In late June, the European Commission warned universities and researchers that terminating Horizon Europe projects with Israeli counterparts based on their nationality would be considered discrimination. This warning came after several institutions said they were suspending EU-funded research collaborations with partners in Israel.
Iliana Ivanova, the EU research and innovation commissioner, said, “Termination solely on the basis of nationality would be improper and would amount to discrimination prohibited under the Association Agreement. Ivanova warned that “any termination request would need to be issued in accordance with the terms and conditions of the relevant grant agreement.” Some universities in Europe announced the suspension of research ties with Israel over its military campaign in Gaza. These include the University of Granada, the Association of Spanish Universities, and the Academic Council of the Free University of Brussels, among others.
However, Ivanova says that Israeli entities are eligible to participate in all Horizon Europe grants under the same terms and conditions as other institutions based in EU member states.
Still, the European Commission may not understand where the pressure to boycott Israel is coming from. For four decades, several Arab states have funded Western academic institutions and used their influence to delegitimize Israel. Their efforts were mostly hidden, and they even recruited Israelis and Jews to defame Israel.
Now, British universities are being targeted.
The British case illustrates the complexity and sophistication of the BDS campaign with its plethora of actors. Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) is the apparent leader. The group describes itself as a “community of people working together for peace, equality, and justice and against racism, occupation, and colonization.” It is the “biggest organization in the UK dedicated to securing Palestinian human rights”, campaigning for “Palestinian rights and freedom.” PCS found that “UK Universities collectively invest almost £430 million in companies complicit in the state’s war on Gaza, which has since killed over 38,000 Palestinians.”
The Qatari-owned media outlet based in the UK, The New Arab, reveals another part of the story. It describes how a pro-Palestinian coalition from the Gulf states, comprising activist groups from Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait, has launched a campaign to boycott universities in Britain that are “allegedly contributing to what they call the genocide in Gaza.” The Gulf Coalition Against Normalization (Gulf CAN) has called on students not to enroll in certain universities in the UK, to remove the universities from scholarships, and to end their relations with arms companies that supply weapons to Israel.
The aim of coordinating campaigns within the Gulf states is to “resist Zionism and the normalization with Israel.”
The Gulf CAN statement reads: “British universities are not only complicit in refusing to acknowledge the genocide in Gaza, but also play a direct role in financing and developing weapons supplied to the Zionist occupation army.” Gulf CAN is “calling on local education stakeholders to boycott the following list of UK universities: Newcastle University, University of Liverpool, University of Nottingham, University of Leeds, Northumbria University, Queen Mary University of London, University of Portsmouth, University of Manchester, Manchester Metropolitan University and Coventry University.”
The institutions on Gulf CAN’s list have invested over £34 million in Israel-linked companies, according to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. “These universities take an explicit position in protecting the occupation by suppressing demonstrations by students demanding an end to their participation in the genocide in Gaza.”
The statement adds, “the suppression has included the use of physical violence, sexual harassment, and the removal of the hijab.”
As can be seen, the Arab coalition invents cases against Britain.
The statement concludes with what is known since the Hamas October attack against Israel: “Universities across the globe, especially institutions in Britain, have been facing pressure to divest from companies linked to Israel with protests and encampments.”
The pressure comes primarily from Qatar. According to The New Arab website, it provides “voices that promote a progressive discourse and counter autocratic and sectarian narratives. We are a progressive, non-partisan news outlet that focuses on issues of democracy, social justice and human rights.” The owner of the New Arab, Fadaat Media Group, was established as a private commercial institution in the Qatari capital, Doha, in 2012. Their missions are: “To side with the Palestinian cause and support all efforts of the Palestinian people, the Arab nation and the peoples of the world to achieve justice in Palestine. Respecting all religious, cultural and ethnic components of Arab societies, and celebrating the diversity and pluralism that characterize our region.”
There is more to it. Middle East actors insert themselves in the Western academic scene to delegitimize Israel. A few days ago, Avril Haines, the director of US National Intelligence, disclosed that Iranian agents have “Inserted themselves in the protest movement,” promoting and even funding the anti-Israel groups on campus. The bombshell announcement rattled the mainstream media and the progressive camp, which portrayed the massive campus disruptions as spontaneous grassroots protests. The American authorities, including the FBI, have launched several investigations into the funding behind the campus upheaval.
As well known, Israel stands as a symbol for the anti-Western, anti-democratic movement of the Islamic theocrats, whose real goal is to destroy the Western world order.
The European Commission should take notice. The players behind the action to terminate Israel from the Horizon Europe project have a larger vision: to undermine free ideas and the exchange of information—the bedrock of Western Civilization.
The European Commission has warned universities and researchers that terminating Horizon Europe projects with Israeli counterparts on the basis of their nationality alone would be considered as discrimination, after several institutions said they were to suspend EU-funded research collaborations with partners in Israel.
“Termination solely on the basis of nationality would be improper and would amount to discrimination prohibited under the Association Agreement [with Israel], EU research and innovation commissioner Iliana Ivanova said in a reply to a letter by Flemish universities published earlier this month.
Ivanova warned that “any termination request would need to be issued in accordance with the terms and conditions of the relevant grant agreement.”
The letter follows on from announcements by several higher education institutions across Europe that they were suspending research ties with Israel over its military campaign in Gaza.
The University of Granada decided to stop working with Israeli partners in five Horizon Europe and Horizon 2020 projects. An association of Spanish universities said it was committed to reviewing and, where appropriate, suspending collaboration agreements with Israeli universities and research centress “that have not demonstrated a firm commitment to peace and adherence to international humanitarian law.”
Last month, the academic council of the Free University of Brussels (ULB) announced it would “suspend all agreements and institutional research projects involving an Israeli university” until universities in Israel made a “clear commitment” to abide by a recent International Court of Justice order against Israel’s assault on Rafah.
The ULB council had asked for clear recommendations and instructions on how to proceed with Horizon Europe projects that involve partners from Israel, so they can better assess if Israeli partners comply with Horizon Europe ethical standards.
The council pointed to Article 14 of the Horizon Europe grant agreement, which stipulates that research projects “must be carried out in line with the highest ethical standards and the applicable EU, international and national law on ethical principles”. Project partners are expected to “commit to and ensure the respect of basic EU values (such as respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and human rights, including the rights of minorities)”.
Termination request
However, Ivanova says Israeli entities are eligible to participate in Horizon Europe grants under the same terms and conditions as institutions based in EU member states. “Moreover, Israeli entities’ participation in Horizon Europe projects is regulated by guidelines “related to entities based in occupied territories since 1967 and the terms and conditions of each grant agreement concluded by consortia involving Israeli entities,” Ivanova said.
It is not immediately clear if universities that have already terminated or suspended the access of Israeli researchers in Horizon grants will be investigated for discrimination.
Ivanova said the granting authority – in this case the European Commission – will assess each termination request. “On the basis of this assessment, the granting authority will decide on the possible legal and financial consequences of the termination such as a grant reduction, which would require a formal contradictory procedure.”
In a scathing letter earlier this month, German MEP Christian Ehler, the European Parliament’s co-rapporteur on Horizon Europe, asked the Commission to defend Israeli participation in the EU research and innovation programme.
Boycott groups from Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait announced a campaign to boycott British universities that are complicit in Israel’s war on Gaza.
The New Arab Staff & Agencies 07 July, 2024
A pro-Palestine coalition group based in the Gulf states has launched a campaign to boycott universities in Britain that are allegedly contributing to what they call the genocide in Gaza.
The Gulf Coalition Against Normalization(Gulf CAN) is calling on students not to enrol in the targeted universities, contracted agents to terminate relationships and ministries of education to remove the universities from scholarships and end their relations with arms companies that supply weapons to Israel and withdraw their investments.
Gulf CAN is an umbrella organisation comprised of activist groups from Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait. It aims to coordinate campaigns within the Gulf states to “resist Zionism” and normalisation with Israel within the region.
“British universities are not only complicit in refusing to acknowledge the genocide in Gaza, but also play a direct role in financing and developing weapons supplied to the Zionist occupation army,” the statement reads.
Gulf CAN is calling on local education stakeholders to boycott the following list of UK universities: Newcastle University, University of Liverpool, University of Nottingham, University of Leeds, Northumbria University, Queen Mary University of London, University of Portsmouth, University of Manchester, Manchester Metropolitan University and Coventry University.
The institutions on Gulf CAN’s list have invested over £34 million in Israel-linked companies, according to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
“These universities take an explicit position in protecting the occupation by suppressing demonstrations by students demanding an end to their participation in the genocide in Gaza,” the statement adds, highlighting that “the suppression has included the use of physical violence, sexual harassment, and the removal of the hijab”.
The organisation says the universities have lost £600,000 due to their campaign so far, noting that scholarship programmes and partnerships with local universities in the Gulf are an “indispensable source of income for British universities.”
The British Council found that Gulf countries, including Kuwait and Qatar, are among the largest markets for sponsored UK study visas in 2018. The UK saw an almost six percent increase in T4 visas from Kuwait.
At the same time, the UK remained Bahrain’s number one destination for students leaving the country, with over 15,000 students.
Universities across the globe, especially institutions in Britain, have been facing pressure to divest from companies linked to Israel with protests and encampments.
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) found that UK Universities collectively invest almost £430 million in companies complicit in the state’s war on Gaza, which has since killed over 38,000 Palestinians.
At the beginning of July, more than a thousand German academics signed a petition stating, “In light of current events: No place for anti-Semitism at universities!” The academics explained, “We, as academic teachers at German universities and researchers at non-university research institutions, stand in equal terms with our Jewish students and colleagues. We will do everything in our power to ensure that they can study and work at our institutions safely and without harm, and that Jews in Germany can feel safe. We condemn anti-Semitic exclusion, the use of terrorist symbols, the questioning of Israel’s right to exist, any form of violence and vandalism within university buildings in the strongest terms. Therefore, it is our belief that the promotion and public expression of hatred towards Jews in our institutions should be ostracized and penalized. We are also deeply concerned about developments regarding the boycott of Israeli universities and the exclusion of Israeli colleagues from academic conferences and journals. We strongly oppose these forms of exclusion and remain committed to collaborating with colleagues at Israeli universities or researchers holding Israeli citizenship.”
Such a demonstration of support is unique and should be praised. While German scholars embrace Israel and the Jews, some in Germany embrace the Palestinians.
In a striking opposition, there are even some Israeli academics who bash Israel.
Moshe Zimmermann, professor emeritus of German history at the Hebrew University, is a case in point. He published a new book, Niemals Frieden? Israel am Scheideweg (Never Peace? Israel at the Crossroads) to impact public opinion in Germany.
The German press reviewed the book and reported on it. Zimmermann does not want Germany’s Federal Government to unambiguously support the Government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, not even after the atrocious terror attacks of 7 October. He insists that the German Government must confront Israel’s current leadership in ways that help to bring about the two-state solution, which, according to him, is the only political arrangement that can facilitate lasting peace and true security for Israel. For Zimmermann, “Lip service won’t do,” as the Israeli Government is not “inclined to live up to the Oslo peace agreements.”
The Hamas atrocities and the Gaza war are Zimmermann’s starting points, not the topic. Zimmermann discusses how the Israeli policymakers bear some responsibility for what happened in October. For example, according to Zimmermann, in 2023, provocations of aggressive and escalating settler activism in the West Bank amounted to “fuel poured onto the fire.”
Zimmermann’s core argument is that right-wing parties have been sabotaging peace efforts for decades, with things getting increasingly worse since Benjamin Netanyahu became Prime Minister again in 2009. Zimmermann calls the current cabinet a Kakistocracy.
Zimmermann argues that unconditional support for Netanyahu will further empower the extremists who hold public office. These people claim the entire area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea for Israel. “Netanyahu himself insists there can be no other state on this land besides Israel. Right-wing populists and radicals systematically endorse the building of ever more Israeli settlements on the very territory, which, according to the Oslo treaties, is meant to become the Palestinian state. Instead, they want to annex it. Their actions have been aggravating tensions for decades.”
Furthermore, Zimmermann accuses settlers of being “trigger-happy as their Islamist Palestinian counterparts.” Like the latter, Zimmermann insists, they want a theocratic state and refer to the Holy Scriptures to justify their action. Zimmermann warns against conflating Israel with its current Government. According to Zimmermann, Hamas does not represent all Palestinians. Extremist aggression, according to Zimmermann, is not only directed at the other ethno-religious group but also targets the opponents. Zimmermann “finds it depressing that religious fundamentalism on both sides is holding both groups captive”.
From Zimmermann’s radical leftist perspective, religious Jews are the enemy; they are similar to Hamas, and the Hamas attack was Israel’s fault.
Zimmermann provided a similar observation in a Haaretz interview, where he declared that “The Hamas Pogrom Demonstrates That Zionism Has Failed.” In his view, the Israelis cannot be safe in their own country if they have to endure what their Diaspora forefathers had suffered at the hands of violent antisemites who raped and pillaged the defenseless Jews.
Unfortunately for the professor, who is fond of comparing everything to Jewish history in Europe, the Hamas attack is anything but a simple pogrom. The 1988 Charter of Hamas, a radical Jihadist terror group, made clear that the overall goal is to liberate Palestine from the “river to the sea,” meaning cleanse all Israelis. More to the point, Hamas serves as Iran’s proxy ring around Israel, along with Hezbollah and the pro-Iranian militias in Syria, Iraq, and the Houthis. The theocratic regime has given Hamas millions of dollars over the years and provided it with sophisticated missiles and rockers. Iranian engineers helped Hamas to build a network of tunnels in densely populated residential areas. Tutored by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the military wing of Hamas, the Izzaddin al Qassem Brigades carried out a successful attack on October 7 using the brutal tactics of ISIS. There is virtually no doubt that Hamas’s success was made possible by the calamitous failure of Israeli intelligence. Yet, the Gaza War indicates that the military can defend the civilian population. On both counts, Professor Zimmermann’s comparisons are fallacious but fit well his habit of making eye-grabbing “equivalences.”
In fact, Zimmermman’s propensity for creating false analogies got him into trouble in the past. He was sued several times for equating children of Hebron settlers to the Hitlerjugend, or the “motivation and the conditions of service of some elite units” in the IDF to Waffen SS, the most notorious military divisions implicated in horrific acts of atrocity during WWII, and, the Bible to Mein Kampf. He also sued his former MA student for libel; she accused him of embracing the equivalency theory to please the German foundations who showered him with honors and monetary prizes. The presiding judge dismissed the case in 2004 and determined that Germany-Israel relations are a highly important public issue, adding that it is unthinkable that a professor, being a public figure, could publish his controversial opinions, which include a comparison between the Hebron youth and the Hitlerite youth, but on the other hand would refuse to accept criticism of his opinions. The judge emphasized that “the court is not the appropriate place for settling accounts between colleagues, and the differences of opinion should be left in the academic arena.”
In the Haaretz interview, Zimmermann returned to his favorite pastime, finding similarities between Nazi Germany and Israel. He said, “When I look at the Israeli propaganda system – ‘Together we will win’ – it’s hard for me not to remember the spirit of steadfastness in a war I am familiar with from German history. You’re in a tough situation, and you know that you somehow have to cultivate this spirit of ‘We will hang in there.’ That’s the type of thing that generates misery. The comparison is of course not one to one, but in Germany in 1944 slogans appeared such as, ‘Our walls are broken but our hearts are firm.’ Today you see, ‘Together we will win’ in every corner of the country. It’s an attempt to generate unconditional support, which prevents a discussion about the goals of the war and the logic of the war. You have to be very careful about the work of propaganda… Anyone who has studied German history and watched Goebbels’ career, sees what a dangerous instrument propaganda is – one that can lead to a loss of the way.”
Zimmemman’s obsession with finding parallels between Israel and Nazi Germany blinds him to the fact that despite his egregious comparisons, his academic career flourished and he retired with full benefits. Zimmerman ignores the fact that Israel is not even slightly similar to Germany in the 1930s. If he was teaching there and trashing the Nazi regime, he would have been sent to a concentration camp, and then as a Jew, he would have been sent to any of the extermination camps.
Zimmermann’s new book empowers antisemites by comparing religious Jews to radical Islamists.
Why prominent Israeli scholar wants Germany to confront Netanyahu
Moshe Zimmermann disagrees with how German leaders interpret our nation’s special responsibility for Israel in particular and Jews in general. The historian from Jerusalem wants them to challenge the right-wing policies of Israel’s government rather than rally around Netanyahu.
Even after the atrocious terror attacks of 7 October, Zimmermann does not want Germany’s Federal Government to unambiguously support the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He insists that it must confront Israel’s current leadership in ways that help to bring about the two-state solution, which, according to him, is the only political arrangement that can facilitate lasting peace and thus true security for Israel. Lip service won’t do, he argues, as Israel’s government is not inclined to live up to the Oslo peace agreements.
In the hope of having an impact on public opinion in Germany, Moshe Zimmermann wrote his latest book “Niemals Frieden? Israel am Scheideweg” (Never peace? Israel at the crossroads) in German. I hope many persons in positions of leadership will read it. The Hamas atrocities and the Gaza war are its starting points, not the topic. Zimmermann does what was totally taboo in Germany after the bloodbath of 7 October: he puts that horrible date in its historical and political context.
The Jewish scholar elaborates eloquently why Israeli policymakers bear some responsibility for what happened. In rather explicit terms, he points out on page 135 that, in 2023, the provocations of aggressive and escalating settler activism in the Westbank amounted “fuel poured onto the fire”. It also matters that, in order to support the settlers, Israel’s government had reduced the military presence along the Gaza border, which Hamas then attacked.
Sabotaging peace efforts for decades
Zimmermann’s core argument is that right-wing parties have been sabotaging peace efforts for decades, with things getting increasingly worse since Benjamin Netanyahu became Prime Minister again in 2009. The professor emeritus of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University even calls the current cabinet a Kakistocracy. The Greek term means government of the worst. Zimmermann is appalled by corruption and incompetence.
In view of these things, Zimmermann argues, unconditional support for Netanyahu will further empower the extremists who hold public office. These people claim for Israel the entire area between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean Sea. Netanyahu himself insists there can be no other state on this land besides Israel. Right-wing populists and radicals systematically endorse the building of ever more Israeli settlements on the very territory which, according to the Oslo treaties, is meant to become the Palestinian state. Instead, they want to annex it. Their actions have been aggravating tensions for decades.
On page 176, Zimmermann indeed accuses settler activists of being as “trigger-happy as their Islamist Palestinian counterparts”. Like the latter, he adds, they want a theocratic state and refer to Holy Scriptures to justify their action. He warns against conflating Israel with its current government and also insists that Hamas does not represent all Palestinians. Extremist aggression, according to him, is not only directed at the other ethno-religious group, but also targets opponents in the own. Zimmermann finds it depressing, that religious fundamentalism on both sides is holding both groups captive.
What has become of Zionism?
The author argues consistently that this is not what Zionism originally intended. Many chapters in the book follow the same pattern:
they begin with a short summary of the ideas articulated by Theodor Herzel, the founder of Zionism in the late 19th century,
elaborate next how those ideas shaped the newly founded state of Israel in its early decades and
then conclude with an assessment of Israel’s right-wing shift that started in the late 1970s.
Early Zionists wanted to create a secular nation state with scope for the peaceful coexistence of Jews and Muslims, Zimmermann writes. Instead, a fanatic government is now trying to abolish the country’s Supreme Court. He stresses that the basic law, which defines Israel exclusively as the state of Jewish self-determination, was only adopted by a right-wing controlled Knesset in 2018, seven decades after the state became independent. The same law downgraded Arabic from the second official language to one that is merely used.
Zimmermann repeatedly mentions apartheid-like conditions in the West Bank, stressing that Palestinians are being denied their rights. He also states that the first Jews who moved to what was, before World War I, still part of the Ottoman Empire had a colonial mindset in the sense of believing that they, as Europeans, were entitled to claim land overseas. However, their migration did not serve the expansion by any European empire, nor was it actively supported by one. Jewish migration to Palestine was thus not a colonial effort.
It matters even more, that masses of those who came to Palestine were fleeing from oppression. That did not change after Israel was established as a state and prevailed against its Arab neighbours in successive wars. Jews were forced to flee many Muslim countries, and their obvious destination was Israel.
It is ironic, according to Zimmermann, that Sephardic Jews from the MENA region tended to appreciate religiously coded identity politics in opposition to the secular Zionism originally endorsed by Ashkenazi Jews from Europe. The background was that they felt oppressed by the first comers and considered them to be arrogant.
Escalating vicious cycle
The historian shows how a vicious cycle escalated over the decades. Both Israeli and Islamist radicals do not want peace, but victory. On both sides, the radicals claim the entire territory between the river and the sea for their own ethno-religious group. On both sides, the radicals benefit from warning against the dangers posed by the radicals on the other side.
Zimmermann expresses deep-felt grief when he reports how he has been warning for decades that violence will only get worse unless peace is made. He insists, however, that there are political forces who still want peace on both sides. In the scholar’s eyes, they deserve more assertive diplomatic support by Germany, the EU, the USA and the international community in general.
Zimmermann does not list precisely what he wants Israel’s allies to do. To me, diplomatic recognition of a Palestinian state and endorsement of Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire, seem to be steps that would put the right kind of pressure on Israel’s government. Moreover, allies should speak out publicly when the Netanyahu government does not act in accordance with international law or universal values such as pluralism, democracy and human rights.
Tackling antisemitism
The book makes it very clear that it is wrong to side with Netanyahu under the impression that anything else would be antisemitic. Zimmermann, who specialises in German history, obviously abhors antisemitism. However, he warns that overemphasising this important concept will only blunt it. He refers to the fairy-tail of the boy who cried “wolf” for fun too often, so nobody came to his help when he was actually attacked by wolves.
My impression is that the sudden international outburst of antisemitism after 7 October, with many people actually celebrating the atrocious mass violence, resulted from “wolf” having been screamed far too often in recent years. German opinion shapers were wrong, for example, to obsess about whether antisemitism had left a mark on reports of international human-rights organisations that spoke of “apartheid”. They condemned Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International of hating Jews, instead of considering the substance of the apartheid reports. Neither organisation has a track record of antisemitism. For many young people, the lesson was that public opinion is biased in Israel’s favour, which made them more susceptible for Hamas propaganda.
Zimmermann takes sides in a long-standing debate on what the precise meaning of “antisemitism” is. He reports that he was among the experts who launched the Jerusalem Declaration, an important document, which emphasises the freedoms of speech and academic research.
According to Zimmermann, Israel’s government has a misleading habit of claiming to speak for all Jews everywhere. However, its policymakers do not consult the diaspora, even though its actions have an impact on Jews abroad, and they expect them to unconditionally support Israel. The author emphasises that many diaspora Jews find that endorsement increasingly impossible – in the USA, for example.
Zimmermann states that his personal stance is one of “constructive pessimism”. He knows that the two-state solution looks less likely with every new turn of the vicious cycle of violence. Given that the alternative is war after war after war, he refuses to give up the hope that peace can ultimately be achieved even though it is becoming increasingly difficult. In his eyes, that is the effort that Israel’s friends must focus on, and lip service is not enough.
Book Zimmermann, M.,2024: Niemals Frieden? Israel am Scheideweg (Never peace? Israel at the crossroads). Berlin, Propyläen.
Never peace? Israel at the crossroadsPropylaea , Berlin 2024
192 pages
16.00 euros
By Ofer Waldman · 25.05.2024
Moshe Zimmermann’s new book is an outcry. Written under the impression of Hamas terror and the Gaza war, the historian sees Israel as a Jewish democratic state more than ever on the brink of collapse – and the life’s work of his generation under threat.
“Constructive pessimism” – this is the term used by Israeli historian Moshe Zimmermann to sum up his own work. The hierarchy between adjectives and nouns is clearly established: with this book, Zimmermann rings all the alarm bells at his disposal. Never before has the German-reading public received a more urgent, prominent and detailed warning that Israel, as a Jewish-democratic state, is on the brink of collapse. Zimmermann presents a grim indictment of Israeli policy over the past few decades, which he has been warning about for years. He does so with increasing urgency and with the sharp analysis of one of Israel’s best-known historians.
Secular, liberal, humanistic
In this almost personal book – the pronoun “I” appears frequently in it – Zimmermann mourns an Israeli “road not taken”, a liberal-democratic development internally, and externally a compromise-oriented path towards the Arab world and especially the Palestinians. A development that corresponds to Zimmermann’s own biography: secular, liberal, humanistic and European in character, even if occasionally alienated from other cultural spheres.
Zimmermann’s grim view of Israel today arises from the two temporal features to which this book refers: it opens with a poem written about the pogroms in the Russian Empire at the beginning of the 20th century; the other temporal feature is the Hamas massacre on October 7, 2023.
The conclusion that emerges from this is that the – according to Zimmermann – messianic, “ethnic” derailment of Zionism, driven by the advocates of a borderless “Greater Israel”, by settlers and their nationalist representatives in Israeli politics, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, is an existential threat to Israel, which has led to the repetition of pogrom-like images on Israeli soil. Zimmermann does not shy away from the explosive claim that Netanyahu and the settler movement are partly to blame for the massacre of October 7.
The cowardice of German federal governments
Zimmermann is well aware of the German context in which this book is read. He clearly rejects those currents that read Israel’s history and present through the paradigms of post-colonialism, but refrains from providing a deeper insight into the post-migrant reality of today’s German society. Many reactions from the left to October 7 made him “suspicious”: Like many other progressive Israelis, he complains that since the Hamas terror attack he has been torn between anti-Semitic criticism of Israel and the far-right Israeli government.
Zimmermann is also critical of German politics: The inflationary use of the term anti-Semitism in the domestic German context in order to – according to Zimmermann – fend off criticism of Israel’s policies, and the lack of courage of German federal governments towards their Israeli partners, are devastating for Israel’s future: “Since Israel’s security can only be guaranteed by settling the conflict via the two-state solution, and Germany must resign because it is ‘unsuitable’, the slogan ‘Israel is German state policy’ remains a bluff, and the path to the abyss is clear.” This book is a cry of resistance, a cry of protest written in words by Zimmermann, who sees the life’s work of his generation being destroyed. A book that offers a condensed history and an alarming assessment of Israel and the conflict, combined with an urgent call to force the two-state solution under international pressure. Not because Zimmermann necessarily considers this possibility to be feasible, but because the alternative would be the end of Israel as a Jewish democratic state.
Moshe Zimmermann, Israeli historian: ‘Jewish nationalism tends to consider everything that does not belong to its nation as the enemy’
The former director of the center for German history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem believes that the ‘pogrom’ of October 7 forces us to ‘question the whole idea of Zionism
Moshe Zimmermann’s family history coincides with his academic specialization. He was born 80 years ago in Jerusalem because his parents fled Nazism in 1938, moving from Hamburg to the British protectorate of Palestine. In the last 50 years he has written dozens of books and articles on German social history, the history of Jews in Germany, nationalism and antisemitism. A professor emeritus of modern history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he directed the Richard Koebner Minerva Center for German History and received the Humboldt Prize for international researchers.
Along the way, he has also delved into cinema and sports, as attested to by the large library inside his home in Kiryat Ono, 6.8 miles east of Tel Aviv. He has not remained within the confines of his academic ivory tower, instead coming down to provide a counter-current analysis of his country’s present, to the point of drawing parallels with Nazism. This struck a chord and earned him three defamation suits that were all ultimately dismissed. He believes that the “pogrom” perpetrated by Hamas on October 7 forces us to “question the whole idea of Zionism,” and that comparing it to the Holocaust is a tremendous example of weakness.
On the way here, I heard Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the radio saying that Israel is fighting neo-Nazis. Why is what has happened since October 7 being framed as related to the Holocaust?
Answer. The absolute and historical enemy of the Jews were the Nazis, so if you want to delegitimize your enemy, it is best to compare him with them. It has become an instinct in Israel, mainly among politicians. It has an element of truth. In one day, more than a thousand Jews were massacred. A pogrom. So one instinctively clings to that comparison. But it is also the source of great weakness. If the worst catastrophe in Jewish history since 1945 has occurred in Israel, we must admit that something is wrong with the whole idea of Zionism, which was created to save the Jews from a diaspora that lasted 2,000 years. And the question is: what did Zionism do on October 7 to save the Jews?
Q. But it was a day, not the six million exterminated in the Holocaust — that could not happen today in Israel. So how does that challenge the whole idea of Zionism?
A. I don’t want to say that it is the end of the idea of Zionism, but it failed at a crucial moment. If such a defect exists, you have to question the whole idea of Zionism. If as a Jew you are discriminated against, you look for a way not to be. This is what happened in Europe since the end of the 18th century. We believed that self-emancipation, having our own state as a nation, not as a religion, was a solution. Until it emerged that Jewish life is in danger, even within a Jewish state that can defend itself. It created a new problem in the Middle East. You have to wonder if it was taken into account beforehand or not.
Q. And was it?
A. If so, was it the right way to move forward, at the expense of the Palestinians? At first, the idea was typically European. Europe as the center of the world and whose inhabitants can colonize or emigrate anywhere. This is how the United States or South Africa were created. This is how colonialism worked in the 19th century, and the Jews were no strangers to that. The idea was not to create an empire, but to save Jews from persecution. From that approach, a conflict emerged. Jewish nationalism developed the tendency to consider everything that does not belong to its nation as the other; even more, like the enemy. The Arab population of Palestine also learned from the Europeans to develop a national consciousness. Soon we had two national identities living in the same place and in conflict.
Q. Those who went to Palestine saved their lives…
A. The majority believed that Europe would provide them with security. It is the main argument in favor of Zionism after 1945. This poses a problem. If [Nazi Marshal] Rommel had occupied Palestine, he would have treated the Jewish population like that of Europe. The counterargument is that if they had already had a state, things would have been different. Take the fate of Poland or Czechoslovakia under Nazi occupation… A state is no guarantee. The fact that people like my family, who went to Palestine, were saved was in large part due to luck.
Q. This touches on what is happening today: having a state and an army does not guarantee safety against all threats.
A. It is an illusion created by the state of mind that everything that happened to us was because we did not have sovereignty. And it is a paradox with no way out. Jews who experience antisemitism abroad are willing to move to Israel, but it is not a safe haven. In the end, Israel is today the main target of antisemitism, and Jews outside Israel have not been spared from antisemitism. Was it predestined, or was it a mistake?
Q. What do you think?
A. If from the beginning the tendency had been to create a nation-state in Palestine based on cooperation with the Arabs on equal terms, the basis for a Jewish existence without antisemitism could have been laid: there would be no motivation for non-Jews to adhere to antisemitic ideas. What we are experiencing today is increasing antisemitism due to the existence of Israel.
“My opinion is that taking revenge on Hamas at the expense of Gazans is unjustified and irrational, but not genocide”
Q. The counterargument is that antisemitism simply takes different forms.
A. Antisemitism is based on stereotypes. But it needs a platform to articulate itself. What would have happened to antisemitism if Israel did not exist? I’m not saying Israel is the cause of this, but it gives antisemites the opportunity to turn latent antisemitism into overt antisemitism. And since Israel behaves the way it does, it favors it.
Q. Where is the line between a legitimate criticism of Israel and an antisemitic one?
A. Motivation. If you attribute a Jew’s behavior to being Jewish, you are arguing on the basis of antisemitism. If you criticize Israel for ruling the West Bank and you would say the same thing about any other nation that occupies territory and subjugates its inhabitants, it is not antisemitism. Or even if you call for a boycott. It is not antisemitic per se. Israeli politicians automatically define all criticism as antisemitic, which will have a boomerang effect, because then it can be said that any criticism of Israel is not antisemitism by definition, even if stereotypes are used.
Q. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism includes comparing the policies of Israel and the Nazis, as you have done…
A. Comparing is something we historians do to understand. I did so with the idea of warning Israeli society that there are elements of Israeli politics or behavior comparable to elements of National Socialism.
Q. So where are we now regarding these elements and what is happening in Gaza?
A. Everyone is using the word genocide. The comparison is legitimate, but I hope that [the International Court of Justice in] The Hague will pay attention to the differences. The genocide planned by the Nazis was based on a plan to wipe out an entire group of people. You cannot prove that this is happening in Israel. My opinion is that taking revenge on Hamas at the expense of Gazans is unjustified and irrational, but not genocide.
Q. You are just now investigating the moment when nations “went crazy,” as happened during Nazism. How does that happen?
A. Only in retrospect do you discover how deep the chasm crossed was. For many, January 31, 1933 [the day after Hitler was appointed chancellor] was no different from January 29. “We have a new government every six months, now Hitler…” Six months later, they discovered that what they got was not just another chancellor.
The Hamas Pogrom Demonstrates That Zionism Has Failed, Says Israeli Historian Moshe Zimmermann
A pioneering Israeli scholar of German history, Prof. Moshe Zimmermann looks back to 1930s Europe in order to understand where Israel is headed
Ofer Aderet
Dec 29, 2023
In the early 1960s, Moshe Zimmermann’s mother was summoned for a reprimand by the principal of Ma’aleh High School in Jerusalem. She was asked to explain why her boy, who was a good student, had drawn a likeness of a man in an SS uniform on a table in the school. The fact that both the principal and the mother were proud Yekkes – Jews of German-speaking origin – undoubtedly added to the mutual embarrassment. Not to mention the fact that Moshe’s father was the principal of the adjacent primary school.
“My poor mother had to explain what had befallen her jewel,” Zimmermann tells Haaretz in an interview marking his 80th birthday. From the distance of years he notes that the background to the incident was the seminal historic event that was then unfolding in Israel: the trial of Adolf Eichmann. “I was riveted by that story, and it was clear to me at that moment that I wanted to be a historian. As a child who grew up in a Yekke home, it was also clear to me that I ought to, and wanted to, deal with the enigma called Germany.”
In the decades since then, Zimmermann became a pioneer and shaper of the study of Germany in Israel. Today an emeritus professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and former director of its Richard Koebner Minerva Center for German History, he has written and edited dozens of books and articles on Germany’s Jews and their complicated and tragic relationship with their homeland, and has proved that history can also be gleaned from sports and the cinema. In contrast to some of his colleagues in academia, however, Zimmermann also goes out of his way to maintain his image as a public intellectual, one who is not afraid to sound his voice trenchantly and acutely about current events, drawing on his insights as a historian. At the height of his career he found himself in courtrooms on several occasions, fending off lawsuits that were filed against him for statements he had made.
“A historian is supposed to stimulate thought,” he observed this month at a conference held in his honor at the Leo Baeck Institute in Jerusalem. “A historian who insists on being neutral, a person of footnotes, and does not provoke, is doing a disservice to the profession.”
“When I think about Germany and about German historians who constantly hid behind the ‘neutrality’ and ‘objectivity’ of history, I know where that leads,” he says. “Those who are colorless, who are neither here nor there, in the end collaborate with what exists. Writing a chronicle is boring. There is no point in telling what happened in Troy, for example, only in order to tell a story. A historian needs to infer from the past about the present.”
Many people are likening October 7 to the Holocaust. They call Hamas “Nazis” and view the pogrom that was perpetrated in communities of the south as a modern parallel to the pogroms they perpetrated.
“What happened on October 7 is very similar to the pogroms that were carried out against Jews not only during World War II, and not only by German Nazis, but also by ‘good’ Lithuanians, Poles and Ukrainians. As a historian, the important thing is not for me to say ‘A pogrom happened here,’ but to infer from that the implications for the Zionist movement. The moment a pogrom against Jews takes place in the Jewish state, the Zionist state, both the state and Zionism are testifying to their own failure. Because the idea underlying the establishment of a Zionist state was to prevent a situation like that in which Jews in the Diaspora find themselves.
“Here is what we need to think about: How did it come about that Zionism disappointed and that the Zionist state – or its prophets, from Herzl onward – is incapable of meeting the goals it set for itself? The event of October 7, a pogrom on the soil of Israel, in the State of Israel, is a turning point in our assessment of the success of Zionism, and a turning point in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“I look at what happened,” he continues, “and I say: The Zionist solution is not [really] a solution. We are arriving at a situation in which the Jewish people who live in Zion live in a condition of total insecurity, and not for the first time. Beyond this, we need to take into account that Israel is causing a reduction in the security of Diaspora Jewry, instead of the opposite. So this Zionist solution is very deficient, and we need to examine what caused this deficiency.”
And what is the cause?
“We need to understand that there are different solutions for Jewish existence, and to accept that the Jews have the right to choose. Emancipation and Jewish nationhood can exist side by side. Some say that emancipation is enough for us, that we can manage the risks of life in the Diaspora. Others say they want a national solution. The very fact that the two solutions are perceived as mutually competitive is already [evidence of] the incipient failure of the nationhood solution.”
To which we need to add the situation at which Jewish nationalism in Israel has arrived.
“Jewish nationhood in the Land of Israel went through a process of nationalism, racialism and ethnocentrism. It created a situation of being unable to reach a modus vivendi with the neighboring world. I look with longing at the early Zionists or at those who were in Brit Shalom [1920s intellectuals in Mandatory Palestine who sought a binational state] and who thought about something different, not about eternal war. The moment you think about eternal war, you expose yourself to the same weaknesses we saw on October 7 in the cruelest form.”
So where do we go from here?
“It’s clear that the two-state solution needs to be the logical result, even though at the moment it looks hopeless and totally absurd. The alternative is either for us to execute a Nazi-like act against the Palestinians, or for the Palestinians to execute a Nazi act against us, meaning an attempt to destroy [Israel] – an apocalyptic ‘solution’ of Armageddon.
“Eight years ago, [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu replied to the question of whether we are always to live by the sword with ‘Yes.’ That is an appalling answer. There are people who would say that there is another alternative: We can expel them from the country, or the Palestinians can live under Israeli rule. But those are solutions that every sensible person would consider unrealistic, and reject. The two-state solution with a completely new conception of ‘state’ should be the aspiration.”
Are you referring to the establishment of a federation?
“Two states, alongside each other, within a new, modern, framework. When I look at Europe, I find the light at the end of the tunnel, no matter the current plight of the European Union. It’s a situation in which countries were willing to give up part of their sovereignty for the benefit of a superstructure, without giving up the old state.
“Two systems, one next to the other, in order to obviate a situation of the sort we were familiar with until World War II,” Zimmermann adds. “We need to evoke the picture of Europe when we think about the Middle East, despite the great challenge of Ukraine. Some people will burst out laughing at that: ‘Come off it, we’re not Switzerland.’ But we need to remember that the Europeans were caught up in harsh confrontations and in enmities that were thought to be eternal, yet they nevertheless succeeded in creating a European union. If it’s possible there, it’s also possible here. I am not being delusional.”
The Zionist solution is not a solution. Jewish people who live in Zion live in a condition of total insecurity. Beyond this, we need to take into account that Israel is causing a reduction in the security of Diaspora Jewry.
Moshe Zimmermann
Isn’t that a utopian scenario?
“We know which forces are interfering, but the term ‘utopian’ says that I am inventing a story that seems unconnected with reality. That is not the case. A basis exists. We work with and cooperate with Palestinians all the time. Even the settlers take pride in the fact that the people who build their homes come from there. In other words, they are able to find a common language with them at some level. Work needs to be done on the religious component. In Europe, it has been much weakened in the modern era. In the Muslim and Jewish worlds, religion has become influential and fundamentalist, and we need to work on secularizing or liberalizing it. That is dependent on education for coexistence, instead of toward confrontation and hatred. This needs to be done with persistence, and with speed, because otherwise the solution I am apprehensive about – destruction, liquidation and expulsion – will become real. And that is something we cannot accept.”
As events unfold rapidly, it’s possible to forget that up until October 7 we were occupied with a different event bearing historical attributes: the legislative-regime coup. Fear for the future of Israeli democracy also led many to draw on comparisons from the Nazi period.
“As a researcher of Germany, I have tended for years to refer to the Weimar Republic, in which democracy was endangered by authoritarian, nationalist, racist and revisionist forces. For years we tried to determine where on the chronological calendar of the Weimar Republic we in Israel were situated. Now, in 2023 we are wondering: Are there not features of the regime in Israel that are familiar from German history after 1933? But the Israeli case of 2023 can be likened to every point in history in which the government was a kakistocracy – a term meaning ‘government by the worst citizens’ – be it Nero, Czar Nicholas II or Donald Trump. If there were a competition, the present Israeli government would be fighting for a place at the top of the list.”
Where do you discern the danger?
“The term ‘putsch from above’ is appropriate to describe the situation. When the separation of powers is in danger, the independence of the judiciary is in danger and the rights of the individual are in danger, it’s clear that the fears of the advocates of liberal democracy are definitely justified. When the majority operates according to fundamentalist religious values or racist principles, the fears are a matter of certainty. The tyranny of the majority, together with rule over another people by an apartheid-like, racist system, is a terrible mixture, certainly if we look over our shoulder to history in other places.”
Zimmermann is currently engaged in a new research project – the study of “nations that went mad” – which sets out to explain “how nations deviate from their course and become extreme,” he says. “The occupation with Germany, which went mad in 1933, until it decreed its self-destruction, and the occupation with astonishing developments in Jewish and Israeli society, led me to deal with a trans-human phenomenon: societies that at a certain point went off-course, or simply ‘went mad,'” Zimmermann explains. “I am examining how societies arrive at a situation in which a sensible outside observer can think to himself: How could these societies, learned and rational, be swept up into collective acts of madness?
“I am looking to locate the spot at which societies fly off-course and find themselves on a dangerous track. It’s important to locate this point in order to cope with such situations in the present.”
What do societies in which this happens have in common?
“It happens in societies that are unwilling to come to terms with insoluble situations, or in societies that are dogmatic in the search for a solution. My guide is the story of the ‘Final Solution.’ After the Nazis made certain assumptions – that there was a problem that needed to be solved – within the external conditions that were created, they had to move from phase to phase until that stage: the Holocaust. It happened without being planned in advance.”
Who is in your sights? Is Israel also on the list?
“The United States during the periods of [Sen. Joseph] McCarthy and of Trump, the Soviet Union in the period of the public trials [under Stalin], Mao’s China and also societies in the Muslim world. Israel went mad starting in 1967 when the idea of biblical territory began to dominate it politically. Romanticism is a dangerous tendency, as we saw in 19th-century Europe. The story of ‘Greater Israel’ and the settlements is the story of a society that is becoming a hostage to biblical romanticism that is sweeping the whole society to perdition. And that is the problem: Once you have embarked on the path, it’s difficult to leave it without undergoing another catastrophe. That happened to Germany in 1945 in the most drastic way. We obviously do not want a catastrophe like that.”
Moshe Zimmermann was born in Jerusalem on December 25, 1943. His parents had arrived in Mandatory Palestine five years earlier from Hamburg. The family of his mother, Hannah Heckscher, of Sephardic Portuguese ancestry, lived in the northern German city for some 400 years. Some branches of the family tree converted to Christianity. One ancestor became a minister in the German government in 1848, others immigrated to different destinations in northern Europe. Zimmermann’s mother left Germany in 1937, first for England, to which her brother had also fled, and afterward, with the aid of a capital certificate – a privilege reserved for affluent families – immigrated to Palestine.
His father, Karl (later Akiva) Zimmermann, was also born in Hamburg, but the family’s origins lay in Eastern Europe and they were thus viewed as Ostjuden (“Jews from the East”). “My father wanted to be a German writer, but in 1933 he could not enter university,” Zimmermann says. As a substitute, he attended a seminary for Jewish teachers and taught in a Jewish school in Stuttgart. He too immigrated to Palestine in 1938, with a Mandatory worker’s certificate, which he obtained by learning carpentry.
Moshe was the first child born in the family – he has three siblings: two sisters and a brother. All of them were educated in the state-religious track and went on to become liberals and left-wingers, “according to the Israeli categories,” Zimmermann says. In Israel, his father was the principal of the Ma’aleh primary school, which Moshe attended. “The whole elite of the National Religious Party [NRP] went there and received a liberal state-religious education: the children of [the philosopher and scientist] Yeshayahu Leibowitz and the children of [NRP] cabinet ministers Burg – with the exception of Avrum – [Haim Moshe] Shapira and [Zorach] Warhaftig. Some in my class became settlers, including a rabbi in Hebron, and others, like me, are on the left side of the map. A classmate of mine was Herzl Halevi, whose nephew is the army chief of staff [Herzi Halevi, who is named for his uncle, who died in the Six-Day War]. Two years below me were the writer Haim Be’er and the [late] journalist Amnon Dankner.”
What is your first childhood memory?
“For a historian, the term ‘memory’ is very problematic. The first photograph in my possession that is relevant for me is of a boy standing on a balcony on King George V Street in Jerusalem next to [what became the] Israeli flag. The date is May 8 or 9, 1945. With the aid of the photograph, I can still remember the celebration that took place to signify Germany’s defeat in World War II.” Later memories are related to the War of Independence. They revolve around “a boy going to kindergarten who has to worry about a shell falling or a sniper operating from the Old City.”
He lived adjacent to the first Knesset building, on King George Street, in the city center, and followed Israel’s unfolding history from that same home balcony. “I remember the demonstrations against the Reparations Agreement [with Germany] and the attempt to assassinate MKs and [bring down] the government. I remember the major politicians who scurried about in front of our home.”
Zimmermann left Jerusalem when he was in his 50s and lives today in Kiryat Ono, east of Tel Aviv, with his partner. His only child, Ariel Zimmermann, is a judge in Tel Aviv District Court. “Today’s Jerusalem is alien to me,” he says. “My Jerusalem is the western part. The eastern part is not mine to this day. I don’t have a connection to it.”
He recalls that he was a “good student, but some were better than I was.” In history he remembers once receiving a grade of 8.5, “which is the last grade before the one that’s given to God.” At 18 the army declined to draft him because he was too thin. He took advantage of the time to embark on undergraduate studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Subsequently, after gaining some weight, he was drafted and was given a singular assignment. “I was in charge of the libraries and the publications of the judge advocate general’s unit,” he says. “I don’t have ‘falafels’ [slang for epaulettes] on my shoulders. It’s not the kind of service you brag about, but from my point of view, it was very beneficial.”
What did you learn there?
“Everything about public international law and the problems the military prosecution had with that. The judge advocate general at the time was Meir Shamgar [later the president of the Supreme Court]. During the Six-Day War, in which I did reserve duty, my assignment was to provide military prosecutors with the ‘security toolbox.’ We knew very well, in advance, that we were organizing for a situation of occupation, and a manual was prepared for the staff about how to comport themselves according to international law.”
The materials Zimmermann is referring to, aka “Shamgar’s toolboxes,” included texts about the laws of war, international conventions, legal history and relevant drafts of legislation.
The two-state solution needs to be the logical result… The alternative is either for us to execute a Nazi-like act against the Palestinians, or for the Palestinians to execute a Nazi act against us.
Zimmermann resumed his studies after his army service; one of his teachers was the renowned historian Jacob Talmon. He wrote his doctoral dissertation in Jerusalem and Hamburg in the 1970s, on the subject of the connection between German nationhood and Jewish emancipation. “It was clear to me that German nationhood was very important for Germany’s Jews, because it was the pre-national reality of separate German entities that blocked their way to equality of rights. But that connection was unstable. The Jews became national-oriented Germans, and the German nationalists said, ‘We don’t want them,’ and invented the new antisemitism. Before, they hated the Jews because they were different; now they hated them because they were trying to be similar.”
What does the German antisemitism of that period have in common with the present-day antisemitism on campuses in the United States and on the streets of some European cities?
“In the meantime, the State of Israel was created, which became a platform for antisemitic attacks. I am not saying that there is antisemitism because of Israel. Heaven forbid. Antisemitism exists because of a legacy of prejudices. But the platform that’s called Israel allows antisemites to express themselves not in the old way of ‘Jews have crooked noses,’ but to speak about ‘Israelis’ – who [just happen to be] ‘Jews.’ That takes us back to the most relevant question today: How can one distinguish between references to Israel that are antisemitic and those that aren’t? That requires a great deal of differentiation. And then you say: When there are stereotypes, beliefs and antisemitic intentions behind criticism of Israel and its policy, we are in the realm of antisemitism.”
As far as Israel’s leaders are concerned, every critique of the government is antisemitic, isn’t it?
“That’s the catch. Israel is aware of this difficulty and is abusing that knowledge. Official Israel makes sure to interpret every criticism of this sort as antisemitism. Because Israel dared, with its effrontery, to present itself as the exclusive representative of Judaism and of the Jewish people, it is bringing about a situation in which whoever attacks Israel can make use of the same Israeli arrogance that identifies Jews with Israel, in order to speak in condemnation of Jews when they speak about condemnation of Israel.
“The result is that pressure is created from both sides. From the Israeli side, every criticism of us is antisemitism; and from the antisemitic side, everything Israel does is Jewish. That is the thin rope on which we walk all the time. And because it is so thin, there is usually a fall from one side of it or the other, and so this argument is mostly not useful.”
Zimmermann’s critique of nationalist extremism in Israel has landed him in court several times, after he pointed out similarities he observed between Nazi Germany and phenomena that occur in Israel.
“I have suffered personally from the self-righteous approach of ‘There can be no comparison.’ My attempt to draw a comparison between a particular element in the Third Reich and what is happening here became the foundation for a judicial campaign against me. And it was very difficult to explain to judges – though in the end it succeeded – what the role of the historian is, why these comparisons are appropriate and why, also as a Jew, one must always make comparisons,” he says. “Whoever, like me, received a state-religious education, learned virtues that the Torah speaks of – kal vehomer [roughly, all the more so], gzeira shava [a parallel between]. That means you make a comparison and from it you reach a conclusion.”
In 1995, half a year before the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, Zimmermann was at the center of an affair that caused a public furor. A local newspaper belonging to from the Yedioth Communications Group interviewed him and titled the resulting article, “Children of Hebron settlers are exactly like Hitler Youth.” Zimmermann was quoted as saying, “There is a whole segment of Israeli society that I unhesitatingly assert is a copy of Nazism. Look at the children in Hebron, they are exactly like Hitler Youth… From the age of zero their head is stuffed with ‘bad Arabs,’ antisemitism, how everyone is against us. They’re transformed into paranoids from a master race, exactly like Hitler Youth.” In the interview, Zimmermann also drew a comparison between “Mein Kampf” and the Bible as books from which an extreme ideology could be derived.
Zimmermann maintained that his words had been taken out of context, and set forth his version in an article he published in Haaretz. “When the question is asked, in reaction to the terrible things children from Hebron said on the anniversary of the death of Baruch Goldstein [perpetrator of the 1994 massacre of 29 Muslim worshippers in the Tomb of the Patriarchs there], as to whether there is a place for comparing their views to what we encountered in the study of National Socialism, we need to take seriously the comparison as the grounds for a reply.
“And the positive reply, however grave it sounds, has a basis. So too in regard to another comparison that was discussed in angry tones. The allegation was made that publishing chapters from ‘Mein Kampf’ in Hebrew, for teaching purposes, is liable to have a detrimental effect on readers in Israel. To which I responded that in Israel, as differentiated from the countries of Europe, racist, right-wing extremism is nourished also from the use of the Bible, and not ‘Mein Kampf.’ However, are we to therefore ban dissemination of the Bible in Israel?” Concluding the article, Zimmermann wrote, “Precisely because I am knowledgeable about the history of Nazism, I can warn about the harmful potential that is latent in every society.”
That prompted some politicians to call on the attorney general to launch an investigation of Zimmermann on suspicion of incitement and insurrection. MKs from the NRP termed him an “Israel-hating paranoiac” and described what he had said as “shocking incitement that could aid Israel haters and Holocaust deniers.” Lecturers at the Hebrew University urged the institution to be rid of him, and Haaretz columnist Dan Margalit wondered, “If a Jewish professor in Jerusalem talks about Bible study in Israel in the same comparative context as inculcation of Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf,’ what is left for Germans to repent about?”
Three defamation suits were filed against Zimmermann – all of which were ultimately unsuccessful. He also recruited the Nazi era in his defense, when he wrote in Haaretz, “Many like to quote Heinrich Heine’s dictum, ‘Where books are burned, people too will ultimately be burned.’ This has a prelude: Where people question legal free speech, they will ultimately burn books. On May 10, 1933, that happened in Nazi Germany. I wonder: Will that be recommended now by those who wish to eject me from the university because of my opinions? To burn the books I have written, or the lectures I gave? There will be a lot of work here, because it’s not just my academic studies. Every year, tens of thousands of students learn from textbooks that I took part in writing. Will they too be burned at the stake?”
You claimed that what you said about the Hebron settlers was taken out of context. What did you actually say, which you continue to stand by?
“I gave an interview in which I explained that behavior of the sort that characterized the Reich is found among us as well. I spoke about a prominent case that gives rise to a comparison between the education of children in Hebron and the education of the Hitler-Jugend. Or, if I look at [Meir] Kahane, who disseminated a leaflet and introduced ‘Kosher Daughter of Israel’ legislation – stipulating that Jewish women need to be protected by the law from having sexual contact with non-Jews – we are in the same school as National Socialism. I am a historian. I am not doing this in order to vilify or to make headlines, but in order to learn from history. By analytical methods, I try to understand what can improve and benefit our society in the present and the future.”
You paid a price.
“It didn’t give me much satisfaction to sit in court. It cost a lot of time and money and hurt my public image – people consider you an Israel-hater. Even in the period before the social media, the post office and the telephone were working. I got my portion in very large doses. I saw the scale of hatred and misunderstanding. People claimed I was an SS man only because I explained to them that Kahanism contains the same elements you find in Nazism.
“But as a historian, it was my duty. And the more time that passes, what was written about me in Wikipedia as a denigration, becomes the Balaam-like example of ‘came to curse, left by blessing’ [from Numbers 24]. Because of what I was quoted as saying, which wasn’t accurate, settlers and their supporters took me to court three times, and in each case the defamation suit was rejected. What’s interesting is who those people were. Rehavam Ze’evi, who later became a cabinet minister, a few parents from Hebron, who were joined by Mrs. Orit Strock [currently a cabinet minister from the Religious Zionism party] and all kinds of others. In retrospect I can say that they proved that what I maintained is right: that there is place to compare certain elements of Israel’s behavior with what I am familiar with from German history after 1932 as well.”
You aren’t the first or the last to draw that comparison. Prof. Leibowitz spoke of “Judeo-Nazis” before you, and Yair Golan, when he was deputy army chief of staff, spoke after you about similar “processes.”
“I spoke in a period when the right was afraid of the left. Today the Israeli right rules with a high hand. It’s the consensus. If you examine what I said then, the warning was well-grounded. What I said at that time is proving itself today, and the matter should have been dealt with already then.”
The story of ‘Greater Israel’ and the settlements is the story of a society that is becoming a hostage to biblical romanticism that is sweeping the whole society to perdition. Once you have embarked on the path, it’s difficult to leave it.
Moshe Zimmermann
A few months later, in October 1995, the late journalist Amnon Dankner, speaking on the television program “Popolitika,” said in reference to Itamar Ben-Gvir (at the time a 19-year-old far-right activist belonging to the Kach party), “One is permitted to defend oneself against little Itamar the Nazi,” and told the man who is today a government minister, “Shut your mouth, dirty Nazi.” Ben-Gvir sued him. This time Zimmermann was involved in the trial behind the scenes. “I had to prepare a professional opinion about whether the doctrine espoused by Ben-Gvir resembles Nazism.” The court affirmed the defamation charge, but ruled that Dankner would pay compensation of just one shekel.
In another lawsuit, which Zimmermann filed against Haaretz and against a former student of his, he lost. Zimmermann maintained that an article the student published in the paper libeled him by claiming that he compared Israel to Nazis while Germany supports him financially. The court rejected the suit, stating, “It is inconceivable that a professor, as a public personality, can publish his controversial opinions, which include a comparison between Hebron youth and Hitlerite youth, but in contrast, will refuse to accept criticism of his views.” Zimmermann says today that he regrets that lawsuit.
Back to 1995. Two months before Rabin’s assassination, Zimmermann published an article in Haaretz that today reads like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Under the heading “Weimar writing on a Jerusalem wall,” he wrote, “The history of the Weimar Republic, a clear-cut test case of the collapse of democracy in the 20th century, appears more relevant than ever.” He warned against the way in which “the enemies of democracy are exploiting its operating rules without the democratic regime being able to defend itself properly,” adding, “One of the paradoxes of democracy is that its dismantlement is not felt on the spot.”
Warning against the prospect of political assassination, he noted, “Those who are familiar with the history of Weimar – that of Germany on the way to the Third Reich – knows that the assassination of citizens, police officers and statesmen who represented the republic, by far-right extremists, threatened democracy more than a decade before the change of government.” Citing the assassination of the German-Jewish Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau in 1922 by right-wing extremists, he observed that this is “often considered the beginning of the end of German democracy then” – and linked that situation with the Israeli reality on what would turn out to be the eve of the Rabin assassination.
That was 28 years ago. Can we say that you were right?
“I wrote then that a political killing was looming. Anyone who was alert, as I was then, to the comparison between the Weimar case and the State of Israel, knew the direction in which things were developing.”
On the other hand, there are now left-wingers who say they have “sobered up” from their naive belief that peace with the Palestinians was possible. The right is delighted. They say they demanded that the “Oslo criminals” be tried back in real time.
“Talk of the ‘Oslo criminals’ recalls the ‘November criminals’ of November 1918 – the month in which the Germans signed the armistice agreement. At that time, the German right wing branded those people, who we know in hindsight did the right thing, as criminals. And the Israeli right is branding the people who paved the way to Oslo as criminals. I am not one of those who ‘sobered up.’ The great prospect for which we strove was Oslo. The two sides, one alongside the other, with mutual acceptance.
“I am not naïve. I know that among the Palestinian population there was a large enough force that was in favor of Greater Palestine, just as on the Israeli side there are the advocates of Greater Israel. The crime is the collaboration between the extremists on this side and the other. Accordingly, there is no place for ‘disillusionment’ about Oslo. The disappearing Israeli left is attesting to the fact that it has lost its confidence when it uses the same linguistic coinages as the right.”
In Germany, too, some are saying they are “disillusioned” with the policies of the former chancellor, Angela Merkel, who opened the gates to immigration and let some people into Germany who don’t wish to adopt German values. Just recently there were reports of raids on terrorist properties, including of Hamas, in Germany. And against this background the far right is gaining strength.
“The extreme-right, populist party entered the Bundestag in 2017. What had been considered impossible became reality. Six years later, that party [the AfD – Alternative for Germany] is only getting stronger. The policy of all the traditional parties – not to cooperate with it – will become even more complicated. Will the ‘firewall’ between the establishment parties and this party be breached? The concern is that in the end people will say there is no other choice, we need to cooperate with them.
“From that moment we know how the disaster will occur, because we Israelis have excellent experience. Netanyahu needed [Ben-Gvir’s party] Otzma Yehudit for parliamentary reasons at first, and then as ministers. Judging by this model, we should be apprehensive that the flood will arrive in Germany, too.
“The difference is that the Germans understand well what the Third Reich was and they have a defensive shield in the form of a constitution. But the case of Germany can’t be isolated from the European situation. So we need to be concerned about what is happening in Germany. I also find it very worrisome that ties exist between the populist right there and the settler right in Israel. A kind of fraternal alliance based on enmity for Muslims.”
Let’s talk about Islam in Germany. The authorities there are intervening to prevent Muslim demonstrators from denying Israel’s right to exist, and this after Merkel said in the past that “Islam has become part of Germany.”
“There are about five million Muslims in Germany. You can’t say that they don’t belong while you agree that Jews belong to Germany when there are no more than 200,000 of them there. The demand being made of those Muslims is to adapt themselves to the German constitution. Anyone who disagrees with the constitution is ostracized. Every time Israel attacks Gaza, there are Muslim elements in Germany, some of them well instructed by the Turkish government and indirectly also by Iran, who speak out against Israel and use antisemitic slogans.
“There are antisemitic elements in the Muslim world, but in the past it displayed a more tolerant attitude toward Jews than the Christian world. In the wake of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the use of European antisemitic slogans by the Muslim world emerged as a weapon against the Jewish state.”
You maintain that Israel has also contributed to this development.
“Israel does everything to place weapons in the hands of its enemies. The moment the Israeli government includes outright racists who talk about ‘Jewish power,’ ‘erasing the Arabs’ or annexation, you are serving those forces. When we act very cruelly against Gaza – and I of course remember the cruelty of October 7 – it’s clear that people who feel that they identify ethnically or religiously with the group that is suffering will take to the streets.
“And that gives rise to another paradox: They are serving their enemy. The German right, which constantly talks about the mistake of accepting Muslim elements as refugees in Germany, says: ‘We were right in 2015 when we said that they must not be admitted. The Muslims are showing us that they are against the Jews, against the constitution, and we, as a result, are in favor of the Jews.’ I hope that readers will be aware of the ironic note: Suddenly the populist German right is on the side of the Jews.
“That is a tactical achievement, of course,” Zimmerman continues. “Public opinion polls show that it’s those who vote for this right who display the highest level of antisemitism. Most Muslims in Germany have undergone an integration process, and don’t have the struggle against Israel on their agenda. But those elements who do so are now receiving a voice, in the social media. So there is a dual danger. On the one hand, that the Muslim element in Germany will acquire a clear antisemitic hue; and on the other hand, that the German right will be reinforced by this situation – and after all, we don’t want that.”
During your years in academia you also dealt with the attempt by the Education Ministry to shape the education of Israel’s children in history. What did you want to see included in the curriculum in Israel?
“That a multicultural way of life is preferable to a culture war, and that an attempt at dialogue is preferable to war. That Jewish nationalism arose as part of the national movements of Europe. That antisemitism is a prejudice, hatred between societies. That other genocides have also taken place [beside the Holocaust]. They said, ‘Heaven forbid, it was something exceptional, different, something else entirely, we are special, there’s no comparison.'”
What happened to the program you formulated and proposed?
“It was attacked by political elements and became a dead letter.”
To conclude, Zimmermann wishes to return to his favorite arena: comparing between then and now. “When I look at the Israeli propaganda system – ‘Together we will win’ – it’s hard for me not to remember the spirit of steadfastness in a war I am familiar with from German history. You’re in a tough situation, and you know that you somehow have to cultivate this spirit of ‘We will hang in there.’ That’s the type of thing that generates misery. The comparison is of course not one to one, but in Germany in 1944 slogans appeared such as, ‘Our walls are broken but our hearts are firm.’ Today you see, ‘Together we will win’ in every corner of the country. It’s an attempt to generate unconditional support, which prevents a discussion about the goals of the war and the logic of the war.
“You have to be very careful about the work of propaganda,” Zimmermann sums up. “Anyone who has studied German history and watched Goebbels’ career, sees what a dangerous instrument propaganda is – one that can lead to a loss of the way.”
לטענת צימרמן, מאמר שפורסם בעיתון היווה פרסום לשון הרע נגדו, מאחר שנטען בו כי הוא משווה את ישראל לנאצים וקשרו זאת לעובדה שגרמניה תומכת בו כספית
אסף ברגרפרוינד 28 במרץ 2004
בית משפט השלום בתל אביב דחה ביום חמישי תביעת דיבה שהגיש פרופ’ משה צימרמן, ראש החוג להיסטוריה באוניברסיטה העברית, נגד עיתון “הארץ” ונגד ענת פרי, דוקטורנטית להיסטוריה וסטודנטית שלו לשעבר. השופטת יהודית שבח דחתה את טענותיו של צימרמן בנוגע למאמר שפירסמה פרי באוגוסט 2002 ב”הארץ”. לטענת צימרמן, המאמר היווה פרסום לשון הרע נגדו, מאחר שפרי טענה בו כי הוא משווה את ישראל לנאצים וקשרה זאת לעובדה שגרמניה תומכת בו כספית.
השופטת קבעה כי נושא יחסי גרמניה-ישראל הוא נושא ציבורי ממדרגה ראשונה והוסיפה כי לא יעלה על הדעת שפרופסור, בהיותו אישיות ציבורית, יוכל לפרסם את דעותיו השנויות במחלוקת, הכוללות השוואה בין נוער חברון לבין הנוער ההיטלריסטי, אך מנגד יסרב לקבל ביקורת על דעותיו. השופטת הדגישה כי “בית המשפט אינו המקום המתאים לעריכת חשבונות בין עמיתים למקצוע וחילוקי הדעות אמורים להיוותר בקתדרה האקדמית”.
צימרמן ופרי מכירים שנים: פרי היתה תלמידתו של צימרמן שאף בדק את עבודתה לקראת סיום התואר השני שלה והעניק לה את הציון 93. בהחלטתה קבעה השופטת כי ממאמרים שכתב צימרמן ומראיונות שנתן לכלי התקשורת ניתן לקבוע כי הוא נוהג לערוך השוואות בין גורמים ישראלים לבין גורמים נאצים וכן הוכח כי הוא מקבל כסף מקרנות מחקר גרמניות.
השופטת ציינה כי המאמר שפירסמה פרי נכתב כחלק מנורמה מקובלת של החלפת דעות הנהוגה בין חוקרים בכלל והיסטוריונים בפרט. השופטת העירה כי העובדה שבעבר נדחו תביעות דיבה שהוגשו נגד צימרמן אין בה כדי להשליך על המקרה הספציפי. במקרה זה, קבעה השופטת, השקפתה של פרי שלפיה המימון ניתן לצימרמן מחמת דעותיו הינה סבירה ומתבקשת מהנסיבות. לקראת סיום פסק הדין מבקרת השופטת את התנהגותו של צימרמן בעת הדיון המשפטי אותה תיארה כ”יהירה ומתנשאת”.
השופטת חייבה את צימרמן, אותו יצג עו”ד ערן לב, בתשלום שכר טרחה של הנתבעים בסך 75 אלף שקל. את הנתבעים יצג משרד עורכי הדין ליבליך-מוזר.
Prof. Oren Kroll-Zeldin, the assistant director of the Swig Program in Jewish Studies and Social Justice at the University of San Francisco, has published a new book, Unsettled: American Jews and the Movement for Justice in Palestine. The book is an ethnographic study, as well as polemics. Kroll-Zeldin identifies himself as an anti-Zionist, an activist who participated in some of the campaigns he wrote about in the book. He interviewed some 70 Jewish young adults. His central thesis is that these young activists who engage in Palestine solidarity express their Jewish identity. They “understand Jewish values as demanding a deep commitment to social justice that necessitates distancing themselves from Israel and Zionism.”
In his new book, Kroll-Zeldin identified the four main Jewish anti-Israel activist groups, “IfNotNow,” protesting against the mainstream institutions’ support for Israel; “All That’s Left” and “the Center for Jewish Non-Violence,” engaging the diaspora Jews in co-resistance actions with West Bank Palestinians; and “Jewish Voice for Peace,” an anti-Zionist organization promoting BDS against Israel.
Kroll-Zeldin’s fifth chapter in the book is titled “Under Pressure: Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions.” He discusses a student-wide referendum from December 2020 at Tufts University with the highest voter turnout in the school’s history. The student body voted to end their campus police’s partnership with Israeli law enforcement. Kroll-Zeldin explains that the student effort was part of a national campaign led by Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), “End the Deadly Exchange,” seeking to end programs that send U.S. law enforcement personnel on trips to Israel to train with Israeli police and military. According to Kroll-Zeldin, the referendum resulted from more than two years of organizing and coalition building led by the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a student organization advocating for Palestinian rights. The Tufts’s SJP chapter was the first U.S. student group to implement the “End the Deadly Exchange” campaign on college campuses bolstered by a diverse coalition of student organizations, such as JVP and Alt-J (Alternative Jews), as Kroll-Zeldin stated.
The Tufts campaign was part of the global BDS. As Kroll-Zeldin describes it, “This movement has grown into one of the most widespread global strategies used to combat Israeli state power and end its policies of occupation and apartheid.” Kroll-Zeldin argues that “as evidenced by the Tufts “End the Deadly Exchange” campaign, “the national BDS movement had played a central role in raising the consciousness of left-wing progressive students across the country around justice struggles in Palestine/Israel. For this movement, U.S. college campuses are among the most important sites of BDS organizing.” Kroll-Zeldin discussed in the book how “student involvement in BDS campaigns helped break the hegemonic pro-Israel consensus in Jewish communities and visibilized the Palestinian struggle both within Jewish campus organizations and in students’ home communities.”
Most importantly, the author acknowledged that because the activists were Jewish, “they defused accusations of antisemitism from Zionist-affiliated organizations.”
Kroll-Zeldin has a long history of anti-Israel activism on campus. As the organizer of the program “Beyond Bridges” since 2010, he was quoted in a 2016 book as saying, “what is often portrayed is that Israel and Palestine are incredibly violent places, that it’s a constant war-torn area, constantly under violence, and while in some respects that is true, in Tel Aviv that is not true, but in Gaza City that is true. I think that the dominant narrative doesn’t make the necessary distinctions between Israelis, Jews, Zionists, the Israeli defense force, and it doesn’t make a distinction between Palestinian, terrorists, Muslims. I think that Orientalist tropes of Muslim as violent, as terrorist are continuously re-inscribed by the media, by scholars… by the US government, so that people continuously think that Palestinians must be violent.”
Kroll-Zeldin has written a chapter in a 2019 book arguing that Israel is an apartheid state.
In another chapter of a 2019 book, Kroll-Zeldin argues “that the situation there— namely, the near-permanent status of occupation supported by institutionalized and systemic oppression—merits the apartheid label. He contends that the widely accepted definition of apartheid, embodied in various international conventions, is an apt descriptor of the situation in the West Bank, as the occupation relies on two separate legal systems, one privileging Jewish citizen and the other oppressing Palestinian residents.”
IAM has repeatedly empathized that for three decades, Jewish or Israeli faculty were recruited by pro-Palestinians to promote an anti-Israel agenda through their teachings. Oren Kroll-Zeldin is a good example of this trend and, crucially, he openly acknowledged that Jewish students at Tufts were valuable to the other groups because they deflected from charges of antisemitism. IAM has also made clear that the International Holocaust Remember Alliance (IHRA) Definition of Antisemitism, which has been adopted widely in the West, defines antisemitism as a set of beliefs and actions unrelated to ethnicity. In other words, both Jews and non-Jews who embrace certain beliefs and actions could be considered antisemitic.
Kroll-Zeldin is an example of faculty indoctrinating social science students. Dr. Chaim C. Cohen, who teaches at the Hebrew University School of Social Work, recently published a fascinating article, “Faculty social-cultural Marxism is behind the campus riots.” The article explains that the faculty, not the students, are responsible for the recent campus uprisings. Social-cultural Marxism rules the academic social sciences and arts in America and actively promotes antisemitism. As Cohen describes it, social-cultural Marxist faculty seized the teaching of the social sciences and liberal arts. The article explains how the ideology of social-cultural Marxism now determines what millions of young students are taught when studying subjects such as history, sociology, psychology, literature, media, and gender studies, among others. The tenured faculty send their students out to protests and tell them what pro-Palestinian slogans to chant. The names of this current ideology include radical progressivism, critical theory, post-colonial analysis, wokism, and social-cultural Marxism. Cohen suggests that without focusing on faculty, fighting antisemitism and excessive pro-Palestinian activism on campus is not complete.
Since 2004, IAM has reviewed countless books and articles that adopted the neo-Marxist, critical theory to paint Israel as a colonial apartheid state. This explains the scope of Israel’s international predicament.
Faculy social-cultural Marxism is behind the campus riots
The faculty, and not the students or presidents, are responsible for the campus uprisings Social- cultural Marxism now rules the academic social sciences and arts in America, and actively promotes antisemitism
Dr. Chaim C. Cohen
Jun 28, 2024, 1:08 PM (GMT+3)
Dr. Chaim C. Cohen, whose PhD. is from Hebrew U., is a social worker and teacher at the Hebrew Univ. School of Social Work, and Efrata College. He lives in Psagot, Binyamin.
Introduction: The media hid the Real Story of the campus uprisings: Social- cultural Marxist faculty ‘formally’ completed their coup de tat -seizure of the teaching of the social sciences and liberal arts in many America’s major universities
This spring’s campus protests/riots in favor of Hamas prove beyond a doubt that the ideology of social cultural Marxism now determines what millions of young Americans are taught when studying subjects such as history, sociology, psychology, literature, media and gender studies in major universities.
This spring, a Leftist dominated faculty hid behind the student protestors, and confused, debilitated administrators. The media only reported the programmed, staged antics of ‘summer camp’ protestors, and the very confused mumbling of university presidents appearing before Congressional committees.
But the power behind the throne, behind the campus riots, was the tenured, secure Leftist faculty. They sent the students out to protests. They told them what pro-Palestinian slogans to chant, and what ideological sound bites to voice. The administrators, in turn, knowing that their faculty unequivocally supported the students, were not able to provide strong, determined leadership to prevent anti American and anti-Jewish/Israel hate speech and campus disruptions.
How do I know? The administrators may have called in the police to provide a temporary quiet, but in the end not a single student, not a single student, was permanently punished. They all got their college credits, and all graduated with diplomas. Graduation without punishment, was the reward they received for being successful co-conspirators with the faculty.
In sum, these spring protests, brought the almost unrestrained academic power of the Leftist faculty ‘ out of the closet’. It is now clear to all Americans who is really determining what millions of young Americans are being taught, and much more worrisome, what these indoctrinated students are beginning to internalize as their “American’ self-identify and political beliefs.
Jewish students, in the short run, were the main victims of this Leftist show of academic strength. But in the long run America and the liberal Western society will be the true victims of this ideological, academic seizure of power.
A brief, necessary ‘detour’: the historical development of the current Left ideology that can best be termed ‘social cultural Marxism ‘
How did this academic coup de tat, palace revolution, come about, most of it ‘under the radar, and unknown to the common American?
1.The different names of the current ideology:
The current Left ideology dominating academic education has several names: it has been termed radical progressivism, critical theory, post-colonial analysis, wokism, and social cultural Marxism. I will use the term social cultural Marxism because it shows how the ‘Marxism of the twentieth first century, evolved from the Marxism of the twentieth century.
2.The historic themes common to all Left ideologies since the French Revolution
For close to two hundred years, all Left ideologies advocate these basic themes:
a) Society is composed of two conflicting forces- one being the segment of society that controls the societal forces that Oppress, and the otherbeing the segment of society that lacks societal resources and is Oppressed
b) The goal of the Oppressed segment is to ‘rise up’ and seize societal control from the Oppressing segment
c) With regard to the civil societal conflict between the Oppressing and Oppressed segments, one standard of civil morality applies to the Oppressing segment, and a different standard of civil morality applies to the Oppressed segment.
d) The successful seizing of control of societal resources by the previously Oppressed segment will then enable it to ‘structurally re- engineer -from above’- a more equal, and a more liberating distribution of societal resources to wider segment of the society.
Leftist ideology here contains an inherent, ‘built in’, contradiction/tension between a government engineering social change from above, and the maintenance of ‘individual freedom/autonomy’ from below.
e) Leftist ideology is ‘utopian-romantically idealistic’ in its historical vision. It believes that is historically possible, and even incumbent, to create a truly just, free basically egalitarian society. Because such a purpose is historically possible and imperative, attaining such an End justifies ‘means’ which are often not free, just or liberal.
3. The recent developmental history of social cultural Marxism
a) Traditional Marxism (beginning in the late 19th century) focused on economic class warfare. It called for the majority laboring, working class (the proletariat) to organize, unite and throw off the oppression of the minority capitalist, property owning bourgeois upper class. The majority working class would then equalize the economic conditions by nationalizing property and wealth
b)1960’s-70’s- by the mid twentieth century the above economic -class definition of societal conflict (capitalists as the Oppressor, and labor as the Oppressed) was beginning to lose credibility. Post World War Two social democratic regimes in Western Europe provided extensive social service benefits, and ongoing economic prosperity was established. The average laborer no longer felt economically insecure. He no longer saw himself as an Oppressed class. Also, the economic and social bankruptcy of the communist/socialist Soviet Union gave economic Marxism a ‘bad name’.
And the New Left of the sixties (with which I partially identified), in both America and Europe, dropped economic Marxism and began to define ‘Oppression’ in non-economic terms, such as ending an imperialistic war in Vietnam, ending racist discrimination, and redefining the social role of woman-feminism.
Thus was born the first ‘seeds’ of a social cultural definition of Marxism.
My New Left, 1960’s radical friends, after losing the political battle for societal change, then made a strategic decision to become professors in the social sciences and arts, and from their academic posts to continue their battle for radical societal change.
c) Important footnote : Already in post-World War One, the German Frankfurt School social philosophy began to define the ideology of social cultural Marxism. They saw that during World War One the laboring class defined their self-identity not in economic Marxist terms (as a proletariat) but in nationalistic terms
They retained the basic Marxist paradigm of Oppressor versus Oppressed, but redefined the identity of Oppression. They argued that the main forms of oppression in a capitalist society were the forces of a ‘capitalist encouraged and imposed false consumerism’ and ‘sexual repression’.
d) 1970’s-80’s, ‘The Truth is that there is no Truth: The academic Left radicals of the 60’s, now holding significant academic posts, made the principle of moral relativism the corner stone of their developing social cultural Marxism. Basing themselves on trendy French philosophers they argued that all claims to ‘ objective, absolute truth’ are simply ideological projections of one’s specific social position in society’s institutional power social structure. This ‘philosophical’ claim would allow them in the next generation to legitimize all ‘fringe’ social movements, easily delegitimize traditional, orthodox morality, and two generations later claim that Hamas terror is the moral equivalent of Israel’s military battle for self-survival.
e)1990’s -2010 – The second generation of radical, Left academic social cultural Marxists now acted to ‘update’ their canonized division of their ‘Oppressing’ and “Oppressed’ social classifications, particularly focusing on self-identities in the context of ‘institutional racism’, ‘a more radical definition of feminism’ and homosexuality.
We can generalize that claims to being part of an ‘Oppressed ‘ social entity now had very little to do with economic status, and everything to do with ‘defining one’s social self-identity’, often in rejection of traditional, normative social self-identities.
f) 2010 till the present: Third generation radical Left academics now more formally organized the ideological framework of the social cultural Marxism, and continued to expand and ‘canonize’ additional minority social self identities as ‘Oppressed’ social entities, including all forms of ‘fluid gender identities and gender transformation’ and to include ALL non-White, second and third World entities (basically all non-Europeans). This was based on adopting a ‘post -colonial ‘social analysis.
For example, ‘To be ‘queer’ – to live outside almost all traditional social norms – has now attained an almost a super legitimate, ‘prophetic’ social status. Also, they have developed the theory of ‘intersectionality’ which means that people of ‘radical sexual social identities’ are now allies in ‘overthrowing social oppression’ with third world Islamic movements who daily ostracize and punish all forms of sexual deviations. (I am sure one hundred years from now historians will laugh at this ideology of intersectionality).
g) Summary of the development of social cultural Marxism . So ‘the results are now in’. According he latest acts of ‘canonization’, if you are White (that also means Jewish), of European origin, and base your social cultural identity on the traditional two parent (male and female) family, traditional organized religion, traditional community organizations, and strongly identify with national patriotism You Are The Oppressors. (I hate to say this). This means you have become the Enemy of all ‘Oppressed ‘ social entities (as the ones defined above) in the world.
Operationally, this means that social cultural Marxism demands that we socially engineer society, in a semi totalitarian manner from above, to transfer ‘societal privileges and resources from the Oppressing class to the Oppressed classes. This program of ‘social engineering from above’ is entitled DEI, meaning the goal is to Diversify, Equitize, and Include the above canonized Oppressed groups in a transfer/redistribution of societal statuses, privileges and resources.
This means to ‘Take from the above Oppressing classes (Whites, two parent families, traditional religious’) and ‘Give to the above canonized Oppressed social groups, mentioned above” and thus detour around the democratic expectation that all societal groups should have basic access to society’s resources, and then compete -without active governmental intervention- to build the life to which they aspire.
This essay’s basic message:
I ‘apologize’ to my readers for the above somewhat ‘heavy’ philosophical detour. But it was the only way that I can demonstrate to my readers what a very serious and very powerful force social cultural Marxism has become; and what We, the defenders of Israel, of the traditional family and sexual morality, and of traditional religion, are ‘up against’.
A three generation, academic Leftist revolution has put the study of the social sciences and the arts in the hands of academics now ruling with an iron fist of a basically undemocratic, non-liberal, non-tolerant social Marxist ideology.
We holders of traditional social values are the real ‘underdog’. And I am not optimistic. It will take more than a generation to free the academic studies from their reign and regime. A social conservative on campus today has to feel like he is fighting, with a bow and arrow, against a well-disciplined army, with advanced intellectual weapons.
But after this ‘philosophical detour’ the reader should now better understand my original point that ‘these campus pro Hamas ‘uprisings’ ‘ were meticulously choreographed from ‘above’ by the social cultural Marxist faculty rulers of the universities.
How bad is this social cultural Marxist academic regime for the Jews? Very bad!
When confronted with complicated questions of social policy and change we Jews somewhat jokingly like to ask to asking “Is it good for the Jews?’ I would answer as following:
First, social cultural Marxism is bad for the Jews because it has made academic studies in the arts and social sciences a very unfriendly, even hostile, cultural-academic environment for Jews who feel proud, and want their Jewish heritage to be an important part of their self-identity. (Radical left wing social activism is a part of our Jewish cultural past, but only a fringe minority)
Jews and academic life and success are like ‘fish and water, bees and honey’. Most Jews probably see academic success as the key to their extraordinary social success of assimilating into American life, and key positions in American society, in less than three generations. I am sorry to write that most Jews will probably choose to achieve academic achievement in a culturally hostile social- even anti-semitic- environments, rather than learn in in what they see as a more culturally friendly, but ‘second rate’ academic institutions. I worry what four years in an unfriendly academic environment will do to their Jewish self-identity. I believe that some will find their Jewish identity strengthened, but the Jewish identity of most will be weakened.
Second, and more important, social cultural Marxism has seriously destabilized American society , thus creating a fertile ground for antisemitism.
Social cultural Marxism has been a very major force in polarizing and destabilizing America, destroying the traditional social norms of the majority of moderate Americans, and destroying America’s sense of national self-confidence. The result is growing sense that American society has become ‘dysfunctional’. Society has to become destabilized when you argue that America was born in the ‘sin of racism’, and the majority White population is inherently the Oppressing Bad Guy who must be condemned to walk around with a sign of Cain on his forehead. (Admittedly the social cultural Marxism now dominating academic life is not the only cause of America’s polarization and destabilizing. The white supremacy and Chistian nationalism of rural Trump America also contribute. But social cultural Marxism is the chosen topic of this article)
And for three thousand years, (be it a declining Rome, a Russia of the Czars, or the German Weimar Republic) a society that has become destabilized, and a sense of polarization and dysfunction pervades it, has always become an extremely fertile ground for the emergence and spread of the cancer of antisemitism.
And this what is happening now. American Jews had a ‘golden age’ when American society believed in its own goodness, and perceived itself as being open, pluralistic and liberal. When American society, and all societies in history, begin to feel polarized and dysfunctional, both the Right and the Left always first point the finger, and blame, the Jews. Jews are always the first to get the blame for society’s sense of failure. This has been our historical destiny.
In brief, academic social cultural Marxism is wood and tinder of the current bonfire of campus antisemitism. The Hamas massacre of Oct. 7th is only the match that lite this raging bonfire
Summary-social cultural Marxism is destroying American academic life, and has become the major source of galloping antisemitism
First, RadicalLeft academics, over the last three generations, have developed a systematic ideology of social cultural Marxism until it is now the most powerful social philosophy dominating the study of the social sciences and the arts.
Second, social cultural Marxism is an inherently divisive, polarizing political ideology as it divides society into Oppressing and Oppressed social entities, and wants to reengineer America’s socials structure from above. “Privileged Whites, and particularly Jews’ have been labeled as the Bad Guys Oppressing class.
Third, the recent campus uprisings are the direct result of academic social cultural Marxist choreographing their students to take their ideology out of the classroom and into the street. This means teaching that Israel is a colonial settler state that deserves to be extinguished ‘From the river to the sea’. Israel’s post Oct. seventh war of survival provided them with a ‘not to be missed’ opportunity to teach their anti-semitic ideology in the street.
Four The domination of social cultural Marxism on campus has thus become an inevitable, inherent, very potent force promoting antisemitism, and anti Israelism in American society today.
Conservative, pro-Israel, Jewish forceswill have to work very hard, and for a very long time, in order to disarm social cultural Marxism and repair the horrible damage it has done to Jewish and American society.
In a student-wide referendum that took place in December 2020, one with the highest voter turnout in school history, the student body at Tufts University voted to end their campus police’s partnership with Israeli law enforcement. The student effort was part of a national campaign led by Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) called End the Deadly Exchange, which seeks to end programs that send U.S. law enforcement personnel on trips to Israel to train with Israeli police and military. The referendum was the culmination of more than two years of campus organizing and coalition building led by the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a student organization that advocates for Palestinian rights. The Tufts chapter of SJP was the first U.S. student group to implement the End the Deadly Exchange campaign on a college campus. They were bolstered by a diverse coalition of student on-campus organizations, such as JVP and Alt-J (Alternative Jews), two Jewish-identified groups that operate independently of the university’s Hillel chapter. The success of the campaign hinged on the broad-based coalition of supporters, which enabled them to convince people of its importance and validity. The Jewish campus organizations, in addition to the Jewish student members of SJP, were integral to this coalition, as, among other things, they defused accusations of antisemitism from Zionist-affiliated organizations. The Tufts campaign was part of the global movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel, more commonly referred to as BDS. This movement has grown into one of the most widespread global strategies used to combat Israeli state power and end its policies of occupation and apartheid. As evidenced by the Tufts End the Deadly Exchange campaign, the national BDS movement had played a central role in raising the consciousness of left-wing progressive students across the country around justice struggles in Palestine/Israel. For this movement, U.S. college campuses are among the most important sites of BDS organizing. As I discuss in greater detail below, student involvement in BDS campaigns helped break the hegemonic pro- Israel consensus in Jewish communities and visibilized the Palestinian struggle both within Jewish campus organizations and in students’ home communities. This chapter examines the central role that BDS activism plays among young Jewish American Palestine solidarity activists.
Oren Kroll-Zeldin has been studying and writing about Israel/Palestine for his entire academic career. Now he has written his first book about it. “Unsettled: American Jews and the Movement for Justice in Palestine,” published this month, delves into the subject through interviews with young American Jews active in the Palestine solidarity movement.
Kroll-Zeldin, 43, is the assistant director of the Swig Program in Jewish Studies and Social Justice at the University of San Francisco, where he is also an assistant professor of theology and religious studies. He identifies as anti-Zionist, as do many of the 70 or so young adult Jews he interviewed.
His book is an ethnographic study, but it’s also a polemic, as Kroll-Zeldin is himself an activist who took part in some of the same campaigns as his interview subjects.
His thesis is that these young activists, ages roughly 18 to 40, engage in Palestine solidarity work to express their Jewish identity; they understand Jewish values as demanding a deep commitment to social justice that necessitates distancing themselves from Israel and Zionism. They are active in four main groups: IfNotNow, which protests mainstream Jewish institutions’ support for Israel; All That’s Left and the Center for Jewish Non-Violence, which try to engage diaspora Jews in co-resistance actions with West Bank Palestinians; and Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist organization that promotes the boycott, sanctions and divestment movement against Israel. This book may not be a comfortable read for older generations of American Jews — but it describes a phenomenon that is real and happening right now.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
J.: Why did you write this book?
Oren Kroll-Zeldin: I had always been interested in the generational shifts in American Jewish connections to and support for the State of Israel and for Zionism, and I had personal experiences interacting with the groups that I focused on. I knew that this was a project that was politically important, that was personally meaningful, and that academically was worthy of inquiry.
You interviewed young American Jews active in four main groups. Despite their political differences on whether Israel should exist as a Jewish state, they all seem to have found a space to “be Jewish” in their activism. How does this work?
A lot of the young activists that I worked with and then interviewed for this project expressed a hesitation in connecting with their Jewishness, at least in mainstream Jewish spaces, because they saw those spaces as upholding certain values that they didn’t agree with vis-a-vis Zionism and the State of Israel. Some removed themselves from Jewish life altogether. Others found Jewish life in places where they could feel connected politically to others based on their anti-Zionism or their anti-occupation political stance.
For many of them, participating in these direct actions on the ground alongside Palestinians, leveraging their privilege as American Jews, was a really important way for them of performing a Jewish identity rooted in the values that they were taught in the Jewish educational spaces they grew up in.
They very intentionally engage with their activism, and they articulate it in Jewish language. They’re engaging in Jewish rituals, having Passover seders at the encampments on campus, reciting Kaddish at protests, as a way of saying we are doing this to perform our Jewish identities.
But there’s another really important part of this. They’re saying we don’t want to end synagogue life or ruin institutionalized Jewish life in the United States. No, we want it to be better, because being Jewish is important to us, and here’s how we think it can be better. You — our Jewish day school, our summer camp, our youth group, our synagogue Hebrew school — you taught us about certain values of peace, of freedom, of equality, of justice. We are enacting these very things that you taught us because we think it is important to apply these values to everyone — not only to Jews, to everyone, and that includes Palestinians.
You often mention the need to “disentangle Judaism from Zionism.” What does that mean?
These activists learned Zionism as a Jewish value in their Jewish upbringings, that being Jewish means, in part, believing in the importance of a Jewish state and a Jewish homeland. What they were not taught is the impacts that that political ideology has had on Palestinians. And in a process of what I call in the book “unlearning Zionism,” which I borrow from other scholars and activists, they went through this very deep process of learning about Palestinian narratives, about Palestinian experiences that were largely hidden from them in their Jewish educations.
A lot of people growing up as Jews in the United States would plant trees in honor of someone through the Jewish National Fund and were never taught that the trees that they were planting were, for the most part, being planted over the remains of destroyed and depopulated Palestinian villages. So liberating Judaism from Zionism is a way of disentangling the Israeli state violence done in the name of Judaism, in the name of Jews, and saying: Our Jewish identities are not intertwined with nationalism, with an ethnonational project.
American Jews have stood up for Palestinian rights for decades, but it’s different with this generation. You write about the importance of lived experience in creating that difference. What are the defining moments for those you interviewed?
This generation of Jews is very far removed from the Holocaust, and that is very significant. This is one of the foundational narratives of the State of Israel, and this is not a lived experience for them. Likewise, the 1967 Arab-Israeli war is not something that young American Jews today can relate to. They only really have experiences seeing news clips and consuming social media, where Israel is the aggressor, where Israel is an occupier, where Israel has all of the power, a country that is supported by the United States government. They don’t see Israel as the underdog; they see the Palestinians as the underdog.
Also, older generations were less likely to encounter Palestinians on campuses or in their communities. Now, it’s very likely for Jewish students to encounter Palestinians on their campuses, for them to become friends, for them to meet each other’s families and to know each other quite well. People are able to travel to Israel and to the Palestinian territories much more easily than previous generations. They can consume alternative news sites like +972 Magazine or Mondoweiss or Al Jazeera and see things that they wouldn’t have seen before. All of this helps to expose people to different narratives than previous generations.
Now there’s a couple of really key mobilizing moments, cataclysmic episodes that transformed this generation of American Jews. The 2014 Gaza war really is the biggest one in the last 10 years [until Oct. 7 and the subsequent war]. That is what led to the founding of IfNotNow and the dramatic rise of membership in groups like Jewish Voice for Peace.
The Trump electoral victory in 2016 forced a lot of young American Jews to rethink their priorities and to mobilize them into activists. The Gaza war in May 2021 was another really significant factor, and again today, what we have seen over the last nine months, since Oct. 7, has really shook the foundation of American Jewish life and has catalyzed a lot of young American Jews to participate.
You finished writing this book before Oct. 7. Would you write the same book today?
Everything has changed since then, and nothing has changed at all. Everything remains the same, only more so. The destruction of Palestinian life is more intense. The violence in Gaza and the West Bank is more intense. The power of the right in Israel and the settler movement are only more intense now. The divisions in the American Jewish community were always there. They’re only more intense today. So I don’t think that I would write anything different.
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Kroll-Zeldin, an assistant professor of Jewish Studies at the University of San Francisco, has spent years talking with young American Jews and researching their attitudes toward Israel, Palestine, and social justice.
He argues that growing numbers of young Jewish people in the US don’t see themselves as closely connected to Israel as their parents and grandparents were, and many are rejecting the idea that Zionism is part of the American Jewish identity.
Kroll-Zeldin, who is also the assistant director of USF’s Swig Program in Jewish Studies and Social Justice, teaches a semester-long class on the conflict in the Middle East. He’s the director of the Beyond Bridges: Israel-Palestine program with the Center for Global Education at USF. It’s an understatement to say he’s an expert on the region.
We spoke with him about his research, his conclusions, how “unlearning Zionism” personally changed his life and his studies—and how this change may impact the future of the Middle East.
48HILLS Shortly after the invasion of Gaza, you did a talk at USF that I went to that I thought was really, really good. And one of the things you said was when you talk about the birth of Israel, multiple narratives can be true at the same time. And I’m wondering if you could start off by talking a little bit about that.
OREN KROLL-ZELDIN: There can be multiple truths at the same time. The birth of Israel, for some Jews around the world, was understood as an absolutely incredible moment in history, a really important moment for Jews rising out of the ashes of the Holocaust. Zionism itself was understood as a national liberation movement.
At the same time, the founding of Israel led to the Nakba, the catastrophe for Palestinians, the ethnic cleansing and dispossession of Palestine, and the creation of a massive refugee problem.
Both of those things are factually accurate, and different people hold different truths about those foundational narratives.
48HILLS One of the things you mentioned in your book is that for a lot of American Jews, the idea of Zionism and support for the state of Israel, almost no matter what it does, was kind of embedded in Judaism for generations, including yours. Can you talk a little bit about that?
OREN KROLL-ZELDIN Yeah, there was a concerted effort by certain American Jewish establishment institutions in conjunction with the government of the State of Israel to ensure this very, very clear link between American Judaism and Israel and Zionism and support for the state of Israel. And really there is a very long history of American Jewish institutions silencing dissent and critique of that connection.
After the Arab Israeli war of 1967, Zionism became deeply interwoven into both American political life, but also, and more importantly for this conversation, Jewish American life in such a way that Zionism almost became a new American Jewish religion. When you would go to a synagogue, there would be an American flag and an Israeli flag on the pulpit. If you went to Hebrew School or Jewish day school or Jewish overnight summer camps, or almost really any Jewish educational institutional space, there were people teaching about Israel, unquestionably teaching about Israel, not telling anything about this other narrative that we started with, that narrative of ethnic cleansing, of dispossession, of the catastrophe of Nakba.
And the byproduct of that is people never knowing in American Jewish spaces what Palestinian narratives were, what Palestinian experiences were. It was only, we’re Jewish, there’s the state of Israel, it’s there for you, it is there for us, and let’s learn about it. Let’s celebrate it.
48HILLS You write in the book about “unlearning Zionism.” And you talk about your own personal experience, and maybe you can tell us a little more about the Berkeley Hillel trip you took in 2006 and how that experience as a young Jewish scholar affected you and brought you kind of on the journey to where you are today.
OREN KROLL-ZELDIN Much like the people I write about in the book, I went through a very similar process of being indoctrinated into unquestioning Zionism, which was strange because in the community that I grew up with, and at least in the home that I grew up in, we would question everything. We were taught to question everything, to champion liberal causes. The one thing we weren’t taught to question was Israel and Zionism, and it wasn’t until much later in my life that I learned to think more critically about that and for me, as for others who go through the process of unlearning Zionism, there are moments that form cracks in the foundational narratives.
I have a whole chapter in the book about Birthright critiquing. And part of the way I know so much about it is my own sort of experience.
48HILLSMaybe we could stop for a second here and you can explain to people what the Birthright program is.
OREN KROLL-ZELDIN Birthright is a free 10-day trip to Israel for Jews from around the world between the ages of 18 and 34, who have never been on a peer trip to Israel before. More than 700,000 Jews from around the world have gone to Israel on a Birthright program. It is the single largest provider of Israel education for Jews across the world.
So I was staffing a trip in 2006, when the 2006 Israel Lebanon war broke out. We were in the north of Israel, very close to the Lebanon border. And one day on the Sabbath, we were eating lunch in our hotel, and three rockets from Lebanon fall within 100 meters of the hotel.
The whole thing shakes. We end up spending much of that day in the bomb shelter, waiting for clearance to be able to get on a bus and leave and go to the center of the country.
I had a really hard time hearing what people were saying: ‘They’re just our enemies. They hate Jews. They just want to wipe us off the face of the map. It’s only because we’re Jewish, that they’re doing this.’ And I remember hearing some deep-seated Anti-Arab racism, Islamophobia.
And I was wondering, well, what are the people on the other side of the border saying? What are people in Lebanon experiencing? And anytime I would ask people that, they would really quickly shoot me down: ‘How could you be talking about them? This is about our survival.’ And that really shook me. I was like, I know there’s more to this story.
So that sort of led me to examine and start learning more. What was happening in Lebanon. What was this war all about? How does this connect to the Palestinian issue? Who are the Palestinians? As I started learning more, I started to meet Palestinians, learn from them, and got deeply invested in the academic scholarship of Palestine studies, of Middle East studies, and connecting that to my own research in Jewish studies and anthropology.
And I guess now there’s this book, exploring that all.
48HILLS One of the stories you also tell is about a student who was on one of these Birthright trips, who was given a map of Israel that did not include any lines around the West Bank. Can you talk a little bit about that?
OREN KROLL-ZELDIN So there’s a really common thing, the use of maps, and this is a big thing today. In these Jewish institutional spaces and on Birthright they give you maps and it’s a map of greater Israel. And there’s no demarcation of the West bank. There’s a very, very small line that points out where Gaza is. But the indication is that all of this is Israel. There’s no occupied Palestinian territories. There’s no sense that there’s any differentiation.
This really speaks to how American Jews are taught about Israel, but it also speaks to the power of the apartheid system in Israel. Jews on the entire land are citizens living with the rights of citizenship. But Palestinians, if they’re living in the West Bank or Gaza, they don’t have the same rights.
So this person on his Birthright trip was pointing out: But wait, where’s the West Bank? What’s going on here? What does that say about the program and the erasure of Palestinian life, Palestinian identity, culture, history, narratives.
You hear American Jews who are pro-Israel on campuses starting to say they feel uncomfortable when they see a protester wearing a shirt where what they would consider to be the state of Israel is with, like, maybe the checkered pattern of a keffiyeh, and is saying, well, this is all Palestine.
In a sense, both sides are using these maps to claim the whole thing belongs to me. It is all Israel, it is all Palestine. And in a sense, this sort of speaks to what we started with, the multiple truths and competing narratives.
We need to make sense of this. American Jews weren’t taught to make sense of this. And this activist on this Birthright trip was raising this as an issue. We need to reckon with what’s going on here. With what you’re putting on these maps.
48HILLS One of the things you write about is anti-Zionism as a Jewish value, and I’m hoping you can talk a little bit about that.
OREN KROLL-ZELDIN Anti-Zionism is a political ideology that is contesting the Jewish nation-state’s stronghold in Israel and its oppression of Palestinians. It’s a way of liberating Jewishness from Zionism. It’s saying there are so many different ways to be Jewish. It’s about the liberation and safety of all, the safety and security of Jews and Palestinians.
We are seeing a lot of allegations of antisemitism [in the movement for justice in Palestine], equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism, which makes it harder to call out actual instances of antisemitism.
Like what we see in the rising white nationalists, the strength of white nationalism that people are very literally being attacked in their places of worship, in their synagogues, and being killed.
And we need to take that seriously. That is very real. But the individual instances of antisemitism in the movement should not be painting the entire thing as antisemitic.
48HILLS One of the themes that comes out of the people you’ve interviewed and the people you talked to was this idea of “co-resistance.” Can you talk a little more about that?
OREN KROLL-ZELDIN: Co-resistance, I think, is one of the most important and profound ways of resisting Israeli policies of apartheid and occupation that exists today. It means that Palestinians and Jews resist collectively on the ground, in alliance and collaboration with one another.
Co-resistance emerged out of the failure of coexistence programs There was a proliferation of coexistence programs during and immediately following the Oslo chords of the 1990s. Coexistence is like, whoa, let’s have a dialogue. And we’ll get to peace through these track two dialogue programs, and we’ll realize: Look, you love movies. I love movies. You like music. I like music. You eat hummus. I eat hummus. Amazing. Let’s all be friends.
The problem with that is it didn’t really address the imbalance of the power dynamics that continued to exist in society. So when coexistence activities started to fail, and not lead to any meaningful changes, Palestinian activists turned towards a new strategy which we now call co-resistance.
Co-resistance is meaningful because it’s always led by Palestinians. They set the terms for what the actions look like, and they invite Jewish Israelis and Jews from the diaspora to participate. Sometimes, if it leads to material changes, real material wins that improve the conditions of everyday life for Palestinians in the West Bank.
But on a symbolic level, I think that co-resistance activism is very significant because, among other things, it builds strong alliances on the ground based on shared political commitments. And provides the framework for what a shared future based on equality for all might look like.
48HILLS What is that future? What’s going to happen now? I feel like there’s now a generation of Palestinians who’ve seen 40,000 of their neighbors killed, and are not going to be easily convinced to make peace with Israel. And Netanyahu has energized the Israeli right, and now you have the right in Israel that doesn’t want to make peace with the Palestinians.
The concept of a two-state solution has been so damaged by the settlements. I see so much anger on both sides, anger among Jews at the attacks of October 7 and the deaths and the hostages and anger among Palestinians over the wildly disproportionate response.
What’s the best outcome? Is there a two-state solution. How do we make this? What would you like to see happen?
OREN KROLL-ZELDIN: Yeah, we’re in a really difficult moment, that’s for sure. This book and my research is not about pointing to solutions, or offering solutions. I’m offering research that talks about the ways that young American Jews are changing the conversation in the American Jewish community, which has a tremendous amount of power over what happens in Israel and Palestine.
There is no consensus among activists over what should happen. And October 7 and the actions of the Israeli military in the months since then have changed the game completely.
The actions of October 7 I think in a day really undid a lot of the work of peace activists and justice activists that people have been working on for the last quarter of a century. In the intervening weeks after that, people who were fully in support of Palestinian liberation, all of a sudden turned very hard against that. And then the actions of the military since then has changed people back.
There are many Jewish Israeli peace and justice activists out there. They do not get the necessary attention; they don’t get the media coverage that others get. Both Israeli and Palestinian societies are struggling right now themselves, so anytime there is the advancement of these Palestinian nonviolent actors, they are either beaten by soldiers or settlers, or they are arrested and put behind bars and held in administrative detention to silence them.
Israel has basically criminalized armed resistance. They have criminalized nonviolent resistance. They, in conjunction with institutions and politicians in the United States have criminalized boycotts and divestments and sanctions campaigns.
So what is the recourse? If every action, every form of resistance has been criminalized. Where do we go from there?
I think we need to work very hard to highlight those who are engaged in co-resistance activism and to build up the profiles of these nonviolent actors, both Palestinian and Israeli Jews, and to highlight the voices of the American Jews who are participating in that work of upholding those voices.
Find out more about Unsettled here.Full disclosure: I teach at USF and run into Oren Kroll-Zeldin in the halls every now and then.
In partnership with the Center for Global Education at the University of San Francisco (USF), the Center for Transformative Education’s Beyond Bridges: Israel-Palestine (BBIP) program was launched in summer 2010 with a pilot group of eight participants from three American schools: Swarthmore College, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of San Francisco. We ran similar programs in summers 2011 and 2012, with 16 students in each group, almost all from USF. All three of these iterations ran for three-weeks, giving participants the opportunity to meet with individuals and organizations working to end, and even transform, this decades-old conflict. We ran the program again in summer 2023.
Between 2008-12, CTE focused exclusively on two conflict transformation programs: (1) a facilitation training course offered at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and USF and (2) BBIP.
For more on the pedagogical underpinnings of these two programs see the following two academic articles:
The University of Minnesota has rescinded its offer to Dr. Raz Segal to direct its Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Segal, a former University of Haifa historian is a professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University.
The move came after two members of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies’ advisory board, Profs. Karen Painter and Bruno Chaouat resigned in protest over Segal’s criticism of Israel’s “ongoing genocide of Palestinians in occupied Gaza.” According to reports, Chaouat and Painter wrote in separate letters of resignation to Provost Rachel Croson and Interim President Jeff Ettinger that Segal was “supporting Hamas” and that he was engaging in “indirect support of antisemitism… Professor Segal, by justifying Hamas’ atrocities five days after they occurred, cannot fulfill the mission of the center.”
The Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) of Minnesota and the Dakotas published a statement saying that dozens of community members contacted the University to protest Segal’s appointment, including descendants of Holocaust survivors and a person who survived the Oct. 7 attack. The JCRC said the next director must be “a unifying and not divisive figure.”
Segal’s support for the Palestinians is evident.
The BDS movement promoted Segal on October 15, 2023, citing him as saying, “Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is quite explicit, open, and unashamed. Perpetrators of genocide usually do not express their intentions so clearly. – Raz Segal – Associate Professor of Holocaust & genocide studies at Stockton University.”
In an article published in The Guardian on October 24, 2023, titled “Israel must stop weaponizing the Holocaust,” Segal wrote, “A powerful state, with powerful allies and a powerful army, engaged in a retaliatory attack against stateless Palestinians under Israeli-settler colonial rule, military occupation and siege, is thus portrayed as powerless Jews in a struggle against Nazis. This historical context in no way justifies or excuses the mass murder of 1,500 Israelis on 7 October, which constitutes a war crime and crimes against humanity. This was the single largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, which deeply shocked Jews and many others around the world.”
On December 9, 2023, Segal published a statement on behalf of “over 55 scholars of the Holocaust, genocide, and mass violence deplore the atrocity crimes against civilians committed by Hamas and Islamic Jihad on 7 October and by Israeli forces since then. The starvation, mass killing, and forced displacement of Palestinian civilians in Gaza is ongoing, raising the question of genocide, especially in view of the intentions expressed by Israeli leaders.” Segal ridicules Israeli President Isaac Herzog where Herzog said, “This war is a war that is not only between Israel and Hamas. It’s a war that is intended, really, truly, to save Western civilization… We are attacked by [a] Jihadist network, an empire of evil… and this empire wants to conquer the entire Middle East, and if it weren’t for us, Europe would be next, and the United States follows.” For Segal, “Herzog builds on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s association of Israel’s attack on Gaza with the Biblical evil of Amalek. but he places it on a modern scale as the last stand against global apocalypse and the demise of ‘Western civilization.’ For Segal, Herzog and Netanyahu “use of religious language and symbolism in this case, reflects a dangerous intersection in the case of Israel of the exclusionary modern nation-state with a settler colonial project in a place infused with multiple religious histories and meanings.” Segal ended his statement by saying that “the scholars who have signed the statement are signaling their alarm about the mass violence underway in Gaza and the inflammatory language that threatens to escalate it further. They call for urgent action to stop Israel’s attack on Gaza and to work towards a future that will guarantee the equality, freedom, dignity, and security of all the people who live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.”
Particularly worrying, Segal spoke live on December 12, 2023, at a meeting of the UN Palestinian Rights Committee. He stated there, “the unprecedented level of mass killings the first two acts of genocide in the UN genocide convention are not the only ones that Israel is perpetrating now in Gaza it is the third Act of the convention ‘deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part’ that mostly fits Israel’s mass violence in Gaza… annihilatory language has also appeared in public spaces in Israel such as banners on the bridges in Tel Aviv that call ‘to annihilate Gaza’ and explain that ‘the picture of Triumph is zero people in Gaza’ there are dozens and dozens of examples of incitement in Israeli media.” Segal ended his speech, “the 56 Scholars of the Holocaust genocide and mass violence who signed a statement on 9th of December wrote that ‘the time for concerted action to prevent genocide is now” warning also that “should the Israeli attack continue Palestinians under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and Palestinian citizens of Israel face grave danger as well it is our urgent responsibility and is the obligation of States under article one of the UN genocide convention to heed this warning and act now to stop and prevent genocide.”
Segal delivered a lecture on Zoom, promoted by the group New England Network for Justice for Palestine, on January 11, 2024, titled “Gaza and the Question of Genocide.” This lecture focused on a “number of unprecedented elements in Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. It will discuss the exceptionally direct, explicit, and unashamed statements of intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza by Israeli leaders and senior army officers, the widespread incitement to genocide in Israeli political and public discourses, and the nature of the mass violence itself that a number of reports have described as one of the deadliest and destructive since World War II.”
Segal wrote in the Time Magazine, “How Weaponizing Antisemitism Puts Jews at Risk,” on May 14, 2024, that Many “have accused protestors and colleges of rampant antisemitism. That’s woefully misguided—and dangerous. Indeed, the blanket assertion by pro-Israel advocates is intended as a political cudgel: weaponizing antisemitism to shield Israel from criticism of its attack on Gaza… those accusing protesters of antisemitism do not appear to consider the many Jews among the protestors in the encampments as Jews, arguing in effect that Jews can only be Jews if they support Israel or do not express pro-Palestinian sentiment. This is absurd, for the idea that all Jews should hold the same views by virtue of their identity is an antisemitic idea itself.” There is “the false equivalency between Jews and Zionists.” According to Segal, “many Jews feel more unsafe today because of the policies of the right-wing government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and claims that Israel represents Jews anywhere. The weaponization of antisemitism by Israel and its allies, including the U.S. government, draws on the deeply problematic ‘working definition of antisemitism” adopted in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)”.”
Segal was an anti-Israel activist even before the war in Gaza. On March 31, 2022, he published an anti-Israel article titled “Israeli Apartheid and Its Apologists,” naming Dr. Deborah Lipstadt, the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, as an Israel apologist. In his view, when the famous Holocaust historian rejected the claims that Israel is an apartheid state, she “portends a worrying and accelerating trend” of “attacking human rights organizations and conflating legitimate criticism of Israel with antisemitism.” Segal stated that “criticism of Israeli policies: those defending such policies distort legitimate criticism of a state and present it, only in the case of Israel, as an attack against a people. I have been engaged in research and teaching about the Holocaust, genocide, state violence, Jewish history, and antisemitism for over fifteen years in Israel and in the US. I have also written about the weaponization of the discourse of antisemitism, used often to silence and attack those who speak about Israeli state violence, especially Palestinians. It is a crude and cruel distortion: abusing the historical struggle of a vulnerable people, Jews, under attack by powerful states to blur the attack of a state, Israel, against a vulnerable people, Palestinians. Knee-jerk allegations of antisemitism are meant to marginalize engagement with this reality.”
Not surprisingly, the pro-Palestinian academic group, the Committee on Academic Freedom of The Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA), wrote a letter to Minnesota University to “express our grave concern about your decision to rescind the offer which the University of Minnesota (U of M) made to Dr. Raz Segal to assume the directorship of its Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (CHGS). This action, the result of your capitulation to political pressure from groups based outside the university which had attacked Dr. Segal for his assessment of Israel’s war in Gaza.” MESA requested the University to “immediately reinstate the offer made to Dr. Segal and apologize to him for surrendering to the smear campaign against him. We further urge you to publicly and forcefully reaffirm your commitment to the principles of academic freedom and to the integrity and independence of your institution’s faculty hiring process. We look forward to your response.” MESA is known to limit its concern to those who promote the Palestinian cause.
IAM has been reporting since 2004 that Palestinians and pro-Palestinians are recruiting Israeli academics to bash Israel. The purpose is to deflect accusations of antisemitism. Segal is a prime example of this trend. He is an Israeli and an associated professor of Holocaust Studies, a double trophy for the community of academic Israel bashes. His academic output is quite modest, especially as compared to his academic activism of writing articles accusing Israel of apartheid and genocide. University authorities should have been more vigilant about the abuse of academic freedom. Recruiting faculty due to their political activism violates the very spirit of higher education.
REFERENCES:
"Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is quite explicit, open, and unashamed. Perpetrators of genocide usually do not express their intentions so clearly."
Raz Segal – Associate Professor of Holocaust & genocide studies at Stockton University.https://t.co/zLe8prmVVb
“Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is quite explicit, open, and unashamed. Perpetrators of genocide usually do not express their intentions so clearly.” Raz Segal – Associate Professor of Holocaust & genocide studies at Stockton University.
ON FRIDAY, Israel ordered the besieged population in the northern half of the Gaza Strip to evacuate to the south, warning that it would soon intensify its attack on the Strip’s upper half. The order has left more than a million people, half of whom are children, frantically attempting to flee amid continuing airstrikes, in a walled enclave where no destination is safe. As Palestinian journalist Ruwaida Kamal Amer wrote today from Gaza, “refugees from the north are already arriving in Khan Younis, where the missiles never stop and we’re running out of food, water, and power.” The UN has warned that the flight of people from the northern part of Gaza to the south will create “devastating humanitarian consequences” and will “transform what is already a tragedy into a calamitous situation.” Over the past week, Israel’s violence against Gaza has killed more than 1,800 Palestinians, injured thousands, and displaced more than 400,000 within the strip. And yet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised today that what we have seen is “only the beginning.”
Israel’s campaign to displace Gazans—and potentially expel them altogether into Egypt—is yet another chapter in the Nakba, in which an estimated 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes during the 1948 war that led to the creation of the State of Israel. But the assault on Gaza can also be understood in other terms: as a textbook case of genocide unfolding in front of our eyes. I say this as a scholar of genocide, who has spent many years writing about Israeli mass violence against Palestinians. I have written about settler colonialism and Jewish supremacy in Israel, the distortion of the Holocaust to boost the Israeli arms industry, the weaponization of antisemitism accusations to justify Israeli violence against Palestinians, and the racist regime of Israeli apartheid. Now, following Hamas’s attack on Saturday and the mass murder of more than 1,000 Israeli civilians, the worst of the worst is happening.
Under international law, the crime of genocide is defined by “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such,” as noted in the December 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. In its murderous attack on Gaza, Israel has loudly proclaimed this intent. Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant declared it in no uncertain terms on October 9th: “We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly.” Leaders in the West reinforced this racist rhetoric by describing Hamas’s mass murder of Israeli civilians—a war crime under international law that rightly provoked horror and shock in Israel and around the world—as “an act of sheer evil,” in the words of US President Joe Biden, or as a move that reflected an “ancient evil,” in the terminology of President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen. This dehumanizing language is clearly calculated to justify the wide scale destruction of Palestinian lives; the assertion of “evil,” in its absolutism, elides distinctions between Hamas militants and Gazan civilians, and occludes the broader context of colonization and occupation.
The UN Genocide Convention lists five acts that fall under its definition. Israel is currently perpetrating three of these in Gaza: “1. Killing members of the group. 2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group. 3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” The Israeli Air Force, by its own account, has so far dropped more than 6,000 bombs on Gaza, which is one of the most densely populated areas in the world—almost as many bombs as the US dropped on all of Afghanistan during record-breaking years of its war there. Human Rights Watch has confirmed that the weapons used included phosphorous bombs, which set fire to bodies and buildings, creating flames that aren’t extinguished on contact with water. This demonstrates clearly what Gallant means by “act accordingly”: not targeting individual Hamas militants, as Israel claims, but unleashing deadly violence against Palestinians in Gaza “as such,” in the language of the UN Genocide Convention. Israel has also intensified its 16-year siege of Gaza—the longest in modern history, in clear violation of international humanitarian law—to a “complete siege,” in Gallant’s words. This turn of phrase that explicitly indexes a plan to bring the siege to its final destination of systematic destruction of Palestinians and Palestinian society in Gaza, by killing them, starving them, cutting off their water supplies, and bombing their hospitals.
It’s not only Israel’s leaders who are using such language. An interviewee on the pro-Netanyahu Channel 14 called for Israel to “turn Gaza to Dresden.” Channel 12, Israel’s most-watched news station, published a report about left-leaning Israelis calling to “dance on what used to be Gaza.” Meanwhile, genocidal verbs—calls to “erase” and “flatten” Gaza—have become omnipresent on Israeli social media. In Tel Aviv, a banner reading “Zero Gazans” was seen hanging from a bridge.
Indeed, Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is quite explicit, open, and unashamed. Perpetrators of genocide usually do not express their intentions so clearly, though there are exceptions. In the early 20th century, for example, German colonial occupiers perpetrated a genocide in response to an uprising by the Indigenous Herero and Nama populations in southwest Africa. In 1904, General Lothar von Trotha, the German military commander, issued an “extermination order,” justified by the rationale of a “race war.” By 1908, the German authorities had murdered 10,000 Nama, and had achieved their stated goal of “destroying the Herero,” killing 65,000 Herero, 80% of the population. Gallant’s orders on October 9th were no less explicit. Israel’s goal is to destroy the Palestinians of Gaza. And those of us watching around the world are derelict in our responsibility to prevent them from doing so.
Correction: An earlier version of this piece said that Israel dropped more bombs on Gaza this week than the US dropped on Afghanistan in any single year of its war there. In fact, the US dropped more than 7,000 bombs on Afghanistan in both 2018 and 2019; at the time of publication, Israel had dropped an estimated 6,000 bombs on Gaza in less than a week.
📽️ LIVE Dr. Raz Segal, referring to the 9 December Statement of Scholars in Holocaust and #Genocide Studies on Mass Violence in #Israel & #Palestine since 7 October, said "𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐨𝐜𝐢𝐝𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐧𝐨𝐰." pic.twitter.com/PTpD6sPZZ2
@UNISPAL LIVE Dr. Raz Segal, referring to the 9 December Statement of Scholars in Holocaust and #Genocide Studies on Mass Violence in #Israel & #Palestine since 7 October, said “𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐨𝐜𝐢𝐝𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐧𝐨𝐰.”
5:53 PM · Dec 12, 2023 · 1,747 Views
@UNISPAL Official account for United Nations GA Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People لجنة الأمم المتحدة لحقوق الشعب الفلسطيني
On Friday, June 7, the University of Minnesota halted indefinitely its search for a director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, just days after it had offered the position to Raz Segal, an Israeli historian and current professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Endowed Professor of Modern Genocide Studies at Stockton University in New Jersey.
The move by the university came after two current members of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies’ advisory board, Karen Painter and Bruno Chaouat, both professors at the university, resigned in protest over Segal’s criticism of Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in occupied Gaza.
This decision comes amidst a frontal assault by the ruling class on the democratic rights of those opposed to the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza. Students, artists, academics and professionals have faced harsh punishment for daring to speak out against Israel’s actions or continued US support of the genocide. In May, over 3,000 students, professors and academic staff were arrested for protesting the genocide in Gaza on college campuses and throughout American cities.
In separate emailed letters of resignation to Provost Rachel Croson and Interim President Jeff Ettinger, Chaouat and Painter claimed Segal was “supporting Hamas” and that he was engaging in “indirect support of antisemitism.” Chauoat declared, “Professor Segal, by justifying Hamas’ atrocities five days after they occurred, cannot fulfill the mission of the center.”
Segal was one of the first renowned public academics to describe Israel’s attacks in Gaza as a genocide. He also unequivocally condemned the attacks carried out by Hamas. In a commentary published in The Guardian October 24 under the headline, “Israel must stop weaponising the Holocaust,” Segal wrote:
A powerful state, with powerful allies and a powerful army, engaged in a retaliatory attack against stateless Palestinians under Israeli-settler colonial rule, military occupation and siege, is thus portrayed as powerless Jews in a struggle against Nazis. This historical context in no way justifies or excuses the mass murder of 1,500 Israelis on 7 October, which constitutes a war crime and crimes against humanity. This was the single largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, which deeply shocked Jews and many others around the world.
The attacks on Segal are mounting. Mark Rotenberg, vice president of Hillel International—a Jewish campus organization which describes itself as “steadfastly committed to the support of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state with secure and recognized borders”—claimed that Segal’s appointment “severely degraded the academic integrity of the department.”
He added, “It’s terribly distressing to see the Department of Holocaust and Genocide Studies led by an anti-Israel propagandist rather than a top scholar in the history of the eradication of European Jewry.”
The decision comes amidst some of the most horrendous massacres of the genocide, including the Nuseirat refugee camp slaughter, which killed almost 300 Palestinians and injured over 700 more. It comes weeks after the Israeli army decided to invade Rafah, crossing a supposed “red line” for the Biden administration, with US support, endangering over a million lives in the only remaining untouched areas of the Gaza Strip.
The absurd attacks on Segal are belied by his scholarship on genocide and Holocaust studies, which is recognized internationally, including in Israel.
After studying at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, he moved on to receive an M.A. in history from Tel Aviv University and then continued his studies at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. He has received multiple fellowships and awards for his work during the course of his career, such as a Harry Frank Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship and a Lady Davis Fellowship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
He has published multiple books on the Holocaust. In recognition of his scholarship, one of his books, DaysofRuin:TheJewsofMunkácsDuringtheHolocaust, was published by Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to victims of the Holocaust.
Other notable works cover the periods preceding and during World War II. He has also made several contributions to the study of genocides and the Holocaust in history to journals such as the Journal of Holocaust Studies over the past decades, including a notable recent publication in March earlier this year on the ongoing genocide in Gaza, GazaasTwilightofIsraelExceptionalism:HolocaustandGenocideStudiesfromUnprecedentedCrisistoUnprecedentedChange.
In the week following the beginning of Israel’s operation in Gaza, he published a blog post titled, “A Textbook Case of Genocide.” In this article, he poses the question, “Israel has been explicit about what it’s carrying out in Gaza. Why isn’t the world listening?” He continues:
Israel’s campaign to displace Gazans—and potentially expel them altogether into Egypt—is yet another chapter in the Nakba, in which an estimated 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes during the 1948 war that led to the creation of the State of Israel. But the assault on Gaza can also be understood in other terms: as a textbook case of genocide unfolding in front of our eyes. I say this as a scholar of genocide, who has spent many years writing about Israeli mass violence against Palestinians. I have written about settler colonialism and Jewish supremacy in Israel, the distortion of the Holocaust to boost the Israeli arms industry, the weaponization of antisemitism accusations to justify Israeli violence against Palestinians, and the racist regime of Israeli apartheid. Now, following Hamas’s attack on Saturday and the mass murder of more than 1,000 Israeli civilians, the worst of the worst is happening.
In the article, he cites the words of Israeli representatives, including Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant, who explicitly declared the genocidal intent of Israel’s operation just two days following the Hamas attack on the Nova music festival. He noted that perpetrators of genocide in history have rarely expressed their intent so clearly as is happening now in Israel.
Despite the attacks on academics and professionals, Segal maintained a principled stance on Israel’s genocide. In December last year, he was interviewed on “Breaking Points,” where he denounced Israel’s ongoing aggression against Palestinians in Gaza and the continued genocidal incitement in Israeli society. He clarified, “I’m talking about, you know, huge signs hanging on the bridges of the Tel Aviv Freeway right after the 7th of October, calling to flatten Gaza, to destroy Gaza, written on them directly that the ‘image of triumph would be zero people in Gaza.’ Very direct, very explicit.” This is in addition to his identification of Israeli apartheid, a stance which he maintains.
In an interview conducted in May by New Jersey Spotlight News, Segal defended student protests against the genocide, denouncing the absurd claims of antisemitism and violence by the media and politicians.
I think that anyone who visits the many “Gaza Solidarity Encampments” now on campuses across the U.S. sees that these accusations are baseless … it’s rooted historically. There have been accusations in the Jewish world among Jews that some Jews are not actually Jews. But these historically actually have been wielded by ultra-Orthodox and Orthodox rabbis against Zionists in their communities.
The entire political establishment—with the Democratic Party at the helm, supported by their fascistic Republican counterparts—has hurled baseless accusations of “antisemitism” in an attempt to silence opposition to the ongoing genocide.
The University of Minnesota’s decision to rescind Segal’s offer is occurring against the backdrop of continued attacks on democratic rights and free speech by US media, politicians and multiple employers against employees speaking out. This is also in the context of the Democratic Party’s rapid escalation of war not only in the Middle East but in Ukraine against Russia and threats against China. The same Democratic Party establishment and media denouncing protests against the obvious genocide in Palestine as “antisemitic” are now supporting self-admitted antisemites in Ukraine, such as the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion. This fascistic group was just cleared to receive more direct support from the Biden administration, which had previously cited it as a hate group.
The Democratic and Republican parties view the massive and growing opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza as a critical threat to plans for a wider war, which the ruling class sees as the only way out of the economic crisis facing global capitalism. As the threat of war grows, the Biden administration is intensifying repression at home. It has criminalized protests, carrying out mass arrests of students, workers and young people. The violence directed at the opposition is a sign of the level of fear within ruling circles that the movement will spread to the working class.
University students, graduate workers, and staff should come to the defense of Professor Segal and demand the university move forward with his hire. The attempt to silence Segal must be seen as part of a broader attack against students, workers and democratic rights. The growing demand to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza must be combined with a struggle against the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine and against dictatorship and social inequality.
We write on behalf of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) and its Committee on Academic Freedom to express our grave concern about your decision to rescind the offer which the University of Minnesota (U of M) made to Dr. Raz Segal to assume the directorship of its Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (CHGS). This action, the result of your capitulation to political pressure from groups based outside the university which had attacked Dr. Segal for his assessment of Israel’s war in Gaza, starkly contravenes your administration’s avowed commitment to academic freedom and to respect for the integrity of the faculty hiring process.
MESA was founded in 1966 to promote scholarship and teaching on the Middle East and North Africa. The preeminent organization in the field, the Association publishes the prestigious International Journal of Middle East Studies and has nearly 2,800 members worldwide. MESA is committed to ensuring academic freedom and freedom of expression, both within the region and in connection with the study of the region in North America and outside of North America.
Dr. Segal, Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Endowed Professor in the Study of Modern Genocide at Stockton University, is widely regarded as a leading scholar in the academic fields in which he works. After a thorough search conducted in full accord with U of M procedures and policies, he was deemed the most qualified candidate for the directorship of CHGS and offered the position. Two members of the CHGS board resigned in protest, citing an October 2023 article in which Dr. Segal had described Israel’s actions in Gaza as “a textbook case of genocide.” Organizations and media outlets based outside the university, including the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas, then launched a campaign to block Dr. Segal’s appointment.
Rather than defend academic freedom and the principle that faculty should make hiring decisions based exclusively on scholarly criteria, without interference by individuals or organizations pursuing their own political agenda, your administration first “paused” and then rescinded the offer to Dr. Segal. The video recording of President Ettinger’s 14 June 2024 report to the Board of Regents explaining his decision, available here (starting at 19:23), clearly indicates that the university surrendered to the campaign against Dr. Segal.
We note the statement issued by the U of M chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) on 12 June 2024 expressing alarm at the withdrawal of the offer to Dr. Segal and declaring that “the central administration has rewarded the brinkmanship of two faculty members acting outside the norms of acceptable faculty conduct, overruled a comprehensive faculty-led process of evaluating candidates for this position, and violated established policy and precedent regarding collegiate hiring practices.” The statement went on to characterize your action as “an appalling violation of academic freedom and a stain on the U’s record. If it goes uncorrected it will have a chilling effect on academic freedom at this institution, not only for faculty but also students and staff, by showing that our central administration will side with outside groups when they demand actions that violate academic freedom.” We also call your attention to the open letter signed by nearly a thousand faculty at universities across the United States and beyond, which noted that “by overruling the faculty experts who selected Dr. Segal, the University of Minnesota’s administrators have effectively issued a vote of no confidence in its own faculty. This move endangers the University’s reputation as an internationally-renowned research institution.”
We must remind you of the statement on “Academic Freedom in Times of War” issued by the AAUP on 24 October 2023, which is directly relevant to the current circumstances:
“It is in tumultuous times that colleges’ and universities’ stated commitments to protect academic freedom are most put to the test. As the Israel-Hamas war rages and campus protests proliferate, institutional authorities must refrain from sanctioning faculty members for expressing politically controversial views and should instead defend their right, under principles of academic freedom, to do so.”
We therefore call on you to immediately reinstate the offer made to Dr. Segal and apologize to him for surrendering to the smear campaign against him. We further urge you to publicly and forcefully reaffirm your commitment to the principles of academic freedom and to the integrity and independence of your institution’s faculty hiring process.
We look forward to your response.
Sincerely,
Aslı Ü. Bâli
MESA President
Professor, Yale Law School
Laurie Brand Chair, Committee on Academic Freedom Professor Emerita, University of Southern California
Scholars of genocide are criticizing the dangerous use of the Holocaust to justify Israeli mass violence against Palestinians
President Joe Biden began his remarks in Israel with this: “Hamas committed atrocities that recall the worst ravages of Isis, unleashing pure unadulterated evil upon the world. There is no rationalizing it, no excusing it. Period. The brutality we saw would have cut deep anywhere in the world, but it cuts deeper here in Israel. October 7, which was a … sacred Jewish holiday, became the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust.
“It has brought to the surface painful memories and scars left by millennia of antisemitism and the genocide of the Jewish people. The world watched then, it knew, and the world did nothing.
“We will not stand by and do nothing again. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.”
With this, Biden reinforced the rhetorical framework that the former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett expressed, in typically unashamed terms, in an interview on Sky News on 12 October: “We’re fighting Nazis.”
A powerful state, with powerful allies and a powerful army, engaged in a retaliatory attack against stateless Palestinians under Israeli-settler colonial rule, military occupation and siege, is thus portrayed as powerless Jews in a struggle against Nazis. This historical context in no way justifies or excuses the mass murder of 1,500 Israelis on 7 October, which constitutes a war crime and crimes against humanity. This was the single largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, which deeply shocked Jews and many others around the world. The context of the Hamas attack on Israelis, however, is completely different from the context of the attack on Jews during the Holocaust. And without the historical context of Israeli settler colonialism since the 1948 Nakba, we cannot explain how we got here, nor imagine different futures; Biden offered us, instead, the decontextualized image of “pure, unadulterated evil.”
This weaponization of Holocaust memory by Israeli politicians runs deep. In 1982, for instance, in the context of Israel’s attack on Lebanon, the Israeli PM, Menachem Begin, compared the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in Beirut to Adolf Hitler in his bunker in Berlin at the end of the war. Three decades later, in October 2015, Benjamin Netanyahu took this weaponization to new levels when he asserted in a speech to the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem that the Palestinian grand mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini planted the idea to murder Jews in Hitler’s mind. And last Tuesday, Netanyahu described Hamas in a press conference, together with the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, as the “new Nazis”.
The Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant said: “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. Hamas won’t be there. We will eliminate everything.” Nissim Vaturi, a member of the Israeli parliament for the ruling Likud party, to take another example, called for “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth”. There are many other such expressions by Israeli politicians and senior army officers in the last few weeks. The fantasy of “fighting Nazis” drives such explicit language, because the image of Nazis is one of “pure, unadulterated evil”, which removes all laws and restrictions in the fight against it. Perpetrators of genocide always see their victims as evil and themselves as righteous. This is, indeed, how Nazis saw Jews.
Biden’s words constitute therefore a textbook use of the Holocaust not in order to stand with powerless people facing the prospect of genocidal violence, but to support and justify an extremely violent attack by a powerful state and, at the same time, distort this reality. But we see the reality in front of our eyes: since the start of Israeli mass violence on 7 October, the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza has surpassed 4,650, a third of them children, with more than 15,000 injured and over a million people displaced.
Israel has also escalated the violence against Palestinians under occupation in the West Bank, including the killing of more than 95 people and an intensification of expulsions, including the destruction of whole communities. Hamas wields no power in the West Bank, but the reality that we can all see means little for Israelis fighting, in their minds, Nazis.
We have seen this sort of use of Holocaust memory in another case of mass violence not too long ago. On 24 January 2020, the Russian president Vladimir Putin was invited to speak at the fifth World Holocaust Forum at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, to mark 75 years to the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet forces. In his speech, Putin presented a distorted history of the second world war and the Holocaust, including distorted maps, to fit a Russian narrative that erased the Nazi-Soviet alliance in the destruction of Poland in 1939 and presented Ukrainians, Latvians and Lithuanians primarily as Nazi collaborators.
Putin used precisely this weaponization of Holocaust history when he launched his assault on Ukraine in February last year, explaining it as a campaign of “denazification”. Explicit and unashamed, just like Bennett. Putin thus used the Holocaust to create a world turned upside down: Ukrainians facing a brutal and unprovoked Russian attack became Nazis.
The history of the Holocaust, however, does offer lessons for the current bloodshed.
For one, it reminds us to center the voices and perspectives of those facing state violence and genocide. And the most urgent thing that Palestinians in Gaza now need is a ceasefire and an end to the Israeli bombing campaign. That is also what at least some of the Israeli survivors of the Hamas attack and family members of Israeli civilians killed or in captivity in Gaza want. A top priority now should be stopping the unfolding violence, saving lives, and the release of Israeli hostages together with hundreds of Palestinian civilians, including 160 children, detained by Israel unlawfully, without charges or trial.
The history of the Holocaust also points to the importance of accountability, even as post-Holocaust accountability remained limited. In the case of Israel’s assault on Gaza, accountability needs to begin from what is very clear: incitement to genocide, which is punishable under article 3 of the UN genocide convention, even when genocide does not follow. While the debate about genocide in Israel’s current assault on Gaza will undoubtedly continue for years, perhaps also in international courts, Israeli war crimes and violations of international humanitarian law are beyond dispute.
It will also be important then that Israeli perpetrators of war crimes and those responsible for violations of international humanitarian law in the many years of the siege on Gaza, including during this current assault, will stand trial. Palestinian leaders and Palestinians who perpetrated the mass atrocities on 7 October should also be held accountable. International courts and legal processes are important because they hold potential to become spaces, however limited, for survivors to tell their stories, assert their humanity, and demand truth and justice.
Indeed, no value related to the study of the Holocaust and its memory occupies a more central place perhaps than truth. No justice is possible, not in the short term and certainly not in the long term, without a truthful reckoning of how we got here. This means recognizing fully the long history of Israeli settler-colonial violence against Palestinians since the 1948 Nakba.
The world is indeed watching, as Biden said, and it knows, despite Biden’s use of the Holocaust to distort what is clearly in front of our eyes, as more than 800 scholars of international law, conflict studies, and Holocaust and Genocide Studies declared in a statement on 15 October: “We are compelled to sound the alarm about the possibility of the crime of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. We do not do so lightly, recognizing the weight of this crime, but the gravity of the current situation demands it.” Scholars whose work has shaped the field of Holocaust and genocide studies, such as Omer Bartov and Marion Kaplan, signed the statement.
This is significant. More and more Holocaust and genocide studies scholars are refusing to allow the continuation of the dangerous use of the Holocaust to distort the historical reality of the Holocaust and Israeli mass violence against Palestinians. This provides some hope in these dark days, as it supports the struggle for a different future, beyond the Israeli settler state, a future that should be based on equality, justice, freedom and dignity for all the people who live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
This article was amended on 30 January 2024. In an earlier version, a reference to Hamas was omitted from the quote attributed to Yoav Gallant, owing to an incomplete translation used as a reference. These missing words have been added.
Raz Segal is an associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University and the endowed professor in the study of modern genocide
Raz Segal is associate professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and an endowed professor in the study of modern genocide at Stockton University.
As Gaza solidarity encampments take root at dozens of campuses across the U.S., many Democratic and Republican lawmakers—in addition to President Joe Biden—have accused protestors and colleges of rampant antisemitism.
That’s woefully misguided—and dangerous. Indeed, the blanket assertion by pro-Israel advocates is intended as a political cudgel: weaponizing antisemitism to shield Israel from criticism of its attack on Gaza, which has left at least 35,000 Palestinians dead in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, wounded tens of thousands more, and forcibly displaced nearly 2 million Palestinians who now face famine conditions. The conditions in Gaza are such that many scholars have said that the situation amounts to a genocide.
Ultimately, the weaponization of antisemitism intensifies the discrimination and exclusion against vulnerable communities in the U.S.—including Jews.
Indeed, those accusing protesters of antisemitism do not appear to consider the many Jews among the protestors in the encampments as Jews, arguing in effect that Jews can only be Jews if they support Israel or do not express pro-Palestinian sentiment.
This is absurd, for the idea that all Jews should hold the same views by virtue of their identity is an antisemitic idea itself. Alarmingly, President Biden has at times exacerbated the false equivalency between Jews and Zionists. In February, on Late Night With Seth Meyers, he said that “were there no Israel, there would not be a Jew in the world who would be safe.”
This claim is ahistorical—and ignores the fact that many Jews feel more unsafe today because of the policies of the right-wing government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and claims that Israel represents Jews anywhere.
The weaponization of antisemitism by Israel and its allies, including the U.S. government, draws on the deeply problematic “working definition of antisemitism” adopted in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). A central force in the institutional world of global Holocaust memory, this international organization of 35 member states (almost all of them in Europe) deals with Holocaust education, research, and remembrance.
The IHRA definition is the basis for the recently proposed Antisemitism Awareness Act, which some 700 Jewish college faculty have signed an open letter urging Biden not to back. The definition includes 11 examples of antisemitism, seven of which mention Israel and thus blur the distinction between Jews and the State of Israel. By contrast, the IHRA definition includes no mention of white supremacists, even though they pose the greatest danger to Jews in the U.S.—as the 2018 Tree of Life Synagogue massacre of 11 Jews in Pittsburgh demonstrated.
This silence, combined with the focus on Israel, facilitates the IHRA definition’s use as a particularly insidious weapon to target people whom white supremacists in the U.S. also single out: Muslims and Arabs.
Take, for instance, the recent attack by a House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Rutgers University-Newark’s Center for Security, Race and Rights (RUCSRR) and its director, Distinguished Professor of Law Sahar Aziz. RUCSRR has come under scrutiny for alleged antisemitism.
Over 500 law professors from across the U.S., who describe themselves as a “racially, religiously, and ideologically diverse” group, condemned these allegations in a letter to the House Committee last month. These law professors note that the Committee is targeting the only center in a U.S. law school devoted to the civil and human rights of South Asians, Muslims, and Arabs, and that Professor Aziz is the only Muslim Arab woman among 130 professors in the law school.
They also point out that since its founding in 2018, RUCSRR has organized nearly 90 events on a wide range of topics, including on the prosecution of Nazi criminals. Yet without any evidence, the House Committee describes Palestinian speakers or speakers who have expressed pro-Palestinian views as antisemitic.
The Committee, the professors argue, is engaged in the “mobilization of Islamophobic tropes to fuel and sustain spurious allegations of antisemitism to discredit and delegitimize critics of Israeli policy and military action.”
Notably, the House Committee has been engaged in similar baseless attacks on dozens of U.S. colleges in the last few months—with Committee member Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Republican who has expressed white supremacist views in the past, playing a key role.
None of this ensures the safety of Jews in the U.S. On the contrary, the Islamophobia and racism inherent in the weaponization of antisemitism risks making antisemitism a meaningless charge, and therefore much harder to combat, at a time when genuine examples of it are rising.
The Gaza solidarity encampments across the U.S. are anti-racist spaces, where Jews, Palestinians, Arabs, Christians, Muslims, Black people, men, women, LGBTQI people, and others stand in solidarity with each other and against Israel’s war on Gaza. (There have been isolated cases of antisemitism on campuses, which remain few and far between.) They stand for truth and justice—demanding that their government and their universities cease their support of Israel’s extremely destructive assault on Gaza. And they point to a different future of equality and peace around the world. By doing so, they also stand as a genuine expression today of a real struggle against antisemitism.
In the following statement, over 55 scholars of the Holocaust, genocide, and mass violence deplore the atrocity crimes against civilians committed by Hamas and Islamic Jihad on 7 October and by Israeli forces since then. The starvation, mass killing, and forced displacement of Palestinian civilians in Gaza is ongoing, raising the question of genocide, especially in view of the intentions expressed by Israeli leaders. Israeli President Isaac Herzog used particularly loaded language in an interview on MSNBC just a few days ago, on 5 December: “This war is a war that is not only between Israel and Hamas. It’s a war that is intended, really, truly, to save western civilization. … We are attacked by [a] Jihadist network, an empire of evil. … and this empire wants to conquer the entire Middle East, and if it weren’t for us, Europe would be next, and the United States follows.” Herzog builds on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s association of Israel’s attack on Gaza with the Biblical evil of Amalek, but he places it on a modern scale as the last stand against global apocalypse and the demise of “western civilization.” Both Herzog and Netanyahu are secular Jews. Their use of religious language and symbolism in this case reflects a dangerous intersection in the case of Israel of the exclusionary modern nation state with a settler colonial project in a place infused with multiple religious histories and meanings. The scholars who have signed the statement are signaling their alarm about the mass violence underway in Gaza and the inflammatory language that threatens to escalate it further. They call for urgent action to stop Israel’s attack on Gaza and to work towards a future that will guarantee the equality, freedom, dignity, and security of all the people who live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
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Statement of Scholars in Holocaust and Genocide Studies on Mass Violence in Israel and Palestine since 7 October
December 9, 2023
We, scholars of the Holocaust, genocide, and mass violence, feel compelled to warn of the danger of genocide in Israel’s attack on Gaza. We also note that, should the Israeli attack continue and escalate, Palestinians under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and Palestinian citizens of Israel face grave danger as well.
We are deeply saddened and concerned by the mass murder of over 1,200 Israelis and migrant workers by Hamas, the Islamic Jihad, and others on 7 October, with more than 830 civilians among them. We also note the evidence of gender-based and sexual violence during the attack, the wounding of thousands of Israelis, the destruction of Israeli kibbutzim and towns, and the abduction of more than 240 hostages into the Gaza Strip. These acts constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity. We recognize that violence in Israel and Palestine did not begin on 7 October. If we are to try to understand the mass murder of 7 October, we should place it within the context of Israeli settler colonialism, Israeli military occupation violence against Palestinians since 1967, the sixteen-year siege on the Gaza Strip since 2007, and the rise to power in Israel in the last year of a government made up of politicians who speak proudly about Jewish supremacy and exclusionary nationalism. Explaining is not justifying, and this context in no way excuses the targeting of Israeli civilians and migrant workers by Palestinians on 7 October.
We are also deeply saddened and concerned by the Israeli attack on Gaza in response to the Hamas attack. Israel’s assault has caused death and destruction on an unprecedented level, according to a New York Times article on 26 November. In two months, the Israeli assault has killed more than 16,000 Palestinians (with thousands more buried under the rubble)—nearly half of them children and youth, with a Palestinian child killed every ten minutes on average before the ceasefire—and wounded over 40,000. Considering that the total population of Gaza stands at 2.3 million people, the killing rate so far is about 0.7 percent in less than two months. The killing rate of civilians in Russia’s bombing and invasion of Ukraine in the areas most affected by the violence are probably similar—but over a longer period of time. A number of experts have therefore described Israel’s attack on Gaza as the most intense and deadliest of its kind since World War II, but while Russia’s attack on Ukraine has, for very good reason, prompted western leaders to support the people under attack, the same western leaders now support the violence of the Israeli state rather than the Palestinians under attack.
Israel has also forcibly displaced more than 1.8 million Palestinians within the Gaza Strip, while destroying almost half of all buildings and leaving the northern part of the Strip an “uninhabitable moonscape.” Indeed, the Israeli army has dropped more than 25,000 tons of explosives on Gaza since 7 October, which is equivalent to two Hiroshima bombs, and according to Human Rights Watch, deployed white phosphorous bombs. It has systematically targeted hospitals, schools, universities, mosques, churches, bakeries, and agricultural fields. The state has also killed many essential professionals, including more than 220 healthcare workers, over 100 UN personnel, and dozens of journalists. The forced displacement has, furthermore, created in the southern part of the Strip severe overcrowding, with the risk of outbreak of infectious diseases, exacerbated by shortages of food, clean water, fuel, and medical supplies, due to Israel’s “total siege” measures since 7 October.
The unprecedented level of destruction and killing points to large-scale war crimes in Israel’s attack on Gaza. There is also evidence of a “widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack” that the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defines as a crime against humanity. Moreover, dozens of statements of Israeli leaders, ministers in the war cabinet, and senior army officers since 7 October—that is, people with command authority—suggest an “intent to destroy” Palestinians “as such,” in the language of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The statements include depictions of all Palestinians in Gaza as responsible for the Hamas attack on 7 October and therefore legitimate military targets, as expressed by Israeli President Herzog on 13 October and by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu when he invoked, on 29 October, the Biblical story of the total destruction of Amalek by the Israelites, just as Israel began its ground invasion. Casting an entire civilian population as enemies marks the history of modern genocide, with the Armenian genocide (1915-1918) and the Rwanda genocide (1994) as well-known examples. The statements also include dehumanizing language, such as Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s reference to “human animals” when he proclaimed “total siege” on Gaza on 9 October. The slippage between seeing Hamas as “human animals” to seeing all Palestinians in Gaza in this way is evident in what Israeli Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian promised to people in Gaza the next day: “Hamas has turned into ISIS, and the residents of Gaza, instead of being appalled, are celebrating. … Human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water [in Gaza], there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.”
These expressions of intent need to be understood also in relation to the widespread incitement to genocide in Israeli media since 7 October. Israeli journalist David Mizrachi Wertheim, for instance, wrote on social media on 7 October that “If all the captives are not returned immediately, then turn the [Gaza] Strip into a slaughterhouse. If a hair falls from their head – execute security prisoners. Violate all norms on the way to victory.” He also added, “we are facing human animals.” Four days later, another Israeli journalist, Roy Sharon, commented on social media “that if, in order to finally eliminate the military capabilities of Hamas, including Sinwar and Deif, we need a million bodies, then let there be a million bodies.” Annihilatory language now also appears in public spaces, such as banners on bridges in Tel Aviv that call “to annihilate Gaza” and explain that “the picture of triumph is 0 people in Gaza.” There are dozens of examples of incitement in Israeli media, which recalls the incitement to genocide in Rwanda as genocide was unfolding there in 1994.
This incitement points to the grave danger that Palestinians everywhere under Israeli rule now face. Israeli army and settler violence in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, which has intensified markedly from the beginning of 2023, has entered a new stage of brutality after 7 October. Sixteen Palestinian communities—over a thousand people—have been forcibly displaced in their entirety, continuing the policy of “ethnic cleansing” in Area C that comprises 60 percent of the West Bank. Israeli soldiers and settlers have furthermore killed more than 220 Palestinians in the West Bank since 7 October, while arresting thousands. The violence against Palestinians also includes acts of torture.
Palestinian citizens of Israel—almost 2 million people—are also facing a state assault against them, with hundreds of arrests since 7 October for any expression of identification with Palestinians in Gaza. There is widespread intimidation and silencing of Palestinian students, faculty, and staff in Israeli universities, and the Israeli Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai threatened to expel to Gaza Israeli Palestinians identifying with Palestinians in Gaza. These alarming developments and measures build on a view of Palestinian citizens of Israel as potential enemies that stretches back to the military rule imposed on the 156,000 Palestinians who survived the Nakba and remained within the territory that became Israel in 1948. This iteration of military rule lasted until 1966, but the image of Israeli Palestinians as a threat has persisted. In May 2021, as many Israeli Palestinians came out to protest an attack on Palestinians in East Jerusalem and another attack on Gaza, the Israeli police responded with massive repression and violence, arresting hundreds. The situation deteriorated quickly, as Jewish and Palestinian citizens clashed across Israel—in some places, as in Haifa, with Jewish citizens attacking Palestinian citizens on the streets and breaking into houses of Palestinian citizens. And now, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right settler who serves as Israeli minister of national security, has put Israeli Palestinians in even more danger by the distribution of thousands of weapons to Israeli civilians who have formed hundreds of self-defense units after 7 October.
The escalating violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and the exclusion and violence against Palestinian citizens of Israel are particularly worrying in the context of calls in Israel after 7 October for a “second Nakba.” The reference is to the massacres and “ethnic cleansing” of more than 750,000 Palestinians and the destruction of hundreds of villages and towns by Israeli forces in the 1948 war, when Israel was established. The language that member of the Israeli Knesset (parliament) Ariel Kallner from the ruling Likud party used in a social media post on 7 October is instructive: “Nakba to the enemy now. … Now, only one goal: Nakba! Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 1948. Nakba in Gaza and Nakba to whoever dares to join [them].” We know that genocide is a process, and we recognize that the stage is thus set for violence more severe than the Nakba and not spatially limited to Gaza.
Thus, the time for concerted action to prevent genocide is now. We call on governments to uphold their legal obligations under the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide to intervene and prevent genocide (Article 1) by (1) implementing an arms embargo on Israel; (2) working to end Israel’s military assault on Gaza; (3) pressuring the Israeli government to stop immediately the intensifying army and settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which constitute clear violations of international law; (4) demanding the continued release of all hostages held in Gaza and all Palestinians imprisoned unlawfully in Israel, without charges or trial; (5) calling on the International Criminal Court to investigate and issue arrest warrants against all perpetrators of mass violence on 7 October and since then, both Palestinians and Israelis; and (6) initiating a political process in Israel and Palestine based on a truthful reckoning with Israeli mass violence against Palestinians since the 1948 Nakba and a future that will guarantee the equality, freedom, dignity, and security of all the people who live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
We also call on businesses and labor unions to ensure that they do not aid and abet Israeli mass violence, but rather follow the example of workers in Belgium transport unions who refused in late October to handle flights that ship arms to Israel.
Finally, we call on scholars, programs, centers, and institutes in Holocaust and Genocide Studies to take a clear stance against Israeli mass violence and join us in efforts to stop it and prevent its further escalation.
Mohamed Adhikari, University of Cape Town
Taner Akçam, Director, Armenian Genocide Research Program, The Promise Armenian Institute, UCLA
Ayhan Aktar, Professor of Sociology (Retired), Istanbul Bilgi University
Yassin Al Haj Saleh, Syrian Writer, Berlin
Sebouh David Aslanian, Professor of History and Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History, UCLA
Karyn Ball, Professor of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta, Edmonton
Haim Bresheeth-Žabner, Professorial Research Associate, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
Cathie Carmichael, Professor Emerita, School of History, University of East Anglia
Daniele Conversi, Professor, Department of Contemporary History, University of the Basque Country
Catherine Coquio, Professeure de littérature comparée à Université Paris Cité, France
John Cox, Associate Professor of History and Global Studies and Director of the Center for Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Studies, University of North Carolina, Charlotte
Martin Crook, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University of the West of England
Ann Curthoys, Honorary Professor, School of Humanities, The University of Sydney
Sarah K. Danielsson, Professor of History, Queensborough, CUNY
John Docker, Sydney, Australia
John Duncan, affiliated with the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London
Didier Fassin, Professor at the Collège de France and the Institute for Advanced Study
Joanne Smith Finley, Reader in Chinese Studies, Newcastle University, UK
Shannon Fyfe, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, George Mason University; Faculty Fellow, Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy
William Gallois, Professor of the Islamic Mediterranean, University of Exeter
Fatma Muge Gocek, Professor of Sociology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Svenja Goltermann, Professor of Modern History, University of Zurich
Andrei Gómez-Suarez, Senior Research Fellow, Centre of Religion, Reconciliation and Peace, University of Winchester
Penny Green, Professor of Law and Globalisation and Director of the International State Crime Initiative, Queen Mary University of London
John-Paul Himka, Professor Emeritus, University of Alberta
Marianne Hirschberg, Professor, Faculty of Human Sciences, University of Kassel, Germany
Anna Holian, Associate Professor, School of Historical, Philosophical & Religious Studies, Arizona State University
Rachel Ibreck, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, Department of Politics and International Relations, Goldsmiths, University of London
Adam Jones, Professor, Political Science, University of British Columbia Okanagan
Rachel Killean, Senior Lecturer, University of Sydney Law School
Brian Klug, Hon. Fellow in Social Philosophy, Campion Hall, University of Oxford, and Hon. Fellow, Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations, University of Southampton
Mill Lake, Associate Professor, International Relations Department, London School of Economics
Mark Levene, Emeritus Fellow, University of Southampton
Yosefa Loshitzky, Professorial Research Associate, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
Thomas MacManus, Senior Lecturer in State Crime, School of Law, Queen Mary University of London
Zachariah Mampilly, Professor, Baruch College and the Graduate Center, CUNY
Benjamin Meiches, Associate Professor of Security Studies and Conflict Resolution, University of Washington-Tacoma
Dirk Moses, Professor of International Relations, City College of New York, CUNY
Eva Nanopoulos, Senior Lecturer in Law, Queen Mary University of London
Jeffrey Ostler, Professor of History Emeritus, University of Oregon
Thomas Earl Porter, Professor of History, North Carolina A&T State University, Greensboro, NC
Michael Rothberg, Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Holocaust Studies, UCLA
Colin Samson, Professor of Sociology, University of Essex
Victoria Sanford, Lehman Professor of Excellence, Lehman College and the Graduate Center, CUNY
Raz Segal, Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Endowed Professor in the Study of Modern Genocide, Stockton University
Elyse Semerdjian, Robert Aram and Marianne Kaloosdian and Stephen and Marian Mugar Chair of Armenian Genocide Studies, Clark University
Martin Shaw, University of Sussex/Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals
Damien Short, Co-Director of the Human Rights Consortium and Professor of Human Rights and Environmental Justice at the School of Advanced Study, University of London
Ronald Grigor Suny, William H. Sewell, Jr. Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of History and Emeritus Professor of Political Science, University of Michigan
Adam Sutcliffe, Professor of European History, King’s College London
Barry Trachtenberg, Rubin Presidential Chair of Jewish History, Wake Forest University
Enzo Traverso, Professor in the Humanities, Cornell University
Jeremy Varon, Professor of History, The New School, New York
Ernesto Verdeja, Associate Professor of Peace Studies and Global Politics, University of Notre Dame
Johanna Ray Vollhardt, Associate Professor of Psychology, Clark University
Pauline Wakeham, Associate Professor, Department of English, Western University (Canada)
Keith David Watenpaugh, Professor and Director, Human Rights Studies, University of California, Davis
Louise Wise, Lecturer in International Security, University of Sussex
Andrew Woolford, Professor of Sociology and Criminology, University of Manitoba
Ran Zwigenberg, Associate Professor of Asian Studies, History, and Jewish Studies, Pennsylvania State University
Dr. Raz Segal is Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Endowed Professor in the Study of Modern Genocide at Stockton University. Dr. Segal has held a Harry Frank Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and was recently a Senior Fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (March-July 2023). His publications include >Genocide in the Carpathians: War, Social Breakdown, and Mass Violence, 1914-1945 (2016); Days of Ruin: The Jews of Munkács during the Holocaust (2013); and he was guest editor of the Hebrew-language special issue onGenocide: Mass Violence and Cultural Erasure of Zmanim: A Historical Quarterly (2018). In addition to scholarly publications, Dr. Segal has published op-eds, book reviews, and larger articles on genocide, state violence, and memory politics in Hebrew, English, and German in The Guardian , LA Times, The Nation, Jewish Currents, Haaretz, +972 Magazine, and Berliner Zeitung , and he has appeared on Democracy Now! and ABC News.
Thursday, January 11, 12:00 PM EDT – on Zoom and in person at Georgetown University, (CCAS Boardroom ICC 141), 1421 37th And O St NW, Washington, DC
Gaza and the Question of Genocide
This lecture will focus on a number of unprecedented elements in Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. It will discuss the exceptionally direct, explicit, and unashamed statements of intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza by Israeli leaders and senior army officers, the widespread incitement to genocide in Israeli political and public discourses, and the nature of the mass violence itself that a number of reports have described as one of the deadliest and destructive since World War II.
Dr. Raz Segal is Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Endowed Professor in the Study of Modern Genocide at Stockton University. Dr. Segal has held a Harry Frank Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and was recently a Senior Fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (2023). His publications include Genocide in the Carpathians: War, Social Breakdown, and Mass Violence, 1914-1945 (2016), and Days of Ruin: The Jews of Munkács during the Holocaust (2013)
The Time for concerted action to PREVENT genocide is NOW!
Jan 4, 2024 This address to the United Nations panel on the Holocaust, Genocide, and Mass Violence, by Mr. Raz Segal, in early December outlined the joint statement presented by 56 scholars, all experts on genocide, who confirmed that Israel IS COMMITTING GENOCIDE against the Palestinians. He also emphasizes the urgency of the UN acting to prevent further killings of the Palestinians. “”The time for concerted action to prevent genocide is now,”” Mr Raz Segal, Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies. No doubt this will be powerful testimony that should be presented to the International Court of Justice on January 11, when Israel will be forced to defend its illegal, immoral and inhumane against the civilians of Gaza since October 8 leading to the deaths of more than 22,000 babies, children, women and men and injuring more than 57,000 others.
Transcript
“on 9th of December a group of 56 senior Scholars of the Holocaust genocide and mass violence who like academics disagree on much all agreed on a statement on the mass violence in Israel and Palestine since 7th of October I signed that statement as well there is evidence the scholars wrote of quote a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population with knowledge of the attack that the Rome statute of the international criminal court defines as a crime Against Humanity moreover they added dozens of statements dozens of statements of Israeli leaders ministers in the war cabinet and Senior army officers since 7th of October that is people with command Authority suggest quote an intent to destroy Palestinians as such in the language of the UN convention on the prevention and Punishment of the crime of genocide we should take seriously the professional position and the warning of dozens of senior Scholars who have devoted their lives to studying Mass violence including genocide Israeli president Isaac Herzog used particularly loaded language in an interview on MSNBC just last week for It’s A War he continued that is intended really truly to save Western Civilization we are attacked by a jihadist network an Empire of evil and this Empire wants to conquer the Middle East and if it weren’t for us Europe would be next and the United States follows OK Builds on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Infamous Association in late October and early November of Israel’s attack on Gaza with a biblical story of a this is a story of the Israelites destroying completely an enemy perceived as the ultimate Evil but Herzog places it on a modern scale as the last stand against Global apocalypse and the demise quote of Western Civilization Israeli defense Minister Yoav Galant set the tone for this on 9th of October when he proclaimed quote total Siege on Gaza in a fight against in his words Human animals Israeli coordinator of government activities in the territories Major General Ghasan Alyan in his video message to the people of Gaza and I quote him Human animals must be treated as such there will be no electricity and no water there will only be destruction you wanted hell you will get hell so quite explicit and direct this practice of casting an entire civilian population as enemies as legitimate military targets is a common genocidal mechanism thus Israeli president Herzog’s words in a press conference on 13th of October that quote it is an entire nation out there Palestinians in Gaza that is responsible that quote should have set off alarms history is again instructive here Hutu authorities in Rwanda for example identified all the Totsis with the Rwanda patriotic front the rebel Totsi Army that had invaded Rwanda from Uganda in 1990 which led to the Rwanda genocide in 1994 Israeli authorities and the Israeli Army have acted according to this genocidal intent in the last two months this is the reason for the unprecedented level of mass killings the first two acts of genocide in the UN genocide convention are not the only ones that Israel is perpetrating now in Gaza it is the third Act of the convention quote deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of Life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part that mostly fits Israel Mass violence in Gaza now the total Siege measures together with a forced displacement of over 1.8 million of the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza have indeed created in the southern part of the strip severe overcrowding with the risk of outbreak of infectious diseases exacerbated by acute shortages of food clean water fuel and medical supplies all along moreover the Israeli Army pushes Palestinians into an increasingly shrinking area in what is to begin with one of the most densely populated areas in the world annihilatory language has also appeared in public spaces in Israel such as banners on the bridges in Tel Aviv that call quote to annihilate Gaza and explain that quote the picture of Triumph is zero people in Gaza there are dozens and dozens of examples of incitement in Israeli media which recalls the media incitement to genocide in Rwanda as genocide was unfolding there in 1994 which led it is worth reminding everyone to the media case when journalists were put on trial and convicted in the ictr the post genocide Trials of incitement to genocide which is a separate crime under article 3 of the UN genocide convention genocide then has become normalized in Israeli media society and politics today the 56 Scholars of the Holocaust genocide and mass violence who signed a statement on 9th of December wrote that quote the time for concerted action to prevent genocide is now warning also that quote should the Israeli attack continue Palestinians under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and Palestinian citizens of Israel face grave danger as well it is our urgent responsibility and is the obligation of States under article one of the UN genocide convention to heed this warning and act now to stop and prevent genocide.”
Scholar says he still wants U Holocaust center job despite controversy
Minnesota News Matt Sepic Minneapolis June 11, 2024 7:30 PM UPDATED: JUNE 14, 2024 3:35 PM
The University of Minnesota has put its search for a new director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies on hold after its job offer to a controversial Israeli historian drew strong objections from two professors and some members of the Twin Cities Jewish community.
Less than a week after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack in southern Israel, Raz Segal of Stockton University in New Jersey published an essay in the magazine Jewish Currents in which he called Israel’s military response “a textbook case of genocide unfolding in front of our eyes.”
University of Minnesota professors Karen Painter and Bruno Chaouat resigned from the center’s board on Friday in protest of Segal’s selection, as first reported in TC Jewfolk.
In a phone interview on Wednesday, Segal told MPR News that he stands by his October article and its key argument that Israel’s siege of Gaza constitutes the systematic destruction of Palestinians and their society in violation of international law.
“They’re concerned about absolute loyalty to Israel, and they’re narrowing down Jewish identity to loyalty to a violent state,” Segal said.
Painter said in a phone interview with MPR News on Tuesday that Segal’s views are extreme.
“We need a moral core to the research,” Painter said. “Sometimes scholars are just trying to be original and provocative. This is not a job for a highly provocative, contentious scholar.”
She praised U Interim President Jeff Ettinger for pausing the hiring process.
“I’m so proud to be at an institution where they recognize a mistake and they correct it and say wait,” Painter said.
Chaouat writes in his resignation letter that Segal cannot fulfill the center’s mission.
“He has failed to recognize the genocidal intent of Hamas. He does not understand that a movement like Hamas is inherently fascist and represents precisely what CHGS stands against.” Chaouat also contends that Segal justified “Hamas’s atrocities five days after they occurred.”
Segal said that Chaouat’s statement is false and defamatory.
“I have said exactly the opposite,” Segal said. “I’ve described the Hamas-led attack on Israel as a case of mass murder, as war crimes, as crimes against humanity. I’ve been very clear on this for months and months on end.”
Segal said that he dedicated his career to studying genocide after hearing stories from his maternal and paternal grandparents about surviving the Holocaust. He has focused much of his scholarship on the mass deportation and murder of Jews in the Subcarpathian Rus’ region of Europe, both by Nazis and Hungarian authorities during and prior to World War II.
In a statement, the U says that because of the director’s “community-facing and leadership role,” it’s important to consider the views of those who opposed the hiring decision, and that Ettinger has paused the selection process “to allow an opportunity to determine next steps.”
Segal said that he received a job offer after meeting with the search committee and visiting campus, and that he still wants to come to Minnesota, though he has not signed a contract.
“What the university should do now is before it descends more into this hole that it has dug itself into, it’s best to retract, to apologize, to offer me the job that I received in a completely legitimate process,” Segal said.
In its own statement, the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas says that dozens of community members contacted the U to protest Segal’s appointment, including descendants of Holocaust survivors and a person who survived the Oct. 7 attack.
The JCRC says the next director must be “a unifying and not divisive figure.”
Segal said he has received many messages of support in response to the U’s announcement.
Dr. Deborah Lipstadt testified on February 8, 2022 before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in her confirmation hearing for the role of Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism. In response to a question from Senator Marco Rubio, she criticized Amnesty International’s latest report on Israel, the most recent among similar evidenced-based reports by human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch and the Israeli B’Tselem, which apply the international legal category of apartheid to describe ongoing Israeli violence against Palestinians since 1948. Amnesty’s report on apartheid in Israel is thorough and well-documented. Still, Lipstadt retorted that it is “unhistorical,” “delegitimizes” Israel, and is somehow threatening for Jewish students on US campuses. This portends a worrying and accelerating trend for an important role in the US State Department, carrying on the Trump Administration’s legacy of attacking human rights organizations and conflating legitimate criticism of Israel with antisemitism.
Dr. Lipstadt is not alone in her harsh condemnation of the Amnesty report, entitled “Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians: A Cruel System of Domination and a Crime Against Humanity,” which was published on February 1, 2022. It prompted immediate reactions from the Israeli government and its aligned American Jewish organizations that seek to control a narrative that persistently erases Palestinian experiences, human rights, and political aspirations. Instead of engaging with the evidence presented in the report, they accused Amnesty of antisemitism and of singling out and seeking to destroy Israel. Never mind that Amnesty is a respected human rights organization that has reported extensively on violations of international human rights and humanitarian laws around the world. Amnesty has, for instance, described Myanmar’s system of rule as apartheid in 2017, without anyone understanding this as rooted in anti-Buddhist prejudice. Amnesty is also reporting now on the severe violations of international law in Russia’s war in Ukraine since February 24, 2022, and no one has suggested that Amnesty is biased against Russians. What is singled out in the case of Israel, therefore, is criticism of Israeli policies: those defending such policies distort legitimate criticism of a state and present it, only in the case of Israel, as an attack against a people.
Knee-jerk allegations of antisemitism are meant to marginalize engagement with this reality, as presented in the report. There is indeed much to discuss: the report is the product of four years of research, based also on the work of Palestinian, Israeli, and international human rights organizations, and on a large body of scholarship. It clearly shows that, according to international human rights and humanitarian law, Israel has created and maintains a system of apartheid, consisting of segregation, discrimination, persecution, and violence against Palestinians in all the areas under its control and military occupation. The report therefore calls for dismantling the apartheid system, not the state; for those responsible for apartheid to be held accountable; and for the victims and survivors to receive justice—all according to international law. The report is a critique not of a people, but of a state, though it does not prescribe what the political future of the state should look like following the dismantling of the apartheid system.
Jews who care deeply about Israel have, in fact, described it as an apartheid state, including leading Israeli organizations and politicians, among them former prime ministers.
Those attacking the report present themselves as representatives of all Jews, but Jews hardly agree on anything, including Israel. It is, furthermore, precisely the association of Jews everywhere with Israel that puts them in danger, as it confirms in the eyes of antisemites that Jews do not really belong where they live. This unfortunate meeting point of antisemites and apologists for Israeli state violence stems from a shared segregationist view of the world, which brings us back to the report: the reality of the system of Israeli apartheid.
Those attacking the report present themselves as representatives of all Jews, but Jews hardly agree on anything, including Israel. It is, furthermore, precisely the association of Jews everywhere with Israel that puts them in danger, as it confirms in the eyes of antisemites that Jews do not really belong where they live.
On the day before Dr. Lipstadt’s hearing, February 7, 2022, the Israeli Parliament approved in first reading the proposed Citizenship Law, which denies Palestinians married to Israeli citizens permanent residency in Israel and thus bans Palestinians from the occupied Palestinian territories and Gaza from living in Israel with their Palestinian partners. Israel’s Minister of Health, Nitzan Horowitz, whose party (Meretz) opposes the proposed law, described it as “racist and discriminatory, and there is no place for it in a democratic state.” This failed to prevent the final approval of the law on March 10, 2022. Israeli Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked sees the Citizenship Law as an “important result for the security of the state and its fortification as a Jewish state,” expressing the apartheid rationale that, furthermore, casts Palestinians collectively as a security threat.
Dr. Raz Segal is Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Endowed Professor in the Study of Modern Genocide at Stockton University. Dr. Segal has held a Harry Frank Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and was recently a Senior Fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (March-July 2023). His publications include >Genocide in the Carpathians: War, Social Breakdown, and Mass Violence, 1914-1945 (2016); Days of Ruin: The Jews of Munkács during the Holocaust (2013); and he was guest editor of the Hebrew-language special issue onGenocide: Mass Violence and Cultural Erasure of Zmanim: A Historical Quarterly (2018). In addition to scholarly publications, Dr. Segal has published op-eds, book reviews, and larger articles on genocide, state violence, and memory politics in Hebrew, English, and German in The Guardian , LA Times, The Nation, Jewish Currents, Haaretz, +972 Magazine, and Berliner Zeitung , and he has appeared on Democracy Now! and ABC News.
Following the model of the American campus encampments, in early May, some 150 pro-Palestinian activist students occupied a courtyard at Berlin’s Free University to protest Israeli military action in Gaza.
The pro-Palestinian student group, named “Student Coalition Berlin,” said in their statement: “In solidarity with the Palestinian people, we the students of Berlin, have set up our camp on the grounds of the Freie Universität (location in previous post). We call our universities and research institutes, our fellow students, faculty and academic partners in Germany and beyond to unite in this urgent call to action. We understand that universities aligned with the politics of this racist state will attempt to downplay the urgency of our demands or deem them unrealistic, but we will not waver, and we will not accept negotiations for half solutions and performative actions. We especially plead with the large and growing number of critical but so far silent lecturers and professors: fulfil [sic] your obligation to protect your integrity as critical researchers. JOIN US. TOGETHER LET US STAND IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE AND WORK TOWARDS A FUTURE FREE FROM COLONIAL OPRESSION.” [sic]
The university administration quickly called in the police, who cleared the area. According to the Police, 79 people were temporarily detained, with 80 criminal investigations and 79 misdemeanor proceedings initiated.
In response, some 100 scholars from universities in Berlin wrote an open letter affirming the students’ right to protest. “Regardless of whether we agree with the specific demands of the protest camp, we stand with our students and defend their right to peaceful protest,” they wrote. The lecturers urged “university management to refrain from police operations against their own students as well as from further criminal prosecution.”
The scholars said in their statement, “Academics in Germany are experiencing an unprecedented attack on their fundamental rights, on the 75th anniversary of the Basic Law… The withdrawal of funding ad personam on the basis of political statements made by researchers is contrary to the Basic Law: teaching and research are free. The internal order to examine such political sanctions is a sign of constitutional ignorance and political abuse of power… It illustrates an increasing rift between decision-makers in the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and those who support the academic system through their research and teaching. Through its intimidating effect alone, the Minister’s actions risk permanently damaging the hard-won right of academic freedom against political and state interference… Regardless of whether we agree with the specific demands of the protest camp, we stand up for our students, and defend their right to peaceful protest, which also includes the occupation of university grounds.”
The scholars also wrote, “As teachers at Berlin universities, our self-image obliges us to accompany our students as equals, but also to protect them and under no circumstances to hand them over to police violence… Freedom of assembly and freedom of expression are fundamental democratic rights that must be protected, especially at universities. In view of the announced bombing of Rafah and the worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza, the urgency of the protesters’ concerns should be understandable even to those who do not share all of the specific demands or who consider the chosen form of action to be unsuitable. It is not a prerequisite for a protest protected by basic rights that it be based on dialogue. Conversely, we believe it is one of the university management’s duties to strive for a dialogue-based and non-violent solution for as long as possible. The FU Berlin executive board violated this duty by having the police clear the protest camp without a prior offer of dialogue. The constitutionally protected right to assemble peacefully applies regardless of the opinion expressed. According to the case law of the Federal Constitutional Court (“Fraport”), freedom of assembly also restricts house rules for places that, like the FU Berlin university campus, are publicly accessible and serve a variety of purposes, including public ones. We call on the Berlin university administrations to refrain from police operations against their own students as well as from further criminal prosecution. Dialogue with students and the protection of universities as spaces for critical public opinion should be the top priority – both are incompatible with police operations on campus. Only through discussion and debate can we as teachers and universities fulfill our mission.”
German Education Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger criticized the academics’ letter for not mentioning the October 7 attacks by Palestinian extremist group Hamas. She repeated that Hamas is listed as a terrorist organization.
Things came to a head when Sabine Döring, a top education ministry official, was fired by Stark-Watzinger over a botched response to the dispute about academic freedom and the right to protest. A report by German broadcaster ARD uncovered emails showing that the Ministry of Education had requested a legal review into whether funding could be cut to the lecturers who spoke against the removal of a pro-Palestinian protest camp. Döring admitted that she “had apparently expressed herself in a misleading manner when commissioning the legal review.” Döring is the second-highest-ranking official in the Ministry. Stark-Watzinger was interviewed about the incident and said, “I have arranged for the facts of the case to be investigated thoroughly and transparently.” She also confirmed that “an examination of potential consequences according to funding law was indeed requested from the relevant departments.”
The latest tussle over free speech is interesting both in its own right and as a reflection. There is also a Muslim interest in this issue. Iranian and Turkish intervention in Germany’s affairs is noticeable. Both countries often report on the events on campus. Germany recently released a report on the widespread Iranian activities and media manipulation. Turkey has used the large expat community to create espionage and influence campaigns, mainly by misrepresenting events.
Hamas’s attack on Israel and Israel’s response has triggered a lot of anti-Israel activities on German campuses as well.
German education chief sacked over Gaza protest response
June 17, 2024
The top civil servant in Germany’s education ministry has been fired after floating a possible funding cut for academics who spoke in favor of pro-Palestinian students.
A top education ministry official has been fired after over a botched response to a dispute about academic freedom and the right to protest.
The request followed a report by German broadcaster ARD reporting emails that showed a legal review had been requested inside the ministry into whether the academics’ funding could be cut.
The review was initiated by Döring, who is responsible for universities. Döring is the second-highest-ranking official in the ministry and, unlike Stark-Watzinger, is not an elected figure.
“I have arranged for the facts of the case to be investigated thoroughly and transparently,” said Stark-Watzinger. She confirmed that “an examination of potential consequences according to funding law was indeed requested from the relevant departments.”
Pro-Palestinian activists had been protesting across the city for several weeks when police moved inImage: Axel Schmidt/Getty Images
Döring admitted that she “had apparently expressed herself in a misleading manner when commissioning the legal review,” Stark-Watzinger said.
“Nonetheless, the impression was created that the Education Ministry was considering examining the consequences under funding law on the basis of an open letter covered by freedom of expression,” the minister added.
Why were the academics targeted?
Some 150 pro-Palestinian activist students, protesting Israel’s military action in the Gaza Strip, occupied a courtyard at Berlin’s Free University in early May. The university quickly called in the police, who cleared the area.
In response, some 100 academics from universities in Berlin wrote an open letter affirming the students’ right to protest.
“Regardless of whether we agree with the specific demands of the protest camp, we stand with our students and defend their right to peaceful protest,” they wrote.
Police said 79 people were temporarily detained following the protest in May, with 80 criminal investigations and 79 misdemeanor proceedings initiated.
In their statement, the lecturers urged “university management to refrain from police operations against their own students as well as from further criminal prosecution.”
At the time, Stark-Watzinger criticized the academics’ letter for not mentioning the October 7 attacks by Palestinian extremist group Hamas and other militants in southern Israel. She repeated that criticism on Sunday. Hamas is listed as a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union and others.
Clearance of a camp at the FU BerlinProtest-free university
Pro-Palestinian students occupy an inner courtyard at the Free University. The area is evacuated shortly afterwards. Teachers express their solidarity with the protests.
Updated: May 8, 3:38 p.m.
BERLIN taz | At around 1:30 p.m. the time has come: the police begin to clear the pro-Palestinian protest camp at the Free University (FU) of Berlin. The demonstrators are sitting on the ground, tightly entangled with one another. Police officers gradually pull people out one by one, sometimes using painful grips, and lead them off the premises – all amid loud protests. Students continue to knock, chant and clap at the windows of the adjacent university rooms in support of the occupiers.
On Tuesday morning, around 150 students set up tents, benches and a small pavilion and hung banners in the theater courtyard of the FU’s “Rost- und Silberlaube” in Dahlem. Almost all of them are wearing keffiyehs; in the middle of the open space stands a woman with a megaphone. “We are the students, let’s stop the bombing now,” she calls out, followed by the controversial chant “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free.” The crowd cheers and applauds.
The protesters put up a list of names of Palestinians killed in Gaza on a wall. A small information stand is set up under the pavilion, with apples, tea and information brochures on the topics of “Occupying Berlin Universities” and “Intifada, resistance everywhere in this country”.
The person at the stand tells taz: “Actually, we have invited speakers for discussion rounds, but the police are not letting them through.” Another protester is upset. She says she did not think “that democracy in Germany is so thin-skinned. Cultural and educational institutions are taking fascist positions.”
Counter-protest quickly forms
But not everyone likes what is happening here: a person is standing within earshot, wearing an Israeli flag. She does not want to be intimidated, but considering what is going on here at the university, she says that as a Jew she is very afraid. “The anti-Semitism that is openly displayed at the university is unbearable.” Someone has also hung an Israeli flag from the window of a room bordering the inner courtyard.
“The situation for Jewish students is becoming increasingly unsafe,” criticizes Noam Petri, Vice President of the Jewish Student Union, to the taz. Petri reports that many Jewish and pro-Israel fellow students are receiving threatening messages. “The situation has not calmed down, we have been warning about this for a long time.”
The group also demands a comprehensive cultural and academic boycott of Israel – which would also mean an end to the FU’s scientific cooperation with Israeli universities. SCB announced that it would not accept “any negotiations or compromises”.
A FU spokeswoman told taz that the protesters had also tried to break into rooms and lecture halls on Tuesday morning. After the occupiers refused to negotiate, the university administration had already ordered the camp to be cleared that morning.
“This form of protest is not aimed at dialogue. We are available for an academic dialogue – but not in this way,” said university president Günter Ziegler. Ziegler made it clear that the FU “firmly rejects” an academic boycott of Israel.
Teachers criticize university management
Many teachers, in turn, criticize this attitude. “It is not a prerequisite for protests that are protected by basic rights that they be directed toward dialogue,” says a statement signed by around 100 teachers from Berlin and other universities . “Regardless of whether we agree with the specific demands of the protest camp, we stand up for our students and defend their right to peaceful protest, which also includes occupying university grounds.”
In view of the worsening situation in Gaza, “the urgency of the protesters’ concerns should also be understandable to those who do not share all of the concrete demands or who do not consider the chosen form of action to be suitable.” The scientists called on the management of Berlin’s universities to refrain from police or criminal prosecution of their students. “Dialogue with students and the protection of universities as spaces for the critical public should be the top priority.” This is not compatible with police operations on campus.
And yet that is exactly what happened: from midday onwards, the police surrounded the theatre courtyard, and officers were also positioned on the adjacent roofs. Just an hour and a half after the evacuation began, the theatre courtyard was empty. Tents, blankets, posters and the protesters’ megaphone were pushed together at the edge of the open space. As the police later announced, 79 people were arrested and released after their identities were established. 80 investigations and 79 administrative offence proceedings were initiated.
In the meantime, pro-Israel demonstrators have gathered in front of the entrance to the building for a counter-demonstration. The approximately 35 people are carrying Israeli flags and signs, for example with the inscription “Jewish Lives Matter”. The remaining pro-Palestinian demonstrators are standing opposite. The police are trying to remove them from the premises.
Tensions have been noticeable for months
The university administration’s quick and repressive action against the occupation comes as little surprise. On Friday, Humboldt University had already cleared a pro-Palestinian sit-in of around 150 people on the lawn in front of the main building in Mitte after just a few hours. The police announced that 37 investigations had been initiated for possible cases of incitement to hatred and resistance against law enforcement officers.
At the Free University, on the other hand, things have remained quiet in recent months, although tensions between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli students were noticeable. In December, pro-Palestinian activists occupied a lecture hall , which was also quickly cleared. At that time, there were physical altercations between pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian students.
Meanwhile, Jewish FU student Lahav Shapira in particular came into focus of pro-Palestinian activists on the social media platform X. In January, a fellow student beat up Shapira and seriously injured him . The police suspect that the motive for the attack was the previous dispute over the Gaza war.
Is the wave of protests from the USA spreading to Germany?
The authorities’ fear that the wave of protests at US universities could spill over into Germany is also behind the tough crackdown on Tuesday. For example, students at New York’s Columbia University occupied a meadow for several weeks to protest against their university’s involvement in the Gaza war. At the beginning of May, the university had the camp cleared with a martial police force.
The form of action was imitated across the country and now also around the world. In addition to Berlin, pro-Palestinian activists also attempted to set up a protest camp at the University of Vienna on Tuesday. At the University of Leipzig, students occupied the main auditorium. In Amsterdam, the police cleared a camp set up on Monday with heavy equipment.
In solidarity with the Palestinian people, we the students of Berlin, have set up our camp on the grounds of the Freie Universität (location in previous post). We call our universities and research institutes, our fellow students, faculty and academic partners in germany and beyond to unite in this urgent call to action. We understand that universities aligned with the politics of this racist state will attempt to downplay the urgency of our demands or deem them unrealistic, but we will not waver, and we will not accept negotiations for half solutions and performative actions. We especially plead with the large and growing number of critical but so far silent lecturers and professors: fulfil your obligation to protect your integrity as critical researchers. JOIN US. TOGETHER LET US STAND IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE AND WORK TOWARDS A FUTURE FREE FROM COLONIAL OPRESSION
Occupations of universitiesDispute over Palestine protests
More than 100 university lecturers criticize the clearing of occupations at universities in a letter. The Science Minister reacts indignantly.
BERLIN taz | The pro-Palestinian protests at the Free University in Berlin only lasted a short time: after a few hours they were ended by a massive police presence. But they are causing quite a stir. On Tuesday, around 150 activists tried to occupy a courtyard on the university grounds and set up tents. The university management called the police. 79 people were temporarily arrested. 80 criminal investigations and 79 administrative offense proceedings were initiated.
More than 100 professors and lecturers from several Berlin universities subsequently published a statement : “Regardless of whether we agree with the specific demands of the protest camp, we stand up for our students and defend their right to peaceful protest, which also includes occupying university grounds,” it says.
They call on Berlin university management to “refrain from police operations against their own students as well as from further criminal prosecution.” Several prominent scientists have signed, including philosophers Rahel Jaeggi, Eva von Redecker and Robin Celikates, historian Michael Wildt, sociologists Naika Foroutan and Sabine Hark and lawyer Maximilian Steinbeis.
“Shocking letter: University professors support Jew-hating mob,” was the headline in the Bild newspaper. Federal Education Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger told the newspaper that the statement left her “stunned”: Instead of clearly standing up against hatred of Israel and Jews, the university occupiers were being trivialized. Teachers in particular must “stand on the basis of the Basic Law.”
Demand for minister’s resignation
The FDP politician received sharp protests online. Ralf Michaels, director of the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg, responded to her on X: “It contradicts your role as Federal Minister of Education to cast doubt on the constitutionality of university lecturers in such a blanket manner.”
The minister received encouragement from Berlin’s Governing Mayor Kai Wegner. “I have absolutely no understanding for the authors of this pamphlet,” the CDU politician told Bild . Anti-Semitism and hatred of Israel are “not expressions of opinion, but criminal offenses.” Schleswig-Holstein’s Education Minister and CDU Vice-President Karin Prien was “stunned” at how scientists “point to the humanitarian suffering in Gaza without mentioning the Hamas hostages with a single syllable.”
The president of the Central Council of Jews, Josef Schuster, said the activists were driven by hatred of Israel and Jews. “I would have expected university lecturers in particular to at least state this clearly when they advocate this form of protest.”
The group “Student Coalition Berlin” (SCB) published a list of demands in advance on Instagram. Among other things, the university should call for an immediate ceasefire and a stop to German arms exports. The group also demands a comprehensive cultural and academic boycott of Israel, which would also mean an end to the FU’s scientific cooperation with Israeli universities.
There have recently been more protest camps in other cities. In Bremen and Leipzig, the universities had them cleared. In Cologne, tents are set up on a meadow, and in Hamburg there is a vigil.
German Education Minister Rules Out Resignation Over Gaza Protest Response
18.06.2024 01:12’No reason’ to step down as directive on looking into sanctioning of university professors supporting pro Palestinian students’ right to protest was not hers, says Bettina Stark Watzinger.
German Education Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger on Monday dismissed calls for her resignation after more than 2,500 academics urged her to step down over her alleged role in considering sanctions against scholars who supported pro-Palestinian students’ right to protest on university campuses.
Asked at a press briefing in Berlin whether she would submit her resignation over the affair, Stark-Watzinger said “I see no reason to do so.”
The minister’s statement came in the wake of the weekend firing of a top education ministry official over a botched response to a dispute about academic freedom and the right to protest.
Sabine Doering, who is responsible for universities, was reportedly found to have looked into a plan to sanction, with financial cuts, university professors who spoke against shutting down a pro-Palestinian protest camp at a Berlin university.
“I did not give the relevant order to have the consequences of funding examined, nor did I want to,” said Stark-Watzinger.
German public broadcaster ARD reported last week about emails that showed a legal review had been requested inside the ministry into whether the academics’ funding could be cut.
Stark-Watzinger had stated that she had “arranged for the facts of the case to be investigated thoroughly and transparently.”
She confirmed that “an examination of potential consequences according to funding law was indeed requested from the relevant departments.”
On Sunday, more than 2,500 academics signed a letter demanding that Stark-Watzinger resign over her alleged attempt to penalize university teachers who supported pro-Palestinian students’ right to protest.
“Academics in Germany are experiencing an unprecedented attack on their fundamental rights, on the 75th anniversary of the Basic Law,” the scholars said in a statement, underlining that recent actions taken by the ministry make Stark-Watzinger’s position as minister untenable.
“The withdrawal of funding ad personam on the basis of political statements made by researchers is contrary to the Basic Law (German Constitution): teaching and research are free. The internal order to examine such political sanctions is a sign of constitutional ignorance and political abuse of power,” the scholars said.
“It illustrates an increasing rift between decision-makers in the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and those who support the academic system through their research and teaching. Through its intimidating effect alone, the minister’s actions risk permanently damaging the hard-won right of academic freedom against political and state interference,” they added.
On May 8, more than 300 academics from Berlin universities expressed their support for pro-Palestine protest camps on the campus of the Free University of Berlin and defended the students’ right to demonstrate.
“Regardless of whether we agree with the specific demands of the protest camp, we stand up for our students and defend their right to peaceful protest, which also includes the occupation of university grounds,” they said.
The academics accused the university’s management of subjecting the demonstrators to “police violence.”
German authorities remove education undersecretary over pro-Palestine sanctions
June 17, 2024 LONDON: German authorities have dismissed Sabine Doring, the undersecretary responsible for higher education, for attempting to impose financial sanctions on academics supporting students protesting against Israel’s attacks on Gaza.
The decision, announced on Sunday, follows days of pressure on Education and Research Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger from thousands of academics.
“In May of this year, a group of university lecturers wrote an open letter regarding the protest camps at universities. This is a legitimate part of debate and freedom of thought. Having a different opinion is equally natural,” Stark-Watzinger said.
She affirmed that academic freedom was protected under constitutional law, adding: “I defend academic freedom in all its aspects. Funding for science is based on scientific criteria, not political ideology. This is a fundamental principle of academic freedom.”
Stark-Watzinger had faced intense criticism and calls for her resignation after media reports revealed that her office launched a legal review to explore sanctions against academics who supported protesting students, including the potential revocation of their funding.
“Academics in Germany are experiencing an unprecedented attack on their fundamental rights, on the 75th anniversary of the Basic Law,” more than 2,000 scholars said in an open letter on Friday.
The letter added: “Regardless of whether we agree with the specific demands of the protest camp, we stand up for our students, and defend their right to peaceful protest, which also includes the occupation of university grounds.”
Over 2,000 academics demand resignation of German education minister over repression
Minister’s attempt to sanction scholars who supported pro-Palestinian students sparks concern over academic freedom in Germany
Anadolu staff |14.06.2024 – Update : 15.06.2024
BERLIN
More than 2,000 academics have signed a letter demanding the resignation of Germany’s education minister over her attempt to sanction scholars who supported pro-Palestinian students’ right to protest.
Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger has come under growing criticism after media reports revealed that her ministry initiated a legal review last month to examine the open letter released by these scholars, and the possibility of dropping funding for their studies.
“Academics in Germany are experiencing an unprecedented attack on their fundamental rights, on the 75th anniversary of the Basic Law,” the scholars said in a statement on Friday, and underlined that recent actions taken by the ministry make Stark-Watzinger’s position as minister untenable.
“The withdrawal of funding ad personam on the basis of political statements made by researchers is contrary to the Basic Law: teaching and research are free. The internal order to examine such political sanctions is a sign of constitutional ignorance and political abuse of power,” the scholars said.
“It illustrates an increasing rift between decision-makers in the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and those who support the academic system through their research and teaching. Through its intimidating effect alone, the Minister’s actions risk permanently damaging the hard-won right of academic freedom against political and state interference,” they added.
On May 8, more than 300 academics from Berlin universities expressed their support for pro-Palestine protest camps on the campus of the Free University of Berlin, and defended the students’ right to demonstrate.
“Regardless of whether we agree with the specific demands of the protest camp, we stand up for our students, and defend their right to peaceful protest, which also includes the occupation of university grounds,” they said.
The academics accused the university’s management of subjecting the demonstrators to “police violence.”
Media reports have revealed that a few days after this open letter, Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger’s office initiated a legal review to examine the possibility of sanctions under civil service law and criminal law against these academics, including the option to revoke funding for their studies.==============================================
More than 2,000 academics have signed a letter demanding the resignation of Germany’s Education Minister over her attempt to sanction scholars who supported pro-Palestinian students’ right to protest, Anadolu Agency reports.
Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger has come under growing criticism after media reports revealed that her Ministry initiated a legal review last month to examine the open letter released by these scholars, and the possibility of dropping funding for their studies.
“Academics in Germany are experiencing an unprecedented attack on their fundamental rights, on the 75th anniversary of the Basic Law,” the scholars said in a statement on Friday, and underlined that recent actions taken by the Ministry make Stark-Watzinger’s position as Minister untenable.
“The withdrawal of funding ad personam on the basis of political statements made by researchers is contrary to the Basic Law: teaching and research are free. The internal order to examine such political sanctions is a sign of constitutional ignorance and political abuse of power,” the scholars said.
“It illustrates an increasing rift between decision-makers in the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and those who support the academic system through their research and teaching. Through its intimidating effect alone, the Minister’s actions risk permanently damaging the hard-won right of academic freedom against political and state interference,” they added.
On 8 May, more than 300 academics from Berlin universities expressed their support for pro-Palestine protest camps on the campus of the Free University of Berlin, and defended the students’ right to demonstrate.
“Regardless of whether we agree with the specific demands of the protest camp, we stand up for our students, and defend their right to peaceful protest, which also includes the occupation of university grounds,” they said.
The academics accused the university’s management of subjecting the demonstrators to “police violence”.
Media reports have revealed that, a few days after this open letter, Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger’s office initiated a legal review to examine the possibility of sanctions under civil service law and criminal law against these academics, including the option to revoke funding for their studies.
“As teachers at Berlin universities, our self-image obliges us to accompany our students as equals, but also to protect them and under no circumstances to hand them over to police violence.
Regardless of whether we agree with the specific demands of the protest camp, we stand up for our students and defend their right to peaceful protest, which also includes the occupation of university grounds. Freedom of assembly and freedom of expression are fundamental democratic rights that must be protected, especially at universities. In view of the announced bombing of Rafah and the worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza, the urgency of the protesters’ concerns should be understandable even to those who do not share all of the specific demands or who consider the chosen form of action to be unsuitable.
It is not a prerequisite for a protest protected by basic rights that it be based on dialogue. Conversely, we believe it is one of the university management’s duties to strive for a dialogue-based and non-violent solution for as long as possible. The FU Berlin executive board violated this duty by having the police clear the protest camp without a prior offer of dialogue. The constitutionally protected right to assemble peacefully applies regardless of the opinion expressed. According to the case law of the Federal Constitutional Court (“Fraport”), freedom of assembly also restricts house rules for places that, like the FU Berlin university campus, are publicly accessible and serve a variety of purposes, including public ones.
We call on the Berlin university administrations to refrain from police operations against their own students as well as from further criminal prosecution. Dialogue with students and the protection of universities as spaces for critical public opinion should be the top priority – both are incompatible with police operations on campus. Only through discussion and debate can we as teachers and universities fulfill our mission.”
Refqa Abu-Remaileh, FU Berlin Mihaela Adamović, FU Berlin Moritz Ahlert, TU Berlin Myriam Ahmed, Free University of Berlin Olly Akkerman, FU Berlin Emad Alali, FU Berlin Yvonne Albers, Free University of Berlin Hamed Al Drubi, FU Berlin Rainer Alisch FU Berlin Rabya AlMouslie, HU Berlin Tunay Altay, HU Berlin Moritz Altenried, HU Berlin Christian Ambrosius, Free University of Berlin Qusay Amer, TU Berlin Ulf Aminde, Weissensee Academy of Art Berlin Schirin Amir-Moazami, FU Berlin Wulf-Holger Arndt, TU Berlin Thomas Arslan, Berlin University of the Arts Daniele Artico, HU Berlin Pelin Asa, TU Berlin Ryszard Auksztulewicz, FU Berlin Eleftherios Avramidis, TU Berlin Juana Awad, W eißensee Academy of Art Berlin Magnus Axelson-Fisk, TU Berlin Thaer Ayoub, FU Berlin Annabella Backes, FU Berlin Fabian Backhaus, TU Berlin Karlotta Jule Bahnsen, FU Berlin Martin C Baier, University of the Arts Berlin Sadia Bajwa, HU Berlin Michael Barenboim, Barenboim-Said Academy Manuela Barney Seidel, FU Berlin Céline Barry, TU Berlin Denise Barth, Free University of Berlin Jamie Baxter, TU Berlin Sina Becker, Free University of Berlin Theodore Beers, FU Berlin Friederike Beier, Free University of Berlin Uli Beisel, Free University of Berlin Christine Belakhdar, FU Berlin Neil Belakhdar, FU Berlin Richard Bellamy, Hertie School Sarah Bellows-Blakely, FU Berlin Marwan Benyoussef, FU Berlin Sofia-Greta Berna, FU Berlin Elena Bernal Rey, FU Berlin Reinhard Bernbeck, FU Faysal Bibi, Museum of Natural History Berlin & University of Potsdam Selma Bidlingmaier, HU Berlin Beate Binder, HU Benjamin Bisping, TU Berlin Milena Bister, HU Berlin Marion Blacher-Schwake, HWR Berlin Carolin Blauth, HU Berlin Jan Boesten, FU Berlin Jonny-Bix Bongers, HWR Berlin Stefan Born, HU Berlin Manuela Bojadžijev , HU Berlin Erik Bos, FU Berlin Jandra Böttger, FU Berlin Dorothee Brantz, TU Berlin Paolo Brusa, FU Berlin Magdalena Buchczyk, HU Berlin Dominic Bunnett, TU Berlin Roberta Burghardt, Berlin University of the Arts Maria Burguera, FU Berlin Basak Cali, Hertie School Diego Calderara, Free University of Berlin Juliana Canedo, TU Berlin Alberto Cantera, FU Berlin Maddalena Casarini, HU Berlin Erna Cassarà, FU Berlin Bruno Castanho Silva, FU Berlin Geert Castryck, HU Berlin Sambojang Ceesay, FU Berlin Robin Celikates, FU Berlin Zülfukar Çetin, Evangelical University Berlin Haci Cevik, HU Berlin Rasha Chatta, FU Berlin Giulia Maria Chesi, HU Berlin Mihnea Chiujdea, FU Berlin Luciana Cingolani, Hertie School Simon Clemens, FU Berlin & HU Berlin Sebastian Conrad, Free University of Berlin Franziska Cooiman, HU Berlin Vinicius Pedro Correia Zanoli, FU Berlin Hana Curak, HU Berlin Eric CH de Bruyn, FU Berlin Siria De Francesco, FU Berlin Osman Demirbağ, FU Berlin Nathalie De La Cruz Aquino, FU Berlin Mercedes del Campo Garcia, FU Berlin Claudia Derichs, HU Berlin Marion Detjen, Bard College Berlin Aletta Diefenbach, FU Berlin Hansjörg Dilger, FU Berlin Maria do Mar Castro Varela, ASH Berlin James Dorson, Free University of Berlin Mahmoud Draz, TU Berlin Lindsey Drury, Free University of Berlin Alexander García Düttmann, University of the Arts Berlin Sarah Eaton, HU Berlin Teboho Edkins, dffb Berlin Harry Edwards, FU Berlin/HU Berlin Ulrike Eichinger, ASH Berlin Patrick Eiden-Offe, Leibniz Centre for Literature and Cultural Research Nadia El-Ali, FU Berlin Hassan Elmouelhi, TU Berlin Onur Erdur, HU Berlin Domenico Esposito, Free University of Berlin Shelley Etkin, HU Berlin Ingrid Evans, Free University of Berlin Farzada Farkhooi, HU Berlin Firoozeh Farvardin, HU Berlin Erika Feldhaus-Plumi, eh Berlin Bernold Fiedler, FU Berlin Norbert Finzsch, Sigmund Freud Private University Berlin Edgardo Flores, Free University of Berlin Ute Florey, Berlin University of the Arts Naika Foroutan, HU Berlin Julia Franz, ASH Berlin Hannah Franzki, FU Berlin Ulrike Freitag, Free University of Berlin Anke Friedel-Nguyen, HU Berlin Martin Fries, Free University of Berlin Iuliia Furman, FU Berlin Alejandra Garcia, FU Berlin Julian Genten, FU Berlin Nida Ghouse, UdK Berlin Silvia Gioberti, Berlin University of the Arts Aniella Goldinger, TU Berlin Jayme Gomes, FU Berlin Edgar Göll, IZT and FU Berlin Philipp Goll, HU Berlin Kristina Graaff, HU Berlin Till Grallert, HU Berlin Federica Gregoratto, FU Berlin Jannis Julien Grimm, FU Berlin Anke Gründel, HU Berlin Beatrice Gründler, FU Berlin David Grundy, Free University of Berlin Anisha Gupta Müller, Weissensee Academy of Art Marie Guthmüller, HU Berlin Heike Hanhörster, TU Berlin Marianne Hachtmann, TU Berlin Caroline Hambloch, HU Berlin Gada Hammoudah, FU Berlin Cilja Harders, FU Berlin Sabine Hark, TU Berlin Angela Harutyunyan, Berlin University of the Arts Constantin Hartenstein, University of the Arts Sophie Hartleib, Free University of Berlin Elke Hartmann, Free University of Berlin Maren Hartmann, University of the Arts Berlin Nadine Hartmann, Berlin University of the Arts Elahe Hashemi Yekani, HU Berlin Aseela Haque, FU Berlin Fe Hentschke, FU Berlin Irene Hilden, HU Berlin Jochen Hinkel, HU Berlin Till Hoeppner, FU Berlin Jeannette Hofman, WZB Berlin Lara Hofner, HU Berlin Lukas Benedikt Hoffmann, FU Berlin Sarah Holz, HU Berlin Daniel Horn, Free University of Berlin Daniel Hromada, Berlin University of the Arts Macartan Humphreys, HU Berlin/WZB Waldemar Isak, HU Berlin Tuba Işik, HU Berlin Daisuke Ishida, Berlin University of the Arts Christian Jacobs, Free University of Berlin Rahel Jaeggi, HU Berlin Janez Janša, UdK Berlin Leonie Jegen, University of Amsterdam/ FU Berlin Gesa Jessen, FU Berlin Matilda Jones, Free University of Berlin Johanna Kaiser ASH Berlin Patricia Acevedo-Kallweit, FU Berlin Juliane Karakayali, eh Berlin Onur Karaköse, HU Berlin Camille Kasavan, FU Berlin Omar Kasmani, FU Berlin Frank Kelleter, Free University of Berlin Natasha A. Kelly, Berlin University of the Arts Gertrud Koch, FU Berlin, retired professor Werner Kogge, Free University of Berlin Markus Kienscherf, FU Berlin Sophie-Jung Kim, FU Berlin Luis Kliche Navas, FU Berlin Kai Koddenbrock, Bard College Berlin Sebastian Kohl, Free University of Berlin Henrike Kohpeiß, FU Berlin Priska Komaromi, HU Berlin Aysuda Kölemen, Bard College Berlin Daniel Kolland, FU Berlin Anika Koenig, FU Berlin Laura Kotzur, FU Berlin Martin Konvicka, FU Berlin Anja Kretschmer, Free University of Berlin Simone Kreutz, HU Berlin Manuela Kruehler, FU Berlin Kai Kruger, Free University of Berlin Heike Kuhlmann, ASH Berlin Bouchra Laun, FU Berlin Yann LeGall, TU Berlin Eric Llaveria Caselles, TU Berlin Baz Lecoq, HU Berlin Kristina Lepold, HU Berlin Dörte Lerp, FU Berlin Eckart Leiser, Free University of Berlin Jakob Lesage, HU Berlin Julia Leser, HU Berlin Mischa Leinkauf, KHB Weissensee Academy of Art Berlin Susanne Lettow, FU Berlin Annette Lewerentz, FU Berlin Claudia Liebelt, FU Berlin Stephan Liebscher, Free University of Berlin Riley Linebaugh, HU Berlin Agata Lisiak, Bard College Berlin Roberto Lo Presti, HU Berlin Dorothea Löbbermann, HU Berlin Isabella Löhr, FU Berlin Nicolas Longinotti, Free University of Berlin Carolin Loysa, FU Berlin Elisabeth Luggauer, HU Berlin Martin Lüthe, FU Berlin Kirsten Maar, Free University of Berlin Viviana Macaluso, FU Berlin Paula Maether, ASH Berlin Somar Almir Mahmoud, HU Berlin Mina Mahouti, Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin Ana Makhashvili, Free University of Berlin Jaime Martínez Porro, FU Berlin Alexandre Martins, FU Berlin Alejandro Marquez, FU Berlin Rosa Matera, HU Berlin Ethel Matala de Mazza, HU Berlin Dominik Mattes, FU Berlin Jordane Maurs, FU Berlin Kalika Mehta, HU Berlin Malte Meyer, FU Berlin Nassim Mehran, Charité Hanna Meißner, TU Berlin Christian Meyer, FU Berlin Anja Michaelsen, HU Berlin Karin Michalski, UdK Berlin Ismay Milford, FU Berlin Laura Moisi, HU Berlin Monika Motylińska, IRS Erkner Deborah Mühlebach, FU Berlin Ernst Müller, HU Berlin Mirjam Müller, HU Berlin Ansgar Münichsdorfer, FU Berlin Maryse Napoleoni, FU Berlin Patty Nash, FU Berlin Tahani Nadim, HU Berlin Klara Nagel, HU Berlin Christfried Naumann, HU Berlin Rima Najdi, UdK Jan Naumann, FU Berlin Ursula Neugebauer, UdK Berlin Esther Neuhann, FU Berlin Johanna Neumann, HU Berlin Valentin Niebler, HU Berlin Sophie Luisa Nientimp-Yakut, FU Berlin Pedro Oliveira, UdK Berlin Aline Oloff, TU Berlin Teresa Orozco, FU Berlin Barbara Orth, FU Berlin Mathieu Ossendrijver, FU Berlin Pamela Owusu, FU Berlin Kübra Özermis, FU Berlin Özgür Özvatan, Berliner Institut für Migrationsforschung, HU Berlin Manuela Peitz, FU Berlin Ivana Perica, ZfL Berlin Margrit Pernau, FU Rodrigo Perujo, FU Berlin Kathrin Peters, UdK Berlin Lucio Piccoli, FU Berlin Maria Piedad Martin Benito, FU Berlin Michael Plöse, HU Berlin/HWR Berlin Sonja Pyykkö, FU Berlin Thomas Poeser, HTW Berlin Susan Pollock, FU Berlin Anne Potjans, HU Berlin Nivedita Prasad, ASH Berlin Joseph Prestel, FU Berlin Josephine Pryde, UdK Berlin Björn Quiring, FU Berlin Montserrat Rabadan, FU Berlin Francesca Raimondi, FU Berlin Lubna Rashid, TU Berlin Alia Rayyan, HU Berlin Jan Rehmann, FU Berlin und Union Theological Seminary New York Gisela Renner, EHB Berlin Nina Reusch, FU Berlin Mykola Ridnyi, UdK Berlin Alix Ricau, FU Berlin Karina Rocktäschel, FU Berlin Raquel Rojas, FU Berlin Gisela Romain, FU Berlin Regina Römhild, HU Berlin Jonathan Rößler, FU Berlin Georg Roth, FU Berlin Kendrick Rowan, FU Berlin Till Rückwart, FU Berlin Mariam Salehi, FU Berlin Ilyas Saliba, HU Berlin Christin Sander, FU Berlin Fabio Santos, FU Berlin Luis Sanz, HWR Berlin Barbara Schäuble, ASH Berlin Utan Schirmer, ASH Berlin Linda Schmidt, FU Berlin Antonie Schmiz, FU Berlin Morten Schneider , HU Berlin Nadja-Christina Schneider, HU Berlin Till Schöfer, FU Berlin Peter Schöttler, FU Berlin Liesbeth Schoonheim, HU Berlin Vanessa Hava Schulmann, FU Berlin Sabine Schülting, FU Berlin Nicolai Schulz, HU Berlin Johannes Schröder, TU Berlin Helga Schwalm, HU Berlin Charlotte Sebes, UdK Berlin Luke Shuttleworth, HU Berlin Jan Slaby, FU Berlin Silvia Steininger, Hertie School Johannes Stephan, FU Berlin Silke Stöber, HU Berlin Hauke Straehler-Pohl, FU Berlin Julia Strutz, HU Berlin Marcela Suarez, FU Berlin Petra Sußner, HU Berlin Kristóf Szombati, HU Berlin Tarik Tabbara, HWR Berlin Niloufar Tajeri, TU Berlin Nader Talebi, HU Berlin Sylvie Tappert, Charité Berlin Farifteh Tavakoli-Birazjani, FU Berlin Heba Tebakhi, FU Berlin Ayşe Tetik, FU Berlin Lili Theilen, KHB Weißensee Dillwyn Thier, FU Berlin Jan Thoben, UdK Berlin Hanan Toukan, Bard College Berlin Mayıs Tokel, FU Berlin Ertug Tombus, HU Berlin Isabel Toral, FU Berlin Izoke Tubi-Weit, WZB Jule Ulbricht, Free University of Berlin Peter Ullrich, Technical University of Berlin Evrim Uzun, HU Berlin Asli Vatansever, Bard College Berlin Jasper Verlinden, HU Berlin Jasa Veselinovic, FU Berlin Richard Palomar Vidal, FU Berlin Joseph Vogl, HU Berlin Alice von Bieberstein, HU Berlin Jonas von Ciriacy-Wantrup, FU Berlin Ferdinand von Mengden, FU Berlin Margareta von Oswald, HU Berlin Livia von Samson, HU Berlin Stefanie von Schnurbein, HU Berlin Jasper Verlinden, HU Berlin Dina Wahba, FU Berlin Agnes Wand, ASH Berlin Janis Walter, Free University of Berlin Tina Walther, FU Berlin Caleb Ward, Free University of Berlin Felix Werfel, Free University of Berlin Gabriele Werner, Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin Ana Werkstetter Caravaca, FU Berlin Linus Westheuser, HU Berlin Marina Weiss, FU Berlin Philipp Weitzel, HU Berlin Roman Widder, HU Berlin Adrian Wilding, HU Berlin Michael Wildt, HU Berlin Luise Willer, FU Berlin Eva Wilson, Free University of Berlin Ruth Wishart, FU Berlin Luc Wodzicki, FU Berlin Vera Lucia Wurst, FU Berlin Liza Wyludda, FU Berlin İlkay Yılmaz, FU Berlin Nicola Zambon, FU Berlin Martha Zapata Galindo, FU Berlin Florian Zemmin, FU Berlin Zinka Ziebell, FU Berlin Johanna zum Felde, FU Berlin
Other supporters
Nelly Y Pinkrah, TU Dresden Benjamin Braun, MPIfG Cologne Margarita Tsomou, University of Osnabrück Max Müller, University of Halle Isabelle Ihring, EH Freiburg Vanessa Thompson, Queen’s University Michelle Pfeifer, TU Dresden Nanna Heidenreich, University of Applied Arts Vienna Sabine Broeck, University of Bremen Daniel Loick, University of Amsterdam Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Bremen University of the Arts Denise Bergold-Caldwell, University of Innsbruck Ivo Eichhorn, University of Frankfurt am Main Eva von Redecker, philosopher and freelance author Michi Knecht, University of Bremen Lotte Warnsholdt, German Maritime Museum, Leibniz Institute for Maritime History Charlie Ebert, Free University of Berlin Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Goethe University Frankfurt Miriam Schickler, Kassel Art Academy Christopher Weickenmeier, Leuphana University Lüneburg Rainer Mühlhoff, University of Osnabrück Miriam Chorley-Schulz, University of Oregon, FU Alumna Miriam Siemon, FU Berlin Dörthe Engelcke, Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law Nina Franz, HBK Braunschweig Aram Ziai, University of Kassel Martin Nonhoff, University of Bremen Roy Karadag, University of Bremen Teresa Koloma Beck, Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg Ina Kerner, University of Koblenz Timothy Williams, University of the German Armed Forces Munich Ana Teixeira Pinto, HBK Braunschweig Jesse Darling, Bremen University of the Arts Katrin Köppert, HGB Leipzig Philip Widmann, University of Zurich Evelyn Annuß, University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna Christian Achrainer, Roskilde University Emile Ike, FU Berlin Jacob Blumenfeld, HU Berlin Andrea Behrends, University of Leipzig Ömer Alkin, Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences Dominik Herold, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main Henriette Gunkel, Ruhr University Bochum Juliane Rebentisch, University of Art and Design Offenbach/Main Donatella della Porta, Normal School of Advanced Studies, Florence Andrei Belibou, FU Berlin Katja Diefenbach, European University Viadrina Pinar Tuzcu, Queen’s University Davide Prati, former UdK lecturer Götz Bachmann, University of Siegen Anselm Franke, Zurich University of the Arts Johannes Bruder, Critical Media Lab Basel Britta Ohm, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz Sophia Hoffmann, University of Erfurt Alfred Freeborn, MPI for the History of Science, Berlin Jesse Olszynko-Gryn, MPIWG Hannah Vögele, FU Berlin/University of Brighton Rita Macedo, HBK Braunschweig Patricia Ward, University of Bielefeld Aki Krishnamurthy, EmpA ASH Berlin Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer, HGB Leipzig Miriam Schröder, Institute for Social Research Frankfurt aM Frieder Vogelmann, Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg Barbara Winckler, University of Münster Aino Korvensyrjä, FU Berlin/University of Helsinki Florence Vienne, FSU Jena Alisha Heinemann, University of Bremen Marc Siegel, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz Manuela Boatcă, University of Fribourg Christian Strippel, Weizenbaum Institute Mirjam Brusius, German Historical Institute London Leonhard Riep, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main Sebastian Elsaesser, Kiel University Caroline Adler, University of Hamburg Johannes Frasch, FSU Jena Alke Jenss, ABI Freiburg Daniel James, TU Dresden Fabricio Rodríguez, Arnold Bergstraesser Institute (ABI) Freiburg Ferdiansyah Thajib, FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg Janina Dill, University of Oxford Thomas Stodulka, University of Münster Andreas Bieler, University of Nottingham/UK Dror Dayan, Liverpool John Moores University, England Helge Jörgens, ISCTE-University Institute of Lisbon Christopher Olk, FU Berlin / HfGG Koblenz Simon Strick, University of Potsdam Johanna Schaffer, Kassel Art Academy Steffen Haag, University of Hamburg Olaf Zenker, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg Carmen Mörsch, Mainz Art Academy, Joannes Gutenberg University Mark U. Stein, University of Münster Maximilian Steinbeis, Constitutional Blog Bea Lundt, European University of Flensburg (em.) Diedrich Diederichsen, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna Jovan Maud, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Dennis Büscher-Ulbrich, Christian-Albrechts University of Kiel Klaus Schlichte, University of Bremen Laurence Cox, National University of Ireland Maynooth Stefanie Ortmann, University of Sussex Max Schneider, HGB Leipzig Pablo Valdivia, European University Frankfurt/Oder Oliver Nachtwey, University of Basel Nina Reiners, University of Oslo Joel Glasman, University of Bayreuth Samuli Schielke, Leibniz Centre for Modern Orient and Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies Viviane Gladow, University of Paderborn Anja Löwe, University of Cologne Franz Knappik, University of Bergen Ralf Rapior, University of Bielefeld Mithu Sanyal, writer and journalist Priyam Goswami Choudhury, University of Potsdam Matthew Stephen, Helmut Schmidt University Hamburg Nora Ragab, IES Abroad Berlin A. Dirk Moses, City College of New York Estefania Bournot Austrian Academy of Sciences Grit Wesser, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz Henning Melber, University of Pretoria Rosa Burc, Center for Social Movement Studies (SNS, Florence) Maria-Inti Metzendorf, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf Julia Kaiser, University of Leipzig Niklas Platzer, University of Chicago Idal Damar, Georg-August University of Göttingen Tareq Sydiq, Philips University Marburg Idal Damar, Georg-August University of Göttingen Sheryn El-Alfy, University of Göttingen Heike Breitenbach, Goethe University Frankfurt Islam Dayeh, Ghent University Jumana Jaber, Göttingen University Nur Yasemin Ural, University of Leipzig Michael Thiel, human rights activist, member of Amnesty International Hamburg Marlon Lieber, Goethe University Frankfurt Melanie Richter-Montpetit, University of Sussex Inga Aenne Feldmann, FU Berlin Carna Brkovic, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz Isabel Feichtner, University of Würzburg Isabell Lorey, Academy of Media Arts Cologne Vanessa Wintermantel, HU Berlin/Constitutional Blog Torsten Menge, Northwestern University in Qatar Katarzyna Puzon, HU Berlin Wolfram Lacher, German Institute for International and Security Affairs, Berlin Eraldo Souza dos Santos, Panthéon-Sorbonne University Jan Wilkens, University of Hamburg Lukas Schmid, Goethe University Frankfurt Ines Schaber, hgb Leipzig Duygu Örs-Ildiz, Leuphana University Lüneburg Christian Kreuder-Sonnen, Friedrich Schiller University Jena Vanessa Carr, LMU Munich Nils Riecken, Ruhr University Bochum Judith Pieper, Free University of Berlin Anthony Obst, FU Berlin Sassan Gholiagha, European University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder) Dennis Klinke, Free University of Berlin Eva Hausteiner, FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg Susanne Schultz, Goethe University Frankfurt Katharina Schramm, University of Bayreuth Sami Khatib, OIB Susanne Leeb, Leuphana University Lüneburg Zozan Baran, FU Berlin Jaime Martínez Porro, FU Berlin Dana Abdel Fatah, HU Berlin Naomi Boyce, Free University of Berlin Friedemann Vogel, University of Siegen Deniz Gedik, HU Berlin Azucena Moran, University of Potsdam Janette Helm, HU Berlin Verena Klemm, Saxon Academy of Sciences Leipzig Cengiz Barskanmaz, Fulda University of Applied Sciences Daniel Marwecki, University of Hong Kong Elizabeth Hicks, University of Münster Claudius Naumann, FU Berlin Mikko Toivanen, FU Berlin Kübra Gümüşay, author Benjamin Savill, Free University of Berlin Christine Binzel, FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg Martin Klein, University of Würzburg Anne Storch, University of Cologne Vildan Seçkiner, Dr.phil., Munich Antje Glück, Bournemouth University (UK) Johannes Jude, University of Edinburgh Lucas Scheel, University of Adelaide Moritz Klenk, Mannheim University of Applied Sciences Ehsan Mohagheghi Fard, hfm Weimar Ana Ivasiuc, European Association of Social Anthropologists Madigbé Sylla, University of Osnabrück Sonja Brentjes MPIWG Sué González Hauck, Helmut Schmidt University Hamburg Martins Kohout, UMPRUM Prague Sebastian Eduardo, Leuphana University of Lüneburg Lisa Franke, Ghent University Giorgos Venizelos, Democracy Institute, Central European University Birte de Gruisbourne, University of Paderborn Sarah Naira Herfurth, University of Applied Sciences Erfurt Aleya Marzuki, University of Tübingen Alia Mossallam, EUME/Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin Tarik Tabbara, HWR Berlin Anne Altvater, Frankfurt Daniela Russ, Universität Leipzig Martin Höpner, Max-Planck-Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung Stephanie Reiß, CiS Forschungsinstitut, Aninstitut der TU Ilmenau Jan Thiele, Consejero Superior de Investigaciones Científicas Endre Borbáth, Uni Heidelberg / WZB Irene Weipert-Fenner, Leibniz-Institut für Friedens- und Konfliktforschung Christian Basteck, WZB Berlin Robert Schmidt, KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt Doris Bühler-Niederberger, Bergische Universität Wuppertal Bernd Bösel, Universität Potsdam Karim Zafer, Universität zu Köln Isabel Bredenbröker, HU Berlin Dorothee Bohle, Universität Wien Lara Krause-Alzaidi, Universität Leipzig Mark Porter, Universität Erfurt Franca Kappes, Geneva Graduate Institute Alfred Freeborn, MPIWG André Bank, GIGA German Institute for Global and Area Studies, Hamburg Hannelies Koloska, Hebrew University Pia Berghoff, FU Berlin Annika Haas, Lehrbeauftragte UdK Berlin Severin Penger, FU Berlin Doris Bühler-Niederberger, Bergische Universität Wuppertal Wouter F.M. Henkelman, EPHE (Paris) Holger Pötzsch, UiT The Arctic University of Norway Tim Seitz, Goethe Universität Frankfurt Björn Bentlage, LMU München Amir Theilhaber, Universität Bielefeld Alexander Dunst, TU Dortmund Irina Herb, Friedrich Schiller Universität Jena Liam Cagney, BIMM Berlin Stephan Milich, Universität zu Köln Mark Curran Visiting Professor FU Berlin (2011-2021) Elif Durmuş, Universiteit Antwerpen John Lütten, Universität Hamburg Roswitha Skare, UiT The Arctic University of Norway Jannis Steinke, TU Braunschweig Pablo Santacana López, Fachhochschule Erfurt Nina Lawrenz, ASH Berlin Bettina Schlüter, Universität Bonn Serena Talento, University of Bayreuth Thomas Bierschenk, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz Himmat Zoubi, EUME/ Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin Guneet Kaur, LSI-BGSS, Humboldt University Maximilian Lasa, University of Copenhagen Christian Hawkey, Pratt Institute Melisa Çiçek, Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen Katrin M. Kämpf, Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln Mareike Biesel, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen Irene Brunotti, Universität Leipzig Valentin Jeutner, Lund University Martin Zillinger, Universität zu Köln Florian Geisler, CAU Kiel Boris Liebrenz, Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig Seb Zürcher, HU Berlin Lana Sirri, Forum Transregionale Studien EUME Yasemin Karakasoglu, Universität Bremen Leire Urricelqui, Uni Graz Lucia Hortal Sanchez, FU Berlin Lars Eckstein, Universität Potsdam Hendrik Süß, Universität Jena Eman Megahed, Ärztin Katia Schwerzmann, Ruhr-Universität Bochum Jana Schäfer, BTU Cottbus Bettina Gräf, LMU München Otmar Venjakob, Universität Heidelberg Cameron Brinitzer, MPIWG Dmitri van den Bersselaar, Universität Leipzig Hauke Dorsch. Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz Björn Bentlage, LMU München, Institut für den Nahen und Mittleren Osten Bo Li, FU Berlin Monica DiLeo, Hertie School Nisaar Ulama Andy Le, Sheffield Hallam University Mira Wallis, HU Berlin Lisa Stelzer, TU Berlin Guneet Kaur, LSI-BGSS, HU Berlin Yulia Khalikova, Universität Hamburg Mirko Reul, Universität Lausanne Malte Kayßer, CAU Kiel Kardelen Günaydin, Universität Osnabrück Philipp Köncke, Uni Erfurt Jens Theilen, Helmut-Schmidt-Universität Hamburg Friederike Nastold, Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg Victoria Sakti, MPI for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity Thea Santangelo, Fachhoschule Potsdam Flora Ghazaryan-Abdin, CEU Wien Ursula Probst, FU Berlin Liina Mustonen, Universität Duisburg-Essen Kfeel Arshad, CAU Kiel Walid Maalej, Universität Hamburg Sylvia Sadzinski, Lehrbeauftragte UdK Berlin Toby Friend, FU Berlin Jan Sändig, Universität Bayreuth Jakob Wunderwald, Universität Potsdam Sarah Etz, HU Berlin Jan van Ginkel, FU Berlin Safia Samimi, Goethe Uni Frankfurt Liverpool John Moores University UCU branch Clara Schmidt, FU Berlin Miriam Friz Trzeciak, BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg Chiara Liso, FU Berlin Imko Meyenburg, ARU Cambridge Thomas Poeser, Lehrbeauftragter HTW Berlin Waseem Ahmed, UCL Agnes Kloocke, SoMi Freie Universität Berlin Boris Michel, MLU Halle Pia Schramm, Uni Tübingen Lara Fricke, University of Exeter (UK) Tobias Banaschewski, Zentralinstitut für Seelische Gesundheit, Universität Heidelberg Ahmed Sayed Julia Hotopp, FU Berlin M. Kamal Nasr, Universitätsmedizin Greifswald Jamie Gorman , Victoria University Melbourne Hannah Müssemann, FU Berlin Lejla Djulancic, FU Berlin Juliane Schicker, Carleton College Lucio Baccaro, MPIfG Liina Mustonen, Universität Duisburg-Essen Angela Anderson, Kunsthochschule Kassel Ned Richardson-Little, ZZF Potsdam Ilse Lenz, Ruhr-Universität Bochum chris zisis, UHH Hatice Gülru Turhan, Freie Universität Lucio Baccaro, MPIfG Oguzkagan Er, TU Berlin Christoph Anderer, FU Berlin Pedro Alexander Bravo Lavin, weißensee kunsthochschule Luisa Stuhr, BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg Maja Wolter, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg Övül Ö. Durmusoglu, HBK Braunschweig Martin Middelanis, FU Berlin Tori Sinanan, FU Berlin Yoonha Kim, HU Berlin Thomas Wendler, Universität Augsburg Sophie Rühlich, FU Berlin Mariam Goshadze, Universität Leipzig Tanja Nusser, University of Cincinnati Katrin Bahr, Centre College Beth Muellner, College of Wooster Carl Gelderloos, Binghamton University Valeria Graziano, Justus-Liebig University, Giessen Nathalie Kallas, FU Berlin Alia Mossallam, EUME/Forum Transregionale Studien Stephen Cummins, MPI für Bildungsforschung/FU Berlin Claudia Pinzón, FU Berlin Anna Holian, Arizona State University Francesca Ceola, TU Berlin Lizzie Richardson, Goethe University, Frankfurt Marina Carmona Ruiz, FU Berlin Rick McCormick, Professor Emeritus, University of Minnesota Kilian Spandler, Universität Kiel Dirk Wiemann, Universität Potsdam Rónán Riordan, Maastricht University Pietro Matteoni, FU Berlin Christiane Carlsson, Webster University St. Louis USA Léa Perraudin, HU Berlin A. Silvera, FU Berlin Rabea Berfelde, HU Berlin Hanna Janatka, Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies Dana Eichhorst, FU Berlin Kim Lucht, FSU Jena Stefani Engelstein, Duke University Sabine Damir-Geilsdorf, Universität zu Köln Juliana Streva, FU Berlin Susan Bernofsky, Columbia University; FU Berlin SS23 Kate Roy, Franklin University Switzerland Ergün Özgür, FU Berlin Veronica Ferreri, University of Waterloo Hannah Birkenkötter, ITAM Mexiko-Stadt/HU Berlin Sebastian Heiduschke, Oregon State University, USA Dominik Finkelde, Hochschule für Philosophie München Niloufar Vadiati, HafenCity University Hamburg Lorena López Jáuregui, FU Berlin Mina Jawad, Autorin Edward Larkey, University of Maryland, Baltimore County Laura Jung, Universität Graz Claudia Wittig, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg Ari Linden, University of Kansas Anna Katharina Mangold, Europa-Universität Flensburg Sabine Mohamed, Johns Hopkins University Imogen Goodman, FU Berlin Cynthia Porter, The Ohio State University Mareike Lisker, HTW Berlin Martin Hamre, FU Berlin Ibrahim Mahfouz Abdou, FU Berlin Paulina Jo Pesch, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg Clara-Auguste Süß, GIGA German Institute for Global and Area Studies, Hamburg Lovisa Claesson, Maastricht University Katrin Sieg, Georgetown University Anastasia Kolas, HfK Bremen Christine Okoth, King’s College London Fabio Gasparini, Seminar für Semitistik und Arabistik Paula Gutierrez de Teran Prado, Rutgers University Alumni Leonie Rau, MPIWG Berlin Maurice Stierl, Universität Osnabrück Belén Díaz, FU Berlin Evan Torner, University of Cincinnati Johannes Siegmund, Uni Wien Daniel Moreno, FU Berlin Julia Lange, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Laura Horn, Roskilde Universität Yannick Ecker, MLU Halle-Wittenberg Doreen Muhl, Universität Siegen Christian Weber, FSU Jena Linda Beck, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen Pedro Fernández Michels, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya Ricarda Theobald, Humboldt Universität Berlin Sven Lütticken, VU Amsterdam & Universiteit Leiden Bernhard Scholze, Hochschule München Shanti Suki Osman, Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg André Grahle, Universität zu Köln Denis Schulz, CODE University of Applied Sciences Berlin Ida Westphal, HU Berlin Adel Mutahar Mutahar, TU Berlin Stefan Ouma, University of Bayreuth Emilia Klebanowski, Radboud University Nijmegen Nina Paarmann, Europa-Universität Flensburg Emilio Guzmán Schwarz, University of Amsterdam Matthieu Stepec, UdK, Barenboim-Said Akademie Raphaël Grisey, NTNU Trondheim Mary Hennessy, University of Wisconsin-Madison Maike Neufend, FU Berlin Sara Lennox, University of Massachusetts Amherst Halil Ege, Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg Terri Ginsberg, City University of New York Maike Neufend, FU Berlin Stas Gutenberg, Touro University Berlin Jens Hanssen, OIB & University of Toronto Oliver Szerkus, FU Berlin Sarah Mühlbacher, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt Max Oliver Schmidt, Uni Potsdam Leyla v. Mende, Universität Hamburg Jens Heibach, German Institute for Global and Area Studies Lilian Haberer, Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln Kyan Pur-Djandaghi, Universität Hamburg Anna Guaita, CAU Kiel Rukeia El-Athman, Robert Koch-Institut Julia Ludewig, Allegheny College Marie Köhler, Universität Köln Ewa Karwowski, King’s College London Ana Cárdenas Tomažič, Institute for Social Research, Frankfurt aM Iken Brockstedt Riegger, FU Berlin Sophie Karbjinski, FU Berlin Juri Kilian, University of Kassel Hannah Knoop, KIT Karlsruhe Sepideh Gherekhloo, TU Ilmenau Heike Becker, University of the Western Cape Candice Breitz, HBK Braunschweig Alba Delgado-Aguilar, University of Leipzig Axel Fair-Schulz, State University of New York at Potsdam/NY Nataša Mišković, Basel Gabriela Manda Seith, guest lecturer UdK Vera Huwe, University of Duisburg-Essen Mar Mañes-Bordes, Saarland University Maria Fosheim-Lund, University of Oslo Faris Mansouri, University of Münster Janina Kehr, University of Vienna André Weissenfels, FU Berlin Jörg Naeve, Reutlingen University Mojisola Adebayo, University of Potsdam / Queen Mary, University of London Kerstin Schrödinger, University of the Arts Helsinki Leila Ullrich, University of Oxford Nicolas Lamp, Queen’s University Samuel Coghe, Ghent University María Antonia Pérez, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main Markus Arnold, University of Art and Design Linz Jakob Hollweck, FSU Jena Florian Muhl, University of Hamburg Sumit Mandal, University of Nottingham Malaysia Ryu Okazaki, Dokkyo University Joanna Ostrowska, University of Warsaw Sebastian Scheerer, University of Hamburg Kathrin Thiele, Utrecht University Claudius Zibrowius, Ruhr University Bochum Tabea Giese, University of Rostock Susanne Koch, University of Southern Denmark Friedemann Gürtler, University of Potsdam Rosa van Dorp, FU Berlin René Kreichauf, FU Berlin/VUB Brussels Sandra Dema Moreno, University of Oviedo Carola Fritsche, MIT Emily Frank, HU Berlin Michael Zander, Magdeburg-Stendal University of Applied Sciences Licia Soldavini, TU Braunschweig Azadeh Ganjeh, Hildesheim University Christine Andrä, University of Groningen Max Oliver Schmidt, University of Potsdam Aydin Demircioglu, University of Duisburg-Essen Maike Messerschmidt, University of the Federal Armed Forces Munich Max Rapp, FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg Sonya El Amouri, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf Anne Cristina de la Vega-Leinert, University of Greifswald Ulrich Thielmann, University of St. Gallen Paulina Block, University of Potsdam Richard Lang, University of Hamburg Peter Förster, University of Cologne Mara Recklies, Burg Giebichtenstein Art Academy Halle Tom Selje, TU Berlin Julian Daum, journalist, FU Alumni Nastaran Tajeri-Foumani, ASH Berlin Mark Barden, Detmold University of Music Krzysztof Gorny, FU Berlin Christoph Bode, LMU Munich Sabine Rutar, IOS Regensburg Sina Emde, University of Leipzig Lisa Mohrat, University of the Federal Armed Forces Munich Ralf Tönjes, University of Potsdam Gwendolyn Gilliéron, University of Strasbourg Andreas Guidi, INALCO Paris Sebastian Schneider FernUni Hagen Annette Lewerentz, FU Berlin Manolis Mikrakis, National Technical University of Athens Giacomo Croci, Brandenburg Medical School Jörg Arnold, University of Münster Jochen Hinkel, Humboldt University, Berlin Florian Hannig, JLU Giessen Hanan Badr, University of Salzburg Felix Anderl, Philipps University Marburg Teresa Kulawik, Södertörn University, Sweden Cristina Samper, Potsdam University René Wildangel, International Hellenic University Thessaloniki Katharina Drasdo, IU International University Salwa Aleryani, UdK Berlin Daniel Hedinger, University of Leipzig Fabian Arntz, University of Potsdam Anja Pichl, University of Potsdam Birgit Meyer, University of Utrecht Christoph Baumgartner, Utrecht University Mujaheed Shaikh, Hertie School Andreas Best, University of Naples Federico II Paula Maether, ASH Berlin Reinhart Kößler, Arnold-Bergstraesser-Institut Freiburg/University of the Free State, South Africa Nevien Kerk, LMU Munich Charlotte Rohde, Bauhaus University Weimar Fatos Atali-Timmer, Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg Bruno Jacoby, HfG Offenbach M Lukasiewicz, University of Leipzig Fatima El-Tayeb, Yale University Fred Abrahams, Bard College Berlin Meryem Yildiz, ASH Berlin Magdalena Graczyk-Zajac, Technical University of Darmstadt Andreas W. Schäfer, University College London Markus Dreßler, University of Leipzig Salim Nasereddeen, University of Potsdam Malte Kobel, Guildhall School of Music and Drama London Elena Tripaldi, Free University of Berlin Adrian Schneider, HU Berlin Sahrah Al-Nasrawe-Sözeri, HWR Berlin Ciaran Cross, FU Berlin Christine Preiser, University Hospital Tübingen Philip Liste, Fulda University of Applied Sciences Sofia Bempeza University of Applied Arts Vienna Nora Shalaby, HU Berlin Jeanne Riou, University College Dublin Nassim Mehran, Charité Xabiero Cayarga, TU Dortmund Lilli Weiss, University of Basel Claire McQuillan, TU Berlin Mujaheed Shaikh, Hertie School Gregor Schiemann, University of Wuppertal Eleonore Neufeld, University of Massachusetts Amherst Ulrike Bergermann, HBK Braunschweig Benjamin Ruß, INRA Luxembourg Alex Rehding, Harvard University Franck Hofmann, Saarland University Tobias Christ, JGU Mainz Alexander Konrad, BHT Berlin Noor-Aiman Khan, Colgate University Georg Jostkleigrewe, University of Halle Yannick Frommherz, TU Dresden Lukas Nehlsen, University of Witten/Herdecke, University of Cologne Hamed al Drubi, FU Berlin Ximena Alba, FU Berlin Lukas Nehlsen, University of Cologne, University of Witten/Herdecke Lianna Mark, LMU Munich Hannes Bajohr, University of Basel Prem Borle, Charité Berlin Raphael Daibert, Leuphana University of Lüneburg Leon Maresch, TU Berlin Georg Jostkleigrewe, University of Halle Wikke Jansen, University of Heidelberg Isabelle Felenda, HTW Berlin Henning Best, RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau Sina Motzek-Öz, Ostfalia University of Applied Sciences Reinhard Klenke, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg Thomas Kilpper, University of Bergen Antke Engel, iQt Edin Sarcevic, University of Leipzig Camilo Almendrales, TU Berlin Franziska Meyer, University of Nottingham Anne Menzel, IFSH/University of Hamburg Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman, Brown University Kathrin Bauer, Free University of Berlin Delio Mugnolo, Distance University in Hagen Karen Adler, University of Nottingham Philippe Roepstorff-Robiano, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf Viktoria Luisa Metschl, University of Applied Arts Vienna Sasha Lange, FU Berlin/University of Manchester Anna Mannert, Charité Clément Lévy, FU Berlin Salim Cevik, SWP Berlin Eren Yildirim Yetkin, Hochschule Koblenz Eric Eggert, Universität zu Köln Tanja Skambraks, Universität Graz Andrea Neugebauer, Uni Siegen Tobias Nikolaus Klass, Bergische Universität Wuppertal Farid Suleiman, Universität Greifswald Barbara Müller, Radboud University Nijmegen Lena Dreier, Universität Münster Miriam Benteler, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar Wolfgang Seifert, Universität Heidelberg Rosalie Arendt, University of Twente Richard Sorg, (Prof. em.), HAW Hamburg Marjan Smeulders, Radboud University Jan F. Kurth, MH Freiburg Johannes Feest, Universität Bremen Juliette Alenda, Radboud University Christian G. De Vito, Universität Wien Ahmed Samy Lotf , Scuola Normale SuperioreCatherine Goetze, University of Tasmania, FU/OSI alumna Lars Reuke, Universität zu Köln Frauke Banse, Uni Kassel Anabelle Contreras Castro, Universidad Naciona, Costa Rica (Alumni FU) Emma Wendt, Universität Münster Friedemann Brock, Studienkolleg MLU Halle Birgit M. Kaiser, Utrecht University Stefan Siebers, HHU Düsseldorf Svenja Goltermann, Universität Zürich Jörg Strübing, Universität Tübingen Clemens Knobloch, Uni Siegen Peter Ott, Merz Akademie Rachid Ouaissa, Phillips-Universität Marburg André Schneider, Fraunhofer IIS Dresden Philipp Wagner, ABI Freiburg Sarah Wessel, BUA Elia Sepúlveda Hernández, UST Chile Sandra Moog, University of Essex UK Ingo Schmidt, Athabasca University Philipp Schwendke, HU Berlin Mariel Reiss, Philipps-Universität Marburg Nadjma Yassari, Max Planck Institut, Hamburg Kathrin Bethke, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen Jenny Stupka, Freie Universität Berlin Dirk Collet, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg Manu Kalia, FU Berlin Hajo Funke, Prof, FU Berlin Julian Tiedtke, Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies Susanne Buckley-Zistel, Philipps-Universität Marburg Michael Mann, HU Berlin Eva Svatoňová, University of Jan Evangelista Purkyně Alessia Pilloni, FU Berlin Trevor Silverstein, Catalyst – Institute for Creative Arts and Technology Berlin Joana Lilli Hofstetter, Scuola Normale Superiore Florenz, Italien Mete Sefa Uysal, University of Exeter Asuman Kirlangic Lennart Reusch, FU Berlin Lonut-Valentin Cucu, FU Berlin Caroline Pitzen, Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach/Main Thomas Guthmann, EH Berlin Burcu Binbuga, Universität Bremen Manuel Schwab, AUC Egypt Ella Lebeau, FU Berlin Joan Font, CSIC Tim Winzler, University of Glasgow Henrike Arnold, Philipps-Universität Marburg Lazaros Karavasilis, University of Bremen Philipp Zehmisch, Universität Heidelberg Patricia Binder, MLU Halle Laurel Braddock, HU Berlin Adam Donald Ferreira – Catalyst Berlin Daniel Koßmann, HU Berlin Nikolai Puhlmann, HU Berlin Mikael Damstuen Brkic, UiO (University of Oslo) Kathrin Kazmaier, Universität Hildesheim Lennart Michaelis, FSU Jena Victor M. Lafuente, Université des Antilles Bernd Gausemeier, Medizinische Hochschule Hannover Mónika Contreras Saiz, FU Berlin Albert Manke, Universität Göttingen Arina Rahma, TU Berlin Júlia Betegh, Hertie School Natacha Quintero González, BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg Willi Pröbrock, TU Berlin Iva Marčetić, University of Kassel Barbora Doležalová, Charles University Prague, Czech Republic Ayça Çubukçu, Associate Professor, LSE Daniel Feldt, Nuremberg Technical University GSO Angela Perez, FAU Erlangen Marco Deseriis, Higher Normal School Franjo Mac Allister, WZB & Kings College London Philipp Kleer, Justus Liebig University Giessen Cristina Moreno Almeida, Queen Mary University of London Magdalen Michlová, Charles University in Prague anna řičář libánská, FF UK, Prague Detlev Quintern, Turkish German University, Istanbul Henning Grosse Ruse-Khan, University of Cambridge Tamara Fleming, UCLA Anna Karakatsouli, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens Rana Brentjes, MPIWG (Max Planck Society) André Fischer, Washington University in St. Louis Michael Rothberg, UCLA Shéhérazade Elyazidi, Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law Birtan Tonbul, FSU Jena Elia Sepúlveda Hernández, UST Chile. Zeynep Türel, University of Applied Arts, Vienna Max Schnepf, Free University of Berlin Simon Beurel, Free University of Berlin Frank Havemann, Humboldt University of Berlin Chiara Thumiger, Kiel University Dorothea Löbbermann, HU Berlin Kutayba al Kanatri, University of Freiburg/Boğaziçi University Kelly Bescherer, Leuphana University Lüneburg Gerado de la Fuente Lora, National Autonomous University of Mexico Georg Jostkleigrewe, University of Halle Rainer Alisch, Free University of Berlin Michael Kämper-van den Boogaart, retired HU George Anastassiou, University of Memphis Marija Pavlovic, PhD researcher at the FU Berlin Yewon Seo, Art Academy Berlin Weissensee Anna Zrenner, FU Berlin Vania Berrios, European University Viadrina Bernhard Gill, LMU Munich Thuc Linh Nguyen Vu, Harvard University/University of Vienna Helîn Öztürk, TU Darmstadt Jennifer Rohl, Trinity College, Dublin Susanne Huber, University of Bremen Thomas Dörfler, University of Jena/University of Bayreuth Fatima El Sayed, Humboldt University of Berlin Felix Xylander Swannell, TU Berlin Robert Heinze, DHI Paris Lucilla Lepratti, University of Leipzig Magda Patyniak, University of Potsdam Sara Samy, TU Berlin Yara Foudah, JLU Giessen Nese Ozgen, University of Osnabrück Stephanie Rudwick, Academy of Sciences, Prague Victoria AE Kratel, Kristiania University College Oslo Mira Hazzaa, University of Osnabrück Mihriban Demir, LMU Ute Koop, ASH Berlin Dirk Martin, Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences Lukas Daub , IfZ Susann Ludwig, University of Leipzig Stefan Salomon, University of Amsterdam Paul Zuendorf, RWTH Aachen Katharina Kuhn, London School of Economics/Goethe University Frankfurt Daniel Bendix, Friedensau Theological College Susann Ludig, University of Leipzig Elisa Cuter, Film University Konrad Wolf Babelsberg Pablo Suárez Cortés, Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology Sophie Hinger, University of Osnabrück Francesca Marschall Jones, University of Göttingen Christian Jooß, Georg-August University of Göttingen Rosa Castillo, University of Bremen Johanna Ullmann, University of Osnabrück, Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies Katja Sirotkin, HTW Berlin Maja Sisnowski, University of Amsterdam Helena Franze, University of Leipzig Daniel Fairfax, Goethe University Frankfurt Ulrich Rössler, FU Berlin Sophia Brown, Free University of Berlin Wolfgang Jonas, HBK Braunschweig Vera Egbers, BTU Cottbus Alexander Harder, HU Berlin Anthony Löwstedt, Webster University Vienna Susanne Klimroth, HU Berlin Benjamin Schuetze, Arnold Bergstraesser Institute (ABI) Freiburg Hyo Yoon Kang, University of Warwick Matilde Baroncini, Free University of Berlin Flora van Uffelen, FU Berlin Eiichi Kido, Osaka University Svenja Schurade, Georg August University of Göttingen Ana Troncoso, Chemnitz University of Technology Heiko Kempa, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg Sebastian Althoff, University of Paderborn Serhat Karakayali, Leuphana University Lüneburg Fynn Steiner, HU Berlin Ian Almond, Georgetown University Qatar Anne Gräfe, Leuphana University of Lüneburg Adnan A. Husain, Queen’s University Paula Achenbach, Philipps University Marburg Christin Bernhold, University of Hamburg Johanna Pink, University of Freiburg Sophia Schroeder, University College London Tobias Schramm, FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg Rainer Brunner, CNRS / LEM, Paris Susanne Lummerding, University of Vienna Mahir Tokatli, RWTH Aachen Ricardo Mata, University of Göttingen Tom Holert, HaFI, Berlin Sandro Mezzadra, University of Bologna Maria-Magdalena Pruß, Leibniz Centre for Modern Orient Berlin Irene Schneider, University of Göttingen Lukas Schmolzi, FU Berlin Sarah Schilliger, University of Bern Nicole Wolf, Goldsmiths, University of London Nils Jansen, University of Münster Annika Strauss, University of Münster Josef Ricar, Charles University Prague Todd Sekuler, ISEK, UZH Anja Schwarz, University of Potsdam Markus Dressler, University of Leipzig Fabius Mayland, FU Berlin Ulla Siebert, Heinrich Böll Foundation Marta Lietti, FU Berlin Laura Amna Stauth, University of Göttingen Georg Cyrus, Leiden University Ulrike Stehli-Werbeck, University of Münster Philipp Tollkühn, FU Berlin Natascha Zander, Weissensee Academy of Art Berlin Oraib Toukan, EUME Berlin Rebecca Murray, University of Sheffield, UK Peter Birke, University of Göttingen Nil Mutluer, Leipzig University Lidia Bellido Barea, Georg-August University Göttingen Bernd Heber, Christian-Albrechts University of Kiel Madelaine Moore, Bielefeld University Rajkamal Kahlon, HFBK Hamburg Rim Naguib, FU Berlin Flávio Aguiar, University of São Paulo Sebastian Berg, Ruhr University Bochum Christian Rademacher, University of Passau Martin Moraw, American University in Cairo Eva Gerharz, Fulda University of Applied Sciences Maria Ziegelböck, Vienna University of Applied Arts Karen Genschow, Goethe University Frankfurt Nadin Heé, University of Leipzig Arash Ghoddousi, Wageningen University/HU Berlin Daniele Artico, HU University Annett Abdel-Rahman, University of Osnabrück Nora Gottlieb, University of Bielefeld Josef Grassl, KHB Berlin Lindsey Drury, Free University of Berlin Yufeng Guan, FU Berlin Lukas Meisner, HWR Berlin/ FSU Jena Fatma Sagir, University of Freiburg Najat Abdulhaq, Birzeit University Konstantin Korn, University of Giessen Anna Luise Schubert, Max Planck Society Cecilia Valenti, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz Vanessa Kopplin, University of Zurich Imad Mustafa, freelance scientist Saumya Premchander, Georg August University of Göttingen Seda Gurses, TU Delft Olaf Köndgen, University of Amsterdam Fabian Schaltenberg, OVGU Magdeburg Benjamin Bäumer, University of Siegen María Teresa Laorden, University of Rostock Hilal Alkan, Leibniz Centre for Modern Orient/ASH Hellen Aziz, TU Berlin Katharina Seibert, University of Tübingen Erica Benner, Hertie School Yasemin Karakasoglu, University of Bremen Tomás Usón, HU Berlin Asha Hedayati, ASH Berlin Pauline Westerbarkey, FU Berlin Shoshana Schwebel, University of British Columbia Lisa Schmidt-Herzog, IMGWF Lübeck María Teresa Laorden, University of Rostock Heidemarie Winkel, University of Bielefeld Anja Weber, Merz Academy Stuttgart Irene Fellmann, FMIK Estelle Ferrarese, University of Amiens Jo Bröse, University of Cologne Holger Lund, DHBW Ravensburg Jamila Mascat, Utrecht University Gerhard Wolf, University of Sussex Anna Steigemann, University of Regensburg/TU Berlin Alex Demirovic, Goethe University Delfina Serrano, CSIC, Soain Derya Buğur, Philipps University Marburg Angela Last, University of Leicester Anas Antifa, University of Osnabrück Michael Hintz, Lecturer HWG Ludwigshafen + EAdA Frankfurt aM Alice Creischer Stephan Janitzky, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna You He, KHM Cologne Malte Albrecht, University of Marburg Mario Novelli , University of Sussex, UK Wolf-Christian Saul, ex FU Berlin Chandrashekar Devchand, University of Potsdam Fatma Sagir, University of Freiburg Christoph Kalter, University of Agder Errol Babacan, University of Münster Tijana Ristic Kern, HU Berlin Gülcan Cetin, Charité University Medicine Berlin Jan Völker, Fellow, Bauhaus University Weimar Philipp Höhn, University of Halle-Wittenberg Julian Rentzsch, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz Philipp Höhn, University of Halle-Wittenberg Jason Groves, University of Washington, Seattle Reinhold Bernhardt, University of Basel Veljko Marković, TU Berlin Frey Kalus, FU Berlin / University of Cambridge Richard Gessel, Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg Gabriele vom Bruck, School of Oriental & African Studies Markus Wissen, HWR Berlin Elaine Bonavia, Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin Stefan Bast, Mainz University of Art Guenter Zurhorst, HS Mittweida Josefine Hetterich, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz Albrecht Fuess, Philipps University Marburg Sofia Varino, University of Potsdam Hauke Brunkhorst, European University of Flensburg Tobias Wille, Goethe University Frankfurt Stefan Landvogt, ZTG employee Leyla Sophie Gleissner, ENS France Sarah Alfahmawi, TU Berlin Jessica Eichler, Max Planck Institute/FU Berlin Markus Rohde, University of Siegen Martina Schäfer, TU Berlin Anne Rothermel, University of Bern Hoda Salah, University of Kiel Jamie Burton, HU Berlin Sara Bellezza, FU Berlin Michel Steuwer, TU Berlin Laura Einhorn, Cologne University of Applied Sciences Alison EF Benbow, HU Berlin Angela Koch, University of Art and Design Linz Mark Frömberg, HTW Berlin Alfredo Romero, HU Berlin Ralf Hoffrogge, Ruhr University Bochum / ZZF Potsdam Laura Stielike, University of Osnabrück Mark Frömberg, HTW Berlin Nicole Waller, University of Potsdam Agnes Wall, ASH Ahmad Shehata, University of Leipzig Kien Nghi Ha, University of Tübingen Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, SOAS University of London Peter Jehle, University of Potsdam Henrike Kraul, FU Berlin Thomas Amundrud, Nara University of Education Max Welch Guerra, Bauhaus University Weimar Janina Schabig, Bard College Berlin Rosbeian, Rosbeiani, FU Berlin Jan Kordes, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main Nicoline van Harskamp, Münster Art Academy Eva Paton, TU Berlin Simon Runke, HU Berlin Torsten Bewernitz, Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences Katja Girr, FU Berlin Yitzchak Ben Mocha, University of Konstanz Tobias Schmitt, University of Hamburg Simon Schiller, Goethe University Frankfurt Jonas Klöker, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz Francesco Sticchi Oxford Brookes University Hans Rackwitz, University of Jena/Leipzig Michaela Reinhardt, University of Piedmont Orientale, Vercelli Emma Gordon, LMU Munich Ranjini Murali, HU Berlin Ana Buchadas, HU Berlin Christine Lander, Berlin University of the Arts Serdar M. Değirmencioğlu, Goethe University Frankfurt Alexander Auch, Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University Manuela García Aldana, Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin Nizar Romdhane, FU Berlin Karmen Tornius, FU Berlin Hadas Emma Kedar, University of Hamburg Camilla Angeli, FU Berlin Sophia Vassilopoulou, FU Berlin Timo Duile, University of Bonn Maja Zwick, FU Berlin Anil Shah, University of Kassel Sarah Speck, Goethe University Frankfurt aM Reltih Floda, TU Braunschweig Helmut Küchenhoff, LMU Munich Henrik Schulz, FH Campus Vienna Jack Naujoks, FU Berlin Franzisca Zanker, ABI Freiburg Huda Zein, University of Cologne Pavel Kolář, University of Konstanz Oliver Pye, University of Kassel Alisa Preusser, University of Potsdam Mahmoud Farag, Technical University of Darmstadt David Stenner, Christopher Newport University Jorge Vega, HU Berlin Amir Moosavi, Rutgers University Marianne Dhenin, University of Basel Michael Friedrich University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart Anna Huber, LMU Munich Lucas Schucht, Institute for Social Work and Social Pedagogy Manfred Rotermund, Ruhr University Bochum (ret.) Monika Bobzien, GGFP Stefan Reichmuth, Ruhr University Bochum Wolfgang Werbeck, University of Münster Nicolas Hoberg, Neu-Ulm University of Applied Sciences, HBK Essen and SRH Heidelberg Berkan Kaya, Bucerius Law School Miira Hill, University of Bremen Christoph Graf, MLU Halle Alexandra Oeser, Centre Marc Bloch, Berlin and University of Paris Nanterre Mathias Delori, Centre Marc Bloch (HU Berlin) Sarah Kruck, Institute for Social Research, Frankfurt aM Thomas Fernholz, University of Nottingham, UK Kira Kosnick, European University Viadrina Paula Teich, University of Potsdam Charlotte Meier, Leipzig University Laura Katharina Mücke, JGU Mainz Michael Maria Schiffmann, Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg Anna Zimmer, Northern Michigan University Sophia Hornbacher-Schönleber, Goethe University Frankfurt Jannis Androutsopoulos, University of Hamburg Ingrid Hudabiunigg, University of Pardubice, CZ David Casero, TU Berlin Anita Chikkatur, Carleton College, MN, USA Alexandra Scheele, Uni Biz Rafah Azzouqa, FU Berlin Rahim Waweru, University of Tübingen Marlen Löffler, IU International University Gerhard Dannemann, HU Berlin Jörn Rüffer, University of Hamburg Herbert Derksen, Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences Maria Pfeiffer, University of Jena Werner Schiffauer, European University Viadrina Frankfurt Oder Annette Jünemann, Helmut Schmidt University, University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg Jelena Cupac, WZB Stephan Guth, University of Oslo Ozren Pupovac, University of Rijeka, Croatia Sabine Ritter, University of Bremen Andrea Wetterauer, Goethe University Frankfurt Sabrina Zajak, Ruhr University Bochum Andrew Michel Thomas, ZtG HU Berlin Jens Wissel, Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences Volker Wulf, University of Siegen Daniel Mühlleitner, Kehl University of Applied Sciences Italo Testa, University of Parma Manuel Lautenbacher, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz Annette Weisser, Kassel Art Academy Carmen Becker, Leibniz University Hannover Katja Wenger, Technical University of Applied Sciences Wildau Mounira al Solh Kassel Academy of Fine Arts Leoni Keskinkilic, Humboldt University of Berlin Jens Schneider, University of Osnabrück Norman Paech, University of Hamburg Florian König, University of Bremen Till Manderbach, UK Würzburg Lothar Zechlin, University of Duisburg-Essen Nicola Schalkowski, Free University of Berlin Alev Masarwa, University of Münster Rabir Zreig, HU Berlin Elena Longhin, TU Delft Rahaf Gharz Addien, DeZIM Ines Mohnke, Georg-August University of Göttingen Herwig Meyer, h-da Darmstadt Aram Bartholl, Hamburg University of Applied Sciences Çağan Varol, University of Kassel Vahid Maghsoodi, HWR Berlin Beverly Weber, University of Colorado Boulder Stephan Guth, Institute for Cultural Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo, Norway Karin Harrasser, University of Art and Design Linz Lothar Zechlin, University of Duisburg-Essen Anja Klein, Technical University of Munich and Humboldt University of Berlin Miguel A. Martínez, Uppsala University, Sweden Stefan Münker, HU Berlin Fabian Krengel, University of Regensburg Benedikt Sauer, University of Göttingen Fatemeh Masjedi, University of Göttingen Amanda Muñoz Hüttl, University of Salamanca, Spain Sowmya Maheswaran, HU Berlin Evrim Kutlu, University of Cologne Andrea Muehlebach, University of Bremen Juli Saragosa, Catalyst Institute of Arts and Technology Roberto Risch, Autonomous University of Barcelona Nandita Badami, MPIWG Bernadett Settele, Zurich University of the Arts Syrinx Hees, University of Münster Eva Hartmann, University of Cambridge Morteza Lichtenstern, freelance scientist Tuba Cekic, Utrecht University Michael Eber, Georg-August University of Göttingen Vasily Moshnyaga, University of Göttingen Ulrich Dolata, University of Stuttgart Jaime Cárdenas Isasi, University of Göttingen Hannah Bechara, Hertie School Russell West-Pavlov, University of Tübingen Daniel Warmuth, HU Berlin Ernst Wolff, KU Leuven, Belgium Marija Vulesica, HU Berlin Daniel Rösler, LMU Munich Stephan Packard, University of Cologne Marija Vulesica, HU Berlin
Last week, MK Ofir Katz, the coalition whip, introduced an expedited bill intending to remove professors who speak against the State of Israel or express support for terrorism. The bill aims to terminate their job without a severance package. The proposed legislation was crafted with the Israeli National Union of Students and endorsed by coalition and opposition members.
According to the bill, “Any institution that fails to dismiss a lecturer under this law will lose its funding from the Council for Higher Education” (CHE).
Katz explained that the proposal aims to “eradicate terrorism from academia” after hearing some provocative statements by professors that have escalated since the events of October 7 and the outbreak of the war. Katz claims that these inflammatory remarks often received institutional support.
Two cases drove the initiative. First, Dr. Anat Matar, a senior lecturer from the Department of Philosophy at Tel Aviv University, eulogized Palestinian terrorist Walid Daqqa as “beloved and a source of inspiration” after he died in prison. Daqa was involved in the kidnapping and murdering of soldier Moshe Tamam in 1984 and was sentenced to life imprisonment. Second, Prof. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian from the Hebrew University Law Faculty called for the abolition of Zionism and, despite overwhelming evidence, doubted that rapes were committed on October 7. She was accused of incitement for labeling the war in Gaza as “genocide” and was briefly detained by police.
Despite student protests, the university presidents refused to dismiss the provocative professors, citing “freedom of speech, even for painful statements.”
The Ministerial Committee will review the bill for legislation. If passed, institutions would have to dismiss a member of staff who denies Israel’s existence as a Jewish state, incites terrorism, or supports terrorist organizations, including an endorsement of armed struggle against Israel or terrorist acts by enemy states, terrorist groups, or individuals who fight against Israel.
MK Katz stated, “We will not let terrorism infiltrate Israeli academia under the pretense of ‘freedom of expression,.. We will not tolerate statements that endorse terrorism or facilitate anti-Israel activities. It is time to fight terrorism in academia, and I am dedicated to this cause.”
The proposed legislation created a firestorm in Israel’s academic circles. The Committee of University Heads (VERA) announced it opposes the bill and stated that the bill not only harms the independence of higher education institutions but also helps the enemies of Israel and the academic boycott movement against Israel and provides them with proof of silencing and limiting freedom of expression in academia.
In a similar vein, Israel’s radical academics organized an anti-Israel webinar. Dr. Matan Kaminer, a Buber Fellow at the Hebrew University Jerusalem, posted a message on the CRIT-GEOG-FORUM list, a forum to discuss critical and radical perspectives in geography. He wrote, “As Israel’s criminal war in Gaza continues, with death, destruction, and starvation reaching disastrous dimensions, Palestinian and critical Jewish faculty and students in Israeli academia are facing unprecedented repression – including suspensions, dismissals and even arrest. Join colleagues from the grassroots organization Academia for Equality for a conversation on the situation in Israeli universities and colleges and the state of the struggle for academic freedom.”
Kaminer currently holds a position at Queen Mary University of London, where, not coincidentally, Profs. Neve Gordon and Shalhoub-Kevorkian also work.
Kaminer invited his readers to a webinar titled “Academic Repression in Israel” held on June 6, 2024. The speakers were Anat Matar (Philosopher and author of The Poverty of Ethics); Sawsan Zaher (Human rights lawyer and legal adviser, Emergency Coalition in Arab Society); Avi-ram Tzoreff (Historian, Academia for Equality’s Solidarity Team); Khaled Furani (Anthropologist and co-editor, Inside the Leviathan: Palestinian Students in Israeli Universities). Chair: Nadia Abu El-Haj (Anthropologist and co-director, Center for Palestine Studies, Columbia University).
Academia for Equality organized the event and the co-sponsors were the BRISMES Committee on Academic Freedom; The Middle East Studies Association (MESA); and the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University.
Shalhoub-Kevorkin was the subject of coverage abroad. The New York Times wrote a sympathetic article, repeating portraying Israel as lacking in academic freedom. Times Higher Education reported on the event, stating there is a “repression” against pro-Palestinian academics and students in Israel during the war, which is, according to scholars, like “being in the belly of the beast.” That there is an increased “crackdown” on those who criticize Israel reaching an “alarming state,” according to Prof. Nadia Abu El-Haj, an anthropologist at Columbia University. She said, “The entanglement of Israeli higher education institutions with the state project is not new… Nevertheless, the extent and character of that cooperation, and the associated increase in repression, is today on steroids.”
Scholars have expressed concern about the “attack” on academic freedom taking place in Israel, with many academics and students being targeted for expressing pro-Palestinian views. Khaled Furani, associate professor of sociology and anthropology at Tel Aviv University, referred to the experience of Palestinian academics living in Israel as “being in the belly of the beast… We inhabit Leviathan now, but we didn’t need October 2023 to see this state of affairs,” he said. Furani is the co-editor of Inside the Leviathan: Palestinian Experiences in Israeli Universities. Furani said their plight dates back to the 1948 Palestine War, when the British withdrew, and even to the 1936 Arab Revolt, but continues to the present, where academics are often treated as “criminals” for their social media posts. “It’s as if the founding moment of 1948 never ended for us,” he said. “The violence that is constitutional to the state has never ended.” Furani said Israeli universities have been “bewitched” by the state and have abdicated their responsibility as places for critical learning. stands?”
Another speaker at the event was Sawsan Zaher, a human rights lawyer based in Israel, who said that since October 7, Palestinian students and teachers, as well as Jewish faculty, have been subjected to a “huge wave” of complaints and a targeted incitement campaign on social media. “There was an intense, aggressive, deliberate start of political persecution that… did not end and continues to this day in higher education institutions,” she said. She also said that “racism and discrimination are nothing new for Palestinian citizens” of Israel. “It is not only about the background of racism that already existed before October 7, but also about the persecution from a political perspective,” she said. “They have been persecuting professors for at least a decade – left-wing Jewish professors, including Palestinians, of course – by issuing and publishing documents against them and lobbying against them, trying to promote bills… that target them.”
Those who oppose the new legislation argue that Matar and Shalhoub-Kevorkian do not endorse terrorism. Matar explained that Walid Daqa regretted his murderous past and repented. Shalhoub-Kevorkian later apologized for her words.
Worth noting that Israel has the Combating Terrorism Law, 2016, a law that enables severe punishment for terrorists and people who are members of terrorist organizations. The law also calls for punishment for people who express support for terrorism or identify with a terrorist organization. The law regulates the issue of declaring an organization a terrorist organization and the use of administrative detention.
As IAM repeatedly reported, Israeli scholars enjoy extremely broad academic freedom, given that most universities are public. So much so that the state never enforced the 2011 Boycott Law that made advocating for BDS illegal. Not incidentally, both Matar and Shalhoub Kevorkian breached the Boycott Law with no repercussions.
As for the proposed new law, things are much more complicated. To recall, the Knesset passed the Higher Education Law in 1958, where the CHE is a statutory corporation. It is the State institution responsible for higher education in Israel. The CHE draws up its policy as an independent and autonomous body. A recognized institution is “free to manage its academic and administrative affairs, within its budget, as it sees fit… In addition to the requirement of an adequate scientific level (hereinafter – a recognized institution), provided that these rules do not limit freedom of opinion and conscience.”
IAM will report on this issue in due course.
REFERENCES:
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/sjgfwuov0 Coalition proposes bill to halt university funds over antisemitic professorsCoalition whip Ofir Katz’s bill would mandate the dismissal of any teacher or lecturer who speaks against Israel or tacitly supports or condones terrorism
Coalition whip Ofir Katz introduced an expedited bill on Monday aimed at removing professors who speak against the State of Israel or express support for terrorism, terminating them without severance pay. The proposal, crafted in collaboration with the National Union of Israeli Students and endorsed by both coalition and opposition members, is expected to trigger significant backlash in academic circles.
“Any institution that fails to dismiss a lecturer under this law will lose its funding from the Council for Higher Education,” the bill stipulates. Katz explained that the proposal to “eradicate terrorism from academia” was a reaction to provocative statements made by professors at various institutions, which have escalated since the events of October 7 and the outbreak of the war. These inflammatory remarks often receive institutional support, according to Katz. He highlighted the case of Dr. Anat Matar, senior lecturer from the Department of Philosophy at Tel Aviv University, who eulogized terrorist Walid Daqqa as “beloved and a source of inspiration” after his death in prison. Despite student protests, the university president refused to dismiss Matar, citing “freedom of speech, even for painful statements.”
Prof. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian from the Hebrew University was also mentioned in the bill. She was detained and later released after being accused of incitement for labeling Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide and calling for the abolition of Zionism, on top of questioning reports of rapes by Hamas on October 7. According to the bill, set to be reviewed by the Ministerial Committee for Legislation, institutions must dismiss any lecturer (including teaching and research staff) who denies Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state, incites terrorism, or supports terrorist organizations. Support for terrorist organizations includes endorsing armed struggle or terrorist acts by enemy states, terrorist groups, or individuals against Israel. “We will not let terrorism infiltrate Israeli academia under the pretense of ‘freedom of expression,” Katz said. “We will not tolerate statements that endorse terrorism or facilitate anti-Israel activities. It is time to fight terrorism in academia, and I am dedicated to this cause.”
National Union of Israeli Students Chairman Elchanan Pelheimer added, “It is time to eliminate terrorism from academia. We cannot allow this to continue. We urge all Knesset members, regardless of political affiliation, to support this bill. Freedom of expression is essential, but incitement to terrorism is unacceptable.”
As Israel’s criminal war in Gaza continues, with death, destruction, and starvation reaching disastrous dimensions, Palestinian and critical Jewish faculty and students in Israeli academia are facing unprecedented repression – including suspensions, dismissals and even arrest. Join colleagues from the grassroots organization Academia for Equality for a conversation on the situation in Israeli universities and colleges and the state of the struggle for academic freedom.
Speakers:
Anat Matar (Philosopher and author, The Poverty of Ethics) Sawsan Zaher (Human rights lawyer and legal adviser, Emergency Coalition in Arab Society) Avi-ram Tzoreff (Historian, Academia for Equality’s Solidarity Team) Khaled Furani (Anthropologist and co-editor, Inside the Leviathan: Palestinian Students in Israeli Universities) Chair: Nadia Abu El-Haj (Anthropologist and co-director, Center for Palestine Studies, Columbia University)
Free to attend and open to all, but registration is essential. Thursday, 6 June 2024 19:00-20:30 BST Online
As Israel’s criminal war in Gaza continues, with death, destruction, and starvation reaching disastrous dimensions, Palestinian and critical Jewish faculty and students in Israeli academia are facing unprecedented repression – including suspensions, dismissals and even arrest. Join colleagues from the grassroots organization Academia for Equality for a conversation on the situation in Israeli universities and colleges and the state of the struggle for academic freedom.
Speakers
Anat Matar (Philosopher and author, The Poverty of Ethics)
Sawsan Zaher (Human rights lawyer and legal adviser, Emergency Coalition in Arab Society)
Avi-ram Tzoreff (Historian, Academia for Equality’s Solidarity Team)
Khaled Furani (Anthropologist and co-editor, Inside the Leviathan: Palestinian Experiences in Israeli Universities)
Chair
Nadia Abu El-Haj (Anthropologist and co-director, Center for Palestine Studies, Columbia University)
Event organised by Academia for Equality. Co-Sponsors: BRISMES; Committee on Academic Freedom, MESA; Center for Palestine Studies, Columbia University.
The repression that pro-Palestinian academics and students in Israel faced during the war is, according to scholars, like “being in the belly of the beast.”
Since October 7, the crackdown on those who criticize the Israeli state, including at its universities, has increased to an “alarming state,” said Nadia Abu El-Haj, professor of anthropology at Columbia University.
“The entanglement of Israeli higher education institutions with the state project is not new,” Professor El-Haj told an event organized by the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies.
“Nevertheless, the extent and character of that cooperation, and the associated increase in repression, is today on steroids.”
Scholars have expressed concern about the “attack” on academic freedom taking place in Israel, with many academics and students being targeted for expressing pro-Palestinian views. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a leading Palestinian feminist scholar, was arrested and detained by Israeli police in April after signing a petition describing Israel’s attack on Gaza as genocide.
Khaled Furani, associate professor of sociology and anthropology at Tel Aviv University, referred to the experience of Palestinian academics living in Israel as “being in the belly of the beast.”
“We inhabit Leviathan now, but we didn’t need October 2023 to see this state of affairs,” says Dr. Furani, co-editor of Inside the Leviathan: Palestinian Experiences in Israeli Universities.
He said their plight dates back to the 1948 Palestine War, when the British withdrew, and even to the 1936 Arab Revolt, but continues to the present, where academics are often treated as “criminals” for their social media posts .
“It’s as if the founding moment of 1948 never ended for us,” he said. “The violence that is constitutional to the state has never ended.”
Dr. Furani said Israeli universities have been “bewitched” by the state and have abdicated their responsibility as places for critical learning. stands?”
Also speaking at the event, Sawsan Zaher, a human rights lawyer and legal advisor based in Israel, said that since October 7, Palestinian students and teachers, as well as Jewish faculty, have been subjected to a “huge wave” of complaints, and a targeted incitement campaign on social media.
“There was an intense, aggressive, deliberate start of political persecution that… did not end and continues to this day in higher education institutions,” she said.
However, she also said that racism and discrimination are nothing new for Palestinian citizens within Israel.
“It is not only about the background of racism that already existed before October 7, but also about the persecution from a political perspective.
“They have been persecuting professors for at least a decade – left-wing Jewish professors, including Palestinians, of course – by issuing and publishing documents against them and lobbying against them, trying to promote bills… that target them. ”
The Markerועד ראשי האוניברסיטאות: התאחדות הסטודנטים מקדמת “סתימת פיות של מרצים”באוניברסיטאות המחקר יוצאים נגד הצעת חוק שיזמה התאחדות הסטודנטים, המחייבת מוסדות אקדמיים לפטר מרצים שמתבטאים באופן שנתפס כפגיעה במדינה ■ “הצעה שתפגע אנושות בעצמאות האקדמיה ובחופש הביטוי, ותסייע לאויבנו להרחיב את החרם האקדמי על ישראל באופן שלא תהיה ממנו דרך חזרה”
June 04th, 13 PM ליאור דטל
אוניברסיטאות המחקר מגנות בחריפות את הצעת החוק שהגיש אתמול (ב’) יו”ר הקואליציה אופיר כץ (הליכוד) – המסיתה נגד מרצים במוסדות האקדמיים. לפי ההצעה, שיזמה התאחדות הסטודנטים, המוסדות האקדמיים יחויבו לפטר באופן מיידי, בהליך מזורז ובלי לשלם פיצויים, מרצים שיתבטאו באופן שמתפרש כשלילת קיומה של מדינת ישראל כמדינה יהודית ודמוקרטית, כהסתה לטרור וכתמיכה בארגוני טרור ובמעשי טרור נגד ישראל. לפי הצעת החוק, המל”ג תטיל סנקציות תקציביות על כל מוסד שלא יפעל כך.
לדברי ועד ראשי האוניברסיטאות וארגון סגל המרצים באוניברסיטאות, הצעת החוק לא רק פוגעת בעצמאות מוסדות ההשכלה הגבוהה, אלא גם מסייעת לאויבי ישראל ולתנועת החרם האקדמי נגד ישראל, ומספקת להם הוכחה לסתימת פיות ולהגבלת חופש הביטוי באקדמיה על ידי הכנסת והסטודנטים. בוועד מאשימים את התאחדות הסטודנטים, שאמורה לייצג את כלל הסטודנטים בישראל, בחבירה לגורמים בימין הקיצוני.
“לצערנו הצעת החוק היא חלק מקמפיין הסתה ושיסוי מתמשך בעל אופי מקארתיסטי נגד האקדמיה הישראלית”, נמסר מוועד ראשי האוניברסיטאות. “שיאו של הקמפיין בקידום הצעת חוק שמהותה סתימת פיות, יצירת אווירת הלשנות ופחד בקמפוסים. הצעת חוק זו תפגע אנושות בעצמאותה של האקדמיה ובחופש הביטוי, ותסייע לאויבנו, באמצעות ארגוני ה-BDS להרחיב את החרם האקדמי על ישראל באופן שלא תהיה ממנו דרך חזרה. אנו קוראים לכל חברי הכנסת לדחות את יוזמת החקיקה לאלתר ולמנוע את הפגיעה הקשה באקדמיה ובדמוקרטיה הישראלית”, הוסיפו.
מהמועצה המתאמת של חברי הסגל הבכיר באוניברסיאות נמסר כי גם היא “מתנגדת באופן נחרץ להצעת חוק ההשכלה הגבוהה, שתאפשר פיטורים של חברות וחברי סגל בנוהל מזורז שעוקף את נהלי המשמעת והתקנונים של המוסדות. המועצה רואה בהצעת חוק זה איום על עצמאותן של האוניברסיטאות בישראל ופגיעה בשמה הטוב של מערכת ההשכלה הגבוהה שלנו בארץ ובעולם. ההצעה היא ניסיון גלוי להלך אימים על מרצות ועל מרצים. היא עלולה להיתפס בעולם כפגיעה בחופש הביטוי בקמפוסים ולגרום לניתוק קשרי מדע עם ישראל ולנזקים ארוכי טווח”.
התאחדות הסטודנטים אף השיקה קמפיין חוצות היוצא באופן ישיר נגד מרצים באוניברסיטאות שהוגדרו כ”תומכי טרור”. בוועד ראשי האוניברסיטאות אמרו בתגובה כי “מדובר בקמפיין רדיפה והסתה נגד חברות סגל אשר עלול להתיר את דמן. לא מתקבל על הדעת שקמפיין הממומן מכספי הסטודנטים יעודד שיסוי ואלימות”.
“מקפצה לקידום פוליטי”
הצעת החוק נולדה במכתב ששלחה התאחדות הסטודנטים בשבוע שעבר לשר החינוך יואב קיש, ולשר האוצר בצלאל סמוטריץ’, שבה ביקשה שיתמכו בהצעה. חלק מראשי אגודות הסטודנטים משכו מאז את חתימותיהם מהמכתב.
“בתקופה שבה גוברות המתקפות על האקדמיה הישראלית וקולות החרם על ישראל, בוחר יו”ר התאחדות הסטודנטים לחבור לחברי כנסת מהקואליציה במסעם להחליש ולפגוע באקדמיה מבפנים”, נמסר ממטה המאבק נגד ההפיכה המשטרית באקדמיה. “מדובר ביוזמה של יו”ר התאחדות הסטודנטים, שמנסה להשתמש בה כמקפצה לקידום פוליטי על ידי חבירה לגורמי ימין קיצוני”.
The Turkish Labor Party (EMEP) hosted a Middle East Conference on May 25-26, 2024.
The conference discussed the developments in the Middle East, particularly “Israel’s attacks on Palestine.” The EMEP statement emphasized that “Israel’s attacks on the Palestinian people have caused tens of thousands of deaths and forced many to migrate.” The conference was “an important step to draw attention to such humanitarian crises and to show solidarity with the Palestinian people.”
The conference discussed “The inaction of regional states in response to Israel’s attacks on Palestine.” It was also noted that the continuous actions of the world’s workers have not been enough to “stop Israel’s aggressiveness,” and that states “responded to these protests with violence, giving Israel a green light.” The conference agreed that the “massacre of the Palestinian people must stop immediately and that their right to self-determination must be recognized.”
On the last day, the EMEP released a final declaration, stating “Peoples should determine their own destiny. We stand with the Palestinian people against Israeli genocide.”
One of the speakers was “Israeli anti-Zionist Prof. Moshe Zuckermann” who “criticized Israel’s attacks on Palestine and the Netanyahu regime.” Prof. Zuckermann addressed the Israeli government in his video message. He stated: “Since January 2023, we have had the most right-wing, one could even say fascist coalition in the entire history of the Israeli parliament. This coalition consists of the right-wing Likud party, two religious – Orthodox parties that are anti-Zionist or non-Zionist, and a third Orthodox party that is mainly elected by Orthodox Jews from the East. There are two parties that are relevant to our topic today: Two religious parties led by Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, which we can also call messianic-religious parties.”
Another speaker was Udi Raz, a doctoral fellow at the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies at the Free University Berlin. Raz, from the German-based Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East “described the German state’s efforts to silence dissenting Jews by labeling all criticism of Zionism as anti-Semitism.” Raz said, “In many ways they are racist and fascist, undemocratic, even though they were democratically elected.” He spoke about the criminalization of anti-Zionist Jews in today’s Germany. Raz noted that anti-Zionist Jews in Germany are accused of being anti-Semites: “We, as anti-Zionist Jews, issued a statement saying, ‘Together with the Jews of Europe and the world, we declare that Israeli colonialism, the occupation of Palestine, the persecution and oppression of the Palestinian people are not carried out in the name of the Jews of the world,’ and then we in the Middle East were branded as anti-Semites. We were boycotted and sanctioned, we were isolated, our bank accounts were frozen.”
The highlights of the conference were “the immediate cessation of the massacre of the Palestinian people, the declaration of a ceasefire, the reconstruction of Gaza and the facilitation of the return of the Palestinian people to their homes. It called for the recognition of the Palestinian state and the release of Palestinians in prison. It was stated that the right to self-determination belongs to the Palestinian people.”
Not surprisingly, the EMEP is a member of the International Conference of Marxist–Leninist Parties and Organizations (CIPOML).
Both Zuckermann and Raz espouse anti-Israel ideas disguised as scholarship. Zuckermann has had a long career in this respect, as IAM repeatedly noticed. For example, in 2001, he published a Hebrew book, The Israel Foundry: Myths and Ideology in a Conflictual Society, which the Journal of Palestinian Studies reviewed in Arabic in 2002. Similarly, Raz is signaling to the anti-Israel cohorts he is happy to provide anti-Israel perception upon request.
Using the neo-Marxist, critical jargon, pro-Palestinian activists all over the globe use the democratic systems of the West to promote a non-democratic society. They recruit Israeli academics to do the job.
EMEP Middle East Conference Final Declaration: We stand with the Palestinian people against Israeli genocide
EMEP has released the final declaration of the Middle East Conference held on 25-26 May: “Peoples should determine their own destiny. We stand with the Palestinian people against Israeli genocide”.
The Labour Party (EMEP) has issued a final declaration following the International Conference on the Middle East, held at the United Metal Workers’ Union headquarters on 25-26 May. The conference was organised to discuss major developments in the Middle East, particularly Israel’s attacks on Palestine.
The statement emphasised that Israel’s attacks on the Palestinian people have caused tens of thousands of deaths and forced many to migrate. The conference was highlighted as an important step to draw attention to such humanitarian crises and to show solidarity with the Palestinian people.
The first day of the two-day conference focused on hegemonic struggles and the economic and political dimensions of inter-state relations in the region. On the second day, solutions were discussed with a focus on public dynamics. Local and international academics, politicians and journalists examined the intense and bloody agenda centred on Palestine from historical and regional perspectives.
IMPERIALIST COMPETITION AND CONFLICTS
It has been noted that the Middle East has been one of the regions with the most intense competition among the imperialist states throughout the twentieth century and today. This competition has become more and more intense because of oil, natural gas and strategic routes. The escalation of conflicts in the region has been linked to the rise of China and Russia as “superpowers”. It was noted that states and local authorities serving the interests of global monopolies have created and exploited unresolved issues in the region by provoking religious and sectarian conflicts.
SYRIA AND TWO HEGEMONIC POWERS
The ongoing proxy wars in Syria and the direct interventions of the USA and Russia were discussed in terms of their destructive impact on the region. The conflicts between these two powers were seen as ongoing efforts to expand their influence and control over regional resources.
TURKEY’S REGIONAL POLICY
It was mentioned that the Turkish government takes every opportunity to assert its initiatives both in the region and globally. This includes operations in neighbouring countries to expand the National Pact (Misak-ı Milli), the sale of drones to Middle Eastern countries, the sale of public institutions and land, the search for partners for projects, and the evaluation of investment opportunities for capital.
ISRAELI ATTACKS AND GLOBAL RESPONSES
The inaction of regional states in response to Israel’s attacks on Palestine was criticised. It was noted that the continuous actions of the world’s workers have not been enough to stop Israel’s aggressiveness, and that states have responded to these protests with violence, giving Israel a green light. It was noted that the power and influence of the states that recognise Palestine has not been enough to make Netanyahu back down.
PROPOSED SOLUTIONS AND HIGHLIGHTS
The conference agreed that the massacre of the Palestinian people must stop immediately and that their right to self-determination must be recognised. Key issues included Turkey’s refugee and immigration policy, which turns the country into a depot, and the internal and external political instrumentalisation of the policy towards the Kurdish people spread across four countries.
NOTABLE VIEWS OF PARTICIPANTS
Israeli anti-Zionist Prof. Moshe Zuckermann criticised Israel’s attacks on Palestine and the Netanyahu regime. Udi Raz of the German-based Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East described the German state’s efforts to silence dissenting Jews by labelling all criticism of Zionism as anti-Semitism. Al-Taher, from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, stressed the importance of democratic popular unity and united struggle against the militant and massacring alliance of Israel and the USA.
KEY HIGHLIGHTS AND THANKS
The main highlights of the conference were the immediate cessation of the massacre of the Palestinian people, the declaration of a ceasefire, the reconstruction of Gaza and the facilitation of the return of the Palestinian people to their homes. It called for the recognition of the Palestinian state and the release of Palestinians in prison. It was stated that the right to self-determination belongs to the Palestinian people.
Thanks were expressed to the speakers from home and abroad, to the participants who were present in the hall for two days, to those who watched the live broadcast and to everyone who shared their feelings and thoughts.
CONFERENCE PROGRAM
May 25, 2024
10:30 Opening Speech: Seyit Aslan (Labor Party Chair)
11:00-13:30 FIRST SESSION POWER STRUGGLES AND HEGEMONY IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Moderator: Fulya Alikoç
Musa Özuğurlu (Journalist)
Gilbert Achcar (UK, Academic)
Maher Arafat Al-Taher (Palestine)
14:00-17:00 SECOND SESSION TURKEY-MIDDLE EAST RELATIONS AND ECONOMIC POLITICS
Moderator: Nuray Sancar
Arzu Yılmaz (KRG – Iraq)
Bahadır Özgür (Journalist)
Mühdan Sağlam (Academic)
Erhan Keleşoğlu (Academic)
May 26, 2024
11:00-13:00 FIRST SESSION PEOPLES AND STRUGGLES IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Moderator: Hediye Levent
Sibel Karadağ (Academic)
Doğan Çetinkaya (Academic)
Mira Assadi (Iran, Academic)
Kıvanç Eliaçık (Union Expert)
14:00-17:00 SECOND SESSION POSSIBILITIES AND CONDITIONS FOR PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Moderator: Hakkı Özdal
Moshe Zuckermann (Israel, Academic)
Udi Raz (Germany, Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East)
JUNE 1, 2024 Middle East Conference: People Should Determine Their Own Destiny. We Stand with the Palestinian People Against Israel’s Genocide
The International Middle East Conference, which we organized to discuss the developments in the Middle East and to express solidarity with the Palestinian people, especially the deaths of tens of thousands of people, mostly children and women, and their forced migration due to Israel’s massacre attacks against the Palestinian people, has filled an important gap.
On the first day, the political economy and political dimensions of hegemony struggles in the region and inter-state relations; On the second Middle East day, local and foreign academics, politicians and journalists who made presentations at our conference, where public dynamics and solution proposals were discussed, placed the intense and bloody agenda that Palestine focused on in its historical and regional dimensions. First of all, we would like to thank them for this solidarity.
Throughout the twentieth century and now, the Middle East has been a region where the fault lines have been most activated by competition and contradictions between imperialist states whose power and influence have changed. Oil, natural gas, open sea and land routes reaching from distant Asia to Europe and Africa have always been at a critical point in terms of being a source of cheap labor. Today, this competition has jumped to the next level. With the rise of China and Russia to the league of ‘superpowers’, conflicts that have emerged in the form of local wars and are gradually increasing in intensity continue.
States serving the interests of world monopolies and local governments in cooperation with them are in a constant state of intervention to re-share an already shared world and to consolidate hegemony by provoking religious and sectarian conflicts, creating unresolvable problems in the region and taking advantage of this deadlock.
After years of proxy war in Syria, two hegemonic powers; The powers that openly confront Russia and the United States with their arrival on the field continue to expand their spheres of influence through the debris they left behind and negotiate over regional resources.
The Turkish administration shares with each other the areas of initiative in the region and the world; They do not shy away from making moves at every opportunity to make the most of the results of their fight, which they wage in some low places, sometimes by going around each other, and in some areas with hot contact. This process is used to expand the National Pact on land and waterways from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, with operations carried out on the borders of neighboring countries. The government markets unmanned aerial vehicles through crowded visits to Middle Eastern countries, sells remaining lands with public institutions, looks for partners for projects, tries to provide swaps to the treasury, and personally evaluates investment opportunities for capital.
The fact that most of the regional states did not react or impose sanctions during Israel’s attack on Palestine was an indication of how the Palestinian people gave way to Israeli politics, which has long been the battering ram of US imperialism.
The uninterrupted actions of the world’s workers against Israel’s attacks have not yet been enough to stop Israeli aggression. Moreover, states responded to these protests with violence, giving Israel an undying green light. The power and influence of the states that recognize Palestine could not make Netanyahu step back.
***
Our conference tried to follow the line in detailing the dimensions of this general situation in the Middle East and connecting the parts to the whole.
Different ideas on this platform; Solution suggestions and wishes were expressed within the scope of international solidarity on the Middle East and Palestine. The common opinion is that the massacre of the Palestinian people should be stopped immediately and the people’s right to self-determination should be recognized.
Among the prominent topics were the refugee and immigrant policy that caused Turkey to become a warehouse country and the international dimensions of this situation. On the other hand, the instrumentalization of political action against the Kurdish people scattered across four countries in the Middle East in terms of domestic and foreign policy is also among the agenda items.
Israeli anti-Zionist Prof., who could not attend the conference in person for predictable reasons, but delivered his speech via video recording. Moshe Zuckermann criticized Israel’s attacks on Palestine and the Netanyahu regime. Udi Raz, from the ‘Jewish Voice Association for a Just Peace in the Middle East’ based in Germany, also talked about the German state’s attempt to silence opposing Jews in order to create ‘its own Jew’ by accusing all criticism of Zionism and the state of Israel as anti-Semitism, and talked about these experiences added to the conference record.
Maher Arafat Al-Taher from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine attended our conference. This picture once again points out that the common struggle of the people against the warlike and murderous union established on the Israel-USA axis is possible and important.
Israel’s aggression, the world in bloodshed
It is a necessity to strengthen the democracy and peace front in the region and in the country against the wars waged by the regional states and imperialist monopolies, which do not hesitate to fight, to restructure the Middle East.
The important emphasis of our conference is this: The massacre against the Palestinian people must be stopped immediately, a ceasefire must be declared, Gaza must be rebuilt and the people of Gaza must be allowed to return to their homes. In addition, the Palestinian state should be recognized and Palestinians in prisons should be released.
The fate of the Palestinian people will be determined by the Palestinian people themselves.
We would like to thank the speakers who attended our conference from home and abroad, the participants who were in the hall for two days, and everyone who watched from the live broadcast, used the podium in the hall or returned and expressed their feelings and thoughts.
The Labour Party (EMEP) organised a two-day “International Middle East Conference” on 25 and 26 May. Many speakers from Turkey , Iraq, Iran, Palestine , Israel, Lebanon, Germany and England attended the conference or were connected via video message.
The opening speech was given by EMEP Chairman Seyit Aslan. Aslan recalled that Israel is openly supported by the world ‘s major imperialist states, especially the USA, and pointed out that the states in the region, including Turkey with the AKP government of President Erdogan , are also largely silent about the massacre of the Palestinian people .
Pointing out that Turkey , which wants to benefit from the contradictions of the imperialist forces and is therefore looking for opportunities for expansionism in the region, Aslan said: “All imperialist military bases in the region, especially in Turkey , must be closed , the imperialist states must withdraw from the region , Netanyahu must be convicted as a war criminal in an independent court , the Palestinian problem must be solved with a two-state solution ! “
“Biden continues to expand Trump’s pro-Israel policy”
Lebanese academic Gilbert Achcar said the Israeli government was rapidly moving toward the extreme right: “The program of Zionism already has such a dynamic. It is a tangent entirely focused on racism, militarism and the extreme right. In the current situation , it coincides with the global trend of the shift to the right.” Achcar pointed out that at the same time, a major pro-Israel shift was taking place in the United States : “Trump was called the most pro-Israel US president in the country’s history at that time . Biden completely followed Trump in this area and even developed it further. Biden even openly and proudly declared himself a Zionist.”
“This is a historic war against imperialism.”
Journalist Musa Ö zu ğ urlu recalled the period of imperialist division that began after the Industrial Revolution and pointed out that Western imperialists are trying to gain influence in the region by supporting religiously oriented governments.
In this sense, Özuğurlu stressed that the war being waged in this region today is a historic war and said: “The resistance that the Palestinian people are putting up today is not only against Israel. The Palestinians are also fighting against the United States, which is the stronghold and executive organ of Western imperialism.”
“Erdoğan would not make harsh statements if he didn’t have to ”
Commenting on the AKP government’s stance on the war, Ö zu ğ urlu said: “If we look at the past, it cannot be said that the AKP government has been very supportive of the Palestinian issue. I do not think that President Erdo ğ an would have used such harsh rhetoric on this issue recently if he had not been forced to . They had to do it because support for the Palestinian people began to grow all over the world.” Ö zu ğ urlu recalled that the left in Turkey has always supported the Palestinian cause and should not leave the field to Islamists . Ö zu ğurlu stressed that the Palestinian issue was indeed one of the important issues used by political Islamists to consolidate and establish their power.
The most right-wing, fascist coalition in Israel
Prof. Dr. Moshe Zuckermann from Israel addressed the Israeli government in his video message. He stated : “Since January 2023, we have had the most right-wing, one could even say fascist coalition in the entire history of the Israeli parliament. This coalition consists of the right-wing Likud party, two religious – Orthodox parties that are anti-Zionist or non-Zionist, and a third Orthodox party that is mainly elected by Orthodox Jews from the East . There are two parties that are relevant to our topic today: Two religious parties led by Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, which we can also call messianic-religious parties .” Udi Raz, doctoral student at the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies In many ways they are racist and fascist, undemocratic, even though they were democratically elected . “
“Anti-Zionist Jews are being criminalized”
Udi Raz, a doctoral student at the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies and a member of the board of the German- based Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East, spoke about the criminalization of anti-Zionist Jews in today’s Germany. Raz noted that anti-Zionist Jews in Germany are accused of being anti-Semites: “We, as anti-Zionist Jews, issued a statement saying , ‘Together with the Jews of Europe and the world, we declare that Israeli colonialism, the occupation of Palestine , the persecution and oppression of the Palestinian people are not carried out in the name of the Jews of the world ,’ and then we in the Middle East were branded as anti-Semites. We were boycotted and sanctioned, we were isolated, our bank accounts were frozen.”
Being a Woman in the Middle East
Academic Mira Assadi spoke about the experiences of women in the Middle East using Iran as an example. Assadi explained that women in the Middle East live in a triangle of oppression : “I define these as religion, politics and the patriarchal system. In Iran, there is a difference between women’s domestic life and public life . We have always thought secretly and rebelled secretly. This rebellion broke out every ten years. There were riots and protests, but there was a state that was stronger than us and we had to return home .” In September 2022, after Jina Mahsa Amini was killed by the morality police , women began their resistance again. Assadi said: “Women’s resistance continues today. If Iran will be a free country one day, it will be under the leadership of women.”
“An international movement is necessary ”
In her video presentation at the conference, Lindsey German of the UK’s Stop the War Coalition also referred to the ongoing arms buildup and increasing likelihood of war around the world, saying: “There is an ongoing war in Ukraine, a proxy war between NATO and Russia. There is an ongoing war in Gaza and an ongoing crisis throughout the Middle East. There is also the possibility of war in the Pacific. There is already an economic war going on. The arms race is continuing. And we have to fear that this will escalate into a larger conflict . In other words, we are discussing these issues at a time of great crisis and great danger to the future of humanity.” German stated : “I believe that we need to build an international movement . We talk about the resistance and resilience of the Palestinian people. This is at the heart of our actions. But we also need our resistance and our international resilience.”
I think that my participation in public protests and advocacy for the equality of Palestinians and Jews in the state of Israel was more decisive for my dismissal than the word apartheid. I go to these protests as a man, out of my conviction that I must rebel against the situation in which the Palestinians live in Gaza and the occupied territories
Large son Udi Raz speaks at a protest for a free Palestine at the FU Berlin on November 3, 2023 (photo by Mariam Aboughazi)
So, I am Udi Raz, Jewish and Israeli, born in 1987 in Haifa, living in Berlin. On October 25, 2023, I was fired from my position as a guide at the Jewish Museum. Haifa is in Palestine and Israel, that’s what I say, it’s self-evident to me, as I sometimes say as a woman, which is self-evident to me. Since 2012, I live in Berlin. I came here so that I would not live in a constant state of war. In Berlin, at the Freie Universität, I studied oriental cultures, and now I am writing my doctorate. My parents were born in Israel, in a kibbutz, they grew up in Zionist indoctrination. My father’s father, my grandfather, was born in Lithuania, and my father’s mother, my grandmother, was born in Argentina. Grandfather spoke Lithuanian, Yiddish and Russian, and grandmother Spanish and Yiddish. They came to Palestine after the end of the Second World War, and after the establishment of Israel, they left the kibbutz and moved to Haifa.
I met more Palestinians in Berlin than in Haifa. Of course, more Arabs. In Haifa I had only one Palestinian in my class, I wasn’t allowed to meet any more. I say it wasn’t “allowed”, it wasn’t expressly forbidden, it’s not written in any law or provision (at least I haven’t seen it written), but that’s how it is in life. It was arranged systematically, and systematically: in 12 years of schooling in Haifa, I had only one Palestinian schoolmate, and that only for three years, in nine years, none. And that in a city where many Palestinians live, and without whom its history cannot be written.
In Berlin, until October 25, I worked as a guide for a department of the Jewish Museum. That department is dedicated to the post-war triangle “Judaism – Israel – Germany”. As a guide, I attended and completed a course, and I led mainly school groups, but also groups of adult visitors. Often, as someone who is Jewish and was still born and raised in Israel, I also shared my experiences from Haifa. Once, while on a video device playing Angela Merkel’s Staatsräson speech for her visits to the Israeli Knesset, I mentioned that Palestinians in Israel are not equal citizens with Jews, but that, according to authoritative independent reports by independent organizations (such as Amnesty International , Human Rights Watch and the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem) Palestinians live under the apartheid state of Israel. There I also explained what apartheid is, the origin of the word, its meaning and other aspects. Of course, all this as a man who was born and grew up in Israel and who is familiar with the reality of what he is saying, so, all in all, I can say about myself, I am an authoritative witness.
I said what is true: that the Palestinians in the land west of the Jordan River do not have the right to vote in the Israeli parliament, but the Jews do. It is apartheid, on the fascist model. Someone heard about it, so they reported me, and I was fired by the boss, that is, by the head of the Museum’s educational department, her name is dr. Diana Dressel. My signed contract was canceled verbally. Well, the Museum has no obligation to fire me as a freelancer with an explanation. The problem is not my boss, the one who fired me, the problem is the Jüdisches Museum Berlin, which is no longer independent, but in the service of the politics of the current government of Israel. I think that more than the word apartheid (by the way, reports of humanitarian organizations around the world are regularly full of it), my participation in public protests and advocacy for the equality of Palestinians and Jews in the state of Israel was decisive for my dismissal. I go to these protests as a human being, out of my conviction that I must rebel against the situation in which Palestinians live in Gaza and the occupied territories. I also go to the protests as a member of the Berlin group “Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East”. Here is this photo where I have a Palestinian headscarf around my neck, it was taken the other day at a protest to end the genocide in Gaza, in front of the large canteen that belongs to the complex where I studied, which is called Freie Universität Berlin. Antisemitism sometimes occurs to me, these are the times now.
That I pronounce and repeat the name racist and apartheid for the regime of today’s state of Israel, did not come from any whim or eclipse of mine, but from experience and conviction. I was in Haifa when there were many terrorist attacks at the beginning of the third millennium. A lot of my peers, whom I knew, my schoolmates also died in those attacks. There is a constant state of war there. All this made me want to leave Haifa and Israel. I decided to go to Germany, because I heard that it is a good country to live and study. And I came, first to Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. I was there for a year, then I came to Berlin. But my heart remained in Haifa. My parents live there, many friends live there, I was born there and spent my young years there. And I know from there, I know too well, how the Palestinians live and how they feel. I know that they consider the year 1948, when the state of Israel was proclaimed, to be the beginning of their catastrophe. I know, because I listened to it, it is still heard from them today. I understand their pain when they say that, it is justified.
This problem of creating only Israel and not creating Palestine, and otherwise any problematization of the issue of the Palestinian state, has been under a tacit ban in Germany since two years ago. Everything else can be a topic of conversation, but the Palestinian issue, not really. Germany is known to be in a permanent process of dealing with its past. In this confrontation regarding Jews and Israel, there are various ways and paths: compensation is paid to the descendants of Holocaust victims, Jews from the former Soviet Union are allowed to immigrate to Germany, but Israel is also given unquestioning support for anything Israel does. Thus, for the Palestinians, the hell in which they live in Gaza, apartheid in the West Bank of Jordan, and for God’s sake also for those in Israel, is slowly moving to Germany. They are less and less given the right to speak about their position. This situation has no basis in any German law, statute or legal act, it’s all tacit, it’s what the police do, it’s how it’s done and implemented, it’s clear, everything according to permission “from above”.
Before leaving Israel, I wanted to learn Arabic, to enroll in an Arabic language course. At that time, and that was the year 2009, there was only one place in all of Israel where this was possible. This was in a center called Giv’at Haviva, which is located halfway between Haifa and Tel Aviv towards the West Bank area of Jordan. So, after completing my military service, I enrolled, of my own volition and desire, in an Arabic language course. I also attended that course for half a year, it was Arabic, actually a Palestinian spoken language, and it is interesting that a lot of young men attended it before going to the army, probably those who later in the army took on tasks to work for example for the intelligence services.
In Berlin, I studied culture and history of the Middle East for three years, then Islamic culture and society, and after finishing my studies, four years ago, I enrolled in doctoral studies at the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies, at the Freie Universität. In research for my doctorate, I deal with “Semitic” negotiations and agreements, that is, the phenomenon of redefining the Other between Muslims and Jews in today’s Germany. The title of my doctoral dissertation is in English: Negotiating “Semites”: Muslims and Jews redefine Otherness in today’s Germany. So, my Jewish and Israeli origin and experience, and the experience of living in a city with a Palestinian ethnic community, is not the only thing that makes me equipped to speak about Israelis and Palestinians, but this also includes my research in the field of Muslim culture and religion, I am not immodest when I say that it doesn’t make me less competent but makes me even more competent. But in the Museum, where I worked honorably, censorship was imposed on the use of words that the museum guide uses, even when they are not his own, but when he cites them from the reports of independent organizations that protect human dignity and rights.
Conflict prevails in society in mythology and ideology. Zuckermann Moshe. 261 Pages, 2001. Resling Publications: Tel Aviv. Comprehensive definition presenting with the aim of “Israeli identity” is the subject of this book. It is a matter of itself, making multiple agents or sides on the light, which is a goal, but it has continuous, the practical process of the work of all aspect , In congregation full and the end of the formation of its Zionist formal formation, the Tel Aviv University in the History philosophy, a professor and the writer. A prominent problem of the goals was one of the “normal nature” with a claim between the prevailing the contradiction that this is Israeli; The community is characterized by the actual contradictions and between the legalism, the contexts, due to the investigation, the non-establishment of some of the parties that are in the vicinity is possible.
Pro-Palestinian academic activists work hard to delegitimize Israel. In recent years, the pro-Palestinian activists hijacked the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES).
Next week, BRISMES is holding a webinar discussing “As Israel’s criminal war in Gaza continues, with death, destruction, and starvation reaching disastrous dimensions, Palestinian and critical Jewish faculty and students in Israeli academia are facing unprecedented repression – including suspensions, dismissals and even arrest. Join colleagues from the grassroots organization Academia for Equality for a conversation on the situation in Israeli universities and colleges and the state of the struggle for academic freedom.” Longtime activist Dr. Anat Matar will speak among other Palestinian and pro-Palestinian academics.
These days, BRISMES doubles its efforts in attacks against Israeli institutions. For this goal, BRISMES established in 2020 a company called BRISMES Campaigns Ltd, with one mission to “support the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against the unjust regime of occupation and apartheid imposed by Israel. We will campaign on and off campus on this and other issues through organizational and cultural struggle in civil and political society.” The BRISMES Campaigns “promotes the grassroots, anti-racist, democratic, transnational and non-violent Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement in solidarity with the liberation struggle in Palestine. We promote the academic boycott of Israeli academic institutions, which are complicit in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. We also campaign for divestment from companies (whether financial, industrial, service-oriented) which aid and abet settler colonialism. We also campaign for sanctions to be imposed on Israel until it ceases to violate international law.”
The BRISMES Campaigns “undertakes solidarity actions to defend Palestinian voices, histories, activists, educators, and educational activities which have come under increasing attack by pro-Israeli groups and individuals in recent years.”
The next level of the delegitimization of Israel is for BRISMES to argue that Israel is a settler-colonial state. According to BRISMES, “in the wake of Hamas’s October 7th violent assault and Israel’s horrific war on Gaza, BRISMES has been witnessing a worrying trend of attacks on decolonial and anticolonial scholarship and perspectives in relation to analyses of the situation in Israel-Palestine. In particular, accusations have increasingly conflated the use of ‘settler colonialism’ – as a descriptor of the policies of dispossession and displacement implemented by the Israeli state against Palestinians – with support of terrorism and/or antisemitism. This has worsened an already challenging environment for speaking about Palestinian human rights on university campuses.”
To downplay the need to fight antisemitism, as IAM reported in September 2023, BRISMES joined the European Legal Support Centre (ELSC), a group that defends and empowers advocates for Palestine in Europe through legal means, to produce a report that demonstrates how academic freedom and freedom of speech on Israel-Palestine have been subject to significant and “unfounded” restrictions due to universities’ widespread adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Definition of Antisemitism.
BRISMES stated that as scholars of the Middle East, “we seek to clarify that the settler-colonial framework, including concrete calls for the decolonization of Palestine, are neither antisemitic, nor supportive of terrorism.”
BRISMES fully supports the arguments that “Israel-Palestine should be understood as a context of settler colonialism.” It states, “Settler colonial studies form part of an established and well-respected body of knowledge in several disciplines and provide analytical tools for understanding the historical development and/or contemporary policies of numerous countries, including the United States, Canada, Australia, Argentina, and South Africa, yet has been portrayed as illegitimate when applied to the context of Israel-Palestine. Critics of settler colonialism in relation to Israel-Palestine claim that the absence of a colonial metropole means that Israel cannot be a settler colony, and that the presence of indigenous Jewish communities in historic Palestine prior to the establishment of the State of Israel mean that Jewish Israelis cannot be settlers, both of which are misunderstandings or mischaracterizations of the claims of settler colonial scholarship.”
BRISMES argues that “The efforts to cast settler colonial claims as antisemitic have emerged at a time when antisemitism, Islamophobia, and anti-Palestinian racism are on the rise across the UK, Europe, North America, and elsewhere. Manifestations of hate towards Jews, Muslims, Arabs and Palestinians must be challenged wherever they appear, not least in higher education institutions. However, the labelling of certain ideas and concepts, including but not limited to, settler colonialism, decolonization, and anti-colonialism, as antisemitic or support for terrorism, constitutes a very dangerous narrowing of the parameters of what constitutes politically-acceptable speech, and repeatedly morphs into Islamophobia.”
Furthermore, BRISMES “warns against the assumption that scholars of the MENA region or students and activists who voice their opposition to the Israeli regime in terms of settler-colonialism, decolonization and anticolonialism are motivated by antisemitism rather than an understanding of historical developments in the region.”
To support its claims, BRISMES cites a report by the Rutgers Center for Security, Race and Rights (RCSRR), rejecting the claims that “when Muslims and Arabs in America defend the rights of Palestinians or criticize Israeli state policy, they are often baselessly presumed to be motivated by a hatred for Jews.” For RCSRR, “such presumptions are informed by Islamophobia.”
BRISMES has become a pro-Palestine activist group. Moreover, their anti-Israel activist academics reject efforts to fight antisemitism. They portray such efforts as Islamophobic. To diffuse the severity of the global wave of antisemitic attacks, these campaigners merge Islamophobia with antisemitism into one category. Britain should also be worried as they harm British higher education as well.
Free to attend and open to all, but registration is essential.
About the Event
As Israel’s criminal war in Gaza continues, with death, destruction, and starvation reaching disastrous dimensions, Palestinian and critical Jewish faculty and students in Israeli academia are facing unprecedented repression – including suspensions, dismissals and even arrest. Join colleagues from the grassroots organization Academia for Equality for a conversation on the situation in Israeli universities and colleges and the state of the struggle for academic freedom.
Speakers
Anat Matar (Philosopher and author, The Poverty of Ethics)
Sawsan Zaher (Human rights lawyer and legal adviser, Emergency Coalition in Arab Society)
Avi-ram Tzoreff (Historian, Academia for Equality’s Solidarity Team)
Khaled Furani (Anthropologist and co-editor, Inside the Leviathan: Palestinian Students in Israeli Universities)
Chair
Nadia Abu El-Haj (Anthropologist and co-director, Center for Palestine Studies, Columbia University)
Event organised by Academia for Equality. Co-Sponsors: BRISMES; Committee on Academic Freedom, MESA; Center for Palestine Studies, Columbia University.
We seek a more liberated Middle East Studies, a popular pedagogy that links research and theory to democratic practice, wider public and private understandings, and egalitarian politics across borders. We oppose the many ways in which Middle East Studies, on and off campus, is implicated in injustice and domination – racism, colonialism, Orientalism, misogyny, homophobia, ableism, authoritarianism, (neo)liberalism, and elitism. We believe in transnational solidarity and global justice, and support the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against the unjust regime of occupation and apartheid imposed by Israel. We will campaign on and off campus on this and other issues through organizational and cultural struggle in civil and political society.
BRISMES Campaigns promotes the grassroots, anti-racist, democratic, transnational and non-violent Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement in solidarity with the liberation struggle in Palestine. We promote the academic boycott of Israeli academic institutions, which are complicit in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. We also campaign for divestment from companies (whether financial, industrial, service-oriented) which aid and abet settler colonialism. We also campaign for sanctions to be imposed on Israel until it ceases to violate international law. More generally, BRISMES Campaigns undertakes solidarity actions to defend Palestinian voices, histories, activists, educators, and educational activities which have come under increasing attack by pro-Israeli groups and individuals in recent years.
BRISMES Statement on Settler Colonialism, Decolonisation and Antisemitism
Posted: 19/02/2024
In recent years, there have been growing movements on university campuses calling for the decolonisation of higher education institutions, through which students would be exposed to a wider range of perspectives, particularly those from and rooted in the lived experiences of people in the Global South. In many cases, universities have declared their support for such calls, incorporating “decolonising the curriculum” into university structures, learning experiences, and anti-racist vision documents and action plans.
Despite this ostensible commitment to the decolonisation of higher education, in the wake of Hamas’s October 7th violent assault and Israel’s horrific war on Gaza, BRISMES has been witnessing a worrying trend of attacks on decolonial and anticolonial scholarship and perspectives in relation to analyses of the situation in Israel-Palestine. In particular, accusations have increasingly conflated the use of ‘settler colonialism’ – as a descriptor of the policies of dispossession and displacement implemented by the Israeli state against Palestinians – with support of terrorism and/or antisemitism (for example, see here, here, and here). This has worsened an already challenging environment for speaking about Palestinian human rights on university campuses. In particular, academic freedom and freedom of speech on Israel-Palestine have been subject to significant and unfounded restrictions due to universities’ widespread adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism, as demonstrated in a recent report by BRISMES and the European Legal Support Centre.
BRISMES is deeply concerned that these attacks on settler colonial, anti-colonial, and decolonial frameworks could lead to a rolling back of the progress that has been made in introducing evidence-based historical analyses emanating originally from Global South scholars, and believes that efforts to stigmatise the findings of these scholars constitute a serious threat to academic freedom and freedom of speech. Building on our extensive collective expertise as scholars of the Middle East, we seek to clarify that the settler-colonial framework, including concrete calls for the decolonisation of Palestine, are neither antisemitic, nor supportive of terrorism. In order to demonstrate that such work is in fact a well-established and respected scholarly field, an appendix accompanying this document describes in detail the arguments made by scholars who argue that Israel-Palestine should be understood as a context of settler colonialism.
Settler colonial studies form part of an established and well-respected body of knowledge in several disciplines and provide analytical tools for understanding the historical development and/or contemporary policies of numerous countries, including the United States, Canada, Australia, Argentina, and South Africa, yet has been portrayed as illegitimate when applied to the context of Israel-Palestine. Critics of settler colonialism in relation to Israel-Palestine claim that the absence of a colonial metropole means that Israel cannot be a settler colony, and that the presence of indigenous Jewish communities in historic Palestine prior to the establishment of the State of Israel mean that Jewish Israelis cannot be settlers, both of which are misunderstandings or mischaracterisations of the claims of settler colonial scholarship.
In particular, in efforts to invalidate scholarship on settler colonialism, its opponents present the calls for decolonisation and anticolonialism outside of their historical context and cast them as calls to displace and/or eliminate all Jews living in Israel. This is in spite of the total absence of these racist elements in settler colonial scholarship, which is driven by a horizon of liberation, antiracism, and justice. If this misleading interpretation were to prevail, then by analogy the decades-long demand to dismantle apartheid in South Africa would have been construed as a demand to destroy South Africa and/or kill or displace all white South Africans. In contrast, a historically-informed understanding of decolonisation advocates for Palestinian rights and self-determination, and argues that this should be carried out not through processes of elimination of the settlers but through a process that revokes the privileges of the settler polity and creates a form of governance based on equality and freedom for all inhabitants.
The efforts to cast settler colonial claims as antisemitic have emerged at a time when antisemitism, Islamophobia, and anti-Palestinian racism are on the rise across the UK, Europe, North America, and elsewhere. Manifestations of hate towards Jews, Muslims, Arabs and Palestinians must be challenged wherever they appear, not least in higher education institutions. However, the labelling of certain ideas and concepts, including but not limited to, settler colonialism, decolonisation, and anti-colonialism, as antisemitic or support for terrorism, constitutes a very dangerous narrowing of the parameters of what constitutes politically-acceptable speech, and repeatedly morphs into Islamophobia. 1
BRISMES strongly warns against the assumption that scholars of the MENA region or students and activists who voice their opposition to the Israeli regime in terms of settler-colonialism, decolonisation and anticolonialism are motivated by antisemitism rather than an understanding of historical developments in the region. We see the attacks on settler colonial studies, and on decolonial and anticolonial perspectives, as part of the wider attacks on critical scholarship that we have witnessed in recent years, in particular regarding critical race theory and trans-inclusive scholarship.
In all cases, it is imperative to uphold the rights of staff and students to use concepts and theoretical frameworks rooted in the historical and lived experiences of colonised peoples and to allow the voices of those living under colonialism to be heard. Universities have a legal obligation to uphold freedom of expression for staff and students, which is paramount for academic freedom and the pursuit of knowledge.
1 In a recent report, the Rutgers Center for Security, Race and Rights, following an analysis of US public debate on Israel-Palestine, finds that, “when Muslims and Arabs in America defend the rights of Palestinians or criticize Israeli state policy, they are often baselessly presumed to be motivated by a hatred for Jews rather than support for human rights, freedom, and consistent enforcement of international law”, arguing that such presumptions are informed by Islamophobia. Rutgers Center for Security, Race and Rights, ‘Presumptively antisemitic: Islamophobic tropes in the Israel-Palestine discourse’, November 2023
Appendix: Academic Arguments for Settler-Colonialism in Israel-Palestine
These maps depict the growing number and geographic expansion of Jewish settlements in the area that had been Mandatory Palestine, from 67 settlements in 1917 to 1,178 settlements in 2020. It does not show Palestinian villages, of which about 500 were destroyed in the aftermath of the 1948 war.
A well-established field of scholarship has shown how colonialism operates as a mode of domination, via the extraction of material resources, exploitation and dispossession, enforced by violence and justified by racist ideologies. Settler colonialism is structured more directly by territorial conquest via mass settlement: whereby a settler population seeks to replace native peoples, ecologies and modes of relations through a combination of killing, ethnic cleansing, land dispossession, partition, transfer and cultural assimilation (see amongst others, Estes 2019, Karuka 2019, Kauanui 2008 and Wolfe 2006). In order to help educate scholars and the wider public on the framework of settler colonialism as it applies to Israel-Palestine, BRISMES has created this appendix, which lays out some of the main arguments that scholars make as to why and how Israel-Palestine should be understood as a settler colonial context.
Before Israel’s establishment in 1948, the Zionist movement described itself as a settler colonial enterprise. Theodor Herzl promised European leaders that the ‘State of the Jews’ would “form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism” (Herzl 1997). Vladimir Jabotinsky described Jewish colonists in Palestine as “alien settlers” intent on thwarting the indigenous population’s aspiration to rule themselves and their country (Jabotinsky 1923). Palestinian, Israeli and international scholars have since shown how the Zionist movement, with the support of imperial Great Britain and, later, the Israeli state, has sought to maximise the land it controls while minimising the number of Indigenous Palestinians under its sovereign authority (Abu-Lughod and Abu-Laban, 1974; Khalidi 2021; Pappe 2008; Rodinson 1973; Said 1979; Sayegh 1965; Sayigh 1979; Veracini 2013; Wolfe 2006; Zreik 2023; Zureik 1979). Settler-colonial and decolonial analyses have highlighted how the space of Mandatory Palestine has been both conceptually and physically de-Palestinianised and ‘Judaised’ (Falah, 1991; Dana and Jarbawi, 2017; Blatman 2017).
Scholars of Israel-Palestine who draw on settler colonialism as a framework have demonstrated how racial dimensions of Israeli power structures manifest themselves in basic laws, citizenship categories and modes of governance (e.g. Lentin, 2018; Rouhana and Sabbagh-Khoury, 2015; Tatour, 2019), as well as the processes through which Palestinians have been dispossessed (Amara 2013; Cohen and Gordon 2018) and the ideological formations and discourses used to justify and normalise Palestinian displacement (Perugini 2019; Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2015). Scholars have shown how Zionist settlers who immigrated first to Palestine and, after 1948, to Israel, displaced and then replaced the majority of the indigenous Palestinian population. Indeed, approximately 750,000 Arab Palestinians either fled or were expelled during the war of 1947-48 and despite UN Resolution 194 underscoring their right to return to their homes, Israel prevented them from doing so.
After 1948, the newly-created Israeli state enacted the massive confiscation of Palestinian lands (Sa’di 2013; Khamaisi 2003). By 1951, the Israeli state effectively owned 92 percent of the land within its territory, up from 13.5 percent in 1948 (Forman and Kedar 2004). Of the 370 new Jewish settlements established soon after 1948, 350 were built on or in proximity to Palestinian villages that had been destroyed (Kedar and Yiftachel 2006). Also by 1951, the 750,000 Palestinians who had become refugees in 1948 were “replaced” by a similar number of Jewish immigrants, both Holocaust survivors from Europe and Mizrahi Jews from Arab-majority countries, thus transforming the nascent state’s ethnic composition without altering its overall population size (Cohen 2002). These and other studies have argued that settler colonial elimination and replacement have constituted the foundational logics of the constitution of the State of Israel, which persist into the present (Jabary Salamanca et al. 2012).
In line with Patrick Wolfe’s (1998) argument that settler colonialism is not an event but a structure, scholars of settler colonialism have argued that the separation of the Palestinian people from their land was embedded in Israel’s laws, policies, and practices after 1948 and swiftly became part of the overarching logic of the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem, Gaza Strip and the West Bank following the 1967 war (Said 1980; see also B’Tselem 2002). They have furthermore argued that these same logics are structuring Israel’s 2023-2024 war on the Gaza Strip, which is characterised not only by the immense numbers of civilians killed but also the forced displacement of over 2 million Palestinians, and the destruction of civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, schools, residential homes and agricultural land. This level of violence has the explicit aim of making Gaza uninhabitable, further disconnecting its population–largely constituted of 1948 refugees–from their land, ecology and space of life. Indeed, it could be argued that the events of the recent months represent some of the most intense moments of settler colonialism and its attempt to eliminate the indigenous Palestinian population in the history of Israel-Palestine.
Indicative Bibliography of Scholarship on Israel-Palestine and Settler-Colonialism
Abu-Lughod, Ibrahim and Baha Abu-Laban (eds) (1974) Settler Regimes in Africa and the Arab World: The Illusion of Endurance. Wilmette, IL: Medina University Press International.
Amara, Ahmad (2013) “The Negev land question: Between denial and recognition.” Journal of Palestine Studies 42(4): 27-47.
Blatman, Naama (2017) “Commuting for rights: Circular mobilities and regional identities of Palestinians in a Jewish-Israeli town.” Geoforum 78: 22-32.
Cohen, Yinon (2002) “From Haven to Heaven: Changes in Immigration Patterns to Israel,” in Levy D. and Y. Weiss (eds), Challenging Ethnic Citizenship: German and Israeli Perspectives on Immigration. New York: Berghahn Books: 36-56.
Cohen, Yinon and Neve Gordon (2018) “Israel’s biospatial politics: Territory, demography, and effective control.” Public Culture 30(2): 199-220.
Dana, Tariq and Ali Jarbawi (2017) ‘A Century of Settler Colonialism in Palestine: Zionism’s Entangled Project.’ The Brown Journal of World Affairs 24(1): 197-220.
Estes, Nick (2019) Our History is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. London: Verso Books.
Evri, Yuval, and Hagar Kotef (2022) ‘When Does a Native Become a Settler? (With Apologies to Zreik and Mamdani)’. Constellations 29(1): 3–18.
Falah, Ghazi (1991) ‘Israeli “Judaization” Policy in Galilee.’ Journal of Palestine Studies 20(4): 69-85.
Forman, Geremy, and Alexandre (Sandy) Kedar (2004) ‘From Arab Land to “Israel Lands”: The Legal Dispossession of the Palestinians Displaced by Israel in the Wake of 1948.’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22(6): 809–30.
Herzl, Theodor. (1997) The Jews’ state: A critical English translation. Jason Aronson, Incorporated.
Jabary Salamanca, Omar and Mezna Qato, Kareem Rabie, Sobhi Samour (2012) “Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine,” Settler Colonial Studies 2(1): 1-8
Jabotisnky, Vladimir Ze’ev. (1923) ” The Iron Wall.”
Karuka, Manu (2019) Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers and the Transcontinental Railroad. Oakland: University of California.
Kauanui, J. Kehaulani (2008) Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity. Durham: Duke University Press.
Kedar, Alexandre and Oren Yiftachel (2006) ‘Land Regime and Social Relations in Israel,’ in de Soto H. and Cheneval F. (eds), Swiss Human Rights Book, Vol. 1, Zurich: Ruffer and Rub, 2006, 129-146.
Khalidi, Rashid (2021) The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017. New York: Picador.
Khamaisi, Rassem (2003) “Mechanism of land control and territorial Judaization of Israel,” in Al-Haj, Majed and Uri Ben-Eliezer (eds) In the Name of Security. Haifa: Haifa University Press: 421-449.
Lentin, Ronit (2018) Traces of Racial Exception: Racializing Israeli Settler Colonialism. London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Murphy, Shannonbrooke (2012) ‘The Right to Resist Reconsidered,’ in Keane, David and Yvonne McDermott (eds) The Challenge of Human Rights: Past, Present and Future. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Pappé, Ilan (2008) ‘Zionism as Colonialism: A Comparative View of Diluted Colonialism in Asia and Africa.’ South Atlantic Quarterly 107(4): 611–33.
Perugini, Nicola (2019) ‘Settler colonial inversions: Israel’s ‘disengagement’ and the Gush Katif ‘Museum of Expulsion’ in Jerusalem,’ Settler Colonial Studies, 9(1): 41-58
Rodinson, Maxime (1973) Israel – A Colonial-Settler State, Anchor Foundation.
Rouhana, Nadim N., and Areej Sabbagh-Khoury (2015) ‘Settler-colonial citizenship: Conceptualizing the relationship between Israel and its Palestinian citizens.’ Settler Colonial Studies 5(3): 205-225.
Sa’di, Ahmad H (2013) Thorough Surveillance: The Genesis of Israeli Policies of Population Management, Surveillance and Political Control Towards the Palestinian Minority. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Said, Edward (1979) ‘Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims’. Social Text 1: 7–58.
Sayegh, Fayez (1965) Zionist Colonialism in Palestine. Beirut: Palestine Liberation Organization Research Center.
Sayigh, Rosemary (1979) Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries: A People’s History. London: Zed Books.
Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Nadera (2015) Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tatour, Lana (2019) ‘Citizenship as Domination: Settler Colonialism and the Making of Palestinian Citizenship in Israel.’ The Arab Studies Journal 27(2): 8–39.
Veracini, Lorenzo (2013) ‘The Other Shift: Settler Colonialism, Israel, and the Occupation.’ Journal of Palestine Studies 42(2): 26–42.
Wolfe, Patrick (1999) Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event. London: Cassell.
Wolfe, Patrick (2006) ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.’ Journal of Genocide Research 8(4): 387–409.
Zreik, Raef (2016) ‘When Does a Settler Become a Native?’ Constellations 23(3): 351–64.
Zreik, Raef (2023) “What’s the Problem with the Jewish State?” in Sa’di, Ahmad H and Nur Masalha (eds) Decolonizing the Study of Palestine: Indigenous Perspectives and Settler Colonialism after Elia Zureik: 73.
Zureik, Elia T (1979) The Palestinians in Israel: A Study in Internal Colonialism. London: Routledge.
The struggle for Palestinian rights has never been more important – or more dire.
The conflict has reached a turning point, as the year 2023 became the deadliest for Palestinians on record. In the Gaza Strip, Palestinians face an existential crisis. Leading genocide scholars, experts in international law, and respected human rights organizations have warned that the world is witnessing a genocide, unchecked war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity by the state of Israel.
Simultaneously, the demonization of pro-Palestinian voices in the United States has risen to a fever pitch – particularly when those voices are Muslim and Arab. Zionists and Islamophobes attack critics of Israel’s policies and practices by conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism and seek to censor discussions within the context of the 56-year-long illegal Israeli occupation and the Nakba. Instead, antisemitism is weaponized to silence and discredit advocates of Palestinian human rights.
Presumptively Antisemitic: Islamophobic Tropes in the Palestine-Israel Discourse examines an understudied and little-understood aspect of Palestine-Israel discourse: how Islamophobia works to fuel and sustain spurious allegations of antisemitism used by the Israel Lobby and its Zionist supporters to shame and silence critics of Israeli ethnic cleansing and apartheid.
While people of all faiths and ethnicities understand and empathize with the historic plight of the Palestinians, nowhere is pro-Israel bias more obvious than when directed against Muslim and Arab defenders of Palestinian human rights. And mainstream media often uncritically repeats such harmful, unsubstantiated claims against Arabs and Muslims.
Three recommendations for U.S. civil society, universities, and elected officials would help all those interested in confronting and countering both Islamophobia and genuine antisemitism – while maintaining necessary support for the human rights of Palestinians:
Congress and the President must include the experiences and perspectives of Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim American communities in foreign policy development. U.S. foreign policy on Palestine and Israel currently excludes the lived experiences, analysis, and perspectives of Arabs (especially Palestinians) and Muslims. One-sided, biased input by pro-Israeli nonprofit organizations, elected officials, and analysts predictably dehumanizes Palestinians and exempts Israel from human rights norms.
Universities must preserve academic freedom and free speech rights. When it comes to the topic of Palestine, students and faculty face overt hostility when they host events, conduct research, publish articles, or engage in campus activism. University administrators enable, or participate in, harassment of faculty and students. Specious administrative complaints of antisemitism coupled with malicious blacklisting by a nationwide Islamophobic network work to quash criticism of Israel.
The U.S. government must hold Israel accountable for violations of Palestinians’ human rights. Ongoing violations of international law by Israel – such as settlement expansion, indefinite detention, extrajudicial killings, house demolitions, and collective punishment of the population of Gaza occur unchecked because the United States consistently looks the other way. Even U.S. domestic laws are flouted in order to craft human rights exceptions for the apartheid Israeli regime.
To read Presumptively Antisemitic: Islamophobic Tropes in the Palestine-Israel Discourse, click here.
Recently, the Islamic Republic of Iran announced the Persian translation of the 2016 book The Biggest Prison on Earth by the Israeli historian Prof. Ilan Pappe.
This should come as no surprise because the Iranian regime regards Pappe, a former professor at Haifa University, as one of its legitimizers, along with Shlomo Sand, Noam Chomsky, and other bashers of Israel.
The regime is interested in Pappe because of his “critically acclaimed investigation of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in the 1940s.” According to Iran, Pappe is a “renowned historian” who turned attention to the “annexation and occupation of Gaza and the West Bank… bringing the readers the first comprehensive critique of the Occupied Territories.” Pappe investigated the “bureaucracy of evil” and explored the “brutalizing effects of occupation, from the systematic abuse of human and civil rights, the IDF roadblocks, mass arrests, and house searches to the forced population transfer, the settlers, and the infamous wall that is rapidly turning the West Bank into an open prison.”
Pappe is a huge asset to the regime because he is “a professor with the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter in the UK, director of the university’s European Centre for Palestine Studies, co-director of the Exeter Centre for Ethno-Political Studies, and political activist. He was formerly a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa (1984–2007) and chair of the Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian and Israeli Studies in Haifa (2000–2008),” as they wrote.
For the regime, the book “exposes Israeli violations in Palestine against its indigenous people.” The Israeli historian “reveals” Israel’s “ugly crimes against humanity over the years, using clear-cut evidence that indicts the settler colonial entity.” Pappe analyzed “Zionist objectives in occupied Palestine and the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians” in different historical epochs. He “begins by describing Israeli preparations made several years before 1967’s Six-Day War to control large portions of Palestine without formally annexing them and thereby granting civil rights to the Palestinians living there” Instead, according to Pappe, with the imposition of Israeli rule, “the Palestinians living there were incarcerated for crimes they never committed and for offenses that were never committed, confessed, or defined.” Pappe showed that the Israelis offered an “open-air prison when the Palestinians were compliant and a maximum security prison.”
As the Iranians stated, Pappe is one of Israel’s New Historians who “has been rewriting the history of Israel’s creation in 1948, and the corresponding expulsion or flight of 700,000 Palestinians in the same year. He has written that the expulsions were not decided on an ad hoc basis, as other historians have argued, but constituted the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, in accordance with Plan Dalet, drawn up in 1947 by Israel’s future leaders. He blames the creation of Israel for the lack of peace in the Middle East, arguing that Zionism is more dangerous than Islamic militancy, and has called for an international boycott of Israeli academics.”
Prof. Benny Morris, one the original New Historians who became disillusioned with his colleagues, devoted time to exposing their “lie industry.” He wrote “The Liar as Hero” in the New Republic in 2011 that Ilan Pappe is a sloppy and dishonest historian. Morris reviewed Pappe’s two books, The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty: The Husaynis, 1700-1948, and The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Morris noted that, “At best, Ilan Pappe must be one of the world’s sloppiest historians; at worst, one of the most dishonest. In truth, he probably merits a place somewhere between the two.” According to Morris, Pappe’s “distortions, large and small, characterize almost every page of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.” Morris wrote that “Pappe introduced the subject, and perverted the text, for one purpose only: to blacken the image of Israel and its leaders in 1948. This is also among the purposes of The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty and Out of the Frame.” Morris says that Pappe “often omits and ignores significant evidence, and he, too, alleges that a source tells us the opposite of what it in fact says, but he will also simply and straightforwardly falsify evidence.” And that “To the deliberate slanting of history Pappe adds a profound ignorance of basic facts. Together these sins and deficiencies render his ‘histories’ worthless as representations of the past.” Or that, “Some of Pappe’s ‘historical’ assertions are, quite obviously, politically motivated, but they are mistakes nonetheless… Suffice it to say that Pappe’s contempt for historical truth and factual accuracy is almost boundless.”
Morris stated: “In sum, Pappeis a retroactive poseur. But by the middle or late 1990s, after getting tenure, Pappe did shift gears into a full-blown radicalism, political and historiographical. By then he was advocating Israel’s elimination and the establishment in the territory of Mandatory Palestine of one state, consisting of Jews and Arabs. That it would have an Arab majority and, if democratic, be ruled by Arabs was to be assured by a mass return of Arab refugees, which Pappe also advocated, and still advocates. One of his books is dedicated to his two children, whom he hopes will live in a better ‘Palestine.’ In Out of the Frame, Pappe defines Zionism as ‘a racist and quite evil philosophy of morality and life.’ The language is fully as virulent as Hamas’s, or worse.”
Morris even mentioned how “Pappe, in the course of the second intifada in 2000-2004—when Israel was virtually at war with the Palestinians of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, while buses and restaurants in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa almost daily were being demolished by suicide bombers—publicly promoted an international boycott of Israel’s universities, including his own. In the name of the embattled Palestinians, Pappe called on Western academic institutions to stop joint projects and cut off research funds (‘divestment’).”
While Pappe was a pioneer of radical anti-Zionism, over time, the ranks of this group grew exponentially, as IAM frequently documented. Morris makes the same point when speaking about the integration of Israeli academics into university life in the West. “By the early 2000s, departments of political science, sociology, Hebrew literature, and cultural studies in some Israeli universities had become bulwarks of anti-Zionism, in which professing Zionists can barely achieve a toehold, let alone tenure. And the history departments and the Middle East studies departments are also far from being redoubts of Zionism. In Israeli academia today, one will find the whole political gamut, running from avowed Zionists to critics of Israeli policies to critics of Israel’s Jewishness and Israel’s existence to (a handful of) advocates of anti-Israel boycotts and divestments.”
Morris ended his piece by discussing how “In Out of the Frame, Pappe complains that Yoav Gelber had referred to him, during the University of Haifa troubles, as Israel’s “Lord Haw-Haw.” That was the name given by the British media to William Joyce, an American-born Englishman of Irish extraction who broadcast Nazi propaganda from Berlin during World War II. He was tried and hanged by the British as a traitor in 1946.” Pappe had fared much better in Great Britain. He got a plush job at the University of Exeter, which he turned into a platform of Israel bushing on steroids.
Indeed, critics attributed the current wave of pro-Palestinian protest on campuses in the United States and Western Europe to the dominance of the “narrative” that considers Israel to be a colonial usurper in the Middle East subjugating the Palestinians. Worse, the “narrative” portrays the brutal Hamas murders as “resistance fighters.”
Interestingly, shortly after the announcement of Pappe’s book published in Iran, Pappe, in a Facebook post on May 16, wrote that he was detained for questioning upon entering the U.S. After describing in great detail his “ordeal” at the hands of the FBI, he managed to find a silver lining in the episode: “The good news is – actions like this by the USA or European countries taken under pressure from the pro-Israeli lobby or Israel itself smell of sheer panic and desperation in reaction to Israel’s becoming very soon a pariah state with all the implications of such a status.”
Pappe is lucky that he landed in the United States. Iran, a country where he is a literary hero, would have dealt with anyone threatening its perceived security very differently. Many academics and others have ended up kept for years in the brutal regime’s prisons. But then again, Pappe has never raised any objection to the horrific violation of humanitarian laws that Iran has committed.
Book by Israeli historian on occupied territories published in Persian
May 13, 2024
TEHRAN-The Persian translation of the book “The Biggest Prison on Earth” written by the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe has hit the Iranian bookstores.
Maryam Gharagozlou and Mehdi Khanalizadeh have translated the book, which is published by Ketabestan Publications, Mehr reported.
Following his critically acclaimed investigation of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in the 1940s, renowned historian Pappe turns his attention to the annexation and occupation of Gaza and the West Bank in this book, bringing the readers the first comprehensive critique of the Occupied Territories.
Based on groundbreaking archival research, NGO records, and eyewitness accounts, Pappe’s investigation of the “bureaucracy of evil” explores the brutalizing effects of occupation, from the systematic abuse of human and civil rights, the IDF roadblocks, mass arrests, and house searches to the forced population transfer, the settlers, and the infamous wall that is rapidly turning the West Bank into an open prison. Providing a sharp contrast with life in Israel, this is a brilliantly incisive and moving portrait of daily life in the Occupied Territories.
First published in 2016, “The Biggest Prison on Earth” exposes Israeli violations in Palestine against its indigenous people. The Israeli historian reveals Israel’s ugly crimes against humanity over the years, using clear-cut evidence that indicts the settler colonial entity. Pappe comprehensively analyzes Zionist objectives in occupied Palestine and the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in different historical epochs.
He begins by describing Israeli preparations made several years before 1967’s Six-Day War to control large portions of Palestine without formally annexing them and thereby granting civil rights to the Palestinians living there. Instead, with the imposition of Israeli rule, “the Palestinians living there were incarcerated for crimes they never committed and for offenses that were never committed, confessed, or defined.”
Pappe shows that the Israelis offered an “open-air prison” when the Palestinians were compliant and a “maximum security prison” when they offered any resistance. Both left them shorn of basic human rights but the latter also featured harsh punishments up to and including military attacks on civilians.
The author cites numerous violations of international law as well as generally duplicitous behavior by Israeli leaders toward other nations and international bodies, particularly during the Oslo Accord negotiations. Moreover, according to a 2016 U.N. report, Israel’s actions toward the Gaza Strip will render life there “unsustainable” by 2020. Pappe’s conclusions won’t be welcome in all quarters but this detailed history is rigorously supported by primary sources.
The Israeli historian’s work earned the 2017 Book of Palestine Award, and it was recently translated into Arabic.
He has dedicated his book to the children of Palestine who endured killing, injury, and bullying because they live in the biggest prison on earth.
Pappé, 69, is a professor with the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter in the UK, director of the university’s European Centre for Palestine Studies, co-director of the Exeter Centre for Ethno-Political Studies, and political activist. He was formerly a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa (1984–2007) and chair of the Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian and Israeli Studies in Haifa (2000–2008).
Pappé is one of Israel’s new historians who, since the release of pertinent British and Israeli government documents in the early 1980s, have been rewriting the history of Israel’s creation in 1948, and the corresponding expulsion or flight of 700,000 Palestinians in the same year.
He has written that the expulsions were not decided on an ad hoc basis, as other historians have argued, but constituted the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, in accordance with Plan Dalet, drawn up in 1947 by Israel’s future leaders. He blames the creation of Israel for the lack of peace in the Middle East, arguing that Zionism is more dangerous than Islamic militancy, and has called for an international boycott of Israeli academics.
His work has been both supported and criticized by other historians. Before he left Israel in 2008, he had been condemned in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament; a minister of education had called for him to be sacked; his photograph had appeared in a newspaper at the center of a target; and he had received several death threats.
Did you know that 70 years old professors of history are threatening America’ national security?
I arrived on Monday at Detroit airport and was taken for a two hours investigation by the FBI, and my phone was taken as well.
The two men team were not abusive or rude, I should say, but their questions were really out of the world!
am I a Hamas supporter? do I regard the Israeli actions in Gaza a genocide? what is the solution to the “conflict” (seriously this what they asked!)
who are my Arab and Muslim friends in America…how long do I know them, what kind of relationship I have with them.
Is some cases I sent them to my books, and is some cases I answered laconically yes or no…(I was quite exhausted after an 8 hours flight, but this is part of the idea).
They had long phone conversation with someone, the Israelis?,
and after copying everything on my phone allowed me to enter.
I know many of you have fared far worse experience, but after France and Germany denied entry to the Rector of Glasgow university for being a Palestinian…God know what will happen next.
The good news is – actions like this by the USA or European countries taken under pressure from the pro-Israeli lobby or Israel itself smell of sheer panic and desperation in reaction to Israel’s becoming very soon a pariah state with all the implications of such a status.
Renowned Israeli historian, Professor Ilan Pappé, was detained and interrogated on Monday at Detroit airport, in the US state of Michigan.
In a Facebook post on Wednesday, Pappé said that he was “taken for a two hours investigation by the FBI” and that his “phone was taken as well.”
“Am I a Hamas supporter? do I regard the Israeli actions in Gaza a genocide? what is the solution to the ‘conflict’ (seriously this what they asked!),” the post continued.
Pappé was also asked who were his “Arab and Muslim friends in America… how long do I know them, what kind of relationship I have with them.”
“They had long phone conversation with someone, the Israelis?, and after copying everything on my phone allowed me to enter,” the post added.
According to the anti-Zionist author and professor, this is a reflection “of sheer panic and desperation in reaction to Israel’s becoming very soon a pariah state with all the implications of such a status.”
Pappé is a professor at the University of Exeter. He was formerly a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa.
He is the author of many books, including The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, The Modern Middle East, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, and Ten Myths about Israel.
Pappé is the co-editor, with Palestinian historian, Dr. Ramzy Baroud of ‘Our Vision for Liberation’.
Pappé is also a regular contributor to the Palestine Chronicle. In one of his latest articles, entitled ‘A Wall and a Watchtower: Why is Israel Failing?’, he wrote:
“Why do so many supporters of Israel and the Israeli Jews themselves believe that this is a sustainable project in the 21st century?
“The truth is, it is not sustainable.
“The problem is that its disintegration could be a long process and a very bloody one, whose principal victims would be the Palestinians.”
For more of Pappé’s writing in the Palestine Chronicle, click here.
Anti-Zionist Israeli historian Ilan Pappé stopped and interrogated at Detroit airport
16 May 2024
By Patrick Martin
Internationally renowned Israeli historian Ilan Pappé was stopped by federal agents and interrogated for two hours Monday as he entered US territory at Detroit Metropolitan Airport. Pappé was visiting southeast Michigan to speak at public meetings in Detroit and two suburbs, Dearborn and Ferndale.
Agents from the Department of Homeland Security confiscated and copied the contents of his cellphone before returning it to him. They asked him detailed questions about his anti-Zionist political views and who he was in contact with in the United States, before finally admitting him to the country.
In a posting on his Facebook page, Pappé recounted some of the details of this outrageous attack on democratic rights, which gives a glimpse of the police-state methods of the US government towards those it suspects of opposition to American foreign policy.
“The two men team were not abusive or rude, I should say, but their questions were really out of the world!” Pappé wrote.
Am I a Hamas supporter? Do I regard the Israeli actions in Gaza a genocide? What is the solution to the “conflict” (seriously this what they asked!) Who are my Arab and Muslim friends in America… how long do I know them, what kind of relationship I have with them.
In some cases I sent them to my books, and is some cases I answered laconically yes or no… (I was quite exhausted after an 8 hours flight, but this is part of the idea). They had long phone conversation with someone, the Israelis?, and after copying everything on my phone allowed me to enter.
I know many of you have fared far worse experience, but after France and Germany denied entry to the Rector of Glasgow university for being a Palestinian… God know what will happen next.
The good news is – actions like this by the USA or European countries taken under pressure from the pro-Israeli lobby or Israel itself smell of sheer panic and desperation in reaction to Israel’s becoming very soon a pariah state with all the implications of such a status.
Pappé was formerly a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa, before moving to Britain, where he was a lecturer at Leeds University. He is now professor of Middle Eastern studies at the University of Exeter.
He has written more than 20 books on the history of Israel-Palestine, including The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, which provides a thorough examination of the Nakba, the driving out of 700,000 Palestinians and the seizure of their land in the course of the founding of Israel in 1947-48.
Other works include The Modern Middle East, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoplesand Ten Myths about Israel.
Pappé gave an interview to Al Jazeera May 15 marking the 76th anniversary of the Nakba (although he prefers to refer to it, not as a catastrophe—Nakba in Arabic—but as a crime, since a catastrophe could be a natural one, but this was a crime with a perpetrator, the Zionists, and a victim, the Palestinians).
Based on his great familiarity with the events of 1948, he observed that the current attack on Gaza is “even worse” than those terrible events. “What we see now are massacres which are part of the genocidal impulse, namely to kill people in order to downsize the number of people living in Gaza,” he said. “Ethnic cleansing is a terrible crime against humanity but genocide is even worse.”
After his interrogation by the DHS, Pappé went on to address the three scheduled public meetings on the topic “Gaza in Context: Past, Present, & Future.” He spoke before large audiences which included many Arab Americans. The Detroit area has the largest population of Arab Americans in the US.
One of his many insights was a detailed explanation of the history of the Gaza Strip, established as a giant refugee camp for Palestinians pushed south by Zionist terrorism in 1948.
The territory was originally a third larger than the present Gaza, but additional land, about 110 square kilometers, was subsequently seized by the state of Israel and handed over for settlement after a campaign by the “left” Zionist party Mapam, which wanted the land to build kibbutzes, because of its fertility.
The kibbutzes attacked on October 7 were among those built on land directly adjacent to Gaza which had been confiscated and its Palestinian population driven into Gaza. Two generations of Palestinian youth learned of the dispossession of its original inhabitants from land which remained within view.
החוקר והיסטוריון פרופ’ אילן פפה נעצר ביום רביעי האחרון עם הגעתו לארה”ב ונחקר על עמדותיו הפוליטיות. כך מסר פפה ברשומה שפרסם אתמול בפייסבוק. הוא הגיע לשיקגו על מנת להשתתף בדיון אקדמי ובשדה התעופה המתינו לו שני סוכנים של המחלקה לביטחון המולדת של ארה”ב, שמנוע ממנו להמשיך בדרכו וחקרו אותו במשך שעתיים. כמו כן, העתיקו את כל תכולת הטלפון הנייד שהחזיק.
“האם מרצה להיסטוריה בן 70 מהווה איום על הביטחון הלאומי של ארה”ב?”, כתב פפה והוסיף שבין השאלות שנשאל: “האם אתה תומך בחמאס?”, “האם אתה סבור שישראל מבצעת רצח עם ברצועת עזה?”, “מהו לדעתך הפתרון לסכסוך הישראלי-פלסטיני?”. ועוד נשאל “האם יש לך חברים ערבים או מוסלמים בארה”ב – כמה זמן אתה מכיר אותם?”. פפה סירב להשיב לחקירה הפוליטיות ורק ענה ב”כן” ו”לא”. יצוין שבשנה האחרונה נאסר כניסתו של פפה ל-29 מדינות אירופיות.
פרופ’ פפה (יליד חיפה, 1954) לימד באוניברסיטת חיפה משנת 1984, תחילה בחוג להיסטוריה של המזרח התיכון ולאחר מכן בחוג למדע המדינה. כמו כן, הוא ייסד את המכון לחקר השלום בגבעת חביבה ועמד בראשו במשך עשור, והיה יו”ר מכון אמיל תומא לעיונים פלסטינים וישראלים בחיפה. במשך שנים רבות פעל נגד כיבוש השטחים הפלסטינים. הוצאת “ספרי נובמבר” פרסמה לפני שלוש שנים את התרגום העברי לספרו “הטיהור האתני של פלסטין”. הספר ראה אור לראשונה באנגלית בשנת 2006, ומאז תורגם ל-15 שפות.
בשנת 2007 עזב פפה את ישראל ועבר לבריטניה, שם הוא מרצה וחוקר בפקולטה להיסטוריה באוניברסיטת אקסטר ומנהל את המרכז האירופי ללימוד פלסטין. בטרם עזב את ישראל קיבל איומי רצח בטלפון ובדואר, בכנסת גינו אותו, שר החינוך קרא לפיטוריו, ותמונתו הופיעה בעיתון “ידיעות אחרונות” במרכזה של כוונת רובה. לצד התמונה פורסם טור בו נכתב: “אני לא אומר שצריך להרוג את האיש הזה, אבל אני לא אהיה מופתע אם מישהו יעשה את זה”.
The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty: The Husaynis, 1700-1948 By Ilan Pappe (University of California Press, 399 pp., $29.95)
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
By Ilan Pappe (Oneworld, 313 pp., $14.95)
I.
At best, Ilan Pappe must be one of the world’s sloppiest historians; at worst, one of the most dishonest. In truth, he probably merits a place somewhere between the two.
Here is a clear and typical example—in detail, which is where the devil resides—of Pappe’s handiwork. I take this example from The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. On February 2, 1948, a young Jewish scientist named Aharon Katzir came to see David Ben-Gurion, the chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive and the leader of the Jewish community in Palestine. Two months earlier, the General Assembly of the United Nations had recommended the partition of the country into two states. The Zionist establishment had accepted Resolution 181, but the Palestinian Arab leadership, and the surrounding Arab states, had rejected it—and Palestinian militiamen began to shoot at Jewish traffic, pedestrians, and settlements. The first Arab-Israeli war had begun.
Katzir had come to report to the man managing the Jewish war effort (Ben-Gurion also held the defense portfolio in the Jewish Agency Executive) about an experiment that he and his team in the Haganah’s “science branch” had been conducting. As was his wont, Ben-Gurion jotted down in his diary what his visitor told him. (Ben-Gurion’s diary, a major source on Israeli and Middle East history, consists almost entirely of his summaries of reports by people coming to see him; very few entries actually enlighten the reader about what Ben-Gurion thought or said.) The entry reads:
Aharon: ‘Shimshon’ [the operation’s codename], an experiment was conducted on animals. The researchers were clothed in gas masks and suit. The suit costs 20 grush, the mask about 20 grush (all must be bought immediately). The operation [or experiment] went well. No animal died, the [animals] remained dazzled [as when a car’s headlights dazzle an oncoming driver] for 24 hours. There are some 50 kilos [of the gas]. [They] were moved to Tel Aviv. The [production] equipment is being moved here. On the laboratory level, some 20 kilos can be produced per day.
This is the only accessible source that exists, to the best of my knowledge, about the meeting and the gas experiment, and it is the sole source cited by Pappe for his description of the meeting and the “Shimshon” project. But this is how Pappe gives the passage in English:
Katzir reported to Ben-Gurion: “We are experimenting with animals. Our researchers were wearing gas masks and adequate outfit. Good results. The animals did not die (they were just blinded). We can produce 20 kilos a day of this stuff.”
The translation is flecked with inaccuracies, but the outrage is in Pappe’s perversion of “dazzled,” or sunveru, to “blinded”—in Hebrew “blinded” would be uvru, the verb not used by Ben-Gurion—coupled with the willful omission of the qualifier “for 24 hours.” Pappe’s version of this text is driven by something other than linguistic and historiographical accuracy. Published in English for the English-speaking world, where animal-lovers are legion and deliberately blinding animals would be regarded as a barbaric act, the passage, as published by Pappe, cannot fail to provoke a strong aversion to Ben-Gurion and to Israel.
Such distortions, large and small, characterize almost every page of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. So I should add, to make the historical context perfectly clear, that no gas was ever used in the war of 1948 by any of the participants. Pappe never tells the reader this. Raising the subject of gas is historical irrelevance. But the paragraph will dangle in the reader’s imagination as a dark possibility, or worse, a dark reality: the Jews, gassed by the Nazis three years before, were about to gas, or were gassing, Arabs. I note also, for accuracy’s sake, that, apart from the 1917 battle for Gaza in World War I, the only people in the Middle East who have used poison gas against their enemies in the past century have been Arabs—the Egyptians in Yemen in the 1960s, the Iraqis in Kurdistan in the 1980s. So there can be no escaping the conclusion that Pappe introduced the subject, and perverted the text, for one purpose only: to blacken the image of Israel and its leaders in 1948. This is also among the purposes of The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty and Out of the Frame.
II. Palestinian Dynasty was a good idea. It attempts to describe the evolution and the activities of one of Palestine’s leading notable families, the Husaynis of Jerusalem, from their rise around 1700 to local and then “national” prominence, until their fall from grace and power in 1947-1948. The Husaynis over the generations were religious leaders and mayors of the holy city, and filled other posts as well, including representing the area in the Ottoman parliament. The most famous Husayni was Muhammad Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the grand mufti of Jerusalem from 1921 and the leader of the Arab Higher Committee (AHC), the Palestinians’ executive political body, and thus of the Palestine Arab national movement during the crucial years between 1936 and 1948. Thereafter only one member of the clan, Faysal, the son of Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni, was to achieve real prominence and a measure of power, as the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Jerusalem affairs supremo in the 1990s. Pappe calls Faysal “the most renowned Palestinian of the end of the twentieth century.” I always thought that was Yasir Arafat.
Pappe uses the Husayni story as a vehicle to describe Palestine’s history during those two and a half centuries, spanning Ottoman and British rule and the clash with Zionism, and ending with the first Arab-Israeli war, the establishment of the state of Israel and the collapse of Palestinian society and politics. The book’s treatment of the successive periods is chronologically disproportionate: pages 23 to 91 cover the Ottoman years, from 1700 to 1875, almost two centuries; and pages 92 to 342 cover the seventy-two years of waning Ottoman rule and the British and “Zionist” years, from 1876 to 1948. In fact, there is far more source material for the later years and a relative paucity of material on the earlier period. But Pappe’s real interest lies in politics, specifically anti-British-imperial politics and anti-Zionist politics, and not in distant Ottoman-era history.
The disproportion also reflects Pappe’s worth as a historian. Let me explain. To cover the history of Palestine—a geographically small backwater in the giant Ottoman domain—and the activities of its aristocracy and their interaction with the authorities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one would have to spend many months in the Ottoman archives in Istanbul. There one would need to locate and pore over reports and correspondence from and about the relevant vilayets (provinces), Syria/Damascus and Beirut, and the relevant sanjaks and mutasarafliks (districts), Jerusalem, Nablus, and Acre, in addition to the central government’s deliberations and decision-making about Jerusalem and its environs. Pappe, who lacks Turkish, has not consulted any Ottoman archives. There is not a single reference to any Ottoman archive, or any Turkish source, in his endnotes.
Another source for the history-especially social and economic history—of Ottoman Palestine is the archives of the local sharia courts in Jaffa and Jerusalem. These archives, to judge from the endnotes, Pappe tapped only briefly, if at all, as if ticking a box. In one endnote he thanks Dr. Mahmoud Yazbak of Haifa University, “who guided me in working on these documents in the Haram [the Temple Mount in Jerusalem].” To judge from the endnotes, Pappe was for some reason deterred from spending time in these repositories.
Indeed, almost all of Pappe’s references direct the reader to books and articles in English, Hebrew, and Arabic by other scholars, or to the memoirs of various Arab politicians, which are not the most reliable of sources. Occasionally there is a reference to an Arab or Western travelogue or genealogy, or to a diplomat’s memoir; but there is barely an allusion to documents in the relevant British, American, and Zionist/Israeli archives. When referring to the content of American consular reports about Arab riots in the 1920s, for example, Pappe invariably directs the reader to an article in Hebrew by Gideon Biger—“The American Consulate in Jerusalem and the Events of 1920-1921,” in Cathedra, September 1988—and not to the documents themselves, which are easily accessible in the United States National Archive.
Those who falsify history routinely take the path of omission. They ignore crucial facts and important pieces of evidence while cherry-picking from the documentation to prove a case. An apt illustration of this delinquency is Efraim Karsh, in Palestine Betrayed. At one point he tells us, quoting a news report from the Palestine Post, that the Palestinian Arab masses actually welcomed the UN partition resolution of November 1947, which posited the establishment of a Jewish state side by side with a Palestine Arab state, when a thousand other pieces of evidence—Haganah intelligence reports, newspapers, monitored Arab radio broadcasts, and the simple fact that Palestine’s Arabs went to war to stymie that resolution—tell us, with overwhelming persuasiveness, the exact opposite.
But Pappe is more brazen. He, too, often omits and ignores significant evidence, and he, too, alleges that a source tells us the opposite of what it in fact says, but he will also simply and straightforwardly falsify evidence. Consider his handling of the Arab anti-Jewish riots of the 1920s. Pappe writes of the “Nabi Musa” riots in April 1920: “The [British] Palin Commission … reported that the Jewish presence in the country was provoking the Arab population and was the cause of the riots.” He also quotes at length Musa Kazim al-Husayni, the clan’s leading notable at the time, to the effect that “it was not the [Arab] Hebronites who had started the riots but the Jews.” But the (never published) “Report of the Court of Inquiry [it was not a “Commission”] Convened by Order of H.E. the High Commissioner and Commander-in-Chief, Dated the 12th Day of April, 1920,” while forthrightly anti-Zionist, thereby accurately reflecting the prevailing views in the British military government that ruled Palestine until mid-1920, flatly and strikingly charged the Arabs with responsibility for the bloodshed. The team chaired by Major-General P.C. Palin wrote that “it is perfectly clear that with … few exceptions the Jews were the sufferers, and were, moreover, the victims of a peculiarly brutal and cowardly attack, the majority of the casualties being old men, women and children.” The inquiry pointed out that whereas 216 Jews were killed or injured, the British security forces and the Jews, in defending themselves or in retaliatory attacks, caused only twenty-five Arab casualties.
The bottom line of the Palin report of July 1, 1920, was that the Arabs “not entirely” unreasonably feared Jewish immigration and eventual political and economic domination, and that the Zionists had occasionally acted with “indiscretion” and political aggressiveness. At the same time, the report continued, in its complex account of the causes of the crisis, the British, too, through their “nonfulfillment” of promises, had contributed to Arab “alienation and exasperation,” as had deliberate incitement by various Arab leaders and journalists. Taken together, these were the wellsprings of the Arabs’ “panic” and rage. But it was the Arabs—the report concluded—who had resorted to murderous violence and attacked the Jews in “treacherous and cowardly” fashion. The picture painted by the Palin inquiry, despite its clear anti-Zionist bias, was far more complicated, nuanced, and balanced than that conveyed in Pappe’s “history.”
About the 1929 “Temple Mount” riots, which included two large-scale massacres of Jews, in Hebron and in Safed, Pappe writes: “The opposite camp, Zionist and British, was no less ruthless [than the Arabs]. In Jaffa a Jewish mob murdered seven Palestinians.” Actually, there were no massacres of Arabs by Jews, though a number of Arabs were killed when Jews defended themselves or retaliated after Arab violence. Pappe adds that the British “Shaw Commission,” so-called because it was chaired by Sir Walter Shaw (a former chief justice of the Straits Settlements), which investigated the riots, “upheld the basic Arab claim that Jewish provocations had caused the violent outbreak. ‘The principal cause … was twelve years of pro-Zionist [British] policy.’”
It is unclear what Pappe is quoting from. I did not find this sentence in the commission’s report. Pappe’s bibliography refers, under “Primary Sources,” simply to “The Shaw Commission.” The report? The deliberations? Memoranda by or about? Who can tell? The footnote attached to the quote, presumably to give its source, says, simply, “Ibid.” The one before it says, “Ibid., p. 103.” The one before that says, “The Shaw Commission, session 46, p. 92.” But the quoted passage does not appear on page 103 of the report. In the text of Palestinian Dynasty, Pappe states that “Shaw wrote [this] after leaving the country [Palestine].” But if it is not in the report, where did Shaw “write” it?
Actually, the thrust of the “Report of the Commission on the Palestine Disturbances of August, 1929,” which appeared in 1930, is completely contrary to what Pappe asserts (though it does list some non-lethal Jewish provocations—peaceful demonstrations, a newspaper article—as among the immediate triggers of the eruption of the Arab violence). The report states: “The fundamental cause, without which in our opinion disturbances either would not have occurred or would have been little more than a local riot, is the Arab feeling of animosity and hostility towards the Jews consequent upon the disappointment of their political and national aspirations and fear for their economic future.” As to the riots themselves, the report states: “The outbreak in Jerusalem on the 23rd of August [the start of the riots] was from the beginning an attack by Arabs on Jews for which no excuse in the form of earlier murders by Jews has been established.” The disturbances “took the form, for the most part, of a vicious attack by Arabs on Jews accompanied by wanton destruction of Jewish property…. In a few instances, Jews attacked Arabs and destroyed Arab property. These attacks, though inexcusable, were in most cases in retaliation for wrongs already committed by Arabs in the neighborhood in which the Jewish attacks occurred.”
Pappe repeatedly asserts, in order to demonstrate an Arab readiness for conciliation, that the Palestinian leadership in 1920-1922, including Hajj Amin, was “ambiguous” about Zionism and “was willing to compromise.” This is nonsense. Indeed, Hajj Amin was tried and convicted in absentia by a British court for helping to incite the murderous riots of April 1920.
To the deliberate slanting of history Pappe adds a profound ignorance of basic facts. Together these sins and deficiencies render his “histories” worthless as representations of the past, though they are important as documents in the current political and historiographic disputations about the Arab-Israeli conflict. Pappe’s grasp of the facts of World War I, for example, is weak in the extreme. He writes that the “Ottoman entry into the war was triggered by an incident in the Black Sea in December 1914.” In fact, the Ottoman Empire joined World War I with Russia’s declaration of war on Constantinople on November 1, following the bombardment of Sevastopol on October 29 by the Turkish cruiser “Yavuz Sultan Selim,” which was really the German cruiser Goeben manned by fez-wearing German sailors. Pappe tells us that Hajj Amin was commissioned as an officer in the Ottoman 46th division, at first serving as “assistant division commander to the governor of Smyrna,” thereby betraying his ignorance of the relevant Ottoman administrative and military structures (lieutenants are not “assistant division commanders”). Pappe maintains that Jamal Pasha’s Fourth Army “had failed to cross the Sinai Peninsula” in World War I—but the Turks crossed the peninsula and fought the British on the banks of the Suez Canal on February 2-4, 1915, and in their second invasion of Egypt, in August 1916, they reached Romani, just short of the canal. Pappe maintains that Allenby’s conquest of Jerusalem in December 1917 “concluded the [British] campaign in the Levant,” but of course it didn’t: Allenby’s army went on, in 1918, to conquer the rest of Palestine and Syria. Pappe notes that “the text of the Balfour Declaration remained unpublished” until February 1920, but it was published already in 1917. He refers to Raghib Nashashibi in 1923 as “a member of parliament”—what parliament?
Some of Pappe’s “historical” assertions are, quite obviously, politically motivated, but they are mistakes nonetheless. He refers to “statements made by Jewish and Zionist leaders about the need to build the ‘Third Temple.’” Husaynis often leveled that charge against the Jews, in order to incite the Muslim masses. But which important Zionist leader in the 1920s advocated the construction of a Third Temple? None whom I can name. Later Pappe reinforces this lie by remarking that “Palestinian historiography, including recent work that draws on newly revealed materials, suggests that the mufti’s concern was not baseless, and that there really was a Jewish plan to seize the entire Haram [Temple Mount].” Pappe offers no evidence for this extraordinary assertion.
Pappe repeatedly refers to “Harry Lock” of the British Mandate government secretariat in the 1920s—but the chief secretary’s name was Harry Luke. Pappe obviously encountered the name in Hebrew or Arabic and transliterated it, with no prior knowledge of Luke against which to check it: if he had consulted British documents, he would have known the correct spelling. Pappe refers to “the Hope Simpson Commission”—there was no such commission, only an investigation by an official named John HopeSimpson. He refers to “twenty-two Muslim … states” in the world in 1931, but by my count there were only about half a dozen. He refers to “the Jewish Intelligence Service”—presumably the Haganah Intelligence Service—and then adds, “whose archive has been opened to Israeli historians but not to Palestinians.” To the best of my knowledge, this is an outright lie. All public archives in Israel, including the Haganah Archive in Tel Aviv, which contains the papers of its intelligence service, are open to all researchers.
Pappe writes, regarding 1939, of “Colonial Secretary Ramsay MacDonald” when it should be Malcolm MacDonald, the official responsible for the famous White Paper of May 1939. (Ramsay MacDonald died two years earlier.) He speaks of “Rommel’s advance towards Alexandria” in “the summer of 1940,” but Rommel reached Africa only the following year. He writes that in 1947 the Haganah immigration ship Exodus “was refused entry [into Palestine] and made its way back to Germany.” Actually, the ramshackle Exodus from Europe-1947 was intercepted by British naval craft and forcibly boarded. The disabled ship was towed into Haifa harbor, where most of its passengers were transferred to a seaworthy ship and sent back to Europe, most disembarking in Hamburg. I could go on. Suffice it to say that Pappe’s contempt for historical truth and factual accuracy is almost boundless.
III. Ilan Pappe has opted out of the Zionist dream—or as he would have it, the Zionist nightmare. About three years ago he moved from the University of Haifa, where he was a senior lecturer in the department of political science, to the University of Exeter in Britain. Out of the Frame gives us Pappe’s explanation of why he chose exile. The title apparently derives from Out of Place, his late friend Edward Said’s autobiography. But Pappe’s book, while offering some autobiographical tidbits, is really a political charge-sheet against Zionism—a polemic, not a memoir.
He tells us that he grew up in a German Jewish family transplanted to the Israeli port city of Haifa, where he was born in 1954. As a youngster he was a Zionist, passing through the routine stations of high school, army, and undergraduate studies in Israel. (He even mentions his service in the Golan Heights during the 1973 war, apparently still a source of pride.) His glissement into militant anti-Zionism began, he recalls, in 1982, at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, where he was supervised in his doctoral studies by Albert Hourani, an Anglo-Lebanese historian who in an earlier life (1945-1947) had served as a spokesman for Hajj Amin al-Husayni and the Palestinian cause.* Hourani went on to become a major historian of the Middle East, and the author of the elegant and acclaimed book A History of the Arab Peoples.
Whatever Hourani’s influence upon him, Pappe proffers another explanation for his disenchantment. He has a personal grievance. In 1982, he was chucked out of Peace Now, whose representative in Britain he says he was, because he had debated with a PLO representative in the House of Commons. (He doesn’t tell us on which side he appeared.) He was also asked by the Israeli embassy to speak at a pro-Israeli rally in northern Britain just after the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon. He declined the invitation, he tells us, not just because of anti-Israeli sentiment but also because a few days earlier Israel’s ambassador in London, Shlomo Argov, had been shot by Arab gunmen, and Pappe was miffed that the embassy had displayed a “willingness to sacrifice me”—perhaps Arab “terrorists” would gun him down, too. The assumption that it was dangerous in those days to speak publicly on behalf of Israel, as if Arabs were regularly gunning down such speakers, is nonsense.
Armed with a Ph.D. in modern Middle East history, Pappe returned to Israel, immediately landing an academic position. His prose, at this point in Out of the Frame, becomes more opaque and convoluted, and for good reason: he wishes to project an image of himself in the 1980s as a young crusading rebel sharply critical of Israel and Zionism, valiantly battling a rock-hard Israeli establishment, including its academic establishment. Israel’s universities, he claims, were then (and are today) governed by an unremitting Zionist orthodoxy and dogmatism.
Yet Haifa University in 1984 accorded him a coveted position, and in fairly short order gave him tenure. Of this, Pappe writes: “Attaining tenure is a painful process for most young academics in Israel; it was doubly difficult for me given my views, which were already quite well known. And yet, as I noted, my positions were not yet crystallized in such a way as constituted a threat to the system, and I passed over the hurdles successfully.” He adds, somewhat contradictorily, that his “radicalism” “enhanced the university’s claim to pluralism and allowed it to boast of its openness to the world at large.” So he kept his radicalism under wraps in order to obtain tenure and he brandished it brazenly, also in order to obtain tenure. Take your pick.
The truth is more prosaic. While Pappe, as a citizen, was a clear dabbler in radical politics, he still operated within the Zionist camp to the extent that the Israeli Communist Party, to which he belonged, posited the existence of the Jewish state within the framework of a two-state solution—in line with Moscow’s position. At the same time, Pappe’s academic output was inoffensive in the extreme. He claims that his first book, Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948-51, which appeared in1988, asserts that “Britain played a major role in allowing the Zionist movement to found a state in Palestine through the ethnic cleansing of its indigenous people.” This is a misrepresentation. The book deals with British policy and, more specifically, with British-Jordanian relations—a subject that was covered much more thoroughly and insightfully, and in elegant English, by Avi Shlaim in his Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine—and it says nothing at all about what Pappe today calls the “ethnic cleansing of Palestine.”
In this passage Pappe is laying claim to what he regards as early anti-Zionist laurels, to which he has no right. Nowhere in his first book is there a mention of “ethnic cleansing” or any of its equivalents. Indeed, Pappe curiously devotes less than one page of Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict to a sub-section titled “The Responsibility for the Creation of the Refugee Problem,” where he asserts, rather feebly and neutrally, that the British had two views on the matter: that the Jews alone were to blame, and that it was “the AHC [that was responsible] for encouraging the exodus in the cases of Haifa, Jaffa and Jerusalem.” Nowhere did the younger, more honest Pappe of the 1980s charge the Jews with expelling “the” Arabs of Palestine. Rather, he tellingly asserted that “the Israelis were prepared [in 1949] to admit joint responsibility with the Arab countries for the refugee problem by making a gesture and offering to repatriate some of the refugees.” Two decades later, moreover, both sides appeared to accept the refugee status quo: “The Israelis … hoped that the Arab states would resettle the refugees [in their territory], and … the Arab states … decided to exploit the conditions in the refugee camps as a political card against Israel.” Today’s Pappe would not let such outrageous truths pass his lips.
Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict was bland and hesitant enough (though, like Shlaim’s Collusion, it did postulate a measure of Jordanian-British-Israeli collusion in 1948) to enable Pappe to get a position in an Israeli university, where Zionist orthodoxy was still the rule and a sine qua non for obtaining a lectureship. The book made no waves, it was read by almost no one, it annoyed nobody. Pappe more or less admits as much when he observes, in his less-than-honest fashion, that the book “was written in the style of a doctoral thesis, which has a way of muting even the strongest critiques” and then claims that its publication elicited “hate letters and death threats”—another claim designed to enhance his selfportrait as a young rebel, which I find extremely difficult to believe.
In sum, Pappe is a retroactive poseur. But by the middle or late 1990s, after getting tenure, Pappe did shift gears into a full-blown radicalism, political and historiographical. By then he was advocating Israel’s elimination and the establishment in the territory of Mandatory Palestine of one state, consisting of Jews and Arabs. That it would have an Arab majority and, if democratic, be ruled by Arabs was to be assured by a mass return of Arab refugees, which Pappe also advocated, and still advocates. One of his books is dedicated to his two children, whom he hopes will live in a better “Palestine.” In Out of the Frame, Pappe defines Zionism as “a racist and quite evil philosophy of morality and life.” The language is fully as virulent as Hamas’s, or worse.
During the 1990s and early 2000s, despite his charm and his charisma as a teacher, Pappe managed to alienate the bulk of the University of Haifa’s establishment, and was for years denied promotion to associate (or full) professorship, despite a fulsome list of publications. His work may be shoddy, and it has grown shoddier with the years, and overtly propagandistic, but the denial of promotion was probably the result of political alienation and an unusual form, on his part, of uncollegiality. I have mentioned Pappe’s “one-statism.” But if truth be told, this is not what pushed the anti-Pappists to accuse him of “uncollegiality.” What drove his Haifa colleagues to distraction was that Pappe, in the course of the second intifada in 2000-2004—when Israel was virtually at war with the Palestinians of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, while buses and restaurants in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa almost daily were being demolished by suicide bombers—publicly promoted an international boycott of Israel’s universities, including his own. In the name of the embattled Palestinians, Pappe called on Western academic institutions to stop joint projects and cut off research funds (“divestment”), to cease contact and cooperation with Israeli academics, to reject Israelis’ submissions to journals and university presses, and so on. (The paradox in all this is blatant: Israel’s academics have for decades been at the forefront of criticism of Israel’s policies in the occupied territories and toward Israeli Arabs. Those are the people Pappe set out to hurt.)
Pappe prefers to explain somewhat differently why many of his colleagues came to loathe him. He alleges that it was the “Tantura Affair,” about which more in a moment, and not his boycott advocacy, that made him his enemies. Pappe’s aim is to paint Israel’s universities as bastions of ideological rigidity and Zionist McCarthyism, and to configure himself as their victim: a crusader for academic freedom crucified on the cross of ideological and historiographical doctrine. This is a stark misrepresentation of reality. True, from the 1950s through the 1970s, and perhaps even in the 1980s, Israel’s universities were, in the humanities and social sciences, in all that concerned the history of Israel and of Zionism, bastions of dogmatism and conformism. But such a characterization is wildly wrong about Israeli universities since the 1990s.
From the 1950s to the 1970s, the universities’ humanities faculties—and, to a lesser degree, their social science faculties—kept out or marginalized anti-Zionist sentiment and dissent. Zionism, as represented by the Labor Zionist mainstream, ruled as the necessary framework for the understanding of Middle Eastern realities, especially the conflict with the Palestinians and the surrounding Arab world. Indeed, the conflict was simply omitted from the curriculum. (This was partly driven by something non-political: the prevalent Germanic view that “current affairs” were not worthy of scholarly treatment.) And the ideological pressure was such that in the 1950s and the 1960s even Zionist historians—but of the wrong persuasion, such as Benzion Netanyahu—were denied positions. (Netanyahu ended up at Cornell, where he became a prominent historian of the Spanish Inquisition.)
But things changed by the 1990s, partly due to the impact of the works of the “New Historians” (and the “Critical Sociologists,” who gained a foothold, or more than a foothold, in Israel’s social science faculties even earlier). Even more important, probably, was the integration of Israeli academia into the intellectually open university life of the West. By the early 2000s, departments of political science, sociology, Hebrew literature, and cultural studies in some Israeli universities had become bulwarks of anti-Zionism, in which professing Zionists can barely achieve a toehold, let alone tenure. And the history departments and the Middle East studies departments are also far from being redoubts of Zionism. In Israeli academia today, one will find the whole political gamut, running from avowed Zionists to critics of Israeli policies to critics of Israel’s Jewishness and Israel’s existence to (a handful of) advocates of anti-Israel boycotts and divestments.
But Pappe prefers to portray his alienation from Haifa as rooted in his own courageous dissidence, his fight against Zionism and McCarthyism. In Out of the Frame, these are portrayed as coming to a head in the Tantura affair. In March 1998, a Haifa University student named Teddy Katz submitted a 211-page master’s thesis titled “The Exodus of Arabs from Villages at the Foot of Southern Mount Carmel in 1948.” It dealt specifically with the fate of two villages, Umm al-Zinat, on the Carmel, and Tantura, on the Mediterranean coast south of Haifa. The main focus was on Tantura. There, argued Katz, a middle-aged kibbutznik and a peace activist, the 33rd Battalion of the Alexandroni Brigade of the Haganah, the main Jewish militia that in the spring of 1948 was transformed into the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), on the morning of May 23 massacred about 250 unarmed villagers after conquering the village the night before. Katz described a systematic Nazi-style slaughter of groups of young men shot and dumped into trenches dug by other Arabs who were themselves subsequently shot, while the village’s women and children sat on a beach a few yards away.
Katz had been supervised by a Haifa University historian named Kais Firro, and had been encouraged in his research by Pappe, who served as his spiritual guide. The student had based his thesis on extensive interviews with refugees from Tantura who lived in the West Bank and in Israel, and with veterans of the Alexandroni Brigade. He had not worked in the Haganah or IDF archives, and his massacre story was based on no documentation, Israeli, British, or Arab.
The thesis was awarded a 97 by Firro, a Druze historian, and by two other professors, an Ottomanist and a social scientist—none of them experts on the 1948 war; and in June 2000, Katz was awarded an M.A. “with distinction.” But by then the trouble had already started. In January 2000, the Israeli daily Maariv published a long magazine piece based on the Katz thesis, and on fresh interviews with some of Katz’s interviewees, that in effect supported the massacre allegation. Alexandroni veterans complained, and the following month Maariv published a second piece quoting the veterans at length, in effect denying the massacre allegation. In both pieces, the veterans had denied that a massacre had occurred of the type Katz and some of his Arab interviewees alleged (though some had hinted at “dark deeds” having taken place).
Meanwhile the Alexandroni veterans hired a lawyer (a left-winger who had represented Peace Now in several cases) and sued Katz for libel. Going through Katz’s taped interviews and his thesis, the lawyer, Giora Erdinast, discovered a series of distortions, discrepancies, and outright inventions. When the court was presented with these findings, Katz broke down—some said he suffered a nervous breakdown or a minor stroke—and agreed to recant: “I did not mean to say that there had been a massacre in Tantura…. Today I say there was no massacre at Tantura.” This was in effect accepted by the court as its ruling, and Katz was ordered to publish his recantation. He never did (it was eventually published by the Alexandroni veterans). Instead he recanted his recantation and appealed to Israel’s Supreme Court. But the high court upheld the lower court’s decision.
Parallel to this process, under pressure from several professors, the University of Haifa established a committee to review Katz’s thesis and evidence. It, too, discovered distortions and discrepancies. In his thesis Katz had “quoted” passages that did not appear in his interview tapes. The university annulled the thesis, but allowed Katz to submit a revised version. In September 2002, Katz resubmitted his thesis, now expanded to 568 pages. Again, inexplicably, he was supervised by Firro. He corrected the misquotations but he remained unrepentant: the Alexandroni troops, he still claimed, had massacred dozens, perhaps hundreds, at Tantura on May 23, 1948.
The university appointed a committee of five examiners. But again it bungled the matter. Two of them were clearly not experts on 1948, and two of the others had a few years earlier published (along with a third historian) an apologetic book effectively clearing the IDF of a massacre in Lydda during the 1948 war. Three of the examiners gave the thesis less than a 75, effectively failing it. The university authorities then compromised again and awarded Katz an M.A.—but of the “non-research” variety, preventing him from pushing on to a Ph.D. within its precincts.
Both times around, Katz had produced a poor piece of work. But this did not mean that there had been no massacre in Tantura. I decided to look into the matter myself, starting with the archives. I found that there is no evidence in the available documentation to show that there was a large-scale or systematic massacre in Tantura. And this is strange, indeed unique, if such a massacre had occurred, because in the case of all the other known massacres of Arabs that occurred in 1948, there is some sort of written corroborative evidence—an IDF report; a British, American, or United Nations cable; a monitored Arab radio transmission. About some of the Israeli massacres—Deir Yassin in April 1948, Dawayima and Eilaboun in October 1948—there are multiple and detailed reports in available Israeli, British, and United Nations documentation. (In recent months the IDF archive has inexplicably and illogically re-classified much of the Deir Yassin material that was open to researchers in the early 2000s.)
Regarding Tantura, there is written evidence that there were small-scale atrocities during and perhaps after the conquest of the village, including the shooting of a handful of captured Arab snipers. And one IDF document, from June 1948, obliquely speaks about an act of “sabotage” in the village, without further explication. But no document even obliquely mentions a “massacre.” There is not a single piece of written evidence from 1948 asserting a large-scale massacre (and 250 dead would have constituted the largest massacre to have occurred in the 1948 war). There are Israeli intelligence reports about Arab radio transmissions, from June 1948, alleging that women refugees from Tantura who had reached the West Bank had reported cases of rape, robbery, and arson. But none mentioned a massacre. Moreover, oral testimony, elicited forty to fifty years after the event, about a massacre—or a denial of a massacre—during a conflict that is still ongoing and in which propaganda continues to play a large role, is not necessarily credible or dispositive, and cannot form the basis of a reliable reconstruction of events. In my view, then, a large question mark hangs over what happened in Tantura.
(In Out of the Frame, Pappe alleges about the massacre at Dawayima, in order to buttress his advocacy of the value of oral history, that “Benny Morris, an ardent positivist and empiricist … reluctantly had to rely on interviews [for lack of documentation].” This is a lie. I interviewed no one about Dawayima. Had Pappe looked at the footnotes in my The Birth of the PalestinianRefugee Problem 1947-1949 (1988) and The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (2004), he would have discovered that there are a fistful of documents—Israeli, British, and United Nations—giving details about the massacre at Dawayima, or at least alleging that one had taken place there. I made no mention of any interviews. But Pappe is not one to look at footnotes, documents, or archives. He already knows what happened.)
In my own inquiry into what happened at Tantura, I, too, interviewed participants from both sides—and I found all equally persuasive and credible. None alleged a large-scale massacre, but some reinforced the smattering of documentary evidence about smaller atrocities. Pappe implicitly concedes the ineluctable weakness of oral testimony about something controversial that occurred decades earlier in the course of an ongoing conflict, and so he asserts at one point in Out of the Frame that “there is also a Palestinian document, the language of which is far from vague or ambivalent. It appears in the memoirs of a Haifa notable, Muhammad Nimr al-Khatib. A few days after the battle he recorded the testimony of a Palestinian who told of summary executions of dozens of Palestinians [in Tantura].”
The problem with this passage is that it contains a number of falsehoods. No document “appears” or is quoted in the al-Khatib memoir. One may consider the memoir itself—Consequences of the Naqbah—a document, but that is not what Pappe says. In any event, the memoir was published in Damascus apparently in the early 1950s (it is undated), and was written by a Muslim Brotherhood cleric and politician from Haifa who was living in Beirut, to which he was rushed for medical treatment and convalescence after being seriously wounded in Haifa in January 1948, four months before Tantura. Thereafter he lived as an exile in Lebanon. There is no evidence that he ever returned to Palestine, and it is highly unlikely that he ever went back. It is unclear whether he invented his Tantura story, or recorded it on the basis of rumors or things he heard from a Tantura refugee (who may or may not have invented his story—in 1948 the Arab world was rife with rumors and inventions about Jewish massacres that had never occurred). The memoir does not tell us when, if at all, he met the witness from Tantura. Al-Khatib’s memoir, which is full of untruths on a variety of subjects, cannot be regarded as a reliable “document” about anything (though it contains colorful, and in part accurate, descriptions of the mass flight of Arabs from Haifa in April 1948, which al-Khatib probably heard from friends and relatives who reached Beirut). It may well have served as the origin of the tale of the Tantura massacre that re-surfaced in Damascus in the 1990s.
Since 2000, Pappe has emerged as the chief proponent of the Tantura massacre story and the main defender of Teddy Katz. In 2002, in Al-Ahram (in English, online), Pappe alleged that the University of Haifa had expelled Katz. Like much of what Pappe has written on the affair, this, too, is a lie. Now, in Out of the Frame, Pappe uses the affair to explain, and to justify, his move to England. He argues that his defense of Katz and of the massacre allegation so alienated his colleagues that they proposed his expulsion from the university.
He describes what he calls a “disciplinary hearing” in May 2002, a month after he had signed an international call for a boycott of Israel’s universities, in which Professor Yossi Ben-Artzi, a historical geographer at Haifa and one of the founders and leaders of Peace Now, accused Pappe of slandering university departments and members of the faculty and generally behaving in a “non-collegial, unethical and immoral” way, deploying “lies, bad-mouthing and impudence.” Pappe, for his part, says that he had violated “not a code of honor, but the precepts of a very inflexible ideology. I was prosecuted by those who saw themselves as the guardians of national history.” Quite characteristically, Pappe fails to tell his readers that one of his University of Haifa critics, the historian Yoav Gelber, in his 2004 book Komemiyut VeNakba, or Independence and the Naqbah, himself revealed quite a bit about Israeli atrocities in 1948-indeed, Gelber uncovered, from documents, far more than Pappe has ever done, including information about what transpired at Dawayima.
In fact, there was no “disciplinary hearing” at the University of Haifa. What happened was that Ben-Artzi lodged a complaint with the university’s disciplinary board and submitted a charge sheet against Pappe. But the board’s chairman, Professor Jacob Barnai, refused to initiate proceedings, and the matter was simply dropped. In Out of the Frame, Pappe devotes five pages to a “disciplinary hearing” that never was. It seems that the university got cold feet because Pappe, as soon as the indictment against him began to materialize, dashed off a batch of e-mails to academics abroad, who promptly wrote the university condemning the “McCarthyite persecution” of Pappe (and Katz) and “the assault on academic freedom.” Pappe relates that he received “2,100 letters of support.” He quotes at length from these letters, mostly by academics who know nothing about 1948 or about Pappe’s falsifications of history. One of the exceptions, Avi Shlaim of Oxford University (who opposes the academic boycott that Pappe advocates but is solidly in Pappe’s camp when it comes to describing current Middle Eastern realities), is quoted as writing that the charges against Pappe were “politically motivated,” and “evoked shock and horror.” In any event, what happened to Pappe in Haifa was caused not by the Katz controversy or the Tantura affair, but by his defamation of the university and of his colleagues, and by his calls for an international boycott against the backdrop of the exploding bombs of the second intifada. An offer eventually arrived from Exeter, and Pappe left for England.
IV. Last semester I taught at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich. The seminar, attended by M.A. students and advanced B.A. students, focused on the 1948 war. About half the students were German, the rest from elsewhere in Europe. This past week I received one student’s end-of-semester paper, titled “Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine May 1948-January 1949.” One of the introductory paragraphs reads: “Ethnic cleansing is inhuman, brutal, and absolutely terrible. Often, a link between the Jewish Shoa [sic] and the Ethnic [sic] cleansing of Palestine is made. While the Nazis expelled and tortured the Jews during World War II, the Jews did nearly the same with the Arab [sic]. The brutality between the two situations is visible [sic].” But the student was apparently troubled by the “nearly,” because in her “Conclusion” she added: “The ethnic cleansing operations from 1948 are often compared to the happenings during the 2nd world War [sic]. In this case, the Jews were on the same Level [sic] as the Nazis.”
The paper, while also listing other works in its bibliography, was based almost exclusively on Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. It is a fine indication of the measure of Pappe’s success, of his reach in polluting Middle Eastern historiography and in poisoning the minds of those who superficially dabble in it. This is unfortunate, even tragic.
In Out of the Frame, Pappe complains that Yoav Gelber had referred to him, during the University of Haifa troubles, as Israel’s “Lord Haw-Haw.” That was the name given by the British media to William Joyce, an American-born Englishman of Irish extraction who broadcast Nazi propaganda from Berlin during World War II. He was tried and hanged by the British as a traitor in 1946. I do not think Pappe has any grounds for complaint. Lord Haw-Haw would have understood and sympathized with what he is doing, and the British are treating him rather well.
*CORRECTION:
Hourani at the time appeared to share in the racist prejudices of his age and society of origin. He wrote (a year after the Holocaust): “The abnormal position and history of the Jews has bred in them certain characteristics—suspicion, clannishness, a sense of insecurity and inferiority—which themselves in turn have become contributory causes of persecution.” Hourani seemed to be suggesting that the Jews were at least partially responsible for what the Nazis had done to them (and perhaps for what Christians and Muslims had done to Jews during the previous 1900 years)—a passage more or less echoed in Husseini’s writings a few years later.
Benny Morris is a professor of Middle Eastern history at Ben-Gurion University and the author of 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (Yale University Press). This article originally ran in the April 7, 2011, issue of the magazine.
Dr. Maya Wind, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, Canada, published her new book, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom.
Wind discussed her new book with the anti-Israel media outlet Democracy Now. Wind said, “University education in the Occupied Palestinian Territories has been under siege, by the Israeli state, by the Israeli military, for decades, including in Gaza. Gazan universities have been subject to a debilitating illegal siege for over 17 years, subject to repeated aerial bombardment. And now, most recently, every single one, as you said, has been destroyed by either controlled detonation or aerial bombardment. This is very intentional. This is part of a broader project by the Israeli state to destroy Palestinian education as a means to destroy the Palestinian liberation movement.”
She said, “What we are seeing now, especially over the last two decades, is a coalescing of Israeli university administrations with the Israeli far right, with other forces to continually foreclose and limit what is permissible to research, to debate, to speak to, to protest on Israeli campuses. And we’re seeing that really manifest for some time. But in particular, over the last five months, this repression has grown. Palestinian students were asked to evacuate their dorm rooms, given 24-hour notice. Palestinian and critical Jewish Israeli students and scholars have been summoned to disciplinary committees and have been suspended for speaking out against this genocide, for conducting research about the Nakba, which is the mass expulsion of over two-thirds of the Palestinian population that enabled the founding of the Israeli state. And so, we are seeing this is a broad project of repressing critical research and debate, which is really the bedrock of higher education. But this is disallowed in the Israeli university system.”
Wind said, “it is important to speak to how imprisonment and incarceration and detention is really a tool, a central tool, of the Israeli state to destroy the Palestinian liberation movement. And we see this particularly play out on Palestinian campuses across the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, where Palestinian universities are routinely raided by the Israeli military. Student activists and organizers in over 411 Palestinian student groups and associations that have been declared unlawful by the Israeli state are routinely abducted from their campus, from their homes in the middle of the night. They are subjected to torture. They are held in administrative detention without charge or trial for months. And so, what we’re really seeing is a systemic attack of the Israeli military and the Israeli military government on Palestinian higher education, and particularly on Palestinian campuses as sites of organizing for Palestinian liberation.”
She claimed, “it sort of speaks to the misconception in the Western academic community about Israeli universities. For too long, Jewish Israeli scholars have been allowed to gatekeep and to narrate to the West what their universities are, and this despite, again, over two decades of mobilization and critical research by Palestinian scholars and civil society organizations about the nature of Israeli universities and their deep embeddedness in the apparatuses of violence of the Israeli state. And so, in my book, I really take this critique seriously and did an in-depth investigation, using archival materials, observing campus protests and classrooms across Israel’s eight major public universities, speaking with Palestinian student organizers, Palestinian and Jewish Israeli faculty and students. And what I really saw and learned in the course of this research is the vast and multifaceted nature of this embeddedness with the project of the oppression of Palestinians.”
She added: “There is an important move, certainly, to resist and to conduct critical research, to protest, to insist on academic freedom on Israeli university campuses by primarily, really led by, Palestinian students and faculty, and sometimes joined by a small contingent of Jewish Israelis. But what this book speaks to is really the structure. This is a structural problem. This is about the very nature of the institutions of Israeli universities, from where they are built — they are built as land grab institutions to further Palestinian dispossession and expand Judaization, which is the continual shrinking of Palestinian land ownership and Palestinian land contiguity and the expansion of Jewish Israeli settlement and population distribution — to the ways in which these universities produce knowledge, expertise and help in the development of weapons, used against Palestinians and then sold abroad as battle-tested. And so, we’re really seeing this vast apparatus and a structural problem of universities subordinating themselves to the requirements and the needs of the Israeli state and Israeli apartheid. And that is what is at stake here… in one of the chapters of the book, I really trace the ways that knowledge production and dominant paradigms in entire disciplines of the Israeli academy have subordinated their research agendas to the requirements of the Israeli state to aid the Israeli state in differentially ruling not only Palestinian and Jewish citizens, but also Palestinian subjects under military governance. “
She continued, “And we’re seeing that play out in multiple disciplines… in archaeology, for instance, Israeli archaeology, institutes and departments are producing knowledge to aid in the dispossession of Palestinians and the expansion of Jewish settlement, using archeological research as a pretext and creating narratives that justify the Jewish — not only Jewish presence, but Jewish exclusive claims to the entirety of the land… Israeli archaeological research has been repeatedly critiqued by Palestinian scholars and others for not only violating the Fourth Geneva Convention, but also conducting unsound and unscientific research by explicitly and intentionally removing Palestinian artifacts and artifacts of the Islamic periods in order to substantiate Israeli state narratives.”
In another recent interview about her book, Wind was described as a “scholar-activist” and she stressed the importance of holding universities accountable. “What we’re witnessing today is not only a genocide, not only an attempt by Israel to erase the Palestinian people, but also [to erase] centuries of knowledge, culture [and] history central to who they are as a people,” Wind said. “Israel has always understood Palestinian education as a threat to its rule and it has targeted it at every turn.. Israeli institutions of higher education are deeply implicated in Israeli colonialism and apartheid and must be understood as settler universities… They are embedded in the infrastructure that sustains Israeli society as a settler society… Before the ’80s, in Israeli universities, Palestinian and some Jewish Israeli scholars really began to explore the histories and structures of Israeli state violence… Following government control, researchers faced harassment and violence that drove many Palestinian scholars and some of the most critical Jewish Israelis out of these Israeli academies.”
The amount of lies and fabrications that Wind is spreading is unbelievable. Wind has been a professional anti-Israel activist for many years.
In her interview, she told Democracy Now, “I myself was an active member of Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine over a decade ago. And it was really hard to organize on that campus then, and it is impossible now, with Columbia University suspending both Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace.
Indeed, she has a long history of anti-Israel activism. In 2009, the Israeli Communist Party (MAKI) published an invitation to a “Demonstration of support for conscientious objectors Maya Yechiali-Wind and Raz Bar David Varon.” MAKI urged its followers to register and attend a demonstration to show support for the two conscientious objectors. The demonstration was held at the entrance of the Army Recruiting Office in Tel Hashomer. MAKI informed its followers that Yechiali-Wind was one of the signatories of the 2008 High school refusal to enlist (Shministim) letter.
Later in 2009, the media reported how “IDF draft dodgers speak at US colleges,” detailing how Maya Wind was one of two Israeli women who refused mandatory army service and kicked off a North American speaking tour to more than a dozen college campuses. Their tour was organized by the anti-war groups CODEPINK and Jewish Voice for Peace. Starting with the University of California, Hastings, University of Maryland, they stopped at Cornell, Columbia, New York University, Brown, Brandeis, and other schools.
In 2010, Wind was part of a group of activists in Sheikh Jarrah, media reported of a small group of young people “with no legal experience who managed to embarrass the Jerusalem police and force them to agree to a large demonstration.” The report said. “This is just another case of fighting occupation, racism and discrimination,” the group said.
In 2010, Wind was the winner of the Palestine-Israel Journal (PIJ) essay writing contest. In her essay “The Necessity of Doubt,” she urged young people to ignore “facts.” She wrote, “Young people have a great capacity to initiate processes of change. Yet in observing my society during and after the last operation in Gaza, I felt that this capacity was not employed at all. Despite our vast potential to create change, with our energy level and tendency to question the previous generation’s values, opinions among Israeli youth regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remain sadly static. We need to channel our natural tendency in constructive directions, by questioning our perception of the conflict and nurturing the notion of doubt. Developing doubt will increase young people’s capacity to think originally and to translate our ideas into innovative actions that may change the political reality of the region. One way of nurturing constructive questioning would be to create an online ‘Israeli-Palestinian Doubt Forum.’ Doubt should be developed particularly in relation to three concepts: facts, collective identity and personal responsibility. First, it is important for my generation to question the official historical ‘facts’ that generally serve as a framework for discussion of the conflict. These ‘facts’ have been internalized and are now considered to provide the background to the debate instead of being subject to debate themselves. We don’t realize that what we assume to be ‘facts’ are frequently only our own narrative, and this greatly restricts our ability to think about the conflict openly and critically.”
In 2011 Wind organized “Israeli Apartheid Week” in New York. At the time, she was an Israeli student at Columbia University. Israeli TV covered this event. Wind was interviewed and explained, “As soon as the occupation ends and we start respecting human rights and international law, I will stop my performances.”
Wind is one of the scores of Israeli “peace activists” becoming academics who adopted the dominant neo-Marxist, critical theory paradigm. As well known, the new approach disregards empirical facts to fit another paradigmatic assumption that the Palestinians are the eternal victims of Israeli aggression and brutality. Palestinian and pro-Palestinian scholars recruit them to demonize Israel. The consequences of the hijacking of Western academia have been clear.
How Israeli universities aid and advance Zionist entity’s settler-colonial project
Wednesday, 27 March 2024 1:08 PM [ Last Update: Wednesday, 27 March 2024 1:08 PM ]
By Humaira Ahad
Jabir Abu Hatim, a third-year student in agricultural sciences at the Hebrew University, has been taking anti-depressants for the last few years.
The 20-year-old was one of the very few Arabs who got admission to an Israeli university. The university acceptance, however, proved a nightmare for him as he was not allowed to study courses of his choice.
Abu Hatim was forced to opt for subjects he had no interest in. His hardship didn’t end there.
The young Palestinian became a victim of discrimination on the campus. Shoddy and prejudiced treatment from his professors and university administration greatly impacted his psychological health, forcing him to confine himself to his room and avoid social circles.
According to a 2017 report, about half of the Arab university students accepted into Israeli universities reported racism and discrimination, and some 40 percent said racist comments came from the faculty.
Israeli universities “are a central pillar of Israel’s regime of oppression against Palestinians,” Maya Wind writes in her book Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom.
The Israeli regime was created through massacres and violent expulsion of Palestinians from their native land. The institutions created by the Zionist entity have worked to push the settler-colonial project of depopulating the land of Palestinians and bringing in outsiders.
Wind, a Jewish Israeli scholar says Israeli universities directly constrain Palestinian rights by supporting and even developing the policies of occupation and apartheid used by the Israeli regime.
According to Wind, these universities train soldiers to create target banks in Gaza.
“And they are, in fact, actually granting university course credit to reserve soldiers returning from Gaza to their classrooms,” she noted, making these universities deeply complicit in the genocide in Gaza.
Israeli universities- tools of settler colonialism
Hebrew University, which was founded in 1918, played a significant role in establishing and promoting the Zionist identity. Built at Mount Scopus in the northeast of the occupied Jerusalem al-Quds, the university worked as a strategic outpost to occupy the historic city.
Frank Mears, one of the master designers of the Hebrew University wrote in a letter that it is the responsibility of the Zionists and the Hebrew University to build a campus atop Mount Scopus that would symbolize the “New Jerusalem upon the hill”.
“After visiting several universities in Israel (occupied territories), I found the history and campus of Hebrew University on Mount Scopus in occupied Jerusalem to be a great example of how higher education institutions became complicit in the Israeli settler-colonial project,” writes Somdeep Sen, associate professor of international development studies at Roskilde University, Denmark.
The Technion (1925) in Haifa and the Weizmann Institute (1934) in Rehovot were used to advance the Zionist plans of drawing Palestinians out of their land.
Weizmann Institute, built on the ruins of the Palestinian village Zarnuqa, was depopulated by the Givati Brigade, a Zionist militia group. The regime later rechristened the village as Rehovot.
In the lead-up to Nakbathese, “scientific and technological institutes” played a significant role in the mass exodus of Palestinians in 1948.
Haganah, the terror militia, established the ‘Science Corps” in all three universities, opening bases on all three campuses to research and refine the military capabilities” of Zionist militias.
The teaching staff and students helped in the production of arms and biological weapons. These weapons were used by the Zionist groups to massacre Palestinians.
Science Corps later merged into Israel’s ministry of war and also led to the creation of the regime’s leading weapons manufacturers, including Rafael and Israeli Aerospace Industries.
As per reports, Technion University, in cooperation with Elbit, one of Israel’s largest arms companies, implemented the apartheid wall and surveillance technology on Palestinians.
Universities as strategic Zionist outposts
By design, Israeli universities were built as strategic regional outposts for pushing Palestinians out of their ancestral homes and expanding Zionist settlements.
In the guise of expanding its campus, Hebrew University occupied Palestinian lands in Sheikh Badr or Issawiyeh and East Jerusalem.
During the Nakba, the Palestinian population of al-Khureiba was forcibly displaced by Zionist forces and the sub-district was occupied by the University of Haifa.
Ben-Gurion University (1969) was established with the sole purpose of occupying the Negev desert. The desert that stretches over an area of 14,000 kilometers in the southern regions of the occupied Palestinian territories borders Jordan in the east and the Sinai Desert in the west.
Falsely promoting the idea of development of the Negev desert through the university, the regime has been targeting the Palestinian Bedouins of the region shrinking their access to the ancestral land and extending its Zionist occupation in the area.
Ariel University, which started as a college related to Bar Ilan University, became an Israeli regime-affiliated official university in 2012. The university was formed in the occupied Palestinian villages of KIfl Hares and Marda, providing way for the establishment of settler colonies in the occupied West Bank.
The university dates back to 1978 when a colony was established in the aftermath of the Camp David agreement between Egypt and the Israeli regime.
The colony started on 1000 square meters which was grabbed from the Palestinians from Salfit City and Marda village to later seize 13.7 km. The university now comprises a college, a number of factories, hotels and residential blocs.
The borders of the colony are four times the size of its built-up area, paving the way for future settlement expansions. Ariel is the third biggest colony in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem in terms of size and number of colonists.
Aerial “transformed…Israeli public perception from an illegal and heavily militarized settlement to a suburb of Tel Aviv. The institution confers degrees as a means of expanding Israeli sovereignty and advancing the annexation of the OPT (occupied Palestinian territories),” writes Wind in her book.
Israel’s Scholasticide
The regime has not stopped using its universities for forwarding the settler colonial agenda but has been working systematically to destroy the Palestinian education system, considering it as a threat to its illegitimate existence.
Palestine’s commitment to education is a significant part of its identity. The resilience of Palestinians is showcased by the country’s incredibly high literacy rate, which stands at 97.7 percent.
“The role and power of education in an occupied society is enormous. Education posits possibilities and opens horizons. Freedom of thought contrasts sharply with the apartheid wall, the shackling checkpoints, the choking prisons,” says Dr Karma Nabulsi, a professor who coined the term “scholasticide” in 2009.
The term denotes the systematic destruction of centers of education precious to Palestinian society by the apartheid Israeli regime forces.
According to the Scholars Against the War on Palestine (SAWP) findings, Israel has bombed all of Gaza’s 11 universities since it launched its genocidal war on the besieged strip on October 7.
At least twelve libraries were also razed to the ground by Israeli airstrikes. SAWP says that this eradication fits the description of scholasticide.
On Tuesday, in a new report, Gaza’s Ministry of Education said around 5,881 Palestinian students have been killed and 9,899 others have been injured since October 7.
According to the ministry, over 5,826 students have been killed and 9,570 others injured in Gaza, while in the occupied West Bank, at least 55 students have been killed and 329 others injured.
A total of 264 teachers and school administrators are also among those killed in Gaza, while 286 government schools and 65 UN schools have also been partially or destroyed in Israeli airstrikes.
Targeting educational infrastructure
Israel’s policy of scholasticide has continued over the years. In 2009, Israel bombed Gaza’s ministry of education, destroyed the infrastructure, and demolished many schools across the besieged strip.
As per a report by the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), Israeli forces and Zionist settlers launched an average of 10 attacks per month on the occupied West Bank kindergartens and school students, staff and facilities between January 2018 and June 2020.
“Over the span of 30 months, 296 attacks against education by Israeli forces or settlers and settlement private security guards took place during 235 separate incidents.”
The regime has also been targeting Palestinian intellectuals and academics in an attempt to muzzle the voice of resistance. The Israeli army has killed 94 academics, along with hundreds of teachers and thousands of students, since October 7, according to reports.
According to Euro-Med Monitor, a Geneva-based human rights group, the Israeli army has been intentionally targeting academic, scientific, and intellectual figures in the coastal territory.
One of them was Refaat al Araeer, a Palestinian poet, writer, professor, and activist, who was killed on December 7 in an Israeli airstrike in Al Shujaiya, a district in southern Gaza.
Al Araeer was a distinguished professor of world and comparative literature and also taught creative writing at the Islamic University of Gaza.
Just two days before his brutal murder, Al Araeer penned a tribute to the Palestinian resistance.
“More horrific Israeli bombardments…We could die this dawn. I wish I were a freedom fighter so I die fighting back against those invading Israeli genocidal maniacs invading my neighborhood and my city.”
Over the years, Israeli universities have been directly complicit in implementing the racist and genocidal policies of the Tel Aviv regime, which assumed the ugliest form after October 7.
Wind believes that Israeli universities are complicit in the ongoing war, marking a new stage of scholasticide. The universities are enlisting their institutes, resources, and courses for the regime’s obnoxious propaganda.
“They are crafting legal scholarship to shield Israel from accountability for its war crimes. They are training soldiers and developing weapons for the Israeli military. Every day, Israeli universities make this genocide possible,” she asserted.
How Israeli universities are an arm of settler colonialism
Maya Wind’s new book meticulously demonstrates how Israeli academic institutions were created to serve the Zionist colonization of Palestine. They continue to do so to this day while fueling Israel’s university-military-industrial complex.
AERIAL VIEW OF THE ROAD FROM JERUSALEM TO THE SETTLEMENT OF MA’ALE ADUMIM, WITH THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY CAMPUS ON THE LEFT, 2007. (PHOTO: ISRAEL NATIONAL PHOTO COLLECTION)
TOWERS OF IVORY AND STEEL How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom by Maya Wind 288 pp. Verso Press, $29.95
Government encroaching on the sacred cow of academic freedom is precisely the way the Israeli government intervenes in the lives of faculty and students. The difference is that, in Israel, such interference is baked into the system. That’s why Maya Wind’s Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedomis a critical tool for anyone affiliated with academic life — students, faculty, or staff. It is also a text that people involved in the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement will find essential: its systematic analysis, history, and solid data are the ammunition we need to combat those who mistakenly assume that boycotting Israeli academic institutions undermines academic freedom.
Wind’s book is structured in two parts — complicity and repression. It opens and concludes with two brilliant essays by Nadia Abu El-Haj and Robin D. G. Kelley. Wind’s first section lays out the creation of Israeli academic institutions as foundations for the militarized settler colonial state while the second half covers how those institutions implement apartheid and suppress Palestinian students and faculty. From the outset, Wind is refreshingly unequivocal: “Israeli universities are not independent of the Israeli security state but, rather, serve as an extension of its violence” (p. 13). Throughout her book, readers glean insight into how Israeli universities create the knowledge necessary to rationalize and legalize Israel’s apartheid regime.
The compiled evidence in Wind’s powerful book includes a variety of materials that are accessible to an Ashkenazi Israeli like Wind, albeit one whose struggle against Zionism began when she was a teenager, including her refusal to serve in Israel’s army. Relying upon research produced by Palestinian scholars and activists, coupled with documents from Israeli state and military archives, Wind reveals precisely how Israeli universities are complicit in the violation of Palestinian rights inside and outside academia.
The university and the colony
Grounding the role of Israeli universities in settler colonialism, Wind illustrates that “before even the founding of Israel, the Zionist movement founded three universities, which were explicitly to serve the movement’s territorial objectives in Palestine.” (p. 23)
The Hebrew University (1918) was designed to be a “strategic outpost for the Zionist movement and to stake a symbolic political claim to Jerusalem,” while the Technion (1925) and the Weizmann Institute (1934) were “established to advance the scientific and technological development of Israel” (p. 23).
Each institution participated in the Nakba by hosting the Haganah’s “Science Corps, which opened bases on all three campuses to research and refine military capabilities” (p. 23). Faculty and students participated in the production of arms and biological weapons on their campuses, serving Zionist militias that would expel and massacre Palestinians. Science Corps was later incorporated into the Ministry of Defense and led to the creation of Israel’s leading weapons manufacturers, such as Rafael and Israeli Aerospace Industries — a consequence of the commingling of academia and the state. As Wind explains, “The Israeli state’s military industries and its universities have always been co-constituted. Universities have birthed, funded, and advanced their scientific research through the Israeli security state and Israeli weapons corporations.” (p. 105)
While one arm of Israeli academia has certainly been fixated on building its arsenal, its other arm has centered on advancing its demographic and territorial expansionist project: “Their campuses, research, and architectural and planning expertise have been committed toward the state’s territorial and demographic project.” (p. 60) In other words, Israeli universities are part and parcel of the Judaization process. Whether it’s occupying lands in Sheikh Badr or Issawiyeh for Hebrew University’s West and East Jerusalem campuses, all universities in Israel have annexed Palestinian land. Police outposts in university neighborhoods coordinate with campus security, “made up of former Israeli combat soldiers, many of whom still serve in combat reserve units” and police Palestinians on and off campus. (p. 148) It’s not too far-fetched to see the parallels between urban American universities and their role in the gentrification and policing of inner-city communities.
But Israeli universities are not only fixated on annexation near the Green Line. The University of Haifa “was designed to further Israel’s regional demographic project” (p. 71) on the land of al-Khureiba. Its “departments of urban planning and geography have contributed their expertise to assess, improve, and design ‘Judaization’ policies.” (p. 72) The scholarly output of its faculty has contributed to policies supporting the Ministry of Defense that “construct scholarly justifications for the expulsion, containment, and discrimination of Palestinian citizens, alongside exclusive and increased investment in Jewish settlements in the Galilee.” (p. 73)
Similarly, “Ben-Gurion University was established in 1969 with the explicit goal to ‘develop the Negev’ and, as the Zionist adage puts it, ‘make the desert bloom.’” (p. 76) As in the Galilee, Israel worked to contain the Palestinian Bedouin population by shrinking access to their land and re-settling it with its lesser desired Jewish people — initially, Arab and Indian — to the Naqab desert.
Israel’s most recent university came into existence in exactly the same manner as those that came before it — on stolen land from Palestinian villages like Kifl Hares and Marda. As Wind highlights, Ariel University’s foundation has the exact same agenda as its counterparts. Indeed, Ariel is seen as a progenitor for solidifying the annexation of much of the West Bank. It “transformed…Israeli public perception from an illegal and heavily militarized settlement into a suburb of Tel Aviv.” (p. 81) The university and the settlement are mutually reinforcing: “The institution confers degrees as a means of expanding Israeli sovereignty and advancing the annexation of the OPT.” (p. 84)
The university-military-industrial complex
Wind does an excellent job of demonstrating how institutions were created to serve Zionist aims, but it’s especially intriguing to read about the ways in which a wide variety of academic disciplines participate in the creation of facts on the ground for the Israeli state: archaeology, law, philosophy, Middle East studies, history, sociology, architecture, anthropology, politics and government, cultural studies, and specialty programs that fuse military and academic work with the high tech sector. Using evidence from each discipline, Wind illustrates the historical and ongoing use of how academia works to displace and disrupt Palestinian lives.
In some fields, like Middle East studies, the revolving door for employees between the state, the corporation, and the university enables the development of its university-military-industrial complex: “This entanglement of university, military, and state expertise shaped the discipline in its early years. Many of the founding Israeli Middle East studies scholars moved between or held parallel roles in academia and the security establishment or were otherwise bound by loyalty and secrecy commitments to state apparatuses.” (p. 49) Of the various contributions such intermixing facilitated was Tel Aviv University’s faculty preventing the return of Palestinian refugees after the passage of UN Resolution 194.
Collusion between the state and academia plays out today in the creation of programs such as Hebrew University’s Havatzalot intelligence program. The university was required to make concessions to host the program, including “far-reaching Israeli military intervention in the program’s content, structure, employees, and infrastructure on campus.” (p. 53) Palestinian students protested this program, including screening a film documenting what it felt like to encounter Havatzalot students in their classrooms; their actions garnered reprimands — including calls for criminal investigations from the Knesset. These actions ring true as we witness Congress’s overstepping by investigating university campus responses to Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.
Repressing Palestinian students
Importantly, the treatment of Palestinian students takes up a critical portion of Wind’s book, especially the education sector more broadly, as it affects Palestinian citizens of Israel and their teachers, both of whom have undergone decades of surveillance and discrimination. Even secondary education in Israel has largely been the purview of the security state. Wind shares that “as recently as 2020, the director general of the Ministry of Education met with the Shin Bet to discuss screening Palestinian citizen teachers for ‘radicalism.’” (p. 137)
Acceptance into Israeli universities requires surmounting various hurdles, including having matriculated at underfunded schools, passing psychometric exams in addition to quotas for programs like medicine, and the rote racism applied to citizens who aren’t Jewish. For those who make it through these hoops and enroll in an Israeli university, there are daily barriers to contend with, from being accepted into student housing to facing harassment on campus. When they attempt to challenge these policies, Israeli universities never side with their Palestinian students: “What remains unaddressed and unspeakable for university administrations is their alignment and collaboration with the Israeli regime of discriminatory policies.” In fact, on an Israeli campus, Wind tells us, “Palestinian identity itself has always been conceived of as a ‘security threat.’” (p. 146)
Enabling suppression of Palestinian student expression, especially those who engage in campus activism, is Im Tirtzu, an organization affiliated with the Likud that seeks to “monitor ‘leftist’ Jewish faculty and intimidate Palestinian student groups,” maintaining branches on all Israeli university campuses. (p. 117) Faculty are not immune to such surveillance if their research and teaching threaten the state; Im Tirtzu’s informing led to the expulsion of political scientists Haim Yacobi and Neve Gordon from Ben-Gurion University. Of course, the work of Ilan Pappé and his student, Theodore Katz, at the University of Haifa are two additional notorious examples discussed by Wind.
Wind also covers Palestinian university education more broadly, including Israeli interference with the creation and running of universities in the West Bank and Gaza. Monitoring student activism on campuses in the West Bank has often led to violent military repression — monitoring that is enabled by the knowledge and weapons produced by Israel’s university-military-industrial complex. Such oppression is directly tied to the university-to-prison pipeline that many Palestinians endure at the hands of Israel’s apartheid regime.
According to Wind’s research, “no Israeli university president or senior administrator has offered to intervene” on behalf of Palestinian faculty or students facing Israeli military invasions of their campuses. Indeed, “Tel Aviv University president even called in 1986 for Birzeit [University] to be closed by the Israeli military government.” (p. 166) As Wind meticulously chronicles, there is a deafening silence within the halls of Israeli academia to any violation of a Palestinian’s right to education. That alone should be a call to arms for joining the academic boycott.
These instances and histories, which are also very much in the present reality of Israeli academia, should be reason enough for academics to join the boycott movement as individuals and as members of professional organizations. Wind’s book is crystal clear: “Israeli universities continue not only to actively participate in the violence of the Israeli state against Palestinians but also to contribute their resources, research, and scholarship to maintain, defend, and justify this oppression.” (p. 178)
Book Club: Drawing on Hebrew sources, Maya Wind shatters the myth of liberal expression in Israeli universities, revealing instead how they prop up apartheid.
Maya Wind show how the Israeli academy acts as a pillar for Israeli occupation and apartheid, whilst also cracking down on pro-Palestinian voices [Verso Books]
Often it is claimed that Israeli universities are the last bastions of academic freedom in an increasingly oppressive state.
Yet a growing number of critical scholars — Maya Wind first among them — have shown us that the freedom that is claimed to flourish in Israeli universities is only available for supporters of the Israeli state.
“Wind shows us how the university has advanced Israel’s demographic project of appropriating Palestinian land and replacing Palestinian inhabitants between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea with Israeli settlers”
Drawing heavily on Hebrew sources that have not been discussed in the English-language debate around Israel and Palestine, Wind documents a long history of collaboration by Israeli academic institutions in the occupation of Palestine and denial of Palestinian rights.
Wind documents, in painstaking detail how, from the beginning of the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 — if not earlier — Israeli universities have been designed as “regionally strategic outposts for the Israeli state’s territorial and demographic project.”
The locations, research focus, and academic hierarchies of Israeli universities all reflect this broader aim.
The occupation of knowledge
First and foremost among Israeli academia’s “regionally strategic outposts” is the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which was deliberately located in 1925 in “a remote enclave among Palestinian villages.”
As the Zionist expansion project grew, so too did the campus of Hebrew University. In more recent years, the university has been heavily involved in consolidating Israel’s illegal hold over East Jerusalem.
Wind documents how the administrators and staff of Hebrew University profited from the Nakba and later displacements of Palestinians from East Jerusalem throughout the 1960s and into the present.
As soon as Palestinians were expelled from Jerusalem in 1948, Israel’s National Library and Hebrew University embarked on a project to loot books from Palestinian homes and libraries.
As part of the Oriental Division of the National Library, these looted books currently form the core of the Middle Eastern studies collection at Hebrew University. The story of this criminal appropriation is also told by Benny Brunner and Arjan El Fassed, in their documentary The Great Book Robbery, which aired on Al Jazeera in 2012.
No Israeli university has managed to evade complicity in the occupation. Wind takes us through the history of Israel’s major public universities, including the University of Haifa, Tel Aviv University, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, the Technion in Haifa, the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Bar-Ilan University, Ariel University, and Hebrew University.
The only universities she does not mention are Reichman University, Israel’s only private university, and the Open University of Israel.
In each case, Wind shows us how the university has advanced Israel’s demographic project of appropriating Palestinian land and replacing Palestinian inhabitants between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea with Israeli settlers.
As Wind explains, drawing on the scholarship of Nadia Abu El-Haj, the aim has consistently been to “create facts on the ground” that make Israel’s demographic engineering and violations of international law much more difficult to reverse.
The incorporation of Ariel University into mainstream Israeli academia illustrates how effectively Israel has created irreversible “facts on the ground.”
Originally established as a college in 1982 under the auspices of Bar-Ilan University of the Negev, Ariel was named after an existing Israeli settlement that was strategically located to disrupt Palestinian territorial contiguity.
Wind documents the process through which Ariel University came to be officially recognised and treated as a legitimate university within Israel, notwithstanding its location in the occupied West Bank.
There was a brief campaign within Israel to prevent Ariel University from becoming accredited but, as Wind notes, this initiative lost its momentum once it became evident that the groundswell of international opposition that Israeli academics feared would result from Ariel’s accreditation never materialised.
“Wind’s timely expose of the struggle for power over Palestinian rights, Palestinian land, and ultimately over Palestinian lives that is currently taking place in Israeli universities will serve as a guide to everyone responding to the call for an academic and cultural boycott of Israel”
In March 2021, over 500 academics signed an open letter calling on the European Commission to ensure that EU funds were not used to support Israeli research activities in the occupied West Bank.
And yet, only seven months later, the European Commission concluded formal negotiations with Israel that resulted in it becoming an associated country, a status that gives researchers based in Israeli universities access to prestigious and lucrative funding from the European Research Council.
Unfortunately, there is no sign that during these negotiations the European Commission raised the concerns voiced by the international scholarly community about Ariel University, whose very location is in violation of international law, or that the illegal activities of any other Israeli university were mentioned as a potential barrier to Israeli participation in EU funding schemes.
Exporting the Israeli psyche
Meanwhile, in the US, a ban that prohibited US taxpayer funding of academic research conducted in Israel’s illegal West Bank settlements, including Ariel University, was lifted in 2020.
The Biden administration gradually reinstated the ban but decided not to adopt the pre-Trump era policy of describing Israeli settlements in the West Bank as illegal under international law.
A few months before the ban was lifted, Ariel University conferred an honorary fellowship on the Republican governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, a politician who has led the way in banning books promoting awareness of the US’s racist past, as well as in banning chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine across Florida university campuses.
The role that DeSantis has played in undermining academic freedom in Florida universities demonstrates that the tendency to look the other way while Israel violates its international obligations and oppresses Palestinians also affects academic freedom in North American and European universities.
The special status accorded by Western powers to Israeli universities makes Wind’s documentation of Israeli academia’s complicity in the denial of Palestinian freedom all the more urgent.
The book includes a preface from Nadia Abu El-Haj and an afterword from Robin D.G. Kelley that situates Wind’s project in mid-2023, just before the Gaza genocide.
In his caustic remarks, Kelley reminds us, not only why we must boycott Israeli universities and other academic institutions, but also why the struggle against Israeli apartheid in academic spaces matters for everyone.
As Kelley points out, although “universities are not necessarily bastions of democracy, equity, or inclusion,” they are “sites of power.”
Even those of us who doubt that universities matter in the broader struggle for collective liberation would do well to remember that “what appears to be a fight to secure intellectual freedom within the academy is fundamentally a struggle for power.”
Wind’s timely expose of the struggle for power over Palestinian rights, Palestinian land, and ultimately over Palestinian lives that is currently taking place in Israeli universities will serve as a guide to everyone responding to the call for an academic and cultural boycott of Israel.
Initiated by Palestinian civil society in 2004, two decades of Israeli apartheid and an ongoing genocide have shown us that boycotting Israeli universities is an ethical as well as a strategic imperative.
Rebecca Ruth Gould is a Distinguished Professor of Comparative Poetics and Global Politics, at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. She is the author of numerous works at the intersection of aesthetics and politics, including Erasing Palestine (2023), Writers and Rebels (2016) and The Persian Prison Poem (2021). With Malaka Shwaikh, she is the author of Prison Hunger Strikes in Palestine (2023). Her articles have appeared in the London Review of Books, Middle East Eye, and World Policy Journal and her writing has been translated into eleven languages
Israeli scholar Maya Wind’s new book, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom, documents how Israeli universities directly constrain Palestinian rights by supporting and even developing the policies of occupation and apartheid used by the Israeli state. “In the West, Israeli universities are considered bastions of pluralism and democracy. But in fact … they are a central pillar of Israel’s regime of oppression against Palestinians,” says Wind, who also discusses Israel’s “scholasticide, [or] the intentional destruction of Palestinian education,” and the movement of conscientious objectors to Israel’s mandatory conscription, in which she took part when she refused to enlist in the army at age 18 and served 40 days in a military prison.
GUESTS
Maya Windpostdoctoral fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia.
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman.
We are looking now at how the attack on Palestinian rights comes not just from the Israeli military, but, our guest says, an Israeli author — but from Israeli universities, as well. That’s according to a new book called Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom. It documents how, quote, “Academic disciplines, degree programs, campus infrastructure, and research laboratories all service Israeli occupation and apartheid,” it says, “while universities violate the rights of Palestinians to education, stifle critical scholarship, and violently repress student dissent,” unquote.
The book’s author is joining us now. She is Maya Wind, postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. Maya Wind is a Jewish Israeli scholar who grew up in Jerusalem. When she was 18, she refused to enlist in the army, served 40 days in a military prison.
We welcome you to Democracy Now!, Maya Wind. If you can respond to what’s happening right now to professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian, her suspension by Hebrew University, and how you see it in a larger context?
MAYA WIND: Yeah. Thank you for having me, Amy.
And let me really start by saying that I’m one of the countless young scholars who have learned so much from professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s uncompromising research and analysis. And it is truly a travesty that Hebrew University has not only been attempting to silence her for years, but is now effectively expelling her for exposing Jewish Israelis to uncomfortable truths.
And I think this really speaks to the larger problem, which is that in the West, Israeli universities are considered bastions of pluralism and democracy, but, in fact, Palestinian faculty, scholars, students, activists have for over two decades contended that they are a central pillar of Israel’s regime of oppression against Palestinians. So, PACBI, which is the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, issued a call back in 2004 to boycott Israeli universities on the basis of this complicity. And as my new book shows, Israeli universities are indeed deeply, deeply implicated in the violation of Palestinian rights.
And as you began in the opening segment, it is important to note that Israel has destroyed every single Palestinian university in the Gaza Strip. So it is not only committing genocide, but also what Karma Nabulsi and other Palestinian intellectuals have long called scholasticide, the intentional destruction of Palestinian education. And this genocide is not only enabled by the rise of the far right or overzealous military leaders, it is, in fact, central — it is part of a project, of an over 75-year project, of the Zionist movement and the Israeli state to eliminate and replace Palestinians with Jewish Israelis. So, genocide is structural to the Israeli state and is sustained by its most liberal institutions, including its universities.
And just now, it is not only that Israeli universities sustain apartheid and violence against Palestinians for decades, but they are currently participating in this genocide. Hebrew University, among others, are training intelligence soldiers to create target banks in Gaza. They are producing knowledge for the state, whether it’s Hezbollah, which is state propaganda, or legal scholarship to help thwart attempts to hold Israel accountable for its war crimes, such as the case brought to the ICJ by South Africa. And they are, in fact, actually granting university course credit to reserve soldiers returning from Gaza to their classrooms. So, Israeli universities are deeply complicit in this genocide.
AMY GOODMAN: Maya Wind, you refused to serve in the Israeli military back 15 years ago, and you were imprisoned for that. Why then? And how does that inform what you do today?
MAYA WIND: So, yes, I was part of a small movement resisting the draft, a movement that unfortunately has not grown in the 15 years since. And this is one of the reasons, one of the many reasons, that it is absolutely essential for people, especially in the United States, which is fully enabling this genocide, to join the movement to Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, and particularly to participate in the academic boycott and sever ties from — of our own universities and our own institutions from Israeli universities, which are implicated in the violation of Palestinian rights and now in genocide, precisely because we need the intervention of international civil society to hold Israelis accountable for these crimes.
AMY GOODMAN: Let me bring back in professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian. What does it mean to have Jewish scholars and students like Maya Wind to be joining with you, speaking up in your behalf to challenge your suspension?
NADERA SHALHOUB-KEVORKIAN: Yeah, well, I think that Maya’s book is a very important book, and those voices are extremely important to really challenge the system and that system of oppression and of the genocidal process. Amy, you know, in class, I do have students, Jewish — mostly Jewish, actually — and Palestinians. I am teaching for years in the Department of Criminology, where lots of our students are serving in different places — the army, the police and so on. The fact that the whole academic space is being turned — and I think teaching and talking and discussing and working and agreeing and disagreeing is very important, is very healthy, is a space to discuss. And this is why it’s not anti-Jewish behavior, saying no to the genocide. It’s not antisemitism to say no to genocide, because my Jewish students are — like Maya and like many others, are really with me in the same path.
What we’re saying here is that — and it’s very important, because it’s with the voices of dissent from around the world, from different — from South Africa, my colleagues to the U.S. and to the U.K. These voices are helping us really explain, number one, that this situation, that the fact that people can be threatened because of their — they can’t speak up, and they can’t talk about abuses and atrocities, should not continue, that the ongoing genocide — and we should call to stop this ongoing genocide, against any people, not only my people. But I’m saying it, that I would — as I was talking about the Rohingya and in Sudan and in other places, against apartheid, against ethnic cleansing. And I think that working together as an anti-oppressive scholars and groups, Jews, Palestinians, Blacks, Native scholars and so on, is the right way. Choosing to punish me and to punish the students is really very problematic, dangerous, and really threatens [inaudible] —
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, I want to thank you for being with us, as well as Maya Wind, author of Towers of Ivory and Steel. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us.
Israeli scholar Maya Wind joins us for Part 2 of her interview about her new book, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom. She discusses Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s universities; the coalescing of Israeli university administrations with the Israeli far right; the move to repress Palestinian organizing on U.S. campuses, including of groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace; and how archaeology, law, Middle East studies and other forms of knowledge production have subordinated their research agendas to the requirements of the Israeli state.
Maya Windpostdoctoral fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
We continue now with Part 2 of our conversation with Maya Wind, author of the new book, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom. Maya is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia.
This week, around a hundred leading European academics signed a petition titled “Annihilation of Gaza Education: Israel is systematically erasing the entire educational system,” they wrote. They protested the Israeli military’s destruction of six universities in the Gaza Strip since October 7th: Islamic University, Al-Israa University, Rabat University, Al-Azhar University, Al-Aqsa University and Al-Quds Open University.
The Intercept recently reported that within the first 100 days of Israel’s assault on Gaza, the Israeli military destroyed every single university in the Gaza Strip. Nearly a hundred university deans and professors and three university presidents in Gaza have been killed in the Israeli assault. Over 4,300 students, more than 230 professors, teachers, administrators have been killed.
Maya Wind, we thank you for staying with us to talk about the significance of what has taken place right now in the Gaza Strip to academia, to the students.
MAYA WIND: Yeah. University education in the Occupied Palestinian Territories has been under siege, by the Israeli state, by the Israeli military, for decades, including in Gaza. Gazan universities have been subject to a debilitating illegal siege for over 17 years, subject to repeated aerial bombardment. And now, most recently, every single one, as you said, has been destroyed by either controlled detonation or aerial bombardment. This is very intentional. This is part of a broader project by the Israeli state to destroy Palestinian education as a means to destroy the Palestinian liberation movement.
AMY GOODMAN: When you raise these issues as a Jewish scholar, as an Israeli student and academic, how are you responded to?
MAYA WIND: What we are seeing now, especially over the last two decades, is a coalescing of Israeli university administrations with the Israeli far right, with other forces to continually foreclose and limit what is permissible to research, to debate, to speak to, to protest on Israeli campuses. And we’re seeing that really manifest for some time. But in particular, over the last five months, this repression has grown. Palestinian students were asked to evacuate their dorm rooms, given 24-hour notice. Palestinian and critical Jewish Israeli students and scholars have been summoned to disciplinary committees and have been suspended for speaking out against this genocide, for conducting research about the Nakba, which is the mass expulsion of over two-thirds of the Palestinian population that enabled the founding of the Israeli state. And so, we are seeing this is a broad project of repressing critical research and debate, which is really the bedrock of higher education. But this is disallowed in the Israeli university system.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, we interviewed Tal Mitnick, who I think was the first refusenik, young person to refuse, in this latest assault to serve in the Israeli military and was repeatedly jailed. You did this 15 years ago. What was it like to be in an Israeli jail then for you, and then also the difference between what happened to you and the thousands of Palestinians who’ve been imprisoned?
MAYA WIND: Yeah, so, it is important to speak to how imprisonment and incarceration and detention is really a tool, a central tool, of the Israeli state to destroy the Palestinian liberation movement. And we see this particularly play out on Palestinian campuses across the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, where Palestinian universities are routinely raided by the Israeli military. Student activists and organizers in over 411 Palestinian student groups and associations that have been declared unlawful by the Israeli state are routinely abducted from their campus, from their homes in the middle of the night. They are subjected to torture. They are held in administrative detention without charge or trial for months. And so, what we’re really seeing is a systemic attack of the Israeli military and the Israeli military government on Palestinian higher education, and particularly on Palestinian campuses as sites of organizing for Palestinian liberation.
AMY GOODMAN: Maya, you are here in New York right now, and you’re going to be speaking in different areas, including at Columbia University. I wanted to turn to a lawsuit that has just been filed by New York Civil Liberties Union and Palestine Legal against Columbia University for suspending two pro-Palestine student groups. That’s Students for Justice in Palestine, SJP, and Jewish Voice for Peace, suspended last November after organizing peaceful protests against the Israeli occupation and the assault on Gaza. Can you talk about the significance of these kinds of suspensions? And it’s not only happening at Columbia and Barnard.
MAYA WIND: Yes, absolutely. So, I myself was an active member of Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine over a decade ago. And it was really hard to organize on that campus then, and it is impossible now, with Columbia University suspending both Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. And students who are mobilizing for Palestinian liberation on campus are facing all forms of harassment, including by Columbia faculty and the administration.
And this move to repress Palestinian organizing on U.S. campuses is very clearly a response to a generational gap. What we are seeing is that young people across the United States recognize Israel for what it is. They know apartheid when they see it. They know genocide when they see it. And in response, they are not only being repressed by university campus administrations, but the state is increasingly moving in to criminalize the BDS movement, because it is gaining such wide traction, especially among young people and students in this country.
AMY GOODMAN: As you go around the country to talk about Towers of Ivory and Steel, your new book, talk about why you called it that.
MAYA WIND: Again, it sort of speaks to the misconception in the Western academic community about Israeli universities. For too long, Jewish Israeli scholars have been allowed to gatekeep and to narrate to the West what their universities are, and this despite, again, over two decades of mobilization and critical research by Palestinian scholars and civil society organizations about the nature of Israeli universities and their deep embeddedness in the apparatuses of violence of the Israeli state.
And so, in my book, I really take this critique seriously and did an in-depth investigation, using archival materials, observing campus protests and classrooms across Israel’s eight major public universities, speaking with Palestinian student organizers, Palestinian and Jewish Israeli faculty and students. And what I really saw and learned in the course of this research is the vast and multifaceted nature of this embeddedness with the project of the oppression of Palestinians.
AMY GOODMAN: And what about the Israeli Jewish professors, scholars, students who resist, like yourself — I mean, you, yourself, of course, you were jailed for your refusing to serve in the Israeli military, but then have gone on to be deeply critical — and those that express solidarity, for example, with professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who has been suspended by Hebrew University? Those protests out there, as she pointed out, were Jewish and Palestinian students, Jewish and Palestinian professors.
MAYA WIND: There is an important move, certainly, to resist and to conduct critical research, to protest, to insist on academic freedom on Israeli university campuses by primarily, really led by, Palestinian students and faculty, and sometimes joined by a small contingent of Jewish Israelis. But what this book speaks to is really the structure. This is a structural problem. This is about the very nature of the institutions of Israeli universities, from where they are built — they are built as land grab institutions to further Palestinian dispossession and expand Judaization, which is the continual shrinking of Palestinian land ownership and Palestinian land contiguity and the expansion of Jewish Israeli settlement and population distribution — to the ways in which these universities produce knowledge, expertise and help in the development of weapons, used against Palestinians and then sold abroad as battle-tested. And so, we’re really seeing this vast apparatus and a structural problem of universities subordinating themselves to the requirements and the needs of the Israeli state and Israeli apartheid. And that is what is at stake here.
AMY GOODMAN: Maya Wind, you’re a postdoctoral fellow in anthropology at the University of British Columbia. In your book, Towers of Ivory and Steel, you examine the role of archaeology, law and Middle East studies. Can you talk about this?
MAYA WIND: Certainly. So, in one of the chapters of the book, I really trace the ways that knowledge production and dominant paradigms in entire disciplines of the Israeli academy have subordinated their research agendas to the requirements of the Israeli state to aid the Israeli state in differentially ruling not only Palestinian and Jewish citizens, but also Palestinian subjects under military governance.
And we’re seeing that play out in multiple disciplines, as you mentioned. So, in archaeology, for instance, Israeli archaeology, institutes and departments are producing knowledge to aid in the dispossession of Palestinians and the expansion of Jewish settlement, using archeological research as a pretext and creating narratives that justify the Jewish — not only Jewish presence, but Jewish exclusive claims to the entirety of the land.
AMY GOODMAN: What about the other way around —
MAYA WIND: This is true in Middle East studies —
AMY GOODMAN: — in archaeology? Is finding whole Palestinian communities, evidence of, artifacts of?
MAYA WIND: Yes. So, absolutely, there is. Israeli archaeological research has been repeatedly critiqued by Palestinian scholars and others for not only violating the Fourth Geneva Convention, but also conducting unsound and unscientific research by explicitly and intentionally removing Palestinian artifacts and artifacts of the Islamic periods in order to substantiate Israeli state narratives.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to this questioning in January at the U.S. State Department, the Associated Press, Matt Lee, questioning State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller about Israel’s demolition of Al-Israa University in Gaza.
MATT LEE: I mean, it looks like a controlled demolition. It looks like what we do here in this country when we’re taking down an old hotel or a stadium. And you have nothing to say? You have nothing to say about this?
MATTHEW MILLER: I — I have —
MATT LEE: I mean, to do that kind of an explosion, you need to be in there. You have to put the explosives down, and it takes a lot of planning and preparation to do. And if there was a threat from this particular facility, they wouldn’t have been able to do it.
MATTHEW MILLER: So, I have seen the video. I can tell you that it is something we are raising with the government of Israel, as we do — often do, when we see —
MATT LEE: Well, “raising” is what? Like —
MATTHEW MILLER: When we see — to ask questions and find out what the underlying situation is, as we often do when we see reports of this nature. But I’m not able to characterize the actual facts on the ground before hearing that response.
MATT LEE: Yeah, but you saw the video.
MATTHEW MILLER: I did see the video. I don’t — I don’t know — I don’t know —
MATT LEE: I mean, it looks like people —
MATTHEW MILLER: I don’t know what was —
MATT LEE: It looks like, you know, a bridge being imploded or something.
MATTHEW MILLER: I don’t know what was under that — I don’t know what was under that building. I don’t know what was inside —
MATT LEE: Well, yeah, but —
MATTHEW MILLER: — inside that building.
MATT LEE: But it doesn’t matter what was under the building, because they obviously got in there to put the explosives down to do it in the way that they did.
MATTHEW MILLER: So, again, I’m glad you have factual certainty, but I just — I just don’t.
MATT LEE: I don’t.
MATTHEW MILLER: I just don’t.
MATT LEE: All have is what I saw on the video, right?
MATTHEW MILLER: I — I just don’t. But I can say say —
MATT LEE: And I think you guys saw it, too.
MATTHEW MILLER: We did see it. I can say that we have raised it with the government of Israel.
MATT LEE: And it’s not troubling to you?
MATTHEW MILLER: We are always troubled by the — by any degradation of civilian infrastructure in Gaza.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Matthew Miller, the State Department spokesperson, responding to a question by the AP reporter Matt Lee. Maya Wind, he’s talking about the demolition of Al-Israa University in Gaza City, one of a number of universities that were blown up by the Israeli military. Why don’t we end with that point and your response to it?
MAYA WIND: What is really devastating is not only the destruction of Palestinian universities, all of them in Gaza, but also the absolute failure of any of the Israeli universities, that are in fact directly facilitating this destruction, to speak out against it. Where is the defense of Palestinian academic freedom?
AMY GOODMAN: Maya Wind, I want to thank you for being with us, author of the new book, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom. To see Part 1 of our conversation, you can go to democracynow.org. Maya Wind grew up in Israel, was a refusenik 15 years ago, served time in Israeli military jail for refusing to serve in the Israeli military. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. She’s currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia in anthropology. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.
On Tuesday, Feb. 6, Maya Wind and Robin D.G. Kelley led a discussion titled “Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom.” The event, located at Pitzer College’s Benson Auditorium, centered around what speakers described as the complicity of higher education institutions in Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestine.
According to event organizer Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and History Daniel Segal at Pitzer, Wind and Kelley were invited to speak at Tuesday’s talk because of their existence as “scholar-activists.”
Wind is the Killiam Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia and the author of the book “Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom.” Kelley is the Gary B. Nash Professor of History at UCLA and the author of numerous books of his own.
For Segal, Wind and Kelley’s scholarly work, combined with their attention to social justice and activism, distinguishes them from many other faculty members.
“Maya Wind and Robin D.G. Kelley define what we mean by scholar-activists as distinct from many faculty who can be recognized as excellent scholars but do not extend their work into activism, during this moment of global-local peril and scare,” Segal said in an email to TSL.
Segal’s emphasis on Wind and Kelley’s existence as “scholar-activists” was highly reflective of the event’s focus on the intersection between scholarship and activism. At the talk, the speakers stressed the importance of holding universities accountable.
“What we’re witnessing today is not only a genocide, not only an attempt by Israel to erase the Palestinian people, but also [to erase] centuries of knowledge, culture [and] history central to who they are as a people,” Wind said. “Israel has always understood Palestinian education as a threat to its rule and it has targeted it at every turn.”
Wind explained her own discoveries about the relationship between Israeli and Palestinian education, which she made while visiting Israel and researching for her book.
“Israeli institutions of higher education are deeply implicated in Israeli colonialism and apartheid and must be understood as settler universities,” Wind said. “They are embedded in the infrastructure that sustains Israeli society as a settler society.”
She said that Israeli universities deny Palestinian freedom by suppressing critical research pedagogy, debate and student mobilization, especially following increased government restrictions in the ’80s and ’90s.
“Before the ’80s, in Israeli universities, Palestinian and some Jewish Israeli scholars really began to explore the histories and structures of Israeli state violence,” Wind said, reflecting particularly on events like the Nakba. “Following government control, researchers faced harassment and violence that drove many Palestinian scholars and some of the most critical Jewish Israelis out of these Israeli academies.”
Wind then went on to describe the current state of Palestinian universities, which she says are facing the full force of Israeli state violence. According to her, Palestinian universities in the occupied West Bank have always been governed by the Israeli military and subjected to bureaucratic restrictions that isolate and obstruct them.
“Now, all 11 of the universities in Gaza have been targeted and either partially or entirely destroyed by Israeli bombardment,” Wind said. “Israel has killed over 240 Palestinian faculty members in Gaza — including deans and university presidents — killed over 4,800 students, injured over 8,400 and has left over 90,000 students with no university to attend.”
Kelley also commented on the silencing of Palestinians in academia, citing professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a Palestinian professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as an example. According to Kelley, Shalhoub-Kevorkian is currently receiving death threats and dismissal because she drafted and signed an open letter calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
“The letter described the mass killing, maiming and enforced starvation of children in Gaza as genocide and for this, she received death threats and threats of dismissal coming from the administration,” Kelley said. “They’re saying that she should be fired because she used the word genocide to talk about killing children; her research is on children — so much for free speech in enlightened Israeli universities.”
Kelley emphasized the responsibility of intellectuals in the face of genocide, which he explained is to speak truth to power and to unwaveringly advocate for principles of justice and critical thought.
“As long as we don’t stand up, we lose the possibility of thought, so we are complicit in the loss of academic freedom,” Kelley said. “We have to stand up for thought, stand up for thinking and stand up for justice. And that’s it.”
Winner of PIJ’s Simcha Bahiri Essay Writing Contest
Young people have a great capacity to initiate processes of change. Yet in observing my society during and after the last operation in Gaza, I felt that this capacity was not employed at all. Despite our vast potential to create change, with our energy level and tendency to question the previous generation’s values, opinions among Israeli youth regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remain sadly static. We need to channel our natural tendency in constructive directions, by questioning our perception of the conflict and nurturing the notion of doubt. Developing doubt will increase young people’s capacity to think originally and to translate our ideas into innovative actions that may change the political reality of the region. One way of nurturing constructive questioning would be to create an online “Israeli-Palestinian Doubt Forum.” Doubt should be developed particularly in relation to three concepts: facts, collective identity and personal responsibility. First, it is important for my generation to question the official historical “facts” that generally serve as a framework for discussion of the conflict. These “facts” have been internalized and are now considered to provide the background to the debate instead of being subject to debate themselves. We don’t realize that what we assume to be “facts” are frequently only our own narrative, and this greatly restricts our ability to think about the conflict openly and critically. Advertisement In a Doubt Forum, Israeli and Palestinian youth could post articles, pictures and their own opinions and feelings, as well as ask others questions about the way they experience the conflict. Exposure to a diversity of information would encourage greater skepticism of the way their respective societies represent the conflict. This new kind of online interaction would challenge the notion of “fact,” leading to a more open-minded and less self-righteous approach to the political debate. It will also lead people to challenge what they “know” about those on the other side, including the reasons for their actions, and the compromises they would be willing to make for peace. In this way, the Doubt Forum would allow for a deeper and more original discussion. Second, the concept of collective identity should be questioned. The conflict is deeply personal to many people, yet the emotions regarding it are often experienced communally. In both societies there is a sense of insecurity, which leads to a feeling that nationalism is necessary to keep the state – or the struggle for one – alive. When collective identity plays such a central role, distinguishing between individuals and their actions or communities becomes difficult. Furthermore, over-identification with one’s society or government does not enable one to examine critically that society’s actions, as the subject becomes emotionally loaded. The Doubt Forum would help undermine collective identity and reveal the individual voices within the two societies. Breaking down collective identity would highlight the common denominator of human experience shared by Israelis and Palestinians. Finding this common denominator would promote understanding of the “other” and create a platform from which to debate the conflict effectively. Finally, perceptions of personal responsibility and of the individual’s ability to make a difference ought to be examined. Although the conflict feels very personal to most Israelis and Palestinians, many still consider their individual actions to be removed from it. People perceive it as affecting them but not the opposite. Therefore, they do not pause to doubt before acting and, as a result, do not feel personally responsible for the course of the conflict. Reading conflict-related personal stories from the other side would force individuals to consider the effects of their actions and recognize that not doing so only helps perpetuate the conflict. The Doubt Forum will promote self-examination and allow us to challenge the intractability of the conflict by doubting before acting. A joint Israeli-Palestinian Doubt Forum that questions the notions of fact, collective identity and personal responsibility would provide a way for Palestinians and Israelis to interact and recognize each other’s humanity – allowing them to meet somewhere other than on opposite sides of a checkpoint. This, in turn, would allow us the freedom to think as individuals – not as nations – and come up with original solutions to the conflict. Interaction in the Doubt Forum would help us question the “facts” and demonstrate the plurality of voices present in both societies. The Forum would strengthen individual identity and empower young people to effect change. With the heightened consciousness, new perspectives, and confidence that the Doubt Forum would give them, young people could make peace possible. Maya Yechieli Wind, 19, of Jerusalem, was the Israeli winner of the Simcha Bahiri Youth Essay Contest organized by the Palestine-Israel Journal. A conscientious objector, she is doing her national service with Rabbis for Human Rights and the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions.
מאיה יחיאלי-ווינד בת ה-19 העדיפה לשבת בכלא מאשר להתגייס לצה”ל, אבל בקמפוס של אוניברסיטת “קולומביה”, ניו יורק, היא דווקא לבשה בשבוע האחרון מדים. יחיאלי-ווינד וסטודנטים פרו-פלסטינים קיימו מיצג במסגרתו “חיקו” את מחסומי צה”ל בשטחים. הם עצרו סטודנטים עוברי אורח, כפתו אותם וכיסו את עיניהם. כך זה נראה
אוניברסיטת קולומביה היוקרתית, ניו יורק, ארה”ב, השבוע. סטודנטים פרו-פלסטינים משתתפים ב”מיצג נגד הכיבוש”, בו חלקם מגלמים חיילים וחלקם מגלמים פלסטינים במחסומים. בראש המפגינים: סטודנטית ישראלית בת 19.
מאיה יחיאלי-ווינד, במקור מירושלים, סירבה להתגייס, ישבה בכלא צבאי וכיום כאמור לומדת בקולומביה. בנוסף ללימודיה, היא הצטרפה לארגון “סטודנטים מקולומביה בעד צדק לפלסטינים”, שארגן את המיצגים השנויים במחלוקת.
יחיאלי-ווינד ועוד סטודנטים לבשו מדי ב’ של צה”ל, הצטיידו ברובים מקרטון, ועצרו סטודנטים ברחבי הקמפוס. בסרטון הם נראים מורים להם לכרוע על הרצפה, מכסים את עיניהם ואוזקים את ידיהם.
המיצג, שאמור לדמות את ה”זוועות”, כך לפי הסטודנטים, נמשך מספר שעות, ומשך עוברי אורח והפגנות נגד. ווינד עצמה אמרה לעיתון האוניברסיטה שסיקר את המהומה, כי “הרבה אנשים מופתעים שאני ישראלית, ושאני בעד זכויות אדם ובעד חוק בינלאומי. זה שילוב נדיר בימים אלה”.
“רצינו לבוא עם חגורות נפץ”מאיה מפגינה “נגד הכיבוש”, השבוע בניו יורק | צילום: חדשות 2
איגוד-העל שמאחד את ארגוני הסטודנטים היהודיים בקמפוס, ארגן במהירות הפגנה כנגד המיצג. “התגובה הראשונית שלנו הייתה לבוא עם חגורות נפץ ולומר ‘רואים, בגלל זה אנחנו צריכים את המחסומים'”, אמר ג’ונה לייבן, חבר האיגוד. “אבל לא רצינו לרדת לרמה הזו”.
במקום, עמדו הסטודנטים הישראלים והפרו-ישראלים ליד המיצג והסבירו לעוברי האורח שנקלעו למקום כי המחסומים הם “רע הכרחי” ושהם מונעים פיגועים בשטח ישראל. “אני חושב שזה הוגן לערוך הפגנות, זה חשוב, אבל לרוב זה חד צדדי”, אמר ליאור חמי, סטודנט ישראלי. “איך זה ישרת את המטרה שלי לראות את הצד השטני של הצד השני? זה באמת יגרום לי להיראות יותר טוב? לא נראה לי”.
אחת המפגינות הפלסטיניות ממזרח ירושלים, דינה זביידי, סיפרה לעיתון כי “הייתי צריכה לעבור מחסום בכל יום במשך שנתיים, אז אני יודעת איך הם מתנהגים”.
מעמדה של ישראל בעולם, לא משהו. העולם לא אוהב את מדיניות הממשלה, ראשי מדינות כועסים על ראש הממשלה, אבל אין ספק שהדבר הכי מתסכל הוא כאשר את הביקורת יוזמים ומזינים ישראלים בעולם. למשל מאיה יחיאלי ווינד, סטודנטית ישראלית באוניברסיטת קולומביה, שיזמה אתמול, ולא בפעם הראשונה, את המיזם הזה בניו יורק
מאיה יחיאלי ווינד, סטודנטית ישראלית באוניברסיטת קולומביה, שתועדה על ידי מצלמות חדשות 2 בהפגנה אנטי-ישראלית בארצות הברית, מסבירה בראיון מיוחד כי היא דווקא כן אוהבת את ישראל. “ברגע שהכיבוש ייפסק ונתחיל לכבד זכויות אדם וחוק בינלאומי, אני אפסיק את המיצגים שלי”, היא טוענת. “אני רק עוזרת להפיץ מידע”
במהלך “שבוע האפרטהייד” המתקיים באוניברסיטאות ומכללות ברחבי העולם, נערכים מייצגים התוקפים את מדיניות צה”ל וישראל. באוניברסיטת קולומביה בניו יורק, ניסתה סטודנטית ישראלית להראות לעוברים ושבים כיצד לכאורה, נוהגים החיילים באלימות כלפי פלסטינים.
במהלך המיצג שנערך אתמול שיחקו שתי סטודנטיות חיילים במחסום שמתעללים וכופתים עובר אורח פלסטיני. הסטודנטית הישראלית שעמדה מאחורי היוזמה מאיה יחיאלי ווינד, מסבירה כי למרות היוזמה שלה היא דווקא אוהבת את ישראל.
“אני כלל לא שונאת את ישראל על אף ששבוע האפרטהייד הזה מוצג כאנטי-ישראלי, הוא אנטי מדיניות ישראל בפלסטין”, מסבירה ווינד בראיון מיוחד לתכנית “שש עם”. “ברגע שהכיבוש ייפסק ונתחיל לכבד זכויות אדם וחוק בינלאומי, אני אפסיק את המיצגים שלי”.
לדברי הסטודנטית הישראלית, היא בעד חוק בינלאומי וזכויות אדם וכי דווקא מתוך אהבה למדינה היא רוצה לראות את המדיניות משתנה. “אני חושבת שקודם כל, אני לא מייצרת שנאה, אני בסך הכל עוזרת להפיץ מידע שהוא אמיתי ונכון. מה שאני מייצגת זה מה שבאמת קורה בשטחים והציבור האמריקני מממן את הכיבוש הישראלי, ולכן יש לו גם זכות לדעת מה קורה שם”.
ווינד מוסיפה: “אני רואה את חיי בארץ. אני רק כאן ללימודים. אני מאוד אוהבת את המדינה, מאוד חשוב לי העתיד שלה, ולכן אני רוצה לראות את המדיניות בשטחים משתנה. אם נשקיע את כמות האנרגיה והמשאבים שאנחנו משקיעים בהסברה בשינוי המדיניות אז לא תהיה לנו בעיה”.
https://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3858178,00.html הפעילים משייח ג’ראח: “דרך חדשה לשמאל”חבורה קטנה של כמה צעירים ללא ניסיון משפטי הצליחה להביך את משטרת ירושלים ולאלצה להסכים להפגנה גדולה. “זה רק עוד מקרה של מאבק בכיבוש, בגזענות ובאפליה”, הם אומרים. בשמאל כבר מדברים עליהם כתקווה החדשה
רונן מדזיני פורסם: 05.03.10 , 00:38
מה שהחל בצעדה של כ-20 צעירים במחאה על כניסת מתיישבים יהודים לשכונה הערבית במזרח ירושלים, הפך בחודשים האחרונים לתופעה פוליטית שלא ניתן להתעלם ממנה. כמה מאות פעילים, אנשי רוח ופוליטיקאים מתאספים מדי יום שישי בצהריים כדי להפגין נגד מה שהם מגדירים “עוולת המדינה”. היד הקשה שהפגינה המשטרה רק חיזקה את המאבק, והפכה אותו ממאבק שולי, לסמל ולמוקד עלייה לרגל של אנשי שמאל רבים ברחבי הארץ. הם אפילו גררו את המדינה לבג”ץ – ורשמו הישג כאשר השופטים אישרו הפגנה במוצאי שבת של מאות משתתפים.
ההישג המשפטי הזה נזקף לזכותם של שלושה סטודנטים, חסרי כל רקע בתחום המשפט. אחד מהם הוא אבנר ענבר (29), דוקטורנט לפילוסופיה באוניברסיטת שיקגו, שסיפר ל-ynet על התנהלות העתירה. “הבנו שאין לנו יכולת לממן שירותים של עורך דין, ולכן החלטנו לכתוב את העתירה בעצמנו. ישבנו על זה יומיים-שלושה באופן מאוד אינטנסיבי – לילות כימים. למדנו את הנושא, קראנו פסקי דין באינטרנט בנושא החופש להפגין, ירדנו לשטח לצלם את האתרים הרלוונטיים, גבינו תצהירים ממפגינים ומתושבי השכונה וכתבנו את העתירה”
נפגשים אחת לשבוע לסיעור מוחין, תכנון הפגנות וחשיבה (צילום: נועם מושקוביץ)
כשהתברר שהמשטרה לא מתכוונת לאשר את ההפגנה, המאבק החריף. “תכננו אירוע גדול למוצאי שבת”, סיפר אבנר ענבר, “והסירוב של המשטרה היה מיידי ולא לווה בהסברים ונימוקים – למרות שעל-פי החוק הם מחויבים לכך. הבנו שמדובר בקמפיין של המשטרה נגד המחאה במקום. הגשנו את העתירה ביום ראשון, וביום חמישי כבר ייצגנו את עצמנו”. הייצוג העצמי, לדבריו, הוא סמל לאופיו של המאבק בשייח ג’ראח – לא-מאורגן, עצמאי ולא ממוסד.
“המאבק יימשך, עד שיסתיים הכיבוש”
מאחורי המאבק החתרני, שמצליח להביך שוב ושוב את משטרת מחוז ירושלים, עומדת קבוצה של צעירים בשנות ה-20 לחייהם. מזה כשנה וחצי הם פועלים ללא תקציב, ללא ידע או ניסיון, ללא עורכי דין או מפלגות העומדות מאחוריהן. כעת, מעודדים מהניצחון במערכה בבג”ץ, הם מבטיחים להמשיך את המאבק. “המאבק יימשך כל עוד המטרה, שהיא הפסקת הכיבוש, טרם הושגה”.
סהר ורדי, מיוזמות המאבק, צעירה בת 19 מירושלים: “זה התחיל לפני שנה וחצי בערך, כשמשפחת אל-כורד פונתה מביתה. זה היה מאבק קטן, בתוך אוהל מחאה”, היא נזכרת. באוגוסט האחרון, עם פינוין של שתי משפחות נוספות שלבתיהן נכנסו מתיישבים יהודים, התחדשה המחאה. “היינו קבוצה של פעילים שהגיעו לשייח ג’ראח די הרבה, והפכנו לפעילים המעורבים יותר סביב הנושא”.
מאבק עצמאי – לא מאורגן ולא ממוסד (צילום: נועם מושקוביץ)
“אחרי הפינוי האחרון בנובמבר עשינו ישיבה והעלינו רעיונות למה אפשר לעשות – אחד מהם היה לערוך צעדה. תוך שבוע וחצי התחלנו – היינו בערך 20 איש, וצעדנו מכיכר ציון לשכונה. שבוע אחרי זה הצטרפו מתופפים, והיינו בערך 40. אז התחלנו להזמין בתפוצה יותר רחבה”, היא מספרת.
להפגנה הבאה כבר הגיעו יותר מ-100 מפגינים – ואז גם נכנסה המשטרה לפעולה וביצעה לראשונה מעצרים. “זה פורסם באיזה מקום, מה שהקפיץ עוד יותר את המאבק – קיבלנו כותרות, וכך הנושא עלה וקיבל מודעות”. מאז, מגיעים לכל הפגנה כמה מאות אנשי שמאל, ובהם אנשי רוח ופוליטיקאים. בין המפגינים ניתן למצוא גם את הסופר דויד גרוסמן, חברי הכנסת לשעבר אברהם בורג ויוסי שריד, “אבל הרוב דומיננטי הוא סטודנטים ירושלמים”, אומרים הפעילים.
“זה רק מקרה אחד של מאבק בכיבוש”
יוזמי המאבק באים מרקע שונה. ורדי היא מיוזמי מכתב השמיניסטים שסירבו להתגייס לצה”ל, ופעילה כבר כמה שנים למען זכויות הפלסטינים. מאיה וינד (20), גם היא ממובילות המאבק, הגיעה מתחום הפעילות למען זכויות האדם.
בשיחה עם ynet מספרת וינד כי לא שיערה בנפשה שהמחאה תזכה לתנופה כה גדולה. “אם היית אומר לי לפני שישה חודשים שחצי מדינה ישמעו על שייח ג’ראח, הייתי צוחקת”, סיפרה. “התחלנו כקבוצה של חמישה-שישה אקטיביסטים בשכונה – ממש עברנו לגור בשכונה לתקופה מסוימת. המאבק שלנו מאוד עממי, דינמי וספונטני, וכל הזמן מצטרפים עוד תומכים. יש לנו מין ועדה קבועה כזו עם תושבי השכונה – אנחנו נפגשים אחת לשבוע לסיעור מוחין, תכנון הפגנות וחשיבה משותפת. זה מקסים בעיני שהצלחנו ליצור מאבק כזה משותף”, הוסיפה.
לטענת וינד, המאבק טומן בחובו כמה מטרות, שאינן מתחילות ומסתכמות בשכונה הטעונה. “המטרה הראשונה והבסיסית היא להביא לצדק בשכונה עצמה, למנוע פינויים נוספים, להחזיר משפחות שפונו לבתיהם ולהקפיא את מפעל ההתנחלות שם. אבל זה לא רק שייח ג’ראח, זה גם מאבק אחד מני רבים למען שחרור מזרח ירושלים ופלסטין. שייח ג’ראח היא רק עוד מקרה של מאבק בכיבוש, בגזענות ובאפליה, ואנו מעלים הרבה שאלות למערכת המשפט הישראלית באשר לאופן שבו צריך להתייחס ליהודים ולפלסטינים”, הסבירה.
הוואקום בשמאל מתמלא
הצעירים המעורבים במאבק מספרים כי עיקר הסיפוק נובע מתחושה שהצליחו לשבור את
המעגל הקטן והמסורתי של השמאל בישראל. ואכן, בחלוף כמה חודשים, עושה רושם שהוואקום שנוצר בשמאל מתמלא לאיטו. “זה הדבר הכי טוב שקרה לשמאל הישראלי בשנים האחרונות”, אמר ל-ynet מוסי רז, ח”כ לשעבר מטעם מפלגת מרצ ומפגין קבוע בשייח ג’ראח. “הם בלי שום ספק התקווה הגדולה ביותר כיום במאבק נגד הכיבוש ולמען חברה צודקת יותר”.
“שייח ג’ראח הוא כבר התחלה של דרך חדשה לשמאל. קבוצה צעירה ונחושה כזו לא ראינו כבר המון שנים”, מוסיף רז. “הם לא מקבלים משכורת, לא שייכים לשום ארגון או מפלגה. הם פשוט אנשים ערכיים שגילו עמידה איתנה מול העוול המוסרי העצום של השלכת אנשים לרחובות – והטמטום הישראלי שמכניס מתנחלים לשכונה ערבית. המאבק יצליח, נקודה. גם אם ייקח שנים ויכנסו עוד משפחות ויהיו עוד עוולות. אי אפשר אחרת, מדינת ישראל לא תתקיים אם לא תפסיק את הכיבוש. לחבר’ה האלה מגיע פרס”, קובע הח”כ לשעבר.
Sep. 15, 2009 E.B. SOLOMONT, Jerusalem Post Correspondent in New York , THE JERUSALEM POST
Two Israeli women who are refusing mandatory army duty have kicked off a North American speaking tour and plan to take their story to more than a dozen college campuses in the next month.
Hoping to highlight their opposition to Israel’s policies toward Palestinians, Maya Wind and Netta Mishly, both 19, will appeal to their American counterparts during their “Why We Refuse” tour from September 12 to October 10. Both women describe themselves as Shministim, a group of high school seniors who refuse to serve in the IDF.
“We believe it is important to spread information about the Israeli occupation and about the movements that work against it,” stated Wind, who said that she was detained for 40 days because of her refusal to serve in the IDF. She was released in March. “We hope to empower people our age to take responsibility by taking a more active role in the resistance movements,” she said.
Their month long tour is being organized by the anti-war groups CODEPINK and Jewish Voice for Peace. According to their itinerary, the young women will visit more than a dozen schools in California, New York and Washington DC, starting with the University of California, Hastings on Monday and finishing with the University of Maryland on October 8. They will make stops at Cornell, Columbia, New York University, Brown, Brandeis and other schools on the way.
“There’s a lot of interest outside of Israel to understand what’s happening inside, how different people express their opposition to what’s happening,” said Sydney Levy, the campaigns director of Jewish Voice for Peace. Last year, the organization collected tens of thousands of letters from North American Jews who supported the Shministim, calling their detention a violation of human rights and international law.
“When you speak with them, you get a sense of what is going on there from an Israeli point of view,” Levy said.
But others said the women’s perceived credibility was precisely why their campaign could have dangerous ramifications.
“I definitely do not agree with what they’re trying to do because I think they’re misguided,” said Dani Klein, the North America campus director for StandWithUs, which advocates for Israel on campuses. Klein said if the campaign gains traction, it could backfire by further empowering anti-Israel students.
“When they see Israelis come out against their own country or their own army, in this instance, it gives those who want to be anti-Israel the fodder to do it,” he said.
The two young women, he said, could inadvertently educate people to hate Israel.
He compared their campaign to Breaking the Silence, a group of former Israeli soldiers who openly criticized Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. “I definitely understand that Israelis have the right not to agree with their government. That’s fine,” Klein said. “Every citizen in a democracy has that right. But you take that up in your country. Once you take that abroad, what does that gain you?”
So far, it is unclear what kind of reception Wind and Mishly will receive during their tour. Levy said demand to hear them speak was high and that time constraints forced him to turn down several speaking engagements on their behalf.
Indeed, campus observers said that political events of the past year – including Operation Cast Lead and the second Durban conference – fueled anti-Israel rhetoric that they expect to continue.
“Last year sort of motivated Israel’s detractors to be more vocal and do more programs,” said Lawrence Muscant, deputy director of The David Project. “My feeling is we’re going to see the same thing carry over into this semester.”
Like Klein, Muscant expressed concern about the campaign, based on knowledge of similar ones in recent years.
“On the one hand, if it were inside Israel, they’re talking about internal Israeli policies. When they speak to the outside world, it often gets lost in translation and it plays into the hands of those who delegitimize the State of Israel and question its right to exist, even if that’s not their goal,” he said.
“Whether this group prescribes to this idea or not, I believe there will be people who use their message to further their own agenda.”
הפגנת תמיכה בסרבניות המצפון מאיה יחיאלי-וינד ורז בר דוד ורון תתקיים ביום רביעי הקרוב (14 בינואר) בשעה 9:00 בבוקר בפתח לשכת הגיוס שבתל השומר. מאיה יחיאלי-וינד, מחותמות מכתב השמיניסטים 2008, תגיע ביום רביעי הקרוב ללשכת הגיוס בתל השומר בפעם הראשונה ותצהיר על סירובה לשרת בצבא הכובש ומדכא עם אחר – בצבא המפציץ והורג עשרות אנשים ביום בשבועיים האחרונים.אליה תצטרף הסרבנית רז בר דוד ורון הצפויה להישפט זו הפעם החמישית על סירובה לשרת בצבא הכיבוש. דובר מכתב שמיניסטים מסר עוד “עכשיו יותר מתמיד חשוב להפגין נוכחות ולהראות שיש ישראלים שממאמינים בדרך אחרת ושמסרבים לקחת חלק בפשעים שנעשים בשמם”. הסעות ייצאו בשעה 8:00 ממסוף 2000 שליד תחנת רכבת ת”א מרכז. לפרטים והרשמה: עומר – 0546612101
LIVE Dr. Raz Segal, referring to the 9 December Statement of Scholars in Holocaust and 
AERIAL VIEW OF THE ROAD FROM JERUSALEM TO THE SETTLEMENT OF MA’ALE ADUMIM, WITH THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY CAMPUS ON THE LEFT, 2007. (PHOTO: ISRAEL NATIONAL PHOTO COLLECTION)
מאיה מפגינה “נגד הכיבוש”, השבוע בניו יורק | צילום: חדשות 2
israel-academia-monitor.com 