21.12.23
Editorial Note
Following the Congressional testimony of three college professors, a huge debate about antisemitism on campus erupted. Dr. Roza El-Eini, a Fellow at the British Royal Historical Society, published an interesting article called “American Universities and the Seeds of Evil.” She lays the blame for the shocking displays of antisemitism on the campus-based crusade against Israel. Academics have taught that Israel is an “apartheid state,” that it was “racist” and “committing genocide” against the Palestinians, and compared Gaza to a “concentration camp.” Israeli Apartheid Week, held on many campuses, was replete with visuals pushing these themes. BDS, another campus invention, has migrated to other sectors of society, including trade unions and the cultural world.
El-Eini noted that many of the professors who teach Middle Eastern Studies and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are from the Middle East and “woefully unqualified.” In the guise of scholarly work, they invent or recycle antisemitic tropes. One of the most egregious is Jasbir K. Puar, from Rutgers University. Her book, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability, spread a blood libel that the IDF harvests Palestinian organs. A course offered by the Near East Studies department at Princeton University assigned the book to its reading list.
El-Eini praised IAM for “holding up a mirror to academia’s unscrupulous BDS advocacy and anti-Israel activism” since 2004. As readers of the IAM reports know, a sizable group of Israeli academics have contributed to the delegitimization of Israel most viciously.
Here are some names that have recurred in the IAM postings:
Oren Yiftachel was a pioneer of the comparison of Israel to apartheid South Africa. He started in the early 2000s, as detailed in the Guardian newspaper in 2002.
Neve Gordon, one of the most vociferous anti-Israeli advocates, pushed the Gaza ghetto analogy in an early article. He went on to criticize Israel for a long line of alleged offenses against the Palestinians and called for the boycott of Israel on the pages of the Los Angeles Times in 2009.
Gadi Algazi pushed the analogy of the “Gaza ghetto” while complaining about Israel’s policy of assassinating Hamas leaders.
Ilan Pappe, a former professor at the University of Haifa, was one of the first to demand boycotting of several Israeli universities.
Rachel Giora and Anat Matar contributed to the BDS movement by starting the Boycott from Within group in 2009.
Adi Ophir and Ariella Azoulay adopted the Nakba terminology, blaming Israel for the mistakes the Palestinians made when attacking Israel in the war of 1948.
Yehouda Shenhav promoted the “Arab Jews” theory that the Palestinians and the Mizrahim are victims of the Ashkenazim.
Ariella Azoulay used a fake image of Palestinians behind a fence chased by Israeli soldiers as if they were in Auschwitz.
Amos Goldberg and Raz Segal pushed for the Nakba-Holocaust equivalence.
Shlomo Sand argues that the Jewish People were invented by the Zionist movement and had no connection to the Biblical Land of Israel. In his view, they were Khazars, a Turkic tribe who converted to Judaism in the 8th century. Sand’s theory became a staple of Iranian antisemitism and anti-Zionism.
Moshe Zimmermann and Moshe Zuckermann wrote in their book that the establishment of the state of Israel “took place at the same time as the collective disaster of the Palestinian people… the Palestinians are indeed, to a considerable extent, victims of Zionism.” Both professors have implied that the Holocaust and Nakba are equal in some ways, supporting the increasingly popular theory that Israel has perpetuated genocide against the Palestinians.
Dalit Baum founded the group “Who Profits from the Occupation,” calling on people to boycott Israeli settlements.
Nurit Peled-Elhanan denied that there were calls for violence against Jews in the Palestinian education system. Numerous studies about the violent content of Palestinian textbooks, especially in the Gaza Strip, contradict this argument.
Yael Barda argued that Israel’s permit system, which allows Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank to work in Israel, has nothing to do with security. In her opinion, it is a tool of control and segregation. Arguably, Barda’s theory fits well with the depiction of Israel as a colonial-apartheid state.
Daniel Bar-Tal studied Israelis’ siege mentality. In Israeli school books, according to Bar-Tal, Arabs are often stereotyped negatively and portrayed as “uneducated people and enemies.”
Oren Ben-Dor wrote “The Boycott Should Continue,” The Independent, 2005.
Baruch Kimmerling wrote in 2005 “I will be the first to admit that Israeli academic institutions are part and parcel of the oppressive Israeli state that has, among its other acts of foolishness and villainy, committed grave crimes against the Palestinian people.”
Tanya Reinhart published an article in 2002 seeking to convince Israeli academics “opposing Israel’s oppressive and brutal policies toward the Palestinian people” to join Professors Hilary and Steven Rose in their effort to promote a boycott against the Israeli academic community and its institutions.
It is beyond the scope of this post to provide a full record of these Israeli scholars. Still, even this abbreviated list speaks to their significance in delegitimizing Israel on campus and beyond. Conceptualizing Israel as an apartheid state spurred the popular Israel Apartheid Week on campuses; the not-so-veiled comparisons between the treatment of Palestinians and Jews in the Holocaust nourished the argument that Israel is committing “genocide.” The initial demand to impose a boycott on Israel all came from the academy in Israel.
It is hard to exaggerate the critical role of this cadre of activists. In a world of identity politics, antisemitic and anti-Zionist Israelis are considered the gold standard among Israel delegitimizers. So much so that many were offered positions in reputable universities in the West, and their articles and books appeared in numerous outlets that pushed the anti-Israel campaign.
As El-Eini rightly pointed out, rehabilitating Israel’s blackened image has to start on campus. The ideologically driven pseudo-science peddled by the activist cohorts needs to be recognized for what it is: anti-Israel propaganda supported by taxpayers.
REFERENCES
https://www.jns.org/american-universities-and-the-seeds-of-evil/
American universities and the seeds of evil
When three university presidents cannot condemn antisemitic calls for genocide, the depravity of academia is proved
ROZA I.M. EL-EINI
Dr. Roza I.M. El-Eini, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, specializes in the study of British Mandatory Palestine.
(December 13, 2023 / JNS)
The signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 between Israel and the PLO set a dangerous precedent because it established terror-diplomacy as the PLO’s modus operandi. Seeing their bombings, stabbings and violence against Israelis rewarded, the PLO readily continued on this path, which culminated in the second intifada of 2000–2005. In tandem with this terrorist campaign, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel began. Based on the anti-apartheid movement, it spread its antisemitic mantras to universities around the world.
Even before this, academics had been declaring that “Zionism is racism” and Israel was an “apartheid state” that was “ethnically cleansing the Palestinians” and “committing genocide.” Holocaust imagery was evoked through the libelous accusation that the Gaza Strip was a “concentration camp.” Well-organized and funded student unions joined in, advocating for an especially aggressive form of BDS. As a result, Jewish faculty and students were left increasingly isolated and distressed. Universities complacently and in many cases benevolently permitted “Israeli Apartheid Week” to become a fixture on campus, so that Jewish students and faculty were annually confronted with raw antisemitism.
University faculties became clogged up with academics—many from the Middle East and woefully underqualified—who peddled and published toxic antisemitic tropes. This has been well-documented by Israel Academia Monitor, which since 2004 has been holding up a mirror to academia’s unscrupulous BDS advocacy and anti-Israel activism. Some of the world’s leading institutions of higher education and academic publishers have become complicit in the dissemination of anti-Israel propaganda, indoctrinating students and legitimizing antisemitism.
Princeton University, once the home of Bernard Lewis, one of the greatest scholars of the Middle East, exemplified this when it authorized a Near Eastern Studies course for autumn 2023 with the turgid title of “The Healing Humanities: Decolonizing Trauma Studies from the Global South.” The syllabus included Rutgers University women’s and gender studies professor Jasbir K. Puar’s book The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability, an anti-Israel screed published in 2017 by no less than Duke University Press. In the book, Puar parroted blood libels against Israel, claiming that the IDF is “harvesting Palestinian organs.” Where to begin? Perhaps by restricting the use of the notably abused terms “university,” “professor,” “academic,” “university publisher” and “academic publication.”
Almost immediately after the horrific news broke of the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas on Oct. 7, thousands upon thousands of faculty and students were unleashed onto university campuses and the streets of major cities in suspiciously well-organized antisemitic mob events, chanting pedantically rhyming hate slogans. The heaving throngs of the geographically ignorant hollered, “From the river to the sea!” a genocidal call for the elimination of Israel.
It soon transpired that many did not know of the whereabouts of all of this water. Perhaps they conflated it with the issue of global warming, thus pulling in another ignoramus, juvenile climate hysteric Greta Thunberg, complete with her febrile link to academia via her honorary doctorate of theology from Helsinki University.
Much more sinister, however, is Hamas’s infiltration of America and Europe both on and off campus. Lorenzo Vidino, of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, has mapped out and quantified this phenomenon in his study “The Hamas Network in America,” revealing that the genocidal antisemitic organization has been operating in America for over 30 years.
Making their well-funded way from training camps in Latin America—which also harbors Hezbollah and Al-Qaeda, among others—Hamas terrorists cross the perfidiously open U.S. border and burrow into the hearts and minds of Americans while being zealously embraced by academia.
As a result, virulently antisemitic jihadists have concluded an alliance with progressives to further their joint assault on the Jews and Western civilization. Universities are at the forefront of this in their role as the Trojan Horse of terrorism, using the freedoms they enjoy even as they are systemically destroying them root and branch.
And who are “they”? “They” are, for example, the presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who glibly sneered and smirked their way through a congressional hearing on campus antisemitism. The moment is now indelible: The presidents of three of the world’s most prestigious universities testified before a House committee that to call for the genocide of the Jewish people is only a violation of their universities’ “code of conduct” in certain “contexts.” Their redolent hypocrisy and dereliction of duty was palpable.
The seeds of evil were long ago sown on university grounds and the writer Douglas Murray is correct when he says that “universities have let evil grow on campus.” The depravity of the three university presidents in question has proved it.
israel-academia-monitor.com 