27.06.24
Editorial Note
The University of Minnesota has rescinded its offer to Dr. Raz Segal to direct its Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Segal, a former University of Haifa historian is a professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University.
The move came after two members of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies’ advisory board, Profs. Karen Painter and Bruno Chaouat resigned in protest over Segal’s criticism of Israel’s “ongoing genocide of Palestinians in occupied Gaza.” According to reports, Chaouat and Painter wrote in separate letters of resignation to Provost Rachel Croson and Interim President Jeff Ettinger that Segal was “supporting Hamas” and that he was engaging in “indirect support of antisemitism… Professor Segal, by justifying Hamas’ atrocities five days after they occurred, cannot fulfill the mission of the center.”
The Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) of Minnesota and the Dakotas published a statement saying that dozens of community members contacted the University to protest Segal’s appointment, including descendants of Holocaust survivors and a person who survived the Oct. 7 attack. The JCRC said the next director must be “a unifying and not divisive figure.”
Segal’s support for the Palestinians is evident.
The BDS movement promoted Segal on October 15, 2023, citing him as saying, “Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is quite explicit, open, and unashamed. Perpetrators of genocide usually do not express their intentions so clearly. – Raz Segal – Associate Professor of Holocaust & genocide studies at Stockton University.”
In an article published in The Guardian on October 24, 2023, titled “Israel must stop weaponizing the Holocaust,” Segal wrote, “A powerful state, with powerful allies and a powerful army, engaged in a retaliatory attack against stateless Palestinians under Israeli-settler colonial rule, military occupation and siege, is thus portrayed as powerless Jews in a struggle against Nazis. This historical context in no way justifies or excuses the mass murder of 1,500 Israelis on 7 October, which constitutes a war crime and crimes against humanity. This was the single largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, which deeply shocked Jews and many others around the world.”
On December 9, 2023, Segal published a statement on behalf of “over 55 scholars of the Holocaust, genocide, and mass violence deplore the atrocity crimes against civilians committed by Hamas and Islamic Jihad on 7 October and by Israeli forces since then. The starvation, mass killing, and forced displacement of Palestinian civilians in Gaza is ongoing, raising the question of genocide, especially in view of the intentions expressed by Israeli leaders.” Segal ridicules Israeli President Isaac Herzog where Herzog said, “This war is a war that is not only between Israel and Hamas. It’s a war that is intended, really, truly, to save Western civilization… We are attacked by [a] Jihadist network, an empire of evil… and this empire wants to conquer the entire Middle East, and if it weren’t for us, Europe would be next, and the United States follows.” For Segal, “Herzog builds on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s association of Israel’s attack on Gaza with the Biblical evil of Amalek. but he places it on a modern scale as the last stand against global apocalypse and the demise of ‘Western civilization.’ For Segal, Herzog and Netanyahu “use of religious language and symbolism in this case, reflects a dangerous intersection in the case of Israel of the exclusionary modern nation-state with a settler colonial project in a place infused with multiple religious histories and meanings.” Segal ended his statement by saying that “the scholars who have signed the statement are signaling their alarm about the mass violence underway in Gaza and the inflammatory language that threatens to escalate it further. They call for urgent action to stop Israel’s attack on Gaza and to work towards a future that will guarantee the equality, freedom, dignity, and security of all the people who live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.”
Particularly worrying, Segal spoke live on December 12, 2023, at a meeting of the UN Palestinian Rights Committee. He stated there, “the unprecedented level of mass killings the first two acts of genocide in the UN genocide convention are not the only ones that Israel is perpetrating now in Gaza it is the third Act of the convention ‘deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part’ that mostly fits Israel’s mass violence in Gaza… annihilatory language has also appeared in public spaces in Israel such as banners on the bridges in Tel Aviv that call ‘to annihilate Gaza’ and explain that ‘the picture of Triumph is zero people in Gaza’ there are dozens and dozens of examples of incitement in Israeli media.” Segal ended his speech, “the 56 Scholars of the Holocaust genocide and mass violence who signed a statement on 9th of December wrote that ‘the time for concerted action to prevent genocide is now” warning also that “should the Israeli attack continue Palestinians under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and Palestinian citizens of Israel face grave danger as well it is our urgent responsibility and is the obligation of States under article one of the UN genocide convention to heed this warning and act now to stop and prevent genocide.”
Segal delivered a lecture on Zoom, promoted by the group New England Network for Justice for Palestine, on January 11, 2024, titled “Gaza and the Question of Genocide.” This lecture focused on a “number of unprecedented elements in Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. It will discuss the exceptionally direct, explicit, and unashamed statements of intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza by Israeli leaders and senior army officers, the widespread incitement to genocide in Israeli political and public discourses, and the nature of the mass violence itself that a number of reports have described as one of the deadliest and destructive since World War II.”
Segal wrote in the Time Magazine, “How Weaponizing Antisemitism Puts Jews at Risk,” on May 14, 2024, that Many “have accused protestors and colleges of rampant antisemitism. That’s woefully misguided—and dangerous. Indeed, the blanket assertion by pro-Israel advocates is intended as a political cudgel: weaponizing antisemitism to shield Israel from criticism of its attack on Gaza… those accusing protesters of antisemitism do not appear to consider the many Jews among the protestors in the encampments as Jews, arguing in effect that Jews can only be Jews if they support Israel or do not express pro-Palestinian sentiment. This is absurd, for the idea that all Jews should hold the same views by virtue of their identity is an antisemitic idea itself.” There is “the false equivalency between Jews and Zionists.” According to Segal, “many Jews feel more unsafe today because of the policies of the right-wing government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and claims that Israel represents Jews anywhere. The weaponization of antisemitism by Israel and its allies, including the U.S. government, draws on the deeply problematic ‘working definition of antisemitism” adopted in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)”.”
Segal was an anti-Israel activist even before the war in Gaza. On March 31, 2022, he published an anti-Israel article titled “Israeli Apartheid and Its Apologists,” naming Dr. Deborah Lipstadt, the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, as an Israel apologist. In his view, when the famous Holocaust historian rejected the claims that Israel is an apartheid state, she “portends a worrying and accelerating trend” of “attacking human rights organizations and conflating legitimate criticism of Israel with antisemitism.” Segal stated that “criticism of Israeli policies: those defending such policies distort legitimate criticism of a state and present it, only in the case of Israel, as an attack against a people. I have been engaged in research and teaching about the Holocaust, genocide, state violence, Jewish history, and antisemitism for over fifteen years in Israel and in the US. I have also written about the weaponization of the discourse of antisemitism, used often to silence and attack those who speak about Israeli state violence, especially Palestinians. It is a crude and cruel distortion: abusing the historical struggle of a vulnerable people, Jews, under attack by powerful states to blur the attack of a state, Israel, against a vulnerable people, Palestinians. Knee-jerk allegations of antisemitism are meant to marginalize engagement with this reality.”
Not surprisingly, the pro-Palestinian academic group, the Committee on Academic Freedom of The Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA), wrote a letter to Minnesota University to “express our grave concern about your decision to rescind the offer which the University of Minnesota (U of M) made to Dr. Raz Segal to assume the directorship of its Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (CHGS). This action, the result of your capitulation to political pressure from groups based outside the university which had attacked Dr. Segal for his assessment of Israel’s war in Gaza.” MESA requested the University to “immediately reinstate the offer made to Dr. Segal and apologize to him for surrendering to the smear campaign against him. We further urge you to publicly and forcefully reaffirm your commitment to the principles of academic freedom and to the integrity and independence of your institution’s faculty hiring process. We look forward to your response.” MESA is known to limit its concern to those who promote the Palestinian cause.
IAM has been reporting since 2004 that Palestinians and pro-Palestinians are recruiting Israeli academics to bash Israel. The purpose is to deflect accusations of antisemitism. Segal is a prime example of this trend. He is an Israeli and an associated professor of Holocaust Studies, a double trophy for the community of academic Israel bashes. His academic output is quite modest, especially as compared to his academic activism of writing articles accusing Israel of apartheid and genocide. University authorities should have been more vigilant about the abuse of academic freedom. Recruiting faculty due to their political activism violates the very spirit of higher education.
REFERENCES:
“Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is quite explicit, open, and unashamed. Perpetrators of genocide usually do not express their intentions so clearly.” Raz Segal – Associate Professor of Holocaust & genocide studies at Stockton University.
October 15, 2023
https://jewishcurrents.org/a-textbook-case-of-genocide
A Textbook Case of Genocide
Israel has been explicit about what it’s carrying out in Gaza. Why isn’t the world listening?
October 13, 2023
ON FRIDAY, Israel ordered the besieged population in the northern half of the Gaza Strip to evacuate to the south, warning that it would soon intensify its attack on the Strip’s upper half. The order has left more than a million people, half of whom are children, frantically attempting to flee amid continuing airstrikes, in a walled enclave where no destination is safe. As Palestinian journalist Ruwaida Kamal Amer wrote today from Gaza, “refugees from the north are already arriving in Khan Younis, where the missiles never stop and we’re running out of food, water, and power.” The UN has warned that the flight of people from the northern part of Gaza to the south will create “devastating humanitarian consequences” and will “transform what is already a tragedy into a calamitous situation.” Over the past week, Israel’s violence against Gaza has killed more than 1,800 Palestinians, injured thousands, and displaced more than 400,000 within the strip. And yet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised today that what we have seen is “only the beginning.”
Israel’s campaign to displace Gazans—and potentially expel them altogether into Egypt—is yet another chapter in the Nakba, in which an estimated 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes during the 1948 war that led to the creation of the State of Israel. But the assault on Gaza can also be understood in other terms: as a textbook case of genocide unfolding in front of our eyes. I say this as a scholar of genocide, who has spent many years writing about Israeli mass violence against Palestinians. I have written about settler colonialism and Jewish supremacy in Israel, the distortion of the Holocaust to boost the Israeli arms industry, the weaponization of antisemitism accusations to justify Israeli violence against Palestinians, and the racist regime of Israeli apartheid. Now, following Hamas’s attack on Saturday and the mass murder of more than 1,000 Israeli civilians, the worst of the worst is happening.
Under international law, the crime of genocide is defined by “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such,” as noted in the December 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. In its murderous attack on Gaza, Israel has loudly proclaimed this intent. Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant declared it in no uncertain terms on October 9th: “We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly.” Leaders in the West reinforced this racist rhetoric by describing Hamas’s mass murder of Israeli civilians—a war crime under international law that rightly provoked horror and shock in Israel and around the world—as “an act of sheer evil,” in the words of US President Joe Biden, or as a move that reflected an “ancient evil,” in the terminology of President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen. This dehumanizing language is clearly calculated to justify the wide scale destruction of Palestinian lives; the assertion of “evil,” in its absolutism, elides distinctions between Hamas militants and Gazan civilians, and occludes the broader context of colonization and occupation.
The UN Genocide Convention lists five acts that fall under its definition. Israel is currently perpetrating three of these in Gaza: “1. Killing members of the group. 2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group. 3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” The Israeli Air Force, by its own account, has so far dropped more than 6,000 bombs on Gaza, which is one of the most densely populated areas in the world—almost as many bombs as the US dropped on all of Afghanistan during record-breaking years of its war there. Human Rights Watch has confirmed that the weapons used included phosphorous bombs, which set fire to bodies and buildings, creating flames that aren’t extinguished on contact with water. This demonstrates clearly what Gallant means by “act accordingly”: not targeting individual Hamas militants, as Israel claims, but unleashing deadly violence against Palestinians in Gaza “as such,” in the language of the UN Genocide Convention. Israel has also intensified its 16-year siege of Gaza—the longest in modern history, in clear violation of international humanitarian law—to a “complete siege,” in Gallant’s words. This turn of phrase that explicitly indexes a plan to bring the siege to its final destination of systematic destruction of Palestinians and Palestinian society in Gaza, by killing them, starving them, cutting off their water supplies, and bombing their hospitals.
It’s not only Israel’s leaders who are using such language. An interviewee on the pro-Netanyahu Channel 14 called for Israel to “turn Gaza to Dresden.” Channel 12, Israel’s most-watched news station, published a report about left-leaning Israelis calling to “dance on what used to be Gaza.” Meanwhile, genocidal verbs—calls to “erase” and “flatten” Gaza—have become omnipresent on Israeli social media. In Tel Aviv, a banner reading “Zero Gazans” was seen hanging from a bridge.
Indeed, Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is quite explicit, open, and unashamed. Perpetrators of genocide usually do not express their intentions so clearly, though there are exceptions. In the early 20th century, for example, German colonial occupiers perpetrated a genocide in response to an uprising by the Indigenous Herero and Nama populations in southwest Africa. In 1904, General Lothar von Trotha, the German military commander, issued an “extermination order,” justified by the rationale of a “race war.” By 1908, the German authorities had murdered 10,000 Nama, and had achieved their stated goal of “destroying the Herero,” killing 65,000 Herero, 80% of the population. Gallant’s orders on October 9th were no less explicit. Israel’s goal is to destroy the Palestinians of Gaza. And those of us watching around the world are derelict in our responsibility to prevent them from doing so.
Correction: An earlier version of this piece said that Israel dropped more bombs on Gaza this week than the US dropped on Afghanistan in any single year of its war there. In fact, the US dropped more than 7,000 bombs on Afghanistan in both 2018 and 2019; at the time of publication, Israel had dropped an estimated 6,000 bombs on Gaza in less than a week.
Read 1 letter to the editor about “A Textbook Case of Genocide”Raz Segal is an associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University and the endowed professor in the study of modern genocide.
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UN Palestinian Rights Committee
@UNISPAL
LIVE Dr. Raz Segal, referring to the 9 December Statement of Scholars in Holocaust and #Genocide Studies on Mass Violence in #Israel & #Palestine since 7 October, said “𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐨𝐜𝐢𝐝𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐧𝐨𝐰.”
5:53 PM · Dec 12, 2023 · 1,747 Views
@UNISPAL Official account for United Nations GA Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People لجنة الأمم المتحدة لحقوق الشعب الفلسطيني
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https://www.democracynow.org/2024/6/18/raz_segal_university_of_minnesota
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/06/18/minn-j18.html
University of Minnesota rescinds offer to professor over criticisms of Gaza genocide
Matt Rigel a day ago
On Friday, June 7, the University of Minnesota halted indefinitely its search for a director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, just days after it had offered the position to Raz Segal, an Israeli historian and current professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Endowed Professor of Modern Genocide Studies at Stockton University in New Jersey.
The move by the university came after two current members of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies’ advisory board, Karen Painter and Bruno Chaouat, both professors at the university, resigned in protest over Segal’s criticism of Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in occupied Gaza.
This decision comes amidst a frontal assault by the ruling class on the democratic rights of those opposed to the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza. Students, artists, academics and professionals have faced harsh punishment for daring to speak out against Israel’s actions or continued US support of the genocide. In May, over 3,000 students, professors and academic staff were arrested for protesting the genocide in Gaza on college campuses and throughout American cities.
In separate emailed letters of resignation to Provost Rachel Croson and Interim President Jeff Ettinger, Chaouat and Painter claimed Segal was “supporting Hamas” and that he was engaging in “indirect support of antisemitism.” Chauoat declared, “Professor Segal, by justifying Hamas’ atrocities five days after they occurred, cannot fulfill the mission of the center.”
Segal was one of the first renowned public academics to describe Israel’s attacks in Gaza as a genocide. He also unequivocally condemned the attacks carried out by Hamas. In a commentary published in The Guardian October 24 under the headline, “Israel must stop weaponising the Holocaust,” Segal wrote:
A powerful state, with powerful allies and a powerful army, engaged in a retaliatory attack against stateless Palestinians under Israeli-settler colonial rule, military occupation and siege, is thus portrayed as powerless Jews in a struggle against Nazis. This historical context in no way justifies or excuses the mass murder of 1,500 Israelis on 7 October, which constitutes a war crime and crimes against humanity. This was the single largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, which deeply shocked Jews and many others around the world.
The attacks on Segal are mounting. Mark Rotenberg, vice president of Hillel International—a Jewish campus organization which describes itself as “steadfastly committed to the support of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state with secure and recognized borders”—claimed that Segal’s appointment “severely degraded the academic integrity of the department.”
He added, “It’s terribly distressing to see the Department of Holocaust and Genocide Studies led by an anti-Israel propagandist rather than a top scholar in the history of the eradication of European Jewry.”
The decision comes amidst some of the most horrendous massacres of the genocide, including the Nuseirat refugee camp slaughter, which killed almost 300 Palestinians and injured over 700 more. It comes weeks after the Israeli army decided to invade Rafah, crossing a supposed “red line” for the Biden administration, with US support, endangering over a million lives in the only remaining untouched areas of the Gaza Strip.
The absurd attacks on Segal are belied by his scholarship on genocide and Holocaust studies, which is recognized internationally, including in Israel.
After studying at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, he moved on to receive an M.A. in history from Tel Aviv University and then continued his studies at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. He has received multiple fellowships and awards for his work during the course of his career, such as a Harry Frank Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship and a Lady Davis Fellowship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
He has published multiple books on the Holocaust. In recognition of his scholarship, one of his books, Days of Ruin: The Jews of MunkácsDuring the Holocaust, was published by Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to victims of the Holocaust.
Other notable works cover the periods preceding and during World War II. He has also made several contributions to the study of genocides and the Holocaust in history to journals such as the Journal of Holocaust Studies over the past decades, including a notable recent publication in March earlier this year on the ongoing genocide in Gaza, Gaza as Twilight of Israel Exceptionalism: Holocaustand Genocide Studies from Unprecedented Crisis toUnprecedented Change.
In the week following the beginning of Israel’s operation in Gaza, he published a blog post titled, “A Textbook Case of Genocide.” In this article, he poses the question, “Israel has been explicit about what it’s carrying out in Gaza. Why isn’t the world listening?” He continues:
Israel’s campaign to displace Gazans—and potentially expel them altogether into Egypt—is yet another chapter in the Nakba, in which an estimated 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes during the 1948 war that led to the creation of the State of Israel. But the assault on Gaza can also be understood in other terms: as a textbook case of genocide unfolding in front of our eyes. I say this as a scholar of genocide, who has spent many years writing about Israeli mass violence against Palestinians. I have written about settler colonialism and Jewish supremacy in Israel, the distortion of the Holocaust to boost the Israeli arms industry, the weaponization of antisemitism accusations to justify Israeli violence against Palestinians, and the racist regime of Israeli apartheid. Now, following Hamas’s attack on Saturday and the mass murder of more than 1,000 Israeli civilians, the worst of the worst is happening.
In the article, he cites the words of Israeli representatives, including Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant, who explicitly declared the genocidal intent of Israel’s operation just two days following the Hamas attack on the Nova music festival. He noted that perpetrators of genocide in history have rarely expressed their intent so clearly as is happening now in Israel.
Despite the attacks on academics and professionals, Segal maintained a principled stance on Israel’s genocide. In December last year, he was interviewed on “Breaking Points,” where he denounced Israel’s ongoing aggression against Palestinians in Gaza and the continued genocidal incitement in Israeli society. He clarified, “I’m talking about, you know, huge signs hanging on the bridges of the Tel Aviv Freeway right after the 7th of October, calling to flatten Gaza, to destroy Gaza, written on them directly that the ‘image of triumph would be zero people in Gaza.’ Very direct, very explicit.” This is in addition to his identification of Israeli apartheid, a stance which he maintains.
In an interview conducted in May by New Jersey Spotlight News, Segal defended student protests against the genocide, denouncing the absurd claims of antisemitism and violence by the media and politicians.
I think that anyone who visits the many “Gaza Solidarity Encampments” now on campuses across the U.S. sees that these accusations are baseless … it’s rooted historically. There have been accusations in the Jewish world among Jews that some Jews are not actually Jews. But these historically actually have been wielded by ultra-Orthodox and Orthodox rabbis against Zionists in their communities.
The entire political establishment—with the Democratic Party at the helm, supported by their fascistic Republican counterparts—has hurled baseless accusations of “antisemitism” in an attempt to silence opposition to the ongoing genocide.
The University of Minnesota’s decision to rescind Segal’s offer is occurring against the backdrop of continued attacks on democratic rights and free speech by US media, politicians and multiple employers against employees speaking out. This is also in the context of the Democratic Party’s rapid escalation of war not only in the Middle East but in Ukraine against Russia and threats against China. The same Democratic Party establishment and media denouncing protests against the obvious genocide in Palestine as “antisemitic” are now supporting self-admitted antisemites in Ukraine, such as the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion. This fascistic group was just cleared to receive more direct support from the Biden administration, which had previously cited it as a hate group.
The Democratic and Republican parties view the massive and growing opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza as a critical threat to plans for a wider war, which the ruling class sees as the only way out of the economic crisis facing global capitalism. As the threat of war grows, the Biden administration is intensifying repression at home. It has criminalized protests, carrying out mass arrests of students, workers and young people. The violence directed at the opposition is a sign of the level of fear within ruling circles that the movement will spread to the working class.
University students, graduate workers, and staff should come to the defense of Professor Segal and demand the university move forward with his hire. The attempt to silence Segal must be seen as part of a broader attack against students, workers and democratic rights. The growing demand to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza must be combined with a struggle against the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine and against dictatorship and social inequality.
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Letter to the University of Minnesota regarding its decision to rescind a job offer to Dr. Raz Segal
- JUNE 18, 2024
- COMMITTEE ON ACADEMIC FREEDOM
Jeff Ettinger
Interim President
University of Minnesota
Janie S. Mayeron
Chair of the Board of Regents
University of Minnesota
Rachel T. A. Croson
Executive Vice President and Provost
University of Minnesota
Ann Waltner
Interim Dean, College of Liberal Arts
University of Minnesota
Dear President Ettinger and colleagues:
We write on behalf of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) and its Committee on Academic Freedom to express our grave concern about your decision to rescind the offer which the University of Minnesota (U of M) made to Dr. Raz Segal to assume the directorship of its Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (CHGS). This action, the result of your capitulation to political pressure from groups based outside the university which had attacked Dr. Segal for his assessment of Israel’s war in Gaza, starkly contravenes your administration’s avowed commitment to academic freedom and to respect for the integrity of the faculty hiring process.
MESA was founded in 1966 to promote scholarship and teaching on the Middle East and North Africa. The preeminent organization in the field, the Association publishes the prestigious International Journal of Middle East Studies and has nearly 2,800 members worldwide. MESA is committed to ensuring academic freedom and freedom of expression, both within the region and in connection with the study of the region in North America and outside of North America.
Dr. Segal, Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Endowed Professor in the Study of Modern Genocide at Stockton University, is widely regarded as a leading scholar in the academic fields in which he works. After a thorough search conducted in full accord with U of M procedures and policies, he was deemed the most qualified candidate for the directorship of CHGS and offered the position. Two members of the CHGS board resigned in protest, citing an October 2023 article in which Dr. Segal had described Israel’s actions in Gaza as “a textbook case of genocide.” Organizations and media outlets based outside the university, including the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas, then launched a campaign to block Dr. Segal’s appointment.
Rather than defend academic freedom and the principle that faculty should make hiring decisions based exclusively on scholarly criteria, without interference by individuals or organizations pursuing their own political agenda, your administration first “paused” and then rescinded the offer to Dr. Segal. The video recording of President Ettinger’s 14 June 2024 report to the Board of Regents explaining his decision, available here (starting at 19:23), clearly indicates that the university surrendered to the campaign against Dr. Segal.
We note the statement issued by the U of M chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) on 12 June 2024 expressing alarm at the withdrawal of the offer to Dr. Segal and declaring that “the central administration has rewarded the brinkmanship of two faculty members acting outside the norms of acceptable faculty conduct, overruled a comprehensive faculty-led process of evaluating candidates for this position, and violated established policy and precedent regarding collegiate hiring practices.” The statement went on to characterize your action as “an appalling violation of academic freedom and a stain on the U’s record. If it goes uncorrected it will have a chilling effect on academic freedom at this institution, not only for faculty but also students and staff, by showing that our central administration will side with outside groups when they demand actions that violate academic freedom.” We also call your attention to the open letter signed by nearly a thousand faculty at universities across the United States and beyond, which noted that “by overruling the faculty experts who selected Dr. Segal, the University of Minnesota’s administrators have effectively issued a vote of no confidence in its own faculty. This move endangers the University’s reputation as an internationally-renowned research institution.”
We must remind you of the statement on “Academic Freedom in Times of War” issued by the AAUP on 24 October 2023, which is directly relevant to the current circumstances:
“It is in tumultuous times that colleges’ and universities’ stated commitments to protect academic freedom are most put to the test. As the Israel-Hamas war rages and campus protests proliferate, institutional authorities must refrain from sanctioning faculty members for expressing politically controversial views and should instead defend their right, under principles of academic freedom, to do so.”
We therefore call on you to immediately reinstate the offer made to Dr. Segal and apologize to him for surrendering to the smear campaign against him. We further urge you to publicly and forcefully reaffirm your commitment to the principles of academic freedom and to the integrity and independence of your institution’s faculty hiring process.
We look forward to your response.
Sincerely,
Aslı Ü. Bâli
MESA President
Professor, Yale Law School
Laurie Brand
Chair, Committee on Academic Freedom
Professor Emerita, University of Southern California
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/24/israel-gaza-palestinians-holocaust
Israel must stop weaponising the Holocaust
This article is more than 7 months old
Tue 24 Oct 2023 19.26 BST
Scholars of genocide are criticizing the dangerous use of the Holocaust to justify Israeli mass violence against Palestinians
President Joe Biden began his remarks in Israel with this: “Hamas committed atrocities that recall the worst ravages of Isis, unleashing pure unadulterated evil upon the world. There is no rationalizing it, no excusing it. Period. The brutality we saw would have cut deep anywhere in the world, but it cuts deeper here in Israel. October 7, which was a … sacred Jewish holiday, became the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust.
“It has brought to the surface painful memories and scars left by millennia of antisemitism and the genocide of the Jewish people. The world watched then, it knew, and the world did nothing.
“We will not stand by and do nothing again. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.”
With this, Biden reinforced the rhetorical framework that the former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett expressed, in typically unashamed terms, in an interview on Sky News on 12 October: “We’re fighting Nazis.”
A powerful state, with powerful allies and a powerful army, engaged in a retaliatory attack against stateless Palestinians under Israeli-settler colonial rule, military occupation and siege, is thus portrayed as powerless Jews in a struggle against Nazis. This historical context in no way justifies or excuses the mass murder of 1,500 Israelis on 7 October, which constitutes a war crime and crimes against humanity. This was the single largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, which deeply shocked Jews and many others around the world. The context of the Hamas attack on Israelis, however, is completely different from the context of the attack on Jews during the Holocaust. And without the historical context of Israeli settler colonialism since the 1948 Nakba, we cannot explain how we got here, nor imagine different futures; Biden offered us, instead, the decontextualized image of “pure, unadulterated evil.”
This weaponization of Holocaust memory by Israeli politicians runs deep. In 1982, for instance, in the context of Israel’s attack on Lebanon, the Israeli PM, Menachem Begin, compared the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in Beirut to Adolf Hitler in his bunker in Berlin at the end of the war. Three decades later, in October 2015, Benjamin Netanyahu took this weaponization to new levels when he asserted in a speech to the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem that the Palestinian grand mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini planted the idea to murder Jews in Hitler’s mind. And last Tuesday, Netanyahu described Hamas in a press conference, together with the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, as the “new Nazis”.
The Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant said: “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. Hamas won’t be there. We will eliminate everything.” Nissim Vaturi, a member of the Israeli parliament for the ruling Likud party, to take another example, called for “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth”. There are many other such expressions by Israeli politicians and senior army officers in the last few weeks. The fantasy of “fighting Nazis” drives such explicit language, because the image of Nazis is one of “pure, unadulterated evil”, which removes all laws and restrictions in the fight against it. Perpetrators of genocide always see their victims as evil and themselves as righteous. This is, indeed, how Nazis saw Jews.
Biden’s words constitute therefore a textbook use of the Holocaust not in order to stand with powerless people facing the prospect of genocidal violence, but to support and justify an extremely violent attack by a powerful state and, at the same time, distort this reality. But we see the reality in front of our eyes: since the start of Israeli mass violence on 7 October, the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza has surpassed 4,650, a third of them children, with more than 15,000 injured and over a million people displaced.
Israel has also escalated the violence against Palestinians under occupation in the West Bank, including the killing of more than 95 people and an intensification of expulsions, including the destruction of whole communities. Hamas wields no power in the West Bank, but the reality that we can all see means little for Israelis fighting, in their minds, Nazis.
We have seen this sort of use of Holocaust memory in another case of mass violence not too long ago. On 24 January 2020, the Russian president Vladimir Putin was invited to speak at the fifth World Holocaust Forum at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, to mark 75 years to the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet forces. In his speech, Putin presented a distorted history of the second world war and the Holocaust, including distorted maps, to fit a Russian narrative that erased the Nazi-Soviet alliance in the destruction of Poland in 1939 and presented Ukrainians, Latvians and Lithuanians primarily as Nazi collaborators.
Putin used precisely this weaponization of Holocaust history when he launched his assault on Ukraine in February last year, explaining it as a campaign of “denazification”. Explicit and unashamed, just like Bennett. Putin thus used the Holocaust to create a world turned upside down: Ukrainians facing a brutal and unprovoked Russian attack became Nazis.
The history of the Holocaust, however, does offer lessons for the current bloodshed.
For one, it reminds us to center the voices and perspectives of those facing state violence and genocide. And the most urgent thing that Palestinians in Gaza now need is a ceasefire and an end to the Israeli bombing campaign. That is also what at least some of the Israeli survivors of the Hamas attack and family members of Israeli civilians killed or in captivity in Gaza want. A top priority now should be stopping the unfolding violence, saving lives, and the release of Israeli hostages together with hundreds of Palestinian civilians, including 160 children, detained by Israel unlawfully, without charges or trial.
The history of the Holocaust also points to the importance of accountability, even as post-Holocaust accountability remained limited. In the case of Israel’s assault on Gaza, accountability needs to begin from what is very clear: incitement to genocide, which is punishable under article 3 of the UN genocide convention, even when genocide does not follow. While the debate about genocide in Israel’s current assault on Gaza will undoubtedly continue for years, perhaps also in international courts, Israeli war crimes and violations of international humanitarian law are beyond dispute.
It will also be important then that Israeli perpetrators of war crimes and those responsible for violations of international humanitarian law in the many years of the siege on Gaza, including during this current assault, will stand trial. Palestinian leaders and Palestinians who perpetrated the mass atrocities on 7 October should also be held accountable. International courts and legal processes are important because they hold potential to become spaces, however limited, for survivors to tell their stories, assert their humanity, and demand truth and justice.
Indeed, no value related to the study of the Holocaust and its memory occupies a more central place perhaps than truth. No justice is possible, not in the short term and certainly not in the long term, without a truthful reckoning of how we got here. This means recognizing fully the long history of Israeli settler-colonial violence against Palestinians since the 1948 Nakba.
The world is indeed watching, as Biden said, and it knows, despite Biden’s use of the Holocaust to distort what is clearly in front of our eyes, as more than 800 scholars of international law, conflict studies, and Holocaust and Genocide Studies declared in a statement on 15 October: “We are compelled to sound the alarm about the possibility of the crime of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. We do not do so lightly, recognizing the weight of this crime, but the gravity of the current situation demands it.” Scholars whose work has shaped the field of Holocaust and genocide studies, such as Omer Bartov and Marion Kaplan, signed the statement.
This is significant. More and more Holocaust and genocide studies scholars are refusing to allow the continuation of the dangerous use of the Holocaust to distort the historical reality of the Holocaust and Israeli mass violence against Palestinians. This provides some hope in these dark days, as it supports the struggle for a different future, beyond the Israeli settler state, a future that should be based on equality, justice, freedom and dignity for all the people who live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
This article was amended on 30 January 2024. In an earlier version, a reference to Hamas was omitted from the quote attributed to Yoav Gallant, owing to an incomplete translation used as a reference. These missing words have been added.
- Raz Segal is an associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University and the endowed professor in the study of modern genocide
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https://time.com/6977457/weaponizing-antisemitism/
How Weaponizing Antisemitism Puts Jews at Risk
BY RAZ SEGAL
MAY 14, 2024 6:57 AM EDT
Raz Segal is associate professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and an endowed professor in the study of modern genocide at Stockton University.
As Gaza solidarity encampments take root at dozens of campuses across the U.S., many Democratic and Republican lawmakers—in addition to President Joe Biden—have accused protestors and colleges of rampant antisemitism.
That’s woefully misguided—and dangerous. Indeed, the blanket assertion by pro-Israel advocates is intended as a political cudgel: weaponizing antisemitism to shield Israel from criticism of its attack on Gaza, which has left at least 35,000 Palestinians dead in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, wounded tens of thousands more, and forcibly displaced nearly 2 million Palestinians who now face famine conditions. The conditions in Gaza are such that many scholars have said that the situation amounts to a genocide.
Ultimately, the weaponization of antisemitism intensifies the discrimination and exclusion against vulnerable communities in the U.S.—including Jews.
Indeed, those accusing protesters of antisemitism do not appear to consider the many Jews among the protestors in the encampments as Jews, arguing in effect that Jews can only be Jews if they support Israel or do not express pro-Palestinian sentiment.
This is absurd, for the idea that all Jews should hold the same views by virtue of their identity is an antisemitic idea itself. Alarmingly, President Biden has at times exacerbated the false equivalency between Jews and Zionists. In February, on Late Night With Seth Meyers, he said that “were there no Israel, there would not be a Jew in the world who would be safe.”
This claim is ahistorical—and ignores the fact that many Jews feel more unsafe today because of the policies of the right-wing government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and claims that Israel represents Jews anywhere.
The weaponization of antisemitism by Israel and its allies, including the U.S. government, draws on the deeply problematic “working definition of antisemitism” adopted in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). A central force in the institutional world of global Holocaust memory, this international organization of 35 member states (almost all of them in Europe) deals with Holocaust education, research, and remembrance.
The IHRA definition is the basis for the recently proposed Antisemitism Awareness Act, which some 700 Jewish college faculty have signed an open letter urging Biden not to back. The definition includes 11 examples of antisemitism, seven of which mention Israel and thus blur the distinction between Jews and the State of Israel. By contrast, the IHRA definition includes no mention of white supremacists, even though they pose the greatest danger to Jews in the U.S.—as the 2018 Tree of Life Synagogue massacre of 11 Jews in Pittsburgh demonstrated.
This silence, combined with the focus on Israel, facilitates the IHRA definition’s use as a particularly insidious weapon to target people whom white supremacists in the U.S. also single out: Muslims and Arabs.
Take, for instance, the recent attack by a House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Rutgers University-Newark’s Center for Security, Race and Rights (RUCSRR) and its director, Distinguished Professor of Law Sahar Aziz. RUCSRR has come under scrutiny for alleged antisemitism.
Over 500 law professors from across the U.S., who describe themselves as a “racially, religiously, and ideologically diverse” group, condemned these allegations in a letter to the House Committee last month. These law professors note that the Committee is targeting the only center in a U.S. law school devoted to the civil and human rights of South Asians, Muslims, and Arabs, and that Professor Aziz is the only Muslim Arab woman among 130 professors in the law school.
They also point out that since its founding in 2018, RUCSRR has organized nearly 90 events on a wide range of topics, including on the prosecution of Nazi criminals. Yet without any evidence, the House Committee describes Palestinian speakers or speakers who have expressed pro-Palestinian views as antisemitic.
The Committee, the professors argue, is engaged in the “mobilization of Islamophobic tropes to fuel and sustain spurious allegations of antisemitism to discredit and delegitimize critics of Israeli policy and military action.”
Notably, the House Committee has been engaged in similar baseless attacks on dozens of U.S. colleges in the last few months—with Committee member Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Republican who has expressed white supremacist views in the past, playing a key role.
None of this ensures the safety of Jews in the U.S. On the contrary, the Islamophobia and racism inherent in the weaponization of antisemitism risks making antisemitism a meaningless charge, and therefore much harder to combat, at a time when genuine examples of it are rising.
The Gaza solidarity encampments across the U.S. are anti-racist spaces, where Jews, Palestinians, Arabs, Christians, Muslims, Black people, men, women, LGBTQI people, and others stand in solidarity with each other and against Israel’s war on Gaza. (There have been isolated cases of antisemitism on campuses, which remain few and far between.) They stand for truth and justice—demanding that their government and their universities cease their support of Israel’s extremely destructive assault on Gaza. And they point to a different future of equality and peace around the world. By doing so, they also stand as a genuine expression today of a real struggle against antisemitism.
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Statement of Scholars in Holocaust and Genocide Studies on Mass Violence in Israel and Palestine since 7 October
RAZ SEGAL
December 9, 2023
In the following statement, over 55 scholars of the Holocaust, genocide, and mass violence deplore the atrocity crimes against civilians committed by Hamas and Islamic Jihad on 7 October and by Israeli forces since then. The starvation, mass killing, and forced displacement of Palestinian civilians in Gaza is ongoing, raising the question of genocide, especially in view of the intentions expressed by Israeli leaders. Israeli President Isaac Herzog used particularly loaded language in an interview on MSNBC just a few days ago, on 5 December: “This war is a war that is not only between Israel and Hamas. It’s a war that is intended, really, truly, to save western civilization. … We are attacked by [a] Jihadist network, an empire of evil. … and this empire wants to conquer the entire Middle East, and if it weren’t for us, Europe would be next, and the United States follows.” Herzog builds on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s association of Israel’s attack on Gaza with the Biblical evil of Amalek, but he places it on a modern scale as the last stand against global apocalypse and the demise of “western civilization.” Both Herzog and Netanyahu are secular Jews. Their use of religious language and symbolism in this case reflects a dangerous intersection in the case of Israel of the exclusionary modern nation state with a settler colonial project in a place infused with multiple religious histories and meanings. The scholars who have signed the statement are signaling their alarm about the mass violence underway in Gaza and the inflammatory language that threatens to escalate it further. They call for urgent action to stop Israel’s attack on Gaza and to work towards a future that will guarantee the equality, freedom, dignity, and security of all the people who live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
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Statement of Scholars in Holocaust and Genocide Studies on Mass Violence in Israel and Palestine since 7 October
December 9, 2023
We, scholars of the Holocaust, genocide, and mass violence, feel compelled to warn of the danger of genocide in Israel’s attack on Gaza. We also note that, should the Israeli attack continue and escalate, Palestinians under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and Palestinian citizens of Israel face grave danger as well.
We are deeply saddened and concerned by the mass murder of over 1,200 Israelis and migrant workers by Hamas, the Islamic Jihad, and others on 7 October, with more than 830 civilians among them. We also note the evidence of gender-based and sexual violence during the attack, the wounding of thousands of Israelis, the destruction of Israeli kibbutzim and towns, and the abduction of more than 240 hostages into the Gaza Strip. These acts constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity. We recognize that violence in Israel and Palestine did not begin on 7 October. If we are to try to understand the mass murder of 7 October, we should place it within the context of Israeli settler colonialism, Israeli military occupation violence against Palestinians since 1967, the sixteen-year siege on the Gaza Strip since 2007, and the rise to power in Israel in the last year of a government made up of politicians who speak proudly about Jewish supremacy and exclusionary nationalism. Explaining is not justifying, and this context in no way excuses the targeting of Israeli civilians and migrant workers by Palestinians on 7 October.
We are also deeply saddened and concerned by the Israeli attack on Gaza in response to the Hamas attack. Israel’s assault has caused death and destruction on an unprecedented level, according to a New York Times article on 26 November. In two months, the Israeli assault has killed more than 16,000 Palestinians (with thousands more buried under the rubble)—nearly half of them children and youth, with a Palestinian child killed every ten minutes on average before the ceasefire—and wounded over 40,000. Considering that the total population of Gaza stands at 2.3 million people, the killing rate so far is about 0.7 percent in less than two months. The killing rate of civilians in Russia’s bombing and invasion of Ukraine in the areas most affected by the violence are probably similar—but over a longer period of time. A number of experts have therefore described Israel’s attack on Gaza as the most intense and deadliest of its kind since World War II, but while Russia’s attack on Ukraine has, for very good reason, prompted western leaders to support the people under attack, the same western leaders now support the violence of the Israeli state rather than the Palestinians under attack.
Israel has also forcibly displaced more than 1.8 million Palestinians within the Gaza Strip, while destroying almost half of all buildings and leaving the northern part of the Strip an “uninhabitable moonscape.” Indeed, the Israeli army has dropped more than 25,000 tons of explosives on Gaza since 7 October, which is equivalent to two Hiroshima bombs, and according to Human Rights Watch, deployed white phosphorous bombs. It has systematically targeted hospitals, schools, universities, mosques, churches, bakeries, and agricultural fields. The state has also killed many essential professionals, including more than 220 healthcare workers, over 100 UN personnel, and dozens of journalists. The forced displacement has, furthermore, created in the southern part of the Strip severe overcrowding, with the risk of outbreak of infectious diseases, exacerbated by shortages of food, clean water, fuel, and medical supplies, due to Israel’s “total siege” measures since 7 October.
The unprecedented level of destruction and killing points to large-scale war crimes in Israel’s attack on Gaza. There is also evidence of a “widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack” that the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defines as a crime against humanity. Moreover, dozens of statements of Israeli leaders, ministers in the war cabinet, and senior army officers since 7 October—that is, people with command authority—suggest an “intent to destroy” Palestinians “as such,” in the language of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The statements include depictions of all Palestinians in Gaza as responsible for the Hamas attack on 7 October and therefore legitimate military targets, as expressed by Israeli President Herzog on 13 October and by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu when he invoked, on 29 October, the Biblical story of the total destruction of Amalek by the Israelites, just as Israel began its ground invasion. Casting an entire civilian population as enemies marks the history of modern genocide, with the Armenian genocide (1915-1918) and the Rwanda genocide (1994) as well-known examples. The statements also include dehumanizing language, such as Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s reference to “human animals” when he proclaimed “total siege” on Gaza on 9 October. The slippage between seeing Hamas as “human animals” to seeing all Palestinians in Gaza in this way is evident in what Israeli Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian promised to people in Gaza the next day: “Hamas has turned into ISIS, and the residents of Gaza, instead of being appalled, are celebrating. … Human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water [in Gaza], there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.”
These expressions of intent need to be understood also in relation to the widespread incitement to genocide in Israeli media since 7 October. Israeli journalist David Mizrachi Wertheim, for instance, wrote on social media on 7 October that “If all the captives are not returned immediately, then turn the [Gaza] Strip into a slaughterhouse. If a hair falls from their head – execute security prisoners. Violate all norms on the way to victory.” He also added, “we are facing human animals.” Four days later, another Israeli journalist, Roy Sharon, commented on social media “that if, in order to finally eliminate the military capabilities of Hamas, including Sinwar and Deif, we need a million bodies, then let there be a million bodies.” Annihilatory language now also appears in public spaces, such as banners on bridges in Tel Aviv that call “to annihilate Gaza” and explain that “the picture of triumph is 0 people in Gaza.” There are dozens of examples of incitement in Israeli media, which recalls the incitement to genocide in Rwanda as genocide was unfolding there in 1994.
This incitement points to the grave danger that Palestinians everywhere under Israeli rule now face. Israeli army and settler violence in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, which has intensified markedly from the beginning of 2023, has entered a new stage of brutality after 7 October. Sixteen Palestinian communities—over a thousand people—have been forcibly displaced in their entirety, continuing the policy of “ethnic cleansing” in Area C that comprises 60 percent of the West Bank. Israeli soldiers and settlers have furthermore killed more than 220 Palestinians in the West Bank since 7 October, while arresting thousands. The violence against Palestinians also includes acts of torture.
Palestinian citizens of Israel—almost 2 million people—are also facing a state assault against them, with hundreds of arrests since 7 October for any expression of identification with Palestinians in Gaza. There is widespread intimidation and silencing of Palestinian students, faculty, and staff in Israeli universities, and the Israeli Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai threatened to expel to Gaza Israeli Palestinians identifying with Palestinians in Gaza. These alarming developments and measures build on a view of Palestinian citizens of Israel as potential enemies that stretches back to the military rule imposed on the 156,000 Palestinians who survived the Nakba and remained within the territory that became Israel in 1948. This iteration of military rule lasted until 1966, but the image of Israeli Palestinians as a threat has persisted. In May 2021, as many Israeli Palestinians came out to protest an attack on Palestinians in East Jerusalem and another attack on Gaza, the Israeli police responded with massive repression and violence, arresting hundreds. The situation deteriorated quickly, as Jewish and Palestinian citizens clashed across Israel—in some places, as in Haifa, with Jewish citizens attacking Palestinian citizens on the streets and breaking into houses of Palestinian citizens. And now, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right settler who serves as Israeli minister of national security, has put Israeli Palestinians in even more danger by the distribution of thousands of weapons to Israeli civilians who have formed hundreds of self-defense units after 7 October.
The escalating violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and the exclusion and violence against Palestinian citizens of Israel are particularly worrying in the context of calls in Israel after 7 October for a “second Nakba.” The reference is to the massacres and “ethnic cleansing” of more than 750,000 Palestinians and the destruction of hundreds of villages and towns by Israeli forces in the 1948 war, when Israel was established. The language that member of the Israeli Knesset (parliament) Ariel Kallner from the ruling Likud party used in a social media post on 7 October is instructive: “Nakba to the enemy now. … Now, only one goal: Nakba! Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 1948. Nakba in Gaza and Nakba to whoever dares to join [them].” We know that genocide is a process, and we recognize that the stage is thus set for violence more severe than the Nakba and not spatially limited to Gaza.
Thus, the time for concerted action to prevent genocide is now. We call on governments to uphold their legal obligations under the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide to intervene and prevent genocide (Article 1) by (1) implementing an arms embargo on Israel; (2) working to end Israel’s military assault on Gaza; (3) pressuring the Israeli government to stop immediately the intensifying army and settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which constitute clear violations of international law; (4) demanding the continued release of all hostages held in Gaza and all Palestinians imprisoned unlawfully in Israel, without charges or trial; (5) calling on the International Criminal Court to investigate and issue arrest warrants against all perpetrators of mass violence on 7 October and since then, both Palestinians and Israelis; and (6) initiating a political process in Israel and Palestine based on a truthful reckoning with Israeli mass violence against Palestinians since the 1948 Nakba and a future that will guarantee the equality, freedom, dignity, and security of all the people who live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
We also call on businesses and labor unions to ensure that they do not aid and abet Israeli mass violence, but rather follow the example of workers in Belgium transport unions who refused in late October to handle flights that ship arms to Israel.
Finally, we call on scholars, programs, centers, and institutes in Holocaust and Genocide Studies to take a clear stance against Israeli mass violence and join us in efforts to stop it and prevent its further escalation.
Mohamed Adhikari, University of Cape Town
Taner Akçam, Director, Armenian Genocide Research Program, The Promise Armenian Institute, UCLA
Ayhan Aktar, Professor of Sociology (Retired), Istanbul Bilgi University
Yassin Al Haj Saleh, Syrian Writer, Berlin
Sebouh David Aslanian, Professor of History and Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History, UCLA
Karyn Ball, Professor of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta, Edmonton
Haim Bresheeth-Žabner, Professorial Research Associate, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
Cathie Carmichael, Professor Emerita, School of History, University of East Anglia
Daniele Conversi, Professor, Department of Contemporary History, University of the Basque Country
Catherine Coquio, Professeure de littérature comparée à Université Paris Cité, France
John Cox, Associate Professor of History and Global Studies and Director of the Center for Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Studies, University of North Carolina, Charlotte
Martin Crook, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University of the West of England
Ann Curthoys, Honorary Professor, School of Humanities, The University of Sydney
Sarah K. Danielsson, Professor of History, Queensborough, CUNY
John Docker, Sydney, Australia
John Duncan, affiliated with the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London
Didier Fassin, Professor at the Collège de France and the Institute for Advanced Study
Joanne Smith Finley, Reader in Chinese Studies, Newcastle University, UK
Shannon Fyfe, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, George Mason University; Faculty Fellow, Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy
William Gallois, Professor of the Islamic Mediterranean, University of Exeter
Fatma Muge Gocek, Professor of Sociology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Svenja Goltermann, Professor of Modern History, University of Zurich
Andrei Gómez-Suarez, Senior Research Fellow, Centre of Religion, Reconciliation and Peace, University of Winchester
Penny Green, Professor of Law and Globalisation and Director of the International State Crime Initiative, Queen Mary University of London
John-Paul Himka, Professor Emeritus, University of Alberta
Marianne Hirschberg, Professor, Faculty of Human Sciences, University of Kassel, Germany
Anna Holian, Associate Professor, School of Historical, Philosophical & Religious Studies, Arizona State University
Rachel Ibreck, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, Department of Politics and International Relations, Goldsmiths, University of London
Adam Jones, Professor, Political Science, University of British Columbia Okanagan
Rachel Killean, Senior Lecturer, University of Sydney Law School
Brian Klug, Hon. Fellow in Social Philosophy, Campion Hall, University of Oxford, and Hon. Fellow, Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations, University of Southampton
Mill Lake, Associate Professor, International Relations Department, London School of Economics
Mark Levene, Emeritus Fellow, University of Southampton
Yosefa Loshitzky, Professorial Research Associate, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
Thomas MacManus, Senior Lecturer in State Crime, School of Law, Queen Mary University of London
Zachariah Mampilly, Professor, Baruch College and the Graduate Center, CUNY
Benjamin Meiches, Associate Professor of Security Studies and Conflict Resolution, University of Washington-Tacoma
Dirk Moses, Professor of International Relations, City College of New York, CUNY
Eva Nanopoulos, Senior Lecturer in Law, Queen Mary University of London
Jeffrey Ostler, Professor of History Emeritus, University of Oregon
Thomas Earl Porter, Professor of History, North Carolina A&T State University, Greensboro, NC
Michael Rothberg, Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Holocaust Studies, UCLA
Colin Samson, Professor of Sociology, University of Essex
Victoria Sanford, Lehman Professor of Excellence, Lehman College and the Graduate Center, CUNY
Raz Segal, Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Endowed Professor in the Study of Modern Genocide, Stockton University
Elyse Semerdjian, Robert Aram and Marianne Kaloosdian and Stephen and Marian Mugar Chair of Armenian Genocide Studies, Clark University
Martin Shaw, University of Sussex/Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals
Damien Short, Co-Director of the Human Rights Consortium and Professor of Human Rights and Environmental Justice at the School of Advanced Study, University of London
Ronald Grigor Suny, William H. Sewell, Jr. Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of History and Emeritus Professor of Political Science, University of Michigan
Adam Sutcliffe, Professor of European History, King’s College London
Barry Trachtenberg, Rubin Presidential Chair of Jewish History, Wake Forest University
Enzo Traverso, Professor in the Humanities, Cornell University
Jeremy Varon, Professor of History, The New School, New York
Ernesto Verdeja, Associate Professor of Peace Studies and Global Politics, University of Notre Dame
Johanna Ray Vollhardt, Associate Professor of Psychology, Clark University
Pauline Wakeham, Associate Professor, Department of English, Western University (Canada)
Keith David Watenpaugh, Professor and Director, Human Rights Studies, University of California, Davis
Louise Wise, Lecturer in International Security, University of Sussex
Andrew Woolford, Professor of Sociology and Criminology, University of Manitoba
Ran Zwigenberg, Associate Professor of Asian Studies, History, and Jewish Studies, Pennsylvania State University
Dr. Raz Segal is Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Endowed Professor in the Study of Modern Genocide at Stockton University. Dr. Segal has held a Harry Frank Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and was recently a Senior Fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (March-July 2023). His publications include >Genocide in the Carpathians: War, Social Breakdown, and Mass Violence, 1914-1945 (2016); Days of Ruin: The Jews of Munkács during the Holocaust (2013); and he was guest editor of the Hebrew-language special issue onGenocide: Mass Violence and Cultural Erasure of Zmanim: A Historical Quarterly (2018). In addition to scholarly publications, Dr. Segal has published op-eds, book reviews, and larger articles on genocide, state violence, and memory politics in Hebrew, English, and German in The Guardian , LA Times, The Nation, Jewish Currents, Haaretz, +972 Magazine, and Berliner Zeitung , and he has appeared on Democracy Now! and ABC News.
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1/11 GAZA AND THE QUESTION OF GENOCIDE WITH DR. RAZ SEGAL (HYBRID)
- Thursday, January 11, 2024
- 12:00 PM 1:30 PM
- Georgetown Univ1421 37th And O Street NorthwestWashington, DC, 20005United States (map)
- Google Calendar ICS
Thursday, January 11, 12:00 PM EDT – on Zoom and in person at Georgetown University, (CCAS Boardroom ICC 141), 1421 37th And O St NW, Washington, DC
Gaza and the Question of Genocide
This lecture will focus on a number of unprecedented elements in Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. It will discuss the exceptionally direct, explicit, and unashamed statements of intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza by Israeli leaders and senior army officers, the widespread incitement to genocide in Israeli political and public discourses, and the nature of the mass violence itself that a number of reports have described as one of the deadliest and destructive since World War II.
Dr. Raz Segal is Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Endowed Professor in the Study of Modern Genocide at Stockton University. Dr. Segal has held a Harry Frank Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and was recently a Senior Fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (2023). His publications include Genocide in the Carpathians: War, Social Breakdown, and Mass Violence, 1914-1945 (2016), and Days of Ruin: The Jews of Munkács during the Holocaust (2013)
Register: Webinar Registration – Zoom
© 2020 New England Network for Justice for Palestine
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The Time for concerted action to PREVENT genocide is NOW!
Jan 4, 2024
This address to the United Nations panel on the Holocaust, Genocide, and Mass Violence, by Mr. Raz Segal, in early December outlined the joint statement presented by 56 scholars, all experts on genocide, who confirmed that Israel IS COMMITTING GENOCIDE against the Palestinians. He also emphasizes the urgency of the UN acting to prevent further killings of the Palestinians. “”The time for concerted action to prevent genocide is now,”” Mr Raz Segal, Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies. No doubt this will be powerful testimony that should be presented to the International Court of Justice on January 11, when Israel will be forced to defend its illegal, immoral and inhumane against the civilians of Gaza since October 8 leading to the deaths of more than 22,000 babies, children, women and men and injuring more than 57,000 others.
Transcript
“on 9th of December a group of 56 senior Scholars of the Holocaust genocide and mass violence who like academics disagree on much all agreed on a statement on the mass violence in Israel and Palestine since 7th of October I signed that statement as well there is evidence the scholars wrote of quote a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population with knowledge of the attack that the Rome statute of the international criminal court defines as a crime Against Humanity moreover they added dozens of statements dozens of statements of Israeli leaders ministers in the war cabinet and Senior army officers since 7th of October that is people with command Authority suggest quote an intent to destroy Palestinians as such in the language of the UN convention on the prevention and Punishment of the crime of genocide we should take seriously the professional position and the warning of dozens of senior Scholars who have devoted their lives to studying Mass violence including genocide Israeli president Isaac Herzog used particularly loaded language in an interview on MSNBC just last week for It’s A War he continued that is intended really truly to save Western Civilization we are attacked by a jihadist network an Empire of evil and this Empire wants to conquer the Middle East and if it weren’t for us Europe would be next and the United States follows OK Builds on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Infamous Association in late October and early November of Israel’s attack on Gaza with a biblical story of a this is a story of the Israelites destroying completely an enemy perceived as the ultimate Evil but Herzog places it on a modern scale as the last stand against Global apocalypse and the demise quote of Western Civilization Israeli defense Minister Yoav Galant set the tone for this on 9th of October when he proclaimed quote total Siege on Gaza in a fight against in his words Human animals Israeli coordinator of government activities in the territories Major General Ghasan Alyan in his video message to the people of Gaza and I quote him Human animals must be treated as such there will be no electricity and no water there will only be destruction you wanted hell you will get hell so quite explicit and direct this practice of casting an entire civilian population as enemies as legitimate military targets is a common genocidal mechanism thus Israeli president Herzog’s words in a press conference on 13th of October that quote it is an entire nation out there Palestinians in Gaza that is responsible that quote should have set off alarms history is again instructive here Hutu authorities in Rwanda for example identified all the Totsis with the Rwanda patriotic front the rebel Totsi Army that had invaded Rwanda from Uganda in 1990 which led to the Rwanda genocide in 1994 Israeli authorities and the Israeli Army have acted according to this genocidal intent in the last two months this is the reason for the unprecedented level of mass killings the first two acts of genocide in the UN genocide convention are not the only ones that Israel is perpetrating now in Gaza it is the third Act of the convention quote deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of Life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part that mostly fits Israel Mass violence in Gaza now the total Siege measures together with a forced displacement of over 1.8 million of the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza have indeed created in the southern part of the strip severe overcrowding with the risk of outbreak of infectious diseases exacerbated by acute shortages of food clean water fuel and medical supplies all along moreover the Israeli Army pushes Palestinians into an increasingly shrinking area in what is to begin with one of the most densely populated areas in the world annihilatory language has also appeared in public spaces in Israel such as banners on the bridges in Tel Aviv that call quote to annihilate Gaza and explain that quote the picture of Triumph is zero people in Gaza there are dozens and dozens of examples of incitement in Israeli media which recalls the media incitement to genocide in Rwanda as genocide was unfolding there in 1994 which led it is worth reminding everyone to the media case when journalists were put on trial and convicted in the ictr the post genocide Trials of incitement to genocide which is a separate crime under article 3 of the UN genocide convention genocide then has become normalized in Israeli media society and politics today the 56 Scholars of the Holocaust genocide and mass violence who signed a statement on 9th of December wrote that quote the time for concerted action to prevent genocide is now warning also that quote should the Israeli attack continue Palestinians under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and Palestinian citizens of Israel face grave danger as well it is our urgent responsibility and is the obligation of States under article one of the UN genocide convention to heed this warning and act now to stop and prevent genocide.”
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Scholar says he still wants U Holocaust center job despite controversy
Minnesota News Matt Sepic Minneapolis June 11, 2024 7:30 PM UPDATED: JUNE 14, 2024 3:35 PM
The University of Minnesota has put its search for a new director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies on hold after its job offer to a controversial Israeli historian drew strong objections from two professors and some members of the Twin Cities Jewish community.
Less than a week after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack in southern Israel, Raz Segal of Stockton University in New Jersey published an essay in the magazine Jewish Currents in which he called Israel’s military response “a textbook case of genocide unfolding in front of our eyes.”
University of Minnesota professors Karen Painter and Bruno Chaouat resigned from the center’s board on Friday in protest of Segal’s selection, as first reported in TC Jewfolk.
In a phone interview on Wednesday, Segal told MPR News that he stands by his October article and its key argument that Israel’s siege of Gaza constitutes the systematic destruction of Palestinians and their society in violation of international law.
“They’re concerned about absolute loyalty to Israel, and they’re narrowing down Jewish identity to loyalty to a violent state,” Segal said.
Painter said in a phone interview with MPR News on Tuesday that Segal’s views are extreme.
“We need a moral core to the research,” Painter said. “Sometimes scholars are just trying to be original and provocative. This is not a job for a highly provocative, contentious scholar.”
She praised U Interim President Jeff Ettinger for pausing the hiring process.
“I’m so proud to be at an institution where they recognize a mistake and they correct it and say wait,” Painter said.
Chaouat writes in his resignation letter that Segal cannot fulfill the center’s mission.
“He has failed to recognize the genocidal intent of Hamas. He does not understand that a movement like Hamas is inherently fascist and represents precisely what CHGS stands against.” Chaouat also contends that Segal justified “Hamas’s atrocities five days after they occurred.”
Segal said that Chaouat’s statement is false and defamatory.
“I have said exactly the opposite,” Segal said. “I’ve described the Hamas-led attack on Israel as a case of mass murder, as war crimes, as crimes against humanity. I’ve been very clear on this for months and months on end.”
Segal said that he dedicated his career to studying genocide after hearing stories from his maternal and paternal grandparents about surviving the Holocaust. He has focused much of his scholarship on the mass deportation and murder of Jews in the Subcarpathian Rus’ region of Europe, both by Nazis and Hungarian authorities during and prior to World War II.
In a statement, the U says that because of the director’s “community-facing and leadership role,” it’s important to consider the views of those who opposed the hiring decision, and that Ettinger has paused the selection process “to allow an opportunity to determine next steps.”
Segal said that he received a job offer after meeting with the search committee and visiting campus, and that he still wants to come to Minnesota, though he has not signed a contract.
“What the university should do now is before it descends more into this hole that it has dug itself into, it’s best to retract, to apologize, to offer me the job that I received in a completely legitimate process,” Segal said.
In its own statement, the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas says that dozens of community members contacted the U to protest Segal’s appointment, including descendants of Holocaust survivors and a person who survived the Oct. 7 attack.
The JCRC says the next director must be “a unifying and not divisive figure.”
Segal said he has received many messages of support in response to the U’s announcement.
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Israeli Apartheid and Its Apologists
RAZ SEGAL
March 31, 2022
Dr. Deborah Lipstadt testified on February 8, 2022 before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in her confirmation hearing for the role of Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism. In response to a question from Senator Marco Rubio, she criticized Amnesty International’s latest report on Israel, the most recent among similar evidenced-based reports by human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch and the Israeli B’Tselem, which apply the international legal category of apartheid to describe ongoing Israeli violence against Palestinians since 1948. Amnesty’s report on apartheid in Israel is thorough and well-documented. Still, Lipstadt retorted that it is “unhistorical,” “delegitimizes” Israel, and is somehow threatening for Jewish students on US campuses. This portends a worrying and accelerating trend for an important role in the US State Department, carrying on the Trump Administration’s legacy of attacking human rights organizations and conflating legitimate criticism of Israel with antisemitism.
Dr. Lipstadt is not alone in her harsh condemnation of the Amnesty report, entitled “Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians: A Cruel System of Domination and a Crime Against Humanity,” which was published on February 1, 2022. It prompted immediate reactions from the Israeli government and its aligned American Jewish organizations that seek to control a narrative that persistently erases Palestinian experiences, human rights, and political aspirations. Instead of engaging with the evidence presented in the report, they accused Amnesty of antisemitism and of singling out and seeking to destroy Israel. Never mind that Amnesty is a respected human rights organization that has reported extensively on violations of international human rights and humanitarian laws around the world. Amnesty has, for instance, described Myanmar’s system of rule as apartheid in 2017, without anyone understanding this as rooted in anti-Buddhist prejudice. Amnesty is also reporting now on the severe violations of international law in Russia’s war in Ukraine since February 24, 2022, and no one has suggested that Amnesty is biased against Russians. What is singled out in the case of Israel, therefore, is criticism of Israeli policies: those defending such policies distort legitimate criticism of a state and present it, only in the case of Israel, as an attack against a people.
I have been engaged in research and teaching about the Holocaust, genocide, state violence, Jewish history, and antisemitism for over fifteen years in Israel and in the US. I have also written about the weaponization of the discourse of antisemitism, used often to silence and attack those who speak about Israeli state violence, especially Palestinians. It is a crude and cruel distortion: abusing the historical struggle of a vulnerable people, Jews, under attack by powerful states to blur the attack of a state, Israel, against a vulnerable people, Palestinians.
Knee-jerk allegations of antisemitism are meant to marginalize engagement with this reality, as presented in the report. There is indeed much to discuss: the report is the product of four years of research, based also on the work of Palestinian, Israeli, and international human rights organizations, and on a large body of scholarship. It clearly shows that, according to international human rights and humanitarian law, Israel has created and maintains a system of apartheid, consisting of segregation, discrimination, persecution, and violence against Palestinians in all the areas under its control and military occupation. The report therefore calls for dismantling the apartheid system, not the state; for those responsible for apartheid to be held accountable; and for the victims and survivors to receive justice—all according to international law. The report is a critique not of a people, but of a state, though it does not prescribe what the political future of the state should look like following the dismantling of the apartheid system.
Jews who care deeply about Israel have, in fact, described it as an apartheid state, including leading Israeli organizations and politicians, among them former prime ministers.
Those attacking the report present themselves as representatives of all Jews, but Jews hardly agree on anything, including Israel. It is, furthermore, precisely the association of Jews everywhere with Israel that puts them in danger, as it confirms in the eyes of antisemites that Jews do not really belong where they live. This unfortunate meeting point of antisemites and apologists for Israeli state violence stems from a shared segregationist view of the world, which brings us back to the report: the reality of the system of Israeli apartheid.
Israel has etched this reality into the landscape of the occupied Palestinian territories and deepened its colonization through walls, fences, other barriers, and roads intended only for Jews or only for Palestinians. The apartheid system in Israel is less visible but, as the report argues convincingly, runs deep. For instance, since 1948, Israel has built 700 new localities for Jews, but none for Palestinians. Zero. Some Palestinians seek to break through this overtly discriminatory reality. One such case happened in 2018, in the northern Israeli town of Kfar Vradim, where the sale of land for new construction was canceled after Palestinians had purchased more than half of the plots. The head of the local council, Sivan Yehieli, explained this decision with apartheid logic: he is “trusted with preserving the Zionist-Jewish-secular character of Kfar Vradim” and maintaining “demographic balances.” If Palestinians in Israel are denied movement on such racist grounds, they are also denied the right to live on their land, as in the case of Palestinian Bedouins in the Negev/Naqab in southern Israel who have faced, since the 1970s, a systemic attack by the state to displace them. To date, Israeli courts have rejected all Palestinian Bedouins’ land claim cases and denied their ancestral land rights.
Those attacking the report present themselves as representatives of all Jews, but Jews hardly agree on anything, including Israel. It is, furthermore, precisely the association of Jews everywhere with Israel that puts them in danger, as it confirms in the eyes of antisemites that Jews do not really belong where they live.
Just as the Israeli apartheid system denies Palestinians’ past, it also seeks to deny their future through an assault against Palestinian children. Palestinian scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian has recently termed this Israeli state violence “unchilding,” which includes imprisonment, causing serious injuries, inflicting psychological trauma, and killing. The numbers are staggering: Israeli authorities have killed more than 2,000 Palestinian children since 2000 and detained around 500-700 Palestinian children every year since 2008.
On the day before Dr. Lipstadt’s hearing, February 7, 2022, the Israeli Parliament approved in first reading the proposed Citizenship Law, which denies Palestinians married to Israeli citizens permanent residency in Israel and thus bans Palestinians from the occupied Palestinian territories and Gaza from living in Israel with their Palestinian partners. Israel’s Minister of Health, Nitzan Horowitz, whose party (Meretz) opposes the proposed law, described it as “racist and discriminatory, and there is no place for it in a democratic state.” This failed to prevent the final approval of the law on March 10, 2022. Israeli Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked sees the Citizenship Law as an “important result for the security of the state and its fortification as a Jewish state,” expressing the apartheid rationale that, furthermore, casts Palestinians collectively as a security threat.
Israel’s Citizenship Law is thus another example, along with many others discussed in Amnesty’s report, that demonstrates Israel’s “purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them,” as the crime against humanity of apartheid is defined in international law. Rather than protecting Jews, then, Lipstadt’s position helps secure a segregationist political ideology authorizing state violence. Many scholars of mass violence and Jewish history, however, teach their students to stand not with violent states, but with their victims. This also applies in the case of the Israeli apartheid system, for everyone living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea deserves equality, security, and freedom.
Dr. Raz Segal is Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Endowed Professor in the Study of Modern Genocide at Stockton University. Dr. Segal has held a Harry Frank Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and was recently a Senior Fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (March-July 2023). His publications include >Genocide in the Carpathians: War, Social Breakdown, and Mass Violence, 1914-1945 (2016); Days of Ruin: The Jews of Munkács during the Holocaust (2013); and he was guest editor of the Hebrew-language special issue onGenocide: Mass Violence and Cultural Erasure of Zmanim: A Historical Quarterly (2018). In addition to scholarly publications, Dr. Segal has published op-eds, book reviews, and larger articles on genocide, state violence, and memory politics in Hebrew, English, and German in The Guardian , LA Times, The Nation, Jewish Currents, Haaretz, +972 Magazine, and Berliner Zeitung , and he has appeared on Democracy Now! and ABC News.
israel-academia-monitor.com 