes it into the news. Yet it is this routine of Occupation, and its acceptance by Israelis by and large, that makes up the background to this latest war.
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| Anat Biletzki (philosophy, TAU) adressing a conference on boycotting Israel |
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| we must, as academics, never forget our political agenda: the eradication of evil. And the Israeli occupation of Palestine is the epitome of evil.We must constantly, as academics, identify with Palestinian teachers and students in conditions of severe repression.We must constantly, as academics, criticize the acquiescence of others in Israel to the occupation. And we must constantly, as academics, call for condemnation of the occupation. ¨ |
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| Anat Matar (TAU, linguistics) thinks terrorists are "political prisoners" |
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So we spread out the signs, there on the desolate road with the barbed wires under the blazing August noon sun: "Freedom for the Political Prisoners!" and "Prisoner Exchange - Now!" and "Democracy is not an Israeli monopoly!". Uri Avnery was there with his white beard and the perennial two-flag symbol, and Khulood Badawi who organized so many of the past month's anti-war protests, and Dr. Anat Matar of Tel-Aviv University with her decades-long involvement with Palestinian (and Israeli) prisoners, and Ya'el Lerer who took up the translating from Arabic and publishing of books which no mainstream publisher dare touch, and Thierry - a Swiss activist residing in Jerusalem who arrives to all demonstrators and protests on his motorcycle...
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| TAU History Professor Gadi Algazi says Israel is a Thief, Conducts Ethnic Cleansing |
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| Palestinian communities were made to disappear behind the wall: discreet ethnic cleansing. |
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| Anat Matar from the Israeli Action Commitee for Palestinian Prisoners and Detainees |
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| "...On January 8, 2007 we will hold a major academic conference on the subject of "Political or "security" prisoners?" at Tel Aviv University . The conference is sponsored by the Minerva Institute at Tel Aviv University and the Adalah Center ...." |
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| Radical anti-American TAU Faculty protest academic honors to Mr
Mofaz, previous Israeli minister of defence, April 23, 2006
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The new Center, which is supposed to be dedicated to the study of Iranian culture and the history of the Iranian people, and to serve as an inter-cultural bridge, appears to have been recruited by the propaganda campaign that brands Iran as the ultimate threat to Israel, the Middle East and the entire world, thereby identifying it as the next target of U.S. (and possibly Israeli) military escapades in this region.
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| Ran HaCohen (comparative literature) warns that Israel's army is bloodthirsty aggresor |
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'So in a final analysis, the main achievements of the Israeli brutality will be more and more bloodshed and devastation on both sides, and a lot of entertainment for the bored Israeli military. When they get tired of playing (and/or losing), Israel will negotiate a prisoner swap and return to the status quo ante, in Gaza as well as in Lebanon, till next time. For many families on both sides, this will be too late.'
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| Prof. Zeev Maoz (political science) thinks Israel's battle with the Hizbollah is a "War of deception and stupidity"
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| There is still hope that some influential people will stand up and say: enough of this stupidity, enough of this blind political force that is creating tomorrow's worst enemies, in the same way we created the Hizbullah and Hamas. |
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| Ze'ev Maoz (political science) thinks Israel is an Immoral Country |
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There's practically a holy consensus right now that the war in the North is a just war and that morality is on our side. The bitter truth must be said: this holy consensus is based on short-range selective memory, an introverted worldview, and double standards.
This war is not a just war. Israel is using excessive force without distinguishing between civilian population and enemy, whose sole purpose is extortion. That is not to say that morality and justice are on Hezbollah's side. Most certainly not. But the fact that Hezbollah "started it" when it kidnapped soldiers from across an international border does not even begin to tilt the scales of justice toward our side. |
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| Tanya Reinhart complains after taking early retirement: "The University of Tel Aviv Embittered my Life"
Poor Baby! |
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| "I have no doubt that we are to blame in this conflict", she says. "Since 1967, we have been occupying the Palestinian territories and we have not been willing to relinquish them. In '88 the Palestinians recognized Israel and settled for a state within the '67 borders. Since then, the blame falls on us absolutely. I deplore Palestinian terror, but since January 2005 all the Palestinian groups, except for Islamic Jihad, have declared a cease-fire. We are the attackers presenting ourselves as the attacked." |
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| Ran HaCohen (comparative literature) on website of Neo-Nazi Norman Finkelstein's |
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| Saturday we had the pleasure of watching Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham Foxman give an especially repulsive horror show on Israeli public television (Channel 1). |
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| Israeli Intellectuals Love War, claims Ran HaCohen (TAU, comparative literature)
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| All generalizations are wrong, except this one: Israeli liberal intellectuals are against war. They have always been against it, and they even suffered greatly for their critical views, as they stress proudly. They were against the previous war, they will be against the next war, they are against all wars. There is just one minor exception, though: the present war, every present war, which they always support. Because the present war – well, that's something totally different from all those other wars! How can you even compare?! The present war is always inevitable, and necessary, and just, and worthy of support. |
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| TAU waves a limp finger at extremist Rachel Giora (linguistics) for using its computer to proliferate anti-Israel hate |
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I got a call from the rector of Tel Aviv University who warned me against using Tel Aviv University email services for
political purposes or else he would lock my account. |
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| TAU History Professor Gadi Algazi / "Commercial and political exploitation of lands stolen by Israel"
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| Rachel Giora (TAU linguistics) issues call for signing anti-Israel petition: says Israel attacks Lebanon for no reason whatsoever |
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| Believing that the current actions by the State of Israel in invading/attacking the State of Lebanon is both an unlawful and unwarranted attack upon innocent civilians by an aggressor nation, we call upon the United States of America and the United Nations to condemn the State of Israel, and the actions thereof, and to demand the immediate cessation of all military action by the forces of the State of Israel within the borders of the state of Lebanon, and to demand the immediate withdrawal of all personnel of the State of Israel from the State of Lebanon. |
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| Tanya Reinhart's WHAT ARE THEY FIGHTING FOR - Israel is a bloodthirsty aggressor |
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The Israeli army is hungry for war. It would not let concerns for captive soldiers stand in its way. Since 2002 the army has argued that an "operation" along the lines of "Defensive Shield" in Jenin was also necessary in Gaza. Exactly a year ago, on 15 July (before the Disengagement), the army concentrated forces on the border of the Strip for an offensive of this scale on Gaza. But then the USA imposed a veto. Rice arrived for an emergency visit that was described as acrimonious and stormy, and the army was forced to back down. Now, the time has finally came. With the Islamophobia of the American Administration at a high point, it appears that the USA is prepared to authorize such an operation, on condition that it not provoke a global outcry with excessively-reported attacks on civilians.
With the green light for the offensive given, the army's only concern is public image. Fishman reported this Tuesday that the army is worried that "what threatens to burry this huge military and diplomatic effort" is reports of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Hence, the army would take care to let some food into Gaza.
From this perspective, it is necessary to feed the Palestinians in Gaza so that it would be possible to continue to kill them undisturbed. |
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| Shir Hever calls for Sanctions and a Boycott against Israel
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| Some sanctions, such as an academic boycott, have a symbolic function. Such sanctions have a powerful ability to produce fruitful debate. The importance of this debate is especially apparent now, as the last attempt at an academic boycott caused a flood of Israel supporters trying to stifle all discussion of the occupation. The call for an academic boycott on Israeli universities specifically targets human-rights violations committed by these universities (violations which are too numerous to list here). |
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| "The Occupation Doesn't Stop at the Checkpoint" says Marxist Sociologist Yehouda Shenhav |
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| The struggle against the occupation must be total. It must be an anti-colonial struggle that will connect between external colonialism and internal colonialism. It cannot separate issues of inequality from issues of political justice, or the opposite. It means boycotting companies that produce goods for perpetuating the occupation, such as those companies which produce goods while oppressing their workers in Israel or outside of it. It is a struggle which understands the occupation in its totality. Not a separation between here and there, not a separation between state and society, not a separation between politics and culture, but an outlook which sees the occupation as an inseparable part of the imperial history in the Middle East. |
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| Cheering for the Ayatollahs - TAU Professors denounce the US, back Iran |
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Hypocrite
This week, scanning the list of the thirty Tel Aviv University professors whose letter excoriated the school for allowing Mofaz to speak, one of whom actually became violent in the auditorium, I recognized the names of professors who had organized the Husseini appearance.
I was shocked when I saw the name Yisrael Gershoni, the same professor who convinced me that the right to free speech on campus – even for one's opponents – was a supreme value, and should not just be acknowledged but actually defended by placing one’s own body in harm’s way.
Now, with the shoe on the other foot, he has signed a letter stating that “the participation of the minister of defense as the keynote speaker at the opening of this conference…must not be permitted.”
Professor Gershoni: I still believe in the principle that you taught me in 1991. I am saddened that you no longer do. |
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| The (late) Tanya Reinhart (Linguistics) on Barbaric Israel |
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Even though it is impossible to compare the sufferings of the residents of Sderot with the sufferings of the residents of Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya in the North of
the Gaza Strip, on which 5,000 shells fell in the past month alone, my heart also goes out to the residents of Sderot. It is their destiny to live in fear and agony,
because in the eyes of the army their suffering is necessary so that the world may understand that Israel is the restrained side in a war for its very existence. |
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| Jose Brunner [Professor of Philosophy of Science and History of Ideas] / 'The competition of victims in Israel/Palestine: on the politics of trauma discourse in the shadow of the two Intifadas' |
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| Perhaps the novelty of active resistance against theoccupation opened up a discursive space in which the psychic vulnerability ofPalestinians could be addressed by mental health professionals. The newlyemerging Palestinian trauma discourse appropriated the category of PTSD in ahighly positivist fashion, providing extensive statistical data in order to presentproof of Palestinian suffering under occupation. It was mainly addressed to theWest, depicting the traumatization of the Palestinians under occupation as aspecial case within the PTSD paradigm. In this discourse there were no adultmales suffering of PTSD unless they were subject to torture in Israeli prisons;for otherwise the traumatization of Palestinians by the occupation is reportedonly with reference to children, youth and women. This discourse is stronglysupportive of the Intifada; it presents itself as located in the context of Israeliviolence on the one hand and Palestinian resilience and social solidarity on theother. Activism against the occupation is portrayed both as a sign of mentalhealth and as conducive to it. The same holds for support for the Oslo peaceprocess that followed the first Intifada in the mind-nineties.The outbreak of the second, violent Intifada in fall 2000 changed theway in which Palestinian health professionals portrayed traumatization by theoccupation. PTSD began to be related to social disintegration and to anepidemic of victimhood and victimization, in which Palestinians are presentedas helpless victims, while Israelis appear as traumatized perpetrators – eitherby the Holocaust or by their role as occupiers. |
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| TAU professor Rachel Giora (linguistics) insists the UK boycott of Israel justified
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Professor Rachel Giora of the University of Tel Aviv backs boycott on her colleagues with different views;
"I support every form of open criticism against the current policies of the Israeli government in the occupied territories, whether it is an economic boycott other forms of resistance. A lack of such stances allows Israelis to assume that the world is not against them. But the world, or large parts of it, are against them. And rightly so."
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| “The dialogue of belonging in and its expression in regional planning,” Dr. Toby Fenster |
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Incorporpating the "Nakba" Narrative (mourning Isreal's existence) in Planning
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| South Asian Studies Yigal Bronner finds some Apartheid |
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Yigal Bronner, a Ta'ayush (Arab Jewish
Partnership) activist and former Tel Aviv University professor who was jailed for refusing to serve in the occupied territories.
Bronner, who now teaches South Asian languages at the University of Chicago, compared Israel to an addict dependent on its military might and U.S. aid.
"Being the clever addict that it is, Israel has created a semblance of normalcy," he said. "It created a sophisticated system of Apartheid and called it the end of the occupation."
Bronner called for an international "intervention of true friends" to save Israel from itself, and lambasted the U.S. Congress — "so-called friends that contribute to the demise of Israel" by continuing to support the occupation. |
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| Unbelievable! Holocaust Remembrance Day at Tel Aviv University |
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Just a few hours before Holocaust Remembrance Day commenced, Tel Aviv University (TAU) held the official initiation ceremony for its Center for Iranian Studies, a new research institute on campus. Some TAU faculty members were upset about that. A group of extremist professors held a demonstration, together with Arab and Jewish student radicals, and sent an official letter of protest against the Center to campus authorities, as reported in Israeli dailies Haaretz and Yediot Acharonot.
First, in their letter, they expressed fear that the new center will be "misused" to paint Iran as a radical, anti-Semitic and pro-terrorism state, and grant legitimacy to Western demonization of Iran. Second, they expressed concern that the operations of the center could be exploited by American imperialism in justifying American aggression against Iran.
Finally, the radicals were particularly upset because a speaker at the opening ceremony was the Iranian-born Sha'ul Mofaz, who had been Chief of Staff of the IDF and then minister of defense of Israel. As such, Mofaz is guilty, in the eyes of the protesters, of illegitimately fighting against Islamofascist terrorism, rather than appeasing it and capitulating to the demands of the terrorists.
The Center for Iranian Studies was funded with contributions by Jews who had escaped Iran for the West and succeeded there. After the ceremony, Mofaz commented on the radical protesters who disrupted it and suggested that they could better spend their time be visiting the families of Jews murdered by terrorists. According to the news reports in Israel, the faculty protesters were of the opinion that defending democracy requires the suppression of Sha'ul Mofaz's freedom of speech.
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| Self-Loathing in Tel-Aviv - Meet Aviad Kleinberg, radical professor of history, who thinks ISRAEL is the terrorist! |
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"...Among the leading voices opposing any Israeli action at all aimed at stopping the massive firing by Palestinian terrorists of Qassam and other rockets at Israeli civilians is Aviad Kleinberg, the chairman of the Department of History at Tel Aviv University. How convenient for him that his campus is not (yet) within range of the Palestinian rockets and missiles...
...Kleinberg's central thesis is that Israel is behaving like a barbarian terrorist state when it defends its civilians from these rockets...
...In other words, Israel shoots at the terrorists for the heck of it because it is a bloodthirsty irrational country trying to terrorize the poor innocent Palestinians for no reason. |
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| Tel Aviv University sets up "Refugee Clinic" in Collaboration with
Anti-Semitic Propaganda Organization
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TAU Law School and sets up a "Refugee Rights Clinic" as a joint
project with the pro-terror anti-Israel extremist group "Physicians for Human Rights" or PHR. This organization has never had a word to say in defense of the human rights of Jews not to be blown up by terrorists nor the right of Jews to defend themselves...
...Among its main activities has been its campaign to force Israel to accept as "refugees" Palestinian homosexuals claiming they are being persecuted by the Hamas and the PLO in "homophobic violence".
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| Dr. Aviad Kleinberg believes Palestinians are naive and innocent who have nothing to do with the harmless Qassam rockets! |
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"If you listen carefully, you can hear the sounds of spring: Birds chirping, the buzz of mosquitoes, and the incessant sound of IDF artillery, turning the lives of innocent Gazans into a living hell...
...Qassams are primitive rockets. They can be fired from just about anywhere, even a backyard. They are not fired from open fields, and the gunmen do not need advanced equipment or complicated logistics...
...You can find an article, maybe even a picture, in Yedioth Ahronoth, of a dog at Kibbutz Zikim that was literally scared to death by the exchange of fire. "The artillery fire killed our dog," screamed the headlines. Who said Jews had no compassion?...
...And IDF attacks almost always strike the innocent.." |
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| YOAV PELED (political science) - regrets Palestinian "resistance" is not more effective |
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"One of the more tragic shortcomings of the regime set up by the PLO was its total inability to mount a credible defence against Israel’s invasion of the West Bank in 2002..."
"The obvious model for the transformation of the Israeli control system into a secular, democratic state is the transition experienced by South Africa. Tilley has an ambivalent attitude towards the value of the South African experience as a model for Israel/Palestine, dismissing it at one point as irrelevant, but repeatedly referring to it nonetheless. " |
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| Tel Aviv U's Red Professor - Marxist Sociologist Yehouda Shenhav |
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| Yehouda Shenhav is among the better-known of Israel's anti-Israel academics. He has signed many of those anti-Israel petitions, collected regularly by certain academics, including one endorsing the Jewish woman arrested for helping her Palestinian boyfriend plan terror bombings, and another proposing international intervention to end Israeli sovereignty. Shenhav's main "academic thesis" has long been the claim that Asian/Sephardic Jews who came to Israel from Arab countries are in fact Arabs of the Jewish faith. |
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| Poet Aharon Shabtai opposes allowing a Poetry Contest to be held in Zionist Jerusalem |
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| I oppose an international poetry festival in a city in which the Arab inhabitants are oppressed systematically and cruelly, imprisoned between walls, deprived of their rights and living spaces, humiliated in chekcpoints and the international laws are violated. |
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| TAU's Orly Lubin (Literature, and Women's Studies) explains that Israelis are opposed to peace |
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| "...Lubin addressed the issue of what the Gaza disengagement means for Israelis. The majority of Israelis, she assured the audience, have no illusions that it is a courageous step. They know that Israel created a ghetto with no infrastructure and allowed no development, and that its army can re-enter at any time. What Israelis saw on television were not the weeping soldiers and mothers shown on American broadcasts, she said, but disengaged, well-trained soldiers dealing with screaming, orange-wearing fanatics and parents putting their children through unnecessary trauma. Within one week, Lubin said, things were back to the normal routine of targeted killings, bombing Gaza, and extending the apartheid wall in the West Bank... |
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| TAU's Anat Biletzki (philosophy) claims Israel is Running Concentration Camps |
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"When peace activists in Israel want to shock their audience, they
sometimes refer to Gaza as a concentration camp.
Anat Biletzki of the human rights group B’Tselem put it this way last year: “I know that when you talk about concentration camps, Jews all jump up in horror. I’m not talking about gassing and I’m not talking about extermination camps. Concentration camps were camps where people were forcibly placed and had to live their lives..."
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| End Israeli Colonialism (by ending Israel?)
says Ran HaCohen (comparative literature)
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Given the continuity of Israel's colonialist policy before and after each election, and the push each election period gives to this policy, one can question whether colonialism is a conscious choice of the Israeli democratic game, but there can be little doubt that the democratic game is a conscious choice of Israel's colonialism.
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| TAU's Ran Hacohen (comparative literature) denounces Israel for being an "Apartheid regime" |
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| "...applicants wait for hours on end, treated like cattle, humiliated by rude Israeli teenage soldiers who are given the chance to play God over the helpless colonized subjects..." |
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| Elana Wesley Supporting the Palestinian's Right of Return, Claims Tel Aviv University is "Palestine" |
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| signed: Elana Wesley, Palestine |
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| Law Professor Kenneth Mann in 'The Apartheid Law in Israel: A Seminar on the Occupation Law and Israel’s Military Courts' |
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The Apartheid Law seminar offers a unique opportunity for lawyers, law students, media professionals and political activists to hear first hand accounts and analysis from the predominant figures in the field.
We believe that the cooperative investigation of the Apartheid law – an issue which has been absent from public discourse in Israel – will consequently lead to public discussion and to civil action.
Session 2: The right for representation in criminal law in Israel – overview
Prof. Kenneth Mann, Tel Aviv Aviv University |
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| Aharon Eviatar (emeritus, geophysics) on Living in a Fascist State (not Syria, but Israel!) |
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| "This dark article, while written with the US in mind, applies even more strongly to Israel."--Aharon Eviatar |
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| South Asia Studies Yigal Bronner in the PLO web site 'Ramalla Online' -
Who cares about terrorism, the main thing is to stop the wall! |
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“The Palestinian people are becoming a landless people through the wall,” Bronner said.
Bronner noticed the cement blocks of the wall are dated with the day of their erection. During the week of the Gaza Withdrawal, Bronner noticed overwhelming construction of the wall around East Jerusalem. Many sections of the wall had completion dates corresponding to the time of the Gaza Withdrawal. As the wall is constructed in an area housing units for Israelis are built. |
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| Tel Aviv University Felon - Dr. Anat Matar (TAU philosophy) was arrested in Bil'in |
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| The Bil'in people received the Israelis with great enthusiasm, offering refuge in their homes - and cold water. Some 25 Israelis were arrested, among them Dr Anat Matar of the Tel-Aviv University, Philosophy Department, |
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| Anat Matar (TAU philosophy) in University of Haifa's "Alef": drums up support for mutiny and insurrection among leftist soldiers |
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In this letter they state that they do not intend to serve in the Israeli army so long as it serves the Occupation. In his letter to the Minister of Defense, Alex writes among other things: "It is impossible to
serve in the occupation army without taking part in the injustices it causes. The occupation is the result of a policy and not imposed by circumstances. The extent and power of its ramifications for the Israelis
and Palestinians cannot be grasped. It is therefore unacceptable by any moral standard. Because one cannot serve in the army without taking part in
the occupation, I cannot, in good conscience, enlist." |
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| Daniel Dor (Communications) wants the Radical Left to get more Militant, stop worrying about being seen as anti-Semitic |
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This paper is of the programmatic type. My goal is to suggest that the Radical Left can, and should, play a more productive role in the effort to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than it does at the moment. This, however, can only be done if we manage to allow some pragmatic insights to constrain our discourse – both in terms of our understanding of our own discourse and its audiences, and our conception of the conflict, its history and its future.
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| Aharon Eviatar (emeritus, geophysics), who also runs local Amnesty International, justifies persecution of Israeli officers for "war crimes": |
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In the UK, they try war criminals, in Israel we promote them.
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| TAU's Anat Matar (philosophy): help us flush out war criminals (meaning Israeli army officers)!
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As you probably know from media reports, Yesh Gvul has taken a f urther step in its campaign against Israeli officers suspected of human rights abuses or war crimes. Operating on material we supplied, a UK law firm has formally filed criminal complaints with the local police, against a number
of senior IDF officers. |
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| TAU's Daniel Dor (communications) claims Israel's media are lying about the "Intifada;" acting as agents of the Zionist Regime |
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| Is Israeli society losing touch with the rest of the world -- and with the reality of the on-going conflict with the Palestinians in the course of the Intifada? Israeli scholar Daniel Dor measures the breach between Israel's collective consciousness and international public opinion, and concludes that Israeli society has dangerously withdrawn into a sense of isolation and victimization -- in very large part because of the role played by the Israeli media during the reoccupation. Dor examines the ways in which the major Israeli media not only reported on events (or failed to do so) but played a key part in shaping opinion, setting the agenda and waging the propaganda war that accompanied the military offensives on the ground. |
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| Anat Matar (philosophy) wants all the terrorists put back on the streets |
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The Committee is an Israeli organization, which firmly believes that there can be no peace between Israel and Palestine so long as thousands of Palestinian so-called "security prisoners" and hundreds of administrative detainees continue to be held in Israeli prisons.
Members of the Committee believe that the Palestinian prisoners can and should play a significant role in advancing the peace process and in spreading the message that co-existence in the Middle East is indeed possible - but only if Israeli society pays attention to their hardships and puts an end to the systematic institutional discrimination against them - which exists first at the judicial level, and later on with regard to their imprisonment conditions and parole opportunities. |
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| Uri Hadar teaches an anti-Israel Indoctrination and Propaganda course: The Psychology of the Occupation |
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Course number 1071.3627.01
The course will account a number of psychological results of the long occupation in the Territories and its impact on the occupiers and the occupied. It will include the following subjects: Identity and alienation (personal and national) pattern of dialogues in the encounters of occupier-occupied, perception of the other and the attitude towards sufferings, the status of the child as subjective. |
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| Dor, Daniel (communications) has a new book: The Suppression of Guilt. The Israeli Media & the Reoccupation of the West Bank.
Guess who he considers the villains! |
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| If there was a common element in the Israeli media coverage of the 2003 military operation “Defensive Shield,” it was a consistent refusal to accept any guilt for what happened in the Palestinian territories. That is what Daniel Dor argues in The Suppression of Guilt: the Israeli Media and the Reoccupation of the West Bank. If houses were abolished, civilians killed or Palestinian allies arrested, Israeli action was presented as a necessary response to Palestinian action, according to Dor’s provocative work. |
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| Collection of Tanya Reinhart 's Pronouncements on "Disengagement" |
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| Tanya's prediction that the disengagement plan is not going to happen turned out to be wrong. Did she admit to be wrong in her last artcle? No. |
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| TAU's Linguistics Rachel Giora Recommends jailed terrorist accomplice Tali Fahima for the "Alternative Nobel Peace Prize" |
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This judge went as far as to declare in her verdict that the Palestinian resistance to the Israeli occupation is a "day-to-day existential threat to Israel". The total absurdity of this (paranoid?) statement [several hundred, perhaps a couple of thousands, poorly trained people with guns, against a regular army with well over a hundred thousand troops, capable of summoning within 48 hours another quarter of a million or so ("reserve") soldiers, equipped with thousands of top of the line tanks, probably close to a thousand combat aircraft, allegedly an arsenal of WMD; a military might most likely surpassing that of any other country
except the US, Russia and China] has escaped the media reporting this malicious verdict. |
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| Ran HaCohen (comparative literature) says Palestinian terrorism is caused by Israel's defending its civilians |
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But it is important not to let the cases of abuse distract from the "normal" routine: Palestinian daily life is unbearable even on what Machsom Watch activists call "an English weather," i.e., a usual day without any exceptional event. If the roots of Palestinian frustration, despair, and violence – "terrorism," if you like – are to be sought, the checkpoint system is an excellent place to start.
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| Tanya Reinhart (TAU, linguistics) endorses the boycotts of Israel |
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| It may be worthwhile, however, to consider how the world perceives us. In July 2004, the International Court of Justice in The Hague ruled that Israel must immediately dismantle those parts of the wall that were built on Palestinian lands. We disregarded the ruling. We are turning the West Bank into a prison for Palestinians, as we have already done in Gaza in the course of 38 years of occupation, every one of which is a violation of UN resolutions. Since 1993 we have been engaged in negotiations with the Palestinians, and in the meantime we continued expanding settlements. In its judgement, the Court recommended to the UN that sanctions be imposed on Israel if its ruling is not obeyed. The Israeli reply - no need to worry! |
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| Ran HaCohen (comparative literature) finds a Palestinian Gandhi - Too Bad he is a Murdering Terrorist |
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Where is the Palestinian Gandhi?" is a quite popular question, especially abroad. You won't often hear it asked (with the inevitable self-righteous shrug) here in Israel: after all, the Israeli culture itself worships violence, with the semantic field of "war" being the richest in the modern Hebrew language, with militarism as the state religion, and with popular wisdom expressed in rules of thumb such as "where force won't do, try more force."...
So the problem is the perpetrators, not the victims: it's Israel, not the Palestinians. The Palestinians don't have to watch the Gandhi film. They fought the First Intifada with stones (1987-1993) and were answered with Israeli bullets. They fought the Second Intifada (2000-2004) with weapons and were answered with Israeli tanks, Caterpillar bulldozers, and airplanes. And they now start a Third Intifada, a popular, unarmed, nonviolent struggle against the strangulating fence, which is answered with Israeli undercover soldiers who throw stones and want us to believe the Palestinians have done it.
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| Marxist Biologist Eva Jablonka promotes boycotts against Israel as "legitimate" |
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Academic and political issues cannot really be kept apart. I think that it is our responsibility as academics to make a public stand about the boycott, as well as about the related issue of the academic freedom of the Palestinians in the territories that we have occupied. I think that it is a moral sin not to condemn the lack of freedom imposed by curfews, closures, roadblocks and systematic harassment of the Palestinian population...As you may know, my position towards the boycott is complex. I am against a full academic boycott because I think that basic channels of communication should be kept open, but I think that a restricted set of sanctions (both economic and academic) is legitimate...I am sick and tired of hearing that the critical and concrete decision of the AUT and similar decisions are anti-Semitic.
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| Transitional Justice and The Right of Return of the Palestinian Refugees / By Yoav Peled and Nadim Rouhana |
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'Our suggestion is based on sound moral foundations that guide the approach of transitional justice.
If the implications of Israel’s recognition of the right of return could be shown to have no negative effect on the question of the continued Israeli Jewish national existence, while the benefits of recognizing that right, in terms of enhancing the prospects for reconciliation, could be immense, some of the fears blocking Israelis’ ability to even consider this issue may be alleviated. To the extent that this would facilitate reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians, a political outcome of great moral value would be achieved.' |
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| Elhanan Reiner blames Israel for severing Palestinians conditions in 'Our City, We Have No Other' |
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the once quasi-legitimate Israeli sovereignty has become a violent occupation that no longer knows its own limitations.
Severing the Palestinian population from its natural surroundings severs them from their communal, social, and familial ties and violates their basic rights |
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| RAN HACOHEN (comparative literature, TAU) serves as apologist for the Hizbollah and its attacks on the Jews |
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| Precisely this is the aim of Israeli propaganda: to portray the Hizbollah as a terrorist group that violates the rules of the game. The facts, however, are that the Hizbollah pretty much follows the rules of good neighbourliness; it is Israel that breaches them. |
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| RAN HACOHEN (comparative literature) is denounced as an anti-Semite and racist by Israel's daily Maariv |
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So wake up members of the academia. The stain of this lot of madmen sticks to you as well, because you remain silent. Silence is not a confession. Silence is not concurrence. But in this war, against this madness, you are leaving a dear man, Prof. Amnon Rubinstein, almost entirely out on his own. Your silence, of the silent majority, is a silence that invites damage to the academia. If that happens, the responsibility will be yours.
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| Maariv reports that RAN HACOHEN (TAU, comparative literature) claims that “Israel is fulfilling Hitler’s dream” |
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"It is no wonder that HaCohen's article gets top billing on the anti-Israel, anti-Semitic site of the Holocaust-denying historian David Irving. Exactly four years ago, Irving lost a libel suit against Prof.
Deborah Lipstadt after she had claimed in a book that Irving was a Holocaust-denier and anti-Semite. The British High Court upheld Lipstadts claims in one of the most important legal rulings related to Holocaust denial. Many things can be said about Irving but he definitely is not a leftist. If Irving admires HaCohen, he must have a good reason. Somewhat
ironically, the headline on the page is The International Campaign for True History. Yes, this article is well suited to two people who disseminate the truth: Irving and HaCohen."
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| RAN HACOHEN (comparative literature) does not think Jews are interested in democracy |
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| Remember these lines: when the next Israeli military strike needs its apologetics, all Marcus (and his colleagues) will do is re-air them. The Israeli media is not following Sharon in the path to peace: it is following Sharon wherever he goes, like a loyal hound, playing peaceful when its master is well-tempered, but happy to expose its sharp teeth when he takes to the hunt. |
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| Abbas 'threatens Israel with peace,' says Ran HaCohen (comparative literature), writing on PLO web site |
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Israel can live with only two kinds of Palestinian leaders. It can live with a puppet who accepts Israel's sovereignty over the Palestinian territories (we may give him some "autonomy" in return), who is ready to give up 60 percent of the West Bank for Israeli settlements and apartheid walls (we may temporarily remove a checkpoint or two in return), who is willing to forget the Palestinian refugees (we may not insist on his conversion to Judaism in return). Israel has made several attempts to find or tame such a Palestinian poodle, but so far failed.
Alternatively, Israel can live with a fanatic, terrorist Palestinian scarecrow, with a murderous, uncompromising hardliner. The settlers often say it aloud: we prefer the Islamic Jihad, who want to throw us all to the sea. It is very easy to deal with such a leader, both nationally and internationally.
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| Yossi Schwartz thinks Israel is the Obstacle to Peace |
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| Thus it is clear that as a result of this summit Abu Mazen will be very welcome in Washington but not so much among the Palestinians who will see him in his true colours. |
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| Dr. Yossi Schwartz, Dr. Elhanan Reiner set up center to help "protect" Palestinians from Israel -
No program for protecting Jews from Terrorists
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HaMoked’s main objective is to assist Palestinians whose rights are violated by the Israeli authorities or as a result of Israeli policy. Once a complaint is received, HaMoked contacts the relevant authorities, for instance the Civil Authority, the Military Attorney General, the State Attorney General, or any of a variety of governmental offices. When necessary, HaMoked files legal claims and submits petitions to the High Court of Justice. Concurrently, HaMoked endeavors to bring about changes in policy by the authorities and to implement legislative amendments that would improve the status of human rights in the Territories and East Jerusalem.
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| Yossi Schwartz "explains" why Israel is not a democracy, but a racist monster |
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Israel is a racist state that came into being as a colonial project through an alliance of the European Jewish Zionists and the Western imperialist powers. The Zionists sought European support in settling Palestine, and in return the state to be established there would be a regional base for Western imperialism. The US supported the creation of a Zionist state. In 1948, Israeli military forces overran the bulk (78%) of Palestine. The remainder came under occupation in the course of the war of 1967.
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| Ran HaCohen, comparative literature, says Israel is "threatened" by peace, and so Israel opposes it |
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| Israel can live with only two kinds of Palestinian leaders. It can live with a puppet who accepts Israel's sovereignty over the Palestinian territories (we may give him some "autonomy" in return), who is ready to give up 60 percent of the West Bank for Israeli settlements and apartheid walls (we may temporarily remove a checkpoint or two in return), who is willing to forget the Palestinian refugees (we may not insist on his conversion to Judaism in return). Israel has made several attempts to find or tame such a Palestinian poodle, but so far failed. |
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| Tanya Reinhart (TAU, linguistics) insists on Marxist web site that Sharon's government will never pull out of Gaza - but failed to eat her bonnet when he did |
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| 'Deception and lies have been a corner stone in Israeli policy, brought to a new level of perfection since Oslo.' |
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| Tanya Reinhart (TAU linguistics) finds some "Slow ethnic cleansing" ... of Arabs by Jews |
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Israel's systematic policy of injuring Palestinians cannot be explained as self-defence or as a spontaneous response to terrorism. It is an act of ethnic cleansing - a process in which one ethnic group is removed from territories that another is interested in ruling. In a place that attracts as much international attention as Israel/Palestine, ethnic cleansing cannot be carried out by a sudden act of mass slaughter or mass expulsion from the territory. Therefore there is a consistent process, the goal of which is slowly and gradually to compel people to die or to escape.
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| RACHEL GIORA (TAU, linguistics) claims imprisoned terrorist accomplice Tali Fahima is a victim of political persecution |
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'The Shabak is trying to silence Fahima, a brave young woman who decided to check by herself what are the conditions in the Jenin refugee camp that cause Palestinians to act against Israel. She met there ordinary people who want to live a life of freedom and dignity.'
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| A description of a lecture by TAU political science professor YOAV PELED at Cornell |
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| Peled summed up the current state of the peace process with this astonishing quote: “The tragedy, from a perspective of peace, is that the Israeli public won’t think about anything but their physical survival.” To which I suppose the vast majority of Israelis would respond, ‘Guilty on all counts, Mr. Peled.’ Normal people, when they’re under attack by religious fanatics, like to defend themselves. Peled likes to write theses blaming capitalism. |
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| RAN HACOHEN (TAU, comparative literarure) denounces those militaristic peace-hating people in Israel, meaning the Jews |
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So in addition to its painful disillusionment, the War on Iraq left Israel's junta rather ridiculed. One junta member, former Minister (and former General) Ephraim Sneh (Labour), once praised the Israeli army as "the strongest military power between the Caspian Sea and Gibraltar". For all that military might, Israeli citizens are anything but secure. In fact, Israel probably sets a historic record in the disproportion between military might and actual security. The War on Iraq exposed once more the absurdities of Israeli militarism: billions of dollars were invested against a threat that did not materialise (and probably did not even exist), but the sense of insecurity has been intentionally nurtured even further.
The Israeli army must now feel deeply frustrated. One wonders where this dangerous sense of frustration will lead. |
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| RAN HACOHEN (comparative literature) says that a genocidal Israel is warring ON BEHALF OF brutal terrorism |
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| The other two options – genocide and ethnic cleansing – are waiting for the right opportunity, which has not arrived yet. But the recent movement of the idea of "transfer" (i.e. mass deportation) into main-stream Israeli discourse, together with the warnings of so-called "mega-attacks" (a new term introduced in the last weeks), are preparing the hearts for such measures. |
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| RAN HACOHEN (TAU, comparative literature) insists Israel is no democracy. You know, unlike Syria. |
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| The Apartheid Wall – the so-called "security fence" – presently being erected deep in occupied Palestinian land has already left about 12.000 Palestinian villagers outside it, trapped between the Wall and the Green Line. All this territory, between the Apartheid Wall and Israel proper, has been termed "the seam zone." |
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| RAN HACOHEN (comparative literature) on Israel's "Apartheid Wall" -
How dare Israel defend its civilians! |
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Keeping silent on this gigantic project and its genocidal implications, meant to prevent any fair future settlement (not to mention the Road Map), is a moral crime, of which almost the entire Western media is guilty.
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| Mosque Opened in Tel Aviv University |
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| Remember the outburst of opposition from campus leftists when the administration at TAU proposed opening a synagogue? |
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| TANYA REINHART (TAU, linguistics) Urges Boycott of Israel
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Reinhart called for a general boycott of Israel, including its military, businesses and universities. She also appealed for protests to impede Israel’s construction of the wall of separation in and along the West Bank.
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| TAU's PAUL WEXLER (emeritus, linguistics) wants Yale to Divest from Israel |
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| 'I favor the boycott even though I would be one of its immediate victims.' |
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| ZE'EV HERZOG (TAU, archeology) finds an enemy - the Bible |
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Herzog's Attack on the Bible Unjustified, by Hershel Shanks:
Almost all, like Herzog and Finkelstein, are serious scholars. But most of them also have a political agenda. Professor Avraham Malamat of Hebrew University publicly described one of them as both "anti-Israel and anti-Bible." At the extreme, they can even be viewed as anti-Semitic.
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| TANYA REINHART: The answer is that Israel is an apartheid regime now what was the question again? |
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A virtual state which serves one purpose: separation - apartheid. "We are here and they are there" - behind the fences, as Barak put it.
Reinhart on Marxist Web SIte
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| TAU Marxist Sociologist YEHOUDA SHENHAV and his role in the Decline of the Israeli Sociology |
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Yehouda Shenhav, Tel Aviv U:
"Determination to make the facts fit a historical narrative of oppression and exploitation also explains the arguments made by Yehouda Shenhav, editor of Teoria Uvikoret and former head of Tel Aviv Universitys Sociology Department, in a 1998 article in the daily Haaretz entitled, The Perfect Robbery. According to the essay, which attempted revisit the
history of the immigration of Iraqi Jewry to Israel in 1951, described the State of Israel as seeking to exploit both the Palestinians and Iraqi Jews
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| TANYA REINHART (TAU, Linguistics) says Israel slaughters innocents for the fun of it |
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and Israel is an apartheid country
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| RACHEL GIORA (TAU, linguistics) Calls For Ban On Investments in Israel |
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| Linguistics professor Rachel Giora, who signed up to the Princeton initiative, says she has received letters suggesting she be fired from her post at Tel Aviv University. She describes the reaction of some of her colleagues to her support of the petition as "very hostile." Following "the example of white South Africans" who called for a boycott against their own country during apartheid rule, Giora says she joined the American initiative as she believes it will be more effective than local Israeli protests in pressuring the Israeli government to change its policies. "The harm I am inviting [upon Israel] is only temporary and may save us from much greater harm" in the long-term, she added. |
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| TAU's RACHEL GIORA (linguistics) leads the pack of "Israeli Academics" demanding that Princeton Boycott Israel |
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| We would like to express our support for your initiative to call upon Princeton University to divest all holdings in corporations doing significant business with Israel. |
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| ANAT BILETZKI (TAU, philosophy) demands that "intellectuals" recognize the Palestinian "Right to Return" - free swimming lessons for the Jews? |
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| The State of Israel was supposed to be a democracy; it has set up a colonial structure, combining unmistakable elements of apartheid with the arbitrariness of brutal military occupation. |
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| MICHAEL KAGAN (TAU, law) wants to stop the flow of funds to the Zionist Entity
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People may disagree on the degree to which the United States is responsible for Israeli policy toward the Palestinians. But let's at least make the Israelis pay for their policy themselves.
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| ANAT MATAR (TAU, linguistics): Israel's 'war to annihilate Palestinian civil society' |
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This is the war that the IDF is waging: the war to deplete and
annihilate Palestinian civil society as a living, healthy, unified, educated, working, potent factor. |
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| YIGAL BRONNER (South Asia Studies) opposes security walls, would rather just let the terrorists come into Israeli cities |
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| The educational system, not unlike other sectors, is on the verge of collapse. This is usually what happens when you take a viable community and surround it with walls. But this is exactly what the Sharon government wants. |
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| TANYA REINHART (TAU, Linguistics): Israel does not Deserve to Exist |
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In 1969, the Israeli philosopher Yesayahu Leibovitz anticipated that in the areas of the occupation "concentration camps would be erected by the Israeli rulers... Israel would be a state that would not deserve to exist, and it will not be worthwhile to preserve it". How far are we from Leibovitz prophecy in the fenced Gaza strip?
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| TANYA REINHART claims that Israel stole the weather from the Palestinians - heck, we don't understand either
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| Genocide is associated in our minds with mass graves, or convoys of population transfer. The slow death inflicted on the Palestinian people has, perhaps, no name yet, but still, how does it happen that the Israeli society seals its heart and its eyes from seeing it? |
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| ZNET (Marxist web site) INTERVIEW WITH TANYA REINHART (TAU, linguistics) |
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By now, much was written already about Barak's non-offer in Camp David.
..... In fact, Barak's Camp David was the second
round of his mastery of deception of public opinion.
also Israel defines its military action as a necessary defense against terrorism. But in fact, the first Palestinian terrorist attack on Israeli civilians inside Israel occurred on November 2, 2000.
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| TANYA REINHART (TAU, linguistics): Israel setting up large "penal colonies" |
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| "when you leave people no hope, there is no way to stop the madness of suicide bombing." and The new stage of Israel's 'separation' can no longer be compared to the Apartheid of South Africa. As Ronnie Kasrils, South Africa's Minister of Water Affairs, said in an Interview with Al Ahram Weekly, "the South African apartheid regime never engaged in the sort of repression Israel is inflicting on the Palestinians" (Issue of March 28 April 3, 2002). We are witnessing the daily invisible killing of the sick and wounded being deprived of medical care, the weak who cannot survive in the new poverty conditions, and those who are bound to reach starvation. |
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| TANYA REINHART (TAU, linguistics): Hoorah for the ACADEMIC BOYCOTT of Israel! |
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The model of boycott followed here is, indeed, that which was formed in the case of South Africa. Just a few years ago, in 1993, the whole world celebrated when the Apartheid regime in South Africa collapsed after 50 years of brutal discrimination and oppression.
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| TANYA REINHART (TAU, linguistics) / EVIL (ISRAEL) UNLEASHED
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Their immediate goal is to get the Palestinians off the international agenda, so slaughter, starvation, forced evacuation and 'migration' can continue undisturbed, leading, possibly, to the final realization of Sharon's long standing vision, embodied in the military plans.
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| TANYA REINHART (TAU, linguistics) wants the world to STOP TERRORIST ISRAEL |
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The Israeli army has been terrorizing cities and villages in the West Bank....
Finally, there is one simple thing that anybody can do: Boycott Israel!... Israel is not the US. It is a small country with hardly any economy, and with a self-image completely detached from reality. It can be stopped. |
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| TANYA REINHART (TAU, linguistics): Those horrid Israelis keep preventing peace |
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Once again, Israel had a historical opportunity to reach a just peace with the Palestinian people, and to integrate in the Middle East. Instead, it turned this to another chapter of oppression and control.
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| Communist Party using Tel Aviv University campus for indoctrination |
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| Communism celebrated at TAU |
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| RAN HACOHEN (comparative literature) is upset by Israel's "Apartheid Wall" (meaning its anti-terrorist wall) |
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Since 1967, Israel has never given up its claim on the occupied Palestinian territories; Israel has not dismantled a single settlement built there, and has never ceased to take Palestinian lands by an ever more sophisticate arsenal of dispossession: the "by-pass roads," the "checkpoints," the relentless harassment of the Palestinian population, and, at present, the project that epitomizes the policy of dispossession: the Apartheid Wall.
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