14.09.23

Editorial Note

The newly-founded Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism (ICSZ) is planning a conference in October 2023. It aims to battle “the IHRA definition of antisemitism” and to show how it “amplifies and hides repressive power and state violence.” The meeting invites those researching and confronting the “repressive” use of the IHRA definition, to “foreclose critical discussion and scholarship on Zionism.” The conference is looking for ways to “support resistance” to the IHRA campaign by “mapping the ways IHRA is making incursions internationally.” 

The ICSZ, “aims to support the delinking of the study of Zionism from Jewish Studies, and to reclaim academia and public discourse for the study of Zionism as a political, ideological, and racial and gendered knowledge project, intersecting with Palestine and decolonial studies, critical terrorism studies, settler colonial studies, and related scholarship and activism. The Institute approaches Zionism as a broad set of colonial and repressive work and solidarities, efforts to curate knowledge and identities, and to dismantle movements that resist it. In other words, Zionism’s project extends beyond the borders of Palestine. Many scholars and activists are working to illuminate such ‘other work’ of Zionist institutions and discourses, historically and in the present, to shape the material conditions of life, the movement of capital, the construction of racial identity, and more.”

According to the invitation, the meeting will take place in the intellectual space of UC Santa Cruz (Oct. 13) and NYU (Oct. 14). However, NYU Law and UC Santa Cruz already announced their refusal to host this conference. UC Santa Cruz published a “Statement on conference organized by the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism” on September 05, 2023. It stated that “UC Santa Cruz does not endorse the upcoming conference organized by the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and no events of the conference are scheduled to take place on the UC Santa Cruz campus. The reference to the ‘intellectual space of UC Santa Cruz,’ and the listing of select individual UC Santa Cruz academic departments and centers purportedly as sponsors, is not, and should not be interpreted as, a university endorsement. At no point in time has UC Santa Cruz endorsed the upcoming conference.” Likewise, New York University (NYU) School of Law has told the Jewish Journal that they will not be hosting the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism’s (ICSZ) upcoming conference on campus.

In a radio program, Arab Talk with Jess and Jamal, Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi from the Department of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University, the founder of ICSZ, discussed a recent article she posted on Mondoweiss entitled “Why we created the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism.” Abdulhadi, a leading Palestinian activist, explained (5:30) that they are “part of a founding Collective of the institute for the critical study of Zionism and this was our responsibility to write this article. One of the reasons why we thought that it was really important is because historically, the “legitimate” academic study of Zionism, anti-Semitism, and Israel studies, housed in Departments of Jewish studies, Israeli studies, and at the Israeli Academy, so “anybody who cares about human rights and justice for all who speaks about this, is labeled as antisemitic and there is the attempt by the pro-Israeli lobby industry to label anyone who criticizes Israel, who criticizes Zionism and considers it a settler colonial project as antisemitic, in order to dismantle us, to remove us, erase our presence and delegitimize what we’re doing and label us as a politics of hate.” (6:40). 

For Abdulhadi, the Zionist project, “is a settler colonial project that was built in Palestine, created, realized in Palestine, although there were other options the Zionist movement received from the British colonial powers in Palestine, for example, Argentina or parts of Africa, but the Zionist movement rejected that, they created it in Palestine and the project itself was built on the erasure of the Palestinian people from their land and erasing their very presence as a people, including their embodiment as humans, as well as their culture, their language, their food, the music, that includes everything else, because you need for Zionism to exist and legitimize itself as a legitimate movement, it needed to erase, exactly like the U.S and our other settler colonial states did to indigenous people, you have to eliminate the presence of the indigenous people, in order to justify why is it that there was a land without people for a people without the land which we know is a Zionist myth.” (8:09)

According to Abdulhadi, the conference is “going to focus on battling the IHRA, which is the definition of antisemitism as created by the Holocaust group within Europe. That is very problematic because one of the ways in which it identifies anti-Semitism is by criticizing Israel and criticizing Zionism, and actually, you can understand that one of the people who created this definition himself says this is problematic. He regretted it, unfortunately, at the time when they decided that he didn’t pass it, and it has been legitimate in multiple central European and Western spaces. However, there is a very strong tide against that, that challenges this kind of equation and actually says that criticizing Israel, first of all, Israel is like any other state, then there is no such thing as singling out Israel. You’re actually treating Israel as any state that should be subject to accountability to human rights conventions, to behavior like any other state, so there is no singling out Israel. Secondly, criticizing Zionism as a settler colonial movement and ideology is totally legitimate and actually has preceded the creation of Israel as such that colonial project has been propagated by many Jewish scholars themselves and thinkers and so on, and today there are many and there is also more and more and more broadening spaces within Jewish communities across, including younger generations, who do not want Israel to speak in their name, who do not accept this definition of anti-Semitism.” (13:18)

Abdulhadi stated, “I should say that we are 100 percent committed to the struggle against antisemitism. We are 100 percent committed to speaking about the Holocaust as a huge tragedy of human life. We are very much committed to standing for justice for all and freedom for all and all forms of anti-racism, and we want to make sure that we are not exceptionalizing Zionism and saying that Israel is above the law and Israel is exceptional to any other state.” (13:46)

For Abdulhadi, the purpose of Zionism is to erase the Palestinians. She said, “there has been a Palestinian village and a community that has been erased so we know at least 530 Palestinian communities have been erased in 1948 before and after actually the creation of the state of Israel which argues against the Israeli and Zionist claim that it was needed in order to be able to save themselves from Arab attacks and Palestinians and that it continued to erase Palestinians to realize the Zionist project… one of the main targets and actually objectives of the Zionist movement, realized through the Jewish National Fund, was to erase, uproot trees that are indigenous to the environment and put in their places, plant trees that come from Europe and elsewhere, which is also explains why there are constantly fires that take place because the trees that they planted are foreign, they’re not indigenous to the land and they are meant to hide the presence of Palestinian agriculture, so we are putting this to challenge the Zionist narrative that makes certain claims that are not really based in reality they are not factual and also to uplift [sic] the Palestinian persons in Palestine and Palestinian indigenous relationship to the land, to the environment to the culture around them.” (15:54)

Abdulhadi revealed her antisemitic views by declaring that Zionism aims to erase the Palestinians’ embodiment and that the JNF aims to erase Palestinian agriculture. Both claims are baseless, malicious, and used to demonize the Jews. The name “Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism” is a clue. As IAM has emphasized, the term “critical” is part of the neo-Marxist, critical approach in social sciences, which rejects the positivist, empirical paradigm based on facts. In the eyes of “critical scholars,” facts and statistical data are suspect because they are generated by the “dominant, colonial or imperialist powers.” However, the Ottoman Empire’s colonialism was legitimate for them.

Abdulhadi is not alone. In the past three decades, many American scholars of Arab and Palestinian descent have turned their scholarships into a platform of anti-Israel, anti-Jewish, and anti-Zionist propaganda. For example, The Middle East Scholars Association (MESA) passed a BDS resolution last year.   

Mixing ideology and scholarship discredits the field of Middle East studies. Worse, it negates the original goal of the federal government to create objective Middle East programs in various universities. Evidently, the government, which supports many of these programs through Title VI grants, is not getting its money’s worth. 

References:

Battling the ‘IHRA definition’: Theory & Activism

Battling the ‘IHRA definition’: Theory & Activism

***NOW OPEN!***
Use this form to sign up, and read about registering below.

We are thrilled to announce the first convening of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism in October 2023! This inaugural gathering will bring together ICSZ’s community of scholars and activists to build and share knowledge about how “the IHRA definition of antisemitism” both amplifies and hides repressive power and state violence.

As detailed below, this is a working meeting for scholars and activists of ICSZ’s community, particularly those engaged in researching and confronting the repressive use of “the IHRA definition” to foreclose critical discussion and scholarship on Zionism. A selection of papers and videos of presentations will, however, be published after the event.

We will update this page as details about the convening are finalized. The program will be linked here as soon as it is published.

What it’s about: Sessions will explore the political, historical, and cultural conditions that enable IHRA campaigns, and share theoretical insights and organizing tools to support resistance. This event focuses on North American academia, government, and institutions while additionally mapping the ways IHRA is making incursions internationally. It will highlight victories, successful strategies, and paths of ongoing organizing.

Registering: Please use this form if you’re interested in attending. Due to limitations on attendance, filling out this form does not immediately register you for the convening. You will receive a response as quickly as possible from our volunteer team to confirm the status of your registration. Deadline: October 9.

Who should come: This is an ICSZ organizational convening for academics and activists who are battling the “IHRA definition” — including students, researchers, faculty, organizers, artists, and activists — to build knowledge and develop strategies to advance that work. ICSZ warmly welcomes allied scholars and activists to join our research community. 

Presenting research by activists and academics: The convening is structured by eight panels dedicated to theorizing, mapping, and political education. Presentations draw from the rich, wide-ranging landscape of academic, activist and community work that focuses not only on the “IHRA definition” itself, but also on the cultural, intellectual and political conditions that lend it power, its impacts, and our modes of resistance to it. 

Building our organizing: The convening will include an organizing lunch on both days for local activist groups to connect individuals and organizations, share materials, and focus on building attendees’ support networks to push back on IHRA campaigns.

Starting points: This convening is the inaugural event of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. We invite you to read the Institute’s points of unity which are the basis for the Institute’s research community. We anticipate that our discussions will be accompanied by a set of materials that share essential information, definitions, and other knowledge. The purpose is to be able to bring together attendees from a range of backgrounds, without assuming that everyone is well-versed in all areas of the work to battle IHRA. We hope these materials will allow presenters tow bring us in-depth discussion of their topics. (If your activist organization would like to co-sponsor and help curate these materials, please be in touch!)

Updates & deadlines: The call for proposals is now closed. 

Logistics: The convening will take place in the intellectual space of UC Santa Cruz (Oct. 13) and NYU (Oct. 14). Participants at each site will be invited to join the other site remotely.

Online attendance: When you register for in-person attendance in either Santa Cruz or New York, you will be invited (and strongly encouraged) to attend the other day online. The meeting is not organized as an all-remote event — we are trying to build our community and ideas in ways that work much better when we’re together! However, for comrades who are involved in this work but can’t make it, we will have limited slots for all-online attendance.

Organizational co-sponsors: The organizing collective is thrilled to be working with such an incredible, powerful, and varied set of co-sponsors. Below is a current list. If your organization is interested, please reach out at info@criticalzionismstudies.org, and see this co-sponsorship form for some initial information.

Current co-sponsors:

Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism

American Friends Service Committee

Center for Creative Ecologies, UC Santa Cruz

Center for Racial Justice, UC Santa Cruz

Critical Race & Ethnic Studies Department, UC Santa Cruz

DSA Santa Cruz’s BDS and Palestine Solidarity Working Group 

Friends of Sabeel North America (FOSNA)

Jewish Voice for Peace

National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP)

NYU Law Students for Justice in Palestine

ReThinking Foreign Policy

Sparkplug Foundation

Teaching Palestine: Pedagogical Praxis and the Indivisibility of Justice

UC Ethnic Studies Faculty Council

U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI)

2023 “Battling IHRA: Theory & Activism” Planning Collective (partial/in formation):

Rabab Abdulhadi, AMED Studies Program, San Francisco State University/Teaching Palestine

M. Muhannad Ayyash, Mount Royal University

Dov Baum, PhD

Kat Cui, NYU Law

Arlo Fosberg, Feminist Studies, UC Santa Cruz

Emmaia Gelman, Sarah Lawrence College

Yulia Gilich

Terri Ginsberg, USACBI

Christine Hong, Critical Race & Ethnic Studies and Literature, UC Santa Cruz

Jennifer Kelly, Feminist Studies and Critical Race & Ethnic Studies, UC Santa Cruz

Arun Kundnani

Sean L. Malloy, University of California, Merced

Jennifer Mogannam, Critical Race & Ethnic Studies, UC Santa Cruz

Sheryl Nestel, Independent Jewish Voices

Lisa Rofel, National Board, Jewish Voice for Peace; Professor Emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz

==========================

https://criticalzionismstudies.org/

The Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism aims to support the delinking of the study of Zionism from Jewish Studies, and to reclaim academia and public discourse for the study of Zionism as a political, ideological, and racial and gendered knowledge project, intersecting with Palestine and decolonial studies, critical terrorism studies, settler colonial studies, and related scholarship and activism.

The Institute approaches Zionism as a broad set of colonial and repressive work and solidarities, efforts to curate knowledge and identities, and to dismantle movements that resist it. In other words, Zionism’s project extends beyond the borders of Palestine.

Many scholars and activists are working to illuminate such “other work” of Zionist institutions and discourses, historically and in the present, to shape the material conditions of life, the movement of capital, the construction of racial identity, and more.

The Institute supports this expansive work with fellowships to support academic and activist work, conferences, and publications that expand the reach of scholars’ and activists’ work into political culture.

People

Founding Collective (partial list)

Rabab Abdulhadi, AMED Studies Program, San Francisco State University/Teaching Palestine

Lau Barrios, No Tech for Apartheid

Dov Baum, PhD

Lisa Duggan, NYU

Emmaia Gelman, Sarah Lawrence College

Yulia Gilich

Christine Hong, Critical Race & Ethnic Studies and Literature, UC Santa Cruz

Jennifer Kelly, Feminist Studies and Critical Race & Ethnic Studies, UC Santa Cruz

Arun Kundnani

Sheryl Nestel, Independent Jewish Voices

Jennifer Mogannam, Critical Race & Ethnic Studies, UC Santa Cruz

C. Heike Schotten, University of Massachusetts Boston/USACBI

Advisory Board (list in formation)

Hil Aked

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Professor of Modern Culture & Media and Comparative Literature, Brown University

M. Muhannad Ayyash, Professor of Sociology, Mount Royal University

Umayyah Cable, Assistant Professor, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Huma Dar, Adjunct 2 Professor, Critical Studies Program, California College of the Arts

Keith P. Feldman, UC Berkeley

Cynthia Franklin, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa

Terri Ginsberg, USACBI

Robin D G Kelley, Professor of History, UCLA

Marisol LeBrón, Associate Professor of Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UCSC

Donna Nevel, Jewish Voice for Peace-South Florida

Shaista Aziz Patel, UCSD, Assistant Professor of Critical Muslim Studies

Dylan Rodriguez, Professor, Dept. of Black Study, University of California at Riverside

Andrew Ross, NYU and USACBI

Sarah Schulman

Sherene Seikaly, UC Santa Barbara

Lesley Williams, Jewish Voice for Peace

Alissa Wise, Rabbi

2023 Conference Planning Collective

See Battling the ‘IHRA definition’: Theory & Activism

Director

Emmaia Gelman

==================================

https://news.ucsc.edu/2023/09/statement-on-conference.html

Statement on conference organized by the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism

September 05, 2023

Updated Sept. 8, 2023

UC Santa Cruz does not endorse the upcoming conference organized by the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and no events of the conference are scheduled to take place on the UC Santa Cruz campus. The reference to the “intellectual space of UC Santa Cruz,” and the listing of select individual UC Santa Cruz academic departments and centers purportedly as sponsors, is not, and should not be interpreted as, a university endorsement. At no point in time has UC Santa Cruz endorsed the upcoming conference.

We note that the conference organizers no longer require individuals to confirm their agreement with the Institute’s “points of unity” before registering. The removal of the points of unity condition is a welcome change, and the University did not and does not endorse in any way its use. Affirmation with those points of unity, as a condition to registering, were on the website and may have been operative throughout the conference registration period, and thus have had the effect of framing the conference in this context. A conference that limits participation based on political ideology is antithetical to UC Santa Cruz values as a public university and constitutes potential viewpoint discrimination in violation of the First Amendment along with potentially impinging on the academic freedom of prospective attendees.

We are vigorous proponents of free inquiry and the free exchange of ideas, and believe that more speech is the best approach to countering speech we find troubling. Both by policy and in practice, the university rigorously honors the freedom to present the widest range of viewpoints irrespective of agreement on those viewpoints. The presentation of the conference’s goals and approach is provoking disagreement as to whether the goals and approach are antisemitic or not antisemitic. This disagreement, like many other disagreements, should be discussed and debated freely and openly in a scholarly community. Amid a sharp rise in antisemitism in the United States, we urge our campus community to understand the impact of their individual views and the expressions of those views on others in the community.

07.09.23

Editorial Note

Prof. Avi Shlaim, the Iraqi-born British-Israeli historian, published a book, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew. Shlaim was a so-called “New Historian” who, together with Ilan Pappe and Benny Morris, provided a revisionist view of the Zionist movement and the circumstances surrounding the birth of Israel. As expected, the Arab anti-Israel media outlet Middle East Monitor (MEMO) praised the book in a review. MEMO is considered pro-Palestinian in an orientation that strongly promotes pro-Hamas content. Also, MEMO supports various Islamist causes and is regarded as an outlet for the Muslim Brotherhood. 

According to the MEMO review, Shlaim highlights a period in modern history before the establishment of Israel, when “indigenous Jews residing in Muslim-majority lands—known as Mizrahim—lived harmoniously alongside their Muslim and Christian neighbors. They played a significant role in the diverse societies.”

For Shlaim, Baghdad was often referred to as the metropolitan “Abode of Peace.” Shlaim delves into his formative years across three distinct countries. He vividly portrays his privileged upbringing within an affluent, well-connected Iraqi Jewish family. However, their lives were dramatically altered when they and other Jews “faced the difficult decision to migrate to the newly established state of Israel. This decision was influenced, not only by the profound implications of the 1948 Palestinian Nakba, or ‘catastrophe’ which saw the displacement of some 700,000 Palestinians from their land but also by the combined pressures of rising Arab and Jewish nationalism with Arab-Jews caught in the middle. In Israel, Shlaim struggled to assimilate “the Ashkenazi-dominated society of the Zionist settler-colonial state.”

Shlaim argues that the “majority of Israel’s Iraqi Jewish community, including himself, were not willing ideologues of Zionism” because this ideology “spawned a state whose cultural and geopolitical orientation identified it almost exclusively with the West.” 

For Shlaim, the departure of Iraq’s ancient Jewish community was “conscripted into the Zionist project,” to bolster a “demographic majority in Occupied Palestine.” While “Initially, the movement turned to the European Ashkenazi Jews, who occupied a higher social status within the nascent community, and arguably still do to this day.” 

For Shlaim, “while the primary victims of Zionism are the Palestinians, the Jews of the Arab lands are the second category of victims… Aside from rising tensions and ‘one infamous pogrom.'” 

For Shlaim, “By endowing Judaism with a territorial dimension that it did not have previously, it accentuated the difference between Jews and Muslims in Arab spaces. [It] not only turned the Palestinians into refugees; it turned Jews of the East into strangers in their own land.”

Again, like many other anti-Israel activists, Shlaim claims he possesses “undeniable proof of Zionist involvement in terrorist attacks” against Jewish sites in Baghdad, orchestrated by the Zionist underground, to pressure the hesitant Jewish community to immigrate to Israel. These allegations have been denied to this day. 

According to MEMO, the book is a “captivating and enlightening read that highlights the complex intersection of identities within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In doing so, it offers a poignant exploration of the victimization and discrimination experienced by Arab-Jews, who, like the Palestinians, were compelled to leave their homelands, albeit with significant nuanced differences.”

To describe the Farhud as a “one infamous pogrom” is to falsify history.

Contrary to Shlaim, Prof. Esther Meir-Glitzenstein, an expert on Iraqi Jews, has written an article about the Farhud. She wrote that the outbreak of mob violence against Baghdad Jewry on June 1, 1941, was a turning point in the history of the Jews in Iraq. In the 1940s, about 135,000 Jews lived in Iraq. The Jews shared the Arab culture with their Muslim and Christian neighbors but lived in separate communities. Jewish assimilation into Muslim society was rare. With the establishment of the Iraqi state under the British Mandate in 1921, Jews became full-fledged citizens and enjoyed the right to vote and hold elected office. Its elite included high-ranking officials, prominent attorneys, dignitaries, and wealthy merchants. In the spring of 1941, Britain was enduring one of its worst periods in World War II. Most of Europe had fallen to the Axis forces. British chances of winning the war appeared slim. Rashid ‘Ali al-Kailani, an anti-British nationalist politician from one of the leading families in Baghdad, carried out a military coup against the pro-British government in Iraq on April 2, 1941. He was supported by the former Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husayni. Since his arrival in Baghdad in October 1939 as a refugee from the failed Palestinian revolt (1936-1939), al-Husayni had been at the forefront of anti-British activity. Rashid ‘Ali al-Kailani formed a pro-German government, winning the support of the Iraqi Army and administration. He hoped the Axis victory in the war would facilitate complete independence for Iraq. The rise of this pro-German government threatened the Jews in Iraq. Nazi influence and antisemitism were already widespread in Iraq with Arabic-language radio broadcasts from Berlin. Mein Kampf had been translated into Arabic and was published in local newspapers. A pre-military youth movement influenced by the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth) started operating. 

However, after occupying Basra in the middle of May, the British refused to enter the city. Consequently, there was a widespread looting of goods in the shops in the bazaars, many of which were owned by Jews. Arab notables sent night guards to protect Jewish possessions, and many gave asylum in their homes to Jews. 

In Baghdad, on the afternoon of June 1, 1941, when the Regent and his entourage returned to Baghdad and British troops surrounded the city, the Jews believed that the danger from the pro-Nazi regime had passed. They ventured out to celebrate the traditional Jewish holiday of Shavuot. Riots broke out, targeting the Jews of Baghdad. These riots, known as the Farhud, lasted two days, ending on June 2, 1941. Iraqi soldiers and police officers who supported Rashid Ali al-Gailani’s coup d’etat in April and Futtuwa youths sympathetic to the Axis incited and led the riots. Unlike in previous incidents, rioters focused on killing. Many civilians in Baghdad and Bedouins from the city’s outskirts joined the rioters, participating in the violence and helping themselves to a share in the booty. During the two days of violence, rioters murdered 150 or 180 Jews, injured 600 others, and raped an undetermined number of women. They also looted some 1,500 stores and homes. The community leaders estimated that about 2,500 families—15 percent of the Jewish community in Baghdad—suffered directly from the pogrom. 

Meir-Glitzenstein ends her article by stating, “By 1951, ten years after the Farhud, most of the Iraqi Jewish community (about 124,000 Jews out of 135,000) had immigrated to the State of Israel.”

As can be seen, Iraq’s collaboration with the Nazis is what caused the Jews to leave Iraq.

MEMO is hosting Shlaim for a book launch in October to spread more falsities. According to the invitation, “Shlaim will discuss his experiences of living in Iraq, Israel and Britain with Prof. Jacqueline Rose. This is a ‘penetrating reflection on the misfortune of the ‘other victims’ of Zionism: Jews exiled from their old Arab homelands where they were well integrated, and transplanted to Israel, to serve as a subaltern class of the Hebrew settler nation,’ explains Israeli philosopher Moshé Machover.”

Shlaim was a rather unremarkable senior lecturer at Reading University when he realized that bashing Israel would improve his status and bring him to Oxford University. Unfortunately, some British Universities promote the falsification of history. 

References:

Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew

REVIEWS

Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew

July 3, 2023 at 9:01 pm

• Book Author(s):Avi Shlaim 
• Published Date:June 2023
• Publisher:Oneworld Publications
• Hardback:336 pages
• ISBN-13:978-0861544639

• by Omar Ahmed

The term “Arab-Jew” is often considered contradictory, as it seemingly represents conflicting identities within the geopolitics of the Middle East. However, Avi Shlaim, an Iraqi-born British-Israeli historian, challenges this notion in his personal story, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew. Shlaim argues that this designation should not be viewed as a dichotomy. Instead, he highlights a period in modern history, prior to the establishment of the state of Israel, when indigenous Jews residing in Muslim-majority lands—known as Mizrahim—lived harmoniously alongside their Muslim and Christian neighbours. They played a significant role in the diverse societies, as was the case for Shlaim, growing up in Baghdad, often referred to as the metropolitan “Abode of Peace”.

The title Three Worlds aptly captures the essence of Shlaim’s memoir, as it delves into his formative years across three distinct countries, “from the vantage point of a scholar of the Arab-Israeli conflict.” He vividly portrays his privileged upbringing within an affluent and well-connected Iraqi Jewish family. However, their lives were dramatically altered when they, along with other fellow Jews in Iraq and the region, faced the difficult decision to migrate to the newly established state of Israel.

This decision was influenced, not only by the profound implications of the 1948 Palestinian Nakba, or “catastrophe” which saw the displacement of some 700,000 Palestinians from their land, but also by the combined pressures of rising Arab and Jewish nationalism with Arab-Jews caught in the middle. Shlaim’s adolescence was then shaped by his experiences studying in London, a world apart from both his native Iraq and the struggles of assimilating into the Ashkenazi-dominated society of the Zionist settler-colonial state.

However, Shlaim highlights that the majority of Israel’s Iraqi Jewish community, including himself, were not willing ideologues of Zionism – an ideology, which “spawned a state whose cultural and geopolitical orientation identified it almost exclusively with the West.” According to Shlaim, the exodus of Iraq’s ancient Jewish community, which had long-standing ties to the land dating back to the Babylonian times and even earlier through their connection to the Patriarch and Prophet Abraham, was not simply a migration.

He suggests they were “conscripted into the Zionist project”, as the Eurocentric movement sought to bolster the numbers of Jewish immigrants in order to establish and maintain a demographic majority in Occupied Palestine. Initially, the movement turned to the European Ashkenazi Jews, who occupied a higher social status within the nascent community, and arguably still do to this day.

The author goes as far as to assert that, while the primary victims of Zionism are the Palestinians, the Jews of the Arab lands are “the second category of victims”, who are seldom thought of as such. Aside from rising tensions and “one infamous pogrom”, Iraq, much like the rest of the modern Middle East and unlike Europe, never had a “Jewish Question”.

For Shlaim, Zionism changed this, “By endowing Judaism with a territorial dimension that it did not have previously, it accentuated the difference between Jews and Muslims in Arab spaces.” This ideology “not only turned the Palestinians into refugees; it turned Jews of the East into strangers in their own land.”

BOOK REVIEW: Among the Almond Trees, a Palestinian Memoir

A significant portion of the book sheds light on the author’s early life in Baghdad and portrays his family’s seemingly idyllic existence in 1940s Iraq, prior to the establishment of Israel. The reader gains insight into the author’s familial roots and extended relatives, some of whom are mentioned repeatedly throughout the book. In fact, the narrative delves so deeply into these family connections that the inclusion of a family tree before the prologue would have been beneficial. This aspect of the book provides valuable insights into the dynamics of the once-vibrant Iraqi Jewish community, albeit one that belonged to the upper middle class. However, as the narrative unfolds, the frequent references to social gatherings, including activities like playing cards, may become repetitive and potentially tiresome for some readers.

Nevertheless, one particularly striking and controversial aspect of the book, which has already garnered attention and discussion on social media, is Avi Shlaim’s claim to possess “undeniable proof of Zionist involvement in terrorist attacks” targeting Jewish sites in Baghdad. Shlaim argues that these attacks were orchestrated by the Zionist underground within the country, with the aim of pressuring the hesitant Jewish community to participate in the Aliyah (Jewish immigration) to Israel. The coverage of these events, although not entirely new, has been deemed a “bombshell” in both literal and metaphorical senses. Without the arrival of Iraqi Jews (who formed the majority of Mizrahim “refugees”), Israel “would have ended up in poorer shape, demographically, economically, and in terms of security.”

Such accusations, are hardly surprising in light of similar controversies such as the Lavon Affair and the actions of certain Jewish extremist groups, notably the Irgun and the Stern Gang that carried out attacks against British authorities and Palestinian civilians during the pre-state period.

As a valuable addition to the budding literature on the experience of Arab-Jews, such as the 2019 memoir When We Were Arabs: A Jewish Family’s Forgotten History by Massoud Hayoun, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew is a captivating and enlightening read that highlights the complex intersection of identities within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In doing so, it offers a poignant exploration of the victimization and discrimination experienced by Arab-Jews, who, like the Palestinians, were compelled to leave their homelands, albeit with significant nuanced differences.

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Friday, 13 October

The wrong kind of Israeli: Avi Shlaim on life as an Iraqi Jew

Join MEMO as we launch Prof Avi Shlaim’s memoir Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew.

By Middle East Monitor

388followers

Date and time

Fri, 13 Oct 2023 18:30 – 20:00 BST

Location

Central London (To be announced)TBC London WC2N 5DU United KingdomShow map

About this event

• 1 hour 30 minutes
• Mobile eTicket

Shlaim will discuss his experiences of living in Iraq, Israel and Britain with Prof. Jacqueline Rose.

This is an “penetrating reflection on the misfortune of the “other victims” of Zionism: Jews exiled from their old Arab homelands where they were well integrated, and transplanted to Israel, to serve as a subaltern class of the Hebrew settler nation,” explains Israeli philosopher Moshé Machover.

About the panel:

Prof Avi Shlaim is an Emeritus Professor of International Relations at Oxford University and the author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (2014) and Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations (2009).

Prof. Jacqueline Rose is internationally known for her writing on feminism, psychoanalysis, literature, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and is currently Professor of Humanities at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities.

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https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-farhud
The Farhud

The outbreak of mob violence against Baghdad Jewry known as the Farhud (Farhud is an Arabic term best translated as “pogrom” or “violent dispossession”) erupted on June 1, 1941. It was a turning point in the history of the Jews in Iraq.

In the 1940s about 135,000 Jews lived in Iraq (nearly 3 percent of the total population), with about 90,000 in Baghdad, 10,000 in Basra, and the remainder scattered throughout many small towns and villages. Jewish communities had existed in this region since the 6th century BCE, hundreds of years before Muslim communities established a presence in Iraq during the 7th century. The Jews shared the Arab culture with their Muslim and Christian neighbors, but they lived in separate communities. Jewish assimilation into Muslim society was rare.

With the establishment of the Iraqi state under the British Mandate in 1921, Jews became full-fledged citizens and enjoyed the right to vote and hold elected office. The Jewish community had between four and six representatives in the Parliament and one member in the Senate. The community was headed by a president, Rabbi Sasson Khedhuri (1933-1949; 1954-1971), an elected council of 60 members, and two executive committees—the spiritual committee for religious issues and the secular committee for managing the secular affairs of the community organizations. Its elite included also high-ranking officials, prominent attorneys and dignitaries, and wealthy merchants. This status of the Jews did not change in 1932, when Iraq gained independence under British informal rule.

In the spring of 1941, Britain was enduring one of its worst periods in World War II. Most of Europe had fallen to the Axis forces, German planes were bombing British cities in the Blitz, and German submarines were exacting a tremendous toll on British shipping. Having driven the British out of Libya, the Afrika Korps under General Erwin Rommel was camped along the Egyptian border and poised to thrust eastward to the Suez Canal. The German Wehrmacht (armed forces) had driven the British out of Greece and Crete, eliminating their last beachhead on continental Europe. British chances of winning the war appeared slim.

Such catastrophic setbacks severely impacted Britain’s presence in the Middle East. Since June 1940, the Vichy government had controlled Syria and Lebanon, and pro-Axis sentiment was prevalent among Egypt’s indigenous government bureaucracy.

In this context, Rashid ‘Ali al-Kailani, an anti-British nationalist politician from one of the leading families in Baghdad, carried out a military coup against the pro-British government in Iraq on April 2, 1941. He was supported by four high-ranking army officers nicknamed the “Golden Square,” and by the former Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husayni. Since his arrival in Baghdad in October 1939 as a refugee from the failed Palestinian revolt (1936-1939), al-Husayni had been at the forefront of anti-British activity. Following the coup, the supporters of the deposed pro-British rule, headed by the Regent, Abd al-Ilah, and foreign minister, Nuri al-Said, fled to Transjordan. In Iraq, Rashid ‘Ali al-Kailani formed a pro-German government, winning the support of the Iraqi Army and administration. He hoped an Axis victory in the war would facilitate full independence for Iraq.

The rise of this pro-German government threatened the Jews in Iraq. Nazi influence and antisemitism already were widespread in Iraq, due in large part to the German legation’s presence in Baghdad as well as influential Nazi propaganda, which took the form of Arabic-language radio broadcasts from Berlin. Mein Kampf had been translated into Arabic by Yunis al-Sab’awi, and was published in a local newspaper, Al Alam al Arabi (The Arab World), in Baghdad during 1933-1934. Yunis al-Sab’awi also headed the Futtuwa, a pre-military youth movement influenced by the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth) in Germany. After the coup d’etat, al-Sab’awi became a minister in the new Iraqi government.

Concerned that Iraq, as a pro-Axis bridgehead in the Middle East, would inspire other Arab nations, and increasingly worried that their access to oil supplies as well as their communications and transportation routes to India were now seriously threatened, the British decided to occupy the country. On April 19, British Army units from India landed in Basra while the British-led Arab Legion troops (Habforce) moved east into Iraq from Transjordan. By the end of May, the Iraqi regime collapsed and its leaders fled first to Iran and from there to German-occupied Europe.

Because the British did not wish to appear to be intervening in Iraq’s internal affairs, they preferred Iraqi troops, who were loyal to Regent Abd al-Ilah, to be the first to enter Iraq’s cities. British authorities also hoped to transfer control of Iraq directly to the Regent and his government. After occupying Basra in the middle of May, the British refused to enter the city and, as a consequence, there occurred widespread looting of goods in the shops in the bazaars, many of which were owned by Jews. Arab notables sent night watchmen to protect Jewish possessions and many gave asylum in their homes to Jews.

In Baghdad the results of this policy were much more severe. On the afternoon of June 1, 1941, when the Regent and his entourage returned to Baghdad and British troops surrounded the city, the Jews believed that the danger from the pro-Nazi regime had passed. They ventured out to celebrate the traditional Jewish harvest festival holiday of Shavuot. Riots broke out, targeting the Jews of Baghdad. These riots, known as the Farhud, lasted for two days, ending on June 2, 1941.

Iraqi soldiers and policemen who had supported Rashid Ali al-Gailani’s coup d’etat in April and Futtuwa youths who were sympathetic to the Axis incited and led the riots. Unlike in previous incidents, rioters focused on killing. Many civilians in Baghdad and Bedouins from the city’s outskirts joined the rioters, taking part in the violence and helping themselves to a share in the booty. During the two days of violence, rioters murdered between 150 and 180 Jews, injured 600 others, and raped an undetermined number of women. They also looted some 1,500 stores and homes. The community leaders estimated that about 2,500 families—15 percent of the Jewish community in Baghdad—suffered directly from the pogrom. View This Term in the Glossary According to the official report of the commission investigating the incident, 128 Jews were killed, 210 were injured, and over 1,500 businesses and homes were damaged. Rioting ended at midday on Monday, June 2, 1941, when Iraqi troops entered Baghdad, killed some hundreds of the mob in the streets and reestablished order in Baghdad.

The causes of the Farhud were political and ideological. On the one hand, the leaders of this pogrom identified the Jews as collaborators with the British authorities and justified violence against Jewish civilians by linking it to the struggle of the Iraqi national movement against British colonialism. Other Arab nationalists also perceived the Baghdad Jews as Zionists or Zionist sympathizers and justified the attacks as a response to Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine. Nevertheless, killing helpless Jews, including women and children, was an unprecedented phenomenon that contradicted Muslim law. In this situation, antisemitic ideology, derived in part from Nazi propaganda, helped to legitimize murdering Jews in Iraq.

The consequences of this pogrom View This Term in the Glossary stunned the Jewish community in Baghdad. Generally unarmed and lacking military training and self-defense skills, Baghdad Jews felt vulnerable and helpless. Many decided to leave Iraq. Hundreds fled to Iran, others went to Beirut, Lebanon, and some even obtained temporary visas for India. A few hundred Jews tried to reach Palestine, but most of them were forced to stop at some point on the way, either by the Iraqi police, which did not allow Jews to immigrate to Palestine, or by Palestinian police, enforcing strict immigration quotas (the White Paper of 1939). Most of the refugees, however, returned to Baghdad after the political situation had stabilized and the Iraqi economy had begun to prosper again.

The Jewish community in Baghdad experienced a rapid return to economic prosperity under British occupation during the remainder of the war years. Wealthy Baghdad Jews and the remittances of Iraqi Jewish émigrés contributed significantly to the reestablishment of commerce and restoration of property. As a further incentive to returning refugees, the Iraqi government paid compensation to the victims of the community in the sum of 20,000 dinars. The emotional and psychological wounds following the Farhud, however, were not so easily healed. Many members of the community remained in a state of profound shock that undermined their sense of security and stability, eventually prompting them to question their place within Baghdad’s society.

Following the Farhud, Jewish leaders also faced a difficult political dilemma. The Farhud had demonstrated that Jews were perceived by many in the Arab nationalist movement and the religious and conservative right as collaborators with and beneficiaries of British colonialism and its alleged Iraqi puppets. On the other hand, Jewish leaders were in fact well-integrated in urban society in Baghdad. Some held public office, others were prominent in economic life, and many had friendly relations with politicians and leaders. Moreover, the hostility of the Arab nationalists toward the Jews only increased their dependence on the pro-British regime. Jewish leaders therefore chose to downplay the potential for danger and tended to dissuade community activists from steps that might have incited an Arab nationalist response. Jewish leaders preferred quiet, personal, indirect diplomacy to overt political activism. The Jews in Parliament adopted the same policy: they never voted against the Iraqi government and never publicly defended the rights of the Jewish minority.

The middle-class intelligentsia in the Jewish community also faced a profound political and cultural crisis. Educated, generally well-to-do, and active as journalists, authors, and poets, Jewish intellectuals in Baghdad had perceived themselves as partners in creating Iraqi culture; they now felt rejected and betrayed. Their faith in the prospect of Jewish integration in Iraqi society had suffered a severe shock. More profound still was the sense of disillusionment among the youth. The bloodshed prompted many of them to reject the cautious policies of the traditional leadership and to respond in a radical fashion. The nationalists among them were attracted to the Zionist movement; young Jewish socialists sought meaning in the Communist party. While the former envisioned the future in Palestine, the latter imagined a just and socialist order for all people with the triumph of socialism in Iraq. Young people who did not identify with either camp sought to emigrate to the United States, England, France, Canada, and elsewhere in the West. In Iraq itself, a few groups of young people formed self-defense organizations and sought to arm themselves. These organizations had been the basis of the ‘Haganah’ (defense) Organization in Iraq, which functioned until 1951.

The Farhud ultimately intensified anxiety among Baghdad’s Jews, who now worried about Axis victories in the war, escalating violence in Palestine, growing Iraqi nationalist opposition, and the departure of the British from Iraq. The Farhud also marked a new era of Muslim-Jewish relations in Iraq, when discrimination and humiliation became further compounded by concerns about a direct physical threat to Jews’ survival.

Among Arabs the whole event was repressed and nearly forgotten. Arab writers of the time mentioned the Farhud only vaguely, and explained it as a consequence of Zionist activity in the Middle East. In contrast, Iraq’s Jews now perceived that threats to Jewish lives existed not only in Europe but also in the Middle East. In 1943, because of both the ongoing murder of European Jewry as well as antisemitism in Arab countries, Iraq’s Jewish communities were included in Zionist plans for immigration and establishing the Jewish state.

By 1951, ten years after the Farhud, most of the Iraqi Jewish community (about 124,000 Jews out of 135,000) had immigrated to the State of Israel.

Author(s): Esther Meir-Glitzenstein

31.08.23

Editorial Note

Articles in the Palestinian media in Arabic reveal that the PLO, which established an anti-apartheid department last year, as IAM reported in December 2022, is sending delegations to meet European officials to escalate the fight against Israel. 

The delegation included Ramzi Rabah, a member of the Executive Committee of the PLO, the Head of the Anti-Apartheid Department, and Dr. Maher Amer, the Director General of the Department. The Department’s delegation concluded its visits to several European countries in June. It is part of a plan to form a “global front against apartheid and Israeli settler colonialism” in preparation for holding an international conference against apartheid. 

The Department had organized several visits to countries such as Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France to meet with the German Left Party, the German and Belgian Ministries of Foreign Affairs, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, the German “Kobe” Foundation, representatives of the Labor and Green parties, the Belgian Socialist Party, the ECCP Foundation and solidarity institutions with the Palestinian cause, representatives of the “Sinn Féin” party, the official of the Left Bloc in the European Parliament, the Center for Human Rights Support in the Netherlands, and the European Center for Legal Support.  

During these visits, the delegation discussed the “most important developments” in the Palestinian arena, notably the “policies of the extreme right-wing occupation government, which are based on displacement and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian people, and control over the Palestinian land according to a systematic policy, based on the annexation of more than 60% of the occupied West Bank, and the intensification of settlement within the framework of a project to undermine the possibility of establishing an independent Palestinian state, and liquidating the legitimate national rights of the Palestinian people.” 

During its visits, the delegation touched on the need to hold European forums at all levels to convene an international legal conference to “combat the system of apartheid and Israeli colonialism.” During its visits, the delegation explained the Anti-Apartheid action plan and the Department’s international movements to combat the “system of apartheid and settler colonialism.” During this series of visits, the delegation delivered a “detailed document on settlement operations and the annexation of Palestinian lands, and a list of the names of ministers and Knesset members residing in settlements established on occupied Palestinian lands in flagrant violation of international law, in addition to the appeal issued by the first national conference against the apartheid system and Israeli settler colonialism.” 

The Department’s delegation has met with Dr. George Rishmawi, Hamdan Al Damiri, and Dieter Lewin Bergker of the European Palestinian Initiative against Apartheid, representatives of the Palestinian embassies in Germany and Belgium, and the Palestinian ambassador to the European Parliament. At the end of the meetings, the Palestinian community in Germany and the Palestinian and Arab Youth Gathering in Belgium organized several political gatherings with members of the community and its frameworks, on the developments of the Palestinian cause in Berlin, Cologne, and Bonn in Germany, and Brussels in Belgium. During this visit, Ramzi Rabah, spoke on the current Palestinian situation, and the dangerous developments of the Palestinian cause, as a “result of the Israeli occupation policy through displacement, annexation and settlement expansion, adding that the Palestinian people will remain steadfast in the face of the racist plans of the occupation, through popular resistance in all its forms.” During the meetings, Rabah saluted the Palestinian community in Germany and Belgium for their distinguished role in supporting the Palestinian cause, calling for coordinating their efforts and developing their work through integration and influence with European frameworks and parties. He praised the support for the Palestinian cause and the historical role of the Palestinian community in Europe in general and in Germany in particular.

Ramzi Rabah has met with Hubert Corman, the Middle East Department official of the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to discuss “forming a global front against apartheid and Israeli settler colonialism.” The meeting was attended by Frederick, responsible for the Palestine file at the Belgian Foreign Ministry, Counselor Hassan Balawi, the Consul of the Palestinian Embassy in Belgium, Dr. Maher Amer, and Dr. George Rishmawi, a member of the European Palestinian Initiative Against Apartheid. Ramzi Rabah presented the situation “under the extremist Israeli ‘troika’ government, which pursues a policy of annexation, ethnic cleansing and settlement strengthening in the West Bank, calling for besieging this government, and the need to expose its brutal and racist policy and practices, and link the Palestinian struggle in the face of apartheid with other means of struggle, until the occupation is defeated and its demise, and its independent state is established with Jerusalem as its capital. Escalation of killings, arrests and land confiscation,” Ramzi Rabah explained, “The racist, far-right occupation government, led by Netanyahu, continues its aggressive policy against the Palestinian people, noting that the years 2022 and 2023 were among the bloodiest years against the Palestinian people, according to the testimony of international human rights and humanitarian organizations, as killings, arrests, and land confiscation escalated, and the expansion of settlements, in addition to the demolitions and destruction of homes, the enactment of a number of racist laws in the Israeli Knesset and the Israeli courts, and the demand of this racist government to impose the death penalty on Palestinian prisoners, and other racist laws that violate international humanitarian law and human rights law.” 

Ramzi Rabah, referred to “the important European role in confronting the apartheid system, by unifying the efforts of all European human rights and humanitarian institutions, in order to achieve accountability for the Israeli apartheid state.” Ramzi Rabah explained, “The anti-apartheid department’s work strategy is represented by building a global front to end apartheid and settler colonialism, and to work with everyone who advocates international human rights law and Palestinian national rights.” 

As IAM noted before, Settler Colonialism is a construct originally adopted by academic circles in the 1970s, while recently, Palestinian officials adopted the term.

However, some Israeli academics are still promoting the delegitimization of Israel in Europe and backing the baseless Palestinian accusations of apartheid.

One such example comes from a recent article titled “Apartheid is real in Israel,” published by the German paper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and authored by Professor Amos Goldberg of the Hebrew University’s Holocaust Studies. He wrote that “Blaming Israel apartheid is not anti-Semitic. It describes the reality. The Israeli government fights human rights, democracy, equality and promotes the opposite: authoritarianism, discrimination, racism and apartheid.” Iranian Press TV and Al-Jazeera celebrated Goldberg. 

According to the Palestinian press, Hubert Corman, the official of the Middle East Department at the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, affirmed his government’s “continuous support for the Palestinian cause, to preserve the option of a two-state solution.” Corman pointed to “the importance of holding the Palestinian general elections, and improving and strengthening democratic performance in the internal issues of the Palestinian people, as they are a key to self-determination and state building for the Palestinian people.”

Corman’s short statement explains the essence of the Palestinian-Israeli dispute. In a recently declassified report from a meeting of the Israeli cabinet in August 1993, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin expressed serious doubts about the ability of Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority to conduct a democratic election as the Oslo Peace Agreement stipulated or stop terrorism. Despite such misgivings, the Israelis signed the agreement in September 1993. Soon after, under the tutelage of Iran, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) started a wave of suicide bombings that killed scores of Israelis and undermined the faith of Israelis in the peace process. As is well known, after the unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, the Strip became a terrorist citadel. Lately, Hamas and the PIJ have tried to set up a terror infrastructure in the West Bank, again with support from Iran and its proxy Hezbollah. Hezbollah is also involved in drug trafficking across the border and mobilizes Israeli Arabs to smuggle both weapons and drugs. There has been a sharp increase in terror attacks associated with the West Bank and a dramatic increase in gang violence in the Arab sector.  

Goldberg, like other Israeli academic activists, has never acknowledged what Rabin feared: the Palestinians, led by the Islamists beholden to Iran and Hezbollah, have zero interest in democracy or a two-state solution. Their only interest is to dismantle Israel.

References:

https://www.alwatanvoice.com/arabic/news/2023/06/26/1526408.html

(Google Translate)

The Organization’s Anti-Apartheid Department ends its visit to Europe

2023-06-26

The delegation of the Department against Apartheid in the Palestine Liberation Organization concluded its visits to several European countries, within the framework of the department’s work to form a global front against apartheid and Israeli settler colonialism, and in preparation for holding an international conference against apartheid.

The department had organized several visits to the countries of Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and France, to meet with the German Left Party, the German and Belgian Ministries of Foreign Affairs, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, the German “Kobe” Foundation, representatives of the Labor and Green parties, the Belgian Socialist Party, the ECCP Foundation and solidarity institutions with The Palestinian cause, representatives of the “Sinn Féin” party, the official of the Left Bloc in the European Parliament, the Center for Human Rights Support in the Netherlands, and the European Center for Legal Support.

The delegation included a member of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Head of the Anti-Apartheid Department, Ramzi Rabah, and Director General of the Department, Maher Amer.

During his visit, the delegation discussed the most prominent developments in the Palestinian cause, and the policies of the extreme right-wing occupation government, which are based on displacement and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian people, and control over the Palestinian land according to a systematic policy, based on the annexation of more than 60% of the occupied West Bank, and the intensification of settlement within the framework of a project to undermine The possibility of establishing an independent Palestinian state, and liquidating the legitimate national rights of the Palestinian people.

During the meetings, the department’s delegation discussed the conditions of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), and the US-Israeli policy, which aims to liquidate UNRWA’s work, by drying up its funding sources, in order to end its tasks and services to the Palestinian people in all refugee camps, where the delegation demanded The necessity of continuing stable and sustainable funding for the Agency.

During its visits, the delegation touched on the need to hold European forums at all levels, in order to convene an international legal conference, to combat the system of apartheid and Israeli colonialism.

During its visits, the delegation explained the action plan of the Anti-Apartheid Department, in addition to the department’s movements at the international level in order to combat the system of apartheid and settler colonialism.

During his series of visits, the delegation of the department delivered; A detailed document on settlement operations and the annexation of Palestinian lands, and a list of the names of ministers and Knesset members residing in settlements established on occupied Palestinian lands in flagrant violation of international law, in addition to the appeal issued by the first national conference against the apartheid system and Israeli settler colonialism.

The department’s delegation participated during its series of visits; Dr. George Rishmawi, Hamdan Al Damiri and Dieter Lewin Bergker of the European Palestinian Initiative against Apartheid, representatives of the Palestinian embassies in Germany and Belgium, and the Palestinian ambassador to the European Parliament.

At the end of the meetings, the Palestinian community in Germany and the Palestinian and Arab Youth Gathering in Belgium organized several political meetings with members of the community and its frameworks, on the developments of the Palestinian cause in Berlin, Cologne and Bonn in Germany, and Brussels in Belgium, during which a member of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization spoke. Ramzi Rabah on the current Palestinian situation, and the dangerous developments of the Palestinian cause, as a result of the Israeli occupation policy through displacement, annexation and settlement expansion, adding that the Palestinian people will remain steadfast in the face of the racist plans of the occupation, through popular resistance in all its forms.

During the meetings, Rabah saluted the Palestinian community in Germany and Belgium for their distinguished role in supporting the Palestinian cause, calling for coordinating their efforts and developing their work, through integration and influence with European frameworks and parties. Support for the Palestinian cause, praising the historical role of the Palestinian community in Europe in general and in Germany in particular.

===================================================

https://panet.com/index.php/story/3788237

(Google Translate)

A delegation from the Anti-Apartheid Department of the PLO meets the Belgian Foreign Ministry

Panet website and Panorama newspaper
17-06-2023 09:54:26 Last update: 17-06-2023 23:02:00

Ramzi Rabah, member of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, head of the Anti-Apartheid Department, recently met with the Middle East Department official.

In the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “Herbert Corman”, as part of the department’s delegation’s visit to several European countries, to discuss “forming a global front against apartheid and Israeli settler colonialism.”
The meeting was attended by Frederick, responsible for the Palestine file at the Belgian Foreign Ministry, Counselor Hassan Balawi, the Consul of the Palestinian Embassy in Belgium, Director General of the Department Dr. Maher Amer, and a member of the European Palestinian Initiative Against Apartheid Dr. George Rishmawi.
A member of the Executive Committee of the PLO presented the situation in the Palestinian territories under the extremist Israeli “troika” government, which pursues a policy of annexation, ethnic cleansing and settlement strengthening in the West Bank, calling for besieging this government, and the need to expose its brutal and racist policy and practices, and link the Palestinian struggle in the face of apartheid With other means of struggle, until the occupation is defeated and its demise, and its independent state is established with Jerusalem as its capital.

Escalation of killings, arrests and land confiscation
Ramzi Rabah explained, “The racist, far-right occupation government, led by Netanyahu, continues its aggressive policy against the Palestinian people, noting that the years 2022 and 2023 were among the bloodiest years against the Palestinian people, according to the testimony of international human rights and humanitarian organizations, as killings, arrests, and land confiscation escalated, And the expansion of settlements, in addition to the demolitions and destruction of homes, the enactment of a number of racist laws in the Israeli Knesset and the Israeli courts, and the demand of this racist government to impose the death penalty on Palestinian prisoners, and other racist laws that violate international humanitarian law and human rights law.

The head of the Anti-Apartheid Department referred to “the important European role in confronting the apartheid system, by unifying the efforts of all European human rights and humanitarian institutions, in order to achieve accountability for the Israeli apartheid state.”
A member of the Executive Committee of the PLO explained, “The anti-apartheid department’s work strategy is represented by building a global front to end apartheid and settler colonialism, and to work with everyone who advocates international human rights law and Palestinian national rights.”

Problems faced by UNRWA
The head of the Anti-Apartheid Department addressed “the problems faced by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), and the pressures it is exposed to from some parties to reduce its budget and reduce its services related to the needs and rights of Palestinian refugees, noting the need for European support to maintain the continuity of its provision.” Health, education and relief services.

In turn, the official of the Middle East Department at the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Tarbit Kormana, affirmed his government’s “continuous support for the Palestinian cause, to preserve the option of a two-state solution.” The official in the Middle East department pointed to “the importance of holding the Palestinian general elections, and improving and strengthening democratic performance in the internal issues of the Palestinian people, as they are a key to self-determination and state building for the Palestinian people.”

======================================================

https://m.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/israel-muss-den-vorwurf-aushalten-ein-apartheid-regime-zu-sein-19120442.html

Jüdische Stimme für gerechten Frieden in Nahost

23 August at 15:09  · 

FAZ 23.8. 2023

Conflict in Middle East

Apartheid is real in Israel

Israel has been protected for a long time from the accusation of apartheid. In light of recent events in my hometown, this cannot be maintained. Therefore, the formula that anyone who talks about apartheid is anti-Semitic doesn’t apply anymore.

By Amos Goldberg

Felix Klein, the anti-Semitism representative of the federal government, recently, on the occasion of an insightful interview with German Middle East expert Muriel Asseburg, made the claim that whoever supports Israel apartheid delegates the Jewish state. Because that is an anti semitic narrative. The thesis is questionable. Because Felix Klein was right, some of the most well-known Holocaust and Antisemitism researchers from Israel, America, Europe and around the world would be Antisemites.

In a recently published petition co-initiated by Omer Bartov, one of the most respected holocaust and genocide researchers, it says “there can be no democracy for Jews in Israel as long as Palestinians live under an apartheid regime that Israeli jurists have characterized.” The petition has been signed by more than 1900 scientists, mostly Jews and Israelis, including Saul Friedländer, Shulamit Volkov, Eva Illouz, Dan Diner and Christopher Browning. They are all well-known in Germany. Many signatories consider themselves Zionists – such as Benny Morris, who has repeated in the past that the term apartheid cannot be applied to Israel.

The petition and its international appeal are extraordinary. But in the light of recent developments in Israel, many people in Israel and around the world, Jews and non-Jews, are changing their minds. This is how Benjamin Pogrund, a Jewish Israeli from South Africa and a sharp critic of all those who call Israel an apartheid state, wrote in a guest article for the Israeli newspaper “Haaretz”: “For decades I have protected Israel from the accusation of apartheid.” I can’t do this anymore. “

A comparison with South Africa

Pogrund backs his argument with facts, including a detailed comparison between Israel and South Africa. Former Major General Amiram Levin, former high commander of the Israeli army, called Israel’s sovereignty over West Bank “fifty-seven years of absolute apartheid,” and Barak Medina, renowned law professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and former Supreme Court candidate, wrote that the false statements of finance and second ministers at the ministry of security Bezalel Smotrich served to justify an apartheid regime in occupied East Jerusalem. Israel is changing before our very eyes, and many people are responding. So how is Felix Klein’s illiteracy to understand? Hannah Arendt might be able to help. As described in “elements and origins of totalitarian rule”, “ideological thinking” is characterized by the fact that it functions “regardless of any experience”, so to say “emancipated from reality”. In Arendt’s opinion, Felix Klein is an ideologist who closes his eyes to reality and doesn’t make it a secret.

In his criticism of Muriel Asseburg formulated in the newspaper “Die Welt”, he is not only trying to refute the argument that Israel practices apartheid. He simply explains that apartheid contradicts the ideological understanding of a “Jewish state” and therefore the corresponding accusations are anti-Semitic. What would he say if Israel can be shown as an apartheid state? That the political reality in the occupied territories and even within Israel corresponds to the criteria, as defined in international law, i.e. in the Roman Statute of the International Criminal Court, which was ratified by Germany in 2000? It would probably be irrelevant for the little one. Israel cannot be accused of apartheid a priori, regardless of the facts, because Israel is a Jewish state.

Contradictory statements

And since the anti-Semitism envoy with a view of Israel refuses to talk about apartheid because it would ignore the Jewish character of the state of Israel, he basically recognizes that a Jewish state can, maybe even should be, an apartheid state. From his point of view, this is not a problem, but a preference, as a “Jewish state”, and if it is an apartheid state that upholds Jewish supremacy, is an even higher value that we are morally obligated to defend and to criticize is anti-Semitic. In other words: Klein recognizes that Israel, as a Jewish state, could be an apartheid state, but finds it anti-Semitic to talk about apartheid in relation to Israel. With this attitude, he is no longer far away from those far-right politicians who belong to the current Israeli coalition government and openly demand that the Jewish character of the state should be above its democratic character.

Even if Israel, according to this logic, again carried out ethnic cleansing as during the Nakba 1948 and would deport countless Palestinians from the State of Israel or West Bank – as the journalist Amira Hass and many experienced observers warn and as threatened by some ministers of the Likud Party and ministers Smotrich is more or less explicitly formulated in his “decisive plan” -, even then Felix Klein would probably say that it is anti-Semitic to call this action an ethnic cleansing, because it helps to strengthen Israel’s character as a “Jewish state”. Perhaps he would agree that you could criticize such a crime without being anti-Semitic, well-known provided Israel’s legitimate security interests are taken into account, as he recently explained with regard to criticism of the illegal barrier wall.

Not surprisingly, that recent developments in Israel have not caused even a trace of irritation at Klein since the formation of the openly racist and anti-democratic government that practices its apartheid policies on a daily basis. And that, while the government continues to push the actual annexation of the occupied territories and deprives the millions of Palestinians living there of their rights, while the Israeli inhabitants of those territories, the settlers, enjoy full civil rights. Although the parallel legal systems are being expanded in West Bank – civil rights for Jews, war rights for Palestinians. Although the government is converting Israel into an authoritarian, anti-democratic state to enable the annexation of the West Bank without being legally challenged.

Although Itamar Ben-Gvir is the Minister of National Security, a man convicted of racism and supporting a terrorist organization in 2008 and an admirer of Jewish terrorist Baruch Goldstein who massacred 29 Palestinians in the Patriarch’s Cave in Hebron 1994. Although terrorist attacks on Palestinians — such as the pogrom in the Palestinian village of Huwara or the murder of a Palestinian in the village of Burqa — occur almost daily. Although Minister Smotrich publicly declares that the Palestinian village of Huwara should be wiped out, and Minister Ben-Gvir justifies the murder in Burqa. And yet minister Smotrich Gelder is cancelling Arab students in East Jerusalem and Arab communities, just like that. Klein can’t shake all that. Reality has no effect on your positions. Therefore, he is probably interested neither in the arguments of the Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard, who pointed out in a detailed 2020 report that apartheid is practiced in West Bank, nor the reports of the Human Rights Watch from 2021, which also find that apartheid was practiced in the occupied territories. He is also not interested in the legal case analyses of the human rights organization B’Tselem (2021) and Amnesty International (2022), which yield the same result.

Felix Klein dismisses the allegations as anti-Semitic because they question Israel’s Jewish character. How slanted. Like a stranger to reality. How ideological. Small may not be receptive to reality, but reality is stronger, and more and more people in the world and in Israel are beginning to see it. Blaming Israel apartheid is not anti-Semitic. It describes the reality. The Israeli government fights human rights, democracy, equality and promotes the opposite: authoritarianism, discrimination, racism and apartheid. Felix Klein and all decent people need to decide on which side of history they want to stand in the fight against antisemitism.

Amos Goldberg is a professor of Holocaust History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. As a co-editor, he last published “The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History” (Columbia University)

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https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2023/08/26/709643/Calling-Israel-apartheid-not-anti-Semitic

Hebrew University professor: Calling Israel apartheid is ‘describing reality’ 

Saturday, 26 August 2023 8:04 AM  [ Last Update: Saturday, 26 August 2023 8:16 AM ]

Calling Israel an apartheid regime has nothing to do with anti-Semitism but is the description of what is happening in reality, according to an Israeli university professor.

Amos Goldberg, a leading professor of the Holocaust at Hebrew University in the occupied al-Quds, made the comment in response to an earlier statement by Germany’s anti-Semitism commissioner Felix Klein, who said applying the framework of apartheid to discuss Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is “an anti-Semitic narrative.”

In an interview with the German daily newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), Goldberg rejected Klein’s remarks and said, “Accusing Israel of apartheid is not anti-Semitic—it’s describing reality.”

In a veiled reference to Klein, Goldberg added, “All decent people must decide which side of history they want to be on.”

The Israeli university professor also warned against the conflation of anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism, describing the issue as a “disturbing” phenomenon as he argued that some of the harshest opponents of Zionism were Jews.

“These identifications are serious because they are derived from alleged lessons of the Holocaust,” he added. “And so it appears that any substantial criticism of Israel and Zionism is perceived in public opinion, and especially among national and international political and cultural institutions, as an ideological continuation of the Holocaust.”

“From the moment Zionism appeared on the stage of history at the end of the 19th century, opposition to it was born within the Jewish world.”

In an open letter earlier in the month, hundreds of academics and public figures from across occupied Palestine and other nations equated the Israeli regime’s decades-long occupation of Palestinian territories with apartheid.

The signatories complained that the Palestinian people “lack almost all basic rights, including the right to vote and protest. They face constant violence: this year alone, Israeli forces have killed over 190 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and demolished over 590 structures. Settler vigilantes burn, loot, and kill with impunity.”

The Israeli oppression of Palestinians has witnessed a sharp rise under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s extremist coalition cabinet, which is composed of far-right Zionist parties that oppose Palestinian statehood and support the expansion of illegal settlements in the occupied lands.

Over the past months, the usurping regime has intensified attacks against Palestinian towns. As a result of these attacks, dozens of Palestinians have lost their lives and many others have been arrested.

According to the United Nations, 2023 is already the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank since it began recording fatalities in 2005. The previous year, 2022, had been the most lethal year with 150 Palestinians killed, of whom 33 were minors, as reported by the United Nations.

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https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/8/27/accusing-israel-of-apartheid-is-not-anti-semitic-holocaust-historian

‘Accusing Israel of apartheid is not anti-Semitic’: Holocaust historian

A growing number of Jewish academics are using the term apartheid to describe Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

Published On 27 Aug 202327 Aug 2023

Amos Goldberg, a leading professor of the Holocaust at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has published a scathing retort saying that describing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as “apartheid” is not anti-Semitic, in a guest post in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ).

Felix Klein, Germany’s commissioner for Jewish Life and the Fight Against Anti-Semitism, said using “apartheid” in such scenarios is “an anti-Semitic narrative” in an interview with Die Welt, one of Germany’s most-read newspapers.

The Israeli government, Goldberg stated, fights against human rights, democracy and equality and propagates the opposite: “authoritarianism, discrimination, racism and apartheid”.

“Accusing Israel of apartheid is not anti-Semitic. It describes reality,” he said.

‘The elephant in the room’

Goldberg’s standpoint was not an outlier, he urged Klein to understand. Rather, it represented a growing chorus of voices, including leading Israeli academics propagating the term apartheid to describe the treatment of Palestinians by the current regime.

In fact, if Klein were right, Goldberg wrote, then some of the best-known Holocaust and anti-Semitism researchers from Israel, the United States, Europe and worldwide would be anti-Semites.

He referenced a petition co-initiated by Omer Bartov, the Israeli-born historian and professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, titled The Elephant in the Room, which states: “There can be no democracy for Jews in Israel while Palestinians live under an apartheid regime”.

The petition has been signed by more than 2,000 academics, clergy, and other public figures at the time of writing and is emblazoned with an illustration that includes a large elephant with the words “Israeli occupation” alongside a speech bubble that reads “Let’s just ignore it”, and surrounded by dozens of people freely waving placards for various social justice movements.

“Palestinian people lack almost all basic rights, including the right to vote and protest,” the petition reads, “Settler vigilantes burn, loot, and kill with impunity.”

A rhetorical shift in Israeli academia

This represents a significant shift in rhetoric among many Jewish and non-Jewish academics, Goldberg wrote in FAZ.

The recent judicial changes proposal that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently pushed through has forced many people to change their perception of the Israeli regime, including Zionists, he states.

Goldberg referenced Benjamin Pogrund, a South African-born Israeli author who was once quoted as saying anyone who labelled Israel an apartheid regime “is at best ignorant and naive and at worst cynical and manipulative”.

Pogrund recently wrote an op-ed for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in which he described his new position: “I have argued with all my might against the accusation that Israel is an apartheid state: in lectures, newspaper articles, on TV and in a book. However, the accusation is becoming fact.”

“We deny Palestinians any hope of freedom and normal lives. We believe our own propaganda that a few million people will meekly accept perpetual inferiority and oppression,” he wrote.

Goldberg also cited Barak Medina, a law professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a former Supreme Court nominee, who wrote that the untrue statements of Finance Minister and Second Minister of Security Bezalel Smotrich served to justify an apartheid regime in occupied East Jerusalem.

‘Accusing Israel of apartheid is not anti-Semitic’

Klein’s statement that accusing Israel of apartheid is anti-Semitic is not far removed from the position of the right-wing extremist politicians in the Israeli coalition government who demand that the Jewish character of the state take precedence over its democratic character, Goldberg argues.

It is a position shared by Bartov, who recently told the Washington Post: “You can call me a self-hating Jew, call me an antisemite … People use those terms to cover up the reality, either to deceive themselves or to deceive others. You have to look at what’s happening on the ground.”

Klein may not be “receptive to reality”, Goldberg concludes in his FAZ article, “but reality is stronger and more and more people around the world and in Israel are beginning to see it”.

 24.08.23

Editorial Note

After years of neglect, the subject of Left-wing antisemitism has finally attracted serious academic attention. The book Mapping the New Left Antisemitism: The Fathom Essays was edited by British Professor Alan Johnson and should become a must-read for those concerned about the alarming rise of antisemitism. 

The book provides a comprehensive critical guide to contemporary Left antisemitism. As one reviewer notes, “Written by many of this generation’s leading scholars, Mapping Antisemitism is a valuable compilation of learned, deeply insightful analysis of contemporary anti-Jewish hostility prevalent in significant strains of Western political thought…the pernicious link between anti-Zionism and antisemitism within the political left.” 

The book makes a clear distinction between the legitimate criticism of Israel and antisemitism, for which the very existence of the Jewish state is a red flag galvanizing various strands of old and new antisemitic voices. The volume also makes clear that Leftist antisemitism is much more corrosive than right-wing antisemitism because Western society’s “progressive” segments are considered legitimate purveyors of such ideas. 

 The topics which the book contributors cover include: antisemitic anti-Zionism and its underappreciated Soviet roots; the impact of analogies with the Nazis; the rise of antisemitism on the European continent, exploring the hybrid forms emerging from cross-fertilization between the new left, Christian, and Islamist antisemitism; the impact of anti-Zionist activism on higher education; and the bitter debates over the adoption of the often misrepresented International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism; among other. 

 Israel Academia Monitor welcomes especially the book’s emphasis on academic antisemitism, the product of generations of scholars both in Israel and the West who abandoned the positivist and objective paradigm of the social sciences. Instead, they embrace the neo-Marxist, critical school of thought in which Israel is viewed as a colonial, neocolonial, apartheid state that subjugates the Palestinians and worse. Over the years, IAM has brought countless examples of Israeli academic activists whose portrayal of Israel is highly antisemitic. As the book notes, many Western academic activists have incorporated antisemitic themes. Ironically, the ongoing case of Jasbir Puar, whose book is taught at Princeton University, alleges that the IDF harvests the organs of Palestinians. Puar, a professor at Rutgers University, has a long history of extreme anti-Israel activism. 

Another interesting point in the book that fits the IAM analysis is the confluence of Western and Islamic antisemitism. Of course, this idea is not new, going back to the time of the Muslim Brotherhood, which adopted much of the Nazi propaganda during WWII. Later, Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamist Republic of Iran, incorporated Nazi-like themes to create a vitriolic antisemitic narrative of Israel and Jews. Interestingly, the regime was eager to use radical Israeli scholars to legitimize its antisemitic ideology. For instance, a translation of the books by Ilan Pappe, arguably the most radical Israeli historian (profiled by IAM numerous times), was published in both Farsi and Arabic. Shlomo Sand, another radical historian from Tel Aviv University, was interviewed several times on the Iranian Press TV. As IAM pointed out, Sand, who claimed that Jewish people were an invention of nineteenth-century Zionists, was particularly useful to the Islamists who denied that Jews had any right to Israel.

 The book, which is scheduled to come out in October 2023, is expected to make a real impact on the debate on current antisemitism.

 A recent example of new Left antisemitism comes in an article published by two Israeli authors, Prof. Ariel Hendel, and Prof. Hagar Kotef, titled “Settler Colonialism and Home.”

 The article discusses forms of settler colonialism, such as the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Algeria, and Israel. “Let us look at Israeli homes as an example. These reminders of the constitutive violence are integrated into so much of the Israeli landscape – which is inlaid with ruins of Palestinian past lives: piles of stones that used to be walls of Palestinian houses, collapsing arches, terraces, fig trees, olive groves, hedges of prickly cactuses… All these serve as a ghostly and yet very material reminder of the violence at the foundation of Israeli homes.”

 According to the authors, “It was in the 1948 war and its aftermath that Zionism as a housing regime (see Allweil 2016) became a project of direct replacement, depriving the Palestinian population from their own homes and lands, and not only a project of providing homes for Jewish immigrants as part of building a Jewish homeland. Approximately 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled during the war. Their return was fully restricted, while their homes and properties were taken by the new regime and given to Jewish immigrants, bulldozed to dust, or left to slow ruination.”

The authors then move on to discuss the Arab inhabitants who build houses without obtaining building permits and cases of house demolitions. 

The authors claim Israel is attempting to replace the Palestinians. “Thus, the symbolic replacement of the Arab with the Western was itself replaced with a different form of replacement: the replacement of living Palestinians with living Israeli-Jews who come to inhibit the former’s home; be it as part of the more national resettlement after 1948… not only physically replace the natives but also to take their place as the legitimate dwellers of the single home and the homeland.” The authors also claim that “most social struggles in Israel revolve around the question of how the material and social benefits of the massive dispossession of 1948 (the real-estate loot) should be distributed among Jews, while not touching at all on the injustice of acquiring these possessions to begin with.”

 The text is full of antisemitic verbiage, blaming the Jews for the misfortune that befallen the Palestinians which they themselves caused; by waging the riots in 1936-9 against the Jews, then their rejection of the Partition Plan, and soon after, waging war against the nascent Jewish State, a war which the Palestinians have lost. Moreover, under the occupation of Egypt in Gaza and Jordan in the West Bank between 1948 and 1967, the Palestinians’ Arab allies did not find the Palestinians righteous for an independent state. But the authors blame Israel and the Jews.

The authors should note that the Balfour Declaration, which the League of Nations adopted, stated that non-Jews should not be harmed while living in the national home of the Jews and also that Jews living in other countries should not be harmed. Yet the Palestinians and their Arab allies breached this arrangement and slaughtered numerous Jews in Palestine and in the Arab world, and as a result, Jews were expelled and absorbed into the Jewish state. 

Clearly, the authors reject the Jews’ right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland by calling Jews settler colonialists. The authors deliberately hide facts to appease their Palestinian camaraderie by taking upon themselves antisemitic diatribes. This is precisely what the book on the New Left Antisemitism discusses in length. 

References:

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781003322320/mapping-new-left-antisemitism-alan-johnson

Book

Mapping the New Left Antisemitism

The Fathom Essays

Edited ByAlan Johnson

Edition1st Edition

First Published2023

eBook Published6 October 2023

Pub. LocationLondon

ImprintRoutledge

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.4324/9781003322320

Pages352

eBook ISBN9781003322320

SubjectsArea Studies, Humanities, Politics & International Relations

ABSTRACT

Mapping the New Left Antisemitism: The Fathom Essays provides a comprehensive guide to contemporary Left antisemitism.

The rise of a new and largely left-wing form of antisemitism in the era of the Jewish state and the distinction between it and legitimate criticism of Israel are now roiling progressive politics in the West and causing alarming spikes in antisemitic incitement and incidents. Fathom journal has examined these questions relentlessly in the first decade of its existence, earning a reputation for careful textual analysis and cogent advocacy. In this book, the Fathom essays are contextualised by three new contributions: Lesley Klaff provides a map of contemporary antisemitic forms of antizionism, Dave Rich writes on the oft-neglected lived experience of the Jewish victims of contemporary antisemitism and David Hirsh assesses the intellectual history of the left from which both Fathom and his own London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, as well as this book series, have emerged. Topics covered by the contributors include antisemitic antizionism and its underappreciated Soviet roots; the impact of analogies with the Nazis; the rise of antisemitism on the European continent, exploring the hybrid forms emerging from a cross-fertilisation between new left, Christian and Islamist antisemitism; the impact of antizionist activism on higher education; and the bitter debates over the adoption of the oft-misrepresented International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism.

This work will be of considerable appeal to scholars and activists with an interest in antisemitism, Jewish studies and the politics of Israel.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part 1|46 pages

Introduction and Contexts

Chapter 1|10 pages

Introduction to Mapping Left Antisemitism

The Fathom Essays

ByAlan JohnsonAbstract 

GET ACCESS

Chapter 2|15 pages

A New Form of the Oldest Hatred

Mapping Antisemitism Today

ByLesley KlaffAbstract 

GET ACCESS

Chapter 3|12 pages

The Jewish Experience of Antisemitism

ByDave RichAbstract 

GET ACCESS

Chapter 4|7 pages

The Left and the Jews

Time for a Rethink

ByAlan JohnsonAbstract 

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Part 2|60 pages

Contemporary Left Antisemitism

Chapter 5|8 pages

What Is Left Antisemitism?

BySean MatgamnaAbstract 

GET ACCESS

Chapter 6|8 pages

Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism

ByMichael WalzerAbstract 

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Chapter 7|7 pages

Alibi Antisemitism

ByNorman GerasAbstract 

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Chapter 8|7 pages

Like a Cloud Contains a Storm

Jean Améry’s Critique of Anti-Zionism

ByMarlene GallnerAbstract 

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Chapter 9|6 pages

What Corbyn’s Favourite Sociologists Greg Philo and Mike Berry Get Wrong About Contemporary Antisemitism

ByMatthew BoltonAbstract 

GET ACCESS

Chapter 10|7 pages

Antisemitism and the Left

A Memoir

ByKathleen HayesAbstract 

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Chapter 11|8 pages

Denial

Norman Finkelstein and the New Antisemitism

ByAlan JohnsonAbstract 

GET ACCESS

Chapter 12|7 pages

‘Toxic Gifts’

Israel and the Anti-Zionist Left. An Interview With Susie Linfield

BySusie LinfieldAbstract 

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Part 3|32 pages

The Soviet Roots of Contemporary Left Antisemitism

Chapter 13|13 pages

Soviet Anti-Zionism and Contemporary Left Antisemitism

ByIzabella TabarovskyAbstract 

GET ACCESS

Chapter 14|9 pages

Communists Against Jews

The Anti-Zionist Campaign in Poland in 1968

BySimon GansingerAbstract 

GET ACCESS

Chapter 15|8 pages

The German Left’s Undeclared Wars on Israel

An Interview With Jeffrey Herf

ByJeffrey HerfAbstract 

GET ACCESS

Part 4|26 pages

Left Antisemitism and the Holocaust

Chapter 16|4 pages

Holocaust Inversion and Contemporary Antisemitism

ByLesley KlaffAbstract 

GET ACCESS

Chapter 17|3 pages

Hitler and the Nazis’ Anti-Zionism

ByJeffrey HerfAbstract 

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Chapter 18|17 pages

Holocaust Falsifiers

Blaming ‘Zionists’ for the Crimes of the Nazis

ByPaul BogdanorAbstract 

GET ACCESS

Part 5|41 pages

Left Antisemitism in Europe and the United States

Chapter 19|13 pages

Reflections on Contemporary Antisemitism in Europe

ByKenneth WaltzerAbstract 

GET ACCESS

Chapter 20|4 pages

The Unwelcome Arrival of the Quenelle

ByDave RichAbstract 

GET ACCESS

Chapter 21|9 pages

A Modern Orthodox-Christian Ritual Murder Libel

St. Philoumenos of Jacob’s Well

ByDavid GurevichAbstract 

GET ACCESS

Chapter 22|13 pages

We Shall Be as a City on a Hill

Trump, ‘Progressive’ Anti-Semitism, and the Loss of American Jewish Exceptionalism

ByShalom LappinAbstract 

GET ACCESS

Part 6|32 pages

Left Antisemitism and Academia

Chapter 23|14 pages

The Meaning of David Miller

ByDavid HirshAbstract 

GET ACCESS

Chapter 24|9 pages

From Scholarship to Polemic? A Case Study of the Emerging Crisis in Academic Publishing on Israel

ByCary NelsonAbstract 

GET ACCESS

Chapter 25|7 pages

Pathologising ‘Jewish Being and Thinking’

Oren Ben-Dor and Academic Antisemitism

BySarah Annes BrownAbstract 

GET ACCESS

Part 7|17 pages

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance

Chapter 26|7 pages

On Misrepresentations of the IHRA Definition of Antisemitism

ByDave RichAbstract 

GET ACCESS

Chapter 27|8 pages

Political Antisemitism

A Defence of the IHRA Definition

ByBernard Harrison, Lesley KlaffAbstract 

GET ACCESS

Part 8|63 pages

Theory and Left Antisemitism

Chapter 28|15 pages

Misreading Hannah Arendt

Judith Butler’s Anti-Zionism and the Eichmann Trial

ByRussell A. BermanAbstract 

GET ACCESS

Chapter 29|8 pages

The Pleasures of Antisemitism

ByEve GarrardAbstract 

GET ACCESS

Chapter 30|11 pages

Intersectionality and Antisemitism

A New Approach

ByKarin StögnerAbstract 

GET ACCESS

Chapter 31|27 pages

Left Alternatives to Left Antisemitism

A Conversation Between Alan Johnson and Philip Spencer

ByAlan Johnson, Philip SpencerAbstract

==============================================================

https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/39771/

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Kotef, Hagar and Handel, Ariel (2023) ‘Settler colonialism and home.’ In: Boccagni, Paolo, (ed.), Handbook on Home and Migration. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 158-169.

Text – Accepted Version  Restricted to Repository staff only until 1 December 2023.  Request a copy

Abstract

Settler colonialism is a specific configuration of the complex relationship between home and immigration. As an organized migration movement, settler colonialism is a political movement whose main aim is the construction of senses of home and belonging in new territories. Furthermore, as such a movement, settler colonialism is also a massive movement for the construction of physical homes for the colonizing population coupled with the destruction of local homes. Either concretely or more metaphorically, settler colonialism is thus an act of living inside depopulated homes. As a result, legitimacy regimes, legal means and land-use regulations render the homes of the colonized temporary and unstable. But precisely therefore, merely being at home becomes an act of resistance for the colonized. This chapter works through this dialectic of destruction and belonging, presenting the home in the colony as a political site, both of control and of resistance, exploring the political, cultural, economic, symbolic, and affective dimensions of the home in settler-colonial settings.

Item Type:	Book Chapters
Keywords:	Settler colonialism; Indigeneity; Israel/Palestine; Home demolitions; State violence; Resistance
SOAS Departments & Centres:	Departments and Subunits > Department of Politics & International Studies
ISBN:	9781800882768
DOI (Digital Object Identifier):	https://doi.org/10.4337/9781800882775.00022
Date Deposited:	08 Jul 2023 09:08
URI:	https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/id/eprint/39771
Funders:	Leverhulme Trust

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17.08.23

Editorial Note

The Palestine Chronicle is an American non-profit organization with a mission to educate the general public by providing a forum that strives to highlight issues of relevance to human rights, national struggles, freedom, and democracy in the form of daily news. Its President is the Palestinian journalist Ramzy Baroud who, in reality, recruits academics in order to besmirch Israel.

Prof. Benay Blend, known to be Jewish, is a case in point. She received her doctorate in American Studies from the University of New Mexico. She has taught at the University of Georgia, Memphis State University, and the University of New Mexico. Currently, she is an adjunct professor of Native American, American, and New Mexico history at Central NM Community College in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She has published widely in such fields as Southwest women writers, Native American Studies, and nature writing. Although Middle East studies is clearly not her subject, she was recruited to write anti-Israel articles. 

In her recent article “‘Ignorance is Bliss’: On the So-Called Contradictions within Israel’s Alleged Democracy,” she quotes two Israeli Arab academics, Prof. Ahmad H. Sa’di, of the Department of Politics and Government at Ben Gurion University, who wrote, “There is little that sets the Zionist venture apart from many other colonial quests… other than its late appearance on the world’s stage.” and that “the legacy of colonialism still pervades all aspects of Western cultures.” (Ahmad H. Sa’di, “Towards a Decolonization of Colonial Studies,” Decolonizing the Study of Palestine: Indigenous Perspectives and Settler Colonialism After Elia Zureik, Ahmad H. Sa’di and Nur Masalha, Eds, 2023, p. 13). 

She then quotes Suheir Abu Oksa Daoud, formerly of the Department of Political Science at the Hebrew University, as saying that Palestinians will still be the “target of discrimination.” In her view, “a state that explicitly defines itself as Jewish, rather than a state for all its citizens… cannot guarantee fundamental democratic rights and equal citizenship to its minority, and their integration into state institutions will be always conditional.”

 Prof. Blend also refers to an article by American-Israeli journalist and historian Gershom Gorenberg, titled “Israel is Best Understood Through Its Contradictions,” published in the New York Times, which covers the protests over proposed judicial reforms. She quotes Gorenberg, who wrote that, “A great many Israelis who ignored the chronic crisis of occupation, or long ago gave up on finding a cure… nevertheless recognize the new and acute threat to the country’s fragile democracy.” For Prof. Blend, without such a cure, “ostensibly the dismantling of the Zionist entity to make way for a secular state with equal rights for all, there is no democracy, fragile or otherwise. But Gorenberg fails to go there. It seems that he might think he lives within a ‘flawed but real democracy,’ but by leaving out the entire Palestinian population, the indigenous people of the land.” She then questions, “is his ignorance really bliss?”

She stresses the importance of confronting uncomfortable truths to achieve liberation. For her, Gorenberg’s case for “Israel’s democracy” is a good example because it is a “contradiction” since “the Zionist state was established by the Nakba (catastrophe), during which military forces expelled at least 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland and murdered 15,000 more in a series of mass attacks, including dozens of massacres.” For Prof. Blend, there “never was a democratic Israel that Gorenberg says is now in danger of being lost, any more than America, founded on the extermination of Native tribes and on the backs of enslaved people, was founded as a democracy in any broad sense of the word.” In Gorenberg’s article, he states that the “size of the protests [have] been possible” because those “who oppose the occupation are intensely involved.” For her, Gronenberg contends that only by preserving this “big tent” can the “democracy movement” defeat the government’s drive towards dictatorship. She asks, “Who frequents this tent that is supposed to save the Zionist state’s democracy? Not ‘48 Palestinians.”  

For her, the “pro-democracy protestors, who refuse to contend with Palestinians, will not come to the aid of fellow Israelis who understand that democracies do not co-exist with occupation.”  

She then borrows from journalist Jacqueline Luqman’s dictum that “Black people will not make common cause with racists and bigots. Racists do not get a pass because they call themselves anti-war” and suggests that this should be a “warning to Israeli activists who oppose the occupation.”

 According to Prof. Blend, “Zionist state repression reaches far beyond its borders.” She writes, “Indeed, the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL) recently adopted a resolution condemning the attacks on Palestine solidarity and Palestinian community organizing in Europe,” it also encourages institutions and legal organizations to “reject” the so-called “IHRA definition of anti-Semitism” that “seeks to equate anti-Zionism and support for Palestinian liberation with anti-Semitism.”

For Prof. Blend, “Pro-democracy protestors care mostly about democracy for Israelis and are content to leave apartheid as it is.”

Even by the often-shoddy standards of this type of diatribe masquerading as academic research, Prof. Blend’s article is appalling. She gives no explanation as to why she picked up the disjointed roster of authors to quote from, apart from the fact that most bash Israel. This is a common device in the genre of pro-Palestinian activist writings. After decades of delegitimizing Israel, this flourishing cottage industry created its own self-referential universe of activists quoting each other ad nauseam.  

No wonder her articles have a huge gap between reality and fantasy. The message portrayed is that the Palestinians, who run two dictatorships, one in the West Bank and the other in Gaza, give the Israeli democracy a failing grade. The Palestinians can run terrorist organizations, blow up buses, hijack airplanes, massacre civilians, engage in honor killing of women, teach children to become Jihadists, arrest dissenters, persecute gay people and commit suicide attacks, yet, they come through as truly democratic compared to Israel. 

As for Prof. Blend, ignorance is indeed bliss.

References:

‘Ignorance is Bliss’: On the So-Called Contradictions within Israel’s Alleged Democracy’

‘Ignorance is Bliss’: On the So-Called Contradictions within Israel’s Alleged Democracy’

August 10, 2023

By Benay Blend

Gorenberg’s case for Israel’s “democracy” is a good example, and is itself a contradiction, because the Zionist state was established by the Nakba (catastrophe), during which military forces expelled at least 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland.

This article draws its title from two opposing articles—Gershom Gorenberg’s opinion piece “Israel is Best Understood Through Its Contradictions” in the New York Times and Erica Caines and Geechee Yaws, “’Ignorance is Bliss’ and Other Fallacies of Counterinsurgency,” an article in Hood Communist which stresses the importance of confronting uncomfortable truths in order to achieve liberation.

“The media presentation of Israel’s mass protest as a fight for democracy is misleading, at best,” writes activist/journalist Ramzy Baroud, “as it fails to address the historical, ideological and, ultimately, class divides in Israeli society.”

Gorenberg’s case for Israel’s “democracy” is a good example, and is itself a contradiction, because the Zionist state was established by the Nakba (catastrophe), during which military forces expelled at least 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland and murdered 15,000 more in a series of mass attacks, including dozens of massacres. Hence, as Baroud contends, Israel’s establishment as a settler-colonial state was “made possible by the expulsion of most of the native Palestinian population.”

“There is little that sets the Zionist venture apart from many other colonial quests,” writes Ahmad H. Sa’di, “other than its late appearance on the world’s stage” (Ahmad H. Sa’di, “Towards a Decolonization of Colonial Studies,” Decolonizing the Study of Palestine: Indigenous Perspectives and Settler Colonialism After Elia Zureik, Ahmad H. Sa’di and Nur Masalha, Eds, 2023, p. 13). Sa’di continues that “the legacy of colonialism still pervades all aspects of Western cultures” (p. 13), as it does in Gorenberg’s essay.

Indeed, as Baroud explains: “Israel’s dichotomy is that it was founded by an ideology, Zionism, which purposely conflated between religion and nationality.” In recent years, Israel’s “religious zealots,” once allocated to the margins, have far outflanked their fellow secularists, making possible the Jewish only laws that are the rational outcome of Zionist logic.

“The irony and the source of confusion,” Baroud concludes, “is that all past and current leadership of Israel – liberal, conservative or religious – are proud Zionists who saw Judaism as a centerpiece in the Israeli identity.” There never was a democratic Israel that Gorenberg says is now in danger of being lost, anymore than America, founded on the extermination of Native tribes and on the backs of enslaved people, was founded as a democracy in any broad sense of the word.

In his article covering the protests over proposed judicial reforms, Gorenberg states that the “size of the protests [have] been possible” because those “who oppose the occupation are intensely involved.” He contends that only by preserving this “big tent” can the “democracy movement” defeat the government’s drive towards dictatorship.

Who frequents this tent that is supposed to save the Zionist state’s democracy? Not ‘48 Palestinians, it seems, for, as Suheir Abu Oksa Daoud explains, they understand that whichever way the issue is decided, Palestinians will still be the target of discrimination. “A state that explicitly defines itself as Jewish, rather than a state for all its citizens,” Daoud contends, “cannot guarantee fundamental democratic rights and equal citizenship to its minority, and their integration into state institutions will be always conditional.”

Moreover, as Baroud explains, Yet, there were no protests “when Israel passed its Nation-State Law in 2018, defining Israel as the ‘national home of the Jewish people, in which it fulfills its natural, cultural, religious and historical right to self-determination.’” Indeed, he continues, most Israeli Jews have no problem with laws that seek to further disenfranchise Palestinian Arab citizens of their country.

There does appear to be an anti-occupation bloc within the larger protests. Members post frequently on Facebook regarding where to meet, what signs to carry, etc. For example, Tzvika Markovitz calls on others to join the “parade of the dead,” a demonstration in which protestors carry pictures of Palestinians who are the victims of state-sponsored murder. Like the Madres of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina (1976-1983), who carried photos of the disappeared, their action is in direct contrast to the majority who see no contradiction between state-sponsored assassination and democracy.

But are they really a part of the broader scene, and if so, are “big tents” a good idea? In a similar vein, organizers of the Rage Against the War Machine rally that was held in D.C. on February 19 proposed a “big tent” venue, a gathering of the left and right, all committed to ending the war.

In “Apologies Not Accepted: Or I Love It When the Universe Proves me Right,” journalist Jacqueline Luqman explained that when she pointed out the “very public bigotry” of the Libertarian party, which took part in the protest, she was accused of being a COINTELPRO agent who was “sowing division” within the ranks.

Luqman’s dictum that “Black people will not make common cause with racists and bigots. Racists do not get a pass because they call themselves anti-war” should be a warning to Israeli activists who oppose the occupation. “Pro-democracy” protestors care mostly about democracy for Israelis and are content to leave apartheid as it is.

“For now,” Gorenberg writes, “everyone trying to save Israel’s democracy is on the same side.” Even if this were so, when the protests are done, whoever wins, pro-democracy protestors, who refuse to contend with Palestinians, will not come to the aid of fellow Israelis who understand that democracies do not co-exist with occupation.

Gorenberg admits that there “is an essential contradiction between liberal democracy and the denial of rights to Palestinians.” As proof, he points out that he can report on the occupation and then return to his home “without fearing government retribution”; in fact, he is denying the existence of Palestinian journalists who have been assassinated for the crime of reporting what they see.

Indeed, The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reports that over the past 20 years, Israel has murdered 22 Palestinian journalists, including Shireen Abu Akleh, a correspondent for Aljazeera, who was killed on May 11, 2022, by Israeli forces. As of this date, no one has been held accountable for these crimes.

Moreover, Zionist state repression reaches far beyond its borders. Indeed, the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL) recently adopted a resolution condemning the attacks on Palestine solidarity and Palestinian community organizing in Europe. It also encourages institutions and legal organizations to reject the so-called “IHRA definition of anti-Semitism” that seeks to equate anti-Zionism and support for Palestinian liberation with anti-Semitism.

Here is the crux: “A great many Israelis who ignored the chronic crisis of occupation, or long ago gave up on finding a cure,” writes Gorenberg, “nevertheless recognize the new and acute threat to the country’s fragile democracy.” Without a “cure,” ostensibly the dismantling of the Zionist entity to make way for a secular state with equal rights for all, there is no democracy, fragile or otherwise.

But Gorenberg fails to go there. It seems that he might think he lives within a “flawed but real democracy,” but by leaving out the entire Palestinian population, the indigenous people of the land, is his ignorance really bliss?

“In a world full of challenges which desperately requires sharp minds to resolve them,” write Caine and Yaw,  “we should view phrases like these as methods of counterinsurgency that prevent us from pursuing awareness of not only past and present conditions, but of the way things could be in the future as well.”

– Benay Blend earned her doctorate in American Studies from the University of New Mexico. Her scholarly works include Douglas Vakoch and Sam Mickey, Eds. (2017), “’Neither Homeland Nor Exile are Words’: ‘Situated Knowledge’ in the Works of Palestinian and Native American Writers”. She contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.

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Eugenics and Ethnic Cleansing: The Values that Unite the US and Israel

Eugenics and Ethnic Cleansing: The Values that Unite the US and Israel

September 20, 2020

By Benay Blend

“You’d have a hard time finding a point in history where the US government *wasn’t* running concentration camps and forcibly sterilizing people.” Onyesonwu Chatoyer, organizer for the All African People’s Revolution Party was responding to a recent lawsuit which alleges that a doctor subjected women to unwanted hysterectomies while being detained by Immigration Control and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

As Tina Vasquez writes, several organizations filed the complaint on behalf of immigrants inside the Irwin County Detention Center (ICDC), a facility in Georgia run by private prison company LaSalle Corrections. According to the whistleblower Dawn Wooten, a licensed practical nurse at the center, several women told her that they were transported to an outside facility to see “the uterus collector,” their name for the doctor believed to be responsible for the measures.

“When I met all these women who had had surgeries, I thought this was like an experimental concentration camp,” a detainee said in the complaint.

Indeed, ICE has a long history of targeting pregnant migrant women and other vulnerable people in the detention system. Under Trump’s new “birth tourism” policy, so-called after parents who allegedly travel to the United States to gain citizenship for their unborn child, certain applicants for visas must provide proof that they are not traveling for that reason.

Much of these policies are based on fear of changing demographics, a fear among white Americans that their cultural capital is losing value. Because presidential hopeful Joe Biden claims that a “shared soul that unites our countries [Israel and the United States}, generation upon generation,” it makes sense that both countries fear changing times.

For example, after years of denying it, Israel admitted in 2013 that it ordered doctors to inject Ethiopian Jewish women with a drug that would involuntarily sterilize them. In much the same language used by white supremacists in America, Netanyahu warned that illegal immigrants from Africa “threaten our existence as a Jewish and democratic state.”

Coerced or forced hysterectomies can be contextualized within a broader history of eugenics in both countries. Hitler is perhaps the most infamous proponent of a master race, but as Edwin Black observes, the movement for ethnic cleansing originated in the United States.

A pseudoscience directing at “improving” the human race, its most extreme form aims to exterminate “undesirable” human beings. Facets of this idea are found in strategic plans such as forced sterilization and segregation laws, as well as restrictions on marriage between white people and African Americans that lasted well into the 20^th century.

Well into the 1970s and 1980s, too, Native American women received tubal ligations when they thought that they were getting appendectomies. Perhaps as many as 25-50 percent of Native American women underwent such procedures between 1970 and 1976. Even more sterilizations are recorded in Puerto Rico where such acts form a dark part of the island’s history.

In a 1927 decision, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind… Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

This rhetoric is reiterated in Israel, where officials such as Ayelet Shaked, of the Jewish Home Party, are known for their racist remarks. For example, in 2015, Shaked openly called for the genocide of Palestinian people by posting a quote from Uri Elitzur, the late right-wing journalist and leader of the Israeli settler movement:

“Behind every terrorist, stand dozens of men and women, without whom [the enemy] could not engage in terrorism. Actors in the war are those who incite in mosques, who write the murderous curricula for schools, who give shelter, who provide vehicles, and all those who honor and give them their moral support. They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.”

According to Ben Norton, Shaked’s views are held by others in Netanyahu’s government. During Israel’s 2014 attack on Gaza, named “Operation Protective Edge,” Norton reports that the military carried out in action Shaked’s extreme rhetoric.

At that time, Moshe Feiglin, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, called for the “conquest of the entire Gaza Strip and annihilation of all fighting forces and their supporters.” His statement follows along the lines of ethnic cleansing. “This is our country – our country exclusively,” he said, “including Gaza.”

On September 14, Bend the Arc: Jewish Action tweeted:

“Forced sterilization is genocide. ICE is performing mass hysterectomies on immigrant women. ICE is committing genocide. It is part of a long history of eugenics and assaults on reproductive freedom in the United States — a system that directly inspired the Nazi regime.”

A “progressive” Jewish organization that calls attention to such issues, Bend the Arc fails to make the connection with Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, also genocide as defined by the Center for Constitutional Rights.

If common values unite Israel and the United States, as Joe Biden claims, then we should all be worried. We should all be connecting the dots.

When news broke a few days ago of the forced sterilizations in Georgia’s detention center there was shock and outrage, as well there should have been. On the other hand, this treatment of “undesirables” has a long history in both Israel and the United States. Indeed, both countries could easily be charged with genocide, in Israel of Palestinians and in the US of the Indigenous people here.

Moreover, if there is very little difference between Trump and Biden regarding their 100 percent support for Israel, as Ramzy Baroud claims, then it seems that the best action for activists in this country will be education work and grassroots actions in the streets.

Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) once said that in order for non-violence to work your opponent must have a conscience. The US, he concluded, has none.

The same could be said for both candidates, at least regarding Israel. Indeed, Biden’s refusal to reverse many of Trump’s Israel policies, writes Baroud, including his application of the Jerusalem Embassy Act, makes clear the “moral bankruptcy” of the Democratic Party which seems motivated much more by its political, rather than ethical, agenda.

– Benay Blend earned her doctorate in American Studies from the University of New Mexico. Her scholarly works include Douglas Vakoch and Sam Mickey, Eds. (2017), “’Neither Homeland Nor Exile are Words’: ‘Situated Knowledge’ in the Works of Palestinian and Native American Writers”. She contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.

– Benay Blend earned her doctorate in American Studies from the University of New Mexico. Her scholarly works include Douglas Vakoch and Sam Mickey, Eds. (2017), “’Neither Homeland Nor Exile are Words’: ‘Situated Knowledge’ in the Works of Palestinian and Native American Writers”. She contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.

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https://www.haaretz.co.il/misc/2003-11-04/ty-article/0000017f-f475-d5bd-a17f-f67fbda50000

שכחו אותן בבית

הן השתתפו בוויכוחים, יצאו בהמוניהן להצביע ועם היוודע התוצאות רקדו ובכו, אבל כשהגברים חזרו לנהל את הרשויות המקומיות, הן נותרו בבית

מאת סוהיר אבו עקסה דאוד
04 בנובמבר 2003

תוצאות הבחירות האחרונות לרשויות המקומיות מאכזבות עוד יותר מאשר במערכות הבחירות הקודמות. בכל פעם גוברות התקוות שהפעם – מכיוון שהנשים הערביות יותר משכילות, יותר פעילות ובעלות נכונות להתחרות בשדה הפוליטי ולצאת נגד המוסכמות – ייצוגן יגדל. רק שתי נשים נבחרו הפעם לכהן כחברות מועצה – אחת בנצרת ואחת בכפר עילבון שבגליל, שתיהן מטעם חד”ש. השמות ששמענו לפני הבחירות התאדו כמו השמות במערכות הבחירות הקודמות.

הייצוג הזעום הזה ממשיך מסורת של יותר מ-50 שנה, שבמהלכן הצליחו רק 12 נשים לכהן כחברות במועצות מקומיות. שבע מהן כיהנו מאז 1998 – ורק שתיים מתוכן נבחרו, שתיהן במועצת נצרת. השאר כיהנו במהלך הקדנציה חודשים ספורים. אשה אחת כיהנה כיו”ר – תופעה שלא חזרה על עצמה כ-30 שנה וכנראה לא תחזור בשנים הקרובות.

לפני הבחירות האחרונות דובר רבות על הצורך בייצוג נשי נאות במגזר הערבי. קורסי מנהיגות נפתחו, מאמרים נכתבו ומרבית הרשימות הציגו נשים ברשימותיהן אך המקומות, ברוב המקרים, לא היו ריאליים. וכשמישהי היתה במקום ריאלי, כמו רבאב אבו-לאשין, שעמדה בראש רשימת תע”ל בנצרת, היא נדחקה למקום ה-13 בשל הסכמים קואליציוניים.

בסך הכל הטעם המר שהותירו התוצאות מעורר את השאלה אם לא עדיף לפעמים להימנע בכלל מהצגת מועמדותן של נשים במקום להשתתף במשחק מכור. הנשים המועמדות בקרקס הזה הן הראשונות שחייבות להפסיק את ההתבזות.

על הסיבות למקום השולי שתופסות הנשים בפוליטיקה נכתב הרבה. במקרה של הערבים הישראלים אפשר להצביע על כמה סיבות השלובות זו בזו – החל בעובדה שהנשים הערביות הן חלק ממיעוט לאומי שולי במדינה שעדיין רואה בו קבוצה בעייתית ולא נאמנה, ועד למצור ששמים על האשה המנהגים הישנים בחברה מסורתית, שמרנית ופטריארכלית שבה משחקת החמולה הגברית תפקיד מרכזי. גם העובדה שהפוליטיקה נתפשת בעיני הנשים כתחום גברי מלוכלך ורווי תכסיסים, מדירה ממנה לא מעט נשים. ובכל זאת, נשאלת השאלה מדוע במקרים רבים כשנשים מאמצות דפוס חיים מודרני, המסורת מוכנה לזוז הצדה – אבל היא ממשיכה להתייצב כחומה בפני נשים השואפות לקריירה פוליטית ייצוגית. מין ופוליטיקה הם שני הטאבואים העיקריים המוצבים בפני האשה הערבייה בחברה הפוסט מודרנית, ואם בענייני מין כבר מוכנים “לוותר” לאשה פעמים רבות – בפוליטיקה לא.

וזה מעורר תהיות: כי רמת ההשכלה, רמת החיים והמודעות עלו, והרבה נשים היום הן בעלות כוח, יכולת פוליטית ורצון להגיע לעמדות פוליטיות ייצוגיות, אך למרות זאת נטרקות בפניהן דלתות הרשימות החמולתיות והמפלגות, שפתאום נעלמים להן הלהט והאידיאולוגיה המוצהרת על השוויון בין המינים.

דווקא העובדה שהפוליטיקה המקומית הערבית – מעוז הגברים המתוסכלים מהשאיפה האובססיוווית לשלוט במשאבים ולצבור כוח – עברה הפעם מהפך, יכלה לסייע לנשים. החמולתיות מתפוררת והאינדיוואליזם חוגג. לא עוד נאמנות למשפחה ולחמולה הגדולה אלא לאינטרסים אישיים גרידא. הדבר היה יכול ליצור יותר מרווח פעולה לנשים. הן לקחו חלק פעיל בוויכוחים לפני הבחירות, התחרו על התבשילים שהכינו לתומכים, יצאו, בהמוניהן, להצביע ועם היוודע התוצאות רקדו ובכו – אבל כשהגברים חזרו לסדר היום הרגיל של ניהול המועצות, הן נותרו בבית.

הכותבת היא סופרת וד”ר למדע המדינה באוניברסיטה העברית

(Google Translate)

Forgot them at home

They participated in debates, went out en masse to vote and when the results were announced they danced and cried, but when the men returned to run the local authorities, they stayed at home

By Suheir Abu Oksa Daoud 

November 04, 2003

The results of the last elections for the local authorities are even more disappointing than in the previous elections. Each time the hopes increase that this time – because the Arab women are more educated, more active and willing to compete in the political field and go against the conventions – their representation will increase. Only two women were elected this time to serve as council members – one in Nazareth and one in Kfar Ilbon in the Galilee, both on behalf of Hadash. The names we heard before the elections evaporated like the names in the previous elections.

This meager representation continues a tradition of more than 50 years, during which only 12 women managed to serve as members of local councils. Seven of them have served since 1998 – and only two of them were elected, both in the Nazareth Council. The rest served during the term for a few months. One woman served as chairman – a phenomenon that has not repeated itself in about 30 years and probably will not repeat itself in the coming years.

Before the last elections, there was a lot of talk about the need for adequate female representation in the Arab sector. Leadership courses were opened, articles were written and most lists featured women on their lists but the places, in most cases, were not realistic. And when someone was in a realistic position, such as Rabab Abu-Lashin, who topped the Ta’al list in Nazareth, she was relegated to 13th place due to coalition agreements.

All in all, the bitter taste left by the results raises the question of whether it is not sometimes better to avoid the presentation of women’s candidacies at all instead of participating in an addictive game. The women candidates in this circus are the first who must stop the humiliation.

Much has been written about the reasons for the marginal place that women occupy in politics. In the case of the Israeli Arabs, several interrelated reasons can be pointed out – starting with the fact that the Arab women are part of a marginal national minority in a country that still sees it as a problematic and disloyal group, to the siege placed on women by the old customs of a traditional, conservative and patriarchal society in which the male clan plays a central role. Also the fact that politics is seen by women as a dirty male field full of tricks, alienates quite a few women from it. Still, the question arises why in many cases when women adopt a modern lifestyle, tradition is ready to move aside – but it continues to stand as a wall in front of women who aspire to a representative political career. Sex and politics are the two main taboos placed before the Arab woman in postmodern society, and if in matters of sex they are already ready to “give up” to a woman many times – not in politics.

And this raises questions: because the level of education, the standard of living, and awareness have risen, and many women today have power, political ability, and the desire to reach representative political positions, but despite this, the doors of clan lists and parties are slammed in their faces, and the zeal and ideology declared for equality between the sexes suddenly disappears.

Precisely the fact that local Arab politics – the stronghold of men frustrated by the obsessive desire to control resources and accumulate power – underwent a transformation this time, could help women. Tribalism crumbles and individualism is celebrated. No longer loyalty to the family and the large clan but to purely personal interests. This could have created more room for action for women. They took an active part in the debates before the elections, competed for the stews they prepared for the supporters, went out, en masse, to vote and when the results were announced they danced and cried – but when the men returned to the normal agenda of running the councils, they stayed at home.

The author is a writer and doctor of political science at the Hebrew University

10.08.23

Editorial Note

A few days ago, anti-Israeli academics circulated a petition titled “The Elephant in the Room.” 

Since 2004, the IAM’s has analyzed scores of similar writings. They are all based on the dominant neo-Marxist, critical paradigm alternatively known as postmodernism. It offers several claims: the traditional positivist school of thought, which emphasized objectivity and facts, is a cover-up for Western dominance; scholars have a duty to expose these “falsehoods” and craft an alternative historical narrative. In the new narrative, the Palestinians are considered the blameless victims of Western colonialism, with Israel being the modern colonial manifestation – an apartheid state.   

With wealthy Arab states pouring money into Western academic institutions, and the new paradigm taking over, Israeli academics who wanted to advance their careers had to fit in. Israeli academics had to produce anti-Israel scholarships to be accepted. For example, Prof. Neve Gordon was invited to UC Berkeley by Prof. Nezar AlSayyad. Prof. Ariella Azoulay was recruited to Brown University by Prof. Beshara Doumani. Prof. Ilan Pappe was recruited to the Exeter University European Center for Palestinian Studies. In 2002, Prof. Oren Yiftachel was forced by the editor to compare Israel to South Africa’s apartheid in an academic journal, among the many other cases IAM exposed in the last twenty years. 

The “Elephant in the Room” takes the activist paradigm to new heights. The group finds a “direct link between Israel’s recent attack on the judiciary and its illegal occupation of millions of Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Palestinian people lack almost all basic rights, including the right to vote and protest. They face constant violence: this year alone, Israeli forces have killed over 190 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and demolished over 590 structures.” They demand “equal rights for all.” The “Palestinians live under a regime of apartheid.” The “ultimate purpose of the judicial overhaul is to tighten restrictions on Gaza, deprive Palestinians of equal rights both beyond the Green Line and within it, annex more land, and ethnically cleanse all territories under Israeli rule of their Palestinian population.” Moreover, “Jewish supremacism has been growing for years and was enshrined in law by the 2018 Nation State Law.” 

According to them, Israel’s “long-standing occupation… has yielded a regime of apartheid. As Israel has grown more right-wing and come under the spell of the current government’s messianic, homophobic, and misogynistic agenda, young American Jews have grown more and more alienated from it.” They call “to embrace equality for Jews and Palestinians within the Green Line and in the OPT. Support human rights organizations which defend Palestinians and provide real-time information on the lived reality of occupation and apartheid.” Moreover, the group demands from the “elected leaders in the United States that they help end the occupation, restrict American military aid from being used in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and end Israeli impunity in the UN and other international organizations.”  

Those who are familiar with history know that the Palestinian narrative is ostensibly fabricated. The Balfour Declaration did not mention the Palestinians because, back then, all natives were Palestinians, including Jews. It stated on November 2nd, 1917: “His Majesty’s Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” The League of Nations adopted a resolution to this effect. In return, the Arab World received Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan. The Arabs objected to the national home for the Jewish People in Palestine for antisemitic reasons. They rejected the 1947 UN Partition Proposal, a clear indication that the Palestinians made a bad decision.

Even more egregious, the brutal regimes of Hamas in Gaza and the PA in the West Bank are not mentioned in the petition. It is well known that when the Oslo Peace Process established the Palestinian Authority, Yasser Arafat created a dysfunctional and corrupt political system. If anything, his successor, Mahmoud Abbas, has exceeded in mismanagement to the point of running the PA into the ground. The situation in Gaza is even more tragic, as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad have appropriated enormous amounts of international aid to purchase weapons to fight Israel. Several rounds of widespread protests, including the current one, have been put down with extreme brutality.   

There is, of course, little hope that the anti-Israel academics would note the tragic situation of the Palestinians. To acknowledge this would go against the paradigm in which the West, in general, and Israel, in particular, are the perennial “bad guys” of history. 

References:

https://portside.org/2023-08-06/elephant-room

Material of Interest to People on the Left

Maavigatio

The Elephant in the Room

There cannot be democracy for Jews in Israel as long as Palestinians live under a regime of apartheid, as Israeli legal experts have described it.

August 6, 2023  

  

Shoshke

We, academics and other public figures from Israel/Palestine and abroad, call attention to the direct link between Israel’s recent attack on the judiciary and its illegal occupation of millions of Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Palestinian people lack almost all basic rights, including the right to vote and protest. They face constant violence: this year alone, Israeli forces have killed over 190 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and demolished over 590 structures. Settler vigilantes burn, loot, and kill with impunity.

Without equal rights for all, whether in one state, two states, or in some other political framework, there is always a danger of dictatorship. There cannot be democracy for Jews in Israel as long as Palestinians live under a regime of apartheid, as Israeli legal experts have described it. Indeed, the ultimate purpose of the judicial overhaul is to tighten restrictions on Gaza, deprive Palestinians of equal rights both beyond the Green Line and within it, annex more land, and ethnically cleanse all territories under Israeli rule of their Palestinian population. The problems did not start with the current radical government: Jewish supremacism has been growing for years and was enshrined in law by the 2018 Nation State Law.

American Jews have long been at the forefront of social justice causes, from racial equality to abortion rights, but have paid insufficient attention to the elephant in the room: Israel’s long-standing occupation that, we repeat, has yielded a regime of apartheid. As Israel has grown more right-wing and come under the spell of the current government’s messianic, homophobic, and misogynistic agenda, young American Jews have grown more and more alienated from it. Meanwhile, American Jewish billionaire funders help support the Israeli far right. 

In this moment of urgency and also possibility for change, we call on leaders of North American Jewry – foundation leaders, scholars, rabbis, educators – to

1. Support the Israeli protest movement, yet call on it to embrace equality for Jews and Palestinians within the Green Line and in the OPT. 
2. Support human rights organizations which defend Palestinians and provide real-time information on the lived reality of occupation and apartheid.
3. Commit to overhaul educational norms and curricula for Jewish children and youth in order to provide a more honest appraisal of Israel’s past and present.
4. Demand from elected leaders in the United States that they help end the occupation, restrict American military aid from being used in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and end Israeli impunity in the UN and other international organizations.
    

No more silence. The time to act is now.Sign now

List of signatories

1.      Shira Klein, Associate Professor of History, Chapman University

2.      Omer Bartov, Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Brown University

3.      Meir Amor, Associate Professor Concordia University (ret.) 

4.      Lior Sternfeld, Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies, Penn State University

5.      David N. Myers, Professor of Jewish History, UCLA 

6.      Yair Mintzker, Professor of History, Princeton University

7.      Tamir Sorek, Professor, Penn State University

8.      Nitzan Lebovic, Professor of History, Apter Chair of Holocaust Studies, Lehigh University

9.      Samuel Moyn, Professor, Yale University

10.  Amos Goldberg, Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem 

11.  Zach Adam, Professor Emeritus, the Hebrew University   

12.  Sarah Stroumsa, Professor Emerita, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem 

13.  Daniel Blatman, Professor Emeritus, Department of Jewish History, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem 

14.  Ella Segev, Associate Professor, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

15.  Ben Kiernan, Professor of History, Yale University (ret.) 

16.  Efraim Davidi, lecturer, Tel Aviv University 

17.  Yael Hashiloni Dolev, Professor, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev 

18.  Anat Matar, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Tel Aviv University 

19.  Dr. Noga Wolff, Independent Scholar 

20.  Omri Boehm, Associate Professor of Philosophy, The New School for Social Research 

21.  Oren Yiftachel, Professor of Geography, Ben- Gurion University of the Negev

22.  Naama Meishar, Technion – Israeli Institute of Technology

23.  Yael Sela, Research Associate, Moses Mendelssohn Center, Potsdam University 

24.  Yiftah Elazar, Senior Lecturer in Political Science, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 

25.  Dudy Tzfati, Associate Professor of Genetics, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 

26.  Ofer Ashkenazi, Associate Professor of History, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 

27.  Sara Helman, Associate Professor, Ben Gurion University of the Negev (ret.)

28.  Outi Bat-El Foux, Professor Emerita, Tel Aviv University 

29.  Benny Morris, Professor Emeritus, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev 

30.  Meron Mendel, Professor, Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences 

31.  Yitzhak Hen, Professor, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

32.  Ronen Segev, Professor, Ben Gurion University of the Negev 

33.  Uri Mor, Associate Professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

34.  Michael Steinberg, Professor of History, Brown University 

35.  Avraham Sela, Professor Emeritus, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 

36.  Atalia Omer, Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame 

37.  Jung Cyrulnik Daphna, Social Worker

38.  Alon Confino, Professor of History and Jewish Studies, UMass Amherst 

39.  Isaac Nevo, Associate Professor, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

40.  Raya Morag, Professor, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 

41.  Katharina Galor, Hirschfeld Senior Lecturer in Judaic Studies, Brown University

42.  Guy Stroumsa, Professor Emeritus, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem & University of Oxford 

43.  Dr. Tammy Razi 

44.  Yosi Avron, Professor Emeritus, Technion – Israeli Institute of Technology

45.  Rachel Burnett, undergraduate student of Psychology & Middle East Studies at UCLA

46.  Liora Halperin, Professor, University of Washington 

47.  Steven J. Zipperstein, Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History, Stanford University 

48.  Hanno Loewy, Jewish Museum Hohenems 

49.  Avrum Burg, Associate Professor, former speaker of the knesset, former chairman of the Jewish Agency 

50.  Abigail Jacobson, Associate Professor, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 

51.  Susan Neiman, Director, Einstein Forum 

52.  David Enoch, Professor of Law and Philosophy, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 

53.  Assaf Hasson, Associate Professor, Ben Gurion University of the Negev

54.  David De Vries, Professor Emeritus, Department of Labor Studies, Tel Aviv University 

55.  Galit Hasan-Rokem, Professor Emerita, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 

56.  Ron Naiweld, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique – CNRS

57.  Edouard Jurkevitch, Professor, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

58.  Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Professor Emerita, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

59.  David Abraham, Professor of Law, University of Miami 

60.  David Guggenheim, Associate Professor, Johns Hopkins University

61.  Ian Balfour, Professor Emeritus, York University 

62.  David Feldman, Director, Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, University of London

63.  Michael Rothberg, Professor of English, Comparative LIterature, and Holocaust Studies, UCLA

64.  Fareed Mahameed, Assistant Director, Center for Transboundary Water Management, The Arava Institute for Environmental Studies

65.  Paul Mendes-Flohr, Professor, The University of Chicago

66.  Iris Hefets, Psychoanalyst, Berlin

67.  Meir Aridor, Associate Professor of Cell Biology, University of Pittsburgh 

68.  Elazar Barkan, Professor, Columbia University 

69.  Atina Grossmann, Professor of History, Cooper Union, New York 

70.  Dmitry Shumsky, Associate Professor of History, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 

71.  Li Wai-yee, Professor of Chinese Literature, Harvard University 

72.  Nina Robins, Masters student of Global Public Health, New York University 

73.  Hannan Hever, Professor of Jewish Studies and Comparative Literature, Yale University 

74.  Haim Bresheeth, Professorial Research Associate, SOAS 

75.  Dr. Adi Avivi

76.  Niv Likwornik, student, Franklin & Marshall College 

77.  Avner Ben-Amos, Professor Emeritus, Tel-Aviv University 

78.  Oded Heilbronner, Professor of History and Cultural Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

79.  Ivy Sichel, Professor of Linguistics, UC Santa Cruz 

80.  Hilla Dayan, Lecturer, activist, Gate48 and Academia for Equality 

81.  Khalefah Alghanim, Graduate Student Researcher at UCLA 

82.  Nomi Erteschik-Shir, Professor Emerita, Ben Gurion University of the Negev

83.  Ayelet Ben-Yishai, Associate Professor of English, Universty of Haifa 

84.  Margaret Olin, Senior Lecturer Emeritus, Yale University 

85.  Jacob Katriel, Professor Emeritus of Chemistry, Technion – Israeli Institute of Technology

86.  Yuval Tal, Assistant Professor, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

87.  Stefan Rokem, Professor Emeritus, The Hebrew University – Hadassah Medical School

88.  Heather Stone, Adv. 

89.  Uri Horesh, Senior Lecturer in Arabic Linguistics, Achva Academic College

90.  Ariel Chipman, Professor of Evolutionary Biology, The Hebrew University

91.  Lev Grinberg, Professor Emeritus, Ben Gurion University of the Negev

92.  Arie M. Dubnov, Max Ticktin Professor of Israel Studies and History, George Washington University

93.  Sofia Fani Gutman, researcher and activist in Palestine, architecture student, The Cooper Union

94.  Aaron Hahn Tapper, Mae and Benjamin Swig Professor of Jewish Studies, University of San Francisco

95.  Yael Poznanski, Senior Lecturer, Achva Academic College

96.  Oded Bein, Postdoctoral Researcher, Princeton University

97.  Tamar Katriel, Professor Emerita, University of Haifa

98.  Tal Bruttmann, Researcher, Paris Cergy Université 

99.  Marcello Flores, Professor, University of Siena (ret.)

100.                      Nurit Peled Elhanan, Lecturer, David Yellin Academic College of Education

101.                      Cora Galpern, student, University of Michigan 

102.                      Rela Mazali, Writer, Independent Scholar, Activist

103.                      Daniel Lieberman, Professor, Harvard University 

104.                      Froma Zeitlin, Professor Emeritus of Classics and Comparative Literature, Princeton University 

105.                      Adi M. Ophir, Professor Emeritus, Tel Aviv University 

106.                      Hasia Diner, Professor Emeritus of American Jewish History, New York University

107.                      David Zonsheine, Former chairperson of B’Tselem and Courage to Refuse 

108.                      Dr. Sigal Yawetz, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School

109.                      Dr. Dan Eshet, Salem State University

110.                      Yuri Pines, Professor, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

111.                      Avigail Arnheim, Musical Director

112.                      Dr. Theodor Bughici

113.                      Robert A. Slayton, Professor Emeritus, Chapman University

114.                      Diana Kormos Buchwald, Professor of History, Caltech

115.                      Ronald Zweig, Taub Professor of Israel Studies (Emeritus), NYU 

116.                      Daria Goren, student, Tel Aviv University

117.                      Itzik Goldberger, Adjunct Professor, Saint Mary’s College

118.                      David M. Mittelman, Assistant Professor of Portuguese, United States Air Force Academy (personal speech, not a statement on behalf of the U.S. Government or any agency) 

119.                      Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, Princeton University

120.                      Ze’ev Rosenkranz, Senior Editor, California Institute of Technology

121.                      Eyal Landman, Architect and Masters student, Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design 

122.                      Hannah Safran, Haifa Feminist Research Center

123.                      Bennett Simon, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Emeritus, Harvard University

124.                      Marion Kaplan, Professor Emerita of Modern Jewish History, New York University 

125.                      Dr. Ira Avneri, Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

126.                      Renee Poznanski, Professor Emerita, Ben Gurion University of the Negev 

127.                      Mark Roseman, Distinguished Professor, Indiana University Bloomington

128.                      Lawrence Baron, Emeritus Professor, San Diego State University

129.                      Ellanora Lerner, undergraduate student, Clark University 

130.                      Joseph Zernik, Human Rights Alert NGO

131.                      Ran Zwigenberg, Associate Professor of Asian Studies, History, and Jewish Studies, Penn State University

132.                      Phyllis Albert, Local Affiliate, Center for European Studies. Harvard University

133.                      Allon M Klein, Associate Professor, Harvard Medical School 

134.                      Einor Cervone, Associate Curator, Denver Art Museum

135.                      Lane Schnell, student at American University

136.                      Anjuska Weil, former member of parliament, Canton of Zurich 

137.                      Maria Mejia-Botero, student, University of Miami 

138.                      Isabella Childress, student, University of Miami 

139.                      Ranen Omer-Sherman, Endowed Chair of Jewish Studies, University of Louisville 

140.                      Yair Wallach, Reader in Israeli Studies, SOAS, University of London 

141.                      Ron Barkai, Professor, Tel Aviv University

142.                      Rogers Brubaker, Professor of Sociology, UCLA 

143.                      Liron Mor, Associate Professor, UC Irvine 

144.                      Mordechai Feingold, Van Nuys Page Professor of History of Science and the Humanities, Caltech

145.                      Roberta Apfel, Associate Professor, Harvard Medical School 

146.                      Judith Zeitlin, William R. Kenan, Jr Professor, University of Chicago

147.                      Carolyn Dean, Professor, Yale University

148.                      Kenneth B. Moss, Professor, University of Chicago 

149.                      Helaine Blumenthal, Ph.D. 

150.                      Ziva Galili, Emerita Distinguished Professor, Rutgers University 

151.                      Nili Gesser, postdoctoral fellow, Drexel University 

152.                      Ian Barnard, Professor of Rhetoric and Composition, Chapman University 

153.                      Shaul Magid, Professor of Jewish Studies, Dartmouth College 

154.                      Aneil Rallin, former Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Composition

155.                      Hagit Borer, Professor, Queen Mary University of London 

156.                      Tamar Barkay, Lecturer, Tel Hai College 

157.                      Zach Gershon, student, Oberlin College 

158.                      Avner Cohen, Professor, Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey 

159.                      Renate Bridenthal, Emerita Professor at The City University of New York 

160.                      Nadav Amir, postdoctoral fellow, Princeton University 

161.                      Eyal Sivan, Filmmaker, Independent scholar, essayist 

162.                      Omer Tamuz, Professor of Economics and Mathematics, Caltech 

163.                      Ruvik Horesh, Professor (retired) 

164.                      Daniel Wittenberg, student, University of Arizona 

165.                      Dr. Liat Tsuman, Psychoanalytic Candidate, New York University 

166.                      Zamir Shatz, artist

167.                      Reshef Agam-Segal, Associate Professor, Virginia Military Institute

168.                      Wu Hung, Professor, University of Chicago 

169.                      Ori Yehudai, Associate Professor of History, The Ohio State University 

170.                      Snait Gissis, Researcher & Teacher, Tel Aviv University 

171.                      Teddy Fassberg, Tel Aviv University 

172.                      Dr Moshe Behar, Herzlia/Manchester 

173.                      Lisa Leitz, Delp-Wilkinson Professor of Peace Studies, Chapman University 

174.                      Sahar Bostock, PhD candidate, Columbia University 

175.                      Nomi Stolzenberg, Professor of Law, University of Southern California 

176.                      Janice Hamer, composer, retired Visiting Associate Professor, Swarthmore College

177.                      Derek Penslar, William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History, Harvard University 

178.                      Sherry Gorelick, Professor Emerita, Rutgers University 

179.                      Ariela Gross, Distinguished Professor, UCLA School of Law 

180.                      Mira Sucharov, Professor of Political Science, Carleton University 

181.                      Katya Frischer, MD

182.                      Irena Klepfisz, Barnard College, retired 

183.                      J.S.Varsano, Doctor of Veterinary Medicine 

184.                      Ruti Margalit, Visiting Professor, Hadassah Medical School, The Hebrew University

185.                      Amanda Bloom, retired Physician Associate

186.                      Allon Pratt, retired teacher, Jewish Theological Seminary

187.                      Shai Haran, Professor, Technion – Israeli Institute of Technology 

188.                      Orly Benjamin, Professor, Bar Ilan University 

189.                      Aviva Halamish, Professor, The Open University of Israel 

190.                      Yofi Tirosh, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University 

191.                      Rachel Zelnick-Abramovitz, Retired Professor, Tel Aviv University

192.                      Avi Rubin, Associate Professor, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev 

193.                      Daniel DeMalach, Lecturer, Sapir Academic College 

194.                      Gila Svirsky, Former CEO, New Israel Fund in Israel 

195.                      Rivka Nir Grinshtein, Lecturer, The Open University of Israel 

196.                      Haggai Ram, Professor of History, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev 

197.                      Elchanan Reiner, Professor Emeritus, Tel Aviv University 

198.                      Harvey Goldberg, Professor Emeritus, The Hebrew University

199.                      Rotem Tellem MD, Tel Aviv Medical Center, Tel Aviv University

200.                      Frances Tanzer, Rose Professor of Holocaust Studies and Jewish Culture, Clark University 

201.                      Rotem Geva, Lecturer, The Hebrew University

202.                      Avihay Dorfman, Professor of Law, Tel Aviv University 

203.                      Gilad Sharvit, Assistant Professor, Towson University 

204.                      Rachman Chaim, Retired Associate Professor, Technion – Israeli Institute of Technology 

205.                      Celia Wasserstein Fassberg, Professor Emerita, The Hebrew University

206.                      Amal Jamal, Associate Professor of Political Science, Tel Aviv University 

207.                      Shiri Regev-Messalem, Associate Professor, Bar Ilan University 

208.                      Chana Kronfeld, Professor of the Graduate School and Prof. Emerita, University of California, Berkeley 

209.                      Anat Ascher, Lecturer and Course Coordinator in Philosophy, The Open University of Israel

210.                      Roee Kibrik, Researcher, The Hebrew University 

211.                      Anat Keidar, Social Worker

212.                      Natalie Davidson, Senior Lecturer, Buchman Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University 

213.                      Dr. Chemi Shiff, Head of Research, Emek Shaveh 

214.                      Efrat Eizenberg, Associate Professor, Technion – Israeli Institute of Technology

215.                      Maxim Reider, Journalist/Photographer 

216.                      Goren Hilit, Psychologist

217.                      Orr Comay, PhD, Tel Aviv University 

218.                      Claude Stern, Lawyer, former Stanford DCI 2020 cohort member

219.                      Dr. Suzy Ben Dori

220.                      Gina Ben David, Performance Artist

221.                      Dr. Chen Misgav, The Open University, Israel

222.                      Yoav Di-Capua, Professor of History, The University of Texas at Austin 

223.                      Mr. Gilad Melzer, Beit Berl College 

224.                      Maayan Padan, PhD Student, Bar Ilan University, Adjunct Lecturer, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev 

225.                      Jennifer Robertson, Professor Emerita, University of Michigan  

226.                      Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani, Professor Emeritus, Tel Aviv University 

227.                      Alma Itzhaky, research fellow, Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research, ZfL Berlin 

228.                      Itamar Haritan, PhD Student at Cornell University

229.                      Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, Professor, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

230.                      Sagit Mor, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Haifa 

231.                      Rachel Kallus, Professor Emerita, Technion – Israeli Institute of Technology

232.                      Ophira Gamliel, Lecturer in South Asian Religions, University of Glasgow

233.                      Alon Marcus, Teaching faculty member, The Open University of Israel 

234.                      Ido Roll, Associate Professor and Deputy Senior Vice President, Technion – Israeli Institute of Technology

235.                      Erica Weitzman, Associate Professor, Northwestern University

236.                      Simon Levis-Sullam, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

237.                      Raz Chen Morris, Associate Professor, The Hebrew University

238.                      Chen Bram, Research Fellow, Truman Institute, The Hebrew University 

239.                      Matityaho Shemoeloff, Author and poet

240.                      Gideon Freudenthal, Professor Emeritus, Tel Aviv University

241.                      Uri Ram, Professor Emeritus, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev 

242.                      Roii Ball, Historian, University of Münster 

243.                      Edith Lutz, PhD in Jewish Studies

244.                      David Winizki, MD, Zürich 

245.                      Marcelo Svirsky, University of Wollongong, Australia 

246.                      Chamutal Eitam, Humanitarian advisor MSF – Médecins Sans Frontières

247.                      Michal Kaiser-Livne, Psychoanalyst, Berlin

248.                      Na’ama Rokem, Associate Professor, University of Chicago

249.                      Jenna M Gibbs, Associate Professor of History, Florida International University 

250.                      Ruth Luschnat, case worker, Berlin

251.                      Rafi Greenberg, Professor, Archaeology, Tel Aviv University 

252.                      Jeff Peck, Professor and Dean, CUNY (retired) 

253.                      Eran Fisher, Associate Professor, The Open University of Israel 

254.                      Guy Bollag, Student, University of Zurich 

255.                      Ruth Fruchtman, Writer and Journalist, Berlin 

256.                      Leah Gruenpeter Gold, PhD candidate, Tel-Aviv University 

257.                      Jonathan Zeitlin, Distinguished Faculty Professor of Public Policy and Governance Emeritus, University of Amsterdam 

258.                      Dr. David Senesh, senior clinical psychologist

259.                      Tal Shkedi, Student, Ono Academic College

260.                      Betty Amstutz Gerson, retired teacher and writer

261.                      Hadas Shintel, Lecturer in Psychology, College of Law and Business, Ramat Gan

262.                      Yossi Dahan, Associate Professor, College of Law and Business, Ramat Gan 

263.                      Itay Shalit, Student, Tel Aviv University

264.                      Miriam Victory Spiegel, Family Therapist, Zürich

265.                      Yoav Beirach, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology

266.                      Jeffrey B Cooper, Professor Emeritus, Harvard Medical School

267.                      Tamir Swissa, Student, Tel Aviv University

268.                      Hadassah Danit O’Reilly, Independent Scholar of Holocaust and Genocide

269.                      Naomi Tauber, Clinical psychologist

270.                      Patrick Barnard, Journalist

271.                      Chiara Adorisio, Associate Professor of Philosophical Anthropology, La Sapienza University

272.                      Shaul Mitelpunkt, Department of History, University of York

273.                      Nadav Assor, Associate Professor of Art, Connecticut College

274.                      Dorit Peleg, writer

275.                      Hagar Dror Maliniek, Clinical Psychologist

276.                      Naomi Weiner, Professor, David Yellin Academic College

277.                      Amir Locker-Biletzki, Independent Scholar

278.                      Paul Osman, Associate Professor, Harvard University 

279.                      Kobi Peterzil, Professor, University of Haifa

280.                      Roy Hoshen, Student, Tel Aviv University

281.                      Geri Müller, President, Association Swiss Palestine, Baden, Switzerland

282.                      Lily Koliner, PhD student, The Hebrew University

283.                      Sharon Peled, Candidate, The Institute For Psychoanalytic Training And Research, NY

284.                      Dr. Lia Eshet, Family physician

285.                      Jill Hamberg, Retired Assistant Professor, SUNY Empire State University

286.                      Ian Lustick, Bess W. Heyman Professor Emeritus, University of Pennsylvania

287.                      Tahel Gover, Academic Librarian, University of Haifa

288.                      Hadar Ahuvia, Choreographer, Rabbinical Student, Hebrew College

289.                      Robert Cohen, Writer

290.                      Nira Yuval-Davis, Professor Emeritus, University of East London

291.                      Neta Stahl, Associate Professor, Johns Hopkins University

292.                      Sasha Senderovich, Associate Professor of Slavic and Jewish Studies, University of Washington Seattle

293.                      Helena Desivilya Syna, Professor Emerita, Yezreel Valley College

294.                      Aram Ziai, Professor in Political Science, University of Kassel

295.                      Dan W Wasserman, Graduate student, Bar-Ilan University

296.                      Yanay Israeli, Assistant Professor at University of Michigan

297.                      Michael Stanislawski, Nathan J. Miller Professor of History, Columbia University

298.                      Clement Segal, Middle-Eastern Studies, Science Po Grenoble

299.                      Barry Cohen, Associate Dean (retired), Ying Wu College of Computing, New Jersey Institute of Technology

300.                      Tova Benjamin, PhD Candidate, New York University

301.                      Vanessa Tor, Theater Director

302.                      Mikhal Dekel, Distinguished Professor, City College of New York

303.                      John P Pittman, Associate Professor, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY

304.                      Joshua Schreier, Professor of History, Vassar College

305.                      Susan Shapiro, Associate Professor, University of Massachusetts Amherst

306.                      Alana M. Vincent, Associate Professor, History of Religion, Umeå University

307.                      Joshua Shanes, Professor, College of Charleston

308.                      Michael G Levine, Professor, Rutgers University

309.                      Allison Mickel, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Lehigh University

310.                      Jonathan Buchsbaum, Professor Emeritus, Media Studies, Queens College, City University of New York

311.                      Dan Simon, Professor of Law and Psychology, University of Southern California

312.                      Rudolf Schär, Alumnus, ETH Zürich

313.                      Avner Baz, Professor, Tufts University

314.                      Mordehai Amihai Bivas, Ambassador (Rt.)

315.                      David Haig, Professor, Harvard University

316.                      Rachel Kapeliuk Azgad, Psychoanalyst

317.                      Avivit Ballas Baranes, Artist and Lecturer

318.                      Clifford Kulwin, Rabbi Emeritus, Temple B’nai Abraham, Livingston, NJ

319.                      Dor Yaccobi, PhD Candidate, Tel Aviv University

320.                      Nathaniel Berman, Professor, Religious Studies, Brown University

321.                      Sam Fleischacker, LAS Distinguished Professor, University of Illinois at Chicago

322.                      Avner Wishnitzer, Professor of Middle Eastern History, Tel Aviv University

323.                      Vardit Rispler-Chaim, Associate Professor, University of Haifa (retired)

324.                      Anita Bardin, Retired Director, Shiluv Family Therapy Institute

325.                      Philip Prinz, Professor Emeritus, San Francisco State University

326.                      Dr. Einat Davidi, Senior Lecturer, University of Haifa

327.                      Rivka Ribak, Associate Professor, Department of Communication, University of Haifa

328.                      Dr. Lian Malki-Schubert

329.                      Joy Ladin, Writer and teacher

330.                      Margaret Schabas, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Professor, University of British Columbia

331.                      Robert Weinberg, Professor of History, Swarthmore College

332.                      Gal Gvili, Associate Professor, McGill University

333.                      Tamar Shochat, Professor, University of Haifa

334.                      Nora North, Retired, NYC Department of Education

335.                      Anat Prior, Associate Professor, Faculty of Education, University of Haifa

336.                      Frances Geteles, Professor Emerita, City College, NY

337.                      Anna Gutgarts, Research Member, University of Haifa

338.                      David Hall, Illustrator

339.                      Edna Gorney, Lecturer, Haifa University (retired)

340.                      Alan Tansman, Professor, University of California, Berkeley

341.                      Paula Varsano, Professor, University of California, Berkeley

342.                      Dr Yohai Hakak, Senior Lecturer, Brunel University London 

343.                      Michael Sfard, Human Rights Lawyer

344.                      Ayla Matalon, Former Lecturer at Technion MBA Program

345.                      Linda Dirtmar, Professor Emerita at the University of Massachusetts

346.                      Pamela Burdman, Executive Director, Just Equations

347.                      Dorit Avnir, Doctor of Arts, Art Therapist

348.                      Ruth Ben-Artzi, Associate Professor of Political Science, Providence College

349.                      Pini Herman, Past Research Associate Professor, University of Southern California 

350.                      Rawia Aburabia, Assistant Professor of Law, Sapir Academic College

351.                      Danny Rubinstein, Journalist and author

352.                      Dorit Barchana-Lorand, Kibbutzim College of Education and the Arts

353.                      Naftali Kaminski, Professor of Medicine, Yale University

354.                      Natasha Gordinsky, Senior lecturer, University of Haifa

355.                      Brigitte Hahn, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology

356.                      Shelley Berlowitz, PhD, Alumna University of Konstanz

357.                      Zur Shalev, Professor, University of Haifa

358.                      Sheer Ganor, Assistant Professor, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

359.                      Leon Duveen, Chair Lib Dems (UK) for Peace in the Middle East

360.                      Elisabeth Goldwyn, Professor, Haifa University

361.                      Patrick Macklem, Professor Emeritus of Law, University of Toronto

362.                      Shir Alon, Assistant professor at the University of Minnesota

363.                      Ori Goldbergת Assistanא Professor, Reichman University

364.                      Nadje Al-Ali, Professor of Anthropology and Middle East Studies, Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs

365.                      Marc Caplan, (APL) Professor, Heinrich-Heine University

366.                      Batja P. Guggenheim-Ami, Professor emeritus, FHSG St.Gall Switzerland

367.                      Menachem Elimelech, Professor, Yale University

368.                      Laura Levitt, Professor of Religion, Jewish Studies, and Gender, Temple University

369.                      Moshe Zuckermann, Professor of History and Philosophy, Tel Aviv University

370.                      Alessandro Treves, Professor at SISSA, Trieste

371.                      David Blanc, Professor of Mathematics, University of Haifa

372.                      Jeremiah Riemer, former Associate Professor, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies

373.                      Edy Kaufman, Professor, M.A. Peace and Conflict Management, University of Haifa

374.                      Elly Levy, Attorney

375.                      Mark Fichman, Associate Professor Emeritus, Carnegie Mellon University

376.                      Cara Rock-Singer, Assistant Professor at UW Madison

377.                      Iris Kaminski, Environmental Scientist, New Haven

378.                      Michael Hiller, Former board member, Grundrechtekomitee (Committee for Basic Rights)

379.                      Andras Hamori, Professor Emeritus, Princeton University

380.                      Sandro Ventura, Psychiatrist

381.                      A. Kedem, PhD student, Hifa University

382.                      Seth Schwartz, Professor of History and Classics, Columbia University

383.                      Ellen Weiss, Children’s book author

384.                      Nir Friedman, Professor, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

385.                      Steve Fassberg, Professor of Hebrew Language, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

386.                      Amos Laor, Labor union lawyer

387.                      Dennis Jett, Professor, Penn State University

388.                      Benny Miller, Professor of International Relations, Haifa University

389.                      Itamar Shachar, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Hasselt University

390.                      Or Simovitch, Arts Educator

391.                      Ran Shauli, Faculty member, Bar Ilan University

392.                      Marcos Silber, Associate Professor, Department of Jewish History, University of Haifa

393.                      Alice Robinson, Psychotherapist

394.                      Israel Charny, Professor of Psychology Hebrew University (retired)

395.                      Sana Knaneh, LSE Alumni, London

396.                      Uri Amir Koren, PhD student, Rutgers University

397.                      Itamar Kastner, Senior Lecturer, University of Edinburgh

398.                      Rosabel Kurth, Student, Carnegie Mellon University

399.                      Gil Gambash, Professor, University of Haifa

400.                      Mark Siegel, Professor, Yale University

401.                      Ellen Shaler, alum, University of Michigan

402.                      Richard Strier, Professor Emeritus, University of Chicago

403.                      Sigall Horovitz, Faculty of Law, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

404.                      Candice Breitz, Professor, HBK Braunschweig, Germany

405.                      Mabel Stilman Kolesas, Librarian

406.                      Ram Reshef, Senior lecturer, University of Haifa

407.                      Dr. Barbara Landau, Lawyer, Psychologist, Mediator, Co-founder J-Link International Network & Co-Chair Canadian Association of Jews and Muslims

408.                      Baruch Eitam, Associate Professor, University of Haifa

409.                      Marianne Hirschberg, Professor, Faculty of Human Sciences, University of Kassel, Germany

410.                      Claire Bergen, Rabbinic Student, International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism

411.                      Sandra Meiri, Senior Lecturer Emerita, The Open University of Israel

412.                      Zackary Berger, Associate Professor of Medicine, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Core Faculty, Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics

413.                      Igal Ezraty, Jaffa Theatre Director

414.                      Michal Kofman, Associate Professor (Term) of sociology, University of Louisville

415.                      Avraham Oz, Professor, University of Haifa

03.08.23

Editorial Note

Pro-Palestinian scholars have opened a new legal front against Israel. This time around, they demand compensation to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, to give them a right to justice by Israel “just as Israeli citizens do… Accountability for civilian harm should not be avoided by classing law enforcement as combat.”

The project is a collaboration between Dr. Haim Abraham (UCL Faculty of Laws), Prof. Gilat Bachar (Temple University Beasley School of Law), and Ceasefire Centre for Civilian Rights, assisted by Mr. Matan Flum (UCL, Bartlett Development Planning Unit). The results were published on July 20, 2023; they include a database that was made possible through the support of the University of Haifa Minerva Center for the Rule of Law Under Extreme Conditions; UCL Laws; UCL Public Policy; UCL’s Private Law Group; and UKRI Research England.

Titled “Mapping civilian harm claims against Israel and the Palestinian Authority before Israeli courts,” it includes an interactive map that presents some 470 Israeli court cases in which civilians sought compensation under tort law for loss of life, bodily injury, and property damage during armed activities. Most claimants are Palestinian civilians injured by Israeli security forces in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The database also includes claims of other nationals and cases of Israeli civilians who sought compensation against Hamas and the Palestinian Authority for the losses incurred during hostilities.

Reliefweb, a pro-Palestinian information organization provided by the UN OCHA, promotes the project. According to this research, the Israeli justice system is “shielding the Israeli Security Forces from accountability for civilian harm caused in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.” The report was conducted by a group named Ceasefire Centre for Civilian Rights, based in the UK.

This project is orchestrated by the OCHA office dealing with the “Occupied Palestinian Territory.” It claims the “protracted political crisis characterized by more than 55 years of Israeli military occupation, 15 years of the Gaza blockade, internal Palestinian divisions, and recurrent escalations of hostilities between Israeli security forces and Palestinian armed groups. The escalating hostilities, blockades and lack of adherence to international humanitarian and human rights law have left many people without access to life-saving medical services, clean water, education and livelihoods, and exposed them to a constant risk of violence and abuse. The humanitarian community is addressing the needs of people in the blockaded Gaza Strip and in the West Bank, where Palestinian households and communities in Area C, East Jerusalem and the H2 area of Hebron city face a coercive environment. At least 2.1 million Palestinians across oPt require humanitarian assistance, representing 58 per cent of Gaza Strip residents and one quarter of West Bank residents.”

Worth noting that OCHA provides food to the Palestinian population of 5.5 million people; they receive assistance from the World Food Program of 309.4K per month. The top five donors are the Government of Germany, $52.6 million; The Government of Japan, $26.7 million; the European Commission, $11.5 million; the Government of the United States of America, $8.3 million; and the Government of Canada, $8.2 million.

The map of civilian harm cases spans over six decades. It illustrates that the Israeli courts awarded ILS 24.4 million in compensation for death, injury, and property damages in seventy-eight successful claims. Yet, over the last ten years, the report claims that access to justice for Palestinians has been severely constrained. By contrast, it claims that Israeli courts have awarded ILS 438.7 million in compensation and costs in 24 successful claims against the Palestinian Authority in recent years. Freedom of information requests revealed that Israel paid approximately USD 94 million in compensation for losses inflicted by its security forces on the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza between 1988 and 2014. 

According to this project, the “right to a remedy for the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza has been progressively limited, including through a series of procedural obstacles, high court fees and securities, the denial of entry permits to access court, and the designation of Gaza as enemy territory. The greatest impact, however, has been the growing use of an exception in the law of tort covering ‘combatant activities’, rendering the state of Israel immune from liability in such cases. A series of amendments passed by the Knesset between 2000 and 2012 widened the definition of the combatant activities exception to cover not just combat activities in the normal sense but policing activities and actions of the civil administration in support of security goals.”

Dr. Haim Abraham of the University College London, who co-leads the research on the database, was quoted as saying, “The effects of the expansion of the combatant activities exception are clear… The Israeli legislature repeatedly broadened the scope of Israel’s immunity from liability to the extent that it is nearly impossible for claims against it to succeed and courts have rejected about nine out of ten claims. Simultaneously, Israeli courts have been far more lenient towards claims against the Palestinian Authority.” 

Professor Gilat Bachar of Temple University School of Law, who co-leads the research, was quoted as saying, “While Jewish Israeli citizens who are residents of the OPT have a right to claim compensation for losses they sustain from the operations of Israel’s security forces, non-Jewish residents effectively have no corresponding right… That raises serious questions about equality before the law.”

For instance, “The killing of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh” in May 2022 prompted a “rare level of international media interest, but was not an isolated event. Already in 2023, 174 Palestinians and 14 Israelis have been killed according to UN OCHA.”

The report continues, The “UN Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation for Victims of Gross Violations of International Human Rights Law and Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law confirm that victims have a right to equal and effective access to justice, and to adequate, effective and prompt reparation for harm suffered, including in the context of armed conflict or occupation.”

According to this report, “Databases that document the losses suffered by civilians in armed conflict are highly important to the facilitation of reparations and reconciliation. Telling individual stories gives voice to vulnerable populations, and aggregating these accounts in a single resource allows the scope and character of the loss that armed conflict inflicts on a community to become apparent. Having a clear account of the wrongs committed during conflict is key to holding those responsible accountable, and accountability and reparations are cardinal to reconciliation between those who suffered the wrongful loss and those who inflicted it.”

Interestingly, according to the report, “In the context of reparation for losses civilians sustain during armed conflict and occupation, Israel offers a unique perspective. The number of cases in which Israeli courts examine the question of state liability in tort law for losses the Israeli military is alleged to have inflicted exceeds the combined cases of Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. The Israeli cases offer a unique insight into legal institutional approaches to urban warfare and counter-terrorism, as well as to attitudes towards prolonged conflict over time.”

As can be expected, it is one-sided. The report suggests reparations for reconciliation based on the UN Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation for Victims of Gross Violations of International Human Rights Law and Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law. This approach has a major legal problem because it ignores the fact that Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and others follow the asymmetrical conflict doctrine. Accordingly, when facing a militarily superior adversary, the terror groups are commanded to embed within the civilian population. In other words, non-combatants become human shields to restrict the IDF’s ability to act. It is well known that Hamas and the PIJ have been embedded in civilian spaces and neighborhoods including mosques, hospitals, and schools.  

The authors of the report would be well advised to consult the literature on the use of human shields in humanitarian law and revise their project. 

References

https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/israels-justice-system-shields-security-forces-accountability-launch-major-new-database

Informing humanitarians worldwide 24/7 —a service provided by UN OCHA

Israel’s justice system shields security forces from accountability – Launch of major new database

Format News and Press Release Source

• Ceasefire Centre for Civilian Rights

Posted20 Jul 2023Originally published20 Jul 2023

20 July 2023

The operation of the Israeli justice system is now effectively shielding Israeli Security Forces (ISF) from accountability for civilian harm caused in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), shows a new map of nearly 500 Israeli court cases published by Ceasefire Centre for Civilian Rights.

The map of civilian harm cases over six decades illustrates that while Israel’s courts awarded ILS 24.4 million in compensation and costs for death, injury and property damage in 78 successful claims,[1] over the last ten years access to justice for Palestinians has been severely constrained. By contrast, in recent years Israeli courts have awarded ILS 438.7 million in compensation and costs in 24 successful claims against the Palestinian Authority.

The right to a remedy for the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza has been progressively limited, including through a series of procedural obstacles, high court fees and securities, the denial of entry permits to access court, and the designation of Gaza as enemy territory. The greatest impact, however, has been the growing use of an exception in the law of tort covering ‘combatant activities’, rendering the state of Israel immune from liability in such cases. A series of amendments passed by the Knesset between 2000 and 2012 widened the definition of the combatant activities exception to cover not just combat activities in the normal sense but policing activities and actions of the civil administration in support of security goals.

‘The effects of the expansion of the combatant activities exception are clear,’ said Dr Haim Abraham of University College London, co-lead researcher on the database. ‘The Israeli legislature repeatedly broadened the scope of Israel’s immunity from liability to the extent that it is nearly impossible for claims against it to succeed and courts have rejected about nine out of ten claims. Simultaneously, Israeli courts have been far more lenient towards claims against the Palestinian Authority.’

‘While Jewish Israeli citizens who are residents of the OPT have a right to claim compensation for losses they sustain from the operations of Israel’s security forces, non-Jewish residents effectively have no corresponding right,’ said Professor Gilat Bachar of Temple University School of Law, co-lead researcher. ‘That raises serious questions about equality before the law.’

The killing of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in May 2022 prompted a rare level of international media interest, but was not an isolated event. Already in 2023, 174 Palestinians and 14 Israelis have been killed according to UN OCHA.

The UN Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation for Victims of Gross Violations of International Human Rights Law and Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law confirm that victims have a right to equal and effective access to justice, and to adequate, effective and prompt reparation for harm suffered, including in the context of armed conflict or occupation.

‘When Palestinians in the OPT are killed, maimed or see their houses destroyed they have a right to justice, just as Israeli citizens do,’ said Mark Lattimer, Executive Director of Ceasefire. ‘Accountability for civilian harm should not be avoided by classing law enforcement as combat.’

Notes for editors:

1. Mapping civilian harm claims against Israel and the Palestinian Authority before Israeli courts, published on 19 July 2023 in English, Hebrew and Arabic, presents over 470 Israeli court cases in which civilians sought compensation under tort law for loss of life, bodily injury and property damage inflicted during armed activities. The vast majority of cases involve Palestinian civilians who were injured by Israeli security forces in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. However, the database includes claims of other nationals, as well as cases in which Israeli civilians sought compensation against Hamas and the Palestinian Authority for losses incurred during hostilities.

The map is online at: https://civilian-harm-map.ceasefire.org/

1. The project is a collaboration between Dr Haim Abraham (UCL Faculty of Laws), Prof Gilat Bachar (Temple University Beasley School of Law) and Ceasefire Centre for Civilian Rights. Map designed by Rectangle.
2. The database has been made possible through support from UCL Laws, UCL Public Policy, UCL’s Private Law Group, UKRI Research England, and the University of Haifa Minerva Center for the Rule of Law Under Extreme Conditions.

[1] These figures do not include claims settled before trial, or any compensation awarded by military courts. Freedom of information requests have revealed that between 1988 and 2014 Israel paid in total approximately USD 94 million in compensation for losses inflicted by its security forces on the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza.

Report details

Primary country

• occupied Palestinian territory

Source

• Ceasefire Centre for Civilian Rights

Format

• News and Press Release

Theme

• Protection and Human Rights

Language

• English
• ======================================================
  https://civilian-harm-map.ceasefire.org/en/about
  
  Mapping civilian harm claims against Israel and the Palestinian Authority before Israeli courts
  
  This interactive map presents over 450 Israeli court cases in which civilians sought compensation under tort law for loss of life, bodily injury, and property damage inflicted during armed activities. The vast majority of cases involve Palestinian civilians who were injured by Israeli security forces in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. However, the database includes claims of other nationals, as well as cases in which Israeli civilians sought compensation against Hamas and the Palestinian Authority for losses incurred during hostilities.Databases that document the losses suffered by civilians in armed conflict are highly important to the facilitation of reparations and reconciliation. Telling individual stories gives voice to vulnerable populations, and aggregating these accounts in a single resource allows the scope and character of the loss that armed conflict inflicts on a community to become apparent. Having a clear account of the wrongs committed during conflict is key to holding those responsible accountable, and accountability and reparations are cardinal to reconciliation between those who suffered the wrongful loss and those who inflicted it.In the context of reparation for losses civilians sustain during armed conflict and occupation, Israel offers a unique perspective. The number of cases in which Israeli courts examine the question of state liability in tort law for losses the Israeli military is alleged to have inflicted exceeds the combined cases of Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. The Israeli cases offer a unique insight into legal institutional approaches to urban warfare and counter-terrorism, as well as to attitudes towards prolonged conflict over time.This project is a collaboration between Dr Haim Abraham (UCL Faculty of Laws), Prof. Gilat Bachar (Temple University Beasley School of Law), and Ceasefire Centre for Civilian Rights. We were assisted by Mr. Matan Flum (UCL, Bartlett Development Planning Unit).We are grateful for the supported provided by our sponsors:
• Contact Us:
  • Dr Haim Abraham – haim.abraham@ucl.ac.ukProf. Gilat Bachar – gilat.bachar@temple.eduCeasefire Centre for Civilian Rights – contact@ceasefire.org
  
  Website design and development by Rectangle

27.07.23
Editorial Note

IAM reported in early June that the American Anthropological Association (AAA) was about to vote on a petition to boycott Israeli academic institutions. The electronic ballot took place between June 15 and 14 July 2023, when the association endorsed the boycott.

Interestingly, only thirty-seven percent of AAA’s members voted. Supporting the resolution were 2,016 members, that is, 71% of the votes, and opposing the resolution, 835 members, which is 29% of the votes.

AAA President Ramona Pérez said about the vote, “This was indeed a contentious issue, and our differences may have sparked fierce debate, but we have made a collective decision and it is now our duty to forge ahead, united in our commitment to advancing scholarly knowledge, finding solutions to human and social problems, and serving as a guardian of human rights.”

She said that the “AAA’s referendum policies and procedures have been followed closely and without exception, and the outcome will carry the full weight of authorization by AAA’s membership.” The boycott is “limited to AAA—as an association—refraining from formal collaborations with Israeli academic institutions. The resolution pertains only to Israeli academic institutions, and not to individual scholars and students affiliated with these institutions.”

The Executive Board has approved “barring Israeli academic institutions from: being listed in AAA’s published materials, including AAA’s AnthroGuide to Departments advertising in AAA publications, websites, and other communications channels, including the AAA Career Center using AAA conference facilities for job interviews participating in the AAA Graduate School Fair; participating in the AAA Departmental Services Program; participating in joint conferences or events with AAA and its sections, and where within AAA’s control, republishing and reprinting articles from AAA publications in journals and publications owned by Israeli institutions.”

However, the AAA academic institutional boycott does not prevent: “individuals affiliated with Israeli academic institutions from registering for and attending AAA conferences, even if their institutions have paid for their expenses; articles published in AAA journals from being reprinted or republished in journals not owned by Israeli institutions that are edited by individuals affiliated with Israeli academic institutions; individuals affiliated with Israeli academic institutions from serving as journal editors or Section / AAA elected officials, even if their institutions have paid for related expenses (their institution would be identified as being subject to an institutional boycott); individuals affiliated with Israeli academic institutions from publishing in AAA journals, even if their institutions have paid for their expenses, and Israeli university libraries from subscribing to AAA journals, including AnthroSource.”

Lastly, the endorsed resolution “authorizes the Executive Board to come up with an implementation plan, which includes specifying the process by which the Board will consider lifting the boycott. The AAA will lift the institutional boycott when it can be established by a consensus of a group of experts commissioned for this purpose that Israeli academic institutions have substantially ended their complicity in violating Palestinian rights as stipulated in international law. The Executive Board will monitor and evaluate the situation at least every five years, or more frequently as deemed appropriate, and determine whether the boycott should remain in place.”

Perez added, “By means of these actions, AAA will contribute to raising critical awareness of the dynamics of peace and conflict in the region, draw attention to the disproportionate suffering of the Palestinian people as a result of the Occupation and what can be done about it, and expand the space for dialogue on these sensitive and important human rights and academic freedom issues… We believe that these actions can contribute to the enrichment of the health and welfare of all citizens in the region, increase circulation of anthropological scholarship, ease restrictions on scholars’ travel, increase freedom of expression for Palestinian and Israeli anthropologists, and increase dialogue about how archaeology is used in political arguments.”

While the AAA insists it “remains steadfastly committed to the protection of academic freedom and the dissemination of anthropological knowledge,” it boycotts the only democracy in the Middle East and supports the tyrannies in the region.  

According to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), singling out Israel while ignoring worse cases of abuse is antisemitic. At no time did the AAA condemn Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), or even the PA for their brutalities committed against their citizens.   Arguably, the most egregious act is the so-called embedding where Hezbollah, Hamas, and PIJ, instruct the militias to position its fighters and equipment among civilians, including private homes and public spaces such as schools, mosques, and hospitals.  The directive is part of an asymmetrical warfare strategy aimed at limiting the IDF’s ability to respond effectively to the terror groups’ missile and rocket attacks.  As a state, Israel is bound by international humanitarian conventions for treating non-combatants, giving the non-state terror organizations an upper hand.  This fact is well known but hardly mentioned by academic activists bent on damning Israel.

The group Anthropologists for the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions took credit for the success of the boycott vote.

The Jewish members of the AAA announced their intentions to sue the organization legally. IAM will report on the developments in due course.

References:

https://americananthro.org/news/aaa-membership-endorses-academic-boycott-resolution/

AAA Membership Endorses Academic Boycott Resolution

July 24, 2023

The American Anthropological Association (AAA) membership has voted to endorse a resolution to boycott Israeli academic institutions. An all-member referendum took place by electronic ballot between June 15 and July 14. Thirty-seven percent of AAA’s eligible members voted, with 2,016 members (71% of the votes) supporting the resolution, and 835 members (29% of the votes) voting to oppose it.

“This was indeed a contentious issue, and our differences may have sparked fierce debate, but we have made a collective decision and it is now our duty to forge ahead, united in our commitment to advancing scholarly knowledge, finding solutions to human and social problems, and serving as a guardian of human rights,” said AAA President Ramona Pérez. “AAA’s referendum policies and procedures have been followed closely and without exception, and the outcome will carry the full weight of authorization by AAA’s membership.”

AAA’s academic institutional boycott is limited to AAA—as an association—refraining from formal collaborations with Israeli academic institutions. The resolution pertains only to Israeli academic institutions, and not to individual scholars and students affiliated with these institutions. The Association remains steadfastly committed to the protection of academic freedom and the dissemination of anthropological knowledge. With this in mind, the Executive Board has approved the following set of actions aligned with the Association’s core values and mission, barring Israeli academic institutions from:

• being listed in AAA’s published materials, including AAA’s AnthroGuide to Departments
• advertising in AAA publications, websites, and other communications channels, including the AAA Career Center
• using AAA conference facilities for job interviews
• participating in the AAA Graduate School Fair
• participating in the AAA Departmental Services Program
• participating in joint conferences or events with AAA and its sections, and
• where within AAA’s control, republishing and reprinting articles from AAA publications in journals and publications owned by Israeli institutions.

The AAA academic institutional boycott does not prevent:

• individuals affiliated with Israeli academic institutions from registering for and attending AAA conferences, even if their institutions have paid for their expenses
• articles published in AAA journals from being reprinted or republished in journals not owned by Israeli institutions that are edited by individuals affiliated with Israeli academic institutions
• individuals affiliated with Israeli academic institutions from serving as journal editors or Section / AAA elected officials, even if their institutions have paid for related expenses (their institution would be identified as being subject to an institutional boycott)
• individuals affiliated with Israeli academic institutions from publishing in AAA journals, even if their institutions have paid for their expenses, and
• Israeli university libraries from subscribing to AAA journals, including AnthroSource.

The resolution authorizes the Executive Board to come up with an implementation plan, which includes specifying the process by which the Board will consider lifting the boycott. The AAA will lift the institutional boycott when it can be established by a consensus of a group of experts commissioned for this purpose that Israeli academic institutions have substantially ended their complicity in violating Palestinian rights as stipulated in international law. The Executive Board will monitor and evaluate the situation at least every five years, or more frequently as deemed appropriate, and determine whether the boycott should remain in place.

“By means of these actions, AAA will contribute to raising critical awareness of the dynamics of peace and conflict in the region, draw attention to the disproportionate suffering of the Palestinian people as a result of the Occupation and what can be done about it, and expand the space for dialogue on these sensitive and important human rights and academic freedom issues,” Pérez added. “We believe that these actions can contribute to the enrichment of the health and welfare of all citizens in the region, increase circulation of anthropological scholarship, ease restrictions on scholars’ travel, increase freedom of expression for Palestinian and Israeli anthropologists, and increase dialogue about how archaeology is used in political arguments.”

For more information visit our Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ).

=================================================

https://www.newarab.com/news/bds-advocates-hail-israeli-boycott-us-academic-group

News  MENA

BDS advocates hail Israeli boycott by American Anthropological Association

Brooke Anderson
Washington, D.C.
25 July, 2023
This move makes AAA the largest US scholarly institution to engage in an academic boycott of Israel, with 71 per cent of the votes supporting the decision.

Palestinian and BDS advocates are hailing the recent resounding decision by the American Anthropological Association to pursue a boycott of Israeli academic institutions.

This move makes AAA the largest US scholarly institution to engage in an academic boycott of Israel, with 71 per cent of the votes supporting the decision. Thirty-seven per cent of AAA’s eligible members, or 2,016 members, took part in the vote, which was cast between mid-June to mid-July and was announced on the 24th.

“This was indeed a contentious issue, and our differences may have sparked fierce debate, but we have made a collective decision, and it is now our duty to forge ahead, united in our commitment to advancing scholarly knowledge, finding solutions to human and social problems, and serving as a guardian of human rights,” said AAA President Ramona Pérez in a public statement.

“AAA’s referendum policies and procedures have been followed closely and without exception, and the outcome will carry the full weight of authorization by AAA’s membership.”

The academic group previously narrowly voted against such a resolution in 2016. Last year, the Middle East Studies Association endorsed an academic boycott of Israel.

Not everyone is celebrating the news. Several pro-Israel advocates have denounced the move, with at least one person threatening a lawsuit last month if the resolution went through.

According to AAA’s public statement, this resolution affects their relationships with Israeli institutions, not individual scholars and those affiliated with them.

The resolution bars Israeli institutions from the following: being listed in AAA’s published materials, advertising in AAA publications and websites; using AAA conference facilities for job interviews; participating in the AAA Graduate School Fair; participating in the AAA Departmental Services Program; participating in joint conferences or events with AAA and its sections; and republishing and reprinting articles from AAA publications in Israeli publications.

On the other hand, the AAA boycott does not prevent individuals affiliated with Israeli academic institutions from attending AAA conferences; articles published in AAA journals from being reprinted or republished in journals not owned by Israeli institutions that affiliated individuals edit; affiliated individuals from serving as journal editors; affiliated individuals from publishing in AAA journals; and Israeli university libraries from subscribing to AAA journals, including AnthroSource.

The statement says that AAA will end its boycott of Israeli academic institutions once they have “substantially ended their complicity in violating Palestinian rights as stipulated in international law.” As such, AAA has said it will regularly monitor the situation.

“By means of these actions, AAA will contribute to raising critical awareness of the dynamics of peace and conflict in the region, draw attention to the disproportionate suffering of the Palestinian people as a result of the Occupation and what can be done about it, and expand the space for dialogue on these sensitive and important human rights and academic freedom issues,” Pérez added in the group’s public statement.

AAA’s announcement comes shortly after a group of Republican lawmakers accused US President Joe Biden’s administration of engaging in an Israeli boycott after it reversed a policy from the previous administration that allowed for US funding of Israeli academic research in the occupied territories.

===============================================https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2023/06/16/suit-threatened-anthropologists-israel-boycott-vote-begins

June 16, 2023

Suit Threatened as Anthropologists’ Israel Boycott Vote Begins

By  Ryan Quinn

• 
  
• 
  

Just as American Anthropological Association members have started voting on a resolution “to boycott Israeli academic institutions,” a law firm has threatened to sue.

The association said voting on the resolution began Thursday and will continue through July 14.

On Wednesday, Lori Lowenthal Marcus, legal director for the Deborah Project, which represents people “facing discrimination in educational settings because they are Jewish and/or pro-Israel,” wrote to the association’s executive director. Marcus said the firm has clients who are part of the association and are “deeply concerned about the association’s proposed resolution endorsing Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) against Israel.”

“We will be closely watching the voting process and the [AAA] board’s response to this proposed resolution,” she wrote. “We will be watching to ensure that AAA members who oppose the proposed AAA BDS resolution are treated fairly and equitably during the voting process as well as after the vote is concluded, and that all applicable provisions of Virginia corporation law and any other applicable law, and of the AAA’s bylaws and other applicable provisions, are complied with. In addition, we will review how the AAA leadership implements the resolution should it pass.”

She wrote, “Should you fail to act consistently with AAA’s bylaws and/or with all relevant federal, state and local laws, we will not hesitate to bring a legal action against the AAA and/or the board.”

She continued to say the “resolution’s explicit call for discrimination against Israeli institutions” violates California and New York law and that it “violates at least” three provisions of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s antisemitism definition, which the commonwealth of Virginia adopted. One of these she said it violates is “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”

The resolution doesn’t mention Nazis. Marcus said Thursday she was referring to phrases in it such as “the Israeli government enshrined the principle of Jewish supremacy.”

Jessica Winegar, a member of the organizing collective Anthropologists for the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions, said, “This legal threat really is totally bogus. It’s not based on any sound legal reasoning, and it’s really a baseless attempt at fearmongering both the AAA and its membership.”

Winegar, a professor of anthropology and Middle East and North African studies at Northwestern University, called it a “misuse of baseless legal threats to silence a democratic process within an academic association.”

Ed Liebow, the AAA’s executive director, said, “We are in receipt of this letter; we have referred it to our attorney and don’t have any comment to offer about it except to say that we are scrupulously adhering to the policies and procedures that we have for putting a ballot measure before our members.”

===========================================

https://www.anthroboycott.org/home
Anthropologists for the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions

WE DID IT!

Thousands voted, our voices were heard, and the American Anthropological Association has formally passed the resolution to boycott Israeli academic institutions! This makes the AAA the largest academic association to endorse the Palestinian call for an academic boycott!

This breakthrough would not have been possible without the support and hard work of so many of you. 

THANK YOU!

In solidarity,

Anthropologists for the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions

American Anthropological Association Endorses Resolution Supporting Palestinian Rights & Boycotting Israeli Apartheid

July 24, 2023 — The American Anthropological Association (AAA), representing thousands of anthropologists and scholars, has passed a historic resolution in support of Palestinian rights and freedom, pledging to boycott Israeli academic institutions that are complicit in maintaining Israel’s oppressive apartheid system. The vote passed with an overwhelming majority following a successful referendum held June 15-July 14, with 71% voting in favor.

Founded in 1902, the 12,000-member AAA is the largest and oldest scholarly body in the United States to endorse a boycott of Israeli academic institutions.

“This resolution is a meaningful demonstration of solidarity by thousands of scholars standing alongside their Palestinian colleagues, whose work and lives are impacted on a daily basis by Israel’s racist, discriminatory policies and brutal military rule,” said Jessica Winegar, an anthropology professor and member of the Anthroboycott collective, which campaigned for the boycott. “As scholars with a long history of studying colonialism, anthropologists are all too familiar with the devastating harm of Israel’s oppression and theft of Palestinian land. This vote is an important step in showing that support for Palestinian rights goes hand in hand with the AAA’s values of human rights for all.”

The resolution precludes the AAA from engaging in any formal relationships with Israeli academic institutions. The resolution does not prevent individual Israeli scholars from participating in AAA activities or collaborating with AAA members.

“As a US-based association, the AAA has a responsibility to speak up against the nearly $4 billion in military funding the United States provides to Israel each year, enabling Israel’s brutal military rule, illegal theft of Palestinian land, and oppressive apartheid system against Palestinians,” said Winegar. “Just as scholars throughout the world came together to put pressure on South Africa to end its violent apartheid system, US academic organizations are following in their footsteps and joining the struggle for Palestinian freedom.”

The Palestinian Campaign for the Cultural and Academic Boycott of Israel (PACBI) celebrated this important win for the movement for Palestinian rights: “We thank those who took the time to learn from and listen to Indigenous Palestinian voices. The AAA membership vote to boycott complicit Israeli universities is wholly consistent with the association’s stated commitment to anti-racism, equality, human rights and social justice and furthers the drive to decolonize anthropology and academia in general.”

The Executive Board of the AAA will now proceed with implementing the resolution, joining the ranks of other scholarly associations that have endorsed a boycott of Israeli academic institutions, including the American Studies Association, the Association for Asian American Studies, the Middle East Studies Association, the National Women’s Studies Association, and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association.

In 2016, a similar boycott resolution narrowly missed adoption by a mere 39 votes – less than 1% of ballots cast.

This breakthrough comes despite attempts to pressure, intimidate, and misinform anthropologists from outside pro-Israel organizations with no apparent link to the discipline. These efforts included unsolicited and harassing emails sent to all AAA members; lobbying university presidents across the country to intervene in the vote; and frivolous threats of litigation.

Anthroboycott extends its deepest congratulations and heartfelt thanks to everyone who voted, as well as the numerous volunteers who dedicated their time and efforts to persuade and mobilize their colleagues. We also thank the sections of the AAA that formally endorsed the boycott: the Association of Black Anthropologists and the Middle East Section. We are grateful to the boards of the Association for Feminist Anthropology, Association of Latina/o and Latinx Anthropologists, and Critical Urban Anthropology Association for encouraging their members to support the boycott. 

Anthroboycott (Anthropologists for the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions) is a collective of AAA members, including faculty, contingent labor, and graduate students, working in support of Palestinian human rights.

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https://www.anthroboycott.org/aboutAbout

Anthropologists for the Boycott of Israeli Academic institutions works in support of justice and human rights in Israel/Palestine.

Our organizers and supporters are scholars working in all major sub-fields of the discipline, including tenure-track and adjunct faculty, graduate students, post-docs, and practitioners.

The campaign is managed by an organizing collective, whose members include:

Diana Allan, McGill University

Lori Allen, SOAS

Lara Deeb, Scripps College

Chris Dole, Amherst College

Sami Hermez, Northwestern University-Qatar

Darryl Li, University of Chicago

Lisa Rofel, University of California, Santa Cruz

Jonah Rubin, Knox College 

Dan Segal, Pitzer College

Ajantha Subramanian, Harvard University 

Jessica Winegar, Northwestern University

For media and other queries, write to anthroboycott [at] gmail dot com.

* Institutions listed for identification purposes only

The resolution before us today is not the first time that the American Anthropological Association has considered the question of our ethical and political responsibility to our Palestinian colleagues. A three-year process of education and engagement began with panels at the AAA in 2013 and culminated in a vote by the membership in spring 2016. Over the course of several annual meetings, numerous panels and roundtables took up the questions of conditions on the ground in Palestine, the denial of academic freedom to Palestinians by Israel, and the complicity of Israeli academic institutions in this denial of rights and freedoms. 

More than 1,000 anthropologists signed the statement of Anthropologists for the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions pledging support for the boycott. 

Seeking to preempt the process of learning and engagement that boycott supporters were engaging in, opponents of the boycott put forth an anti-boycott motion at the 2014 AAA business meeting. The historically well attended meeting (until the next year that is) resoundingly rejected this motion. 

Responding to the boycott petition, and recognizing the deep concern of the membership, the AAA organized discussions on these questions and formed a Task Force on American Anthropological Association (AAA) Engagement on Israel/Palestine. After undertaking rigorous research, including 120 interviews, a trip to Israel/Palestine, significant background reading, the Task Force unanimously concluded that “there is a strong case for the Association to take action on this issue, and that the Association should do so.” 

At the 2015 AAA meeting, more than 1500 people attended the business meeting and voted on two resolutions. One, a countermotion that rejected the boycott of Israeli academic institutions (and any use of boycott as a political tactic) with the claim to offer “dialogue” as an alternative course of action, was overwhelmingly rejected (196-1173). The membership recognized the motion for what it was: a call for inaction and support of the status-quo under the guise of “moderate” action. The resolution calling on the AAA to endorse and implement the boycott of Israeli academic institutions passed by a remarkable margin of 1,040 votes in favor to 136 against.

Nearly half of the AAA membership participated in the final ratification vote, which was defeated by an incredibly narrow 39 vote margin.  

In the ensuing years, the “significant limitations on academic freedom [that] have led to substantial deprivations in the health and welfare of Palestinians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, as well as within Israel itself” described by the AAA Task Force have only grown more severe.

For information about the previous campaign of 2014-2016, please find our archived website here.

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Renewing the Call to Boycott 

(March, 2023)

On March 3, 2023, 206 members of the American Anthropological Association submitted a petition to the Executive Board requesting a full-membership vote on a resolution to boycott Israeli academic institutions. 

As anthropologists who care about academic freedom and social justice, we must speak out in support of our Palestinian colleagues and oppose the systematic effort to make Palestine an exception to free speech.

A similar resolution was endorsed by a vote of 1040-136 at the AAA business meeting in Denver on November 20, 2015, and narrowly missed adoption in the subsequent full membership vote by a margin of only 39 votes (2,384 in favor and 2,423 opposed; 49.6% – 50.4%). The strong participation in that vote indicates that the matter is one of grave concern to AAA members.

Palestinian human rights and civil society organizations have called for the boycott of institutions complicit in Israeli apartheid and violations of international law. Since the last vote, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, as well as Israeli human rights organizations, have found Israel to be committing apartheid, a crime against humanity. Several academic associations, including the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) and the British Society for Middle East Studies (BRISMES), have passed boycott resolutions. Within the AAA, the Middle East Section passed a resolution to boycott Israeli academic institutions in 2021, and a Middle East Section Statement on Palestine was endorsed by twenty additional section boards and AAA subcommittees.

The need for this vote in support of Palestinian civil society’s call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions has only gained in urgency since the last boycott vote. The situation in Palestine has deteriorated, deepening the repression of Palestinians through ongoing and intensifying threats to their rights at every level, including the right to an education and to academic freedom. The recent Israeli elections, which installed the most extreme right-wing coalition government to date, suggest that additional restrictions on Palestinians’ academic and broader freedoms are imminent. In the first month of 2023 alone, Israeli military campaigns have killed 35 Palestinians and injured over 500, while settler attacks on Palestinians and their property have significantly increased, emboldened by the new government. 

The time for action is now.

For inquiries and to sign up to receive our emails: anthroboycott@gmail.com

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https://anthroboycott.wordpress.com/about/
ARCHIVED: Anthropologists for the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions, 2014 – 2016 Campaign

About

Anthropologists for the Boycott of Israeli Academic institutions works in support of justice and human rights in Israel/Palestine.

Our organizers and supporters are scholars working in all major sub-fields of the discipline, including tenure-track and adjunct faculty, graduate students, post-docs, and practitioners.

The campaign is managed by an organizing collective, whose members include:

Nadia Abu El-Haj, Barnard College and Columbia University
Lara Deeb, Scripps College
Ilana Feldman, George Washington University
Lisa Rofel, UC Santa Cruz
Ajantha Subramanian, Harvard University

For media and other queries, write to anthroboycott [at] gmail dot com.

The campaign acts in consultation with and under the guidance of an advisory group, whose members include:

Lila Abu-Lughod, Columbia University
Talal Asad, CUNY Graduate Center
Glenn Bowman, University of Kent
Brian Boyd, Columbia University
Karen Brodkin, UCLA
Steven Caton, Harvard University
Partha Chatterjee, Columbia University
Donald Donham, UC Davis
Abou Farman Farmaian, New School for Social Research
James Ferguson, Stanford University
Les Field, University of New Mexico
Roberto Gonzalez, San Jose State University
Sondra Hale, UCLA
Thomas Blom Hansen, Stanford University
Engseng Ho, Duke University
Rhoda Kanaaneh, Columbia University
Ahmed Kanna, University of the Pacific
J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Wesleyan University
Saba Mahmood, UC Berkeley
Joseph Masco, University of Chicago
Sunaina Maira, UC Davis
Nadine Naber, University of Illinois at Chicago
Julie Peteet, University of Louisville
Jemima Pierre, UCLA
David Price, Saint Martin’s University
Junaid Rana, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Daniel Segal, Pitzer College
Michael Taussig, Columbia University
Erica Williams, Spelman College

* Institutions listed for identification purposes only.

20.07.23

Editorial Note

Dr. Nick Riemer from the English Department at Sydney University recently published a book, Boycott Theory and the Struggle for Palestine: Universities, Intellectualism and Liberation. 

Riemer discusses in length the academic boycott of Israel led by the pro-Palestinian BDS campaign. The book details how academic BDS relates to a range of controversies in progressive politics, such as disruptive protest, silencing, free speech, the real-world consequences of intellectual work, the rise of the far right, and the nature of grassroots campaigning. The book “presents the fullest justification for the academic boycott yet given, considering BDS efforts on campuses around the world.” 

The opening chapters explore the “fundamentals of the academic boycott campaign, detailing the conditions on the ground in Palestinian and Israeli higher education and analyzing debates over the boycott and its adoption or resistance in the west.” The later chapters contextualize the boycott with respect to broader questions about the links between theory and practice in political change. Directly rebutting the arguments of BDS’s opponents,” the book “demonstrates the political and intellectual soundness of a controversial and often misrepresented campaign.” 

Riemer hopes that by “defending an original view of the differences between reflecting on politics and doing it in the specific context of the liberation of Palestine, the book’s arguments will have a resonance for many wider debates beyond the context of either universities or the Middle East.”

According to Riemer, “Palestinians cannot expect strong support from a profession that often cannot bring itself to defend its own members: resistance to the boycott is one especially obvious consequence of academics’ general disengagement from politics. The effect of scholarly political quietism is, of course, wholly political in its reinforcement of the status quo.” 

The book brings “the hope of contributing to the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign—one of the most vital global justice movements there currently is—by advancing it in universities.” 

He starts with a “detailed description of the daily reality of university life in occupied Palestine. The effects of Israeli apartheid on Palestinian universities still are not very well known, which is a significant obstacle in the way of international academic solidarity with Palestine.” Riemer explains, “My thought was that if readers can get a detailed account of what Israeli oppression means in a context they are familiar with—universities—then this would be a good way to understand the urgency of justice for Palestine in general. I also give a detailed account of Israeli universities’ responsibility for and involvement in state anti-Palestinianism, which is the justification for boycotting them in the first place.” 

Chapter two in the book addresses the central “academic freedom” argument against the boycott of Israel. “My main idea is that, far from a violation of the ordinary norms of the academy, boycotting is actually a constitutive and deeply embedded feature of academic professionalism, albeit a strongly disavowed one.” 

In chapter three, “I draw out the ideological and material parallels between neoliberal universities as mechanisms for the enclosure of knowledge, and Israeli apartheid as a mechanism for the enclosure of Palestinians, and I suggest ways in which universities can be seen as “little Israels”—in other words fundamentally coercive regimes that put a veneer of liberalism over basically inegalitarian practices. This chapter particularly considers the humanities and social sciences, the areas in which BDS activities are most vigorous.”

In chapter four, “I change gear to look at one of the best-known hallmarks of BDS activism internationally, the active disruption of Zionists invited to speak at universities. I try to give an account of speech, disruption, and silencing that is anchored in a materialist conception of language, predicated on the fact that disruptive protest has regularly been an instrument of social progress.” 

Interestingly, Andrew Riemer, Nick’s father, was a famed author and the son of Holocaust survivors from Hungary.

Riemer promotes an egalitarian society, and in his view, the Palestinians are an egalitarian society. Quite obviously, he projects his own vision of what a social order should be for the Palestinians. He is a veteran academic “social warrior” ensconced in the privileged bubble of Western universities who indulge in fantasies about the superiority of non-Western civilizations. Typical of his “social warrior” cohorts, Riemer totally ignores the breathing corruption and abuse of power in the Palestinian Authority under Yasser Arafat, where regime cronies siphoned millions of dollars in donations from the international community. The governance of the current head of PA, Mahmoud Abbas, is not much better. Even worse, the brutal theocratic rule of Hamas, which has ruled the Gaza Strip since 2007. Monies sent by Arab countries and the international community are diverted to manufacturing weapons and digging tunnels against Israel. In what is a clear violation of international law, Hamas and its partner, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, have embedded their military assets among the civilian population in order to limit Israel’s ability to retaliate. 

Riemer’s animus against Israel equals his dislike of the entire Western civilization. For example, in 2019, he objected to the teaching of Western civilization at the Ramsay Center for Western Civilization. Riemer was named a Useful Idiot by a fellow Australian, who wrote, “His arguments — I’m being charitable when I use such a word — are so risible that I’m doubtful that he has persuaded anyone at all.” 

The same could be said about his recent book.

References:

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538175866/Boycott-Theory-and-the-Struggle-for-Palestine-Universities-Intellectualism-and-Liberation

Boycott Theory and the Struggle for Palestine

Universities, Intellectualism and Liberation

NICK RIEMER

The academic boycott of Israel, a branch of the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, is one of the richest—and most divisive—topics in the politics of knowledge today. In Boycott Theory and the Struggle for Palestine, Nick Riemer addresses the most fundamental questions raised by the call to sever ties with Israeli universities, and offers fresh arguments for doing so. More than a narrow study of the boycott campaign, the book details how academic BDS relates to a range of live controversies in progressive politics on questions such as disruptive protest, silencing and free speech, the real-world consequences of intellectual work, the rise of the far right, and the nature of grassroots campaigning. 

Written for open-minded readers, the book presents the fullest justification for the academic boycott yet given, considering BDS efforts on campuses around the world. The opening chapters explore the fundamentals of the academic boycott campaign, detailing the conditions on the ground in Palestinian and Israeli higher education and analyzing debates over the boycott and its adoption or resistance in the west. The later chapters contextualize the boycott with respect to broader questions about the links between theory and practice in political change. Directly rebutting the arguments of BDS’s opponents, Boycott Theory and the Struggle for Palestine demonstrates the political and intellectual soundness of a controversial and often misrepresented campaign. In defending an original view of the differences between reflecting on politics and doing it in the specific context of the liberation of Palestine, the book’s arguments will have a resonance for many wider debates beyond the context of either universities or the Middle East.

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Universities as tools of apartheid

 PUBLISHED 29 MAY 2023 · THE UNIVERSITY / PALESTINE

Universities as tools of apartheid

Nick Riemer                                

In his new book Boycott Theory and the Struggle for Palestine: Universities, Intellectualism and Liberation (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023), Nick Riemer mounts a comprehensive argument for the institutional academic boycott of Israel. This edited extract outlines the central rationale for the boycott—Israeli universities’ institutional role in enabling apartheid, occupation and anti-Palestinianism.

In its institutional support for the Zionist project, more than simply being complicit with anti-Palestinianism, Israeli higher education is a central instrument of it. This is a role Israeli universities have played from the outset. Like Palestinian ones, Jewish universities in Palestine were created in an explicit state-building perspective, and the 1948 Zionist takeover of historic Palestine means that university education in Israel takes place in areas from which Palestinians have been expelled, or where they are second-class citizens: Ben Gurion University is located in Beersheba, occupied by Israel on October 21, 1948, with the population of five thousand being driven out at gunpoint to Hebron and many of them shot; the University of Tel Aviv lies on the ground of the destroyed Palestinian village of Al-Shaykh Muwannis, one of whose last remaining houses is now the faculty club; most famously, the Mount Scopus campus of HUJ is on expropriated Palestinian land just beyond the Green Line.

A common narrative today stresses HUJ’s status as ‘a pioneer in establishing contacts with Palestinian scholars’ and a contributor to ‘the political movement towards peace.’ But the very existence of HUJ in Jerusalem, whether beyond or within the Green Line, derives from a project of Palestinian educational dispossession: in 1922, a proposal by the British governor of Jerusalem for an English university intended for a mixed student body of Arabs and Jews alike fell foul of the Zionist movement, which refused to participate on the grounds that it ‘constituted a threat to Hebrew culture in Palestine’ and to the future Hebrew University in particular. Zionists’ preference for exclusivity in education regularly obstructed the creation of mixed Jewish-Arab institutions, creating an obstacle to educational opportunity for Palestinian students by requiring them to go abroad if they wanted to pursue university study. Even today, most Israeli universities lack Arabic signage, and Arabic is largely missing from university websites. Use of Arabic has sometimes even been forbidden on campus, as have displays of the Palestinian flag. Historically, HUJ enacted Palestinian dispossession in other ways, too: after 1948, books plundered from Palestinian households became the core of the Hebrew University’s collection.

Institutional Zionism is matched by intellectual. The scientific and ideological service to the Zionist project provided by disciplines like history, archaeology, sociology and Middle Eastern studies has been documented in detail by many researchers. Archaeology in particular has been identified as central to the ongoing construction of Israel’s origin myth, with pro-settlement organizations regularly funding digs, including in the West Bank, in contravention of international law. The Israeli NGO Emek Shaveh opposes the politicization of Israeli archaeology, campaigning against the use of ‘the ruins of the past … [as] … a political tool in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict’ and the fact that, despite the frequent involvement of Israeli universities, ‘archeology in the West Bank is treated as a military activity and not as academic research.’

Criticisms of the Israeli academy’s silence in the face of attacks on Palestinians are frequent: the Israeli academic Chen Misgav reports that ‘it seems oppression and the egregious violation of the freedom of Palestinian academics produce mainly yawns’ from his colleagues. ‘Faculty members,’ a Haaretz journalist commented in 2017, ‘rarely involve themselves in issues not directly related to their employment conditions and responsibilities.’ When the Committee of University Heads in Israel was asked in 2019 by thirty-three academics at the University of Haifa to protest against Israel’s denial of visas to lecturers wanting to visit West Bank universities, it refused.

Israeli universities play a vital role in the development of the material and intellectual supports of Palestinian oppression. In 1963, the occupation of the West Bank was planned at the Hebrew University’s Givat Ram campus. Following the 1967 invasion of the West Bank, eminent Israeli political scientists, sociologists and anthropologists contributed to a large-scale study of the newly occupied territories, designed to provide accurate information on the characteristics of their population with objectives that were ‘not academic but rather aimed to serve state interests,’ such as suppression of resistance and the departure of Palestinians to neighboring Arab countries. Today, research cooperation between universities and weapons manufacturers binds Israeli higher education tightly into the state’s military-industrial complex: Israeli universities are reliant for much of their income on IDF training and research funding. The Technion, for instance, has close institutional links with Elbit Systems and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, Israel’s biggest arms manufacturers, and developed the remote-controlled bulldozer used to destroy Palestinians’ houses. The university’s aerospace faculty maintains ‘exceptionally close ties’ with these firms, as well as with Ministry of Defense research agencies and army and air force units. During Operation Protective Edge in 2014, the Technion raised half a million dollars for those of its students involved in combat. Ben Gurion University cooperates closely with IDF logistics, cyber-defense, air force technology and computing units, and trains IDF soldiers in engineering and exact sciences. Its robotics lab has the IDF as an important ‘client and stimulus to research.’ The Hebrew University’s technology transfer company, Yissum, takes part in a long-term collaboration with Lockheed Martin, which supplies a very wide range of material, including fighter jets and artillery support, to the IDF. Tel Aviv University facilitates the recruitment of its students by weapons companies, cooperates closely with Elbit Systems and, in 2022, established the Elrom Center, a joint venture with the Israeli Air Force to advance air and space power in Israel. Given that Palestinians are privileged targets of IDF operations – Israel launched full-scale wars against Gaza in 2008, 2012, 2014 and 2021 – Israeli universities’ ties with the military translate directly into attacks on Palestinians.

Universities also train students in the rehabilitation of Israel’s tarnished reputation: the University of Haifa’s ‘Ambassadors Online’ course is aimed at the promotion of Israel’s online international image. The program provides students with training in combatting ‘delegitimization’ efforts online, in collaboration with the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. At the private Reichmann University, students can study for credit in the ‘Public Diplomacy’ program, which provides training in online activism in favor of Israel and against BDS, in collaboration with Act.IL, an aggressive online hasbara organization which the university started. The Technion’s ‘Defense Strategy for International Markets’ course prepares students to sell the weapons systems tested on Palestinians to global buyers. Students at HUJ can get credit for volunteering with the Zionist organization Im Tirzu, which intimidates and discredits pro-Palestinian academics.

The University of Haifa educates ‘senior officials and high ranking officers’ through the National Security Studies Program and the National Security Studies Centre. Tel Aviv University established and hosts the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), which aims to shape Israeli national security policy. As at all such institutes in Israel, INSS staff are principally former senior IDF and other state security officers. The INSS’s 2018 ‘Plan’ sketches a proposal for dealing with the ‘Palestinian threat,’ predicated on a unilateral move to ‘serve Israeli interests.’ It recommends completion of the separation wall, ‘ongoing construction in settlement blocs and their definition as essential to Israel in any future situation,’ refusal of Palestinian refugees’ internationally-established right of return, and retention of IDF freedom of action throughout the West Bank – all presentedas compatible with the aim of a ‘just’ Israeli state. Another senior INSS figure, Gabi Siboni, a former IDF colonel and a senior research fellow at the institute, is a proponent of the ‘Dahiya doctrine’ used to devastating effect in Lebanon and Gaza: the doctrine specifies that ‘with an outbreak of hostilities, the IDF will need to act immediately, decisively, and with force that is disproportionate to the enemy’s actions and the threat it poses.’ ‘Such a response,’ it continues, ‘aims at inflicting damage and meting out punishment to an extent that will demand long and expensive reconstruction processes.’

The Moshe Dayan Center (MDC) at Tel Aviv University describes itself as ‘founded, in part, to bridge the gap between the Israeli intelligence apparatus and academia, and to provide research solutions to contemporary issues that the intelligence services did not have the time or capability to pursue.’ According to its website, it continues to ‘play a crucial role in safeguarding Israel’s future,’ undertaking activities that ‘are not merely academic in nature. Instead, the MDC attacks real-world problems and helps to achieve real-world solutions.’ Similarly, the BESA Center – the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University – produces policy recommendations for the Israeli political, military and foreign affairs communities, and ‘conducts specialized research on contract to the Israeli foreign affairs and defense establishment.’ Efraim Inbar, the center’s former long-term director, has acknowledged that ‘political neutrality’ is not an option for the center, which is Zionist in orientation. A paper released by the Center in 2018 argued that only ‘a fourth massive round of fighting against Hamas’ would make Hamas realize that ‘that the pain to be suffered is so great, and the chance of eliminating the Jewish state so slim, as to render further violence pointless.’ ‘Now, alas,’ the paper concluded, ‘is the time for war.’ After operation Guardian of the Walls in 2021, one BESA Center paper advocated boycotting Palestinians; another warned against any Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank.

The Israeli army and security apparatus supplies a significant proportion of universities’ senior academic leaders and administrators. IDF soldiers have privileged access to higher education throughout Israel thanks to the ‘Uniform to Studies’ scheme, which provides generous scholarships for discharged combat soldiers, with plans to extend the scheme to anyone who has served in any capacity. Since Palestinian Israelis do not serve in the IDF, they are ineligible for this significant reduction in the cost of university education. Reservists, too, gain automatic academic credit with every eighteen days of annual service. Tel Aviv university offered a year’s free tuition to students who participated in the 2014 Gaza war.

The formal instruction required for positions of responsibility in the IDF is dispensed through the university system, with the University of Haifa responsible for IDF officer-training since 2018. Even before this arrangement started, Haifa offered a Masters program in national security for members of the IDF, the police, Mossad, Shin Bet, and other security and intelligence services. Bar-Ilan University offers a bachelor’s degree for IDF and Shin Bet officers. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem hosts the Talpiot program, which supplies the IDF with elite expertise in technology, as well as the Military Medicine Program, applications for which are assessed by the army, with successful applicants’ tuition fees being waived. During the 2014 war on Gaza, HUJ declared that ‘the university is joining the war effort to support its warrior students, in order to minimize the financial burden’ on them. In 2019, the university took out a full-page newspaper advertisement to stress its commitment to its soldier students. Details of Israeli university graduates have been forwarded by universities to the Shin Bet, allegedly for recruitment purposes. In 2018, HUJ prompted further calls for boycott by hosting a day-long Shin Bet recruitment event for its students.

Israeli universities do not just supply the technical expertise on which the oppression of Palestinians depends, the training for the army that implements it, and the ideological firepower needed to justify it in the battle of world opinion: their own campuses are sites on which Palestinian oppression is enacted. The Hebrew University, for instance, lets its rooftops be used for police surveillance of Palestinians in the adjoining East Jerusalem suburb of Issawiya. Most significantly, this oppression is structural: Palestinian students, already subjected to significant discrimination in their schooling, are significantly under-represented in Israeli higher education, and are marginalized in many ways, including linguistically and in access to dormitories. Israeli Palestinian staff, too, are in a tiny minority: a 2018 appointment of an Arab Christian is thought to be the first Arabic Deanship in Israel ever. Political activity by Arab students on Israeli campuses has often been banned or obstructed, including by Zionist students, as have conferences on topics deemed excessively pro-Palestinian. In 2018, several Israeli universities voluntarily disrupted classes or otherwise supported protests against domestic violence, but nothing anywhere near such levels of institutional support for the Palestinian cause has ever been shown: on the contrary, Israeli universities have blocked prizes being awarded to pro-Palestinian organizations, and regularly suppress pro-Palestine and peace activism. Their heads and other senior officials defend Israeli society against charges of apartheid, discipline or fail to defend pro-Palestinian faculty members, and refuse to protest against violations of Palestinian academic freedom – instead denouncing BDS initiatives and initiating programs to counteract them. Israeli university authorities often criticize and resist government policy on other matters, such as the requirement for gender-segregated programs for ultra-Orthodox students. They have also sometimes asserted the independence of the Israeli faculty, including boycott supporters, against efforts by the state to interfere politically in university business through ethics codes or vetoes on appointments. But they have never officially objected to the overall militarization of Israeli higher education, or asserted the educational rights or academic freedom of Israel’s subject Palestinian population. 

Nick Riemer

Nick Riemer works in the English and linguistics departments at the University of Sydney. He is currently president of the Sydney University branch of the National Tertiary Education Union.More by Nick Riemer

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https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/45071

Nick Riemer, Boycott Theory and the Struggle for Palestine. Universities, Intellectualism and Liberation (New Texts Out Now)

By : Nick Riemer

Nick Riemer, Boycott Theory and the Struggle for Palestine. Universities, Intellectualism and Liberation (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Nick Riemer (NR): Most importantly, the hope of contributing to the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign—one of the most vital global justice movements there currently is—by advancing it in universities. Usually, writing books is not the best way to advance political causes. But the academic boycott is complex and intensely contested, and it seemed to me that there was a potential political benefit in laying out the arguments for it at length, and in analyzing the uptake and resistance to it in the context of the contemporary “neoliberal” university.

A secondary motivation was simply the very high intrinsic interest of the questions the book addresses about the way that intellectual and political progress might relate. What makes the academic boycott so interesting and important is that it is a case where political advances do not arise from the explicit pursuit of intellectual work, but from its outright suspension, at least in the university. When we implement the institutional academic boycott of Israel and refuse to participate in certain kinds of intellectual exchange, just like when we go on strike, we are saying that there is something more important than engaging in the kinds of organized thinking that universities sponsor. It seems to me there is an important lesson there more broadly—about the responsibility to do more than think and talk, and about the risks of what in the book I call “smartwashing,” in other words the mystifying use of intellectualism or complexity to suppress political action.

The effects of Israeli apartheid on Palestinian universities still are not very well known, which is a significant obstacle in the way of international academic solidarity with Palestine.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

NR: The book goes from the most particular issues relating to the academic boycott to the most general. It starts with a detailed description of the daily reality of university life in occupied Palestine. The effects of Israeli apartheid on Palestinian universities still are not very well known, which is a significant obstacle in the way of international academic solidarity with Palestine. My thought was that if readers can get a detailed account of what Israeli oppression means in a context they are familiar with—universities—then this would be a good way to understand the urgency of justice for Palestine in general. I also give a detailed account of Israeli universities’ responsibility for and involvement in state anti-Palestinianism, which is the justification for boycotting them in the first place. 

I then go on in chapter two to address the central “academic freedom” argument against the boycott. My main idea is that, far from a violation of the ordinary norms of the academy, boycotting is actually a constitutive and deeply embedded feature of academic professionalism, albeit a strongly disavowed one. In the third chapter I draw out the ideological and material parallels between neoliberal universities as mechanisms for the enclosure of knowledge, and Israeli apartheid as a mechanism for the enclosure of Palestinians, and I suggest ways in which universities can be seen as “little Israels”—in other words fundamentally coercive regimes that put a veneer of liberalism over basically inegalitarian practices. This chapter particularly considers the humanities and social sciences, the areas in which BDS activities are most vigorous.

In chapter four, I change gear to look at one of the best known hallmarks of BDS activism internationally, the active disruption of Zionists invited to speak at universities. I try to give an account of speech, disruption, and silencing that is anchored in a materialist conception of language, predicated on the fact that disruptive protest has regularly been an instrument of social progress. 

The last two chapters take up more general questions that the academic boycott raises about the politics of intellectual activity in universities and outside them. Chapter five looks at a couple of case studies of situations where academic work was not boycotted but should have been, and the last chapter, chapter six, explores the ways in which intellectual activity can be reactionary and therefore deserving of boycott.

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

NR: Boycott Theory is an outlier compared to most of my academic work, which is in (of all things) the history and philosophy of linguistics. But recently, as a result of my involvement with the BDS campaign, I have started to do scholarly work about the academic boycott too. The book expands on some of the ideas in my chapter in David Landy, Ronit Lentin, and Conor McCarthy’s collected volume Enforcing Silence (Zed Books, 2020), which is often referenced in Boycott Theory. One of the book’s chapters (chapter four) actually does draw on scholarship about language in linguistics and elsewhere, which it puts to work for an analysis of disruptive protest of the kind that Palestine activists often engage in. The book is also related to my teaching: I teach a seminar course called “Text, Action and Ideology” which covers many of the broader issues discussed in Boycott Theory. 

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have? 

NR: The book is polemical as well as scholarly, and I hope it will be a useful resource for the Palestine solidarity movement and will showcase just how solid the arguments for the academic boycott are. Academic research and exchange are prima facie the kind of activities where a boycott is least justifiable, so if a boycott of them does in fact make sense—as it does—that means there is no form of boycott that can be ruled out. So in justifying the academic boycott, the book indirectly justifies the consumer and cultural boycott as well. 

Overall, Boycott Theory is probably intended for two main audiences: people—mainly but not just in universities—who are curious about the academic boycott and want to understand it better; and people already in the campaign who are looking for a repository of arguments and ideas about it. I also hope that Zionists will read it. Our side has all the good arguments, and they really need to let that sink in. I would also hope that the last two chapters, which are on the relation between thought and (in)action, might interest a further set of readers who might not otherwise ever open a book on Palestine solidarity.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

NR: I am working on several projects in linguistics—a second edition of an introduction to the field of semantics that first came out over a decade ago, and a large project on the political history of ideas about Western theories of language from World War I onwards. I am also working with a colleague on an article for a forthcoming issue of Middle East Critique on the Zionist repression of Palestine solidarity work in Australian universities.

J: Tell us more about those last two chapters, where you broaden the focus out from the academic boycott.

NR: Chapter five examines two recent debates about the political stakes of intellectual work conducted by academics—a much-reported German scholarly edition of Hitler’s Mein Kampf published in 2016, and a case of institutional collaboration between researchers and security forces responsible for torture. Both these cases raise parallel questions to those raised by the academic boycott about the political effects of research, and they allow us to see more clearly what is at stake in the boycott’s refusal of intellectual engagement. They are both also extremely interesting in their own right, and sharply raise the question of the conditions in which it can be politically regressive to undertake academic research—something we do not think enough about in universities.

In the last chapter, I look more generally at the connections between thinking and political inaction, and explore ways in which intellectual work can exert a conservatizing political impact. We like to think that the work we do as researchers, scholars, and thinkers is inherently progressive, but I think that—unfortunately!—that is clearly an illusion. What makes the academic boycott so interesting and also such an important example for the Left is that it is a case where political advances do not arise from the explicit pursuit of intellectual work, but from the outright suspension of it, or at least its outright suspension in the university. When we boycott certain kinds of intellectual exchange, just like when we go on strike, we are saying that there is something more important than engaging in the kinds of organized thinking that universities sponsor. It seems to me there is an important lesson there more broadly, about the risks of  “smartwashing” and about the responsibility to do more than think and talk. So the book ends with a defense of a certain kind of progressive anti-intellectualism.

Excerpt from the book (from Chapter 3, pp. 59-63) 

Denying Politics

Academics who encourage their colleagues to implement the institutional boycott of Israel violate one of higher education’s firmest commands: never politicize. In an academy often attacked as in thrall to dangerous “political correctness” – that is, politicized to the point of censorship – and riven by endless “political” disputes, including over Palestine, the claim that politics is regularly taboo will seem ludicrous. It is anything but. Just like any structured, professional activity, academia certainly has its own politics: academics seek power, strategize, form blocs, and make professional choices in ways that they believe further their values or interests, and that sometimes align with political choices they make outside the institution. This is not, however, the kind of politics that is relevant here: university workers are no more or less “political” in this – trivial – sense than are other comparable professionals. It is no more informative to conclude that universities are especially political places because they are the sites of academic or intellectual politics, than it would be to conclude that offices are especially political because they are the sites of office politics. But if academia well and truly has its own politics, that is where politics in universities is supposed to stop. In the imagination of most academics, universities should be undistorted by external political agendas: the objection that supposedly purely academic topics have been “politicized” is one of the right’s main complaints against the academic left.  

That doesn’t mean that politics isn’t regularly discussed in universities. When prominent BDS-opponent Cary Nelson claims that “all teaching and research is fundamentally and deeply political,” especially in the humanities and social sciences, what he means, he tells us, is that it is in “dialogue with cultural values and norms that undergo continual change and that are sites of struggle, linked to assumptions about identity that are socially and politically constructed, engaged with social life and the public sphere and thus with the politics of culture, constrained and encouraged by discourses embedded in politics.” This claim of the distinctly political character of academic work amounts to the observation – an uncontroversial one – that universities abound in discussion of political topics: Nelson’s claim that the humanities and social sciences are “in dialogue” with politically important themes means that academics and students often relate their teaching and research to political issues.

The crucial point, however, is that talking about politics is not the same as participating in it. If we understand politics as the effort “to share power or … to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state,” then, contrary to Nelson and others’ belief, it plays almost no part in most academics’ professional (as opposed to personal) lives, even when its “political” character is trumpeted. “Academics look at the social world as something to be studied, to be researched, to be analyzed, even to be opined – but not to be acted on,” according to Daniel W. Drezner in his study of the “ideas industry.” This is not to say that academics never act politically: “there comes a time,” one US scholar is quoted as saying in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election in 2016, “when you have to take your head out of your books and your computers” and “try to come out, as some people say, on the right side of history.” Most of the time, however, books and computers are where academics’ heads stay firmly planted: the distinguishing feature of many kinds of academic professionalism, especially in much of the humanities, is its aspiration to stand imperiously above, and therefore not immediately affect, worldly political matters. To deal with “the broadly defined ‘humanities’,” Said wrote in 1982, “is to deal with the non-political.” 

The comment captures an important truth: while academics often debate or invoke politics, sometimes heatedly, academic work rarely engages it: even if academics’ choice of problems to teach or research is informed by political considerations, and academics intend their teaching and research to contribute to advocacy for particular political positions, including Palestine justice, these goals are typically understood as derivative of their more essential academic features. Academic work can serve secondary political purposes only if it is, first and foremost, academic: the expression of political positions cannot, in conventional understandings, be allowed to escalate so far as to jeopardize scholarly objectivity, which is what guarantees universities’ imagined status as independent, non-partisan institutions.

It’s therefore no surprise that the assertion of the political nature of academic work, especially in the humanities and social sciences, is rarely meant to suggest that it could bear any strong relevance, let alone constitute any real challenge, to specific political actors. Politics as a concrete practice – and, even more so, the politics of Palestine justice – is for the most part taboo in universities. Cary Nelson concludes as a result of four decades’ observation that “the overwhelming majority of faculty members are reluctant to reveal their political views to their students”; “[d]uring my last six-year stint in the political science department at DePaul University in Chicago,” Norman Finkelstein tells us, “the country passed through two presidential elections, September 11, and two major wars, yet I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of political conversations with my colleagues.” So while academics do from time to time use their professional personas to take a stand on questions of immediate political moment, they do so mostly in heavily qualified ways, and almost always with the reminder that their students or readers must decide for themselves where they stand. Cushioned in that very typical proviso, the divorce between scholarship and politics is consummated. Politics is constitutively insulated from academic authority. It is the domain of opinion, where participants must ultimately be free to make their own choices: scholarship, safely confined within the seminar room or academic article, is politically inert. Speech in universities simply does not usually aim to mobilize opinion in favor of a concrete political outcome. 

Given their general professional aversion to explicit politics, academics’ reluctance to embrace BDS is wholly expected, but it becomes even less surprising when seen in light of the profession’s general unwillingness to seriously defend its own professional milieus from the decades of higher education “reform” that have degraded it in many parts of the west. All around the English-speaking world, and in many places beyond it, neoliberalism in universities has largely won a crushing victory at students’ and academics’ expense. In that light, insistent claims of disciplines’ “political” character stand out in bathetic relief against their inability to accomplish what should be, surely, among their most elementary “political” aims – safeguarding the institutional security of their own practitioners. In relation to an important mechanism of the neoliberalization of higher education, the rise of academic managers, one attentive observer even feels that “the colonization of higher education by management has never been openly discussed.” Another – a London politics academic – says he found his five-year experience as an official of the University and College Union “exhausting and demoralizing, because so few academics seemed willing to participate” in defense of pay, pensions and reforms of higher education governance.

Any number of aspects of the professional culture of higher education support western academics’ unwillingness to acknowledge or confront their own political agency, whether over BDS or over their more immediate self-interest. In The Authoritarian Personality, Adorno identified the tendency of educational systems “to discourage anything supposedly ‘speculative,’ or which cannot be corroborated by surface findings, and stated in terms of ‘facts and figures’.” The analysis is still germane after more than seventy years. As the very agents of the positivistic educational culture Adorno identified, and institutionally immersed in a highly quantified world of enrolment figures, citation counts, grant income, funding formulas and ranking positions, there is nothing surprising in academics’ apparent inability to engage in “speculative” politics by grasping their own potential to act. The investment which academics typically bring to questions of disciplinary, intellectual politics – Which field will a new position be created in? What subjects are to be compulsory for final-year students? – contrasts starkly with their frequent disengagement from the broader issues which set the parameters of their professional life, whether over the Israel boycott or many other macro-questions of institutional politics. There is no lack of precedent for political activity by academics. But it is understood as exceptional, and often viewed with a certain degree of hesitation or embarrassment, even by its participants. 

Palestinians cannot expect strong support from a profession that often cannot bring itself to defend its own members: resistance to the boycott is one especially obvious consequence of academics’ general disengagement from politics. The effect of scholarly political quietism is, of course, wholly political in its reinforcement of the status quo. 

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https://electronicintifada.net/content/why-are-colleges-civil-israel/38176

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Why are colleges “civil” to Israel?

Rod SuchThe Electronic Intifada12 July 2023

Boycott Theory and the Struggle for Palestine: Universities, Intellectualism and Liberation by Nick Riemer, Rowman & Littlefield (2023)

Australian scholar Nick Riemer explains the focus of his new in-depth study of the academic boycott of Israel by saying that “almost everything in the politics and culture of higher education works against academics boycotting Israel.”

Indeed, the obstacles presented by that culture are what’s mainly addressed in Boycott Theory and the Struggle for Palestine: Universities, Intellectualism and Liberation as he delves into the history of the academic boycott.

Academics, especially in the United States, have been denied work or tenure because of their advocacy for Palestine, a story presented in We Will Not Be Silenced: The Academic Repression of Israel’s Critics – an anthology of testimonials from repressed scholars published in 2017 but still relevant today.

Riemer describes the origins and early successes of the academic boycott, predating the 2005 Palestinian civil society call for BDS with the formation of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) a year earlier.

Even earlier, in 2002, Riemer notes, “several hundred European academics and researchers called for a moratorium on European funding of Israeli cultural and research institutions.” By year’s end, the University of Paris 6, now part of the Sorbonne, called for cutting off the European Union’s research agreement with Israel.

Other victories followed, including the University of Johannesburg in South Africa severing ties with Israel’s Ben-Gurion University in 2011. Numerous academic associations adopted pro-BDS resolutions in solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Ideology of the academy

But unlike the BDS movement against apartheid South Africa, which resulted in many US universities actually divesting from companies doing business with the country, nearly all Western universities and colleges have resisted calls from faculty and students to cut ties with Israel.

Riemer locates many of the reasons why, including university links to the military-industrial complex. But he reserves most of his critique for the dominant ideological narrative of “academic freedom” and the “civility” and “collegiality” reasons given for maintaining ties with Israeli academic institutions.

Riemer notes that from its beginning, PACBI called for the boycott of Israeli institutions, not individual Israeli scholars.

This provision, recognizing Israeli academics who oppose the occupation, differed from the academic boycott call issued in 1958 by the African National Congress – a blanket boycott of both institutions and individuals. Objections were rarely raised about the issue of “academic freedom” when it came to boycotting apartheid South Africa.

Riemer documents numerous examples of academic freedom being denied to Palestinian scholars, rarely acknowledged by hypocritical Western academic institutions.

Israeli troops routinely impose checkpoints outside university entrances, raid Palestinian campuses and arrest and imprison students. Movement restrictions prevent many Palestinian students from studying or teaching abroad or even in other parts of Palestine, and international scholars are restricted from teaching in the West Bank and Gaza.

As of 2022, Israel announced that it would vet all applications from foreign academics to teach at West Bank universities after a long history of limiting the number of foreign academics and refusing entry and re-entry. Israel’s numerous bombing campaigns in Gaza have not only disrupted education for long periods but have often targeted university campuses and buildings.

Outside Palestine, examples abound of “academic freedom” being denied to scholars who lost their positions due to their advocacy for Palestinian rights, such as Norman Finkelstein, Steven Salaita and Cornel West, to name only a few.

More recently, the effort by Israel and its proxies to impose the highly flawed IHRA definition of anti-Semitism on campuses – conflating criticism of Israel and Zionism with anti-Jewish bigotry – has resulted in numerous cancellations of scheduled talks, courses and film screenings in direct contradiction to most notions of academic freedom.

Riemer goes beyond the issue of censorship by asking why academic culture values not just civility and collegiality but actually negates the boycott by elevating thinking above acting. In contrast to the famous quote from Karl Marx, Riemer seems to be saying that for most academics, the point is to just interpret the world, not to change it.

The later chapters of Boycott Theory delve into this and related questions, such as those related to free speech and the right, both morally and politically, to disrupt hate speech aimed at reinforcing “the murderous practices of Israeli apartheid.” Riemer also discusses the role of intellectuals, asking can there be theory without practice, and what are the differences between solitary and collective intelligence.

Riemer couches some of these ideas in provocative phrases, such as the need for “groupthink” and “anti-intellectualism.”

Unfortunately, as intriguing as some of his ideas are, the author fails to convey them in an expository way by explaining the concept in detail, presenting the evidence for it and disrupting contrary claims. As a result, the reader is left unconvinced.

Tactic vs. strategy

Is there a need for a “theory of boycott,” as implied by the book’s title?

There is, but the author’s frequent description of the boycott as a tactic neglects its chief importance as a strategy.

The African National Congress regardedboycott, divestment and sanctions as one of the “four pillars” of South Africa’s liberation struggle, giving it a place of importance equal to its other strategic methods: armed struggle, political mass struggle and clandestine underground struggle.

The BDS movement has become a strategic component of the Palestinian liberation struggle not only because it has united Palestinians (polls show that more than 80 percent of Palestinians support BDS), but also because it has given people around the world a way to support that liberation struggle on a global scale.

It has also been the chief vehicle for changing the once-dominant belief that Israel is a democracy deserving of support, to an insurgent narrative that Israel is an apartheid state and that apartheid must end.

It is an idea that has become a material force. After all, ideas – once they’re grasped by a mass of people – can become a force in their own right.

Rod Such is a former editor for World Book and Encarta encyclopedias. He lives in Portland, Oregon, where he is active in the Demilitarize Portland2Palestine campaign.

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Three Cheers for Nick Riemer, Useful Idiot

Three Cheers for Nick Riemer, Useful Idiot 

14th April 2019

Timothy Cootes

In the debate over the establishment of the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, no one has sniped and sneered from the opposing camp with anything quite like the ferocious energy of Dr. Nick Riemer, senior lecturer in English and Linguistics at the University of Sydney. No doubt, his noisy interventions must leave many longing for the days when the musings of academics were only available in the mercifully unreadable journals of the academic Left. Riemer, with his endless tweets, op-eds, essays, and campus protests, has been very difficult to avoid.

Not that I really mind, I have to confess. Surprisingly, whenever I come across Riemer’s latest hissy-fit in the Sydney Morning Herald, I react with wry appreciation rather than annoyance. You see, those of us who support the goals of Ramsay couldn’t have asked for a better enemy. His arguments — I’m being charitable when I use such a word — are so risible that I’m doubtful that he has persuaded anyone at all. If anything, he has powerfully made the case for the Ramsay Centre in a useful albeit unwitting manner.

Although Riemer’s campaign has been running for months, he introduced himself to a wider audience in the aftermath of the massacre in Christchurch. In a much-discussed column, he set out his reflections on that awful event in his characteristically obtuse way:

Many academics have accused Ramsay of being the intellectual face of a Western supremacist politics, and therefore fundamentally incompatible with universities’ obligation to support multiculturalism.

I like the honesty here: indeed, only academics could come up with such a ridiculous notion. The general and far more intelligent public would struggle to find a connection between a fondness for Plato and Aristotle and the horrors of white supremacy. Riemer, though, encouraged his readership to “reflect seriously on how the Ramsay curriculum validates the worldview behind Friday’s massacre.”

How so, exactly?

Well, Riemer seems especially bothered — or “triggered”, as the kids say these days — by the proposed reading list and its suggestion that the Great Books ought to be studied as a whole. That is, one should begin with Homer, stop by Augustine, and follow up with Shakespeare and Nietzsche. For Riemer, this will logically lead students and the Australian society at large to adopt attitudes of European supremacy, and only bloodshed could follow that.

Looking back, it’s obvious Riemer’s case against Ramsay would end up here. He had previously asserted, without any explanation, that the mere existence of Ramsay on campus could be physically harmful and constitute “a threat to students from non-Western backgrounds.”

If all this seems a bit bewildering, then congratulations: you, dear reader, have been spared whatever passes for an education in the humanities at our universities. Riemer apparently sees sinister and bloodthirsty motivations where none exist, and his vision is hard to square with the Ramsay Centre’s humbly stated ambition to “promote an interest in and awareness of Western Civilisation.”

For this reason, his connecting Ramsay with the massacre of innocent Muslims at prayer deserves special condemnation. The thinking here goes something like this: the murderer in Christchurch fretted about the state of the West, and anyone who shares those concerns must similarly share his aims and approve of his methods. This is an inexpensive and asinine trick, and an academic who is allegedly interested in the use of language should know better.

It’s too easy to point out, for example, that Riemer’s rhetorical flaying of the Western world, its heritage, as well as Israel and Zionism (of course) would meet the approval of any hardened jihadist. Let me hasten to add that such a comparison is unfair, of course. Despite some ideological comradeship, Riemer probably wouldn’t make a good recruit for the Islamic State.

No comparison is really necessary, anyway: dealing with Riemer and his shabby arguments is easy enough. Writing for a more ursine audience in Overland, he allowed himself to be even more unpersuasive in a follow-up rant:

In arts faculties themselves, the danger posed by the ‘Western Civilisation’ program has been clear to all but a small group of hold-outs. Driving the opposition to Ramsay has, of course, been the self-evident fact that the whole project is an initiative of the racist right…

One can begin to detect the elements of his strategy here: meet the word count by banging on about xenophobia, chauvinism, and white supremacy without ever saying anything meaningful at all. It’s remarkable, in a way: apparently, you can can easily get a series of non-sequiturs published in national newspapers and magazines. He groped his way towards an argument by drawing attention to the list of speakers for Ramsay’s public lectures, which includes Greg Sheridan of The Australian, the leftie writer and editor of Areo, Helen Pluckrose, and Rod Dreher of The American Conservative, among others.

And? So what? There’s certainly more intellectual diversity here than what you’d find at the typical humanities faculty meeting at, say, Mr Riemer’s Sydney University roost, where I’m sure there are hugely varying levels of commitment to the revolutionary struggle. And that’s the point, after all. Riemer, backed by an army of his colleagues, demonstrates just how corrupt and rotten and censorial the universities have become. The Australian public knows it, too, and Riemer seems to be working hard to convince them further.

That’s why I welcome his efforts. In all his anti-Ramsay whinging, one sees, very clearly, the case for the Ramsay Centre and why it must succeed. I suspect that Riemer may ultimately assist with this project rather than his own. In a small way, the Great Books program will be established not despite his interventions, but because of them.

Nick Riemer and his co-thinkers don’t know it, but their petulance and intolerance of others’ ideas is further proof of the need for the Ramsay Centre. Among the many things they don’t know and can’t understand, he and they are actually helping the right side.

Timothy Cootes has written for Quadrant, Quillette, and The Spectator Australia. He lives in Sydney.

13.07.23

Editorial Note

IAM notes that Western scholarship has, by and large, avoided topics that could upset Arabs and Iranians. A substantial academic industry decries Islamophobia, the purported Western fear and loathing of Islam and Muslims. In this view, the 9/11 attacks and the war on terror dramatically increased hatred of all things Muslim in Western discourse. To avoid further inflaming Islamophobia, the famously self-censoring academic community has threaded very lightly on topics of Arab and Iranian antisemitism. Iran, in particular, has so far escaped close scrutiny of its long-standing antisemitic record and persistent denial of the Holocaust.     

To provide a more balanced view, IAM has taken the initiative to highlight scholars researching Middle East antisemitism. 

Arguably, Dr. Matthias Küntzel, a German historian and political scientist, should be considered a leading voice in this group. He was a non-resident research associate of the Vidal Sassoon Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University between 2004 to 2015. He is currently a member of the German Council on Foreign Relations and the German Historical Association. Kuntzel started his career some thirty years ago by exploring how Auschwitz could happen. He then moved on to investigate the impact of Nazi antisemitism on the Middle East. Küntzel’s earlier books include Germany and Iran; Jihad and Jew Hatred; Bonn & the Bomb, among others. His newest work is Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East: The 1948 Arab War against Israel and the Aftershocks of World War II. 

By researching the Nazi archives, Kuntzel discovered that the Ministry of Propaganda of the Third Reich created an extensive propaganda network aimed at the Near and Middle East. Radio Berlin broadcasted daily programs in Arabic and Farsi, which were very popular among the public. As a young theology student, Ruhollah Khomeini listened to the Persian propaganda from Berlin and embraced it when he came to power in 1979. The leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt were also influenced. It became clear in their foundational writings. In those days listening to the radio was a public occasion. People sat in cafes in the town square.

In May 1942, Louis Dreyfus, the American ambassador to Iran, wrote that German propaganda “made a deep impression on the masses. The daily radio broadcasts from Berlin had been particularly effective and a film audience in the poor section of Tehran had cheered wildly for Hitler and at decidedly the wrong places when a British war film was shown. At one point, the British pressured the Iranian police to remove all radios from public places, but they were quickly restored.”

In the Arab world, the first Arabic pamphlet, Islam and Judaism, was published in August 1937 in Cairo by the Director of the Palestinian-Arab Bureau of Information in Egypt, who is believed to have had many contacts with Nazi agents. In 1938 a German version of Islam and Judaism was published in Berlin under the title: “Islam – Judaism. Call of the Grand Mufti to the Islamic world in 1937”. Islam and Judaism derailed plans for a two-state solution for Palestine. 

Islam and Judaism is significant because it is possibly the very first document to construct a continuity between Muhammad’s confrontation with the Jews in Medina and the contemporary conflict in Palestine, thus linking the seventh to the twentieth century. It is the first written evidence of Islamic antisemitism and the forerunner of Sayyid Qutb’s 1950 pamphlet Our Struggle with the Jews. Islam and Judaism concludes that “the verses from the Qur’an and hadith prove to you that the Jews have been the bitterest enemies of Islam and continue to try to destroy it. Do not believe them, they only know hypocrisy and cunning. Hold together, fight for the Islamic thought, fight for your religion and your existence! Do not rest until your land is free of the Jews.” 

According to Kuntzel, the Muslim Brotherhood was the largest antisemitic movement in the world, in 1948, with one million members, and it was determined to continue the war started by Hitler, with the help of the Mufti, to prevent a Jewish state. “Its campaign could draw on the lingering echoes of the antisemitic Nazi propaganda in which preventing the emergence of a Jewish state and wiping out the Jews living in Palestine had been constant themes.”

Kuntzel’s work provides insight into a topic that is hardly discussed. 

References:

http://www.matthiaskuentzel.de/contents/broadcasting-as-a-weapon-the-persian-language-nazi-propaganda-and-its-consequences

Broadcasting as a weapon: The Persian-language Nazi propaganda and its consequences

I delivered this speech on June 4, 2023 on the occasion of the Klangteppich V – Festival for Music of the Iranian Diaspora in Berlin

By Matthias Küntzel

Hamburg, 04.07.2023

As a German who doesn’t even read Farsi, why am I dealing with Iran? It is firstly because Iran is a particularly fascinating country with a particularly fascinating history and population. Secondly, it is because I have always followed the great uprisings of the Iranian people against Ali Khamenei and his regime and supported them in my essays: the Green Movement of 2009, the Movement of 2019, and now, of course, the Woman-Life-Freedom Uprising, which continues today while we are here in Berlin. Third, I am also particularly interested in Iran because one of my research interests is the ideology of Islamism and its connection to antisemitism.

In the beginning of my research, more than 30 years ago, I naturally wanted to know how Auschwitz could happen and why my parents were able to love Adolf Hitler as teenagers. To understand this, I focused on Nazi ideology, and specifically Nazi antisemitism.

Since the 9/11 attack in 2001, I began to study Jew-hatred in Islamic societies and especially the Muslim Brotherhood, that is, Sunni Islam. In 2005, the then Iranian President Ahmadinejad demanded that Israel be erased and disappear from the map. That same year, at the Frankfurt Book Fair, I was able to buy from Iranian booksellers an English written copy of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion: the most prominent antisemitic libel and Hitler’s textbook for the Holocaust.

I started to study the reasons and roots of the Iranian regime’s hatred of Israel and its antisemitism. I was especially interested in the influence that Nazi Germany had taken to create and strengthen this hatred also in Iran.

In doing so, I discovered that the Nazis used very well done radio broadcasts to spread their hate propaganda in the Near and Middle East not only in Arabic, but also in Persian language, day after day from 1939 to 1945. After all, Ruhollah Khomeini was one of the regular listeners to the Persian-language propaganda from Berlin. This brings us to our topic – the Persian-language radio propaganda of the Nazis and its after-effects.

German-Iranian cooperation during World War II

Let me start with a few basic facts about the the special relationship between Tehran and Berlin. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, Germany and Persia have made a great team. Persia needed Germany because it distrusted all the other great powers but was dependent on foreign technical assistance. Germany needed Iran because it was the only raw material-rich country as yet unconquered in the nineteenth-century struggle for colonies. These mutual interests produced an unparalleled level of cooperation between a Christian and a Muslim country.

Already in the First World War most Iranians had supported the Germans, who were fighting their common enemies, the British and the Russians. Moreover, the Germans also enjoyed great prestige as technicians and engineers. Since the mid-1920s, Germany had not only laid the foundations of an Iranian industrial infrastructure, but also exported technical education to Iran.

With the start of the Second World War, cooperation became especially close. In 1940 47 percent of all Iranian exports went to Nazi Germany, while Germany’s share of Iranian imports had reached 43 percent. During those years, eighty percent of all machinery in the country came from Germany.

Iran was of strategic importance for the Nazis’ warfare. According to Adolf Hitler’s plan the Wehrmacht would after the assault on the Soviet Union occupy the Caucasus and in so doing, open the way to the Middle East. Then Iran and Iraq would be conquered and the British Empire destroyed from the south. According to the Nazi plan, a pro-German mass-movement in Iran reinforced by a concentrated propaganda effort would prepare for the German invasion of that country. Fortunately, however, the war took a different course. 

The Nazi radio at work

At the beginning of World War II German short-wave transmitters were broadcasting in 15 different foreign languages. However, of all the foreign-language broadcasting units, the “Orient Zone” was given “absolute priority”. It broadcast to Arabs and Persians, but also to Turks and Indians and employed about 80 people, including some 20 presenters and translators.

Editorial control was in the hands of the Foreign Office Radio Policy Department and the program content was determined in cooperation with the Propaganda Ministry and the Wehrmacht High Command’s Foreign Propaganda Department. The broadcasts were recorded in Berlin, Kaiserdamm no. 77 and then transferred by a special telephone line to Zeesen, a small village 40 kms south of Berlin.

The transmitter systems in Zeesen were equipped with state-of-the-art directional antennae. The American radio expert César Searchinger described the “huge” short-wave radio complex in Zeesen as “the biggest and most powerful propaganda machine in the world” and its “supremely cunning technology of mass influence” as “the most formidable institution for the dissemination of a political doctrine that the world has ever seen.”

While exaggerated, the assessment is not wholly false. While all the combatant powers in the Second World War used short-wave transmitters in different languages, the Zeesen radio had some special features.

Firstly, in 1936 the Olympics took place in Berlin. The overhaul of the Zeesen short wave equipment carried out in preparation for this event had greatly improved its long-range sound quality. No other station provided a better listening experience than Radio Zeesen.

Secondly, the Orient Zone editors succeeded in recruiting Bahram Shahrokh as their Persian announcer. He was an outstanding speaker with a good voice and excellent diction. A 1941 survey of German propaganda achievements in Iran boasted that “Sharokh [was] always praised as a brilliant speaker and was more popular than even others, including the enemy ones.”

Let me give you an example how Shahrokh’s antisemitic incitement in Berlin had at times a direct impact on the situation of the Jews in Iran. An Iranian Jewish woman, her name is Parvin, who was 17 years old at the time, remembers in particular a speech by Bahram Shahrokh on Radio Zeesen on the occasion of the Jewish Purim festival. Shahrokh urged the audience to exact revenge for the alleged massacre of Persians by Jews that the biblical Purim story mentions. Parvin recalls:

The next day some Muslim friends of my father came into his pharmacy and demanded an explanation. I was with him that day and heard them belittle and mock the Jews. When my father tried to explain the issue … they attacked him and grabbed his neck, whereupon my father told me to run home. I never asked, nor did I ever find out how he got rid of them.

At the same time Shahrokh presented himself as brave and cheeky. He repeatedly made barbed remarks about Reza Shah, the detested Iranian ruler. Following angry protests from Reza Shah, who was a regular listener of the German radio station, at the end of 1940 the German Foreign Office had to take Shahrokh off air, but only temporarily. In August 1941 Britain and the Soviet Union occupied Iran, ousted Reza Shah Pahlavi from his throne and installed his son, Mohammed Reza Shah, in his stead. Shortly thereafter, Shahrokh was back on air.

Thirdly, the Zeesen broadcasts employed a crude and folksy antisemitism. In 1940 Reader Bullard, the British Ambassador to Iran, complained that, “Even if we [the British] do broadcast in Persian, we cannot hope to rival the Germans in interest, as their more violent, abusive style, with exaggerated claims … appeals to the Persian public.”

And indeed: Radio Zeesen’s programs were rabble-rousing rather than factual. Their aim was not to inform, but to incite antisemitism and to boast of German successes. They were targeted at a mass audience rather than intellectuals. Thus, the United Nations was dubbed the “United Jewish Nations,” and the Jordanian king, Emir Abdullah, was mocked as “Rabbi Abdullah” for wanting to negotiate with the Zionists.

The fourth distinguishing feature of this radio propaganda was its adaptation to Islam.

Already during World War I, many Shi’ite clerics had demonstrated reverence for the German Emperor as a protector and a secret convert to Islam. Hitler, for as long as the Germans were winning, was an even better figure upon which to project such a myth. A report on this matter by the German Ambassador in Tehran, Erwin Ettel, of February 1941 is illuminating:

For months, reports have been reaching the Embassy from the most varied sources that throughout the country clerics are speaking out, telling the faithful about old, enigmatic prophesies and dreams which they interpret to mean that God has sent the Twelfth Imam into the world in the shape of Hitler. Wholly without Embassy involvement, an increasingly influential propaganda theme has come into being, in which the Führer and therefore Germany are seen as the deliverers from all evil.

The German short-wave radio station was happy to exploit these fantasies in its Farsi broadcasts. However, Erwin Ettel was not satisfied. The Imam-belief strengthened the love of Germany, but it contributed little to hatred of the Jews. Here was still work for him to do.

It was understood in Berlin that German-style antisemitism would have little resonance in Iran. “The broad masses lack a feeling for the race idea,” explained the propaganda expert of the German embassy in Tehran. He therefore laid “all the emphasis on the religious motif in our propaganda in the Islamic world. This is the only way to win over the Orientals.” But how exactly could Nazi Germany, of all countries, conduct a religious propaganda campaign? Ambassador Ettel had an idea:

“A way to foster this development would be to highlight Muhammad’s struggle against the Jews in ancient times and that of the Führer in modern times,” Ettel recommended to the Foreign Office. “Additionally, by identifying the British with the Jews, an exceptionally effective anti-English propaganda campaign can be conducted among the Shi’ite people.”

Ettel even picked out the appropriate Koranic passages: firstly, sura 5, verse 82: “Truly you will find that the most implacable of men in their enmity to the faithful are the Jews and the pagans”; and, secondly, the final sentence of chapter 2 of Mein Kampf: “In resisting the Jew, I do the work of the Lord.”

Ettel’s proposal demonstrates that the Nazis sought to use religion to create an implacable hostility to the Jews. Again and again the program makers of the Orient Zone repeated only those verses from the Koran that are suitable for presenting the Jews as “enemies of Islam.” Let me quote the historian David Motadel:

Berlin made explicit use of religious rhetoric, terminology, and imagery and sought to … reinterpret religious doctrine and concepts to manipulate Muslims for political and military purposes. … German propaganda combined Islam with anti-Jewish agitation to an extent that had not hitherto been known in the modern Muslim world.

These, then, were the four special characteristics of Radio Zeesen’s Iranian broadcasts: First, the excellent sound quality, second, its popular speaker, third, the populist agitation, and fourth, the use and abuse of religion.

What do we know about the resonance of this propaganda among the Iranian population?

We must keep in mind that during the 1930s short-wave radios offered a medium with a great power of attraction. In his memoirs, Grand Ayatollah Husain Ali Montazeri recalls the installation of a radio in an Isfahan coffee house at the end of the 1930s: “Thousands of people” had come to see and hear the radio including Montazeri himself, who was wondering, “what is a radio?”

In those days listening to the radio was a public occasion. People did so in coffee houses and bazaars. Sometimes the radio would be placed on a pedestal in the town square around which the information hungry would gather. For example, the population in the center of Tehran was regularly bombarded with German news at the Maidan-I-Sepah Square. What had been heard would immediately then be talked about, further extending the reach of the programs’ message. It has been estimated that by the start of the 1940s, “about a million people were regularly listening to the radio in the Middle East and North Africa.”

Obviously, Germany’s Farsi-language wartime broadcasts enjoyed great popularity. Let me quote Iranian writer Amir Hassan Sheheltan:

In many newspapers and private notes of the time we find reports of how in the late 1930s … during the broadcast of the Farsi-language news from Berlin people would gather together on the steps of the tea houses with a radio set in order to listen to the Germans’ reports of their territorial gains on the various fronts. The reports inspired the fantasy of the crowd on the street that every victory corresponded to a defeat for the colonial powers, the Soviet Union and Britain, which they cheered and applauded.

Moreover, after the deposition of Reza Shah in 1941 by Britain and the Soviet Union, many fervently awaited the German invasion of Iran, hoping that it would put an end to the hated British-Soviet occupation. Now the Nazis’ radio propaganda was more than just commentary on the war: it was an instrument in the service of the “liberation” of Iran by German forces.

“In those days”, according to an American journalist, “swastikas were painted on the walls of many houses in Tehran. Bazaar traders sold pictures of Hitler. The new Shah recalled that, ’… the German … propaganda was very effective. … The propagandists always depicted Hitler as a Muslim and descendant of the Prophet. He was said to have been born with a green band around his body’.”

In May 1942, also Louis Dreyfus, the American ambassador to Iran at the time, was alerted: 

German propaganda … made a deep impression on the masses. The daily radio broadcasts from Berlin had been particularly effective and a film audience in the poor section of Tehran had cheered wildly for Hitler and at decidedly the wrong places when a British war film was shown. At one point, the British pressured the Iranian police to remove all radios from public places, but they were quickly restored, again at British request, when it was found, strangely, that one could not tune in the British broadcasts either, without a radio.

Finally, in June 1942, the BBC reported: “Although action is been taken to make effective the ban on public listening to Axis broadcasts, it seems that listening in private houses is still widely practiced. As a result it appears that many people are still convinced that the Axis powers will win the war; Hitler, moreover, is said to enjoy great personal popularity.”

At the same time, after the fall of Reza Shah, who, despite his admiration for Hitler, did not share the latter’s antisemitism, Jew-hatred began to play a greater role in the Zeesen broadcasts. Among the regular listeners to this material was a man of whom the world was later to hear much more: Ruhollah Khomeini.

“Germany’s Persian service was, during the war, to enjoy the widest possible audience in Iran and Iraq”, writes Amir Taheri in his biography of Khomeini. When, in winter 1938 Khomeini, then aged thirty-six, returned from Iraq to Qum in Iran, he 

had brought with him a radio set made by the British company Pye which he had bought from an Indian Muslim pilgrim. The radio proved a good buy. … It also gave him a certain prestige. Many mullahs and talabehs would gather at his home, often on the terrace, in the evenings to listen to Radio Berlin [= Radio Zeesen] and the BBC.

Even though Khomeini opposed Hitler and National Socialism, it is reasonable to assume that there is a link between the eruption of his Jew-hatred in 1963 and the invective from Berlin that he had imbibed over the radio 20 years previously.

Did Radio Zeesen influence Ayatollah Khomeini?

Research on the impact of the Nazi’s radio propaganda in Iran has just begun and many additional discoveries can be expected. What we can conclude today is that this radio propaganda changed the generell perception of the so-called Jewish danger.

In 1963, the Nazi seeds may have bore fruits when Khomeini enriched his anti-Shah campaign with anti-Jewish slogans. Now his religious warning cry “Attack on Islam” was replaced by the antisemitic battle cry “Jews and foreigners wish to destroy Islam!”

Khomeini’s most important book, The Islamic State, published in 1971, is full of antisemitic invective. Let me quote just one sentence: ”[T]he Jews and their foreign backers are opposed to the very foundations of Islam and wish to establish Jewish domination throughout the world. Since they are a cunning and resourceful group of people, I fear that – God Forbid – they may one day achieve their goal.”

Such fantasies about Jewish world domination were never part of the Shiite tradition. Here Khomeini has adopted a key idea of European antisemitism and linked it to his religion-based anti-Judaism. Khomeini had been a regular listener to the Nazis’ wartime Farsi-language broadcasts and, although it cannot in retrospect be proven, it would seem obvious that his fantasy had at least partly been shaped by this six-year-long barrage of antisemitic Nazi propaganda.

In addition, Radio Zeesen propagated exactly the kind of genocidal anti-Zionism which became prevalent after the Islamic revolution.

We have to keep in mind that between 1906 and 1979 no other Muslim country had such an enlightened religious leadership as Iran; a religious leadership that also accepted Iran’s good relationship with Israel.

As early as 1967, however, Khomeini started to preach a genocidal hatred against Israel. It is the “duty” of all Muslims, he told his followers during that year, “to annihilate unbelieving and inhuman Zionism.”

After the victory of the Islamic Revolution in 1979, three things happend: First, Khomeini ordered the execution of Iran’s most prominent Jew, Habib Elghanian, in a sustained effort to intimidate the Iranian Jewish community.

Second: He moderated his tone and promised to spare Iranian Jews, provided they accepted a subordinate status and radically distanced themselves from Israel.

Third: Iran’s new rulers began to concentrate their anti-Jewish hatred on Israel. They began to use the term “Zionist” the way Hitler used the word “Judas”: as a cipher for all evil in the world. “From the beginning,” Khomeini declared in 1981, “one of our main goals was the destruction of Israel.”

The real aim of Khomeini’s struggle with the Jews was, in my opinion, the wish to fight all aspects of modernity that could undermine his conservative concept of Islam. This connection between antisemitism and anti-modernism also explains the popularity of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which is of Russian origin, in the Islamic world. 

This text was conceived as a rallying cry against liberalism: in order to drive forward the struggle against individual freedom the latter is denounced as the main tool of a global Jewish conspiracy. Ideas originally disseminated a hundred years previously by Tsarist agents in order to save Tsarism are today being repeated by key leaders of Islam in order to secure the domination of a conservative Islam.

At the beginning of my talk I mentioned the Woman-Life-Freedom Uprising, which continues today while we are here in Berlin. The courage of the women of Iran and their persistent fight for freedom is for me still a bright beacon of hope for the future. 

But for this hope to be realized, it is – I think – essential to also look back and answer the question – What went wrong? – which I at least partly tried to do today. Thank you for your attention.

(The sources of the quotes can be found in my book Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East: The 1948 Arab War against Israel and the Aftershocks of World War II, to be published by Routledge in August 2023. Please visit the Homepage of Berlin’s Klangteppich V – Festival for Music of the Iranian Diaspora here.)

Bild: Rundfunkempfänger Telefunken Super “Zeesen” T 875 WK. Quelle: Stiftung Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin · Lizenz: CC0 – No rights reserved · Bild wurde beschnitten und farblich angepasst.

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The 1948 Arab war against Israel: An aftershock of World War II?

The 1948 Arab war against Israel: An aftershock of World War II?

In introduction to some discoveries and arguments of my new book: “Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East: The 1948 Arab War against Israel and the Aftershocks of World War II”.

By Matthias Küntzel

FATHOM, JUNE 2023

Is there any connection between the Nazi war of extermination against the Jews that ended in May 1945 and the war of the Arab armies against Israel which started in May 1948? It’s an obvious question, but one that is rarely asked. Why?

The answer is because – at least this is my assumption – the provable existence of threads of continuity between 1945 and 1948 calls into question cherished certainties: for example, the conviction that the Arab movement against Zionism and Israel had nothing to do with the Nazi fantasies of the previous phase and that Israel, i.e. Jews, were mainly responsible for the 1948 war and antisemitism in the region.

My new book Nazism, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East(Routledge, August 2023) challenges this conventional wisdom. It offers a new interpretation of the origins of the Arab-Israel war of 1948.

The central role of Nazi antisemitism in the planning and implementation of the Shoah is well known. The impact of that same Nazi antisemitism on the Middle East, on the other hand, remains gravely under-researched.

My book aims to fill this gap to the extent currently possible. It sets forth the methods used by Nazi Germany from 1937 onwards to disseminate its antisemitism in the Middle East in the Arabic language and the role that this antisemitism would play 11 years later, when the Arab armies fell upon the newly founded Jewish state of Israel. This fateful war triggered the Palestinian refugee catastrophe that has marked the Middle East conflict ever since.

The spread of antisemitism in the Middle East did have something to do with the Zionist movement and the building of the Jewish state. There was, however, more than one way to respond to these developments. There were, for example, Egyptians who welcomed the “victory of the Zionist idea [as] the turning point for … the revival of the Orient”. Others, such as the ruler of Transjordan, Emir Abdullah, sought sometimes more, sometimes less cooperation with the Zionists. A third group may have opposed Zionism, but not Judaism, while initially it was only the supporters of the Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin El-Husseini, who adopted the antisemitic approach. 

The Nazis exclusively backed this last group. They saw the clashes in Palestine as an opportunity to promote their form of Jew-hatred and to impose an antisemitic interpretation on the local conflict.

Only in recent years has the significance of the Nazis’ Arabic-language propaganda in the Arab world been brought to light, notably through the pioneering work of Jeffrey Herf. In 2009 he introduced us to the content of the manuscripts of the Nazis’ Arabic-language broadcasts in his book Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World. Five years later, David Motadel published further important findings in his study Islam And Nazi Germany’s War.

Building on these studies, the current book presents a series of new facts that have the potential to change our view of the past and present of the Middle East conflict.

1937: Islam and Judaism

Firstly, I set out what is currently known about the origin and dissemination of the pamphlet Islam and Judaism, which was first published in 1937 in Cairo in order to derail plans for a two-state solution for Palestine. It is a shocking text that uses religion for the sole purpose of inciting Jew-hatred.

Islam and Judaism is significant because it is, as far as we know, the very first document to construct a continuity between Muhammad’s confrontation with the Jews in Medina and the contemporary conflict in Palestine, thus linking the seventh to the twentieth century. It is the first written evidence for what I call Islamic antisemitism and the forerunner of Sayyid Qutb’s 1950 pamphlet Our struggle with the Jews.

Islam and Judaism concludes with the following words:

[T]he verses from the Qur’an and hadith prove to you that the Jews have been the bitterest enemies of Islam and continue to try to destroy it. Do not believe them, they only know hypocrisy and cunning. Hold together, fight for the Islamic thought, fight for your religion and your existence! Do not rest until your land is free of the Jews. 

“Free of the Jews” – “Judenfrei” – is a typical Nazi expression which we do not find in early Islamic writing.

The first Arabic version of Islam and Judaism was published in August 1937 in Cairo by the Director of the Palestinian-Arab Bureau of Information in Egypt, who is believed to have had many contacts with Nazi agents. 

In 1938 a German version of Islam and Judaism was published in Berlin under the title: “Islam – Judaism. Call of the Grand Mufti to the Islamic world in 1937”. 

Finally, during the Second World War, this brochure was printed and distributed in large numbers by German forces and translated into several languages. A translation of this document appears as an appendix to my book.

The very date of the pamphlet’s publication and dissemination – 11 years before the foundation of Israel and 30 years before Israel’s assumption of control in Gaza and the West Bank – is important. It contradicts the widespread assumption that Islamic antisemitism developed as a response to alleged Israeli misdeeds.

It was not the behaviour of the Zionists that prompted the publication of this hostile text but rather the very first attempt to implement a two-state solution for Palestine. This fact suggests that Jew-hatred was a cause, not a consequence of the crises in the Middle East conflict.

1938/39: Goebbels and the Muslim Brotherhood

Secondly, I present new archival discoveries relating to the collaboration between German Nazi agents and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Documents from the British National Archive reveal that this collaboration was known about at the highest levels in Germany and that, according to one note, “GOEB. [Goebbels] has spoken about it with much praise.” 

Nazi agents not only transferred money to the Muslim Brotherhood, but also attended conferences of this organization, held common “Palestine meetings” with it and gave lectures to its members on “the Jewish question”. 

After 1945, this Nazi operation paid off when that very same Muslim Brotherhood, now grown into an influential mass movement, pushed the Arab rulers into war against Israel.

1939-1945: Arabic-language radio propaganda

Thirdly, I analyze the six years of antisemitic radio propaganda in Arabic that the Nazis broadcast from the small town of Zeesen near Berlin which – unlike the written text – could reach the Arab masses. Back then, listening to the radio was a public affair: The men listened to it at the bazaar, in marketplaces and in coffee houses. The content of the programs would become the dominant topic of conversation, multiplying their impact.

This is what the British secret service reported on the impact of Radio Zeesen: 

In general it may be said that the middle, lower middle and lower classes listen to the Arabic broadcasts from Berlin with a good deal of enjoyment. They like the racy, ‘juicy’ stuff which is put over. … What the average Palestine Arab does imbibe, however, is the anti-Jew material. This he wants to hear and to believe; and he does both. To that extent German propaganda is definitely effective.

The “anti-Jew material” was effective because the Nazis could build on the patterns of early Islamic anti-Judaism and instrumentalize the local conflict with the Zionists. In addition, the BBC and the other Allied broadcasters gave in to the Nazis by failing directly to challenge their anti-Jewish incitement. None of them wanted to be seen as defenders or even “accomplices” of the Jews – thus confirming aspects of the Nazi propaganda.

My book shows that in retrospect, those six years of daily radio propaganda marked a turning point dividing Middle Eastern history into a before and an after. These years worsened the image of the Jews in the Arab world. They fostered an exclusively anti-Jewish reading of the Qur’an. They popularized the European world-conspiracy myths. They shaped a genocidal rhetoric towards Zionism. A consequence of this propaganda was that by 1948 large swathes of the Arab public viewed a Jewish state as a mortal threat that had to be violently destroyed.

1944: weapons “for the battles to follow”

Fourthly, I describe certain measures taken by the Nazis in 1944/45 to prepare for the forthcoming war against Israel. With their own defeat looming, they wished to preserve their antisemitic legacy by taking steps to prevent the future establishment of a Jewish state. 

Thus, in his memoirs, Amin el-Husseini, the former Mufti of Jerusalem, relates that in October 1944 the Wehrmacht provided aircraft to store ammunition and weapons in Palestine as “preparations for the days after the end of World War II” and “for their preparation for the battles to follow”. 

On 6 October 1944 five Nazi parachutists did indeed fly out from Athens to land in the Jordan valley with the task of hiding crates of weapons that they had previously dropped from the plane. Ten days later they were captured by the British. While this may have been an isolated and ineffective action, it nonetheless provides a direct link between the Nazis’ world war and the “battles to follow” in Palestine.

1947/1948: Arab hesitation, Islamist mobilization

Fifth, my book shows that Arab attitudes toward Zionism were less monolithic than has often been assumed. Thus, already in 1937, there were many Arabs who supported the two-state solution for Palestine. Admittedly, in 1947 the Arab League unanimously opposed the two-state solution for Palestine advocated by the United Nations in November 1947. 

Even so, how to react to this decision was disputed until the last minute: on several occasions the Arab League ruled out the possibility of an attack by regular Arab forces on the Jewish state. Egypt, for example, questioned this war, which began on May 15, 1948, only a few days before it began: “We shall never even contemplate entering an official war”, declared General Muhammad Haidar, Egypt’s Defence Minister, at the beginning of May 1948. “We are not mad”.

Why did an “official war” against Israel nevertheless take place? My book provides evidence that it was primarily pressure from the “Arab street” and the antisemitic campaigns of the Muslim Brotherhood that led the Arab rulers to overcome all their doubts and attack Israel. 

In 1948 the Muslim Brotherhood was the largest antisemitic movement in the world, with one million members. It was determined to continue the war to prevent a Jewish state started by Hitler and the Mufti. Its campaign could draw on the lingering echoes of the antisemitic Nazi propaganda in which preventing the emergence of a Jewish state and wiping out the Jews living in Palestine had been constant themes.

This war was not inevitable. It took place despite many countervailing considerations because the Nazis’ antisemitic Arabic-language propaganda had shaped the postwar political climate. In this feverish atmosphere, no Arab leader felt able to successfully resist the Brotherhood’s warmongering. 

There are, therefore, good grounds for interpreting the Arab war against Israel as a kind of aftershock of the previous Nazi war against the Jews. Amin el-Husseini embodied the continuity of the two events. His religiously packaged antisemitism, which had cost thousands of Jews their lives in 1944, was four years later directed against Israel.

Why the ignorance?

So why then is the role of Nazi propaganda and Nazi policies largely ignored in debates on the roots of antisemitism in the Middle East? A plausible hypothesis is that this pattern of omission reflects a desire to protect a proposition that is accepted as dogma in many academic circles: the idea that Israel, i.e. Jews, bears sole responsibility not only for the war in 1948, but also the antisemitism in the region. Claims such as “The spread of antisemitism in the Arab-Islamic world is the consequence of the Palestine conflict” are widespread.

From this paradigm, numerous Middle East experts derive mitigating circumstances for Arab antisemitism. “Is the fantasy-based hatred of the Jews that was and still is typical of European racists … the equivalent of the hatred felt by Arabs enraged by the occupation and/or destruction of Arab lands?”, is the rhetorical question of the British-Lebanese anti-Zionist Gilbert Achcar. “Arab antisemitism, in contrast to European anti-Semitism, is at least based on a real problem, namely the marginalization of the Palestinians,” insists German Islam researcher Jochen Müller.

This paradigm, which distinguishes between a Nazi-like European antisemitism and an “at least” understandable hatred of Jews in the Middle East, hides the Nazi influence on the image of Jews held by many Muslims in the Middle East. And it has political consequences: The basic assumption that antisemitism in the Arab-Islamic world is merely a response to Israel and can therefore be downplayed as a kind of local custom is one of the foundations of German and European Middle East policy and may be one of the reasons why the latter refuses to decisively combat the Jew-hatred of, for example, Hezbollah and the Iranian regime.

It is, however, necessary to understand how strongly modern Middle East history is shaped by the aftermath of National Socialism. Only then will we be able to properly understand and adequately counter the antisemitism in this region and its echo among Muslims in Europe and address the political realities of the Middle East realistically and effectively.

Please find the original Fathom publication here. 

Image: The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, greeting Bosnian Muslim Waffen-SS volunteers with a Nazi salute. November 1943. Source: Wikimedia Commons · Author: Mielke · License: CC BY-SA 3.0 DE · Image is cropped and color graded.