Pitzer College, Claremont, California, is under attack by the BDS groups to suspend its Study Abroad Program with the University of Haifa.
The University of Haifa Study Abroad Program at the International School, promises “an experience that you will never forget!” The courses are taught in English by faculty from various departments within the University. All classes are academically accredited per the standards and criteria of North American and European universities. The disciplines include Anthropology, Arabic Language and Culture, Communications, English Language and Literature, Economics and Business Management, Hebrew Language, History, Holocaust Studies, Law, Literature, Maritime Civilizations, Middle Eastern Studies, Peace and Conflict Studies, Philosophy, Political Science, Psychology, Religious and Jewish Studies, and Sociology.
The University of Haifa is considered the most diverse in Israel, boasting a 35 percent Arab student enrollment.
On March 30, the Claremont Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) relaunched their academic boycott campaign to suspend Pitzer College’s study abroad program with the University of Haifa. SJP held an event with over 40 students and community members. The event is part of a series of festivities SJP organized to celebrate Palestine Freedom Weeks. The call to suspend the program is based on “Israel’s discrimination.” SJP says the “University of Haifa’s systematic discrimination against Palestinian, Arab and Muslim students. Most Palestinian students are barred from entry into the program” which undermines Pitzer’s commitment to academic freedom. “Because of the violence and discrimination faced by Palestinians at the University of Haifa and in occupied Palestine, we believe that no student should study abroad at a university operating on occupied land — especially considering that many Palestinian students cannot attend this program.” SJP’s demands the program be suspended until “the Israeli state ends its restrictions on entry to Israel based on ancestry and/or political speech and the Israeli state adopts policies granting visas for exchanges to Palestinian universities on a fully equal basis as it does to Israeli universities.” SJP organizer Miriam Farah told the press, “It’s important for us to target the institutions that we’re currently at and ask ourselves, ‘how does our current institution further perpetuate Israeli violence and Israeli apartheid?’” The Suspend Pitzer Haifa campaign circulated a petition in support of the demands for suspension.
Daniel A. Segal, Jean M. Pitzer Professor of Anthropology and Professor of History, whose expertise areas are:The Caribbean; post-Columbian world history; the social construction of race, as the Pitzer website reveals, is among the leading voices calling to suspend the Pitzer-Haifa program. He posted on his website, “Recent Public Statements I Endorse(all issued by organizations within which I serve on the executive committee or equivalent),” which includes a letter by Jewish Voice for Peace,fromJune 9. 2022; and, a letter by USACBI, the U.S. campaign focused on a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions, from April 12, 2022.
However, the protest groups against the Pitzer study abroad with Haifa have a long history.
In 2018, the Pitzer faculty voted to suspend the Study Abroad Israel program, which started in 2007, to suspend the collaboration because of a “violation of Palestinian rights.”
Segal, who is Jewish spearheaded the motion. He declared that “the college should stand against Israel’s restrictions on academic exchange, including a 2017 law to bar entry to those who support BDS against the Jewish state.” The BDS supporters urged the study program to be resumed only after Israel ends its entry restrictions based on “ancestry and/or political speech,” and grants visas to Palestinian students on a “fully equal basis.” In 2017, the Pitzer Student Senate voted to bar the use of student funds by five firms, including Caterpillar and Hewlett-Packard, that were complicit in “suppressing Palestinian rights.”
Segal said that the concerns about singling out Israel should not be used to impede social justice. While students and faculty members complainants of the statement “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free” as an anti-Semitic threat, Segal dismissed this claim. He stated, “that claim about that expression is a common lie of Zionist propaganda, precisely to trick people like her into censoring pro-Palestinian speech… Some naïve people might even have been duped by this lie, this propaganda, and genuinely think that the phrase means that, but it’s nonsense — malicious nonsense.”
The then-Pitzer President, Melvin L. Oliver condemned the vote and, together with the college trustees, nullified it.
Interestingly, also in 2018, Segal was accepted to participate in the Palestinian American Research Center (PARC) US Faculty Development Seminar on Palestine. PARC’s mission is to “promote and facilitate scholarly research on Palestine, build a broader and deeper knowledge base of scholarship on Palestine, initiate and encourage exchange between U.S. and Palestinian scholars and institutions, and widely disseminate scholarly research on Palestine.”
Segal was one of the dozen US faculty members participating in the ninth annual Faculty Development Seminar on Palestine which is Jerusalem-based, and includes visits to Palestinian universities, research institutes and cultural institution and roundtable discussions, tours of historic cities, and meetings with Palestinian colleagues. PARC states that seminar participants will “deepen their knowledge of their fields of interest in Palestine and build relationships with Palestinian colleagues and institutions.”
Segal’s courses at Pitzer College include a two-semester world history sequence and a seminar on Donald Trump’s America.
Segal is an example of how Palestinians recruit Jewish or Israeli academics. For him, it doesn’t matter if the Palestinians are ruled by dictatorships that execute gays and dissidents and suffer the worse types of human rights abuses, as long as Israel is to be blamed.
Program Title: Semester at the University of Haifa
Location: Haifa, Israel
Host Website: University of Haifa International School – https://uhaifa.org
Eligibility Students must be in good academic standing and have a 3.00 or higher GPA. Preference given to juniors and first semester seniors but sophomores are eligible if space is available.
Preparation Suggested general preparation options include: Comparative Politics; Intercultural Communications; Language Culture and Society; Introduction to International/ Intercultural Studies; Introduction to Sociocultural Anthropology; Engaging Difference.
Application Students must first apply through Pitzer’s Office of Study Abroad and International Programs. If accepted by Pitzer, students will then be asked to complete the Haifa application.
Program Dates Fall program: Early August to early January. Note: Students will take Intensive Hebrew Ulpan or Intensive Arabic from early August to late August. The actual semester program runs from mid October to early January.Spring program: Late January to early June – Intensive Hebrew Ulpan or Intensive Arabic winter program runs late January to mid February. Semester program runs late February to early June.
Required Courses Pre-semester Intensive Hebrew Ulpan or Intensive Arabic, and the minimum full-time course-load equivalent to four PItzer course credits during the regular semester, and the Pitzer course MLLC110 Intercultural Learning: Portfolio Writing via Sakai.
Intensive Language Students will take either an Intensive Hebrew Ulpan or Intensive Arabic prior to the semester program. Students may choose to continue their language study during the regular semester.
Independent Study The university does not offer support for independent study projects.
Course Options The semester program will consist of courses offered by the University of Haifa International School, which are taught in English. For course offerings, go the course catalog
Students have course options outside the International School. If a student is proficient in Hebrew, he/she can select courses offered by other departments within the University of Haifa. The English Language and Literature Department as well as the Fine Arts Department are options for students who are not proficient in Hebrew but wish to take courses outside the International School. It should be noted that the University of Haifa and International School calendars differ. Students who take courses outside the International School should be prepared for a longer semester.
Credit Possible Pre-semester Intensive Hebrew Ulpan or Intensive Arabic (5 credits), and 12 or 13 credits during the regular semester. Additionally, students will receive 0.5 Pitzer course credits for the writing course via Sakai. (See above under Required Courses.) In total, students should end up with 4.75 or 5.00 course credits.
Housing and Board Options There are two types of dormitory accommodations available to international students: modest apartments of three double rooms and a shared bathroom, kitchen, and living space or apartments of six single rooms, each room with its own bathroom, and a shared kitchen and living space. All international students will be sharing their suite with Israeli students, a diverse population of Hebrew, Arabic, English, Russian, and Spanish speakers. There is no meal plan. Students receive a stipend to prepare meals in their suites.
Approved Study Abroad Programs for Pitzer College Students
Africa and Middle East GHANA – SIT Ghana Globalization and Afro-Chic ISRAEL – University of Haifa LEBANON – American University of Beirut MOROCCO – Al Akhawayn University RWANDA – SIT Rwanda SOUTH AFRICA – University of KwaZulu Natal MULTI-COUNTRY – *Pitzer in Southern Africa The Americas ARGENTINA – ISEP Universidad del Salvador; ISEP Universidad Católica de Córdoba BRAZIL – Pitzer in Brazil Summer Program CHILE – ISEP Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso COSTA RICA – *Pitzer in Costa Rica Semester Program; *Pitzer in Costa Rica Summer Health CUBA – Sarah Lawrence College in Cuba ECUADOR – *Pitzer in Ecuador MEXICO – Autonomous University of the Yucatan Asia and Oceania AUSTRALIA – University of Adelaide; ISEP Direct at La Trobe University; ISEP Direct at University of Technology in Sydney BHUTAN- Royal Thimphu College HONG KONG – Lingnan University JAPAN – Kwansei Gakuin University Semester and Summer Program KOREA – ISEP Ewha Womans University; ISEP Korea University; ISEP Yonsei University KYRGYZSTAN – Bard Abroad in Bishkek NEPAL – *Pitzer in Nepal NEW ZEALAND – ISEP Massey University in Palmerston North VIETNAM – *Pitzer in Vietnam Summer Program Europe DENMARK- ISEP University of Aalborg ENGLAND – Sarah Lawrence College with University of Oxford; Sarah Lawrence College London Theatre Program with the British American Drama Academy; University of Birmingham; University of Bristol; University of Essex FRANCE- Sarah Lawrence College in Paris; Sciences Po; University of Nantes GERMANY- Bard Abroad in Berlin; ISEP Justus-Liebig Universtät Giessen; Leuphana University of Lüneburg GREECE – College Year in Athens IRELAND – University College Cork ITALY – *Pitzer in Italy; The Centro: Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome NETHERLANDS – ISEP Tilburg University SCOTLAND – University of Aberdeen SPAIN – University of León; ISEP University of Murcia; Spanish Institute for Global Education with University of Sevilla, University of Pablo de Olavide or EUSA Centro Universitario SWEDEN – ISEP Mälardalen University; ISEP Södertörn University Domestic Exchanges Arizona Northern Arizona University – School of Indigenous Studies Maine Colby College New York Bard College – BGIA, New York City New York Sarah Lawrence College Pennsylvania Haverford College * Indicates a Pitzer College run program. Program options subject to change each year. Pitzer College Direct Run Programs Pitzer College embraces a unique set of educational objectives that encourage students from all majors to think about the world in ways that expand their understanding of other cultures. To further its educational objective of intercultural understanding, Pitzer has carefully developed its own study abroad programs. These programs employ a nationally recognized cultural immersion model integrating intensive language instruction, study trips, family stays, a core course on the host culture, community service, and the opportunity to pursue an independent study project. The Pitzer in Brazil Summer Program provides students with an unparalleled opportunity to engage with a city that has retained and celebrated its African roots and improve their Portuguese language skills. The program takes place over six weeks in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. The city is an UNESCO World Heritage site, the first colonial capital of Brazil, and the center of Afro-Brazilian culture. During the Pitzer in Costa Rica Summer Health Program students explore important public health concepts, develop their Spanish language abilities, and have an opportunity to become immersed in the health care industry in Costa Rica. Through the Pitzer in Vietnam Summer Program students study Vietnamese language, history, culture, political structures, and environmental issues. The program is based in Hue, Vietnam which underwent significant damage during the war but recently many of its extraordinary historical monuments, including its Imperial (“Forbidden”) City have been extensively restored. The Pitzer in Costa Rica Semester Program is a great option for students who want to develop their Spanish language abilities and have an interest in ecology, environmental studies, chemistry, engineering, biology, ecotourism, and cultural studies. The Pitzer in Ecuador Semester Program provides a dynamic setting for studying the Ecuadorian economic, political, cultural, and environmental reality. The program is based in Quito, the one of the most beautiful cities in South America and is affiliated with Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ). The Pitzer in Italy Semester Program goes beyond an acquaintance of Italian culture. The program is based in Parma which provides students with a high degree of integration into Italian family life and community. Students learn about the Emilia-Romagna region and how it has played a vital role in Italy’s economic, cultural, and political life. Pitzer in Nepal Semester Program is the college’s longest-running program and has gained recognition for its highly effective approach to language and cultural training. Through the program, students become acquainted with some of the main historical, social, and political issues fundamental to Nepal’s modern identity. Pitzer in Southern Africa Semester Program is a multi-country comparative studies semester program in Botswana and South Africa. It provides students with an opportunity to learn about the multiple ways governments, NGOs, and local communities choose to approach issues such as the colonial legacy, development, power, human rights, big game conservation, tourism, health care, education, and poverty alleviation.
On Wednesday, April 12, Claremont Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) announced an April 14 event to repaint the Pitzer College Free Wall.
This followed an April 11 email from Pitzer’s Vice President of Student Affairs Sandra Vasquez to Pitzer students confirming that the Pitzer administration removed pro-Palestinian artwork and messages painted by Claremont Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) on the wall.
Prior to the administration’s repainting, the wall contained Palestinian symbols such as a keffiyeh pattern, an olive leaf and an outline of the state of Palestine with the Palestinian flag inside of it. It also featured statements like “Suspend Pitzer Haifa,” “Free Palestine” and “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free.” SJP initially spray-painted the messages on March 30, the day of their Suspend Pitzer Haifa campaign relaunch.
Vasquez explained that she directed the removal following concerns from a Pitzer student and a faculty member.
“[The] Office of Student Affairs leadership took immediate steps to share our acknowledgement of [the] error, an explanation of how it occurred, and an apology with a concerned faculty leader, both in-person and in writing via email,” Vasquez said in the email. “Our office made an honest error, and again, I sincerely apologize.”
Pitzer Professor of Anthropology and History and proponent of SJP’s campaign Dan Segal contacted Vasquez on Thursday, April 6, confirming the administration’s involvement after hearing about the issue. Segal shared that Vasquez explained that the student and faculty member complainants had interpreted the statement “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free” as an anti-Semitic threat.
“I told her the truth: that that claim about that expression is a common lie of Zionist propaganda, precisely to trick people like her into censoring pro-Palestinian speech,” Segal said. “Some naïve people might even have been duped by this lie, this propaganda, and genuinely think that the phrase means that, but it’s nonsense — malicious nonsense.”
He sent an email to Pitzer faculty later that day stating that the painted over wall constituted “a grievous violation of speech rights” and targeted Palestinian-identified students.
“In wider U.S. society, anti-Palestinian bigotry —racism, to speak honestly — is normalized. And rather than Pitzer being an exception to this wickedness, it is especially true at Pitzer,” Segal said in an email to TSL. “This new censorship by the Pitzer administration hardens that normalization of anti-Palestinian racism by this Pitzer administration.”
SJP was not consulted prior to their artwork and messages being painted over, Palestinian student and SJP member Jacob Brittain PZ ’23 explained.
“It was a complete falling apart of the administration structure and their communication, since it was not even clearly communicated [that] when [they] do remove anything from the Free Wall, this is supposed to happen,” Brittain said.
Brittain clarified that the “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free” statement is a common phrase used in support of Palestinian freedom.
“Understanding the [intentions] of where [the statement] comes from is the key purpose,” Brittain said. “I think that’s something that allows me to feel like I have a voice when I hear it or when I say it.”
Segal criticized Vasquez’s email response, sharing that the administrative apology was too abstract in mentioning the censorship.
“This so-called apology thus fails to acknowledge, and fails to accept responsibility for, the harms done by this administrative censorship to Palestinian and Palestinian-American students at Pitzer and at the 5Cs,” Segal said via email.
According to Brittain, Pitzer administration has offered to reimburse the spray paint and materials needed to reinstate the mural.
SJP member Evelyn Lillimoe PZ ‘25 stated that she was not completely surprised at Pitzer’s actions given their precedent of opposing student support for Palestinian liberation, referencing former Pitzer President Melvin Oliver using two vetoes during his tenure in response to resolutions in support of Palestine.
“Pitzer has a long history of silencing student voices that are for Palestinian immigration and specifically Palestinian student voices,” Lillimoe said. “I think this act of censorship was shocking but not necessarily unsurprising.”
In reparation for the act of censorship, Brittain and Lillimoe ask that Pitzer support their Suspend Haifa Pitzer campaign.
“If Pitzer is truly dedicated to social responsibility and uplifting student voices, then what they need to do is support our campaign to conditionally suspend the study abroad program at the University of Haifa because that is a way that we can materially contribute to the fight for Palestinian Liberation,” Lillimoe said.
The addition of the “inadequate” apology to the censorship and previous veto of the Suspend Pitzer Haifa resolution signals a broader anti-Palestinian trend, according to Segal.
“My response to this administration is this: your anti-Palestinian racism is showing,” Segal said in his April 11 email.
On Thursday, March 30, Claremont Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) relaunched their academic boycott campaign to suspend Pitzer College’s direct enrollment study abroad program with the University of Haifa in Israel.
SJP held the relaunch at Pitzer’s Grove House, where over 40 students and community members gathered to listen to a presentation held by club organizers. The event, which was announced on the club’s Instagram page, is part of a series of festivities SJP organized as part of Palestine Freedom Weeks.
The boycott campaign announced last Thursday models after its iteration in the 2018-2019 school year, when SJP addressed grievances with the Haifa program and called upon its conditional suspension based on their demands. The call to suspend the program based on Israel’s discrimination and its subsequent Pitzer College Council motion was a source of tension and controversy between students, faculty and Pitzer’s then-administration.
In their campaign statement published last Thursday, SJP emphasized the University of Haifa’s systematic discrimination against Palestinian, Arab and Muslim students. Most Palestinian students are barred from entry into the program, which they said undermines Pitzer’s commitment to academic freedom.
“Because of the violence and discrimination faced by Palestinians at the University of Haifa and in occupied Palestine, we believe that no student should study abroad at a university operating on occupied land — especially considering that many Palestinian students cannot attend this program,” SJP said in their statement.
Currently, SJP’s demands include that the program be suspended until “the Israeli state ends its restrictions on entry to Israel based on ancestry and/or political speech and the Israeli state adopts policies granting visas for exchanges to Palestinian universities on a fully equal basis as it does to Israeli universities,” SJP said in their campaign statement.
If they were to suspend the Haifa program, Pitzer would become the first institution nationally to endorse the academic boycott, according to SJP.
“It’s important for us to target the institutions that we’re currently at and ask ourselves, ‘how does our current institution further perpetuate Israeli violence and Israeli apartheid?’” SJP organizer Miriam Farah CM ‘23 told TSL.
In 2019, the Pitzer College Council, which is composed of students, faculty and staff, voted 67 to 28 in favor of conditionally suspending the program, following more than a year of organizing. Pitzer became the first higher education institution to pass such a motion.
However, former Pitzer President Melvin Oliver vetoed the vote less than three hours after it occurred, citing the political nature that would be implicated in the suspension, stating that “[i]t is rarely, if ever, the role of the college to be taking such positions” in a press release.
Oliver has since retired from his role as president and Strom Thacker is set to take on his role this July. Farah added that with this new campaign, SJP hopes to make the feelings of the Pitzer community clear to Thacker.
“It’s very important for us to consider these shifting dynamics of concern and how students and faculty can have an active role in the new president’s agenda,” Farah said.
The campaign is part of a wider trend advocating for Palestinian liberation internationally, namely the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement that was adopted by the National Students for Justice in Palestine in 2005.
SJP cited the wave of support in academia, including the Middle East Studies Association vote to endorse the Palestinian call for BDS on March 23, 2022. However, SJP organizers like Anna Babboni SC ‘24 hope that the 5C community becomes more engaged in such conversations about BDS on campus..
“There’s been some loss of momentum about taking up BDS on these campuses, so even just talking about the academic boycott […] is a huge way to create a domino effect on our campuses to get people interested and committed to Palestinian liberation and freedom,” Babboni said.
Pitzer Professor of Anthropology and History Dan Segal is a strong proponent for the Suspend Pitzer Haifa campaign and was previously involved in leading the initial faculty vote in 2018 that catalyzed the College Council motion the following year.
As a person of Jewish background, Segal has been active in Palestinian solidarity work in the United States for decades by showing support for Palestinian freedom and liberation. He said he cannot support Pitzer in facilitating the program.
“We shouldn’t have an exchange relationship with a university, for instance, in which Palestinian students don’t have equal rights at those universities to Jewish students,” Segal said.
Segal also called upon Haifa’s involvement with occupation forces as a reason that Pitzer should not maintain an exchange relationship with the university. In addition, he endorses the BDS movement in providing a nonviolent path for institutions to show that they are unwilling to support the Israeli state.
“When that message gets across, that’s when Israel will come finally to the negotiating table and will negotiate an end to their atrocities [and] their human rights violations,” Segal said.
Segal also called upon the next Pitzer president to act differently than his predecessor.
“We have to count on him […] not to support the denial of freedom to other people [and] not to support other people living under repression,” Segal said. “If he were to veto a successful suspension of the Pitzer Haifa program and show that he, like Melvin Oliver is a supporter of apartheid, is a supporter of murderous ethnic cleansing, then very clearly he’s unfit to serve.”
The launch of the boycott campaign is part of the Palestinian Freedom Weeks that SJP is currently hosting through March and April. According to Babboni, SJP aims to promote cultural events, conduct political education and advocate for the Claremont community to take up BDS.
On April 2, SJP and the 5C Prison Abolition co-hosted a talk titled “Policing in the US and Palestine.” Around 30 students attended the discussion with the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, an organization that builds community power to abolish police surveillance and its deliberate harm toward Black and Brown people.
During the talk, members of the Coalition spoke about abolitionist organizing and the connection between US and Israeli policing and human rights.
Farah said the talk was important in drawing connections between the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and the Israeli Defense Fund (IDF).
“What I found most interesting was how police organizations and forces in LA have close ties to Zionist and Israeli organizations,” Farah said. “I think oftentimes people forget how much funding the U.S. government gives to Israel, nearly 4 billion [dollars] per year, and most of it goes to military aid, so I think it’s important for us to draw these connections.”
On Tuesday, March 28, SJP also held an Academic Boycott 101 event, along with a history of BDS at the 5Cs. Farah said she sees these events as a way for students from any background to participate in the BDS movement and provide feedback.
The Suspend Pitzer Haifa campaign circulated a petition in support of the demands for the conditional suspension.
“We want to reiterate the point that the Pitzer community voted to suspend this program during the 2018-2019 school year and there is continued support for that resolution,” Farah said.
Babboni emphasized the importance of the petition in guiding SJP’s future actions.
“We want to show that this is a community ask, that this is what the Pitzer community wants,” Babboni said. “We want to pulse check where people are at with how committed they feel to taking up the academic boycott and what the boycott means to them and get the ball rolling for our future campaign strategy.”
Segal called upon the 5C community and administration to show continued support for the campaign and expand throughout the consortium.
“The challenge ought to be to the faculty, students and staff at each of the other colleges which have not ended their exchange relations with Pomona [College], Scripps [College] and [Claremont McKenna College],” Segal said. “Every college and university in this consortium should ask itself, ‘Can they support a program that is bolstering apartheid, a program that denies academic freedom to Palestinians?’”
In an April 4 email to TSL, Assistant Vice President of College Communications Wendy Shattuck told TSL that Pitzer was aware of the campaign but had no further comments at the time.
We, Claremont Students for Justice in Palestine, call on Pitzer College to suspend its exchange with the University of Haifa until
(a) Israel ends its discriminatory restrictions on entry based on ancestry and/or political speech and
(b) Israel adopts policies granting visas for exchanges to Palestinian universities on a fully equal basis as it does to Israeli universities
BECAUSE
In 2018, Pitzer College’s faculty voted to conditionally suspend the College’s exchange with University of Haifa until the above conditions were met. The resolution then moved to the College Council, where it passed again with ⅔ majority
This marked a historic win for the BDS movement and Palestinian freedom, making Pitzer the first institution of higher education in the country to cut ties with an Israeli study abroad program
However, merely four hours after the bill passed, President Melvin Oliver nullified the vote and flew to the University of Haifa to affirm his support of Israeli apartheid, thus undermining the Pitzer community’s embrace of the academic boycott in support of Palestinian freedom
Throughout Pitzer’s 60-year history, the Pitzer administration and board of trustees have twice unilaterally rejected a democratic motion set by its College Council or the Student Senate. Both vetoes addressed bills that fought for Palestinian liberation, demonstrating the extent to which Pitzer College disregards community calls for justice in Palestine
Pitzer’s “core” values include “social responsibility,” “intercultural understanding,” and “student engagement.” We must hold the college to an ethical and democratic standard regarding their stance on Palestinian freedom, justice, and equality
Between 1947 and 1948, more than 40,000 Palestinians were forced out of their homes in Haifa alone, and refugees still, to this day, cannot return to their homes. Descendants of these refugees who study at the Claremont Colleges would likely be barred from this study abroad program. How can we have a program that some of our own students cannot participate in due to their ethnicity?
Prioritizing human rights, ethical considerations, and supporting the academic boycott is the pinnacle of academic freedom and a larger fight for justice internationally
Palestinian and Arab students and faculty at the University of Haifa have urged us to take up this fight: “Since we the Palestinian students in Haifa University are banned from supporting or calling for the boycott of Israeli universities and Israeli academia in general, we thank the rallying students for rising the Palestinian cause in American universities.”
Given President Oliver’s recent retirement and the reasons described above, it is time for President-Designate Strom Thacker to abide by the Pitzer community’s overwhelming support of Palestinian freedom by cutting its ties with the University of Haifa. One tangible way we can support Palestinian freedom in our campuses is by making sure we’re not supporting institutions that contribute to discrimination and oppression. As the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel asserts, “To enroll, or participate in any way, in a study abroad program at an Israeli institution means ignoring if not perpetuating the ongoing violation of the academic- and, indeed, human- freedoms of Palestinians.” Join us to demand the conditional suspension of Pitzer’s study abroad program at the University of Haifa by signing this petition. You can also access further resources at our website.
The Pitzer College Council will vote today on whether to suspend the school’s study abroad program with the University of Haifa in Israel. Advocates for suspending the program, including Pitzer College professor Dan Segal cite Israel’s “discrimination on the basis of ancestry and legitimate political speech” as motivation for bringing the motion forward.
Here are the key players on both sides of the debate and events which have occurred in the lead-up to the vote.
SUSPEND THE PROGRAM
Dan Segal
Dan Segal, a professor of anthropology and a faculty representative on Pitzer’s Study Abroad and International Programs Committee, brought forward the initial motion to suspend the Haifa program at the Nov. 8 faculty meeting. He has been the most vocal faculty member in support of suspending the program.
In comments to the Pitzer Board of Trustees, Segal wrote that participating in the study abroad program “exposes [Pitzer students] to discrimination on the basis of ancestry and legitimate political speech — specifically speech in favor of the nonviolent pursuit of social justice” and that the original motion passed by faculty “lends crucial support for academic freedom for Palestinian universities.”
On Tuesday, Segal co-sponsored an amended motion with Faculty Executive Committee Chair Claudia Strauss that lays out a uniform policy ending study abroad programs in countries that “restrict entry on the basis of either (a) legally protected political speech or (b) race or ancestry (as distinct from citizenship).”
Under the resolution, the FEC would initiate a case study of any program violating the aforementioned policies before having Pitzer College Council vote on its suspension.
This policy would be applied to all Pitzer study abroad programs.
After establishing this policy, the motion would apply it to Haifa — suspending the program.
This amended motion is a “direct response to the concern voiced by some faculty and students that absent such an initial statement of uniform policy, some outside audiences will misread and/or misrepresent the motion as somehow having a double-standard about the Israeli state,” Segal said via email.
Students for Justice in Palestine
Students for Justice in Palestine is a “grassroots student organization that is part of a national coalition of college chapters,” SJP chair Lea Kayali PO ’19 said via email. “SJP raises awareness about the situation in Palestine and advocates for an end to the Israeli occupation through educational initiatives, college motions … and student actions.”
In advance of the Haifa vote, the organization has focused on outreach to Pitzer faculty and student senators, and on building a coalition of other campus groups, according to SJP member Jorj Chisam-Majid PZ ’20. Several Pitzer affinity groups have provided statements of support for the Haifa motion.
SJP feels “very confident about the vote because we have received a lot of support and have had very successful outreach campaigns,” Chisam-Majid said. “What we are more worried out is a situation where [Pitzer] President [Melvin] Oliver and the Board of Trustees veto the vote — which would be another huge blow to the shared governance and Pitzer’s commitment to social justice.”
Added Kayali: “In the U.S., we have a unique obligation to be attentive to and act on Israeli human rights violations. The U.S. gives Israel $3.8 billion in military aid annually, and routinely defends Israel’s violations of international human rights.”
DON’T SUSPEND THE PROGRAM
Pitzer President Melvin Oliver
At a Pitzer College Council meeting last November, President Melvin Oliver opposed the faculty motion, questioning why the resolution targeted Israel only, and not other countries that have allegedly perpetrated human rights abuses, including China and Nepal.
After the College Council vote, Oliver will make a final decision on the Haifa program’s fate, taking into consideration the council decision. However, the president has historically honored College Council decisions, according to Pitzer Student Senate member Isaiah Kramer PZ ’20.
Claremont Jewish Organizations (Claremont Progressive Israel Alliance, Claremont Colleges Hillel, J Street U Claremont Colleges)
The Claremont Colleges Hillel, J Street U Claremont Colleges and Claremont Progressive Israel Alliance released a joint statement March 13 urging the Pitzer College Council to apply the same standards to all of Pitzer’s study abroad programs or “vote down the motion if it remains as-is.”
The statement mentions a Jewish student leader in opposition to the Haifa motion who was targeted by “menacing emails and had their name placed on a hate site,” and condemns Islamophobic rhetoric targeting Muslim and Arab students at Pitzer.
Zachary Freiman PO ’20, who is on the board of the Claremont Progressive Israel Alliance, said “the effort to delegitimize the State of Israel, whether through the anti-Semitic [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions] campaign or other means, and scrub the Jewish connection to the Land of Israel is a modern-day form of anti-Semitism.”
Claremont Colleges Hillel, a 5C Jewish student organization, posted a statement on its Facebook page.
“We have heard from many students, especially Jewish students, that they have felt ostracized and confused by the rhetoric surrounding the upcoming vote,” the post states. “We certainly empathize with this perspective as the movement to suspend the Haifa program seems to have been selectively chosen to single out Israel.”
The joint statement from Hillel, J Street and CPIA also acknowledged that “there is no question that Palestinians live under occupation and are subject to discrimination.”
EVENTS ON CAMPUS
Israel on Campus Coalition
The Israel on Campus Coalitionposted a video on its Facebook page March 11 in opposition to suspending the Haifa program. The text in the video, which featured interviews with 5C students read, “How would you feel if your student exchange program was cancelled … Only because of where you come from?”
The ICC is an organization that “unite[s] and empower[s] pro-Israel campus organizations,” according to its website. It is unclear whether the organization is working with 5C students or groups.
Jessi Hjelle SC ’21 said her comments in the video were misconstrued to seem like she supported the Haifa program when she actually opposes it.
Hjelle said she was approached by a group of people who appeared to be students, asking her if she wanted to be in a study abroad video. They asked if she planned to study abroad and where, and what she would do if she was told she could not study abroad in her preferred country.
“At no point during this time did these people mention Israel or Haifa to me,” Hjelle said via message. “They took my answers and used them out of context for their own propaganda.”
When Hjelle reached out to ICC to ask if they would edit her out of the video, she said they ignored her.
SJP released a statement condemning the video as “unethical propaganda” and stating that they “denounce ICC’s disingenuous distortion of student opinion, designed to fabricate a false narrative.”
Posters on campus and other threats
Posters have appeared across Pitzer’s campus depicting a tweet from several years ago allegedly from the Palestinian Sunni-Islamist fundamentalist organization Hamas, which the U.S. State Department classifies as a terrorist organization, expressing support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, accompanied by a photo of masked Hamas militants carrying rifles.
The posters urge Pitzer to keep the Haifa program and have become a source of fear for some Muslim and Palestinian students on campus.
Chisam-Majid said they were “terrified” by the posters, which “clearly draw on old racist and Islamophobic tropes that insinuate any activism by us is similar to ‘terrorism’ and that the BDS movement is somehow violent.”
Posters like these often come before a round of doxxing and harassment — especially by outside actors, they said.
At the March 10 Pitzer Student Senate meeting, Kramer said he had filed a safety report. He also said there was security camera footage of someone putting up posters, and security will attempt to identify the responsible individual.
Pitzer’s Dean of Faculty Nigel Boyle said administrative offices have also received anonymous harassment via phone calls and emails. IT was able to trace some of the emails to Pennsylvania, he said.
“Obviously the fear is that that’s something that could escalate quite nastily,” Boyle said. “You always worry how certain individuals might react to inflammatory pieces they might read.”
Pitzer Professor Daniel A. Segal Selected for Palestinian American Research Center Seminar
Claremont, Calif. (March 28, 2018)—Pitzer College Professor Daniel A. Segal has been accepted to participate in the Palestinian American Research Center (PARC) US Faculty Development Seminar on Palestine this summer. The PARC 2018 Faculty Development Seminar will be held from June 20 to July 3, 2018, in Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Segal, Jean Pitzer professor of anthropology and professor of history, will be one of approximately a dozen US faculty members participating in the ninth annual Faculty Development Seminar on Palestine. The seminar’s Jerusalem-based activities will include visits to Palestinian universities, research institutes and cultural institution as well as roundtable discussions, tours of historic cities and meetings with Palestinian colleagues. PARC says seminar participants will “deepen their knowledge of their fields of interest in Palestine and build relationships with Palestinian colleagues and institutions.”
Daniel A. Segal is an anthropologist and historian whose courses at Pitzer College include a two-semester world history sequence and a seminar on Donald Trump’s America. In 2017, he was awarded a Fulbright US Scholar research fellowship to examine the entry of the Brazilian state into the northern Amazon. He was the inaugural director of Pitzer’s Munroe Center for Social Inquiry and is a former fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, as well as the past secretary of the American Anthropological Association and past president of the Society for Cultural Anthropology. He graduated summa cum laude from Cornell University and earned his MA and PhD from the University of Chicago.
About Pitzer College
Pitzer College is a nationally top-ranked undergraduate liberal arts and sciences institution. A member of The Claremont Colleges, Pitzer offers a distinctive approach to a liberal arts education by linking intellectual inquiry with interdisciplinary studies, cultural immersion, social responsibility, and community involvement. For more information, please visit www.pitzer.edu.
American Jewish Committee (AJC) praised Pitzer College President Melvin L. Oliver for his principled stance in affirming that a study abroad partnership with the University of Haifa in Israel will continue despite a vote by the school’s College Council recommending that the program cease to operate.
“Some will say that I am taking my own position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in choosing not to implement the recommendation of the College Council. I am not. Instead, I am refusing to permit Pitzer College to take a position that I believe will only harm the College,” Oliver wrote in a strong statement issued soon after the vote.
The drive to end the Haifa University partnership was initiated by a Pitzer professor and other Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS)-affiliated activists on campus.
“By singling out Israel, the recommendation itself is prejudiced,” wrote Oliver. “If implemented, the recommendation would unnecessarily alienate a large cross section of the College’s constituencies. The reputational harm to the College would be irreparable and as president of his institution, I cannot permit that to happen.”
Calling the College Council recommendation “an academic boycott of Israel,” Oliver wrote, “I categorically oppose any form of academic boycott of any country. We cannot allow our objections to the policies of any nation’s government to become a blanket indictment of the nation itself and, by extension, its citizens.”
AJC has advocated for months for a rejection of the proposed boycott of Haifa University.
“The College Council action was an outrageous attack on academic freedom,” said AJC Los Angeles Assistant Director Siamak Kordestani and AJC Director of Campus Affairs Zev Hurwitz. “The measure threatened to allow a dangerous precedent – that it is acceptable for outside political influence to limit student experiences.”
Oliver has been vigorously supportive of academic freedom since the fall semester, when the attempt to end relations with the Haifa campus began. At the time Oliver also spoke out strongly against ending this academic opportunity for Pitzer students.
“By preventing the implementation of an effort to sever ties with Israel’s most diverse campus, President Oliver demonstrates moral courage, support for true academic freedom, and the preservation of neutrality for Pitzer College on contentious conflicts,” said Kordestani and Hurwitz.
BY TERESA WATANABESTAFF WRITER DEC. 8, 2018 5 AM PT
Pitzer College faculty have voted to suspend a study abroad program in Israel, sparking widespread controversy over what is believed to be the nation’s first such campus action in support of Palestinian rights.
The program with the University of Haifa is tiny — only 11 students have participated since it began in 2007 — but its potential suspension has sparked outsized response from those who hail it as a human rights breakthrough and others who say it unfairly singles out Israel and denies academic opportunities to Pitzer students.
Faculty and students on a college governing council will vote next semester on whether to support last month’s faculty decision at the small liberal arts college in Claremont. Last week, Pitzer President Melvin L. Oliver condemned the vote at the governing council meeting, saying it was a repudiation of the college’s educational mission to promote intercultural understanding.
But Daniel Segal, the anthropology and history professor who spearheaded the motion, said the college should stand against Israel’s restrictions on academic exchange, including a 2017 law to bar entry to those who support boycotts, divestment or sanctions against the Jewish state. The faculty motion calls for the study abroad program to be resumed only after Israel ends its entry restrictions based on “ancestry and/or political speech” and begins to grant visas for exchanges to Palestinian universities on a “fully equal basis”to those it grants for exchanges to Israeli ones.
Segal, who is Jewish, said his tradition’s ethics obliged him to support the human rights not only of Jews but of all people.
The recent faculty vote marked the latest controversy at Pitzer over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Last year, the Pitzer Student Senate voted to bar the use of student funds for goods or services provided by five firms, including Caterpillar and Hewlett-Packard, that the students believed were complicit in suppressing Palestinian rights. But Oliver and college trustees nullified the vote in what they acknowledged was an unprecedented move against student autonomy.
The Pitzer faculty also voted last month to oppose that action by Oliver and the trustees.
Ron Robin, president of the University of Haifa, said it was particularly ironic that faculty chose to target the study abroad program on his campus because it is the most diverse in Israel, with the proportion of Arab students — 35% — higher than the Arab population in Israel at large. His said the university’s social mission is to create a broad middle class inclusive of all religions, races and ethnicities.
“We have Jews and Arab faculty and students coexisting and this seems to contradict the narrative about Israel as an apartheid state,” Robin said in an interview. “We hope we’re a crystal ball of what Israeli society could look like.”
Students at Pitzer haven’t made a lot of use of the program. None have participated in it since 2016, a college spokeswoman said.
Claire Wengrod, a senior majoring in political studies and member of the college Faculty Executive Committee, said the program should remain an option for students. She and other student senators are sponsoring a resolution to oppose suspension of the program, criticizing faculty for not consulting students first. The Student Senate is set to vote Sunday.
“I support students having the choice where they want to study,” Wengrod said. “I don’t think it’s right for the school or faculty to prevent students from doing it.”
But Lea Kayali, president of Students for Justice in Palestine at the Claremont Colleges consortium of Pitzer and four other undergraduate campuses, said her organization feels differently.
“We are really ecstatic to see the faculty supporting Palestinian students and all those effected by Israel’s atrocious border and visa policies,” she said in an email. “For us, it is time that the college stand in support of students denied educational experiences in occupied Palestine.”
In the past two years, Israel’s restrictions on visas have sharply decreased the number of international academics at Palestinian universities, jeopardizing their programs, according to the Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Assn. of North America. But the Israeli Supreme Court recently ruled that a student’s political views alone could not be used to deny entry for studying in Israel.
Advocates for Israel said they feared the Pitzer action could embolden faculty on other campuses to follow suit. AMCHA Initiative, a California-based nonprofit that fights anti-Semitism on college campuses, this week launched a national campaign with 100 other organizations to urge college leaders to condemn faculty who promote academic boycotts of Israel.
AMCHA organized a similar effort in 2013 after the American Studies Association endorsed an academic boycott of Israel.
“Curtailing student academic freedom and educational opportunities for political reasons is reprehensible and a very dangerous precedent,” said Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, the nonprofit’s director.
Oliver, in his remarks to the college council, said that Pitzer continues exchanges with countries such as China and Nepal with “significant human rights abuses.”
“We need to reject this restriction and double down on our engagement with communities we disagree with, whose political systems we decry, and where discrimination and bias are endemic,” he said.
Segal said concerns about singling out Israel should not be used to impede social justice.
2023 U.S. Faculty Development Seminar on Palestine Travel Fellowships
Two program dates: April 24 – May 7, 2023 or May 15 – May 28, 2023 in Jerusalem and the West Bank
EXTENDED DEADLINE: Applications due December 28, 2022 Awards announced January 30, 2023
The Palestinian American Research Center (PARC) announces its 14th annual Faculty Development Seminar (FDS) on Palestine competition for U.S. faculty members with a demonstrated interest in, but little travel experience to, Palestine. Applicants may come from any field of study. Each of our 2023 programs will host 12 U.S. faculty members to participate in roundtable discussions; visits to Palestinian universities, research institutes, and cultural institutions; tours of historic cities; as well as meetings with Palestinian colleagues. Through these activities, participants will learn about the region, deepen their knowledge about their fields of interest in Palestine, and build relationships with Palestinian colleagues and institutions.
Applicants must:
Be U.S. citizens.
Be full-time faculty members at recognized U.S. colleges or universities. Applicants may come from any academic discipline, including the arts, humanities, social sciences, economics, law, health, and sciences.
Have a demonstrated interest in Palestine.
Have little previous travel experience to Palestine.
Be willing to integrate their experiences from the seminar into their own teaching, research and/or other projects.
Be willing to use their skills and experience to benefit Palestinian colleagues and institutions.
Be a member of PARC. Visit the PARC membership page for more information.
PARC will make all arrangements for the program, including hotel, site visits, tours, and meetings with Palestinian colleagues. PARC will cover all expenses for in-country, group ground travel, accommodations, and group meals. International travel and personal and free day expenses will be the responsibility of each faculty member and/or their university. In cases of demonstrated need, there is limited funding available to cover partial costs for international travel.
Professors from Minority Serving Institutions and Community Colleges are especially encouraged to apply. PARC will provide three travel stipends up to $1,000 each for airfare for professors from these institutions.
Funding for these three participants is provided by the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs through an agreement with CAORC.
The Center for the Study of the Holocaust Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity (CHGCAH) at the City University of New York (CUNY) is “dedicated to the study and prevention of mass violence and its legacies.” Its mission is to “promote the exchange of ideas across disciplines and generations. Serving as a hub for a vibrant community of scholars from many fields with convergent interests, the Center is a forum for innovative research, graduate student mentoring, and public programming. Reaching beyond the university, the Center is enriched by linkages with NGOs, cultural institutions, and supra-national organizations.”
According to Prof. Deborah Dwork, its Director, CHGCAH is hosting a year-long virtual series on “The Marginalized and the Erased,” explaining that “The historical record is marked by voids: elided events; disappeared people; erased accounts; marginalized communities.” CHGCAH aims “to tackle a number of those blank spots.”
As part of this series, a conference titled “Beyond the Settler State: Anticolonial Pasts and Futures in Palestine/Israel,” will take place on Apr 27, 2023. The conference description states, “Born in the Bronx or Berlin, Jews of a certain age remember the justificatory slogan for the establishment of Israel, ‘A land without a people for a people without a land.’ Persuasive as this may have been at the time, it spoke and continues to speak today to a settler colonial policy of violent erasure. Erasure that the November 2022 Israeli election and subsequent ministerial choices promise to intensify. Looking forward, what futures beyond the settler state might there be? Please join a conversation between sociocultural anthropologist and Feminist Studies scholar Sarah Ihmoud (College of the Holy Cross) and Holocaust and Genocide Studies scholar Raz Segal (Stockton University) about possible paths toward anticolonial futures, particularly in light of anticolonial pasts, in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.”
Interestingly, Prof. Raz Segal, Stockton University, published a paper, “Israeli Apartheid and Its Apologists” in 2022 and “Distorting the definition of antisemitism to shield Israel from all criticism” in 2019. Prof. Sarah Ihmoud of the College of the Holy Cross published a paper “Antiblackness and the Womb of Zionist Settler Colonialism” in 2021 and “Mohammed Abu-Khdeir and the Politics of Racial Terror in Occupied Jerusalem” in 2015.
These events are also supported by The Center for Jewish Studies, The Graduate Center—CUNY; CUNY Academy for the Humanities and Sciences, The Graduate Center–CUNY; The School of General Studies and the Master of Arts in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Stockton University; The Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University.
Two weeks ago, CHGCAH hosted “The Bedouin Village of Rah’ma: Toward Recognition and Beyond,” where, according to the invitation, “The Bedouin of the Negev desert have long sought legal recognition from the State of Israel. Without legal status, they are denied their basic rights as Israeli citizens: access to public health services, water, electricity, public transportation, is inadequate or unavailable. Rah’ma is one of the few unrecognized villages that has been promised recognition, yet that promise remains unfulfilled. Still: a school has been approved and built, public utilities have improved, and village residents see some hope. What makes Rah’ma different from other Bedouin villages in the Negev? What paved the way to the promise of recognition? What changes will recognition bring? And can Rah’ma be a model for Israeli-Bedouin relations going forward?”
The conference featured a discussion between Sliman Elfregat, Rah’ma school principal; Debbie Golan, co-founder and president of Atid Bamidbar; and Dvir Warshavsky, Ministry of Education project director. Chair and moderator: Eli Karetny, deputy director of the Ralph Bunche Institute.
Last month, CHGCAH organized a conference titled “Israel/Palestine: What the Archives Reveal and Conceal.” According to the invitation, “The story of the past calls for extensive use of archival documents. But, adducing risk to state security, Israeli archives, especially the state archives, block access to key collections that pertain to the state’s history in general and the Palestinian Nakba and ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular. Palestinian researchers who seek to tell the story of the Palestinian past using Palestinian personal papers and archival materials face additional, unofficial, obstacles.”
This event was chaired and moderated by Professor Amos Goldberg, head of the Avraham Harman Research Institute for Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University. The speakers, Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, professor of sociology at the Hebrew University and a 2022 Guggenheim Distinguished Scholar, and Yaacov Lozowick, a historian who served as Israel’s chief archivist from 2011-2018. The conference discussed the “role of archives in the power dynamics of the conflict.”
Clearly, the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity, with its partners – have all lost their moral and academic compass. A conference’s use of the slogan “A land without a people for a people without a land” is a cheap shot catering to the popular theory that the Jews were and are colonizers who had no historical connection or right to the land. No one in the Zionist movement, or anyone else, had any illusion that the Palestinians would disappear from the land. For much of its history, the Zionist movement has emphasized the need to share the land: the Jews accepted the 1947 UN Partition Proposal, which the Palestinians rejected. Right after the Six-Day War in 1967, the Palestinian and their Arab supporters gathered at the Khartoum Conference, the capital of Sudan. The resolution contained what became known as the “Three Noes”: “No peace with Israel, no negotiation with Israel, no recognition of Israel.” Even as recently as 2001, in Camp David II, Yasser Arafat rejected the Israeli proposal to return virtually the entire West Bank and the Gaza Strip. When Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza, Hamas, supported by the Islamist regime of Iran, turned it into a launching pad for missiles and rockets against Israeli villages and towns.
IAM, which has periodically dealt with CUNY, has uncovered the incessant focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Far from being “marginalized and disappeared,” there is a vast literature on Palestinians, probably more than on any other ethnic group.
There is a simple answer to the question as to why CHGCAH has deviated from its mission in researching the Holocaust, genocide and crimes against humanity. The false Palestinian narrative gives the activist Center a handy tool to bash Israel.
The story of the past calls for extensive use of archival documents. But, adducing risk to state security, Israeli archives, especially the state archives, block access to key collections that pertain to the state’s history in general and the Palestinian Nakba and ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular. Palestinian researchers who seek to tell the story of the Palestinian past using Palestinian personal papers and archival materials face additional, unofficial, obstacles. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, professor of sociology at the Hebrew University and a 2022 Guggenheim Distinguished Scholar, and Yaacov Lozowick, a historian who served as Israel’s chief archivist from 2011-2018, will discuss what Israeli archives reveal and conceal. Please join for a challenging conversation that will range from the role of archives in the power dynamics of the conflict to the stories still to be told if access to the archives were unfettered. Chair and moderator: Hebrew University professor Amos Goldberg, head of the Avraham Harman Research Institute for Contemporary Jewry.
This event is hosted in association with:
The Center for Jewish Studies, The Graduate Center—City University of New York
CUNY Academy for the Humanities and Sciences, The Graduate Center–CUNY
The School of General Studies and the Master of Arts in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Stockton University
The Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University
Beyond the Settler State: Anticolonial Pasts and Futures in Palestine/IsraelDescription
Born in the Bronx or Berlin, Jews of a certain age remember the justificatory slogan for the establishment of Israel, “A land without a people for a people without a land.” Persuasive as this may have been at the time, it spoke and continues to speak today to a settler colonial policy of violent erasure. Erasure that the November 2022 Israeli election and subsequent ministerial choices promise to intensify. Looking forward, what futures beyond the settler state might there be? Please join a conversation between sociocultural anthropologist and Feminist Studies scholar Sarah Ihmoud (College of the Holy Cross) and Holocaust and Genocide Studies scholar Raz Segal (Stockton University) about possible paths toward anticolonial futures, particularly in light of anticolonial pasts, in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
This event is hosted by the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity in association with:
The Center for Jewish Studies, The Graduate Center—CUNY
CUNY Academy for the Humanities and Sciences, The Graduate Center–CUNY
The School of General Studies and the Master of Arts in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Stockton University
The Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York UniversityTime
ISRAEL/PALESTINE: WHAT DO THE ARCHIVES REVEAL AND CONCEAL?
ISRAEL/PALESTINE: WHAT DO THE ARCHIVES REVEAL AND CONCEAL?
Wednesday, February 15, 2023
12:00 pm — 1:00 pm
Online
Open to the Public
A conversation about how archival materials about the state’s history in general and the Palestinian Nakba and ongoing Israeli-Palestine conflict are blocked from public access.
The story of the past calls for extensive use of archival documents. But, adducing risk to state security, Israeli archives, especially the state archives, block access to key collections that pertain to the state’s history in general and the Palestinian Nakba and ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular. Palestinian researchers who seek to tell the story of the Palestinian past using Palestinian personal papers and archival materials face additional, unofficial, obstacles. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, professor of sociology at the Hebrew University and a 2022 Guggenheim Distinguished Scholar, and Yaacov Lozowick, a historian who served as Israel’s chief archivist from 2011-2018, will discuss what Israeli archives reveal and conceal. Please join for a challenging conversation that will range from the role of archives in the power dynamics of the conflict to the stories still to be told if access to the archives were unfettered.
CHAIR AND MODERATOR
Amos Goldberg, professor at Hebrew University, and head of the Avraham Harman Research Institute for Contemporary Jewry.
SPEAKERS
Yaacov Lozowick Areej Sabbagh-Khoury
THIS EVENT IS HOSTED IN ASSOCIATION WITH
The Center for Jewish Studies, CUNY Graduate Center CUNY Academy for the Humanities and Sciences, CUNY Graduate Center The School of General Studies and the Master of Arts in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Stockton University The Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University
Feb 16, 2023 The story of the past calls for extensive use of archival documents. But, adducing risk to state security, Israeli archives, especially the state archives, block access to key collections that pertain to the state’s history in general and the Palestinian Nakba and ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular. Palestinian researchers who seek to tell the story of the Palestinian past using Palestinian personal papers and archival materials face additional, unofficial, obstacles. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, professor of sociology at the Hebrew University and a 2022 Guggenheim Distinguished Scholar, and Yaacov Lozowick, a historian who served as Israel’s chief archivist from 2011-2018, will discuss what Israeli archives reveal and conceal. Please join for a challenging conversation that will range from the role of archives in the power dynamics of the conflict to the stories still to be told if access to the archives were unfettered. Chair and moderator: Hebrew University professor Amos Goldberg, head of the Avraham Harman Research Institute for Contemporary Jewry. This event is hosted in association with: The Center for Jewish Studies, The Graduate Center—City University of New York CUNY Academy for the Humanities and Sciences, The Graduate Center–CUNY The School of General Studies and the Master of Arts in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Stockton University The Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University
Feb 16, 2023 The story of the past calls for extensive use of archival documents. But, adducing risk to state security, Israeli archives, especially the state archives, block access to key collections that pertain to the state’s history in general and the Palestinian Nakba and ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular. Palestinian researchers who seek to tell the story of the Palestinian past using Palestinian personal papers and archival materials face additional, unofficial, obstacles. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, professor of sociology at the Hebrew University and a 2022 Guggenheim Distinguished Scholar, and Yaacov Lozowick, a historian who served as Israel’s chief archivist from 2011-2018, will discuss what Israeli archives reveal and conceal. Please join for a challenging conversation that will range from the role of archives in the power dynamics of the conflict to the stories still to be told if access to the archives were unfettered. Chair and moderator: Hebrew University professor Amos Goldberg, head of the Avraham Harman Research Institute for Contemporary Jewry. This event is hosted in association with: The Center for Jewish Studies, The Graduate Center—City University of New York CUNY Academy for the Humanities and Sciences, The Graduate Center–CUNY The School of General Studies and the Master of Arts in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Stockton University The Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University
Transcripts generated by Youtube
Introduction 2:33 Deborah Dwork: Hello. My name is Deborah Dwark, and I am the director of the Center for the study of the holocaust genocide and crimes against humanity at the graduate Center City University of New York. 2:50 Deborah Dwork: It is my great pleasure to welcome you to the force Deborah Dwork: of a year long virtual series on the marginalized and the erased. 3:02 Deborah Dwork: The historical record is marked by voids alighted, events 3:07 Deborah Dwork: disappeared. People Deborah Dwork: erased accounts, marginalized communities. This series tackles a number of those blank spots in history and in our own time. 3:24 Deborah Dwork: I thank our series partners, and why use Professor Emerita of Hebrew, and today studies Marion Kaplan and Stockton University. Professor Raz. Segal. 3:37 Deborah Dwork: I thank 2 Center associate, one as Avedo, and who’s help? I rely. Dr. Eli correct me. Deputy director of the Ralph Bunch Institute for his support and the DC’s. Terrific it people. 3:54 Deborah Dwork: Above all, I am grateful t0 0ur speakers and to everyone who has tuned in. 4:02 Deborah Dwork: Thank you for your engagement. Deborah Dwork: It is now my pleasure to introduce almost Goldberg the chair of our panel, and it is he who has the honor of introducing our speakers 4:18 Deborah Dwork: almost holds the Jonah Mac over chair in Holocaust Studies in the Department of Jewish History and contemporary jewelry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. 4:30 Deborah Dwork: He heads the Abraham Armen Research Institute of Contemporary Jewelry at the same institution. 4:40 Deborah Dwork: An audacious scholar. Deborah Dwork: Amos’s Anna analyses of the past and of the present are as unflinching 4:52 Deborah Dwork: as they are erudite both qualities. Deborah Dwork: his encyclopedic knowledge and his steadfast honesty 5:04 Deborah Dwork: shine bright in his scholarship, public engagement, and teaching. 5:11 Deborah Dwork: I have learned from him over and over again his books push me. 5:18 Deborah Dwork: actually demand of me to rethink questions long held as settled 5:27 Deborah Dwork: not only what to think about the past. but how to think about the past. 5:35 I mentioned just 2 0f his works. Deborah Dwork: trauma in first person, dire rewriting during the holocaust. 5:42 Deborah Dwork: which probes the effects of violent oppression on the inner self 5:49 Deborah Dwork: and a co-edited volume with the sociologist and political scientist, Bashir Bashir. 5:57 Deborah Dwork: the Holocaust and the Nakba. Deborah Dwork: a new grammar of trauma and history. 6:05 Deborah Dwork: which brings us t0 0ur panel today. Deborah Dwork: which I hastened to say 6:11 Deborah Dwork: came into being, thanks to the generosity of our speakers, Arish and Yakov 6:20 Deborah Dwork: and our chair almost Deborah Dwork: Hamas. The floor is yours. Israel today 6:30 Amos Goldberg: Thank you, the Bora very much for this very generous introduction of myself, and I really thank you and all 6:38 Amos Goldberg: the bora and all the institutions, sponsoring, and the individuals organizing this important event. You are 6:46 Amos Goldberg: an example of academic leadership. AIM Amos Goldberg: I. I will frame this a talk within what’s happening today in Israel. 6:57 Amos Goldberg: We are experiencing today in Israel a very dramatic and very frightening political moment. The constitutional basis of this country. 7:05 Amos Goldberg: the actual that actually lacks the constitution is, we made. The 3 classical branches of government are restructed to collapse into the executive branch. The government. 7:15 Amos Goldberg: in order to become an authoritarian regime. Amos Goldberg: I participated in some of the demonstration in Jerusalem, including the big one. Just 2 days ago. It was huge between 100,000 t0 360000 participant, and estimated to participate in Depends who, you ask. 7:33 Amos Goldberg: But there were very few Palestinians there. Amos Goldberg: They could not feel welcome within the sea of Israeli flags, while Palestinian slag were particularly both practically banned. 7:43 Amos Goldberg: Palestinians and liberal Jews tend to experience the events very differently. Pull or a poll and frightening. 7:51 Amos Goldberg: But why liberal Israel is 10 again. This is, of course, not cute, but 7:56 Amos Goldberg: some kind of a was typology. Amos Goldberg: Israeli Jews tend to think of it in terms of revolution which turns inside from being a liberal democracy to become a totalitarian regime 8:08 Amos Goldberg: similar to Turkey or Hungary. Palestinians tend to see it again. Amos Goldberg: All Palestinians, but 8:14 Amos Goldberg: in terms of typology is a continuation of a long historical process and an almost inevitable outcome of the settler colonial setting of this country and its apartheid regime that it established since 1,948, 8:28 Amos Goldberg: I think more or less, is the same. Would be said the same could be said about the archives, which is our theme today. 8:36 Amos Goldberg: All agree that there are big problems in the Israeli archives. They conceal much more than they reveal. 8:42 Amos Goldberg: but only a small portion of the files are open to the public to see Amos Goldberg: the Mossad in the Shabbat. The 2 main secret services archives are completely sealed, and it is to the best of my loan, and I was told by Adam R. As another 8:57 Amos Goldberg: expert in archives. The Idf archive open only some 56,000 files out of 2 mill 12 million, which is half a percent. 9:06 Amos Goldberg: Nonetheless. Amos Goldberg: I think Palestinian scholars and liberal Israeli scholars tend to perceive the Israeli archives very differently, while many, again a technologically liberal Jews approach the archive for not adhering to democratic standouts. Many Palestinians see it as yet another hostile 9:25 Amos Goldberg: settler colonial institution, even if it could bring some benefit under some certain circumstances. 9:31 Amos Goldberg: and also the experience physically encountering the archivists, and and then in the archives themselves are very different. 9:39 Amos Goldberg: Today we have 2 very imminent scholars. Both are experts on Israeli archives. 9:46 Amos Goldberg: After I introduce to talk about these issues or other issues that they will choose to talk 9:51 Amos Goldberg: about Amos Goldberg: After I introduce them they will talk for about 15 min each. Then we will open the floor for questions. You are most invited to post your questions 10:01 in the Q. And a. Books Amos Goldberg: on the bottom ball. They already, during the talks, and not Don’t, wait for them to the end. 10:13 Amos Goldberg: so we will. Then we will have some 20 0r 25 min Talk a. Amos Goldberg: And Q. And a. And we will close in 1 h. 10:22 Amos Goldberg: First, we’ll speak. Dr. Yako Blasovic is a chief archivist. 20112018, and currently running research project into the history of Israel’s settlement project at the top center for Israeli. Start Israel studies at New York University. 10:35 Amos Goldberg: and he’s also proud Grandpa. Amos Goldberg: He will talk on Israel’s National Archives Online or bloke. 10:44 Amos Goldberg: Second, we’ll speak. Dr. Ariza, Bahouri, Senior Lecturer of Sociology, and on Topology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The research in Swiss line, Political and historical Sociology, Settler Colonialism memory, gender indigenous studies and critical to a social theory. A forthcoming book colonizing Palestine and Zion is left in the making of the Palestinian N. Akbar by Stanford University Press 11:09 Amos Goldberg: is coming soon, and it examines encounters between kibut settlers and palestinians inhabitants in northern Palestine Israel Valley before during and after 1,948 11:21 Amos Goldberg: she’s I would she’s a My person is on it. She is a proud mother. 11:27 Amos Goldberg: So Yakov please go ahead. Yaacov Lozowick: Thank you almost for the invitation. Thank you to Nora for the Opening remarks 11:35 Yaacov Lozowick: greater invitation, and thank always what this once you come to listen to us this evening, it’s the evening 11:45 Yaacov Lozowick: I i’m speaking in 2 capacities between 2,011 and 2,018. I was ahead of the I was the State archivist, which means basically I was the head of the of Israel’s national archives and of race, other entities. 11:58 And then, at late in late, 2,018, I left that job and crossed the lines, and literally the next week 12:05 Yaacov Lozowick: became a major. one of the one of the major users 12:12 Yaacov Lozowick: of the archive system in a project in which we will get ordered 12:17 Yaacov Lozowick: millions of pages of documentation, and some of them we’ve gotten. Yaacov Lozowick: So i’m bringing 2 perspectives. So what about about the person running the archives and trying to keep the as good or possible as as good as possible service to the public. 12:34 Yaacov Lozowick: and then following on that a user who is much more aware of the failures of the system. 12:41 Yaacov Lozowick: So let me start with the good news. The good news Yaacov Lozowick: that for those of us who use archival documentation, and our kind of documentation is 12:50 Yaacov Lozowick: exceedingly important. If you want to understand all sorts of aspects of the past, not all of them, but many 12:56 Yaacov Lozowick: so for those of you. Thus us who use our kind of documentation, some of the archive of documentation of the state of Israel is actually very, very easily accessible. 13:06 Yaacov Lozowick: Let me start with the best place of all. The rest of the wall is the website of the Knesset. which has simply put up on its website just about 13:14 Yaacov Lozowick: all the protocols and the deliberations of the Yaacov Lozowick: plan them and of the committees The Knesset website 13:21 Yaacov Lozowick: since the beginning of the State, and it’s all up there, maybe not all of it, but almost all of us up there, and what it is not yet is going on 13:29 Yaacov Lozowick: starting from 1,948 until until this morning. Any Any meeting or deliberation in the Knesset today will be online tomorrow with the 13:39 Yaacov Lozowick: it’s not for a searchable. It’s you have to know what you’re looking for in order to find it. But if you know what looking for, you can find it. 13:48 Yaacov Lozowick: and just this morning not in connection with this meeting I had a discussion with the head of the woman who runs their archive, and she was telling me, among other things, about the project they have now of 14:00 Yaacov Lozowick: of constructing a very intelligent search engine capacity that they don’t yet have and hold. She hopes at some some point in the near future, they will have that and make the material even more accessible. So that’s the 14:15 Yaacov Lozowick: at the opposite end of the because it is almost mentioned. The intelligence agencies. There’s no Assad in the in the in the in the Shabbat. 14:23 Yaacov Lozowick: Some of those, some of the intelligence agencies of the military are basically sealed. For all practical purposes those materials are not going to be open in our lifetime. 14:33 Yaacov Lozowick: For better or for worse. Yaacov Lozowick: it can be explained, it could be justified. It’s not a particularly good thing. It’s a fact. State and military archives 14:41 Yaacov Lozowick: However, those agencies produce only a very small percentage of the archival records of the state of Israel and the government in the 14:49 Yaacov Lozowick: so the fact that it’s all is sealed is problematic. But doesn’t affect the broader picture 14:55 Yaacov Lozowick: and a broader picture. There are 2 major archives legally in the same archive, but in reality there are 2 archives, the State archive and the military outcome. 15:04 Yaacov Lozowick: Theoretically a military archive is subordinates. The stay in Archive and as part of it. Yaacov Lozowick: but in reality it doesn’t work that way, and the stair are kind of has very little influence over what happens in the 15:16 Yaacov Lozowick: military archive when I was a state archives they were always very respectful and different to me as long as I did exactly what they wanted. In other words, if I was the front 15:25 Yaacov Lozowick: for there, for for whatever they were doing. Then they gave me all the respect to somebody who’s Who so, who has a high position and and represents them. 15:35 Yaacov Lozowick: The moment that I tried not to to, to to their line, I found that I had absolutely no power whatsoever. 15:42 Yaacov Lozowick: and the State archive. The State archive is probably the largest in so depending how you measure it, and the State archive is contains all of the documentation of the government of the state of future, of meaning the Government Ministries. 15:57 Yaacov Lozowick: There is material there from from the Presidents, the ministry which is actually not ministry. There’s some material from the from the military agencies. 16:06 Yaacov Lozowick: and there’s a lot of material which are not from ministries at all, but from various other agencies in the, in, the in, the in, the in the general administration. State archives online 16:20 Yaacov Lozowick: about 10 years ago. Yaacov Lozowick: we, the Government, a cabinet in a, you know, in a process of which I was very proud to participate, decided to put what for archives are very large sums of money, and hundreds of millions of dollars 16:35 on to pour them on to the state archives in, or that the State archives g0 0nline. Yaacov Lozowick: And to the best of my knowledge, even today the state of Israel is one of the few countries in the world. I know of 2, but there could be another one or 2 that i’m not aware of. The United States is not one of them. 16:53 Yaacov Lozowick: Where there is the intention to put the entire archival record online. 16:59 Yaacov Lozowick: everything Yaacov Lozowick: online for free and online for use by anybody where wherever they are, and whenever they are, and when there’s a lockdown because of Covid and the archives remain open because they 17:12 Yaacov Lozowick: that was the attempt, and between the moment the Government made that decision until I left in 2,018, we made significant strides in achieving that goal 17:23 Yaacov Lozowick: such that today. I don’t. I don’t i’m not there anymore, and I try and stay away from them. 17:29 Yaacov Lozowick: I don’t know the number today, but I would. My estimate is that there are 50 0r 60 million pages 17:36 Yaacov Lozowick: of documentation online at the website of the usual. Say Archive, and they’re there, and anybody can go and use them. 17:44 Yaacov Lozowick: The archive is continuing to put online materials according to their own reports. 17:50 Yaacov Lozowick: to the tune of about let’s say 40 0r 50,000 files a year times a 100, so it will give you 400. They’re putting on a couple of more 1000000 0f pages every every year. 18:05 Yaacov Lozowick: and so that’s that’s the good news, if what you’re interested in is has already been opened. It’s a smallish percentage, but it’s not tiny. 18:15 Yaacov Lozowick: If what you just use has already been open, then it’s there, and if what you’re interested in has not yet been open, you can order it. 18:22 Yaacov Lozowick: and they will open it for you free of charge and put it online for you in favor of everybody to see it. And that’s the end of the bit of the good news. Now it’s going to 18:31 Yaacov Lozowick: the bad news is that far more documentation is not online than his online. 18:37 Yaacov Lozowick: And the raids of opening. I said 40 0r 50,000 Yaacov Lozowick: files a year is actually smaller than the rate of documentation which becomes which should be going online according to the law documentation, which is 15 years old, should be online. 18:55 Yaacov Lozowick: and unless it’s diplomatic or Yaacov Lozowick: classified secret to a certain extent, in which case it with 25 years, or 3 years or 50 years, and there’s some issues of privacy that capability keep it sealed even longer. But privacy issues, for example, from very rarely will keep a file sealed, because, since it’s all digital lines all online. 19:15 Yaacov Lozowick: The archive is figured out wasn’t Very hard to do is figure out a way of redacting names in such a way that the entire file can g0 0nline without minus the names. 19:25 Yaacov Lozowick: So Yaacov Lozowick: the the archives have a tremendous backlog, and the back of is growing every year. 19:33 Yaacov Lozowick: There’s more material that comes of age and should be online. That is open. The second thing is that even when you do all order something, and and as a general rule in most cases, what the archive does is it opens what’s being ordered? In other words. 19:48 Yaacov Lozowick: they would like to have enough resources t0 0pen systematically entire part segments of the archive, but they don’t have those resources. 19:57 Yaacov Lozowick: and in reality most of what is open every year is what the public has ordered. 20:03 Yaacov Lozowick: and from my own personal experience. I can tell you that when you order material that you sometimes will get it within a week it will come online for you, and sometimes it takes 3 0r 4 years. 20:12 Yaacov Lozowick: And why does it sometimes take 3 0r 4 years? Well, this is a big and tough question, and I’m give the very, very few minutes. I mean this that I have here. I’m not going to delve into it in any great depth. 20:24 I will say that there are Yaacov Lozowick: basically a number of motivations for slowing down the process of opening 20:31 Yaacov Lozowick: the archival material. Yaacov Lozowick: The largest motivation is that the archive does not have the budget and the funds, and the resources to deal with the with the problem. 20:42 Yaacov Lozowick: But, on the other hand, it’s also not doing its best to utilize the resources that it does have. Yaacov Lozowick: and the possibilities that it does have. So that is an excuse which they love to use, but which I find only partially convincing. There’s something to it. 20:56 Yaacov Lozowick: but it’s not as convincing as they would like you to believe when they say we don’t have the resources to be. 21:02 Yaacov Lozowick: The second reason is that there’s material in there. They don’t want that. They don’t want you to see. But here, actually, the reality is that this is not a major issue. The archives the only have their act together, and they’re working much slower than they ought to be, but it’s not primarily, because they’re trying to keep 21:20 Yaacov Lozowick: so so specific things secret. And the proof of that is in the fact that you look at what they have opened. 21:27 Yaacov Lozowick: and you will find that in the 50 for 60 million pages that they’ve opened there is endless amounts of damning and incredibly incriminating things that do not like, make the state of Israel, and his policies look particular and particularly nice. 21:41 Yaacov Lozowick: And yet the archives are not. Yaacov Lozowick: They’re not blocking that material for that reason, according to the law, they’re not allowed to use that reason. In other words, embarrassing findings are not a legal reason that you’re allowed to 21:56 Yaacov Lozowick: to it so. Yaacov Lozowick: But the fact is that that is not generally what’s going on. What’s going on is 22:05 Yaacov Lozowick: sometimes a broader interpretation of what might harm the States 22:11 Yaacov Lozowick: security and foreign relations, then in reality is justified. Those are the 2, the the 2 principles that they’re allowed to use. If opening something will harm either the the the foreign relations, or the security of the state of Israel and the archivist are allowed not t0 0pen it. 22:30 Yaacov Lozowick: As I said, embarrassing material is not doesn’t. Fall under that. 22:36 Yaacov Lozowick: but they do at times use those interpretations in a broader way than 22:41 Yaacov Lozowick: and then then they should be, and there’s no political oversight, and there’s no public oversight. It’s very opaque. You can’t. You can’t see what it is and what it is that there that there’s not opening because they’re not opening it. There’s no way of 22:54 Yaacov Lozowick: of, of of of supervising their their their internal processes. 22:59 Yaacov Lozowick: So that is one part of what’s going on, and the second part of what’s going on is bureaucratic inertia and non-interest. The current administration of the archives 23:11 Yaacov Lozowick: is very excited about adapting AI to archival material, which is indeed a very fascinating topic. 23:18 Yaacov Lozowick: and they’re putting a lot of effort into that. And they’re doing all sorts of other things which are interesting to them into the system around the matter which are not particularly interest. I’m. Interested in public, which means that even the resources they do have. 23:30 they do not Yaacov Lozowick: puts as much effort int0 0pening material as they ought to. 23:36 Yaacov Lozowick: And the bottom line is that a lot of what the public by law should be allowed to see? It cannot see, or it can see only if it’s. If If researchers are willing to to put pressure on them and to and also to have a lot of patients. And Indeed, i’m talking from personal experience. There’s material that I ordered 4 years ago, which is not yet built. 24:04 Yaacov Lozowick: Finally, my last comment. Yaacov Lozowick: The reality is that at the moment in the entire state of Israel, and over the entire globe there are fewer than 5 people in the entire world. No public pressure 24:15 Yaacov Lozowick: We know enough about the laws of archives in Israel, and care enough. and are willing to stand up to the archives to make a fuss. One of the reasons that the archives allows itself not to. 24:27 Yaacov Lozowick: To. To. To hit the schedule and not to do things in a satisfactory way is because they know that nobody is going to complain that it doesn’t make any difference when I was a State, or I ever said I would use to say, the public demands this to be open. Everybody would look at me, and they would as if I was crazy, and they would say, Yaku! If there’s no public they want it t0 0pen. There may be an individual researcher, but even the individual researcher is not going to make this team. 24:51 Yaacov Lozowick: and they were Basically, right. Yaacov Lozowick: There are almost no users of the archives who stand up to them, face them, demand 25:01 Yaacov Lozowick: from knowledge what the rules really are, and demand that their material be open; and since there’s no public pressure on them like any other bureaucracy. There’s no public pressure on that, and there are other things that they’re more interested in, and so they don’t do it. 25:16 Yaacov Lozowick: And my final comment to that is that my experience has been that when I do 25:22 Yaacov Lozowick: argue with them, first of all, they open more material than otherwise. Yaacov Lozowick: and secondly, when they have redacted parts of a file, and I point out to them, if this doesn’t make any sense in about 25% of the cases that I say that 25:37 Yaacov Lozowick: they eventually agree with me in the open the full they open the full file. I mean 75 0f the cases they don’t, but it does mean that when you face them they will back down 25% of the cases 25:49 Yaacov Lozowick: roughly Yaacov Lozowick: so My request and suggest is that if any of you out there want to join us, instead of there will be, instead of our being 4 0r 5 people putting pressure on them. If we could be 50 0r 500 it would probably make a difference. 26:04 Yaacov Lozowick: And with that I finished with this. 26:09 Amos Goldberg: Thank you very much. A cold, knowing it from within and from without. And now, Orange, go ahead. 26:18 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: Hi, everyone! Thank you all for the introduction, and of course thank you with the border for the organization. I’m grateful for the invitation to speak today on this important panel. 26:30 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: and to share my insight as a sociologist who has long been working with Israeli and Palestinian archives. My historical sociological findings derive from field work in numerous archives in Israel. 26:45 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: Local Kibbut’s archive of Hashemer had Sahar’s settlement movement especially in Mar, Haymek, Hazoria, and the Gizral Valley, which intensively documented interactions with the ultimately displaced neighboring Palestinian villages 27:01 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: and 5 national archives. Yet the Ii research and Documentation Center, and has to be on Institute for Labour Movement Research, Hagana Historical Archives is real estate archives, and the central same archives 27:15 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: dedicated to the history of the Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: my years of archival mining engaged systematic analysis of 27:25 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: protocols, interview files, photographic collections, correspondences, memoirs, theologies, books 27:34 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: that the Kibu team and other historians produced on their own initiative and recurring newsletters. 27:43 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: I reconstruct the sediment processes on the frontier between 36 and 56, the zenith of the process of Zionist Colonization and Palestine and Palestinian resistance, using also post hoc recollections 28:00 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: recorded between sixties and the Ninetys, and preserved in the archives through my field work in Kibbut’s archives, tracing ruler named 28:11 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: Occupation, and take over, I transformed my relationship from one of Positivists 28:19 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: extraction t0 0ne of ethnographic participant observation. Realizing that these archives can be useful in explicating the informational mechanisms of settler colonial rule and the Palestinian past. 28:35 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: In this talk I speak to how the Zionist left during the British mandate, and following the Israeli State establishment, archived as means of appropriating land, and ultimately eliminating neighbouring Palestinians 28:51 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: from desired space, and in doing so preserved both a history of indigenous presence and of settler colonial violence. 29:02 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: I describe this process as archives of apprehension. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: by which I mean information gathering on the indigenous as as a. As a reconnaissance and ethnographic practice of settler, colonial conquest and apprehension As an effective state of anxious 29:22 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: archival subjects concerned with the reversibility of settler territorial sovereignty. 29:29 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: He puts archives during the British mandate period, and shortly after we’re organized as a practice of colonization. 29:38 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: Local examples from Hashemer had saire the allegedly radical lift as faction within the Zenous settlement movement, and other forms of apprehension, such as the Hagana village files project in the forties. Mandatory Palestine show how archives of apprehension include what colonization s0 0ften aims to eliminate. 30:02 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: even as lift the stainless archives reflect a selectivity around terms of perpetuation and guilt. They document encounters with and observation of the indigenous, whose resistance shaped inclusion, and exclusion in the archives. 30:23 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: This talk emerges in response to an epistemic context in Israeli social science and history in which the critical archival theories, long in play, in the study of transatlantic slavery and settler colonialism in the Americas and Antipodes have only recently trickled into the historical study of Palestine. Israel 30:48 generally, by way of cultural studies Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: as positivism, largely rains in historic historiographic methods. Archives of apprehension can partially recover histories of Palestinian villages and their inhabitants, especially regarding records of life on the frontier. 31:09 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: A populated rural zone, marked by a collision over land between Jew settlers Palestinians and British forces. 31:19 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: I argue that these archives of apprehension can reconstruct the historicity of a protracted colonization otherwise and preserved 31:31 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: in the case of Palestine Israel archives have often been treated as repositories for extracting contempt on territorial conflict. 31:43 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: Most scholars have relied on and continue to rely on elite sources in national Israeli British and Arab archives, and therefore depict a macro political account of 1,948 war based on details, of battles and war maneuvers. 32:04 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: diplomacy elite decisions and planning, or demographic and geographic accounts of transformation. This approach sidelined ambivalences, contingency and local variations wherever it neglects constitutive interactions between settlers one 32:23 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: and the indigenous that preceded the watershed moment of the 1,948 to grasp micro and meso-level processes. It is beneficial. Consider 32:36 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: to consider the resources produced in settler colonial archives, instrumentalizing such archives for historical sociological work, in tales, examining archival forms and processes of meaning, making 32:51 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: alongside, attempting to historically situate their functions in the constitution of settler sovereignty. 32:59 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: Settler colonial archives are conflict archives, in which political violence, physical and epistemic, is seen chronically documented and encoded these partial and fragmented archives vitally disclose otherwise unknowable aspects of indigenous life 33:18 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: on the frontier, and ultimately of settler colonial governance, including mechanism of classification and contribution attribution. In preserving phenomenological moments of the past. This archive became central to colonize their self-understanding 33:37 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: as they work to displace indigenous sovereignty and ensure the irreversibility of settlers accumulations 33:47 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: archive of apprehension, should be formulated and reconstructed a set of tools to trace colonization practices and to potentially reappropriate indigenous historicity 34:01 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: prior to the israeli founding in 4 in 48 Zionist colonial Nikolai in the populated frontier, prepared for land purchase by gathering detailed information about the Palestinian villages. 34:17 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: geography, typography, demography, political activity, customs, and culture, a strategy that in able design is move movement, albeit minimal initial foothold. In late Ottoman and mandatory Palestine. 34:32 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: The same is colonies among these those of Hashomer had Sair came to constitute pockets of a semi-sovereign rule listed within British Imperial view. 34:43 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: the archival institution and ethnographic practices of apprehension that appears through our design. This movement contributed to a colonial information, and Field used to entrench surveillance and control. 34:59 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: The goal was to a certain to rhetori at every visibility in the rural frontier. and to consolidate continuous presence outside urban centers. These archives, then. 35:13 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: would merge the history of the settler colonizer and the indigenous as dialectically intertwined, especially on the constitutive violence enacted against the indigenous population and practices of land control and resistant to replacement. 35:31 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: He boots settlers first fare faced a question of how to frame the story of the existence and ultimate disappearance of the Palestinian villages nested. Besides him. 35:47 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: I want to share a screen showing. I hope I can share. 35:54 If you are with me. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: It’s just 1 s, and I think it will share. Can you see the screen? 36:06 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: I’m sorry it’s a slow, but Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: a second, and I will be with you. Then you see the screen. 36:15 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: Yes. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: yes, okay. 36:22 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: Take a look at how the kibbut’s Archive documented 36:28 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: The documents. Each are a village that it’s helped to displace on a large map hanging prominently on the wall in the entrance of the keyboard archive representational discourse of the Palestinian Arab villages 36:45 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: shaped how settlers perceive the history of the indigenous, and their exit, as has she met, had saved settlers articulated indigenous life. Their information, gathering practices became a legitimation mechanisms as they attempt 37:01 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: to reconfigure Palestinian history as prehistory, and as they became intensely interested in the question of the Palestinian ethnic origin. The colonial archive captured captures the displaced Palestinian villages, just as it re 37:19 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: structures the historical narrative Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: representation of the Palestinian villages and their inhabitants persisted in the archive, despite systematic endeavors, to silence what preceded the distraction of property, renaming of places and etc. Many of the kibut’s archives contain media collections with images of the later displaced Palestinian village 37:46 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: villages and Kib boots. Member encounters with the Palestinian, indigenous in the vicinity 37:53 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: at Kibbutza, and Hashofet Archive, For instance, I located photographs of one of the one time Palestinian village Dramara. 38:03 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: a hilltop village which the Kibbutz colony subsumed in 37 after its residents were displaced. 38:13 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: I will share. Can you see the screen. 38:19 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: Ramos? Yes. 38:25 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: great. This is the Palestinian village, Johara I actually discovered in the Archive. 38:38 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: Neither Johara nor its occupation appear in Israeli and Palestinian historical sources on the displaced Palestinian villages, and yet detailed R. Of these villages and other others that elsewhere are lost remains in the keyboards archive. 39:00 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: Another another instance is in the project of the village files a completion of documents containing detailed information about the Palestinian villages and cities in mandatory Palestine, collected by the Hagana, the Zionist Free State militia between 43 and 48. The projects astounding delivers of cartographic visual and discursive detail can still be found in the Hagana Historical archives. 39:30 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: facilitated by hundreds of Hagana scouts, reconnaissance commanders, and intelligence officers. The settler militia apparatus inclusive of lyftusky wood settlers and Arab experts sought to apprehend the basic structure of the Arab village in their terms. Even as as the settler’s goals for the file wharfed over time scouts surveyed the village, topographic 39:57 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: geographic architecture, socio-cultural and political features, including infrastructure elements like roads, land, quality, water sources, and demographic data, including religious affiliation and age Details of the male Population 40:15 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: mit Ctl. And informants, Kitchen villages, maths, and viewpoints in my field work. Investigating the shermer, had saved colonies at Hagana historical archives, I encountered thousands of files detailing a range of information about the Palestinian villages, one 40:33 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: among them those that neighbor that would seem. I examine Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: files, detailed anything from your aura. So from a Bosre village newly planted through trees, or the number of students enrolled in it’s girls schools to the location of 29 0r up coffee houses in hyphen where political activity was presumed to take place to the names and ages of the Arab activity. Activists in Tantura obtained from an in for 41:07 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: this slide that I’m. Showing now depicts the first page of a 41:26 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: practices, and these 2 images, this, one and the other one. 41:32 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: Our drawings created by Hagan’s count on 41:39 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: efforts to apprehend Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: just a second. I I see there is object. Efforts to apprehend. The Palestinians are important to resource are important resources, not least because they outline how Zenus lift us on the frontier understood themselves. There are numerous 42:02 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: erez 42:21 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: a value Hashemer had surre often profaced alongside their value of class liberation. For these lift, test. The archive reflected, and produced their self perception by preserving the Palestinian villages in Archival Iv. Even as the villages were being displaced, they simultaneously recognized, and this about the settlement rule in the village distraction, the constant colonial anxiety over impairments reinforced 42:49 by persistent violent violent scrimmage. Required a iterative reaffirmation of the colonial legitimacy and the Zionist militia attempt to so to secure it. 43:01 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: Second, the inclusion forms part of an appropriation come substantial process settlers did not express feeling jeopardized by their explicit inclusion of the Palestinian path they legitimized their practices of territorialization and their right to claim space 43:20 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: by de-linking Palestinians as non-sover, non-historical, and rooted and unproductive from the land the kibut settlers substantiated their claims by linking themselves to 43:33 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: to conting just a jewish history extending to ancient time to position their claim to land as indisputable. They also aligned the right to belonging with Hashomer had say, Socialism claims that Lang belonged to those who productively worked it. 43:51 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: Therefore the Palestinian on these settlers believed to be unproductive, despite their long history of cultivation, were not deemed legitimate processors of desired space, and their inclusion and archival form was no threat of 44:07 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: a redistribution. Third and loss. Some left as them as settlers expressed on few occasions, and in various locations across the archive effects of uneasiness and hunting over their own actions, and all over the sordid fate of their previous Palestinian neighbors, including the Palestinian in the archives, then may be one way. The settlers attempted to preserve this past 44:31 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: and all its features to depict what they turned an inevitable and intentional outcome and lost hyper inclusion in the archives pissed pits entirely. The Zionist policy of details. Palestine was not 44:47 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: only the promised land, it was a specific territory with a specific characteristic that was surveyed down to the laws. 44:55 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: Millimeters settled on, planned for in detail, as it were. To it, argues Zenus Sittler historiography has dual function to inhabit the claims of settler and legitimacy on one hand, and to preserve the history of settler violence. On the other hand, thereby settler colonial archives are a significant but totally in adequate resource that we can that can be called up on to revive a past elsewhere denied 45:23 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: Such archives, offer tools to challenge the inevitability of colonization and the valence of this position through the attempt to collect and eternalize settler national sovereignty. Such a process, paradoxically and dialectically preserve indigenous collective presence. Thank you. 45:44 Amos Goldberg: Thank you very much. We have already a number of questions, and I asked you also to prepare questions to each other. But let’s first. They go to the audience that they have, they. So I I I will. I will Audience Questions 46:01 Amos Goldberg: collect together a couple of questions. I think you mostly 46:07 Amos Goldberg: a both of you. But you decide what you so many, many ask about those things that 46:16 Amos Goldberg: not open. Amos Goldberg: and for a it can. The speakers give an idea of what is the unavailable part of the archive? In other words, what are the authorities trying to hide? And what are the mechanisms? 46:30 Amos Goldberg: Another question in this direction is Amos Goldberg: a a for for for for a a Dr. Lassovi. One example of the unavailable parts would be their Ghana photographer, Shaga pellets, photos taking a April 1,948 during the Delia scene. Massacre 46:47 Amos Goldberg: and documentary movie make a Neta Sushani and many others have tried to have looked at the these photos during the years, but the request have always been denied. So with the kind of material from 1947 1949 will ever be released. 47:02 Amos Goldberg: So and there are several more questions on Amos Goldberg: what is what is unavailable. So perhaps you start the Yakub, and then I leave you at your jump in and add your 47:14 Amos Goldberg: what Amos Goldberg: unmute? Yaacov Lozowick: Yes, Sorry about that. State Archive 47:21 Yaacov Lozowick: First of all in in the State Archive. There’s almost nothing from 1,948, which is still sealed. Yaacov Lozowick: And no should there be there’s no law that would allow it still to be sealed up to almost 75 years. 47:33 Yaacov Lozowick: It’ll say like, have. So I, as I said, there’s that that’s I mean. I suppose there may be a file here out there that somebody missed, or for whatever reason. But there’s no policy of hiding material from 1,948 the family matter is in the State archive. There’s no policy abiding information at all. 47:51 Yaacov Lozowick: There is in the State archive and in the Military Archive. Yaacov Lozowick: What is hidden is much more a question of what they have not yet gotten to, and they’re not in any hurry to get to. I’ll give you an example. The protocols of the cabinet meetings. according to law, should be open up until 1,992 is nice. Remain seal for 30 years, and 92 t0 23 is. 48:13 Yaacov Lozowick: is it? Where that’s that’s a 30 year period. So it it should be that all the cabinet meetings from 1,948, until 1,992 should all be open. In reality they’re open until 1,977 and from 1977 0n They’re not open. 48:28 Yaacov Lozowick: Is this a policy decision to say that we’re not going t0 0pen? What was done for the big and gave government? I don’t think so. I honestly don’t think that’s what’s going on. Opening cabinet to protocols is a is a is a lengthy process. 2 different people have to read it. A third person has to has to look over at what they did. It’s a lot of work. They’re not in any particular way to do so. This is very aggravating. 48:52 Yaacov Lozowick: but I don’t think it’s a policy of saying we don’t want people to know what the vacant government is. 48:58 Yaacov Lozowick: As a general statement, I would say, even in the military archive, which is far more sealed than the state of 49:04 Yaacov Lozowick: you’ve been in the military archive. There is rarely a policy of saying, we don’t want this sort of material to be to a certain extent in the military archive. There is, indeed military material from 1,948, which is not yet open. 49:19 Yaacov Lozowick: There is a lot of material in the State in the military, from from more recent years which is an open. 49:26 Yaacov Lozowick: I again I I I mean I will be the first to admit that this is very frustrating and aggravating. 49:33 Yaacov Lozowick: but I have to say that I think it is more Yaacov Lozowick: a question of 49:40 Yaacov Lozowick: focusing their Yaacov Lozowick: limited resources on things that interest them rather than things interest the public More than a policy of this is what we want to hide. I I don’t think that they are certainly not in state archive 49:54 Yaacov Lozowick: in the military archive I don’t know, but in the standard I have. There is no policy that says we’re going to hide the events of 1948 0r 1967 0r or anything else. And so it’s a question of they don’t care enough, and the public is not putting pressure on them, and so they’re not getting around to doing. 50:17 Amos Goldberg: Please, do you want to add something? Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: I think I want to add another layer of say of what Yakov, they say. Thank you, Yako, I think. First of all, the question is not about hiding or not. It’s not to just that. Discussion 50:36 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: First of all, how the percentage of materials that are exposed in this or cars. They, as as far as I know, they don’t exceed 5%. This is first. 50:47 so we, the the general information from the archives are just 5, so we have 95 around 95% 50:57 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: that are not a a a open to the public. The second thing is, i’m not sure about the your opinion, Yakov. About their. They They rarely hide information or etc. I myself find in different files 51:18 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: places where a paper was added. A file was removed from here, especially after the a. After the the archives were opened, and there were information about the 48 the like, the and etc. So this is one. The second thing the harm was, I think, we should like the the that we should raise is also which kind of archive we are looking for, and for which, what is the AIM of this? 51:46 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: As I said on my port in in my talk, and I want to in a certain that that the the this state archived as as the State archive, or the Hagan, or etc., they give us to just a general a general pictures, and if we go to the local archives, the one that I examine, they really expose 52:11 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: mit Ctl, and a different kind of history of past of information and the possibility to read against the archivally grain. That means not to just what they AIM. By the collections of this archive archival material is more open to us. One. 52:27 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: So I would move if from the question of hiding or not, because I I think, and and the other people actually Benny Morris himself talks about, for example, how the how the Zionist leaders would themselves 52:44 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: through their right, through their writing, their preserving the protocols of committees, Bingarian himself and his diaries would eliminate part of what the 52:58 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: in the beginning role in this journals or in these menu. So the question is for for me is to they construct and to read the critically the archives. It’s not the just what they include, but how we read them. What are the information that we can extract from them. 53:19 Yaacov Lozowick: I I would agree with her. She’s right. 53:29 Yaacov Lozowick: and what she’s describing is a way of a very intelligently analyzing what’s in there in order to see 53:37 Yaacov Lozowick: the outlines of what’s not in there. That’s great, that that’s that’s that’s good historical research doesn’t it doesn’t change the fact that the archives are open or not open. 53:53 Amos Goldberg: I don’t know if you mentioned it, that they Amos Goldberg: they unlock unlawfully. It sends out the archives and a a and it’s it’s, it’s, it’s it’s the archives and in and of it and UN unlawfully. 54:10 Yaacov Lozowick: No, no, I don’t. I don’t. There is no such committee not that i’m aware of. There’s a process again in this. In the in the in the military archives they have a committee which has no legal standing, but it’s very. It’s very much there which a a decides in the case of each researcher, if they’re going to be, if they’re going to be helpful or not, which is totally illegal. 54:30 Yaacov Lozowick: and I’ve told them any number of times. This is illegal, but they continue to it, and that’s the way it is. But there there’s no committee which is deciding that this is, or that can’t be open. What there is is a process of 54:43 Yaacov Lozowick: checking files before they open to the public. Yaacov Lozowick: and some of that was done many years ago. When, when I really says correctly, she’s right. When I read, says that she gets files that have entire pages removed. She’s right. But the fact is, those files are probably the pages. We probably will removed in the 19 nineties, or maybe even in the 19 eighties. 55:04 Yaacov Lozowick: or certainly 20 years ago, and if you, if you, if you say to them, wait a minute that you could have done that then, but you can’t do it now. They will back up. They’ll feel back off. I I have this experience with the military archive. Last week they sent me a pile of files took me a long time to get them, but they sent me a pile of files. 55:23 Yaacov Lozowick: about 20,000 pages of files, and there were about 760 pages that were there, were they were it it said that they were removed. 55:31 Yaacov Lozowick: I said, what’s going on? You You can’t do that that’s illegal, and they said you’re right, Yako. But the files were checked in in 2,006, and in 2,006. It was still legal, because it was less than 50 years, and we since you call our attention to fact, we will now go and re-examine those files, but I assume that they’re probably open most of the pages. 55:48 Yaacov Lozowick: This will take months to waste of their time in line. It’s aggravating. Yaacov Lozowick: But and this is what I said before, if there were more users who were insisting on 55:59 Yaacov Lozowick: who knew the law and insisted that they live according to the law, they would be more careful. 56:07 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: Yeah. Cove a, and that’s Yaku. Sorry almost. Can I have the small thing about the digitization, Yakov? I would think I I I I think we need to complicate our our perspective of the digitization and make the archive accessible to general to public. Because if we, if we 56:34 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: try to deeply understand this process. This is, I see it as part of surveillance that the original materials before they’re digitizing are scrutinized to the public. I am afraid that this process might take out out 56:53 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: further information. Further, a files that could that we, as researchers, can approach them differently. This is first, second, almost, if they, if you may let me. I see one questions from Dr. Sal about the the significance of using left in this case 57:16 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: to this is the question I I address deeply in my book. But here I want to say that 57:25 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: the 57:48 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: there’s an in interaction with these movements. So they, the the question of left here is in the Archive, specifically dealing with the archives, I think, and according to my work, in different archives, the list test archives quote, and was left us. Zen is left us include more information about the Palestinians, because they address also the question. 58:17 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: the Arabic question intensely, and they are occupied with. So, in terms of how these archives can help us 58:26 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: reconstruct the Palestinian House. It’s beneficial, but E. As to the other question about left, I I will leave it to my book, because it will take more time from me to explain 58:46 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: almost. You are still in a muted Amos Goldberg: Thank you. So let’s take one very brief. We fair question, and I I encourage also the public, the audience 58:58 Amos Goldberg: to search a to a search, the website of a keyboard? 59:04 Amos Goldberg: A. What do we do? Do we do a an extensively and an impressive work in the archives, and search there and see the reports on 59:15 Amos Goldberg: on, on various aspects, on various topics that we have discussed here. So 59:20 Amos Goldberg: we Google a you vote and see how Ak or v it, and and you can see it there. A very brief question to to to you a 59:33 Amos Goldberg: a it. Amos Goldberg: a Los Angelesen, and it’s, please be. We have 1 min to answer it as a a taking the add, a history is told by the oppressive victims. It face value and seeking an alternative narrative. What forms of archival or historical knowledge are available from Palestinian projectives. 59:55 Amos Goldberg: a perspectives either through all this or less institutional, any means of information collection. Please be brief, because we have only 1 min. 1:00:05 I just want to say that the the answer to this is, I can share in in an article that I published, which is settler colonialism, and the Archives of Apprehension, where I based my talk on it’s that I can’t relate to this question. But the oral history projects by the Palestinian Institute and different Palestinian Institute are very important and crucial a oral history projects and the family 1:00:35 Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: files, of course, and there are other, a Palestinian documents and resources. I think that should be, including, while we a right the history of Palestine and the Palestinian I myself did around 50 0ral history interviews, and this will be this in on my second book. Project. 1:00:57 Amos Goldberg: Okay. Amos Goldberg: Thank you very much. 1:01:04 Deborah Dwork: and I add my thanks. Thank you, Ari Shakov, and almost for the work each of you does for these fabulous presentations for your participation in this event. 1:01:18 Deborah Dwork: Indeed, many thanks to everyone, speakers and listeners for Jo for joining today. The conversation prompts all of us to think and to think a new, and to send in requests to the Archive for the opening of documents. 1:01:38 Deborah Dwork: So I thank you. Deborah Dwork: and have a good evening. All 1:01:44 Deborah Dwork: those who are in Jerusalem, and a good afternoon for those of us in New York. Thank you so very, very much. 1:01:52 Yaacov Lozowick: Thank you. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: Thank you. The Board and everyone. Thank you.
Mar 17, 2023 The Bedouin of the Negev desert have long sought legal recognition from the State of Israel. Without legal status, they are denied their basic rights as Israeli citizens: access to public health services, water, electricity, public transportation, is inadequate or unavailable. Rah’ma is one of the few unrecognized villages that has been promised recognition, yet that promise remains unfulfilled. Still: a school has been approved and built, public utilities have improved, and village residents see some hope. What makes Rah’ma different from other Bedouin villages in the Negev? What paved the way to the promise of recognition? What changes will recognition bring? And can Rah’ma be a model for Israeli-Bedouin relations going forward? Please join for a discussion between Sliman Elfregat, Rah’ma school principal; Debbie Golan, co-founder and president of Atid Bamidbar; and Dvir Warshavsky, Ministry of Education project director. Chair and moderator: Eli Karetny, deputy director of the Ralph Bunche Institute.
Transcript
0:59 Deborah Dwork: Hello. Deborah Dwork: My name is to Deborah Dwork, and I am the director of the Center for the study of the holocaust 1:07 Deborah Dwork: genocide and crimes against humanity at the graduate Center City University of New York. 1:15 Deborah Dwork: It is my great pleasure to welcome you to the fifth of a year long series on the marginalized 1:24 Deborah Dwork: and the displaced. Deborah Dwork: The historical record is marked by voids. Delighted events disappeared. People erased to counts marginalized communities. 1:38 Deborah Dwork: This series tackles a number of those blank spots in history. and in our own time. 1:48 Deborah Dwork: I thank our series partners, and why You’s Professor Emerita, of Hebrew and Judic Studies, Marion Kaplan and Stockton, University, Professor Ros. Sagon. 2:02 Deborah Dwork: I think, to center associate one as a vehicle on whose help I rely 2:09 Deborah Dwork: Michael X. From for his outreach activities and the Gc’s terrific it people Brad, Wholesh and Steve Thomas. 2:20 Deborah Dwork: Above all. Deborah Dwork: I am grateful to our speakers and to everyone who has tuned in. Thank you for your engagement. 2:30 Deborah Dwork: It is now my pleasure to introduce my colleague, Dr. Eli. Correct me. Deputy Director of the Ralph Bunch Institute for International Studies, and a lecturer in Political science at Baruch College at Cuny. 2:48 Deborah Dwork: Eli will have the honor of introducing our esteemed guests. 2:55 Deborah Dwork: the son of immigrants. Deborah Dwork: not by their own reckoning refugees, so as I say, the son of immigrants from the Ukraine. As it was then 3:08 Deborah Dwork: Eli returned to his parents homeland as a Peace Corps volunteer. His life path took him from there to scholarship 3:19 Deborah Dwork: on the intellectual foundations of American neo-conservatism the wartime origins of the United Nations. 3:29 Deborah Dwork: And now a research project on the negative Bedouin 3:36 Deborah Dwork: in the course of the discussion today you may catch a glimpse of a core interest. 3:44 Deborah Dwork: What factors influence the path Deborah Dwork: to recognition of Bedouin villages by the state of Israel. I will leave you with that cliffhanger. 3:58 Deborah Dwork: Eli. Deborah Dwork: It is with great appreciation that I seed the floor to you. 4:07 Eli Karetny: Thank you, Professor Dork. Eli Karetny: It is my honor and privilege on behalf of the Cuny Graduate Center, the Route Bunch Institute 4:14 Eli Karetny: and the center for the study of the holocaust genocide and crimes against humanity. To moderate this discussion of the Bedouin of the negative. 4:21 Eli Karetny: Our second discussion of the topic Eli Karetny: This is a follow up to our October, 2021 event which looked at the Bedouin issue through the lens of emptied lands and displaced people there we discussed the situation of the unrecognized villages and now Israeli Policies of displacement and urbanization 4:39 Eli Karetny: have led to hopeless conditions in these villages, leaving some to become symbols of Sumud. Eli Karetny: a Bedouin tradition of steadfastness that animates an attitude of nonviolent resistance which the Palestinian writer, Raja Shahade, has described as a third way between mute submission and blind rage. 4:57 Eli Karetny: But an ethic of resistance that links identity and political struggle to reclaiming ancestral land is not the only way the better, and have chosen to pursue their goals 5:06 Eli Karetny: better when Sumud expresses itself differently from village to village. Some villages even choose to focus on the tools of engagement 5:13 Eli Karetny: by deepening relations with neighboring Jewish towns. Eli Karetny: The village of Ahma is a case study, and how good neighborly relations between Bedouins and Jews on the periphery can overcome challenges at the national level. 5:26 Eli Karetny: The plan for today’s discussion is to focus on. Eli Karetny: to compare it to other unrecognized Bedouin villages, discuss what makes it unique, but also what makes it representative of those Bedouin villages that resist urbanization while seeking recognition by working closely with neighboring Jewish communities 5:43 Eli Karetny: and local government agencies rather than emphasizing the tools of resistance. Eli Karetny: But in light of what’s happening now in Israel? We’re reminded that resistance is often required 5:52 Eli Karetny: when state policies threaten the basic rights of citizens. Eli Karetny: Some commentators like Youval Harari, have called the government’s proposed changes to the judiciary. 6:02 Eli Karetny: a cool. Eli Karetny: an anti-democratic plan, that endangers the fundamental rights of all Israeli citizens, particularly minorities. the nature, and maybe even the existence of Israeli. Democracy appears to be at stake. Certainly the liberal character of Israeli. Democracy is at stake. 6:18 Eli Karetny: but Israel’s Arab citizens never experienced Israel State power as liberal Eli Karetny: Israeli Arabs understand the State can deny its citizens their basic rights. 6:27 Eli Karetny: and if the State privileges the Jewish character of his democracy. so Eli Karetny: how much of what we fear could happen in Israel and not just in Israel is already happening, maybe has always been happening. The logic of the modern state can be ruthless, and the logic of ideologies that privilege, certain chosen groups, is always so. 6:45 Eli Karetny: The better one of the negative have their own story to tell about their experience as indigenous Arabs confronting a modern State, which granted them citizenship soon after its founding. 6:55 Eli Karetny: but never protected the basic rights that accompany this legal status. Eli Karetny: But there seems to be a positive shift in recent years and State policy towards some guideline villages. 7:04 Eli Karetny: even as the Supreme Court ruled definitively against all Bedouin claims to ancestral land ownership. It also insisted that the State cannot deny it’s bed on the citizens their basic rights. 7:15 Eli Karetny: the act of recognizing Bedou and villages, but forced the State to build schools, provide electricity, water, health services. 7:23 Eli Karetny: But the State continues to deny that recognition. So all but a few villages and treat the bedroom as trespassers on their own historic lands. 7:32 Eli Karetny: The State has favored Jewish settlement of the land since it’s founding, which is meant that some Bedou and villages are relocated to make room for new Jewish towns. 7:40 Eli Karetny: How this would change, if at all, under a transformed Israeli regime is unclear 7:46 Eli Karetny: for some bedroom villages nothing will change at all. Eli Karetny: Pressure to urbanize will continue demolitions, relocations with the dial of recognition. This will continue 7:56 Eli Karetny: some villages of long known. They would never be recognized by the State. Eli Karetny: and even as they differ amongst themselves as to how best to proceed with honor, Young Bedouin may be turning toward new legal and political tools. Some of them may turn to international law and the protections offered by undrip the UN Declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples. 8:14 Eli Karetny: Some may turn to their king in the Palestinian national movement. Some will remain steadfast in their samood. 8:20 Eli Karetny: but Rafael has pursued a different path, and it now finds itself at the doorstep of legal recognition which should facilitate further development. I’m delighted to introduce our panelists who have each played in their own way a role in the changes that Akma is now undergoing, centered around an elementary school that was built in 2,020. 8:38 Eli Karetny: I’ll introduce our speakers and invite each to share a few thoughts about what’s happening in Israel at the national level. But then we’ll shift our focus to Rahma, which may offer some insight into changing social dynamics in Israel. 8:51 Eli Karetny: Debbie Goldman and Golan was born in the Us. And made Aliyat to Israel in 1,972 ultimately settling in the town of Utaham in the negative desert She’s, the co-founder of ate Buttoni, Butter, which means future in the desert. 9:05 Eli Karetny: which does important work in several areas, including as an incubator for Bedou and Jewish initiatives that support women’s, empowerment programs, capacity development projects for Bedouin farmers and other educational health initiatives. 9:17 Eli Karetny: A Tee Bami Bar is a co-founder and leading member of the good neighbors network, and the negative, which includes 9 Grassroots, Bedouin and Jewish organizations, and 40 activists in 14 Bedouin and Jewish localities. 9:31 Eli Karetny: The Network’s mission is to build a foundation of trust and collaboration between residents of Jewish and Bedouin communities share best practices, create grassroots, social change 9:41 Eli Karetny: and influenced public policy. Eli Karetny: Slim on Alpha-gat has been the Rahma school principal since it opened in 2,020. 9:49 Eli Karetny: He was born in Rahma got a master’s degree in history and geography from Jadata University in Jordan. 9:55 Eli Karetny: has a teacher certificate from Ben Gurion University, and is a graduate of the principals training program at Ahma College 10:02 Eli Karetny: for 17 years. Lemon was a nature education teacher and one of the biggest bedroom schools in the Mega. Eli Karetny: He believes better when education requires blending modern pedagogy with traditional cultural knowledge 10:13 Eli Karetny: via. Or Shevsky. Eli Karetny: He’s a social activist, engage in education, policy, reform. He has managed projects for the Ministry of Education consulted for various foundations and currently works. The Rashi Foundation. 10:25 Eli Karetny: via is a lifelong resident of, and has worked closely with, the Bedouin of Rahma for many years, including developing educational programs at the Rahma School 10:34 Eli Karetny: landscaping projects after-school robotics programs, student mentoring even helping Rachman residents defend against demolition orders 10:43 Eli Karetny: the format of Today’s talk is a. Q. A. About the Bedouin of Rahma. I’ll ask each speaker, as I said, to say a few words about the national situation. But then we’ll shift our focus to Rahma. 10:53 Eli Karetny: A note to the audience. The final round of questions will come directly from you, so please use the Q. A. Box and zoom to ask questions of our panelists. 11:03 Eli Karetny: So the first question is to each of you, we I I want to apologize. We were hoping Sliman would, would would be here by now. But 11:12 Eli Karetny: I’m sorry. Okay, that’s great. I see perfect. So 11:18 Eli Karetny: that is excellent Welcome, Shalom. The first question is for you. How concerned are you about the this this situation happening nationally the political situation? How is it affecting life for for you? And in 11:37 Eli Karetny: Hi, let me just say, Slamine, who was aware that this question would be coming, prepared a few remarks. He will speak in Hebrew, and I will share a screen of his translated remarks, which they’d be translated earlier today. So i’m going to share that screen and 11:53 Eli Karetny: slim on police. The floor is yours. 12:08 Debbie Golan: Hey, man Dvir Warshavsky: again. 12:41 Dvir Warshavsky: and a to. Aye, aye, Sierra Leone. 13:01 Dvir Warshavsky: Oh, now she hmm! 13:17 Dvir Warshavsky: And of the Kazakh. 13:25 Eli Karetny: So the Sliman 13:30 Dvir Warshavsky: David Eli Karetny: to be here. Maybe I i’ll shift to you to beer, just to say a few words, please, about the you know your thoughts about the national political situation. How far do you think some of these proposed changes could actually go. Do you? Do you see this as a threat to? Is Israeli democracy? 13:49 Dvir Warshavsky: Yeah. So I would say, in short, that all I think all of us Really, we don’t really know what’s gonna happen, but it’s it. It’s it’s quite scary, and we we don’t really know. But the direction is. 14:05 Dvir Warshavsky: I don’t know it. It looks very problematic. 14:11 Dvir Warshavsky: but I have to say that I think that it’s important to to to point about the distinction between the things that going on in the political level 14:21 Dvir Warshavsky: and the things that happened in the civic level of the the level of the communities, especially in the periphery context. 14:29 Dvir Warshavsky: I mean, there is a it’s. Of course, there is connection between these levels. but definitely not 14:36 Dvir Warshavsky: total correlation, like there is other trends that happen in the same time, maybe sometimes in a very paradoxical way. 14:46 Dvir Warshavsky: And there’s many new connections in the level of communities 14:51 Dvir Warshavsky: that they that Dvir Warshavsky: exist, although we don’t really know how. 15:00 Dvir Warshavsky: in the long run the the political level will influence them. So it’s an important thing to note and let’s see. 15:08 Eli Karetny: Thank you to be here and and Debbie. Maybe you could just share a few thoughts about how you understand what what’s happening. 15:14 Debbie Golan: I I really identify with the words of the President of Israel Hertzog. It’s a character of last night, he said. We’re either on the edge of a cliff, but also maybe on a potential for moving off to a new rising to a new future. And I think 15:31 Debbie Golan: that we have a tremendous opportunity here as well as tremendous. What looks like danger to basic democratic rights and 15:39 Debbie Golan: balances, and 15:45 Debbie Golan: I think my my personal take is to Debbie Golan: a Debbie Golan: work harder to to do what we can to connect communities and people 15:57 Debbie Golan: of differing opinions, and also differing nationalities here in Israel, and also between Rahma and Yvonne, in the hope that the interpersonal and intercommunal relationships that we’re building will be strong enough to weather any top down. 16:15 Debbie Golan: Kind of decisions. I’m. I’m. Very concerned. But I want to spend my energy 16:21 Debbie Golan: on the the building of the better foundations which I think are necessary, and I think that I see them also emerging. 16:29 Debbie Golan: New groups are coming into the protest movement. Who are, I mean right wing, and 16:34 Debbie Golan: not only left wing, and that Debbie Golan: for me is the kind of awakening of the silent majority what’s called a silent majority that gives me great hope that there is a lot of people who don’t want to rush down 16:47 Debbie Golan: this too fast road to Debbie Golan: to what looks dangerous 16:54 Eli Karetny: today. Thank you for that, Debbie, just knowing a little bit about just how hard you you work. I can’t imagine what what it looks like for you to work even harder. So with that I wouldn’t want to shift to to talking about Rahma and what’s happening with the Bedouin in the negative. 17:10 Eli Karetny: and Debbie might maybe we can begin with you sharing some some of the experiences with the the work of your organization that 17:20 Eli Karetny: I know You’ve done a lot of important work over the years with the Bedouin. Maybe you can tell us about how the relationship between the residents of Utah and the bedroom of Rahma serves as a kind of model for the work of the good good neighbors network. 17:36 Debbie Golan: I’ll be happy to the Our nonprofit is over it’s almost 33 years old, from 1,990, and from the in the inception one of our goals was creating connections, mutual acquaintance and joint 17:53 Debbie Golan: work, joint action, collaboration between diverse population groups, both within your and and between Yuru Khan and Rahma, and between different population groups in the negative region as a whole, and I think the key to our work is working with, and not for, and being very 18:12 Debbie Golan: listening really carefully to what what hurts other people, but also what we have in common, and what? What will work 18:22 Debbie Golan: together, maybe to to make things better. The the work with the Rasma sits on of between you are common. It’s on a very solid foundation of relationships that we’re built because a lot of the Presidents of are Arabic, speaking North African Jews and some of the Persian Jews who Don’t speak Arabic. 18:41 Debbie Golan: but they come from agricultural backgrounds and found a a common language also. Many of the men in Raqhma. The older men especially served in the Idf as trackers for many years, and some lived in Yurucham. So that was like a kind of foundation of mutual acquaintance. 150 18:57 Debbie Golan: and good neighborly relations that a group called a Citizens group called Milk is only need. Your original texture and neighbors that we started about 17 years ago. One 19:08 Debbie Golan: built on that. And then we decided to. We began talking with our Bedwin neighbors and seeing, okay, what’s one of the big issues? What are the big issues that you’re dealing with. 19:19 Debbie Golan: and one area was education. There were no kindergartens. They, the Government ministry of education assumed that 3 to 5 year olds, would be bused 35 kilometers to another tribe or another town, and and that just didn’t happen. So the people in Rahma said the first thing we water kindergartens 19:35 Debbie Golan: so our kids can get prepared for school. And then after that there was a 5 year struggle. That also was about 5 years, 4 and a half years, and then a 5 year struggle to get the elementary school open again, so the children wouldn’t have to be bust, and there wouldn’t be the dropout situation. That’s often new case in Bedwin schools, and 19:53 Debbie Golan: the work that we do together today is based on Debbie Golan: both. As you mentioned Women’s empowerment a a joint Yurukam Rahma Women’s group that became a model for a rod. Telerad, the robotics program that beer headed that he’ll he’ll speak about. I think Yuri Khan is a robotics empire for children, and and that’s also 20:15 Debbie Golan: benefiting the residents of Raja. But also there’s something called a youth home that a lawyer, you know, a police set up for disadvantaged neighborhoods around Israel. And this is his first time to set up such a program in Rothman and unrecognized Bedwin village. 20:30 Debbie Golan: It’s basically giving afternoon enrichment activities and help with homework. 20:36 Debbie Golan: But we also see that bed with women that we’ve worked with, that we work now with. There are 3 groups of women studying Hebrew in their homes, and some some of them started help with the homework for the kids in their area of Rahma. I think I should say that Rahman is not like a concentrated in one spot village. It’s 16 20:55 Debbie Golan: clubs of settlement surrounding your and 300 degrees, and very spread out. It’s a kind of way of preserving something of the nomadic distance between people that existed also in a sedentary format, and 21:11 Debbie Golan: therefore you need buses for everything to get people to the school and to the kindergarten, and also to activities enrichment activities in your 21:22 Debbie Golan: which provides services. De facto is a mixed city Debbie Golan: for for Eli Karetny: Debbie. Can you say a little more about about this unique relationship? What seems to me like a unique relationship, or maybe, or maybe tell us just how unique is this, and also what what is what? Some of the kind of historical experiences that have contributed to this to the relationship. Some, you know you do harm is not like other Israeli cities, right? So maybe give us a feel for what makes you, Tom unique, and how that contributes to to this special relationship. 21:53 Debbie Golan: Okay, I I think I mentioned that that maybe i’ll make it clear. Your hum is a small town of not even yet 13,000 people 22:01 Debbie Golan: by extremely diverse with representatives from most of the major immigrant groups that came to Israel, I would say about 40% North African, 12% Indian Jews, maybe 5% Persian Jews, and about 25% Russian speaking Jews from all over the former Soviet Union, and 22:21 Debbie Golan: and Debbie Golan: also a religious Zionist community and and secular and ultra orthodox. 22:29 Debbie Golan: So it’s a very, very mixed community and a poor community. The socioeconomic ranking of Israeli localities has us, in the third from the bottom 22:40 Debbie Golan: level, and it’s about 30% of your home’s budget goes to welfare. 22:47 Debbie Golan: elderly immigrants, etc., and Debbie Golan: therefore there is maybe a commonality of 22:56 Debbie Golan: the the the need to deal with issues of being in a periphery, and the negative periphery far from the center of country, far from centers of power. And 23:06 Debbie Golan: one of the things that’s also unique about your home, I think, is that it always, from the beginning actually had this entrepreneurial spirit in areas of education and culture, and even businesses, to some extent that that has 23:22 Debbie Golan: maybe interacted with and and helped Debbie Golan: promote some of those initiatives, also with our neighbors and friends in Rahma the 23:32 Debbie Golan: I. When we founded the good neighbors network with chateau, and and then later, the Council for unrecognized villages in Israel, we said, the model of promoting 23:45 Debbie Golan: good health. Okay, which is a critical issue for poor communities where it’s cheaper to buy junk food and 23:51 Debbie Golan: get Debbie Golan: obese and diabetes and heart problems, especially if you’re leading a sedentary life now instead of a nomadic one. It’s also in in your and it’s I mean it’s. It’s a common problem in poor populations in the negative. 24:06 Debbie Golan: And Debbie Golan: so we we said, okay, we Debbie Golan: We can 24:13 Debbie Golan: teach other activists in Bedwin and Jewish villages and towns in the Negative how to 24:20 Debbie Golan: News Debbie Golan: Women’s Empowerment. Hebrew Instruction. Arabic Language Studies Sports for Children and Tourism Development as so community-based tourism. The kind of tourism that a Tibet Bar believes in as a social change tool, because it adds. 24:38 Debbie Golan: it gives a stage for personal stories. It gives income. Debbie Golan: and it gives 24:44 Debbie Golan: a new way to encounter the other. Okay, whether you’re from the center of the country or from abroad, and you you, you are no longer trapped by the images that the media sells, and this is important for Yurukan no less than for Raja. 25:02 Eli Karetny: Thank you, Debbie. Thank you. In in our discussions you’ve helped me understand the complexity of the Bedouin issue, both as a subset of the broader Israeli Palestinian struggle and a separate challenge related to indigenous rights, Ancestral land claims and the protection of basic citizenship rights. 25:23 Eli Karetny: So the Bedouin are Israeli citizens. They are Palestinian Arabs. They’re Muslim, but above all, they’re better win. Even if the Bedouin way of life is no longer an option, the traditional better one way of life. 25:36 Eli Karetny: But you often remind me that these identity questions can actually create obstacles to progress, and it’s better to think in terms of village strategies. And here we’ve discussed 2 different approaches to kind of sets of tools, some mood and engagement. 25:54 Eli Karetny: Can you talk about what each of these mean to you? Why, some villages would emphasize one approach over the other, and why Rahma has tended to opt for engagement. 26:06 Dvir Warshavsky: sure. So I can say that in general, when we are thinking about the different strategies. 26:12 Dvir Warshavsky: I should say that even though every every village, every community, bedroom community have its own story, which is quite unique. The challenges the big challenges is a is most of the time quite similar. Like all of the villages 26:31 Dvir Warshavsky: doesn’t matter, if they are recognized or unrecognized, suffer by demolition orders by lack of 26:39 Dvir Warshavsky: infrastructures, and many, many challenges which is very similar. 26:45 Dvir Warshavsky: So so it’s not so trivial, and it’s, maybe may surprise us that different villages choose different strategies of how of how to deal with 26:56 Dvir Warshavsky: the very challenging and difficult situation that they are deal with. 27:02 Dvir Warshavsky: So Dvir Warshavsky: if if I I will start with talking about this full mode. 27:08 Dvir Warshavsky: so we know about, and maybe it’s more famous about a few villages that they are like the role model of how a bedroom, local community, a struggle, and and 27:21 Dvir Warshavsky: and in in in more or less effective way try to to get the 27:29 Dvir Warshavsky: rights on on lens, sometimes to to. 27:36 Dvir Warshavsky: So it’s create processes of recognition. So one case study which is very famous is the Omar Khran is a village next to me, and Fora to to my town, maybe more. 27:57 Dvir Warshavsky: which is. Dvir Warshavsky: which is a unrecognized village, who there was a plan to build the 28:06 Dvir Warshavsky: Jewish down above it. Dvir Warshavsky: And then there was a big, like many, many ways. They tried many strategies in many ways, and then some of them was to collaborate with the Jewish actors, and I was part of some of that. This 28:28 Dvir Warshavsky: projects and and Dvir Warshavsky: the same time, and after after a while it was more a central, also more a 28:39 Dvir Warshavsky: protests and and active strategies also, with many times with the Jewish bedroom collaboration. 28:50 Dvir Warshavsky: And then. Dvir Warshavsky: but but in a way. That is more, I can say more like 28:58 Dvir Warshavsky: a classical way in in an active term, because it’s more complicated, but 29:05 Dvir Warshavsky: not for now. Now I will be a quite simplistic, and then i’ll try to to make it more complicated. 29:13 Dvir Warshavsky: So there is a story of which is also a village that destroyed hundreds of times, and every time, like the police destroyed and 29:26 Dvir Warshavsky: the activists and the inhabitants. Dvir Warshavsky: it’s the original I mean the the owners of the land come again and build it again. And it’s like very repetitive. 29:37 Dvir Warshavsky: and that’s maybe the classical a form in the the most famous form of a so what there is many other ways that I will not mention all of them, but also 29:50 Dvir Warshavsky: is also a very interesting case studio. If one of you want to see, I think it’s a very interesting, and and you can you can check after 29:59 Dvir Warshavsky: after the Webinar Dvir Warshavsky: and and I want to mention to mention a different way different strategy. which which is a more typical to 30:13 Dvir Warshavsky: community Dvir Warshavsky: in. I think that the during all the history of the village and it’s the village, as I said that suffered by the the same challenges, like every other unrecognized village. 30:29 Dvir Warshavsky: still the strategy focus on Dvir Warshavsky: for operations and then working with 30:38 Dvir Warshavsky: Jewish communities, and also most of the time with the authorities. 30:43 Dvir Warshavsky: and to try to find find out together solutions. I have to say that today that we feel that the political level is, is less an address than 30:56 Dvir Warshavsky: a year ago. So when we have a demolition order, it’s more like a collaboration between communities. 31:04 Dvir Warshavsky: And that’s that’s I think the the most important thing here. 31:10 Dvir Warshavsky: and it’s it’s independent in what’s going on in the politic 11 like. I think that there is a stable infrastructure of connections between the communities, which is also a strategy of how to deal with demolition, all those how to deal with the lack of infrastructures. And I think that 31:29 Dvir Warshavsky: thinking about what’s happened in the last 10 years, this last 10 years in we we can see a few very successful processes that we can. 31:43 Dvir Warshavsky: We we can see as a Dvir Warshavsky: outcome of of this strategy. Starting with creating a building. 31:54 Dvir Warshavsky: the kindergarten, the first indoor garden in the village about 15 years ago, I think if i’m right, maybe 17, yeah. And no 15. Yeah. Okay. And then and also 3 years ago, after a very long and intensive process. 32:12 Dvir Warshavsky: And that was, it Dvir Warshavsky: was a a project that there was also a collaboration between a actors from Italian and from the leadership of last me, and they established a elementary school, which is Lima now is the the manager of the size of this school. 32:34 Dvir Warshavsky: which which is an official school of the Ministry of education and everything. And so it’s not. Of course there is many, many things that we still have to do. It’s only one step, and then the go, of course. 32:49 Dvir Warshavsky: is to have a service center is to recognize this village, but I think that that the steps that we already did, and I say we because I think that it’s a a share shirt project. Of that many will come people. 33:05 Dvir Warshavsky: I think that we did something that is very unique, and it makes me to think that 33:12 Dvir Warshavsky: the strategy of collaborations between communities Dvir Warshavsky: is a is a very effective way. 33:19 Dvir Warshavsky: Maybe I will add Dvir Warshavsky: that I think that this choice, the choice of rasm to 33:25 Dvir Warshavsky: to take this Dvir Warshavsky: strategy. Dvir Warshavsky: Connect I. There is many factors here, but one of them, maybe 2 of them, is what they’d be mentioned that Las Vegas, in fact, part of it will come, and it will come surrounded by rasm. And actually the center of it will come. The commercial center is also. 33:45 Dvir Warshavsky: and and the services center of real time is also the services and the commercial center of. So the connection between the the communities is very like it’s very basic. It’s daily. 33:58 Dvir Warshavsky: and it it makes more levels of of connections, of of collaborations, and which is very, extremely important. 34:05 Dvir Warshavsky: and also the cultural background, which is also something that the that we mentioned mentioned. And I think that it’s also a very important point. 34:17 Dvir Warshavsky: and maybe I will adjust to say Dvir Warshavsky: to to Con as a conclusion that when we talk about solid. 34:27 Dvir Warshavsky: I think that some more have Dvir Warshavsky: many applications like there is more active applications that we can see in many villages. 34:36 Dvir Warshavsky: and also sometimes in. But I think that an important application that we we can see in Rasman, and it’s 34:43 Dvir Warshavsky: also a form of Simon is Dvir Warshavsky: is also about patience. He is also about the understanding. 34:53 Dvir Warshavsky: and that’s something that Simon told me 2 months ago, when the Government just elected, and I was really worried, and I went to Slim on, and I asked him what what we’re going to do right now. It’s really scary, and and we don’t really know what’s going to happen to all the projects that we we do. And Simon told me, okay, see 35:11 Dvir Warshavsky: if it will be and not democratic government, you know. It’s not the first one in this area. 35:19 Dvir Warshavsky: The Ottoman Empire was here. Dvir Warshavsky: It wasn’t the most democratic, you know, political system. The British Mand that was here, and they left, and we are still here. 35:33 Dvir Warshavsky: and you and me. We’re still gonna be here, and and and we just have to wait. 35:39 Dvir Warshavsky: And I think that this form of so mode is is is an important point, because 35:46 Dvir Warshavsky: I really believe that all of us like in in this the communities. The society is gonna be here, anyway, in any case. So all all the infrastructures, all the all the connections that we create in this level, I think that it’s is is really 36:06 Dvir Warshavsky: so standing by the way to to to look on on on this very complicated situation. 36:12 Dvir Warshavsky: Yeah, thank you very much and lots of important things. 36:18 Eli Karetny: and I I wanna shift the to talking about the school and hearing about from both Debbie and and Suliman about the process of, you know, getting the approvals getting the school bill. What are kind of all the different moving parts. But I I do want to first follow up with with something you said one of the things you said, you know, in thinking about this special relationship between Raqqa and and you know, Ham, and the way that the the tools of of engagement have been effective for Rahma. 36:48 Eli Karetny: Remember you telling me in the past that other bedroom villages also tried, you know, tried engagement, tried other approaches, and and they they weren’t effective. So the kind of turning to kind of some mood as a kind of long term resistance. Strategy was seemed to be for some villages the the only alternative left 37:08 Eli Karetny: but for for Rahmah engagement has been effective, so I maybe help us see again, or or further. W. Why, Why, it’s worked there, and it doesn’t work elsewhere. And you mentioned the location, the kind of the closeness. 37:21 Eli Karetny: proximity, the geographical closeness to to you know you also mentioned the kind of for the cultural history of of, and the kind of the make up of of of you to hom. But I wonder if if leadership plays any role. There’s civic leadership. 37:37 Eli Karetny: but also political leadership leaders in Rahma leaders in Utahom. What makes them different than maybe a a leaders elsewhere throughout Israel. 37:48 Dvir Warshavsky: Yeah, that’s a good point. So I think that basically the the connections in the more like daily level in so small place like it will come in last me. 38:01 Dvir Warshavsky: so that immediately affects also the decision making in the political level in the municipality of it will come. And of course, in the Council of Rasm, which exists, I have to say, and 101. 38:18 Dvir Warshavsky: So that’s that’s one thing that it’s. I think that it’s important to to note. 38:24 Dvir Warshavsky: And yeah, and and also Dvir Warshavsky: it may be. 38:30 Dvir Warshavsky: I I may say that the I think that the in different Dvir Warshavsky: in different communities in different villages it’s Sometimes there is 38:41 Dvir Warshavsky: similarities to what’s to the situation here in in your, for example, and also in Diamonda, which is about 15 min north from Iraq, and there is also a a village next to the Mona, who called the Casino. 38:58 Dvir Warshavsky: And then Dvir Warshavsky: and there is many connections like there is many people from the man who works in the educational system inside Casara sale, and also people from 39:09 Dvir Warshavsky: it work in the man I like. There is Dvir Warshavsky: connections, and also there is also in the political level. There is a dialogue at least. 39:17 Dvir Warshavsky: and between the communities. Dvir Warshavsky: but I think that the the geographical distance which exist there and have a very big influence, because it’s not in your Also, I think that we we, in a way we can call it a mixed city. 39:31 Dvir Warshavsky: So Dvir Warshavsky: whatever we do in last may effect immediately, it will come if there is a problem, and the people of of last now afraid to be in a roof, and they will not 39:45 Dvir Warshavsky: the the of of of the local communities, so they they will not. The I don’t know, go to come to go to shops, and they will not be at work, and, like the friends of them in your home, will ask why we don’t You don’t come in the opposite like 40:04 Dvir Warshavsky: It’s the it’s a it’s one city in many ways in the Mona and Castle assail there is many connections. 40:10 Dvir Warshavsky: but it’s not the same. You got geographical Dvir Warshavsky: space. 40:16 Dvir Warshavsky: So so in a way, it creates also, I think, different connections and a less connections, I think also, and and it affects. It affects also the 40:32 Dvir Warshavsky: the nature of the of the dialogue between the leadership in both sides. 40:38 Debbie Golan: But but it’s not the dichotomy. Okay, there’d be one. I want to add something. So I I would like to add that in the neighbour good neighbors network between the mits paramount, and 40:52 Debbie Golan: even though there is geographical distance. There’s a lot of interactions, especially around joint tourism, entrepreneurship, and also and now the recognition of Abe, which is a large 41:03 Debbie Golan: hereto for unrecognized village that was one of the 3 Rahma Abde, and in Hashemzana that were recognized by the Government by the preceding government, and and 41:16 Debbie Golan: are in some kind of recognition process, and Jews and Bedwin are working together both on the leadership level and also on the grassroots level in that area, and to a lesser extent, but also in Arad Telescope there is a interaction between especially education and Women’s groups 41:35 Debbie Golan: at the schools in Bolt, Arad, the Democratic School, and the school in Elfura and Tallahad, and and the around enrichment activities. I wanted to maybe translate for Suleiman. 41:47 Debbie Golan: Your question maybe, has something to add about leadership, because I think it is an important question 42:11 Debbie Golan: the the 42:16 Debbie Golan: so you should be my bedroom ab day. 42:24 Debbie Golan: But but the kidu she’s Debbie Golan: sharing to him 42:30 Debbie Golan: tagat Al-miye tad license 42:39 Dvir Warshavsky: and 43:00 Dvir Warshavsky: she 43:09 Dvir Warshavsky: a 43:15 Dvir Warshavsky: hey? 43:28 Dvir Warshavsky: I mean 43:42 Dvir Warshavsky: a 44:23 Debbie Golan: all kinds of interactions. The the commercial center is to be able mentioned the the fact that I mentioned also the residents of roughly get their services from you will come. So there is that interaction. But also there’s a lot of opportunities through a Tibet bar and other communal organizations for mutual. 44:42 Debbie Golan: a consultation for mutual interaction, and that he it Part of that is also that the leadership 44:49 Debbie Golan: in both towns in both the knows knows each other, and also the last point was very important. In other words, Tai Kyle is invited to Rahma to speak. When we had demonstrations to open the school in in Raqqa. So she came to speak, and her, the leader of the opposition to the municipal council also came to speak. 45:08 Debbie Golan: and the the a lot of people in Rahma about 300 Bedwin are registered as voters in Yukon, because a lot of roughness it’s in the 45:17 Debbie Golan: jurisdiction. The the boundaries, the the municipal boundaries of your will have 45:23 Debbie Golan: which Yukon has decided to give up. Debbie Golan: and Ramat, negative Regional Council have decided to give up about 2,000. Do not for the betterment, for the for the planned recognized dropway in the future. So 45:38 Debbie Golan: there’s a sense here that it’s going to be better for both communities. If situation in Rahma will improve, and that we have a mutual responsibility to help each other. I think that’s right. That’s what 45:50 Debbie Golan: So I was trying to say. 46:33 Dvir Warshavsky: who are we? 46:41 Dvir Warshavsky: And Dvir Warshavsky: my time T. V. 46:55 Dvir Warshavsky: The I have the 47:09 Dvir Warshavsky: but it’s it’s. Maybe it’s. 47:21 Eli Karetny: Thank you, because i’m on. We don’t have too much time I want to take at least a few questions from the audience. I have, you know, tons more questions, but i’ll be able to follow up with you guys, you know, after the Webinar about lots of. But here’s a a question from from Carol sitcherman, and it’s a question that also kind of 47:40 Eli Karetny: frames there our whole discussion today, and Eli Karetny: it’s about to what extent Rahma can be a model or or the relationship between you, Don’t, have to be a model. Carol asks, Can the cooperation cooperative relationship between the Bedouin village of Rahma and the Jewish town of Gilcombe be emulated in other communities that Don’t have the demography of you know how. 48:02 Eli Karetny: To what extent does that demography demographics make the town receptive to cooperation? So to? Is there something here or that that can be a model to to others. 48:13 Debbie Golan: and maybe maybe I think that’s the whole idea of the good neighbors network was to use Euro-com Rahma relations and mutual projects, joint projects as models for other places. And when we have funding we could do a lot, and even without funding, we’re still doing. 48:28 Debbie Golan: Not a not Not so, not very. We. We’re we’re doing significant things together. And I think that 48:36 Debbie Golan: I spoke about the demography right. If there’s a Debbie Golan: a kind of mutual culture of hospitality and 48:46 Debbie Golan: live and let live. Okay, that is characteristic of your hub, then. 48:51 Debbie Golan: That’s it. I think. Le Man also mentioned right now in what he was saying, that people in Alaska want to live their lives 48:59 Debbie Golan: quietly. If there is a theft Debbie Golan: in in your home, and it’s bed when it’s never bed, when from Rahma it’s from other places. And there’s a there’s been offers of cooperation in in the the Civil Civil Civil Civil Guard, so to speak, of the 49:22 Debbie Golan: There’s Debbie Golan: this. The brief answer is, Yes, I I think that there this can be a model, and the kinds of projects that we’re doing. There’s a lot that we can learn and teach other places to 49:37 Eli Karetny: the farm that we have only a few minutes left, and we’re getting a couple of really good questions on from from Mary and Kaplan. She asks whether the schools are integrated. I I know they’re not, but maybe you can just say something more about. You know better when schools being for the better when children and separated from the Jewish schools. 50:24 Dvir Warshavsky: you a mute 50:40 Dvir Warshavsky: Yeah, it’s the growth. Dvir Warshavsky: Yes, that mode 51:17 Dvir Warshavsky: they had to be on a bedroom. I for not here. I need no idea. 51:22 Debbie Golan: I’m not i’m not as a mentality currently in Rahma and in your home won’t. 51:33 Debbie Golan: won’t, be amenable to having a a a a bilingual school, or a by national school. People are interested in having education systems or institutions that reflect their own cultures and help them 51:48 Debbie Golan: advance their children. But it it doesn’t contradict the deep desire for coexistence and mutual respect. 51:57 Debbie Golan: The question of land, he said if we had. There are also examples of people from Raqqa who’s children studied in Yoruhan schools. 52:05 Debbie Golan: but also went back to out of your office and move back to Rosma Debbie Golan: A, 52:12 Debbie Golan: and we can go into this. But there’s not really a lot of time. Debbie Golan: if not always. I think integration is the best. 52:21 Debbie Golan: The way to enable people to move ahead. That’s my permission. That’s my take on things. But another very important issue that he mentioned is that 52:30 Debbie Golan: the whole question of land and the Bedouin claims to only about 3% of the territory of the negative. But he said, okay, if the Government doesn’t think that 52:40 Debbie Golan: we. We even have that land. So where am I going to live right? So 52:46 Debbie Golan: he thinks that that maybe Debbie Golan: in a in a mixed school some of the politics might get in the way of mutual joint education that would be beneficial to both communities. 52:58 Eli Karetny: Thank you. 53:06 Dvir Warshavsky: is shared. Debbie Golan: He wants to. So they might have something urgent that came up. 53:11 Dvir Warshavsky: and he’s he’s apologizing that he has to 53:17 Debbie Golan: You’ll have another question a last question he’d be. You’ll be happy to answer before he goes. Maybe something about the the the role that the school plays in the kind of unfolding process of recognition. What what comes next? Water, electricity, paved roads like. What w that? That that sequencing work? 53:53 Dvir Warshavsky: Say a classic. Dvir Warshavsky: And it’s no 54:02 Dvir Warshavsky: I I 54:08 Dvir Warshavsky: the 54:15 Dvir Warshavsky: Hello, Akara! Dvir Warshavsky: No. Can I make sure 54:23 Dvir Warshavsky: De Luca, my and Shehma comes here in my there. Dvir Warshavsky: you know no relevant. It’s no. I heard you from a car 54:34 Dvir Warshavsky: that’s it through. 54:52 Dvir Warshavsky: It’s the they that I had no 55:01 Dvir Warshavsky: myself but Debbie Golan: the fact, the fact, he says, that the fact that there is a school, one of the factors in the recognition of the town, and that he, he. 55:15 Debbie Golan: he what he sees and what he feels Bedwin in is recognition, and on their own terms, in other words, a a a model of a town that will be also agricultural, and enable them to pursue certain traditional ways of life that they have. 55:32 Debbie Golan: But what are the things that they’re aiming for is this kind of Mo shave, which is an Israeli Jewish, cooperative, agricultural village that can combine tourism with agriculture with people who live there and do engage in other professions, and there’s no reason that it can’t be a model for 55:51 Debbie Golan: Rahm and other Bedwin villages in the negative, so that it’s not a completely urban settlement, but something that’s more integrated with the way of life of Bedwin traditionally, and just to say that next week there’s a visit of the ministry of Agriculture people, and in the text that I’m sent the third text. He talks about 56:11 Debbie Golan: how when we work together getting Debbie Golan: higher-ray ranking officials down to discuss making a Bedwin moshave is something that Jews can do more easily with Bedwin, and then, when the Bedwin talk, it’s a different perspective when it’s backed up by Yurujan, by the mayor, and by leadership 56:34 Debbie Golan: and by civilian activists, that Debbie Golan: that can explain why it’s so important to do something that will have sustainability and relevance for bedwin way of life. 56:48 Eli Karetny: Thank you, Debbie Toda Sliman. Eli Karetny: Maybe we just to to close things off. We only have a few minutes left. It would be great to learn to to understand little more about what recognition means, like what? What was the process of getting here now that it it’s kind of happened. What what does it mean now? Does it? Does it really pave the way for further developments? Is it a kind of 57:12 Eli Karetny: you know? Is it a symbolic thing, because it it always I thought of it as something more than symbolic, that it really has legal weight right? But but but what’s changed since recognition, so maybe help us understand that 57:25 Debbie Golan: you can complete my my my answer. But I think that the answer is that it’s not so clear for everyone like 57:38 Dvir Warshavsky: we. We are looking on the recognized villages, and like on the like, Officially. 57:44 Dvir Warshavsky: Yeah, when you were recognized on a village legally. Dvir Warshavsky: so you can hope that there will be like a a plan for this like planning 57:56 Dvir Warshavsky: a process, and then Dvir Warshavsky: recognition will mean that there will be like a services center, and we see that sometimes there is sometimes not. And 58:09 Dvir Warshavsky: but but it’s it’s it’s an important step, because I I will. I would say that without recognition. There is no chance 58:17 Dvir Warshavsky: to these processes. Dvir Warshavsky: but with the recognition it’s an option. It’s not necessarily will happen, because it’s really not so clear. What’s 58:24 Dvir Warshavsky: the immediate effect of this act, but it’s a necessary necessary step 58:30 Dvir Warshavsky: before all of the of the all the other processes that we want to add something 58:36 Dvir Warshavsky: Yeah. Eli Karetny: muted. Debbie Golan: so they might apologize that he had to really leave. Now I think I completely agree that the Government still Hasn’t discovered the most 58:52 Debbie Golan: the best practices for recognizing a Bedouin village, and it’s definitely more than symbolic, because it means that along with a municipal plan, there’s also the possibility of building legally so. There theoretically, wouldn’t be any demolition orders needed. 59:11 Debbie Golan: and that it would mean there are infrastructures like sewage, like paved roads like electricity from the national grid like 59:20 Debbie Golan: after school and the leisure activities like a community center. These things Don’t exist in in as well. 59:30 Debbie Golan: and also water in a in a better way, and and then, as Saliman said in our preparatory meeting, he said that he would. He’s he’s dying to pay municipal taxes, because it’ll mean he’ll be getting the services that are due to him, and not only that, but negative towns 59:47 Debbie Golan: and other towns in Israel that are low in the lower ranking of Israeli socioeconomic ranking of Israeli settlements. They get discounts and taxes in your home residents. We pay 10% less taxes, and he’s saying, i’m, i’m dying to get a 10% discount on my taxes. So far my salary goes mostly to taxes. 1:00:05 Debbie Golan: so it’s definitely something promising. He also mentioned in the preparatory meeting. It’s in the text a translator for him that 1:00:13 Debbie Golan: he he wants a house, a permanent settlement, not pertinent building right, not a metal shack that he may have to change the roof if the weather is bad, and and might leak and stuff, and 1:00:25 Debbie Golan: and it’s true that some of the Bedwin have made nice homes out of those metal shacks, but it’s no 1:00:31 Debbie Golan: a comparison to a home that has a paved road, and that has a neighborhood, and it has the infrastructures that hopefully future Rahma will. And, as beer mentioned, the so far the examples of some of those recognized bedroom villages 1:00:47 Debbie Golan: not talking about the towns initiated by by Israel are not that attractive to to to Bedwin? So what we’re trying to do here, I think, in Rahma together. 1:00:59 Debbie Golan: the Bedwin of Rahma and the Jews in the and the leadership in both communities is to create a model of what 1:01:06 Debbie Golan: could work for the best Debbie Golan: right? And that’s what we’re working on. Eli Karetny: Thank you, Debbie. Thank you, Devere, and I’ll thanks, Sliman again. It’s time to wrap up. I wish we had more time, and our conversations will continue. But I invite the Bora back to to to wrap things up. Thank you again. 1:01:26 Eli Karetny: Thanks, David. Deborah Dwork: Tomorrow, please. What I add my thanks. For some reason I I press the 1:01:35 Deborah Dwork: it start Video. Deborah Dwork: Okay. So I add my thanks to Eli. And I thank you, Eli, for moderating this really riveting conversation. So many thanks to Debbie to Sulimon, to beer, and to everyone who has joined to listen. Today 1:01:57 Deborah Dwork: the discussion prompts us to think a new and in light of the current political situation, and what we have learned to plum new perspectives. 1:02:10 Deborah Dwork: so warmest wishes to all stay safe. Stay well.
Among the most progressive of Zionist settlement movements, Hashomer Hatzair proclaimed a brotherly stance on Zionist-Palestinian relations. Until the tumultuous end of the British Mandate, movement settlers voiced support for a binational Jewish-Arab state and officially opposed mass displacement of Palestinians. But, Hashomer Hatzair colonies were also active participants in the process that ultimately transformed large portions of Palestine into sovereign Jewish territory. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury investigates this ostensible dissonance, tracing how three colonies gained control of land and their engagement with Palestinian inhabitants on the edges of the Jezreel Valley/Marj Ibn ‘Amer.
Based on extensive empirical research in local colony and national archives, Colonizing Palestine offers a microhistory of frontier interactions between Zionist settlers and indigenous Palestinians within the British imperial field. Even as left-wing kibbutzim of Hashomer Hatzair helped lay the groundwork for settler colonial Jewish sovereignty, its settlers did not conceal the prior existence of the Palestinian villages and their displacement, which became the subject of enduring debate in the kibbutzim. Juxtaposing history and memory, examining events in their actual time and as they were later remembered, Sabbagh-Khoury demonstrates that the dispossession and replacement of the Palestinians in 1948 was not a singular catastrophe, but rather a protracted process instituted over decades. Colonizing Palestine traces social and political mechanisms by which forms of hierarchy, violence, and supremacy that endure into the present were gradually created.
About the author
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Reviews
“Colonizing Palestine guides us with great precision and acumen through the memory lanes of Israelis and Palestinians. Those who think they have read it all about the Nakba and its impact on our present realities will need to consult this impressive and crucial addition to the literature on settler colonialism and Palestine.”—Ilan Pappé, University of Exeter
“Areej Sabbagh-Khoury’s groundbreaking book sheds light on the structures and events that facilitated Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine. A must-read for anyone who wants to understand exactly how the tensions between socialism and Zionism played out on the ground.”—Maha Nassar, University of Arizona
The Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) at Harvard University will host on March 30, 2023, Prof. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, chair in Law, Institute of Criminology-Faculty of Law, The Hebrew University; and Chair in Global Law, Queen Mary University of London.
The invitation states, “Her research focuses on trauma, state crimes and criminology, surveillance, gender violence, law and society. She studies the crime of femicide and other forms of gendered based violence, violence against children in conflict ridden areas, crimes of abuse of power in settler colonial contexts, surveillance, securitization and social control. As a resident of the old city of Jerusalem, Shalhoub-Kevorkian is a prominent local activist. She engages in direct actions and critical dialogue to end the inscription of power over Palestinian children’s lives, spaces of death, and women’s birthing bodies and lives.”
The CMES homepage directs the reader to “Readings and Digital Resources on Palestine,” a list of readings on Palestine gathered by Rosie Bsheer and Cemal Kafadar, CMES core faculty members. The reading list aims to “contextualize current events in Palestine,” offering “analyses and histories of expulsion, occupation, settler colonialism, forced evictions, home demolitions, and annexation that situate the current struggle as part of the ongoing Nakba of 1948 and in relation to the Naksa of 1967. These resources also point to the myriad attempts to control knowledge production on Palestine and to silence critical speech that attempts to humanize Palestinians.”
The Center’s one-sided list of readings includes: “Fayez Abdullah Sayegh, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, Vol. 1 (Beirut, Lebanon: Research Center, Palestine Liberation Organization, 1965). Walid Khalidi, From Haven to Conquest: Readings in Zionism and the Palestine Problem Until 1948 (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1971). Fouzi Al-Asmar, To Be an Arab in Israel (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1978). Rosemary Sayigh, The Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries (Zed Press, 1979). Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine (Vintage, 1992). Nadia Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (University of Chicago Press, 2002). Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman, A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture (Verso, 2003). Sara Roy, Failing Peace: Gaza and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Pluto Press, 2006). Ussama Makdisi and Paul A. Silverstein, Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North Africa (Indiana University Press, 2006). Omar Jabary Salamanca, Mezna Qato, Kareem Rabie, and Sobhi Samour, “Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine,” Settler Colonial Studies 2.1 (2012). Shira Robinson, Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel’s Liberal Settler State (Stanford University Press, 2013). Jasbir Puar, “Rethinking Homonationalism,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45.2 (2013), 336-39. Ella Shohat, On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements (Pluto Press, 2017). Tareq Baconi, Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance (Stanford University Press, 2018). Rana Barakat, “Lifta, the Nakba, and the Museumification of Palestine’s History,” Native American and Indigenous Studies 5.2 (Fall 2018), pp. 1-15. Sherene Seikaly, “How I Met My Great-Grandfather: Archives and the Writing of History,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 38.1 (May 2018), p. 6-20. Ussama Makdisi, Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World (University of California Press, 2019). Matthew Hughes, Britain’s Pacification of Palestine: The British Army, the Colonial State, and the Arab Revolt, 1936–1939 (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019). Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 (Metropolitan Books, 2020). Seth Anziska, Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo (Princeton University Press, 2020).”
Clearly, Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies was hijacked by Palestinian and pro-Palestinian advocates, providing anti-Israel bias. As can be seen, the first monograph on the reading list is Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, published by the Palestinian Liberation Organization research center in Beirut. The author, Fayez Abdullah Sayegh, was born in 1922 in Kharaba, Mandatory Syria; as a child, the family moved to Tiberias, and he went to school in Safed. He joined the Syrian Social Nationalist Party in 1938 and was later expelled. In 1949, he earned his Ph.D. in philosophy, with a minor in political science, from Georgetown University. Sayegh worked for the Lebanese Embassy in Washington, DC and at the United Nations. He taught at several universities, including Yale, Stanford, and Macalester College, as well as at The American University of Beirut – his alma mater and the University of Oxford. Sayegh founded the Palestine Research Center in Beirut in 1965. That year, the Center published his historical study entitled Zionist Colonialism in Palestine.
Nothing on the CMES reading list acknowledges that the Palestinians and their Arab allies were belligerent and attacked the Jewish Yishuv. They lost the war between November 30, 1947, and July 20, 1949, which they started. As a result, the Palestinian Nakba in 1948 and Naksa in 1967 were the outcomes of their own making. Moreover, during this period, both Jordan, which occupied the West Bank, and Egypt, which occupied the Gaza Strip, did not find the Palestinians meritorious for independence.
Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who wrote in the past about the “Honor Killing” in Palestinian society, where family members kill the daughter of the family because she is independent, switched her focus to blaming Israel for the “unchilding” (that is, “the authorized eviction of children from childhood for political goals”) of Palestinian children, who are fighting against the Israeli security forces. Stone-throwing, knifing, and shooting are among the Palestinian children’s methods.
Equally important, her switch to writing on settler colonialism is equally egregious. The settler colonialism in Palestine began during the Ottoman Empire era and lasted 402 years.
Contrary to Shalhoub-Kevorkian and CMES assertion, the Jews received the right to establish their national home in their ancestral homeland in Palestine from the League of Nations in 1922. Britain was appointed the executor of this decision. At this time, Transjordan was created for the Arabs in Palestine. The CMES at Harvard University should teach facts, not false.
The CMES has a long history of catering to Palestinians. In one infamous case, it received a donation from the Alawi Foundation, a regime’s charity that specialized in tarnishing Israel in American universities. In return, it hosted as a visiting scholar Ali Akbar Alikhani from the Faculty of Worlds Studies at the University of Tehran, an anti-Semite and a propagandist for the regime. Alikhani suggested that criticisms of the modern Israeli state are immaterial given the “historical violence of Zionism… Israel is a country that from its inception was based on force, coercion and oppression of others.” Among Alikhani’s “academic” sources was the notorious Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy.
An Ivy League University such as Harvard should provide its students with a marketplace of ideas, not one-sided propaganda.
Jerusalem: Examining Settler Colonialism and Undoing Colonial Knowledge Production
Date:
Thursday, March 30, 2023, 4:30pm to 6:00pm
Location:
CGIS Knafel 262, 1737 Cambridge St, Cambridge, MA 02138
The WCFIA/CMES Middle East Seminar is pleased to present
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian Lawrence D Biele Chair in Law, Institute of Criminology-Faculty of Law, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem; and Chair in Global Law, Queen Mary University of London
Discussant: M. Brinton Lykes, PhD, Professor of Community-Cultural Psychology and Co-Director of the Center for Human Rights and International Justice, Boston College
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian is the Lawrence D. Biele Chair in Law at the Faculty of Law-Institute of Criminology and the School of Social Work and Public Welfare at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Global Chair in Law- Queen Mary University of London. Her research focuses on trauma, state crimes and criminology, surveillance, gender violence, law and society. She studies the crime of femicide and other forms of gendered based violence, violence against children in conflict ridden areas, crimes of abuse of power in settler colonial contexts, surveillance, securitization and social control.
Shalhoub-Kevorkian is the author of numerous books among them “Militarization and Violence Against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East: The Palestinian Case Study” published in 2010; “Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear”, published by Cambridge University Press, 2015. She just published a new book examining Palestinian childhood entitled: “Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding”, and a new edited book entitled: Understanding Campus-Community Partnerships in Conflict Zones”, and is currently co-editing two new book on the sacralization of politics and its effect on human suffering, and Islam and gender based violence.
She has published articles in multi-disciplinary fields including British Journal of Criminology, Feminist Studies, Ethnic and Racial Studies, State Crime, Violence Against Women, Social Science and Medicine, Signs, Law & Society Review, International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies. As a resident of the old city of Jerusalem, Shalhoub-Kevorkian is a prominent local activist. She engages in direct actions and critical dialogue to end the inscription of power over Palestinian children’s lives, spaces of death, and women’s birthing bodies and lives
Rosie Bsheer, Assistant Professor of History, and Cemal Kafadar, Vehbi Koç Professor of Turkish Studies, both core faculty members of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, recommend the following English-language materials and resources to contextualize current events in Palestine. These resources offer analyses and histories of expulsion, occupation, settler colonialism, forced evictions, home demolitions, and annexation that situate the current struggle as part of the ongoing Nakba of 1948 and in relation to the Naksa of 1967. These resources also point to the myriad attempts to control knowledge production on Palestine and to silence critical speech that attempts to humanize Palestinians.
Samir Mansour Bookshop in Gaza, Before and After Israeli attack, May 18, 2021. Credit: @samirbookshop
ACADEMIC READINGS
Fayez Abdullah Sayegh, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, Vol. 1 (Beirut, Lebanon: Research Center, Palestine Liberation Organization, 1965).
Mohammed El-Kurd, “Tomorrow My Family and Neighbors May Be Forced From Our Homes by Israeli Settlers,” The Nation, November 20, 2020.
Noura Erakat and Mariam Barghouti, “Sheikh Jarrah Highlights the Violent Brazenness of Israel’s Colonialist Project, The Washington Post, May 10, 2021.
CMES: Political Thought In The Islamic World: Findings From A Study Of 280 Muslim Scholars From The 7th Century To The Present
Date:
Tuesday, April 26, 2016, 12:30pm to 2:00pm
Location:
CMES, Room 102, 38 Kirkland St, Cambridge, MA
The CMES Middle East Forum presents
Ali Akbar Alikhani Associate Professor of Political Thought in the Islamic World, Chair, Arab World Studies Department, University of Tehran; Visiting Scholar, Center for Middle Eastern Studies
Arnold Schwarzenegger, the American actor, and politician who served as the governor of California between 2003 and 2011, emerged as an unexpected combatant against antisemitism. In a compelling video, Schwarzenegger spoke about the rising hate and antisemitism that “we have seen all over the world.” He talked about his visit to Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp where more than a million Jewish men, women, and children lost their lives. “Once you’ve spent the time to really think about all those things, then your imagination has no choice but to start the real work, how do we stop this from ever happening again? After a trip to Auschwitz, you will never question why never again is the rallying cry of all of the people who fight to prevent another Holocaust.”
Having been deeply touched by his experience in Auschwitz, he decided to appeal to those full of hatred. “I don’t want to preach to the choir. Here is the day I want to talk to the people out there who might have already stumbled into the wrong direction, into the wrong path. I want to talk to you if you have heard some conspiracies about Jewish people or people of any race or gender orientation and thought that makes sense to me. I want to talk to you if you found yourself thinking that anyone is inferior and how to get you because of their religion or the color of their skin, or their gender. I don’t know the road that has brought you here, but I’ve seen enough people throw away their futures for hateful beliefs.״
He ended by pleading, “I don’t care how many hateful things you may have written online. I don’t care how often you have marched with carrying that hateful flag or what hateful things you may have said in anger, there’s still hope for you, there’s still time for you to choose strength, choose life. Conquer your mind. You Can Do It.״
Schwarzenegger did not identify those who wave the flag of hatred by name, but some academic groups and individuals stand out. Earlier this month, the Palestinians and their supporters announced “Israeli Apartheid Week” on campus.
In the US, at UC Davis, Apartheid Week is about to begin. Organized by Students for Justice in Palestine, an on-campus political advocacy group for Palestinian Liberation, it is recognized by chapters nationwide. UC Berkeley’s Apartheid Week is also coming up, where an apartheid wall is erected in conjunction with Bears for Palestine. Apartheid Week is focused on the “right of return for Palestinian refugees and the end of the Israeli occupation in the West Bank in Gaza.”
In the Netherlands, Israeli Apartheid Week is taking place in the Hague, Groningen, Amsterdam, Haarlem, Utrecht, and Leiden under the banner #UnitedAgainstRacism.
In Ireland, the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign organized an “Israel Apartheid Week” in Celbridge, Dublin, Ennis, and Wexford under the banner of “Boycott Israeli Goods Action” on March 4, 2023. The group asked shoppers “not to buy Israeli products on sale in Irish stores.” According to the organizers, the BDS campaign “aims to apply economic pressure through people power, on the Israeli state to compel it to comply with international law and end the apartheid regime it imposes upon the Palestinian people.”
Closter to home, the BDS campaign has targeted Ben Gurion University. The Philosophy Department at BGU is hosting a conference in Israel titled “Anti-theory in the Philosophy of Science and Ethics” between July 4, 2023, to July 6, 2023. The invitation explains that two philosophical movements emerged in the 1970s and 80s, the philosophy of science and ethics. Both challenged the prevailing conception of philosophical theorizing. Despite the undeniable differences between science and ethics, there is an important similarity between the two anti-theory movements. The aim of the conference is to “bring together scholars from philosophy of science and ethics to provide a comparative assessment of anti-theory movements in the philosophy of science and in ethics and to explore ways in which insights gleaned from one subfield can shed light on the other.” The confirmed speakers included Sophie-Grace Chappell (Open University, UK), K. Brad Wray (Aarhus University, Denmark), Nora Hämäläinen (University of Helsinki), Jamie Shaw (Leibniz Universität Hannover), Shlomit Wygoda Cohen (Polonsky Fellow, Van Leer Institute), it says.
However, Prof. Sophie-Grace Chappell has declined the invitation. In a Facebook post, she explained her decision as a response to what she saw as a “brutal” oppression of the Palestinians. She said it is a protest “In light of the longstanding failure of the State of Israel to accord basic human rights to the Palestinian people living within its legitimate territory.” The BDS movement congratulated Chappell on her decision and urged others to follow.
Like most pro-Palestinian advocates, Chappell has never seen fit to discuss the appalling lack of basic human rights in the Gaza Strip and the only marginally better situation in the West Bank. The latest statistics of the Freedom House, which measures civil, religious, and political freedoms around the globe, gave very low marks to the PLO, which runs the West Bank, and especially Hamas, which is in charge of the Strip. Corruption, an integral part of Palestinian self-rule, is also sky-high.
Schwarzenegger’s plea would behoove the BDS movement for an open-minded dialogue as an antidote to hatred of Israel.
During the 1970s and 80s two movements emerged—one in the philosophy of science and the other in ethics—that challenged the prevailing conception of philosophical theorizing in their respective fields. In PoS, Paul Feyerabend (1970, 1975) criticized attempts to identify a scientific method and to formulate a theory of scientific rationality. Scientists, he claimed, do not—and should not—follow strict rules of a fixed method. In ethics, a diverse group of prominent philosophers questioned the purpose and value of moral theorizing. They insisted that excellent moral behavior does not consist in following strict moral principles and that organizing our lives on dictates of moral theory is morally pernicious (MacIntyre 1981; Williams 1985; Baier 1985; Taylor 1989).
Despite the undeniable differences between science and ethics, there is, nevertheless, a deep and important similarity between the two anti-theory movements—they both reject the presumption that a chief task of their field is to formulate strict principles for practical guidance. Interestingly, this principal similarity has been overlooked and the debates in the philosophy of science and in ethics have developed independently one from the other. The aim of the workshop is to bring together scholars from philosophy of science and ethics to provide a comparative assessment of anti-theory movements in the philosophy of science and in ethics and to explore ways in which insights gleaned from one subfield can shed light on the other.
Confirmed Speakers: Sophie-Grace Chappell (Open University, UK), K. Brad Wray (Aarhus University, Denmark), Nora Hämäläinen (University of Helsinki), Jamie Shaw (Leibniz Universität Hannover), Shlomit Wygoda Cohen (Polonsky Fellow, Van Leer Institute)
The workshop is organized by Dr. Uri D. Leibowitz (urileib@bgu.ac.il) and Dr. Klodian Coko (klodian.coko.hps@gmail.com) from the Philosophy Department at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in conjunction with a research project funded by the Israeli Science Foundation (ISF 1943/20).
Chappell withdrew over “the longstanding failure of the State of Israel to accord basic human rights to the Palestinian people” and the “increasingly extreme, inhumane, and violently oppressive policies currently being deployed against innocent Palestinians by the Settler movement in the West Bank and elsewhere, with the connivance and at times active support of the Israeli [occupation forces] and of members of the present Israeli government.”
We appreciate the fact that Chappell chose to heed Palestinian and anti-colonial Israeli appeals urging her not to allow Israel’s decades-long apartheid regime, currently under its most racist, homo- and trans- phobic government ever, to use her name and standing as a stamp of approval.
With her withdrawal, Chappell joins the many principled scholars who are refusing to participate in complicit conferences that whitewash Israeli apartheid. It sends a message to Israel that, like apartheid South Africa, it cannot continue to commit the crime against humanity of apartheid without consequences. It also signals to Israeli institutions that are complicit in apartheid that scholars will not continue business-as-usual relations with them.
The conference host, Ben Gurion University, is deeply complicit in Israel’s system of oppression against Palestinians. As early as 2011, the University of Johannesburg in South Africa severed all institutional ties with Ben Gurion University after a fact-finding mission found it guilty of “institutional complicity and active collaboration with the Israeli military, occupation and apartheid practices.”
We urge all remaining speakers to follow Chappell’s ethical example by withdrawing from the conference at Ben Gurion University. Apartheid was the antithesis of ethics in South Africa, and it is the same with Israel. Organizing a conference on ethics in apartheid Israel makes a travesty of ethics.
In light of the longstanding failure of the State of Israel to accord basic human rights to the Palestinian people living within its legitimate territory, or adjacent to that territory; in light of the increasingly extreme, inhumane, and violently oppressive policies currently being deployed against innocent Palestinians by the Settler movement in the West Bank and elsewhere, with the connivance and at times active support of the Israeli Defence Force and of members of the present Israeli government; in light of the Netanyahu administration’s continuing attacks upon the judiciary and the rule of law in Israel; in light of my perception that if I went to Israel and was arrested for protesting about these things, the probability of effective lobbying for my release from the British Government is extremely low; and in light of the advice of friends both Palestinian and Israeli; I have reached the conclusion that I must withdraw from the speaking engagement at a conference in Israel in June that I entered into last November, when consequences of the result of the last Israeli General Election that are now obvious to all, were not yet apparent to me.
I must apologise to the organisers of the conference for any inconvenience caused to them by my decision, which is not reversible except by a drastic alteration in the political situation in Israel.
A large Palestinian flag hung from a tree in the quad, waving in the sunshine as students gathered around on Wednesday to hear personal stories about life in Palestine and precautions when visiting there.
Organized by Students for Justice in Palestine, an on-campus political advocacy group for Palestinian Liberation, the teach-in was day three in a weeklong event at UC Davis known as Apartheid Week, recognized by chapters nationwide. Focused on the right of return for Palestinian refugees and the end of the Israeli occupation in the West Bank in Gaza, throughout the week, educational events also included a Hunger Banquet: Living on $1.90 a Day and work on an apartheid wall at UC Berkeley in conjunction with Bears for Palestine.
The World Bank’s previous definition of “extreme poverty”, $1.90 per person per day, was updated last September, measuring at $2.15 per person per day. According to the World Bank, about 648 million people were in extreme poverty in 2019.
President of SFJ UCD Yara (who requested her last name be withheld for safety reasons) said Apartheid Week highlights how “the system perpetuates apartheid” and how different experiences of Palestinians differ depending on gender, age, where they are geographically in Palestine. “Even within the West Bank, Palestinians, some different towns and cities are living under different forms of restrictions of movement, economic suppression, political and civil suppression from the Israeli military. So throughout the week, we’re just going to be having educational events highlighting these forms of violent oppression that Palestinians are subjected to,” she said.
The Apartheid Wall invites community members to question its symbolism. “There’s an apartheid wall in the West Bank and around Gaza right now, so people struggle to get in or leave, especially when it comes to Gaza. Palestinians can’t leave Gaza, and Palestinians can enter if they live outside,” Yara said.
Seena
Born in the U.S., Seena, the vice president of Students for Justice in Palestine, travels each summer to visit family outside of Palestine. Their village was demolished and her grandparents became refugees in Jordan and Kuwait. She returns every summer to visit family and work in the refugee camps.
“(Working in the camps) is a world within itself,” she said. “Seeing your people that way is challenging, but they have so much hope and resistance. It’s very hard coming into contact with settlers or Israeli forces, but at the end of the day, Palestinian people are the most resilient people I know. It’s a beautiful culture and a beautiful place. While everything we talked about is so sad, I always have shown and shed light on the beauty of the land and the people in the culture.”
What follows is a personal account Seena shared at the teach-in regarding her visit to Palestine last summer. It has been edited for clarity:
I got to go to Palestine for three months, see my family, see my land, and be with my people. And a big thing for me is to go pray in Jerusalem. I got the privilege of doing that this summer, and I couldn’t be more grateful. But I must say it’s not easy for me to get in as a Palestinian woman. My American passport means nearly nothing to them. When I was in Jerusalem, going through all of the little vendors selling food, shirts and little knickknacks, I was stopped by an IOF (Israeli Occupation Forces) soldier. I was asked to present my visa and passport, which I did without argument.
As I waited to get those things returned to me, I had a sweet older man who asked me what village I was from. And I, of course, I’m so proud of where I’m from, and I immediately began to tell him about how the beautiful village my family is from is sadly in ruins, and he was actually able to know and understand, which was very fun and interesting for me. And then, it came time for me to get my passport back.
Before giving my passport back, I was asked to recite the opening verse of the Quran. I was asked, as a Muslim woman, why I was there. Upon being asked to recite the opening verse in the Quran, I couldn’t really bite my tongue, and I looked at him, and I said, “Are you kidding me? Because in what way are you to make me feel so low? It makes me feel as though I have to prove myself as a Muslim woman, on my ground and land, to pray in a mosque for my people?”
And not long after the second those words left my mouth, the environment around me completely changed. He had a gun larger than me on him. He began to explicitly tell me, “Do you understand where you are? I don’t care if you’re from California. This isn’t California. I will have you forcibly removed. I will have you arrested, and I will not allow you to pray in your mosque.” This all happened to me in 10 minutes with my cousin right next to me in absolute and utter shock that I was being treated this way.
But at the same time, I expect nothing less. I expect nothing less of this military occupation. It is something that I do not fear. I do not fear these soldiers. I do not fear these people because, at the end of the day, their main basis, their main foundation, is absolutely nothing. It’s empty words. It’s empty promises. So at the end of the day, I looked at him and said “really” again, and he was starting to get very frustrated. I saw his hand moving to his gun, and I knew that they shoot before they ask.
And, immediately, all I could think about was my family. My mother, my cousin who is a martyr, and at that moment, I knew I couldn’t do that to my family. The countless stories you hear of them shooting up Palestinians are devastating. At that moment, my cousin and I began to recite the verse. And at that moment, he gave us our passports back. But I wasn’t going to go without that being said. Midway through the recitation, he asked me to stop after giving me my passport. I continued with my recitation.
I could see the anger on his face because he could tell that I was not bothered. He could tell that there was no effect on me. I walked away with a smile because, at the end of the day, I was still home. That’s my home. I have the right to return to my home, and I wish nothing but that for every Palestinian brother and sister.
My story is no different than thousands of others. My story is not the worst; if anything, it’s a great story. I’m here to tell you about it today. But I want you to know that this is ongoing. Palestinians face going through checkpoints through these interactions, just getting into Palestine. All of that is a struggle for us. But we continue to go because we know that’s home that will forever be home. I am sharing one of my many stories of Palestine’s beautiful land and beautiful people, and I am so proud to call it home.
“Apartheid week” is being held this week, hosted by student groups Bears for Palestine, or BFP, and Berkeley Law Students for Justice in Palestine, with the goal of covering “the origins of Israeli apartheid and how it affects Palestinians today.”
Events began Monday and will continue throughout the week, ending with an “apartheid wall assemble” Friday.
“Apartheid week” was planned in collaboration with various Palestinian clubs across campuses in the United States and Canada, said a BFP representative who wished to remain anonymous due to security reasons, in an email.
They noted that the topics and discussions brought up during this week are important to Palestinian Americans and international students, since many have family members who have been “directly affected by the occupation.”
“This year, the United States has already given $3.8 billion to Israel. It’s only March. Since the year started, we have heard reports almost every week about different villages Israeli Defense Forces have been raiding,” the BFP representative said in the email. “We’re constantly worried that the next person we hear about dead will join our long list of family members who have passed at the hands of the regime.”
On Monday, they hosted a workshop discussing the debate around “greenwashing” in Palestine.
Tuesday’s event, titled “Apartheid: The Matrix of Control,” consisted of a workshop with Palestine DeCal facilitators, covering how Israel “controls” Palestinians in occupied territories, the representative said.
On Wednesday, they hosted a screening of “Farha” and had a Q&A with the director Darin Sallam. Thursday’s event, titled “Youth: The Yearn for Return,” consisted of a workshop about Palestinian activism over the years, the representative said, along with a panel discussing questions accumulated throughout the week.
Friday’s planned event consists of a makeshift wall, which they plan to plaster on campus. The BFP representative added that the event and wall were supposed to represent the separation of Palestinians.
“As Palestinians, we’re always attacked when we try to speak about our injustices. The truth is hard to hear, and many choose to be ignorant,” the BFP representative said in the email. “We’re just asking for our basic human rights. We demand our right to return and live in our ancestral homeland without the constant fear of death and erasure.”
A campus sophomore, who wishes to remain anonymous for safety concerns, said in an email that it was “wonderful” to see many people on campus coming together to discuss Palestine.
The source added that the events serve as a reminder of the reality of the “trauma, difficulties, and hardships” Palestinians face.
“It’s incredibly heartbreaking that people have become so desensitized to violence, specifically violence occurring in the MENA region,” the source said in the email. “These events not only bring people together, but they educate us on what a free Palestine really is, and challenges us to unlearn false narratives that have been embedded in our education system and the general media.
Israeli Apartheid Week kicks off next week! For the 18th time, thousands of events and actions are organized worldwide under the banner of Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) and #UnitedAgainstRacism.
Numerous panel discussions, demonstrations, workshops, film evenings, etc. will also be organized in the Netherlands this year. The Hague, Groningen, Amsterdam, Haarlem, Utrecht and Leiden are #UnitedAgainstRacism
Inspired by the ongoing resistance in Palestine, we hope to contribute to the Palestinian liberation struggle with Israeli Apartheid Week 2023. We have listed all events. View them below in the IAW Calendar.
Activists, students, organizations and everyone else making #IAW23 possible: You are amazing!
The goal of IAW is to highlight Israel’s regime of settler colonialism and apartheid over the Palestinian people, and mobilize global action to help dismantle it. Thanks in part to IAW, it is becoming increasingly difficult for apartheid Israel to hide the institutionalized racism and systematic oppression of the Palestinians.
IAW fuels the unstoppable growth of the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice and equality.
[Celbridge] Israeli Apartheid Week – Boycott Israeli Goods Action Sat, 4 March 2023, 11:00AM (Outside Castletown Gates) [Celbridge] Israeli Apartheid Week – Boycott Israeli Goods ActionSat, 4 March 2023, 11:00 Outside Castletown GatesAs part of #IsraeliApartheidWeek 2023, the North Kildare Branch of the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign will hold a Boycott Israeli Goods information stall outside Castletown Gates on Saturday 4th March from 11:00am, asking shoppers not to buy Israeli products on sale in Irish stores.The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign aims to apply economic pressure through people power, on the Israeli state to compel it to comply with international law and end the apartheid regime it imposes upon the Palestinian people.
[Dublin] Israeli Apartheid Week – Boycott Israeli Goods Action Sat, 4 March 2023, 12:30PM (Outside the old Debenhams Shop, Henry Street, Dublin 1) [Dublin] Israeli Apartheid Week – Boycott Israeli Goods ActionSat, 4 March 2023, 12:30 Outside the old Debenhams Shop, Henry Street, Dublin 1As part of #IsraeliApartheidWeek 2023, the Dublin Branch of the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign will hold a Boycott Israeli Goods leafleting action, meeting outside the old Debenhams shop on Henry Street in Dublin on Saturday 4th March from 12.30pm, asking shoppers not to buy Israeli products on sale in Irish stores.The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign aims to apply economic pressure through people power, on the Israeli state to compel it to comply with international law and end the apartheid regime it imposes upon the Palestinian people.
[Ennis] Israeli Apartheid Week – Boycott Israeli Goods Action Sat, 4 March 2023, 11:30AM (Tesco and Aldi, Frances Street, Ennis) [Ennis] Israeli Apartheid Week – Boycott Israeli Goods ActionSat, 4 March 2023, 11:30 Tesco and Aldi, Frances Street, EnnisAs part of #IsraeliApartheidWeek 2023, the Clare Branch of the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign will hold a Boycott Israeli Goods leafleting action at Tesco and Aldi in Ennis on Saturday 4th March from 11:30am, asking shoppers not to buy Israeli products on sale in these stores and others such as Dunnes Stores, Lidl etc.The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign aims to apply economic pressure through people power, on the Israeli state to compel it to comply with international law and end the apartheid regime it imposes upon the Palestinian people.
As part of #IsraeliApartheidWeek 2023, the South East Branch of the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign will hold a Boycott Israeli Goods leafleting action at The Bullring in Wexford on Saturday 4th March from 2pm, asking shoppers not to buy Israeli products on sale in Irish stores.
The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign aims to apply economic pressure through people power, on the Israeli state to compel it to comply with international law and end the apartheid regime it imposes upon the Palestinian people
The construct of Israel as an apartheid state has deep academic roots. Encouraged by the boycott and the subsequent collapse of the apartheid regime in South Africa, academic activists decided to apply the formula to Israel. Members of Matzpen, the radical group, were the first to use the term ‘apartheid’ to describe the Israeli political system. For example, Uri Davis wrote Israel: An Apartheid State in 1987. However, the early radicals were too marginal and too few to affect a serious change in perception.
The Islamist government in Iran provided a more decisive impetus in the 1990s. Alarmed by the Oslo peace, which would have established a Palestinian state alongside Israel, the regime deployed its formidable propaganda apparatus to push the apartheid narrative, mostly by collaborating with the rapidly growing number of left-wing NGOs. Tehran was triumphant at the 2001 human rights Durban Conference when some three thousand NGSs declared Israel an apartheid state and called for BDS, seen in Tehran as a significant achievement. Propaganda aside, Iran, working through the Quds Force (QF), the foreign operations division of the Revolutionary Guards, did its best to undermine the Israeli trust in the Oslo peace process. The QF activated the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and Hamas in a wave of terror attacks, including the devastating suicide bombings which killed and injured thousands of Israelis. Yasser Arafat, who lost control of the Palestinian Authority, refused to sign the Camp David II peace agreement, an act that triggered the bloody Second Intifada.
Unmoved by these developments, the activist-academic community worked assiduously on promoting the “Israel as an apartheid” construct. In 2002 the British newspaper the Guardianpublished an exposé on how David Slater, the editor of an academic journal Political Geography rejected articles by Israeli authors just because of their nationality. The exception was a co-authored article by Dr. Oren Yiftachel. After months of negotiations, the editor accepted the article on the condition that it would reference the Israeli polity as an apartheid state. Since then, Yiftachel has published numerous writings using the false narrative that Israel is an apartheid State.
IAM reported in 2021 on Yiftachel’s activism in “BGU Oren Yiftachel’s Two Decades of Apartheid Analogy.” Yiftachel mentioned in his 2021 Haaretz article a report published by the Israeli human rights group B’tselem, which he referred to as an “apartheid document.” Yiftachel, a board member of B’tselem, co-authored this report. It was this report that Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch cited and adopted the apartheid fallacy.
Having emerged as the leader of the activists, Yiftachel was under pressure to explain why Israel should be considered an apartheid country. He took a stab at this in his book Land and Power: from Ethnocracy and Creeping Apartheid in Israel/Palestine, in Hebrew, which is full of confounding statements. For instance, in Yiftachel’s view, Ethiopian Jews, who are full Israeli citizens, are “white.” Israeli Arabs are not white. He never bothered to explain why a “white colonial government” would bring African blacks as immigrants to Israel and even proceed to give them full citizenship.
Despite the glaring contradictions – the construct of apartheid based on racial differences in Israel – the academic community has forged on. According to Google Scholar, over twelve thousand scholarly articles and books discuss the apartheid analogy in Palestine/Israel.
In February 2023, the Israeli social sciences network published a call for papers for a conference titled “A Partnership Based Israeli-Palestinian Peace – Toward a Changed Paradigm.” The conference will occur at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute on May 10, 2023, and at the Hebrew University on May 11, 2023. The invitation explains that it has been twenty years since the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and the intensification of the “Jewish apartheid regime between the Jordan and the sea.”
Unsurprisingly, Yiftachel is on the conference’s steering committee. The committee includes, among others, Dr. Yael Barda of the Hebrew University, another political activist, as IAM reported in 2019.
According to the organizers, there is a growing recognition that “the two-state solution has reached an impasse.” Therefore, “an alternative paradigm for the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, based on equality and partnership (the partnership paradigm), has begun to take shape in academic and public discourse. The most significant change is not rooted in a specific political model; instead, this new paradigm signifies a shift in the basic assumptions for evaluating the desired political arrangements and the social processes that may lead to their realization. The new partnership paradigm assumes that it is not possible, nor is it appropriate, to strive to abolish the existing integration of Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs throughout the country, and recognizes the strong affiliation of the two nationalities to the entire space between the Jordan and the sea. It assumes that national (collective) and individual rights are of equal importance to everyone—Jews and Palestinians—and that their realization is justified insofar as it is consistent with equality between the nations and the individuals.”
The conference aims to “examine, from a multidisciplinary, theoretical, and comparative point of view the possible future implications of this paradigm shift for academic research, social action, and cultural production in the [sic] Israel.”
In other words, the conference promotes an imaginary vision that should replace reality. “According to the commonly accepted approach, Israeli-Palestinian peace will materialize only in a framework of two national states, based on political and geographic separation between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. This separation paradigm has far-reaching implications for academic research and social action. One particular consequence is the restriction of constitutional, social, economic, and political discourse to the land within the Green Line—effectively categorizing anything beyond it as not representative of the ‘Israeli reality,’ and thus outside the acceptable boundaries for research, discussion, and action. Thus, the partnership paradigm requires corrections in all these aspects and their interplay.”
Among other points, the conference aims to “encourage and facilitate the growing discourse in academia and civil society that focuses on paradigms of peace and decolonization based on equality and partnership.” Also, the conference seeks to establish an “egalitarian political framework” and the “Presentation and examination of grassroots activism aimed at propelling social, cultural, and economic processes for implementing the new paradigm.”
The steering committee “invites proposals related to the conference topic from scholars in a variety of disciplines and using various research methods as well as from individuals involved with the topic in civil society organizations.”
Of course, there is nothing wrong with holding a conference that promotes peace. But the neo-Marxist, critical jargon indicates that the organizers live in a bubble separated from the reality in the region and, indeed, the global scene. The Palestinians are not independent agents that can make peace. Hamas and the PIJ – along with Hezbollah, the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen – are part of the network of Iranian proxies in the Middle East. Having established dominance in the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank, they would continue to serve as opponents to peace. Indeed, more so now than during the Oslo process. Iran has vastly improved its position by becoming a close ally of Russia and China against the background of the war in Ukraine. The regime has supplied drones to the Russian army; there are concerns that, in return, Moscow would help Tehran to develop its nuclear project. Iran has recently been admitted as a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a Russian-Chinese alliance to counter the American-led international order.
No amount of critical rhetoric can hide these facts. Without explaining the pernicious doings of the Iranian regime, the conference would be just another exercise in Israel-bashing.
Van Leer has used its considerable resources to promote the narrative of apartheid by providing a platform for political activist academics like Yiftachel. It is unfortunate that the Hebrew University is legitimizing Van Leer’s endeavor.
References:
[SocSci-IL] קול קורא להגשת הצעות להשתתפות בכנס ״שלום ישראלי-פלסטיני מבוסס שותפות – לקראת שינוי פרדיגמה״ – מאי 10-11, 2023 ירושלים
On Tue, 14 Feb 2023 at 07:14, limor yehuda wrote:
מכון ון ליר, המחלקה לסוציולוגיה ולאנתרופולוגיה והמרכז לחקר המגוון והרב תרבותיות באוניברסיטה העברית מזמינים הצעות להשתתפות בכנס בנושא״שלום ישראלי-פלסטיני מבוסס שותפות – לקראת שינוי פרדיגמה״.הכנס יתקיים בימים 10-11 במאי, 2023 במכון ון-ליר ובאוניברסיטה העברית בירושלים, וילווה בתרגום סימולטאני מעברית וערבית לאנגלית.מצורף קול קורא בעברית, ערבית ואנגלית.
מועד אחרון להגשת הצעות 1.3.2023.
Limor Yehuda, PhD |
ليمور يهودا ، د. |
לימור יהודה, ד״ר
Research Fellow, The Harry S. Truman Research Institute
A Partnership-Based Israeli-Palestinian Peace – Toward a Changed Paradigm
The conference will take place at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute on Wednesday 10.5.23
and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on Thursday 11.5.23
Background
A Partnership-Based Israeli-Palestinian Peace – Toward a Changed Paradigm
Twenty years after the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and the intensification of the Jewish apartheid regime between the Jordan and the sea there is a growing recognition that the two-state solution has reached
an impasse. In light of this, in recent years an alternative paradigm for the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, based on equality and partnership (the partnership paradigm), has begun to take shape in academic and public discourse. The most significant change is not rooted in a specific political model; instead, this new paradigm signifies a shift in the basic assumptions for evaluating the desired political arrangements and the social processes that may lead to their realization.
The new partnership paradigm assumes that it is not possible, nor is it appropriate, to strive to abolish the existing integration of Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs throughout the country, and recognizes the strong affiliation of the two nationalities to the entire space between the Jordan and the sea. It assumes that national (collective) and individual rights are of equal importance to everyone—Jews and Palestinians—and that their realization is justified insofar as it is consistent with equality between the nations and the individuals.
Topic and Rationale
According to the commonly accepted approach, Israeli-Palestinian peace will materialize only in a framework of two national states, based on political and geographic separation between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. This separation paradigm has far-reaching implications for academic research and social action. One particular consequence is the restriction of constitutional, social, economic, and political discourse to the land within the Green Line—effectively categorizing anything beyond it as not representative of the “Israeli reality,” and thus outside the acceptable boundaries for research, discussion, and action. Thus, the partnership paradigm requires corrections in all these aspects and their interplay.
The goal of this conference is to encourage and facilitate the growing discourse in academia and civil society that focuses on paradigms of peace and decolonization based on equality and partnership. In this context, the conference aims to examine, from a multidisciplinary, theoretical, and comparative point of view the possible future implications of this paradigm shift for academic research, social action, and cultural production in the Israel.
Possible Proposal Topics
1. Change in the analysis and understanding of the conflict and the local situation, in their various dimensions, arising from the adoption of an approach that assumes political partnership and equality
2. New approaches to measuring and evaluating local social, economic, political, cultural, and spatial data and processes
3. Learning comparatively—historically and theoretically—from other places that have undergone a transition from an exclusionary political framework to a more multinational or multi-communal inclusionary and egalitarian political framework
4. Presentation and examination of approaches to Palestinian and Jewish reconciliation and where they overlap or contradict each other
5. The place of local and regional government and of urban spaces in the approach to peace based on equality and partnership
6. Presentation and examination of grassroots activism aimed at propelling social, cultural, and economic processes for implementing the new paradigm
7. The influence of the new geopolitics, including the changes in regional politics and Israel’s status
8. Examination of the roles of the law and the international community, including states, the United Nations, and other international organizations
9. An examination of class, religious, and gender issues and their expression in the partnership paradigm
Submission of Proposals
The steering committee invites proposals related to the conference topic from scholars in a variety of disciplines and using various research methods as well as from individuals involved with the topic in civil society organizations. Each proposal must include the following
details: (1) the proposer’s full name and academic or organizational affiliation;
(2) an abstract of 200–250 words. Proposals for unconventional formats are welcome.
Deadline for Submission of Proposals: 1.3.23
Please send proposals to Nogaf@vanleer.org.il and write in the subject line “Proposal for the conference on partnership-based peace.”
The Conference Steering Committee
Dr. Limor Yehuda, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and The University of Haifa
Mr. Ameer Fakhoury, Polonsky Academy, The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute
Prof. Oren Yiftachel, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Dr. Rula Hardel, Shalom Hartman Institute
Dr. Yael Barda, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Dr. Assaf David, The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.
‘It’s water on stone – in the end the stone wears out’
This summer, a little-known Manchester academic caused an international storm when she sacked two Israeli scholars from the editorial board of her journal. But was it an isolated freelance protest – or the first skirmish in a wider academic boycott?
Until a few months ago, Dr Oren Yiftachel was the kind of Israeli dissident that foreign critics of his country found admirable. He was born on a socialist kibbutz half a century ago. During his 20s and 30s, as that strain of cosmopolitan idealism began to lose its influence on Israel, he went abroad to live and travel. In 1994, he returned to Israel to work in the geography department at Ben Gurion University in the arid south of the country, where the particular proximity of Palestinian settlements and the challenges of desert life in general had made collaboration with Palestinian academics a local tradition.
Over the next eight years, with his open-necked shirt and his open, inquisitive face, Yiftachel became a familiar irritant to Israeli rightwingers. He made a point of working with Palestinians whenever possible. He published books and articles about his government’s illicit appetite for Palestinian land. He told Israeli newspapers that, “Israel is almost the most segregated society in the world.” He set up an Arab-Israeli journal that so enraged some Israeli conservatives that they campaigned to have it banned.
Given these radical credentials, Yiftachel did not anticipate any problems when, last spring, he submitted a paper to a left-leaning periodical called Political Geography. He had written for the respected British journal before. It specialised in the same probings of territory and power as he did. This time Yiftachel’s paper, co-written with a Palestinian academic, Dr Asad Ghanem of Haifa University, described Israel as “a state dedicated to the expansion and control of one ethnic group”; the paper concluded that such societies “cannot be classified as democracies in a substantive sense”.
Yet when Yiftachel heard back from Political Geography, he got a shock. The precise details of what happened are disputed but, according to Yiftachel, the paper was returned unopened. An explanatory note had been attached, he says, stating that Political Geography could not accept a submission from Israel.
“I hadn’t read the paper,” says David Slater, one of the periodical’s editors, who is also a geography professor at Loughborough University and a prominent British supporter of Palestinian causes. “But I was familiar with some of the author’s previous work… I was not sure to what extent he had been critical of Israel.” Slater says he hesitated about what to do with the paper, “for a while”.
“I protested,” Yiftachel says. Through the summer and autumn, it is agreed by both sides, there was a tense exchange of email. Among the editors of the periodical, Slater admits, there was “a slight disagreement” over how to proceed: his colleagues were keener on the paper than he was. Eventually, Yiftachel says, Political Geography was “forced” to consider his work; but between May and November, whenever he asked if it was actually going to be published, the journal simply responded that the paper was “under consideration”.
Finally, in mid-November, between six and eight months after Yiftachel first submitted his paper, depending on whose account you believe, Political Geography informed him that it would publish his article as long as he made “substantial revisions”. Yiftachel was asked to include a comparison between his homeland and apartheid South Africa.
Yiftachel agreed. Yet he still sounds slightly puzzled at how he ran into such difficulties with an apparent political kindred spirit like David Slater. Slater maintains that Political Geography is not officially hostile to contributions from Israel. But then, almost in passing, he mentions something interesting. At some point last spring or summer, while he was pondering Yiftachel’s paper, Slater signed a petition calling for an academic boycott of Israel.
The idea first surfaced as a polite, almost diffident letter to this newspaper on April 6. “Despite widespread international condemnation for its policy of violent repression against the Palestinian people, the Israeli government appears impervious,” the letter began, somewhat predictably. Yet then it proposed a novel solution: “Many national and European cultural and research institutions regard Israel as a European state for the purposes of awarding grants and contracts. Would it not therefore be timely if a moratorium was called upon any further such support unless and until Israel abides by UN resolutions and opens serious peace negotiations with the Palestinians… “
The letter had been written by two British academics: Steven Rose, professor of biology at the Open University, and his wife, Hilary, professor of social policy at Bradford University. Besides their signatures, the letter listed 123 other academics as supporters, mostly European but a few from the US and Israel.
All this did not come completely out of the blue. Nine months earlier, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign had called for a British boycott of Israeli agricultural produce, with some success. Other boycotts of Israeli tourist resorts, Israeli-manufactured goods and Israeli investment opportunities had been long been mooted on the internet. In liberal British academic and literary circles, which for years had contained critics of Israel, there had been renewed stirrings of protest against the Israeli government during 2001 and early 2002: circular letters of support for Palestinian writers, collective statements of outrage at Israeli military tactics, and occasional flashes of public anger, such as the poet Tom Paulin’s repeated comparisons of Israeli nationalists to Nazis. Finally, in the fortnight before the Roses published their letter, there were the daily television and newspaper images from Israel and the Palestinian territories. As invading Israeli tanks ground parts of Jenin to dust and Palestinians bombed chattering cafes in Tel Aviv and civilians on both sides were killed in greater numbers than for decades, it was hard for the politically conscious in Britain and elsewhere not to take sides. “There was this cumulative frustration,” says Steven, “that European governments were not doing more to stop things.”
However, what seemed straightforward in April now seems less so. The original, quite limited, boycott proposed then has grown into something larger and less well-defined. As the Roses’ petition has acquired hundreds more signatures, other, more radical calls for academic boycotts of Israel have been launched from Britain and abroad. Rival counter-petitions condemning the boycotts have been set in motion. And around all this has swirled a vast and ferocious debate about Israel and the Palestinians, about anti-semitism, about academic freedom, about boycotts in general. International political figures have been drawn in: from Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who issued a statement supporting the Roses and comparing their protest to the struggle against apartheid, to Tony Blair, who last month reportedly told Britain’s chief rabbi that he was “appalled” at the academic boycott and would “do anything necessary” to stop it.
One obvious but significant feature of a political dispute involving academics is that they tend to relish arguments. They have access to the internet. They have international contacts and horizons. And since April, as the violence in Israel and the Palestinian territories has continued almost unabated, universities in both places have been directly affected. Israeli campus buildings have been bombed; Palestinian universities have been blockaded by Israeli troops. Whatever your view of the academic boycott, it has become increasingly difficult to dismiss it as pure ivory tower politics.
Yet the extent to which an actual academic boycott of Israel exists, beneath all the rhetoric for and against, has remained mysterious. In April, the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education voted for “all UK institutions of higher and gurther education… to review – with a view to severing any academic links they may have with Israel”. In May, the Association of University Teachers voted for a funding boycott of Israeli universities. But when I rang both unions almost six months later to ask what concrete effect these resolutions had had, a Natfhe press officer said, “I’m unaware of any action being taken so far. Given the size and complexity of higher education institutions, implementing a boycott will take a long time… We’ve asked our branches to engage in a discussion as to what an academic boycott should be.” At the AUT, no one even seemed able to remember what boycott they had agreed.
There have been instances of individual British academics boycotting Israel. In June, two Israeli professors were removed from advisory positions on a pair of small academic journals put out by a Manchester publishing firm called St Jerome. The editor of the journals and the co-owner of St Jerome, Mona Baker, was and is – for the time being at least – a professor of translation studies at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (Umist). She briefly became the most infamous academic in Britain and is currently subject to an investigation by Umist, the limits of which have remained ominously unstated. The inquiry is expected to conclude within weeks.
In April, an English lecturer at Birmingham University called Sue Blackwell removed the links to Israeli institutions from her personal website. A dispute about her underlying attitude to Israel has flickered intermittently since, between her and the Board of Deputies of British Jews. Blackwell’s website has been scrutinised by Birmingham University; last month it was cleared of alleged breaches of university regulations. As with Baker, the very length of the controversy generated by what originally seemed a small political gesture suggests that openly boycotting Israel may be a hard and lonely road to take.
More discreet withdrawals of cooperation, however, may be another matter. As Yiftachel discovered, the workings of academic journals and academia in general, with its intricate, stop-start machinery of international collaborations, research grants and references, paper submissions and promotions and assessments – much of this screened from outsiders by traditions of confidentiality, and by anxiety about damaging careers – provides plenty of opportunities for boycotts and semi-boycotts and temporary boycotts that never declare themselves as such. At some Israeli and British universities, and in some Jewish pressure groups, there are persistent and growing murmurs about boycott-related discrimination. Some cases are minor but revealing. “I am concerned about my return to England at the end of the academic year,” a British lecturer at an Israeli university writes to a friend in London. “English friends have made me feel like a settler for being here.” Other cases are more substantial – a thesis supervisor at a British university, it is alleged, is currently refusing to support an Israeli student’s work due to the student’s nationality – but impossible to prove without the breaking of professional confidences. Other cases are verifiable but add little to the overall picture: St Jerome Publishing recently refused to fulfil an order for a single book placed by Bar-Ilan University in Israel.
On British campuses, the Union of Jewish Students (UJS) claims that anti-Israeli posters and pamphlets and stickers are appearing and anti-Israeli meetings are being held with increasing frequency. Alleged hostility to Jewish student societies and Jewish individuals is also on the rise. “Students are incredibly worried,”says Michael Phillips, the campaigns director of the UJS. “The boycott may have started with reasonably legitimate aims, but it’s a very different thing now.”
In Israel, it is starting to have an effect on everyday academic life. “Every year we send most of our research papers abroad for refereeing,” says Professor Paul Zinger, the outgoing head of the Israel Science Foundation. “We send out about 7,000 papers a year. This year, for the first time, we had people writing back – about 25 of them – saying, ‘We refuse to look at these.'” At the Academic Study Group on Israel and the Middle East, a fund for joint projects between Israeli and British universities, the number of people applying for grants has fallen by a third. “There is a palpable slowing down of academic activity,” says John Levy, who helps run the fund. “We’re not even attempting to set up [joint] workshops. What we’re encountering is very many people who are saying, ‘Can we simply delay matters?'”
Not all of this change, Levy says, is directly because of the boycott. Anxiety about visiting Israel amid the current violence is putting off foreign academics, too. But security concerns can be a useful cover for people who want to withdraw cooperation without causing a fuss. “Since the intifada began we’ve had conferences that people have said they would come to but haven’t,” says Frank Schuldenfrei of the British Council in Tel Aviv. “If someone looks you in the face and says, ‘I’m not coming over because my wife doesn’t want me to come,’ who can say if that’s the reason? There is no doubt that in certain circles Israel has become less popular in the last six months.”
In one of the curious symmetries of politics, strong supporters of the boycott offer the same sort of vague-but-potent anecdotes about its impact as the boycott’s opponents. “We’ve had specific instances of people reporting in, as it were, saying they’ve cancelled such and such a project with Israeli colleagues,” says Steven Rose.
Colin Blakemore, an Oxford University professor of physiology who was one of the original signatories of the Rose letter, says with certainty, “I do not know of any British academic who has been to a conference in Israel in the last six months.”
This matters more to Israel than you might imagine. Academic activity, and particularly science, are areas in which the country excels. “In physiology and neuroscience, physics and computer science, the Israelis certainly punch above their weight,” says Blakemore. Schuldenfrei calls Israel “a very important player in the academic marketplace”. For a small nation without abundant natural resources, this has had obvious benefits. From agriculture to arms manufacturing, Israel has become more technology-driven and successful than comparable nations.
At the same time, though, the nature of Israel’s academic pre-eminence makes it vulnerable to a boycott. “We are top of the world league with Switzerland and, I think, Sweden for the proportion of research projects that are international collaborations,” says Zinger. “Close to 40% of papers published in Israel involve cooperation abroad.” For complicated and expensive scientific research, there is often no alternative; yet for the weightiest historical and political reasons, campus links between Israel and its Arab neighbours have always been limited. Instead, Israel has developed academic connections with the west, and Europe in particular – which has its own equally weighty historical reasons, notably the holocaust, to treat it generously. Israel receives subsidies from EU funds for scientific research, the only non-member state to do so. “In the most recent four-year framework programme, we paid in €150m,” says Zinger, “and we got research grants of €165m.”
Back in April, when Steven and Hilary Rose composed their letter, targeting this cashflow seemed clever politics. “We both had an academic-political interest in EU science policy,” says Hilary, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. “We tried out the letter on a few friends, and they said it was a goer.” There is a pause. Then her husband says: “It’s not the first time we’ve done something like this.”
The Roses are sitting side by side, sharp-eyed and slouching confidently in their casual, donnish clothes, on a low sofa in their living room in north London. Together and separately, they have been involved in left-wing political causes for decades. They speak in long, fluently argued paragraphs.Since April, the Roses have written newspaper letters and articles defending the boycott and the right of people such as Mona Baker to interpret it in their own way. In August, Steven Rose, who is Jewish, publicly renounced his entitlement to Israeli residence and citizenship. At times, he and Hilary can make the boycott sound almost beyond criticism. It has generated important debates, they say. It has put pressure on an unjust government. It has Palestinian support: “It is rather touching,” says Hilary, “to have the chancellor of Bir Zeit [the main Palestinian university] write to you.” Finally, the boycott has reasserted the important right of people to challenge Israel without being anti-semitic. Steven Rose gets up from the sofa and disappears upstairs to fetch a piece of paper. It is a copy of a letter from Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and dozens of other prominent Jews to the New York Times in 1948, condemning the then brand-new state of Israel for containing extreme Jewish nationalists of a “fascist” nature, who had recently carried out a “massacre” of Palestinian villagers. The boycott, the Roses say, is in this tradition of constructive criticism.
Yet occasionally an unease slows their rhetoric. “Our initiative has produced a certain number of would-be supporters,” says Steven, choosing his words carefully, “who are pathologically anti-Jewish.” He produces another letter, this time with a recent date and a plastic folder around it as if it were poisonous.
“Dear Professor Rose,” it begins, “I write to congratulate you on the campaign to boycott Israel which I believe you and your husband are sponsoring. The problem is that it does not go far enough. We need to set up a boycott of all Jewish businesses, organizations and individuals. Hit the Zionist Yids where it hurts them – in their pockets… ” The typed letter ends with a shaky blue signature and an address in south London. “We called the commission for racial equality,” says Hilary crisply.”We are keeping the letter in plastic so we can give it to the police.”
Since April, the boycott has awakened other ugly impulses. The Roses’ email addresses, like those of many people drawn into the debate have been flooded daily with abusive messages. “Become a suicide bomber and blow yourself up… if you died the world would be a better place… what you are doing is worse than what the Nazis did… you sonderkommando [concentration camp collaborator] scum… ” From the day the first boycott petition appeared, what you could call a counter-boycott has been organised against the Roses and their allies. Like the boycott itself, this campaign has its moderates and extremists, its public gestures and undeclared initiatives, its concrete steps and carefully directed threats.
In June, Patrick Bateson, a professor of animal behaviour and provost of King’s College, Cambridge, who had signed the Rose letter, became involved in a correspondence with Henry Gee, a senior editor at the science magazine Nature. Gee made clear his objections “as a Jew” to the academic boycott. Then he continued: “I would not, of course, do anything as crass as ‘boycott’ papers from you and your colleagues that might happen to pass across my desk at Nature, though I would get much less pleasure in reading them… knowing what I do of your attitudes… [These] confirm my view… that Cambridge, and particularly the university, would be an uncomfortable place for me to visit.”
“The implicit threat was plain,” Bateson says. When contacted recently, Gee declined to discuss their correspondence further. Bateson says he will continue sending articles to Nature: “It may be an interesting test case.”
Colin Blakemore’s experience since he signed the Roses’ petition has been more bruising. “I was contacted by Steven just two days before it was submitted,” he says. “I was a bit hesitant about signing, because I saw a lack of balance. I asked for a sentence condemning Palestinian terrorism. But there was not enough time – the letter was about to be sent out.”
So he signed it anyway. Shortly afterwards, a French translation of the petition began circulating, which was significantly more aggressive than the original, with Blakemore and the other initial signatories’ names attached.
“I found myself being sucked in,” he says. Over the summer, although he still had links with Israeli academia Blakemore found himself facing a public campaign. He was, and is, president of the Physiological Society. Without naming him, a motion was proposed by a Jewish member for the society’s annual general meeting stating that, by supporting the boycott, Blakemore was breaking an important international convention on academic freedom, statute five of the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU). Since the 30s, the Physiological Society and other ICSU members had agreed to behave “without any discrimination on the basis of… citizenship, religion, creed, political stance, ethnic origin, race, colour, language, age or sex”. For many opponents of the academic boycott, this is a clinching argument.
In the end, Blakemore never faced a hostile annual general meeting. “My train was late.” The motion was withdrawn, he says, “after a lot of talk”. But he remains anxious about the consequences of his involvement in the boycott and how his stance became distorted: “I am deeply concerned for relations with my Jewish colleagues. The misrepresentation sticks. You can’t explain your personal position to everyone.”
In truth, boycotts are blunt weapons. Even the most apparently straightforward and justified ones, on closer inspection, have their controversies and injustices. Since the academic boycott of Israel began, both its supporters and its opponents have frequently cited the cutting of campus links with apartheid South Africa as an example of a less contentious action. But the South African boycott did not necessarily seem like that at the time.
The first calls for a general boycott of South Africa came in the 50s. Yet it was not until 1980 that the UN passed a resolution urging “all academic and cultural institutions to terminate all links with South Africa”. Opposition to this boycott persisted throughout the 80s: conservatives around the world disliked such anti-apartheid initiatives; campus libertarians perceived a loss of academic freedom; and some liberal South Africans argued that their universities, as centres of resistance to apartheid, made precisely the wrong targets.
Then, as now over Israel, some boycott participants seemed to become infamous almost by accident. In 1985, it was Professor Peter Ucko of Southampton University, who reluctantly banned South Africans, including personal friends, from an archaeological convention. This time, the boycott’s anti-heroes have been Mona Baker and her husband Ken.
Unlike the Roses, and many of their petition’s signatories, the Bakers are not prominent or politically connected academics. They now move in a lurid new world of death threats, feverish messages of support, conspiracy theories about Zionist networks, and computer viruses sent almost monthly to sabotage their business. For critics of the Bakers, they have received support from some awkward quarters. The leftwing, anti-Zionist Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe, is in regular, approving contact; Ken describes him as “fabulous”. In Israel, Pappe’s career has been regularly threatened by right-wingers who disapprove of his pro-Palestinian views. Like the harassment of Palestinian students by the Israeli army, this is a tricky fact to take on board for those who oppose the academic boycott on the grounds that it threatens campus freedoms in Israel and the Palestinian territories.
So far, the boycott feels less substantial than the issues around it. “It is annoying but there is no damage,” says Paul Zinger of the Israel Science Foundation. “It doesn’t seem that it has gathered any momentum.” The Roses insist it is too early to judge the boycott’s effectiveness. “Boycotts are slow,” says Hilary. “We didn’t eat South African oranges for about 1,000 years.” Steven adds: “It’s water on stone – eventually water on stone wears away.”
There are signs that the turbulent experiences of some of the boycott signatories have made them more, not less militant. At the Physiological Society, Colin Blakemore has set up a study group to examine when conventions about academic freedom should give way to boycotts. Its conclusions, he hints, are not likely to be favourable to Israel. More broadly, he has come to question whether academia should be insulated from politics at all: “Is it really true that scientific research is such a special activity that it should be last on the list when it comes to boycotts?” Steven Rose goes further: “Academic freedom I find a completely spurious argument in a world in which science is so bound up with military and corporate funding.”
Even Oren Yiftachel, for all his difficulties with Political Geography, agrees that academia cannot and should not function in a vaccuum. Yet that does not mean he has become a convert to the academic boycott of Israel. His objections are not just personal or philosophical, but tactical. Recently, he went to America with a Palestinian colleague to speak about Israel. “In all our lectures, we would talk about roadblocks, terrorists, a colonial situation. Everyone in the crowd would ask about whether the boycott was anti-semitic.”
In this report we referred to the treatment of a paper written by Professor Oren Yiftachel of Ben Gurion University and Dr Asad Ghanem of Haifa University, which was submitted to the journal Political Geography. We reported that Professor Yiftachel had, after a protracted dispute, agreed to revise the paper according to suggestions made by Political Geography, including the insertion of a comparison of Israel and apartheid South Africa, and that on this basis the paper had been accepted for publication. We now understand that the paper’s acceptance for publication has not been guaranteed, and that agreement has not been reached between Professor Yiftachel and Dr Ghanem and Political Geography over all the changes the journal suggested – in particular the comparison of Israel and South Africa. Professor Yiftachel and Dr Ghanem have received a list of comments and suggestions from three academic referees appointed by Political Geography, and they are considering what revisions are most appropriate for the paper, purely on scholarly grounds. Whatever revisions are finally made, the paper will then be refereed again. Professor Yiftachel, as we reported, has consistently opposed the academic boycott, and he remains committed to his position, as well as to the ending of Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.
The following correction was printed in the Guardian’s Corrections and Clarifications column, Wednesday January 15 2003
In this article, we quoted from correspondence between Patrick Bateson of King’s College Cambridge and Henry Gee, a senior editor of the science magazine, Nature. Dr Gee, has asked us to make it clear that the correspondence was quoted without his agreement or permission.
In November 2022, IAM reported that “(Hebrew U) Amos Goldberg Continues Comparing the Palestinian Self-Inflicted Nakba to the Holocaust of the Jews by the Nazis.”
Professor Amos Goldberg, a Hebrew University Holocaust researcher, and Dr. Bashir Bashir of the Van Leer Institute, Jerusalem, co-authored a 2018 book that contends “the Shoah [Holocaust] and the Nakba are two interlinked catastrophes.” According to them, when a Palestinian is asked about the Holocaust, he often brings up the Nakba, “the displacement of Palestinians associated with the founding of the state of Israel.” Goldberg and Bashir have “developed a concept aimed at promoting dialogue about these two interlinked national traumas.”
According to Goldberg and Bashir, The “Shoah was, in terms of its scale, not comparable with any other event that as such is considered singular.” But since “the Holocaust has become the ultimate symbol of evil… any attempt to connect it even loosely with other chapters of the history of violence is quickly suspected of being an attempt to trivialize the Holocaust.” They argue, “while the Shoah is over as an historical event and the Jewish people have, despite the trauma, been able to get back on its feet again, the Palestinians are to this day, in a position of political, military, economic, and cultural weakness because of the consequences of the Nakba.” This “asymmetry in the national catastrophes of both peoples from a moral point of view: the Palestinians were not to blame for the Holocaust, but the Israelis were responsible for the displacement and flight of the Palestinians and for their discrimination in Israel and oppression in the Occupied Territories.” The “rapprochement between Israelis and Palestinians, who both see themselves as victim communities, is made more difficult above all because the Shoah and the Nakba are used equally to legitimize national claims.” They wish to integrate the catastrophe of the other into one’s own narrative without abandoning the “ultimate claim to justice.”
As IAM explained, an event hosting Goldberg and Bashir titled “Understanding the pain of the others.” by the Goethe institute in Tel Aviv and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation was supposed to take place on November 13, 2022, but a week earlier, Goethe institute postponed the event.
According to the Goethe Institute, “The public discourse that has developed in Germany and Israel in the run-up to the event has made it impossible to carry out the event appropriately. Since we are expecting disruptions to the event, we cannot guarantee a safe implementation of the panel discussion at this point. The important topic of remembrance culture cannot be addressed in the way it needs to under these circumstances. The Goethe-Institute and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation have therefore decided to postpone the event.”
Dani Dayan, the chairman of Yad Vashem, announced that the event would be canceled entirely.
However, disregarding the protest, the event took place in Germany on February 2, 2023. The Einstein Forum at the University of Potsdam held the roundtable discussion.
The speakers included Bashir, Goldberg, and Charlotte Wiedemann. According to the invitation, “In her book Understanding the Pain of Others, the author Charlotte Wiedemann pleads for a new inclusive memory culture that promotes solidarity instead of competition among victims. Doing justice to the victims of colonial crimes and their descendants does not call into question the specificity of the Shoah. On the contrary: the importance of human rights for all is a central lesson from the Holocaust. But tragically, Holocaust memory has not brought us much closer to such universal values. In their co-edited volume The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History Amos Goldberg, Bashir Bashir, and the contributors to the volume explore the possibility of creating a shared language for discussing the memories of two entangled, but entirely different historical events: the genocide of European Jews and the displacement of Palestinians. At the center of this new language is the concept of empathic unsettlement which challenges the mutual denial of the suffering of the Other, recognizes the political asymmetries in Israel-Palestine, and gives rise to an egalitarian binationalism.”
The following day, Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt, wrote on Twitter: “‘Understanding the Pain of Others: The Holocaust, the Nakba and German Memory Culture’- An outstanding event yesterday night at the @einsteinforum , in Potsdam. I was deeply moved by it, & the eloquence & strength of the speakers on such a sensitive topic.”
As IAM indicated, efforts to equate the Holocaust and the Nakba are insidious cases of propaganda to demonize the Jewish state.
Goldberg, a Professor of Holocaust Studies, should know well that Jews had no choice when loaded on trains to be murdered in extermination camps. On the other hand, the Palestinians made their own choice, albeit flawed. The Palestinian leader, Mufti Haj Amin al Husseini, a Nazi collaborator, ordered the riots of 1936-39, where numerous Jews were killed. His ultimate goal, which he discussed with Hitler in Berlin, was establishing extermination camps in Palestine. The British victory over the Nazis in El Alamein spared the Jews in Palestine the fate of their European brethren.
In 1947, when the United Nations voted to divide Palestine into two states – a larger one for the Palestinians and a smaller one for the Jews – the Palestinians made another flawed decision. They rejected the Partition Proposal and – together with their Arab Allied States started a war against the new Jewish states, which they lost.
It is easy to understand why the Palestinians would want to minimize their responsibility. It is more difficult to explain why Goldberg would spend much of his academic career producing propaganda-like literature to this effect. Unfortunately, he is not the only one. IAM has repeatedly pointed out that radical academic activists have used the lax rules of academic freedom to write about topics that further their political agenda. The Israeli taxpayer who supports the universities deserves better.
Understanding the Pain of Others The Holocaust, the Nakba and German Memory Culture
Gesprächsleitung: Susan Neiman, Potsdam
Live im Einstein Forum. Das Tragen einer medizinischen Maske wird empfohlen. Auch im Live-Stream via Zoom (hier registrieren)
In her book Understanding the Pain of Others, the author Charlotte Wiedemann pleads for a new inclusive memory culture that promotes solidarity instead of competition among victims. Doing justice to the victims of colonial crimes and their descendants does not call into question the specificity of the Shoah. On the contrary: the importance of human rights for all is a central lesson from the Holocaust. But tragically, Holocaust memory has not brought us much closer to such universal values. In their co-edited volume The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History Amos Goldberg, Bashir Bashir, and the contributors to the volume explore the possibility of creating a shared language for discussing the memories of two entangled, but entirely different historical events: the genocide of European Jews and the displacement of Palestinians. At the center of this new language is the concept of empathic unsettlement which challenges the mutual denial of the suffering of the Other, recognizes the political asymmetries in Israel-Palestine, and gives rise to an egalitarian binationalism. This debate was originally scheduled to take place in the Goethe Institute Tel Aviv but was cancelled due to political pressure.
Charlotte Wiedemann is a journalist and author. She has published numerous books on international topics, most recently Den Schmerz der Anderen begreifen. Holocaust und Weltgedächtnis (2022). Afflicted by silence in her own family, she has followed debates about German responsibility for National Socialism for four decades. Bashir Bashir is associate professor of political theory at the Open University of Israel and senior research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. His research interests are: democratic theory, nationalism and citizenship studies, liberalism, decolonization, and reconciliation. His most recent publication is The Arab and Jewish Questions: Geographies of Engagement in Palestine and Beyond (2020).
Amos Goldberg is associate professor of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. For decades he has researched Holocaust memory at the intersection of history, critical theory, and literature. His publications include Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing during the Holocaust (2017) and his co-edited volume Marking Evil: Holocaust Memory in the Global Age (2015).
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Bashir Bashir, Amos Goldberg, Charlotte Wiedemann: Understanding the Pain of Others
Einstein Forum 3.29K subscribers
Feb 5, 2023
Understanding the Pain of Others: The Holocaust, the Nakba and German Memory Culture In her book »Understanding the Pain of Others«, the author Charlotte Wiedemann pleads for a new inclusive memory culture that promotes solidarity instead of competition among victims. Doing justice to the victims of colonial crimes and their descendants does not call into question the specificity of the Shoah. On the contrary: the importance of human rights for all is a central lesson from the Holocaust. But tragically, Holocaust memory has not brought us much closer to such universal values. In their co-edited volume »The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History« Amos Goldberg, Bashir Bashir, and the contributors to the volume explore the possibility of creating a shared language for discussing the memories of two entangled, but entirely different historical events: the genocide of European Jews and the displacement of Palestinians. At the center of this new language is the concept of empathic unsettlement which challenges the mutual denial of the suffering of the Other, recognizes the political asymmetries in Israel-Palestine, and gives rise to an egalitarian binationalism. This debate was originally scheduled to take place in the Goethe Institute Tel Aviv but was cancelled due to political pressure. Chair: Susan Neiman, Potsdam Charlotte Wiedemann is a journalist and author. She has published numerous books on international topics, most recently »Den Schmerz der Anderen begreifen. Holocaust und Weltgedächtnis« (2022). Afflicted by silence in her own family, she has followed debates about German responsibility for National Socialism for four decades. Bashir Bashir is associate professor of political theory at the Open University of Israel and senior research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. His research interests are: democratic theory, nationalism and citizenship studies, liberalism, decolonization, and reconciliation. His most recent publication is »The Arab and Jewish Questions: Geographies of Engagement in Palestine and Beyond« (2020). Amos Goldberg is associate professor of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. For decades he has researched Holocaust memory at the intersection of history, critical theory, and literature. His publications include »Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing during the Holocaust« (2017) and his co-edited volume »Marking Evil: Holocaust Memory in the Global Age« (2015).
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"Understanding the Pain of Others: The Holocaust, the Nakba and German Memory Culture"- An outstanding event yesterday night at the @einsteinforum, in Potsdam.
I was deeply moved by it, & the eloquence & strength of the speakers on such a sensitive topic. Recording available. https://t.co/RkYZnrUxzf
— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) February 3, 2023
If you took the time to listen to the event & the speakers you would realize that no one here or there is trying to equate anything. As Professor Goldberg masterfully said, it is about understanding the nexus between the two tragedies as key to understand ‘the pain of the other’.
The German state-funded Goethe Institute pulled the plug on a slated Sunday event in Tel Aviv that draws a line of connection between the Holocaust and the Palestinian “Nakba,” Yad Vashem chairman Dani Dayan announced on Friday.
Nakba (catastrophe) is the term Palestinians use for their defeat and exile at the hands of Israeli forces during the 1948 War of Independence.
Dayan wrote on Twitter: “At the end of our in-depth conversation, [Goethe Institute Board chairman Mr. Johannes] Ebert assured me that the event will not take place. Wise decision.”
Earlier today, I spoke at length with the Chairman of the Board of the worldwide Goethe Institute Mr. Johannes Ebert. At the end of our in-depth conversation, Mr. Ebert assured me that the event will not take place. Wise decision. https://t.co/O60L0CYtQM— Dani Dayan (@AmbDaniDayan) November 11, 2022
When The Jerusalem Post queried the institute on Monday, Jessica Kraatz Magri, a spokeswoman for Goethe, told the Post that the organization “postponed the event” until Sunday and provided an updated link to the discussion. The event was sponsored by left-wing German political party Rosa Luxemburg Foundation (RLS).
Foreign Ministry, Jewish and Zionist organizations express outrage at planned panel
Following a hailstorm of criticism on Wednesday about the event just as Jews around the world were commemorating Kristallnacht, Goethe stuck with its postponement.
The Foreign Ministry called for the cancellation of the event and expressed “shock and disgust” after the original announcement, calling it “blatant contempt of the Holocaust” and a “cynical and manipulative intent to create a connection whose entire purpose is to defame Israel.”
Dayan tweeted prior to the event that it “constitutes intolerable distortion of the Holocaust. Holding it on the anniversary of the November Pogrom (‘Kristallnacht’) is unforgivable.”
The event planned by the German cultural institute @goetheinstitut in Israel constitutes intolerable distortion of the Holocaust. Holding it on the anniversary of the November Pogrom (“Kristallnacht”) is unforgivable. pic.twitter.com/T1ifmEwVqc— Dani Dayan (@AmbDaniDayan) November 8, 2022
Israel’s Ambassador to Germany Ron Prosor told 103FM Radio that the event is “an attempt to make an inappropriate comparison at the expense of Holocaust survivors.” He added that “if it wasn’t ironic it would be tragic. This must not become an accepted discourse under the pretense of ‘holding a civilized discussion.’ It’s not.”
Alrun Kaune-Nüßlein, the director of political communication for RLS, told the Post that “we try to enable a debate between different democratic and emancipatory positions, as it corresponds to the tasks of an institution for social analysis and political education. As a left-wing institution in and from Germany, dealing with the numerous Nazi mass crimes – and in particular the murder of six million Jews – is central to us. Relativizing the Shoah is unacceptable for the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation,” she said.
“We regret that the date of the event caused irritation. We are therefore postponing the event to November 13, 2022.”
Journalist at center of panel has faced criticism for anti-Israel views
At the now-canceled event, journalist Charlotte Wiedemann was set to discuss her book Grasping the Pain of the Others with Bashir Bashir, associate professor of Political Theory at the Open University of Israel; Amos Goldberg, associate professor of Holocaust History and director of the Research Institute for Contemporary Judaism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; and Inge Gunther, a journalist covering Israeli and Palestinian affairs.
Wiedemann has faced criticism for her attacks on Israel’s existence. She wrote in the left-wing German daily newspaper taz: “There is no need to agree on the extent to which the founding of the State of Israel was also an act of settler colonialism.”
The left-wing and pro-Israel weekly paper Jungle World criticized the author for her pro-Iran regime views. Danyal Casar wrote that “Charlotte Wiedemann can nowhere see such an opposition in the taz.” Wiedemann wrote that ‘there is no opposition’ which could take responsibility in Tehran if the current system implodes.”
The European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) will hold a workshop in Israel between 11 to 14 March 2023. Titled “Mechanisms of Neuronal Remodeling,” it will take place in Kibbutz Nahsholim. According to the invitation, the workshop is “essential for establishing functional nervous systems across species. Remodeling involves specific elimination of existing connections, typically followed by strengthening of surviving synapses or even axon regrowth to develop new, adult-specific connections. While altered remodeling has long been suspected of contributing to neuropsychiatric conditions, such as autism, schizophrenia, and ADHD, studies only recently established firm molecular similarities between such disorders and developmental remodeling. Moreover, the mechanisms involved in developmental remodeling appear to be reiterated in neurodegeneration and during regeneration. Despite these significant advances in the field, many important questions remain open and will be discussed.”
The workshop will also discuss topics such as “Cell biological mechanisms and signaling pathways that control remodeling. Pathways activated in different paradigms and across species. Types of remodeling in circuit formation and its impact on learning and memory. Contributions of non-neuronal cells during remodeling. Neuron-neuron and tissue-neuron interactions during remodeling. Mechanisms of regrowth during development remodeling and post-traumatic regeneration?
The published list of speakers includes: Aakanksha Singhvi Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center | US; Andrew Chisholm UC San Diego | US; Asya Rolls Technion | IL; Avraham Yaron Weizmann Institute of Science | IL; Cagla Eroglu Duke University | US; Claude Desplan New York University | US; Debra Silver Duke University | US; Elly Tanaka Institute of Molecular Pathology | AT; Guillermina López-Bendito Instituto de Neurociencias UMH-CSIC | ES; Hongyan Wang Duke–NUS Medical School | SG; Jaeda Coutinho-Budd University of Virginia | US; Laura Andreae Kings College London | UK; Laura Cancedda Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia | IT; Laurent Nguyen University of Liege | BE; Lora Sweeney Institute of Science and Technology Austria | AT; Marco Terenzio Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology | JP; Oliver Hobert Columbia University | US; Oren Schuldiner Weizmann Institute of Science | IL; Peri Kurshan Albert Einstein College of Medicine | US; Stefanie Schirmeier Technische Universität Dresden | DE; Susana Cohen-Cory UC Irvine | US; Thomas Misgeld TUM/DZNE | DE; Timothy Mosca Jefferson University | US; Dietmar Schmucker Universität Bonn | DE.
However, the Palestinian BDS Movement is trying to sabotage the workshop. A letter was circulated by the Palestine Academy for Science and Technology (PalAST) calling on the EMBO to refrain from “holding workshops in Israel until its apartheid regime has been dismantled” and to uphold its “moral obligation to end its complicity in whitewashing Israel’s crimes.”
Particularly egregious are the Palestinians’ claims that the workshop’s location is “particularly offensive to us as Palestinians.” Because it is close to “the site of a massacre and a mass grave.” According to the Palestinians, “In May 1948, during the ethnic cleansing of Indigenous Palestinians from our homeland, the Israeli army attacked the Palestinian village of Tantura. After seizing the village, Israeli soldiers gunned down as many as 200 unarmed captive Palestinian civilians. The testimony of Israeli soldiers present at the massacre, which was featured in a recent documentary, shows the savagery with which the soldiers acted. ‘They put them into a barrel and shot them in the barrel.’ Following the massacre, the bodies of the slaughtered Palestinians were buried in a mass grave. In June 1948, just weeks after the massacre and after expelling the remaining Palestinians from Tantura, Zionist settlers took over Palestinian homes, renaming the village Nahsholim. Today, the mass grave is located under the beach parking lot. This is where EMBO plans to hold its “Mechanisms of neuronal remodeling” workshop. Neither Tantura is the only site of a massacre committed by the Israeli regime, nor are massacres relegated to history.”
To those unfamiliar with the history, the fighting in Tantura was part of the 1948 war when the Palestinians and their Arab allies were confident they could win after rejecting the 1947 UN Partition Plan. In the ensuing fighting, large Arab and Palestinian forces were deployed against the small Jewish army. Tantura, located on the main road between Haifa and Tel Aviv, was the scene of a fierce battle between the two sides. The Palestinian “Nakba” was self-inflicted and caused the Jewish Yishuv to lose one percent of its population. This tragic act of war that the Palestinians and their Arab allies instigated harmed both people, Israelis and Palestinians.
The gross misrepresentation of the Tantura battle is just one example of the continuous misinformation used by the Palestinians to push their BDS campaign.
The Palestinian letter to the EMBO also states, “In just the past year and a half, Israel has carried out two extensive military assaults on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, killing hundreds, including more than 80 children, injuring thousands, and destroying vital infrastructure. Gaza, with its 2 million Palestinian residents, has been under a brutal 15-year illegal Israeli siege. EMBO’s partners in these workshops are deeply complicit in Israel’s ongoing crimes against Palestinians.”
The BDS movement represents the decades-old fixation with victimhood that prevented the Palestinians from solving the conflict, even when the Oslo Accords and Camp David II presented a fair solution. The BDS rhetoric obscures that Iran, the main supporter of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), has cardinally opposed ending the conflict. In the eschatology of the Islamist regime, liberating Jerusalem is thought to be the prelude to the return of the Hidden Imam. Theology aside, by aligning itself with the Palestinians, the Shiite regime has bolstered its bona fides in a Sunni region. The Quds Force (QF), the foreign division of the Revolutionary Guards, had trained and equipped Palestinian jihadist suicide bombers to undermine the Oslo Accords. When Israel unilaterally withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2006, QF helped to turn the area into a heavily armed proxy against the so-called “Little Satan,” the Iranian name for the Jewish State.
Hamas and the PIJ have run a brutal and corrupt regime that subjugates its people. “Whispered in Gaza,” a recently clandestinely produced documentary, uncovers the lives of Palestinians under their Iranian-supported masters. The BDS would be well-advised to watch it to discover what real suffering means.
Developmental neuronal remodelling is essential for establishing functional nervous systems across species. Remodelling involves specific elimination of existing connections, typically followed by strengthening of surviving synapses or even axon regrowth to develop new, adult-specific connections. While altered remodeling has long been suspected of contributing to neuropsychiatric conditions, such as autism, schizophrenia, and ADHD, studies only recently established firm molecular similarities between such disorders and developmental remodeling. Moreover, the mechanisms involved in developmental remodelling appear to be reiterated in neurodegeneration and during regeneration. Despite these significant advances in the field, many important questions remain open and will be discussed at this meeting.
Specific topics that will be covered in this workshop include:
Cell biological mechanisms and signaling pathways that control remodelling.
Pathways activated in different paradigms and across species.
Types of remodelling in circuit formation and its impact on learning and memory.
Contributions of non-neuronal cells during remodelling.
Neuron-neuron and tissue-neuron interactions during remodelling.
Mechanisms of regrowth during developmental remodelling and post-traumatic regeneration?
About EMBO Courses and Workshops
EMBO Courses and Workshops are selected for their excellent scientific quality and timelines, provision of good networking activities for all participants and speaker gender diversity (at least 40% of speakers must be from the underrepresented gender).
Organisers are encouraged to implement measures to make the meeting environmentally more sustainable.
Palestinian Scientists Urge EMBO to Relocate Workshops from Apartheid Israel, Including at Site of Tantura Massacre
February 16, 2023 / ByPalestine Academy for Science and Technology (PalAST) /The Palestine Academy for Science and Technology (PalAST) calls on the European Molecular Biology Organization to uphold its “moral obligation to end its complicity in whitewashing Israel’s crimes” by refraining “from holding workshops in Israel until its apartheid regime has been dismantled.”
On the 19th of January 2023 and after finding out that the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) was organizing multiple workshops in Apartheid Israel, Palestine Academy for Science and Technology (PalAST) sent the following letter to the organizing board:
As Palestinian scientific and academic societies and unions, we note with grave concern that the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) is planning three workshops in apartheid Israel. We urge EMBO to immediately relocate these workshops to any other country that is not committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Israel’s illegal settlement regime in the occupied Palestinian territory is considered a war crime under international law.
The EMBO workshops include “Bacterial cell biophysics: DNA replication, growth, division, size and shape” (11–15 December 2022), “The 20S proteasome degradation pathway” (8–12 January 2023), and “Mechanisms of neuronal remodelling” (11–14 March 2023). Holding any of the EMBO workshops in apartheid Israel as it continues to deny the fundamental rights of millions of Palestinians will, regardless of intentions, contribute to prolonging Israel’s well-documented crimes against Palestinians.
Prominent human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Israeli NGO B’Tselem, have all found Israel guilty of the crime against humanity of apartheid, as have UN experts.
The last workshop’s scheduled location is particularly offensive to us as Palestinians. While whitewashed as “beautiful” and “secluded” on “Israel’s most beautiful stretches of beach” in an area of “serenity and tranquility,” it is in fact the site of a massacre and a mass grave.
In May 1948, during the ethnic cleansing of Indigenous Palestinians from our homeland, the Israeli army attacked the Palestinian village of Tantura. After seizing the village, Israeli soldiers gunned down as many as 200 unarmed captive Palestinian civilians. The testimony of Israeli soldiers present at the massacre, which was featured in a recent documentary, shows the savagery with which the soldiers acted. “They put them into a barrel and shot them in the barrel.”
Following the massacre, the bodies of the slaughtered Palestinians were buried in a mass grave. In June 1948, just weeks after the massacre and after expelling the remaining Palestinians from Tantura, Zionist settlers took over Palestinian homes, renaming the village Nahsholim. Today, the mass grave is located under the beach parking lot. This is where EMBO plans to hold its “Mechanisms of neuronal remodelling” workshop.
Neither Tantura is the only site of a massacre committed by the Israeli regime, nor are massacres relegated to history. They are our everyday lived experience. In just the past year and a half, Israel has carried out two extensive military assaults on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, killing hundreds, including more than 80 children, injuring thousands, and destroying vital infrastructure. Gaza, with its 2 million Palestinian residents, has been under a brutal 15-year illegal Israeli siege.
EMBO’s partners in these workshops are deeply complicit in Israel’s ongoing crimes against Palestinians. Ben-Gurion University (BGU), for example, hosts the Homeland Security Institute whose partnerships include Israel’s top weapons companies and the Ministry of Defense.
The Weizmann Institute offers an MA program tailored specifically for active duty soldiers and recently opened a pre-military academy that will prepare high school seniors for “meaningful military service.”
The US-Israel Binational Science Foundation funds research in illegal Israeli settlements built on militarily occupied Palestinian land in violation of international law.
This past March, EMBO endorsed a statement by seven national science academies just days into Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, defining it as “an assault on the fundamental principles of freedom, democracy and self-determination, which provide the basis for academic freedom and opportunities for scientific exchange and cooperation.”
By the same standard, EMBO must also recognize Israel’s decades-long regime of military occupation and apartheid as an assault on Palestinian freedoms and right to self-determination, and refrain from holding workshops in Israel until its apartheid regime has been dismantled, as was South Africa’s.
EMBO has a moral obligation to end its complicity in whitewashing Israel’s crimes. We urge EMBO to respect this obligation by relocating the upcoming workshops. We further call on speakers not to participate, if the workshops go ahead as planned.
There is no “serenity and tranquility” atop a massacre’s mass grave.
(PalAST will keep its fellow academics updated regarding any replies from EMBO)
An initial posting of this letter mistakenly included an incorrect image. PalAST took immediate steps to remove it and apologize for any offense that it has caused. This does not take away from the well-documented case of the Tantura massacre as mentioned in our letter.
On Sunday, February 12, the computer servers of the Technion in Haifa were targeted by a cyber attack, as announced by the university. The university disconnected the computer systems until it completed its investigation. An email allegedly sent by the hacking group Darkbit reveals they demanded 80 bitcoins, or some $1,750,000, in ransom.
According to the Technion, classes are taking place as usual despite the attack.
The wording of the Darkbit email that followed the attack included anti-Israel rhetoric. It said, “We regret to inform you that we’ve had to hack Technion network completely and transfer ‘all’ data to our secure servers… Keep calm, take a breath and think about an apartheid regime that causes troubles here and there. They should pay for their lies and crimes, their names and shames. They should pay for occupation, war crimes against humanity, killing the people (not only Palestinians’ bodies, but also Israelis’ souls) and destroying the future and all dreams we had. They should pay for firing high-skilled experts,”
In an interview, Alex Steinberg, a product manager at the cyber security firm ESET, explained that “the motivation to steal information from the institute could stem from a number of reasons. Firstly, countries like Iran, China, and Russia, could benefit greatly from the information. Additionally, they may want to steal the information to sell it for a profit,” he said. “In the ransom note, it seems that the attackers are demanding a monetary sum, but it could be a façade for other purposes… Some sources indicate that security and private entities in Israel are requesting to conduct in the Technion research whose results are not intended for publication. Hopefully, sensitive information didn’t leak as a result of the attack.”
In 2021, Bar-Ilan University was also the subject of a cyber-attack when the hackers demanded $2.5 million. Bar Ilan refused to pay, and as a result, the hackers leaked hundreds of thousands of personal information of students and faculty. The media notes that the cyber-attack was carried out by an Iran-linked group named Agrius.
Checkpoint, the Israeli cyber security firm, reported that, on average, Israeli educational institutions are targeted by hackers 3,383 times per week. Checkpoint explained that hackers prefer educational organizations due to their valuable personal data and the scant investment in cyber security.
Interestingly, Tasnim, the Iranian news agency based in Tehran, reported on the Technion cyber ransomware attack. They noted the attack came about a fortnight after a massive cyber attack targeted several Israeli chemical companies operating across “the occupied territories.” Tasmin explained that on January 30, a group of hackers launched a massive cyber-attack on Israeli chemical companies and “warned” engineers and workers to “quit their posts before they suffer severe repercussions of the Tel Aviv regime’s relentless violence against Palestinians.” In their words, “Our message to chemists working in the chemical factories is to leave their job, look for a new one, and take refuge in a place where we are not present. This is while we have a strong presence anywhere.” A message by the “Electronic Quds Force” stated, “We confirm that your work in chemical factories poses danger to your lives; however, we will never hesitate to melt your bodies with chemicals next time an act of aggression is perpetrated against Palestinians.”
Meanwhile, Tomas Meskauskas, the founder, author, and editor of PCrisk, a cyber security portal that informs Internet users about the latest digital threats, offers removal and decryption options of the DarkBit ransomware.
IAM will report on the investigation once it is published.
Leading Israeli research institute falls prey to cyberattack In ransom note littered with anti-Israel rhetoric, hackers threaten to leak Technion’s data online if demands not met within five days
Roei Hahn, Yuval Mann | published: 02/12/23 | 16:02
Computer servers at the Technion Institute of Technology in Haifa were targeted by a cyberattack overnight Sunday, a spokesperson for the university confirmed in a statement.
According to the statement, all of the university’s computer systems have been disconnected deliberately until a probe sheds light on the extent and intent behind the attack.
While the academic institute did not divulge information about the nature of the attack, in an email that reached Ynet and was allegedly sent by the group – going by the name Darkbit, hackers demanded that Technion pay 80 bitcoin, or about $1,750,000, in ransom. The hacker group threatened to increase the requested sum by 30% if their demands are not met within 48 hours, and put all of the university’s data up for sale on the web after five days. Despite the attack, classes at the Technion took place as usual on Sunday, with students being asked to disconnect their personal computers from the local network and minimize email traffic until further notice. Cybersecurity experts recommend against paying ransom for two reasons: firstly, there is no guarantee the attackers will keep their word and return the stolen information, and secondly, paying ransom encourages hackers to continue targeting other companies and organizations.
The wording of the email that followed the attack is littered with anti-Israeli rhetoric, which suggests the attack was motivated by ideological reasons, and not greed. “We regret to inform you that we’ve had to hack Technion network completely and transfer ‘all’ data to our secure servers,” the attackers wrote in the email, “Keep calm, take a breath and think about an apartheid regime that causes troubles here and there. They should pay for their lies and crimes, their names and shames.” “They should pay for occupation, war crimes against humanity, killing the people (not only Palestinians’ bodies, but also Israelis’ souls) and destroying the future and all dreams we had. They should pay for firing high-skilled experts,” the mail read. Alex Steinberg, a product manager at cybersecurity firm ESET, explained that “the motivation to steal information from the institute could stem from a number of reasons. Firstly, countries like Iran, China, and Russia, could benefit greatly from the information. Additionally, they may want to steal the information to sell it for a profit.” “In the ransom note, it seems that the attackers are demanding a monetary sum, but it could be a façade for other purposes,” Steinberg added. “Some sources indicate that security and private entities in Israel are requesting to conduct in the Technion research whose results are not intended for publication. Hopefully, sensitive information didn’t leak as a result of the attack.”
This isn’t the first attack targeting an academic institute in Israel. In 2021, Bar-Ilan University also fell prey to a ransomware attack in which hackers demanded around $2.5 million. The university refused to pay the sum, resulting in the hackers leaking hundreds of thousands of personal records of students and academic faculty. The cyberattack was reportedly carried out by an Iran-linked hacker group known as Agrius. According to data from cybersecurity firm Checkpoint, Israeli educational institutions are targeted by hackers 3,383 times per week on average, twice as often as other organizations. The company explained that educational organizations are a preferred target for hackers due to the valuable personal data they hold and relatively scant investment in cybersecurity.
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – A top Israeli technology school and a center for cyber security education came under a ransomware attack by a group of hackers.
The attack on the Technion University came nearly a fortnight after a massive cyberattack targeted Israeli chemical companies operating across the occupied territories.
According to the Walla news site, the cyberattack was carried out by a group called Darkbit, which demanded 80 bitcoins from Technion, which is equivalent to $1,747,971.
The group has also said that the amount will go up by 30% if the ransom is not received within 48 hours.
“You will receive a decrypting key after the payment. Notice that you just have 48 hours. After the deadline, a 30% penalty will be added to the price. We put data for sale after 5 days,” DarkBit wrote in a message on the university website.
“We’re sorry to inform you that we’ve had to hack Technion network completely and transfer all data to our secure servers. So, keep calm, take a breath and think about an apartheid regime that causes troubles here and there,” DarkBit group wrote in the mail.
“They should pay for their lies and crimes, their names and shames. They should pay for occupation, war crimes against humanity, killing the people … and destroying the future and all dreams we had. They should pay for firing high-skilled experts,” the hacker group further mentioned.
The group also shared a TOX messenger ID through which individuals can contact them to recover their personal files. DarkBit has claimed that the files are encrypted using AES-256 military-grade algorithm.
“Any try for recovering data without the key (using third-party applications/companies) causes permanent damage,” DarkBit wrote.
The university said it is postponing scheduled exams due to the ransomware attack, but classes will continue as usual. Its website remained inaccessible at the time of writing.
Back on January 30, a group of hackers launched a massive cyberattack on Israeli chemical companies, warning their engineers and workers to quit their posts before they suffer severe repercussions of the Tel Aviv regime’s relentless violence against Palestinians.
“Our message to chemists working in the chemical factories is to leave their job, look for a new one, and take refuge in a place where we are not present. This is while we have a strong presence anywhere,” Russia’s Arabic-language RT Arabic television news network cited the message published by the Electronic Quds Force.
It added, “We confirm that your work in chemical factories poses danger to your lives; however, we will never hesitate to melt your bodies with chemicals next time an act of aggression is perpetrated against Palestinians.”
A general view taken from the Mount of Olives shows an Israeli flag with houses in Jerusalem’s predominantly Arab neighbourhood of Silwan appearing in the background, on January 2, 2023. (Photo by AHMAD GHARABLI/AFP via Getty Images)
Apreviously unknown cybercrime group attacked an Israeli technical university over the weekend, demanding $1.7 million in bitcoin as payment for what the attackers claim are the Israeli government’s “lies and crimes” ranging from occupation to war crimes to tech layoffs.
The Israel Institute of Technology, also called Technion, announced the attack on Twitter midday Sunday, and on Monday tweeted that the school remained “under a challenging cyber attack,” calling it a “complex event,” according to a Google translation. Around the same time, the online malware repository vx-underground posted a photo purporting to show the ransom note in which the group identified itself as “DarkBit” and demanded 80 Bitcoin.Image posted to the DarkBit Telegram channel
The school said Monday services were slowly returning to normal, but its website remained inaccessible Monday morning U.S. time. The school said in one of its tweets that it had “proactively blocked all communication networks.”
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DarkBit launched a Telegram channel on Saturday and claimed responsibility for the attack on the school, calling it “the technological core of an apartheid regime,” and threatening more attacks on entities affiliated with Israel. It’s not yet clear who is behind the group. The name could be seen as an amalgamation of older, established ransomware variants DarkSide and LockBit, and the demand of 80 Bitcoin follows an established ransomware pattern. But the ransom note seems designed to evoke the appearance of hacktivism, with the references to war crimes and occupation.
“While this attack had the characteristics of a ‘usual’ large scale ransomware attack (asking for 80btc to release the encrypted files), the way the group delivered their message and the overall political sentiment they used, and the threats, make us believe it’s ideologically driven and not a pure financial ransomware attack,” Messing said. “We expect them to continue to threaten the leakage of information, and also possibly act on the threat, in an attempt to embarrass the university and threaten its faculty, students and partners.”
Gil Messing, spokesperson at Israeli cybersecurity company Check Point, told CyberScoop in a statement that the company believes DarkBit “are linked to a different ideological group with possible connections to Iran” based on a both technical and non-technical factors. Messing noted the creation of the Telegram channel the day before the attack, as well as hacking into and manipulating the school’s LinkedIn account:Screenshot of a post made to the university’s jobs page on LinkedIn (Check Point)
Israel’s education sector is targeted roughly 3,400 times per week, compared to 1,600 per week for the overall national average, Messing noted, and universities there have been targeted by ideological hackers from Iran in the past.
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“The university is a quality target for hackers and they are still in the process of understanding the scope of the attack, which servers are impacted and what data is encrypted,” he said. “This will take some time before the full picture becomes clearer.”
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*הודעה חשובה* הטכניון נמצא תחת מתקפת סייבר. היקפה של המתקפה ואופיה מצויים בבדיקה. כדי לבצע את תהליך איסוף המידע והטיפול בו, אנו נעזרים במיטב המומחים בתחום, בטכניון ומחוצה לו, ומתואמים עם הרשויות המוסמכות. הטכניון חסם בשלב זה באופן יזום את כל רשתות התקשורת. pic.twitter.com/SBIbZVwzRc
*הודעה חשובה* הטכניון נמצא תחת מתקפת סייבר. היקפה של המתקפה ואופיה מצויים בבדיקה. כדי לבצע את תהליך איסוף המידע והטיפול בו, אנו נעזרים במיטב המומחים בתחום, בטכניון ומחוצה לו, ומתואמים עם הרשויות המוסמכות. הטכניון חסם בשלב זה באופן יזום את כל רשתות התקשורת.
Dear Colleagues, We’re sorry to inform you that we’ve had to hack Technion network completely and transfer “all” data to our secure servers. So, keep calm, take a breath and think about an apartheid regime that causes troubles here and there. They should pay for their lies and crimes, their names and shames. They should pay for occupation, war crimes against humanity, killing the people (not only Palestinians’ bodies, but also Israelis’ souls) and destroying the future and all dreams we had. They should pay for firing high-skilled experts.
Anyway, there is nothing for you (as an individual) to be worried. That’s the task of the administration to follow up our instruction for recovering the network. But, you can contact us via TOX messenger if you want to recover your files personally. (TOX ID: AB33BC51AFAC64D98226826E70B483593C81CB22E6A3B504F7A75348C38C862F00042F5245AC)
Our instruction for the administration: All your files are encrypted using AES-256 military grade algorithm. So, 1. Don’t try to recover data, because the encrypted files are unrecoverable unless you have the key. Any try for recovering data without the key (using third-party applications/companies) causes PERMANENT damage. Take it serious. 2. You have to trust us. This is our business (after firing from high-tech companies) and the reputation is all we have. 3. All you need to do is following up the payment procedure and then you will receive decrypting key using for returning all of your files and VMs. 4. Payment method: Enter the link below hxxp://iw6v2p3cruy7tqfup3yl4dgt4pfibfa3ai4zgnu5df2q3hus3lm7c7ad.onion/support Enter the ID below and pay the bill (80 BTC) – You will receive decrypting key after the payment.
Notice that you just have 48 hours. After the deadline, a 30% penalty will be added to the price. We put data for sale after 5 days. Take it serious and don’t listen to probable advices of a stupid government.
The Hebrew-language Behevrat Haadam (In the Company of Man) of the Israeli Association of Anthropology published “Congratulations on receiving the Distinction Award for your doctoral thesis!” to Dr. Eilat Maoz in June 2022. Behevrat-Haadam explained that Maoz, a postdoctoral researcher in the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning at the Technion, wrote her doctoral thesis in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago under the supervision of Kaushik Sunder-Rajan and Stephan Palmie. Maoz’s doctoral thesis is a historical ethnography focusing on the police in Jamaica, where she “investigates the global, stratified and deceptive social order.” She proposes the concept of a “police economy,” replacing the “state police,” assuming that the state is the “main, if not the only, agent of organized violence.”
Interestingly, both supervisors research entirely different topics. Rajan’s recent book is Pharmocracy: Value, Politics and Knowledge in Global Biomedicine, as seen from contemporary India. Palmie’s work focuses on Afro-Cuban religious formations.
According to Behevrat-Haadam, Maoz’s doctoral thesis, “The Frontier and the Plantation: A Police Economy of Post-Slavery Jamaica,” shows how “formal and informal, global and national organizations, operating in offices Air conditioned and in the field, coalescing together to create violence that is perceived – more and more – as abstract, uncontrollable, or in Marxist terms ‘alienated.'”
Her “work is based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in several central locations: the Jamaican police, the police investigation department established in 2011 and managed “jointly” by Great Britain and Jamaica, and a civil society organization that deals with creating peace agreements between gangs, preventing blood feuds and helping young people. In addition, the work relies on archival research in England and Jamaica and in-depth interviews with police officers of various ranks, local and foreign security and reform consultants, gang members, and social and political activists. The work seeks to understand and describe the configuration of organized violence, and the way in which this violence takes on meaning and is perceived in a post-slavery, post-colonial society where concepts such as “emancipation” (1838) and “independence” (1962) have almost lost all meaning.”
Her Ph.D. thesis deals with “the rise and fall of the post-colonial state in Jamaica – a story told through the police so that the police are a means of understanding the state and not the other way around. Among other things, this part deals with the development of a radical black consciousness in the ranks of the police in the 1970s. It shows how the ‘return of the colonial masters’ at the beginning of the millennium is a necessary product of the destruction of the leftist political project in the 1970s and the imposition of the neoliberal dogma on the state (as it happened throughout South America). This part also deals with the role of liberal discourses (in particular, the ‘cancellation’ or abolitionist discourse, that of the 19th century as opposed to today) in abolishing the political autonomy of groups and peoples seeking to liberate themselves.”
She follows Frantz Fanon, a French West Indian Psychologist and Political Philosopher from the French colony of Martinique, whose work became influential in post-colonial studies, critical theory, and Marxism.
Her Ph.D. thesis deals with the issues of “murder by the police through an ethnographic examination of two cases… Beyond the description of a global control structure, in which the state is only one factor, and not the most central one, the work claims, following Fanon, that decolonization requires us to confront the need to reorganize the structures of violence – in order to take control of alienated colonial violence. In this sense, the work criticizes the tendency of the left and contemporary critical theory to deny, retaliate, or attribute violence, especially to the state and to ‘the other’ in general. A tendency that has moral and racist elements, which undermines the role of politics and breeds a right-wing populism of ‘law and order.'”
Clearly, her attack on police viewed through the critical, neo-Marxist lens fits her current work.
Maoz’s work at the Smart Social Strategy at the Technion. Her work is “Critical Urban Safety: A Democratic Framework.” She starts by claiming that “conservative studies and programs emphasize territorial defense, spatial control, and increased surveillance, critical studies direct our attention to financial disinvestment, spatial inequality, racialized class stratification, displacement, and gentrification.” The “former views it as a collection of defensible and securitized properties and assets, whereas the latter views the built environment and urban society as one intermeshed fabric.” At Smart Social Strategy, “we join forces with critical scholars.”
Although not a criminologist, she uses “comparative critical criminology and critical security debates.” In her words: “we also aim to envision and model forward-looking, critically inspired, urban change.” The case study is the Hadar neighborhood in Haifa, Israel. This urban quarter of some 40,000 residents is home to a diverse population of Jews, “Palestinian-Arabs,” and others. Established in the 1920s by Jewish entrepreneurs in the context of “Zionist colonization.” In her work, she plans to “promote security and justice for victimized populations,” suggesting that she might critically examine the police, as she did in Jamaica, stating that “crime rates tend to be inflated by excessive policing and over-reporting.” The “lower-class residents—most of them Arabs—fear the growing infiltration of gangs and arms. The latter fear for young men who may become victims and perpetrators or suffer police brutality on account of their national identity.”
Maoz is a Hadash (a communist party) activist. She appeared in September 2020 in a radio program named “Hadash Party Wave,” which noted: “We hosted the anthropologist and left-wing activist Eilat Maoz to delve deeper into the forces that navigate and control the occupation, on the occasion of the release of her new book on ‘Living Law.’ We talked about the connection between privatization and neoliberalism within the Green Line and the Wild West policy in the West Bank, about the differences between the occupation during the formation days and the Likud days, about policemen and thieves in the occupied territories – and we tried to understand why the settlers opposed the annexation plan?”
After completing her post-doctorate, if Maoz secures an academic position, she would join the burgeoning ranks of political activists whose critical, neo-Marxist analysis is distant from political and economic reality. For instance, her analysis of the Hadar neighborhood should have tried to explain the skyrocketing criminality in the Arab sector instead of dismissing it with the worn-out critical, neo-Marxist tropes of “promoting security and justice for the victimized populations.”
It looks like the Israel National Insurance Special Projects Fund sponsors her project and gets little in return for its money.
אילת מעוז, כיום פוסט-דוקטורנטית בפקולטה לארכיטקטורה ובינוי ערים בטכניון, כתבה את עבודת הדוקטורט שלה במחלקה לאנתרופולוגיה באוניברסיטת שיקגו, בהנחיית קאושיק סונדר-רג׳אן ושטפן פלמיה. עבודת הדוקטורט של מעוז היא אתנוגרפיה היסטורית התמקדות במשטרה בג׳מייקה – כמושג, כמוסד, וכרעיון וחוקרת דרכו את הסדר החברתי הגלובלי, המרובד והמתעתע. בעבודתה היא מציעה את המושג של ״כלכלת משטרה״ (police economy) כתחליף למושג ״מדינת משטרה״ שמניח כי ״המדינה״ היא הסוכן המרכזי, אם לא הבלבדי, של אלימות מאורגנת; ובוחנת את השחקנים, ההגיונות והפרקטיקות המעצבים ויוצרים את מה שהיא מכנה אלימות מנוכרת.
העבודה זכתה בפרס ליכטשטיין של אוניברסיטת שיקגו לדוקטורט המצטיין באנתרופולוגיה בשנת 2021. מאמר ראשון מתוכה, Black Police Power: The Political Moment of the Jamaica Constabulary עתיד להתפרסם בכתב העת Comparative Studies in Society and History.
הנה פירוט על עבודתה:
ב-7 במאי 2003, בשעה חמש אחר הצהריים, עצרה ניידת משטרה מול בית קטן בכפר קראל במרכז ג׳מייקה. השוטרים, שהשתייכו ליחידת ״עילית״ לניהול הפשע, ירדו מהרכב ופתחו באש לעבר תושבי הבית וחבריהם – כולל ילדה בת שבע המכונה פינקי – שישבו במרפסת. לדברי השוטרים, הם הגיעו לבית כדי לעצור גנגסטר ידוע בשם צ׳ן צ׳ן, שהגיע לאחרונה לאיזור והחל לגבות דמי חסות ממכרה זהב שהקים תאגיד אוסטרלי עלום בשם אוסג׳ם. אבל כמה דקות אחרי חמש השוטרים כבר הודיעו בקשר שבמהלך ״חילופי אש״ נהרגו ארבעה מיושבי הבית (צ׳ן צ׳ן לא היה ביניהם).
הגרסה שמסרו השוטרים היתה קונבנציונאלית ביותר. הם טענו שירו על התושבים רק כדי להתגונן. השכנים, ששמעו את הכל מבעד לגדר טענו בדיוק את ההפך: שהמשטרה ירתה בשתי נשים ושני גברים בדם קר, בעודם מתחננים על חייהם. מה שלא היה ידוע באותה שעה, אבל החל להתברר בהמשך, זה שזמן קצר אחרי הרצח התקשר מפקד היחידה לגנגסטר ידוע אחר וביקש לקנות ממנו אקדחים כדי לטמון בזירה – דבר שהפך זה מכבר לפרקטיקה מקובלת.
במדינה שבה שיעור הרצח על ידי המשטרה הוא השני הגבוה בעולם, רצח כמו זה שהתרחש בקראל היה יכול בקלות להצטרף לסטטיסטיקה מכוערת (250 מקרי מוות בידי המשטרה מידי שנה בממוצע, במדינה של פחות משלושה מיליון נפש). אבל, מסיבות שלא כאן המקום לפרט, אירוע קראל הניע תגובת שרשרת שהביאה חמישה קציני משטרה בריטיים לתפוס עמדות פיקוד בכירות – כולל את תפקיד סגן המפכ״ל – במשטרת ג׳מייקה. אירוע שתושבי האי הקריבי, ובעיקר השוטרים, כינו באירוניה מובנת ״שובם של הקצינים הקולוניאליים״ או אפילו ״שובו של המאסטר״. להזכירנו כי משטרת ג׳מייקה הוקמה עם סיום משטר עבדות בן יותר משלוש מאות שנה והמשיכה לשמש כלי דיכוי מרכזי של המדינה הקולוניאלית עד העצמאות ב-1962 – ובעצם, כפי שמתברר, אולי גם הרבה אחרי.
עבודת הדוקטורט ״הספר ואחוזת המטעים: כלכלת המשטרה של ג׳מייקה״ (The Frontier and the Plantation: A Police Economy of Post-Slavery Jamaica), היא אתנוגרפיה היסטורית שחוקרת את סדר חברתי גלובלי, מרובד ומתעתע באמצעות שימוש במשטרה – כמושג, כמוסד, וכרעיון – כעדשה אנליטית מושחזת. העבודה מציעה את המושג של ״כלכלת משטרה״ (police economy) כתחליף מתבקש למושג של ״מדינת משטרה״ שמניח כי ״המדינה״ היא הסוכן המרכזי, אם לא הבלבדי, של אלימות מאורגנת ומראה כיצד ארגונים פורמליים ולא-פורמליים, גלובליים ולאומיים, הפועלים במשרדים ממוזגים ובשטח, מתלכדים יחד ליצירת אלימות שנתפסת – יותר ויותר – כאבסטרקטית, בלתי נשלטת, או במונחים מרקסיסטיים ״מנוכרת״.
הריסות בקינגסטון, בירת ג’מייקה – עיר של מלחמת אזרחים מושתקת. צילום: אילת מעוז
העבודה מבוססת על 18 חודשים של עבודת שדה אתנוגרפית בכמה מוקדים מרכזיים: המשטרה הג׳מייקנית, מחלקת חקירות השוטרים שהוקמה ב-2011 ומנוהלת ״במשותף״ על ידי בריטניה וג׳מייקה וארגון חברה אזרחית שעוסק ביצירת הסכמי שלום בין כנופיות, במניעת נקמת דם ובסיוע לצעירים. נוסף על כך, העבודה נשענת על מחקר ארכיוני באנגליה ובג׳מייקה ועל ראיונות עומק עם שוטרים בדרגות שונות, יועצי רפורמה וביטחון מקומיים וזרים, חברי כנופיות, ופעילים/ות חברתיים ופוליטיים. העבודה מבקשת להבין ולתאר את התצורה של אלימות מאורגנת, ואת האופן שבו אלימות זו מקבלת משמעות ונתפסת, בחברת פוסט-עבדות פוסט-קולוניאלית שבה מושגים כמו ״שחרור״ (1838) ו״עצמאות״ (1962) כמעט ואיבדו כל פשר.
החלק הראשון של הדוקטורט עוסק בעלייתה ונפילתה של המדינה הפוסט-קולוניאלית בג׳מייקה – סיפור שמסופר דרך המשטרה, כך שהמשטרה היא אמצעי להבנת המדינה ולא להפך. בין היתר, חלק זה עוסק בהתפתחות של תודעה שחורה רדיקלית בשורות המשטרה בשנות השבעים ומראה איך ״שיבתם של האדונים הקולוניאליים״ בראשית המילניום היא תוצר מתבקש של הרס הפרויקט הפוליטי השמאלי בשנות השבעים וכפיית הדוגמה הניאו-ליברלית על המדינה (כפי שהתרחש בכל בדרום אמריקה). חלק זה גם עוסק בתפקיד של שיחים ליברליים (בפרט , שיח ״הביטול״ או האבולישן, זה של המאה ה-19 ולהבדיל זה של ימינו) בביטול האוטונומיה הפוליטית של קבוצות ועמים המבקשים להשתחרר.
חלקו השני של הדוקטורט עוסק באופן ישיר בסוגיות של רצח על המשטרה, על ידי בחינה אתנוגרפית של שני קייסים – רצח של ״עבריינים״ כפי שהוא נתפס על ידי מנהיג כנופיה מכהן ורצח שיטתי של גובי פרוטקשן. בשני המקרים, העבודה מתארת את הכלכלה הפוליטית של הרצח, אשר במקרה הראשון משמש כאמצעי משמוע ובמקרה השני כאמצעי ניהול של סקטור בכלכלה הגלובלית של הפשע. בחלק האחרון של הדוקטורט אני עוסקת במימדים מרכזיים של הרפורמה המשטרתית המקודמת בג׳מייקה, ועומדת על הפיכתה של קהילת העוני, או הסלאם, למעין נכס.
מעבר לתיאור של מבנה שליטה גלובלי, שהמדינה בו היא רק גורם אחד, ולא המרכזי ביותר, העבודה טוענת, בעקבות פאנון, שדה-קולוניזציה דורשת מאיתנו להתעמת עם הצורך לארגן מחדש את מבני האלימות – על מנת להשתלט על אלימות קולוניאלית מנוכרת. במובן זה, העבודה מבקרת את הנטייה של השמאל והתיאוריה הביקורתית בת זמננו להתכחש, להיפרע, או ליחס אלימות במיוחד למדינה ובכלל ״לאחר״. נטייה שיש בה יסודות מוסרניים וגזעניים, שחותרת תחת תפקיד הפוליטיקה ומצמיחה פופוליזם ימני של ״חוק וסדר״.
אירחנו את האנתרופולוגית ופעילת השמאל אילת מעוז בשביל לנבור עמוק יותר בכוחות שמנווטים ושולטים בכיבוש, לרגל הוצאת ספרה החדש בנושא “חוק חי”. דיברנו על הקשר בין ההפרטה והניאו-ליברליזם בתוך הקו הירוק למדיניות המערב הפרוע בגדה המערבית, על ההבדלים בין הכיבוש בימי המערך לימי הליכוד, על שוטרים וגנבים בשטחים הכבושים – וניסינו להבין למה המתנחלים התנגדו לתכנית הסיפוח? מראיין:גולי דולב השילוני תודה רבה לצוות ההפקה שלנו: טל שדות, יהונתן שמילוביץ, תומר שור, תמר מארה, דוריאל לנקה, אורי נתן, סער יהלום, גלעד פולמבו, אמנון ברונפלד וזוהר אלון עיצוב לוגו: פלג ספיר הצטרפו לרשימת התפוצה שלנו – ותקבלו הודעה בוואטסאפ בכל פעם שעולה פרק חדש: https://chat.whatsapp.com/LaUdAfDuvMq… לרכישת ספרה של אילת מעוז “חוק חי: שיטור וריבונות תחת כיבוש”: https://www.kibutz-poalim.co.il/livin… אפשר להאזין גם בספוטיפיי http://tiny.cc/kea8oz או בסאונדקלאוד https://soundcloud.com/gal-hadash או במלא מקומות אחרים https://anchor.fm/gal-hadash נשמח אם תכתבו לנו! כאן בתגובות, או ל-gal.hadash2020@gmail.com גל חד”ש הוא הפודקאסט השבועי, השמאלי והפוליטי של סניף חד”ש-תל אביב
Research Fellow, Urban Safety in a Transitional Era
PhD. University of Chicago, Anthropology M.A. Tel Aviv University, Sociology and Anthropology B.A, Tel Aviv University, History and Gender Studies
Research focus Eilat Maoz studies and implements democratic security-making and urban conflict transformation. Drawing on a rich comparative stock of critical research and action, she develops participatory frameworks for making cities safe, creative, and egalitarian. Recognizing momentous planetary challenges in the present era—combating inequality and fighting climate change—she turns critical insights, especially from anti-colonial theory and from the Global South, into collective action plans. Combining ethnographic, historical, and cartographic methods, Maoz analyzes complex security regimes and multi-dimensional urban conflicts. Her dissertation, based on 18 months of ethnographic study of policing and organized crime in Jamaica, coined the term “police economy” to theorize the multi-scalar formal-informal formations of organized violence that stretch ‘above’ and ‘below’ the state. The work was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and won the prestigious William Rainey Harper Dissertation Fellowship (2019) and the Lichtstern Dissertation Prize in Anthropology (2021). Her first book, Living Law, was published by the Van Leer Institute in 2020, and her articles are published across academic and popular venues. She teaches classical social theory, political-economic anthropology, critical criminology, and qualitative research design, and works closely with activists, local government, and civil society.
Contemporary debates on policing trace the rise of “law and order” populism and police militarization to colonial histories and imperial boomerang effects. In a time marked by the renewed imperative “to decolonize,” however, few studies examine what decolonizing policing did or could look like in practice. This article draws on oral history narratives of Jamaican police officers to recover their ideas about transforming the colonial Jamaica Constabulary Force in the 1970s. Born out of black power mobilizations and under a democratic socialist government (1972–1980), police decolonization was viewed as part of broader transformative effort to rid the country of colonial inheritances in economics, culture, and politics. Jamaican policemen, radicalized since the early twentieth century, then began revising their social mandate and ask who the police should serve and protect. Ultimately, due to internal contradictions and external pressures, the experiment failed, giving rise to police populism and increased violence against black men and women in the ghettos. The episode reveals how populism emerges out of a failure of emancipatory campaigns and how radical critique can turn into ideological justification. It also highlights the need to distinguish between diverse, contradictory, and overlapping demands to decolonize societies and institutions today.
Ariel University is holding a conference, “Israel-Korea Workshop for Astronomy and Space Science,” from January 29 to February 3, 2023. “Is-Ko-Space 2023” aims to enhance the collaborations between the Korean and Israeli “highly productive astronomical communities.” The workshop includes “two days of science presentations, a two-day visit to Israeli astronomical observatories, and plenty of time to discuss collaborations. The science-presentation part (January 29 – 30) will include four plenary sessions: Observational Facilities and Instrumentation Extragalactic Physics and Astronomy Stars and Planets Solar System Physics and Space Science For students: Award prizes will be given to the best poster and the best talk. The observatory visit will be held on February 02 – 03 and will feature: Visit of Wise Observatory in Mitzpe Ramon Visit of Weizmann Institute Observatory in Ne’ot Smadar Time to discuss possible collaborations In between (January 31 – February 01) participants are invited to: Attend the 18th Ilan Ramon International Space Conference Work on individual Israeli-Korean collaborations.”
Advocates of the academic boycott of Ariel University were quick to react. On January 29, 2023, Prof. Nir Gov of the Department of Chemical and Biological Physics at Weizmann Institute, sent an email to the Academia IL Network. “To all Academy members in Israel willing to cooperate with the institution called “Ariel University”.” Gov gave the example of “Is-Ko-Space 2023.”
He wrote: “I hope you are aware that 1) Ariel University is located in the Ariel settlement in the heart of the West Bank, which was occupied in 1967, on an area most of which was declared state land and in this way was confiscated from the use of the local Palestinian residents by orders of the army. 2) The State of Israel exercises military rule in this territory against the Palestinian residents, including a military court, without basic human rights. 3) The area where Ariel is located has never been annexed to the State of Israel, as determined by the High Court of Justice in its ruling on Ariel University. Ariel is not inside the State of Israel. According to the UN, this area is defined as the “Occupied Palestinian territories” (OPT, Pt). 4) The Palestinian residents living around Ariel are prevented from entering the Ariel settlement, and certainly not to the university. This contrasts the situation in Israel, where all academic institutions are equally open to all residents, as in any democratic country. 5) The Ariel settlement, and Ariel University, were built as part of a political policy of the right-wing parties in Israel, who wish to make the Israeli occupation of the territories a permanent and irreversible situation. Hence, faculty members at Ariel University have to agree to a political worldview, which makes the entire institution have a clear political affiliation, unlike all other higher education institutions in Israel and any democratic country. 6) The settlements, and Ariel University, are illegal according to the Geneva Convention and international law.” He ended his appeal by stating, “I hope you will take these facts into account, and make the moral and decent decision, in favor of peace and human rights.”
Gov urged his academic peers to boycott the “Is-Ko-Space 2023“ in his plea to boycott Ariel University. Ironically, Gov’s employer, Weizmann Institute, is part of the conference.
Prof. Emeritus Amos Korczyn of the Department of Neurology at Tel Aviv University responded to Gov: “Thanks, Nir. I think writing to the scientific journals that publish scientific articles from Ariel University is important because the address “Ariel University, Israel” is false. Therefore these articles should be rejected and deleted if published. Amos Korczyn, emeritus Medicine, Tel Aviv.”
Gov then assured Korczyn, “Hello Amos; indeed, Prof. Ofer Aharony and I write to Scientific journals and request that they write a correct address and that Ariel is not in the State of Israel. Several journals agreed that writing this false claim should be prevented, but we must persevere. If you know of such cases, please email the journal editors, as many requests will help in this struggle. Thank you, Nir.”This is not the first time Israeli academics are calling for the boycott of Israel in general or Ariel University in particular.
To recall, Professor Oded Goldreich, also from Weizmann Institute, urged boycotting Ariel University, thus breaching the Boycott Law passed by the Knesset in 2011. Two Education Ministers rejected the prize committee’s recommendation to award Goldreich the prestigious Israel Prize.
Without providing an explanation, the Israeli Supreme Court decided to bypass the Boycott Law and ordered the Prize to be awarded to Goldreich.
More generally, since the 2011 Boycott Law has never been implemented, Israeli radical-leftist academics preach for a boycott without impunity.
Hagai Netzer (Tel-Aviv University, TAU), Chung-Uk Lee (Korea Astronomy and pace Science Institute, KASI), Eli Waxman (Weizmann Institute of Science, WIS), Thiem Hoang (KASI), Shay Zucker (TAU), Myungshin Im (Seoul National University, SNU), Ehud Behar (Technion, Israel Institute of Technology), Hyung Mok Lee (SNU), Re’em
Sari (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Jaejin Lee (KASI), Sagi Ben-Ami (WIS), Hagai Perets (Technion), Leon Ofman (TAU, CUA/NASA GSFC), Adi Zitrin (Ben-Gurion
University of the Negev), Dafne Guetta (Ariel University, AU), Asaf Pe’er (Bar-Ilan University), Doron Chelouche (Haifa University), Ido Ben-Dayan (AU), Amit Kashi (AU).
SOC:
Inwoo Han (Co-Chair, KASI), Lev Tal-Or (Co-Chair, AU), Sagi Ben-Ami (WIS), Dafne Guetta (AU), Amit Kashi (AU), Chung-Uk Lee (KASI), Hyung Mok Lee (SNU), Jaejin Lee (KASI), Myeong-Gu Park (Kyungpook National University), Volker Perdelwitz (WIS), Noam Soker (Technion), Shay Zucker (TAU).
———- Forwarded message ——— From: Nir Gov Date: Sun, Jan 29, 2023 at 9:15 PM Subject: [Academia-IL-Bashaar] לידיעת חברי האקדמיה בישראל שמתלבטים לגבי השתתפות בכנס ב”אונ’ אריאל” To: Academia List List <academia-il@listserver.cc.huji.ac.il>
לכל חברי האקדמיה בישראל, שמוכנים לשתף פעולה עם המוסד הנקרא “אונ’ אריאל”,
1) אונ’ אריאל ממוקמת בהתנחלות אריאל בלב הגדה המערבית שנכבשה ב-1967, על שטח שברובו הוכרז כאדמות מדינה ובדרך זו הופקע משימוש התושבים הפלשתינים המקומיים ע”י צווים של הצבא.
2) מדינת ישראל מפעילה בשטח זה שלטון צבאי כלפי התושבים הפלשתינים, כולל בית-משפט צבאי, ללא זכויות אדם בסיסיות.
3) השטח שבו ממוקמת אריאל מעולם לא סופח למדינת ישראל, כפי שנקבע ע”י בג”צ בפסיקתו בנושא אונ’ אריאל. אריאל איננה נמצאת בתוך מדינת ישראל. ע”פ האו”ם מוגדר שטח זה כ”שטחים הפלסטינים הכבושים” ( Occupied Palestinian territories – OPT, Pt).
4) התושבים הפלשתינים הגרים מסביב לאריאל מנועים מלהיכנס להתנחלות אריאל, ובוודאי שלא לאוניברסיטה. זאת בניגוד למצב בתוך ישראל, היכן שכל המוסדות האקדמיים פתוחים באופן שוויוני לכל התושבים, כבכל מדינה דמוקרטית.
5) ההתנחלות אריאל, ואונ’ אריאל, נבנו כחלק ממדיניות פוליטית של מפלגות הימין בישראל, המעוניינות להפוך את הכיבוש הישראלי בשטחים למצב קבוע ובלתי-הפיך. מכאן שלמעשה אנשי סגל באונ’ אריאל צריכים להסכים לתפישת עולם פוליטית, דבר ההופך את המוסד כולו לבעל זיקה פוליטית מובהקת, בניגוד לכל שאר מוסדות ההשכלה הגבוהה בישראל ובכל מדינה דמוקרטית.
6) ההתנחלויות, ואונ’ אריאל, אינן חוקיות לפי אמנת ז’נבה והחוק הבינלאומי.
אני מקוה שתקחו בחשבון את העובדות הללו, ותקבלו את ההחלטה המוסרית וההגונה, בעד שלום וזכויות-אדם.
נושא: Re: [Academia-IL-Bashaar] לידיעת חברי האקדמיה בישראל שמתלבטים לגבי השתתפות בכנס ב”אונ’ אריאל”
שלום עמוס
אכן פרופ’ עופר אהרוני ואנוכי כותבים לעיתונים
מדעיים ומבקשים שיכתבו כתובת נכונה, ושאריאל
איננה במדינת ישראל. מספר עיתונים הסכימו שאכן
צריך למנוע את הפירסום השקרי הזה, אבל
חייבים להתמיד בנושא. אם אתם.ן מכירים
מקרים כאלו, אנא שלחו מייל לעורכי העתון. פניות
רבות יואילו במאבק הזה. תודה רבה
ניר
————————————–
Prof. Nir Gov
Department of Chemical and Biological Physics
Weizmann Institute of Science
Rehovot, Israel
From: amos korczyn Sent: Sunday, January 29, 2023 9:56:44 PM To: Nir Gov Cc: Academia List List; Daniel Michaelson; Dan F; Gozes Illana Subject: Re: [Academia-IL-Bashaar] לידיעת חברי האקדמיה בישראל שמתלבטים לגבי השתתפות בכנס ב”אונ’ אריאל”
תודה ניר.
לדעתי חשוב לכתוב אל העיתונים המדעיים המפרסמים מדעיים מאוניברסיטת אריאל, כי הכתובת ״אוניברסיטת אריאל, ישראל״ היא כתובת שקרית ולכן יש לדחות מאמרים אלה, ולמחקם אם פורסמו.
עמוס קורצ׳ין, דימוסאי רפואה, תל אביב
Professor emeritus Amos D Korczyn CONy President Department of Neurology Tel Aviv University
Claremont, Calif. (March 28, 2018)—Pitzer College Professor Daniel A. Segal has been accepted to participate in the Palestinian American Research Center (PARC) US Faculty Development Seminar on Palestine this summer. The PARC 2018 Faculty Development Seminar will be held from June 20 to July 3, 2018, in Jerusalem and the West Bank.
![[here goes you know what sign]](https://ci4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/9jcbj9ZSkcifIw7mx_ueVFLwR9fkn-IvKIg8gcRtSTrzbhTFQAoXeqzXvLKT2nuy86h-dxUi=s0-d-e1-ft#https://philevents.org/images/o.gif)
Image posted to the DarkBit Telegram channel
Screenshot of a post made to the university’s jobs page on LinkedIn (Check Point)
israel-academia-monitor.com 