text:
Board & Mission Statement
Why IAM?
About Us
Articles by IAM Associates
Ben-Gurion University
Hebrew University
University of Haifa
Tel Aviv University
Other Institutions
Boycott Calls Against Israel
Israelis in Non-Israeli Universities
Anti-Israel Petitions Supported by Israeli Academics
General Articles
Anti-Israel Conferences
Anti-Israel Academic Resolutions
Lectures Interrupted
Activists Profiles
Readers Forum
On the Brighter Side
How can I complain?
Contact Us / Subscribe
Hebrew University
Hebrew University Academics Promote Achille Mbembe who Supports BDS, Espouses anti-Semitism and Delegitimizes Israel
IAM reported in May on the philosopher Achille Mbembe who calls for the boycott of Israel, espouses anti-Semitic jibes by minimizing the Holocaust, and accuses Israel of executing Nazi-like atrocities.
Recently, the radical academic group Academia for Equality (A4E) posted an invitation to a symposium on the international academic platform, "PTEL: Political Theory Email List" which provides notices of events and news for and by political theorists. The group organizes a symposium titled "Concerning Palestine/Israel: Thinking with Achille Mbembe." The symposium will take place online on September 15, 2020. A4E invites researchers, artists, and activists who are "informed by the work of Achille Mbembe," to send in abstracts. The organizing committee hails from the Hebrew University: Prof. Louise Bethlehem, former Chair of the Program in Cultural Studies; Revital Madar, Bethlehem's Ph.D. student; Dr. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, of the Sociology Department, whose expertise is Israel's "War by Other Means Against the Palestinians in Israel"; and Dr. Matan Kaminer, a long-time political activist, currently a Buber fellow, whose expertise is Thai migrants in Israel. As the son of activist Noam Kaminer, he co-edited a book with Prof. Joel Beinin on the Israeli radical left.
The symposium seeks to revisit Mbembe's "contributions to our understanding of Palestine/Israel" and wishes to explore how his work could be used to analyze "key occurrences and dynamics, with reference to the Nakba and its aftermath, the 1967 Occupied Palestinian Territories, or pertaining to the Israeli regime in general." For this, the organizers propose analyzing Mbembe's 2019 book "Necropolitics" and other interventions, as applicable within the context of Palestine/Israel.
Mbembe's "Necropolitics" was published first in 2003 as a chapter in a book. It exposes the theory of the walking dead, comparing the "contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death." By forcing some of the bodies to locate between life and death. Mbembe uses examples of slavery, apartheid, the colonization of Palestine and the figure of the suicide bomber, to show the different forms of necropower (statist, racialized, a state of exception, urgency, martyrdom) that reduce people to the precarious conditions of life.
More specifically, according to Mbembe, the "colonial occupation," in Gaza and the West Bank, is "the most accomplished form of necropower." The "colonial violence and occupation are profoundly underwritten by the sacred terror of truth and exclusivity (mass expulsions, resettlement of stateless people in refugee camps, settlement of new colonies). Lying beneath the terror of the sacred is the constant excavation of missing bones; the permanent remembrance of a torn body hewn in a thousand pieces and never self-same; the limits, or better, the impossibility of representing for oneself an original crime, an unspeakable death: the terror of the Holocaust."
Mbembe represents the Palestinian suicide bomber, as "The besieged body becomes a piece of metal whose func'tion is, through sacrifice, to bring eternal life into being. The body duplicates itself and, in death, literally and metaphorically escapes the state of siege and occupation." According to Mbembe, "There is no doubt that in the case of the suicide bomber the sacrifice consists of the spectacular putting to death of the self, of becoming his or her own victim (self-sacrifice). The self-sacrificed proceeds to take power over his or her death and to approach it head-on. This power may be derived from the belief that the destruction of one's own body does not affect the continuity of the being. The idea is that the being exists outside us."
The organizers claim that the symposium was proposed "in the wake of the recent campaigns against the political philosopher Achille Mbembe in Germany and the denunciation of his work as anti-Semitic."
However, as IAM indicated in its post in May, Mbembe is hardly a political scientist but rather an activist using the academic discourse to propagate anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli tropes. Here are some examples:
Mbembe wrote in 2015, that the occupation "is not apartheid, South African style. It is far more lethal." That the Jewish "victimhood, and a supremacist complex" are making the occupation "the biggest moral scandal of our times, one of the most dehumanizing ordeals." Israelis are willing "to go all the way—carnage, destruction, incremental extermination." Every "three years, an all-out, asymmetrical assault against a population entrapped in an open-air prison." As Israel uses "the army, the police, the settlers, the pilots of bombing raids, the zealots, and the cohort of international Pharisees and their mandatory righteousness, starting with the United States of America." He accused Israel of trying to purge the "Palestinians from the land."
In 2016, he wrote that Israel's "desire for apartheid and the phantasy of extermination are not new phenomena." That Israel's "fanatical policy of destruction aimed at transforming the life of Palestinians into a heap of ruins or a pile of garbage destined for cleansing... when required, transform itself into an instrument of strangulation."
Mbembe is also a staunch supporter of BDS:
In 2010, Mbembe was a signatory to a petition urging the University of Johannesburg to sever its relations with Ben-Gurion University.
In Dec. 2015 Mbembe was among scholars from South African universities, who pledged, "we will not: accept invitations to visit Israeli academic institutions; act as referees in any of their processes; participate in conferences funded, organized or sponsored by them, or otherwise cooperate with them."
IAM reported in November 2018 an international conference in South Africa, when Mbembe and a colleague first refused to participate because of several Israeli participants and later published a statement announcing that, "We were informed by the organizers that the Israeli speakers who were on the program have rescinded their participation at the conference and for this reason, we are open to participating in the conference."
It should come as no surprise that Mbembe, like many of radical academic activists relies extensively on Israeli activists to promote his views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For instance, he quotes Eyal Weizman, professor of Spatial and Visual Culture and a British Israeli architect, in his discourse of the Palestinian-Israeli dispute. Weizman himself was denied entry to the US in February, for refusing to disclose information to Homeland Security who found him a security risk. Weizman is a notoriously anti-Israel activist. His Forensic Architecture research agency, based at Goldsmiths, University of London, hasn't found any fault with the Palestinians only with Israel.
A4E bills itself as "a members' organization of academics fighting against the occupation and for the democratization of society in Israel." But as can be seen, the organizers promote Mbembe who supports BDS, produces anti-Israel and anti-Semitic scholarship, in addition to downplaying suicide bombing by glorifying it as a sacrifice. Hebrew University should take notice that several of its scholars embrace Mbembe who was barred by other academic and popular forums.
HUJ Dmitry Shumsky: The Next Generation of Academic-Political Activists
Dr. Dmitry Shumsky, a senior lecturer in the Department of Jewish History, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is said to be interested in Zionist history. Thanks to Haaretz newspaper, he became a political activist.
Shumsky, who immigrated from Ukraine to Israel in 1990, made himself first an expert on Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union and provided Haaretz with "an indictment against the Russian-speaking community."
It is his background that apparently attracted the attention of Haaretz, which was highly upset by the ascent of Avigdor Lieberman's rightwing party Yisrael Beiteinu. As well known, the party, which was supported mainly by the Russian immigrants, took a hard-line position against the Palestinians who, at the time, waged a bloody Intifada. For the Russian immigrants - the suicide bombing attack in front of the crowded Dolphinarium discotheque in Tel Aviv in 2001, killing 21 young Russian immigrants and wounding more than 120 - was a seminal event in this respect.
Nevertheless, Haaretz, like most of the liberal media at the time, could not bring itself to admit that Islamist terrorism destroyed the Oslo peace process and bolstered Likud and other rightwing parties. Haaretz proposed an alternative explanation, namely, that some Israeli Jews, like the Mizrahim and the Russians, suffer from a congenital hatred of the Arabs. To prove that, in February 2004, the Haaretz journalist Lilly Galili interviewed Shumsky for an article Titled "Why do they hate Arabs and Mizrahi Jews? For those reasons they hated Caucasian." The then Ph.D. candidate at the University of Haifa Jewish History Department, obligingly told her that the Russian-speaking immigrants brought with them Islamophobia from their country of origin. Not incidentally, Shumsky had authored an article "Orientalist Discourse and Islamophobia among Russians speaking intelligentsia in Israel," presented at a conference at Ben-Gurion University. He explained that "the nationalistic and racist manifestations among the immigrants from the Soviet Union" derives from the fact that the "immigrants imported the Islamophobic discourse that ruled the Soviet Union… This is a special incarnation of the Soviet Orientalist discourse that has put Russian colonial consciousness vis-a-vis the natives of the Caucasus and Central Asia."
How could Shumsky empirically determine that the Russian immigrants are infected with the virus of "Soviet Orientalist discourse" is anyone's guess. But wrapping himself in the mantle of Edward Said was a good career move. Soon after, Shumsky became a Haaretz columnist.
Shumsky's Ph.D. thesis deals with the early Prague Zionism and explores the ideological path pursued by its prominent Zionist activists who moved from Jewish nationalism to the idea of a binational Arab-Jewish state in Palestine.
Fifteen years later and Shumsky still follows the same train of thought. Shumsky's most recent academic articles in 2020 and 2019 focus on Vladimir Jabotinsky, the iconic thinker of the rightwing Likud Party. For Shumsky, Zionist historians portrayed Jabotinsky exclusively as "clung to a Jewish national identity," but Shumsky sees this as a one-dimensional image, because Jabotinsky, in his younger age, had an identity of a "Russian state patriotism." Likewise, Shumsky argued, Jabotinsky's "pro-Odessan" articles escaped the attention of scholars who only focused on his "national Zionist thought and activity," something Shumsky aimed to refute.
His most recent book, Beyond the Nation-State: The Zionist Political Imagination from Pinsker to Ben-Gurion, aimed to demonstrate that some of the most prominent Zionist mainstream thinkers envisioned something different than what Israel is today. The book was reviewed by Allan Arkush, professor of Judaic studies and history at Binghamton University, who found Shumsky's assertions as "marked by many forced and unsatisfying readings." Arkush added that some of Shumsky's arguments "seem rather dubious." Arkush also noted Shumsky's decade long op-ed columns in Ha'aretz, "denouncing Israeli policy toward the West Bank, supporting BDS, and calling for an end to Jewish sovereignty over the Old City of Jerusalem."
Once ensconced in Haaretz, Shumsky could practice his extreme anti-Israeli animus. One of his discursive tricks was to imply that the BDS movement was mostly an invention of the Likud government. In one Haaretz article, he claimed that "If the BDS movement didn't exist, Benjamin Netanyahu's government of occupation and settlement would have had to invent it." Both the boycott movement and the Israeli government are striving for a single organic Israeli unit. "There is basic consent between the BDS movement and the Israeli government regarding the geopolitical space between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, as a single state called Israel." Therefore, Shumsky urged to "join a boycott of the occupation and settlement project."
In May 2015, Shumsky was behind a petition published in Haaretz (his employer), where he collected money. "Do not Let the Occupation Turn 50!" Claiming that "Out of deep concern for our country's physical survival and moral integrity, we... call to end the occupation." The petitioners "call on the international community and the 15 members of the UN Security Council: 1. To support the Palestinian Authority's appeal to the UN and immediately recognize the State of Palestine and accept it as a full member.2. To impose an economic and cultural boycott on the settlement enterprise in the territories Israel occupied in June 1967."
In a 2018 Haaretz article, "We Are All BDS," Shumsky sympathized with the Palestinians and ignored Palestinian violence against Israeli civilians. He hypothesized the next intifada, declaring that "the Palestinians' understandable resistance to national servitude under Israel will be more violent than in the past until it develops into the mother of all intifadas." He warned that Israel's response would be lethal and "may even include expelling part of the Palestinian population and tightening the noose of military rule around the necks of those who escape the fate of transfer." In order to prevent this, he suggested that "remnants of the left that oppose the occupation and the settlements must begin preparing for life in a new political reality," a South Africa situation in "all intents and purposes," with leftists and Palestinian subjected to "one apartheid state." It is "the left," which should "openly support boycotts of and sanctions on Israel until it releases the Palestinian people from national enslavement in their own land." Because "if this horror scenario materializes," every decent Israeli "will have to stand behind the boycott, divestment and sanctions program."
His political bias is so evident in another article, where Shumsky envisioned a Palestinian state. For Shumsky, "It is not inevitable… the Palestinian state will allow some of the Jews to remain in its territory. In this case, they may even be granted basic civil rights. After all, the Palestinians are the only Arab nation under the control of the only democracy in the Middle East. It is therefore possible that it should learn from this experience and build an Arab and democratic state."
Haaretz, a pioneer of the Oslo agreement, turned a blind eye to the fact that Yasser Arafat either could not or would not stop Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The newspaper had little to say about Iran and Hezbollah's effort to derail the fragile peace process and their role in the bloody second intifada. Rather than acknowledging this simple fact, Haaretz turned to Shumsky, who peddled fanciful theories such as the "virus of Orientalism."
[Hebrew U] The Double-Headed Professor Amiram Goldblum
Professor Amiram Goldblum is a renowned pharmaceutical scientist at the Hebrew University Jerusalem (HUJ) whose many discoveries have been lauded in the scientific world. Goldblum and his team at the Institute for Drug Research have discovered 27 new molecules that activate a special protein and have the potential to treat fatty liver disease, obesity, diabetic nephrotoxicity, and to heal wounds.
However, astonishing as it may sound, Goldblum has earned a reputation for egregious attacks on the State of Israel and the IDF.
Goldblum has called pro-Israel activists "Nazi dogs," and refused to teach them. In July, the news reported that Goldblum called IDF soldiers who demoted an Arab building "Jewish terrorists" and wished for a "lighting bolt" to strike them down. Goldblum's political polemics are extreme, in March, referring to a comment by Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, he used foul language and wrote the following comment: "So you Idiot Evaneglists, the most stupid religion on this earth and as dangerous, if not more, than extreme Islam - ask yourselves where was your God when the Nazis killed 6 millions of us, including 1.5 million children ? I can tell you where YOU were then, you murderers of Jews and Blacks, YOU - sons of the most despicable KKK - you did not allow Jews to flee from Europe to the US, you bitches. Go to hell, Evangelists with your crazy religion. You are supporters of bloodshed and racism, and for that very good reason, lots of Jews HATE you."
Goldblum's Facebook page is replete with hatred towards religious Jews while, unsurprisingly, full of expressions of support for Arabs.
Recently, Goldblum decided to pen a new revision of history. According to him, the ongoing war between the Palestinians and the Israelis is a result of Jewish settler's provocations. He proposes to destroy the homes of "Jewish terrorists." He points out to the cases of Jewish terrorism against Palestinians, such as the Israeli "settler" Baruch Goldstein, following his 1994 Hebron Cave of the Patriarchs Massacre. "Using provocations in order to elicit retaliation from the Palestinians has been a cornerstone in the settlers' methods of expanding their control." For Goldblum "This wasn't the first time: the Hadassah Convoy Massacre, in which Arab forces killed 77 Jewish doctors and nurses on April 13, 1948, came four days after Zionist paramilitary militias, Irgun and Lehi, committed the infamous massacre in the village of Deir Yassin." Goldblum adds that "The settlers have internalized and improved upon the method." Goldblum accepts the Arab version, that the Hadassah Convoy Massacre was a result of the Deir Yassin Massacre, and ignores that on March 2, 1948, the Hadassah Hospital received a phone call from an Arab, warning that the hospital would be blown up. Although it didn't happen, two weeks later, during a press conference, Abdul Kader al-Husseini, the leader of the Arab forces in Jerusalem, threatened that Hadassah Hospital and the Hebrew University would be captured or destroyed. This was a month before the Deir Yassin Massacre, when Palestinian attackers targeted the road to Hadassah hospital on a regular basis.
Naturally, Goldblum's dislike of Jews attracts neo-Nazis. His article was picked up by the "Jew World Order: Jewish Supremacy 卐" a website created among others, by "true Hebrew Semite Israelite Christians, who wish to spread the truth to the people of the world about the criminal murderous Khazars, that fraudulently call themselves Jews, a Rothschild Invention of satanic origins. The word Jew was invented in 1770. All historical and Holy books were re-written to convince us of the fake identity and history of the Jew." Not surprisingly, Jew World Order also embraces Shlomo Sand's Khazar theories.
As well known, Israel has a very permissive academic freedom policy. Scores of radical scholar-activists have used it to push fanciful theories that have painted Israel as an apartheid state, a colonial state, a fascist state and so on. However, Goldblum's use of invectives and attacks on people of faith, be it Christians or Orthodox Jews stand out. Such language would not have been tolerated in the American academy where a few professors were fired for using highly derogatory language against Jews and Israel on their social media platforms. At the very least, the Hebrew University authorities should censure Goldblum for his pernicious attacks on all those he disagrees with.
HUJ Yael Berda Delegitimizes Israel at a United Nations Meeting
Dr. Yael Berda is a lawyer teaching Sociology at the Hebrew University. Berda is also a political activist who uses her academic position to discredit Israel, a fact that IAM reported before. In her academic writing she focuses on Israel's permit system in the West bank and East Jerusalem, portraying it a "colonial form of power". Palestinian newspaper recently wrote she is convinced that the "security restrictions on Palestinians have nothing to do with security issues." For her, it's racial segregation.
Berda has participated in June, at a United Nations meeting in Geneva, titled "the International Conference on the Question of Jerusalem." Invited by the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, and sponsored by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, an inter-governmental organization with 57 member states. The participants looked for ways of "Preserving the cultural and religious character of Jerusalem," under Palestinian control. The meeting criticized Israel's policies and measures "aiming to change the character of Jerusalem". Other speakers included Ambassador Cheikh Niang, Chair of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People; ASG Samir Bakr, Assistant Secretary-General for Palestine and Al-Quds Affairs of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation; Ms. Carla Khijoyan, Program Executive for the Middle East; WCC Min. Ahmad Majdalani, Minister of Social Affairs of the State of Palestine; among others.
Berda's speech presented a very dire picture of East Jerusalem under Israel, blaming Israel alone. For Berda, it is Israel's "colonial control" and the residents are "under constant threat of violence". According to her, city tax is part of the "bureaucracy of the occupation", which is "an effective tool against Palestinians". She coined it "colonial bureaucracy" and "racial hierarchy." Berda absolves all Palestinian violence and blames Israel for "rampant arrests," where "youth might find themselves detained." The essence of her talk was that the Jerusalem Municipality, which collects high taxes, gives almost nothing in return, only the security forces are visible. For Berda, the "regime" separates between Palestinians and Palestinians, evidence the regime is not dedicated to security provisions but to other "colonial goals". For her, most of these activities are on administrative bases, such as the court orders and demolitions orders, that can be stopped with political pressure. "It can be incredibly affective if the administration has an active opposition," she urged the audience.
Just before Rosh Hashana, on Saturday morning of September 28, Berda will speak at the University of Basel in a conference "Comparing Colonialism: Beyond European Exceptionalism" Her talk is "Bureaucratic Tools of Emergency and Citizenship in the Colonial Past and Present: Israel/Palestine and India." Berda investigates the bureaucratic classification of population, based on the "practices of identification, registration, mapping and zoning" and questions "how colonial practices, designed to control subjugated populations, have become organizing principles of the modern state". She will be discussing the "administrative colonial legacies" of the historical colonial rule, with the rise of contemporary colonial forms of power." In particular, Berda will focus on "Israel's military government over the Palestinians 1949-1966 in 'security zones', and its practices of population classification", comparing with "classification practices of Palestinians in Israel's contemporary military rule over the Occupied West Bank."
Similarly, in 2017, Berda was invited to deliver a lecture at Harvard University on Israel's anti-terrorism law. Berda discussed "the colonial origins of these security laws and their relation to citizenship." Berda provided an alternative analysis of the ways the anti-terrorism bill uses the emergency laws by the British Empire. According to Berda, this "legal toolkit" produced a triple bind between security, loyalty, and identity through bureaucratic means. Berda argued that the British colonial roots of security practices, which focus on "population management and its classification as loyal to the state, or suspicious," have formed the boundaries of citizenship. For Berda, the "institutionalization of British colonial emergency laws... deeply impacted the scope and authority of executive power to justify consistent violation to civil rights." by the contemporary state.
Berda, however, does not consider terrorism against civilians to be a major factor for instilling security measures.
Like many of her political comradery, she remade herself an expert on Israeli history. In the spring, she will be teaching a course at India's Jindal Global University on "State and Society from Mandate Palestine to Present day Israel." Berda is often invited to speak at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. Given her written record, it is not hard to imagine that her message would be stridently anti-Israel.
Barda's activist career included Machsom Watch and often represented members of the organization International Solidarity Movement (ISM, aka PalSolidarity). In 2004, Berda represented Ewa Jasiewicz, a British-Polish journalist who was detained at Ben Gurion Airport upon arrival, because in 2002, the journalist lived and worked in the West Bank city of Jenin. In an email published by the ISM, the journalist told a story of the son of the family she stayed with, who opened fire on Israelis a few months earlier. The journalist wrote: "I don't get why activists can't go and do the Knesset or something, or do a sophisticated politician bump-off like the PFLP?" These are the types Berda represented.
In 2005, after newspapers charged Berda with waging a war against Israel's secret service she went to the United States for two months. As a lawyer, Berda represented more than two hundred Palestinians trying to obtain labor permits to enter Israel.
Like her other radical peers, Berda receives a salary from the Hebrew University, that is, from the Israeli taxpayer. Even a casual perusal of her activities indicates that she spends an inordinate part of her time traveling and giving talks to delegitimize Israel.
The university authorities are custodians of the public money that enables them to thrive. The question is whether in the case of Yael Barda the HUJ has been a responsible custodian.
HUJ Prof. Amos Goldberg Protecting Holocaust Denial for Political Gains
IAM reported that Prof. Amos Goldberg, a Hebrew University scholar of the Holocaust, has been a staunch political activist for many years. IAM covered in length some of his activities.
In recent years, with the support of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, Goldberg has been involved in Holocaust Reductionism, that is, comparing the Holocaust to lesser catastrophes thus enabling scholars to claim similarities between the two. This is a softer form of Holocaust denial. An example of this trend is the recent Goldberg's co-edited book with Prof. Bashir Bashir, published in 2018, The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History. As Bashir and Goldberg stated in the introduction, that many Palestinians "find it hard to recognize the Holocaust and the suffering experienced by the Jews. Some prefer to ignore the issue, downplay its importance, or even deny the Holocaust entirely, dismissing it as the invention of a powerful Zionist propaganda machine. In many other cases, even when Palestinians or other Arabs do recognize the historical reality of the Holocaust, they acknowledge it as merely a matter of historical fact. In this view, the Holocaust doesn't merit any empathy toward the Jews or isn't linked to their conditions and fate."
After explaining how many Palestinians refuse to acknowledge the Holocaust, the book contributors compare the Nakba to the Holocaust because this is the only way for Palestinians to relate to the Holocaust: "At times they view it as a deliberate distraction from their own suffering or as an event of which they themselves are the ultimate victims. As such, both the Holocaust and the Nakba, as dominant national narratives, serve to bolster exclusive identities within the two groups. For the most part, each group sees its own catastrophe as a unique event and seeks to devalue or even deny the catastrophe of the other. These two national narratives are, in fact, connected to two far greater narratives embraced by contemporary global culture."
Instead of exposing Palestinian Holocaust denial, the editors prefer to establish the comparison between the Holocaust - the catastrophe befallen on the Jews when 6 million were murdered - to the Nakba, a self-inflicted loss in a war which they initiated.
Earlier this month, Goldberg co-authored an article, "Distorting the definition of antisemitism to shield Israel from all criticism." He lamented that the new definition of antisemitism, formulated by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), "initially sought to combat racism against Jews and Holocaust denialism, but its definition of antisemitism serves as a tool to silence all criticism of Israel." Goldberg explain this logic as "deployed by supporters of Israel's occupation and nationalistic government in order to delegitimize anyone who dares criticize Israeli policies." As Goldberg sees it, it's an "attempt to silence criticism of Israel's 52-year-old military occupation (one of the longest running in the world), which includes dispossession, humiliation, expulsions, and daily violence against Palestinians, plays into the hands of avowed antisemites."
Goldberg argues that the IHRA definition is "catastrophic" because it is diverting attention from "real anti-Semites," and is silencing criticism of Israel and its "ethno-nationalist vision". Whereby viewing "Palestinians – residents of the occupied territories, refugees from the 1948 war, and citizens of Israel (as well as refugees from Africa) – as an existential danger. But the IHRA definition and its derivatives contribute precisely to that. Right-wing politicians, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli right-wing media, have understood that the focus of the fight against antisemitism has shifted from racist nationalists to criticism of Israel, and they use the IHRA definition for their purposes... the right understands very well the powerful potential of the IHRA definition, not only for the purpose of shielding Zionism from any criticism, but also for defending the occupation itself. Using the IHRA's poor definition of antisemitism, they have succeeded in completely changing the discourse: rather than talk about the occupation, the Nakba, or its violation of national, human and civil rights, the dominant public discourse now revolves around what is or is not forbidden when it comes to criticism of Israel, and to what extent said criticism is antisemitic. In this reality, Israel no longer needs to defend itself against allegation — it has a free hand to throw around accusations."
For Goldberg, the IHRA definition is unnecessary, because the idea that only Israel is targeted by this kind of criticism "is not only divorced from reality, it aims at creating a chilling effect. It suffices, for example, to take one look at the list of people charged by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which includes not a single Israeli, to ask ourselves whether there is a need for such a provision in the bill, apart from the desire to suppress any criticism of Israel." Goldberg is also unhappy because the New Jersey State Senate introduced a law based on the IHRA definition, adding a clause forbidding peace or human rights investigations to focus solely on Israel.
Goldberg has been recently involved in attempting to persuade the German Parliament, the Bundestag, to drop their decision equating BDS with anti-Semitism. Not only circulated a petition, Goldberg has also published an appeal, which IAM translated from German by Google Translate. "An appeal from Israel to my German friends," in which he claims that adopting the IHRA definition "endangers the values of democracy." He argues that "I have often heard well-meaning German friends say that they understand my criticism of the policy of the Israeli government towards the Palestinians. Sometimes they even admitted to supporting them. But they did not want to say that out loud." For Goldberg, the "failure to distinguish between anti-Semitism and legitimate criticism becomes moral and intellectual convenience, even laziness. Benjamin Netanyahu announces annexation of large parts of the West Bank… Minister Bezalel Smotrich has suggested that apartheid should be the solution to the conflict with the Palestinians. Education Minister Rafi Perez expressed similarly." For Goldberg, the Germans are also paying the price for passivity. "I observe how the political system in Germany is rapidly eroding free speech when it comes to Israel and Palestine, and how public discourse derives from defamation and character assassination. Bundestag equates BDS with anti-Semitism."
Goldberg complains that now in Germany, "Palestinians are forbidden to protest, scientists suspected of sympathizing with BDS are not invited to conferences... I warn my friends in Germany about our experiences in Israel: There is more trouble ahead if you vigorously defend the principles of democracy, freedom of expression and principled foreign policy." Goldberg continues, "Democracy needs active citizens, History teaches us, that protecting a democracy requires the courage of active citizens, because if too many decent people refrain from defending their underlying principles and rules, they will stagger or fall. Germans who appreciate these values and care about the integrity of Israel must now overcome their anxious hesitation and join the Israeli and Jewish democratic camps. They must muster the energy to distinguish between anti-Semitism and manipulation that should protect Israel from legitimate criticism of its violations."
Also in 2018, Goldberg contributed an article, an extended version originally published in 2012, to MADAR, the Palestinian Forum for Israeli Studies based in Ramallah. MADAR was established in 2000 by a group of Palestinian intellectuals and academics. Not surprising, it serves as an academic propaganda tool to attack Israel. In their journal Israeli Affairs (Issue no. 70), which focuses on the relations between Israel and Germany, Goldberg's article, translated to Arabic, criticizes the Yad Vashem Museum. The museum, according to its website, "presents the story of the Shoah from a unique Jewish perspective." Goldberg's problem is that "One can also wonder what groups and issues are included in this 'Jewish perspective' and in what ways? And which ones are left out?" For Goldberg, "the Yad Vashem 'Jewish narrative' is self-contained and is closed to any 'otherness' of historicity that makes the story much more complex, and therefore becomes, as I claim, a mythic narrative." Goldberg protests it excludes non-Jewish otherness.
Goldberg stated that, "Though very narcissistic and problematic," this narrative of this victim group tends to adopt such a melancholic narrative, which makes sense in the Israeli context because the Holocaust is "the major pillar of current Israeli victimized identity." Because "According to the most updated comprehensive survey of Israeli Jewish identity conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute together with The Guttman Center for Surveys, 98 per cent of the Jewish population believe that it is 'fairly important' or 'very important' to remember the Holocaust." Such a complete consensus, for Goldberg, "has proven itself to be an extremely powerful and useful diplomatic tool in gaining international support in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict and in maintaining the occupation in Palestine."
Another problem which Goldberg finds is that most video testimonies are in Hebrew. "The focus on Hebrew is therefore a Zionization of the 'Jewish perspective'." Goldberg laments the "tendency to experience Holocaust memory by almost exclusively and entirely 'identifying with the (Jewish) victim' is a much broader cultural phenomenon that tends to dominate many of the major Holocaust representations." Goldberg questions "why does the Israeli national (perhaps even chauvinistic) version of the 'Jewish narrative' so closely correlate to the global allegedly cosmopolitan Holocaust narrative." The answer is, according to Goldberg, that the state of Israel, "has used the memory of the Holocaust for decades to refute any criticism of its 1948 Nakba or the severe deprivation and violation of fundamental collective and individual human and civil rights of the Palestinians." Goldberg ends his piece by warning that excluding otherness will result in "extreme violence", that is the "basis of the fascist enterprise," which is now "more than ever relevant to the Israeli context."
Goldberg was hired to teach and research the Holocaust. But he spends much time and energy peddling Holocaust Reductionist theories. And, as IAM has emphasized, the taxpayers are left to sponsor his activities.
HUJ Daphna Golan-Agnon Accused by Students of being Biased and Aggressive
In March 2019, IAM was contacted by an international student who studies at the International School of the Hebrew University. The student claimed an anti-Israel and anti-Semitic atmosphere on campus. The student also felt been treated differently and discriminated against, for being visually Jewish. But the student was unable to provide IAM with any written material to prove this case. In general, IAM is cautious when approached by students who may be unhappy with their grades only to blame the institution for political bias.
A few days ago, the media reported a complaint by students from the same International School at the Hebrew University, titled "Hebrew University's International Graduate Professor Spouts Anti-Israel Rhetoric," as well as "Hebrew U. Prof Accused of 'Systematic Misinformation,' Political Bias." This time the student provided proof, including a print-screen of an email arriving from Prof. Daphna Golan, who teaches this class, saying: "I am not sure why you are studying in my course – but both of your handouts are disgraceful... You are a student whose presence in class is very disturbing to the whole group and your remarks are very unpleasant. I am sorry I had to read your unpleasant and not intelligent papers. You got zero on both." The print-screen shows this email was also sent to the program director Rula Abu Zayyad.
The media also interviewed another student from this class who said in response about Golan, that "The way she had attacked him [the student] was not okay... everyone in class was upset by the way she spoke to him." The friend from class added that the assigned paper of this student was actually professional. "You could tell that the professor was very biased and aggressive to people whose positions weren't the same as hers."
A perusal at the syllabus of Golan's course "The Role of NGOs in Promoting Human Rights and Transitional Justice" reveals a one-sided picture and excess of activism. Students learn "the importance of the Nakba for Israelis and Palestinians." Golan's reading assignment presents the Palestinian narrative alone and refers to Palestinian and Israeli NGOs protecting Palestinians rights. There is no effort to include the Israeli point of view.
Hebrew University is failing its duty to promote a more balanced view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This is especially regrettable because many American universities have taken steps to curtail the one-sided presentations driven by pro-Palestinian activists on campus.
Also, with regards to discrimination, Hebrew University should seriously look into all these cases by speaking to all the students participating in Golan's class. It should re-evaluate the student's assigned paper by an external examiner in order to determine whether the failing grade was a political bias on Golan's part. Whether it is or isn't, her use of language aimed at this or other students is unacceptable.
IAM will report in due course on further development of this case.
Research on Palestinian Martyrdom: from the Hebrew University to New Zealand University
Mariam Abdul-Dayyem and Efrat Ben-Ze'ev, two researchers from the Hebrew University have published their findings on the concept of Shahid, in the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies. Abdul-Dayyem, a Palestinian from East Jerusalem, conducted the research while studying for an MA at the Department of Sociology. She previously studied at Birzeit University. Prof. Ben Ze'ev is an associate fellow at the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace.
Shahid is the Islamic martyr who sacrifices his/her life. The concept is part of a collective heritage of Muslim communities, since the early stages of childhood, taught and discussed at home and school as an integral element of public life and space. The research is based on Abdul-Dayyem's two periods of fieldwork, first, a year-long at Birzeit University in 2007–2008 and second, in various locations in the West Bank, from May to December 2017.
As explained in the introduction, before starting the research, Abdul-Dayyem was concerned that studying in a Jewish institution would be interpreted by the Birzeit students as a betrayal. Due to her hesitation, a Birzeit cafeteria worker, "known for his patriotism", offered to assist her in locating interviewees. She was then confident to approach students, introducing her research topic and mentioning her affiliation with the Hebrew University.
In the first period, Abdul-Dayyem interviewed students with diverse levels of religiosity, secularity, and conservatism. Nine of them had no political affiliations, two were associated with Hamas, three with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, one with Fatah and one with the Communist Party. All of them were studying for BA and ranged in age from 19 to 27 years.
During her interviews, there was generally an admiration for the shahid's willingness to sacrifice him/herself for the collective. The subjects emphasized that the sacrifice was for "the people" and that "such a sacrifice makes for a more meaningful death." They even described it as "beautiful". The researchers noted that the concept of Shahid is relevant for all Palestinians, secular and religious, Christian and Muslim.
The authors explored the concept of the Istishhadi, when, "he or she who commits a suicide attack against those viewed as invaders." The authors noted that the term is relatively new and appeared in the Palestinian public scene since the early to mid-1990s, following the Oslo Accords, when suicide bombing began. While the authors admit the act was controversial, their interviewees were exploring its positive sides.
The authors revisited the topic in the second period of research, a decade later, to reassess the role of the Shahid as an icon. This time they focused on the use of new media and digital culture. Thirty-six people were interviewed, both in cities and villages. Abdul-Dayyem's interviewees were activists, journalists, scholars, and students.
The authors noted the impact of major political changes that had taken place from 2007 to 2017. Attempt to gain independence failed; "the Palestinian Authority was still struggling to func;tion under conditions of a very limited level of sovereignty. The Hamas-Fatah divide grew deeper and the prolonged Israeli siege on Gaza, with intermittent incursions, attacks and killing, continued for an entire decade." Following the Arab Spring, the Middle East has transformed into civil wars, "attracting the media's attention away from the Palestinian cause".
Only one interviewee was negative about some aspects of martyrdom. Salaam, a 26-year-old activist, and journalist from a village near Jenin was explicit in her rejection of the "veneration of a 'death culture.'" Salaam stated: "Historically, we promoted the death culture through funerals, through the glorification of the shahīd's mother, through posters, through calling him a hero. I am against calling him a hero. He should be called a victim, especially if he was a child. They spread the idea of death and it is very ugly, even through the slogans in funerals and demonstrations—'with soul, with blood, we sacrifice you, ya shahīd'. If someone wants to grieve, it is Ok to grieve; it is your right. It is normal to see someone crying if she lost her son. It is not normal to see her trilling. We spread the death culture. The struggle was used to spread a culture of death. It can be so until you are personally effected. Once you are effected, it stops being your culture. If I will lose my son, I will stop promoting this culture, I will stop yelling these slogans."
The authors noted that Salam's attitude is not necessarily embraced by the bereaved families. Salaam thought that "Palestinians should also re-think the representations they used because they address non-Palestinian audiences." Salaam stated "We do not have an awareness of social media conventions. We still post the blood and bodies' images. It effected the Palestinian cause negatively. Israel has an electronic army and uses social media to deliver its messages in order to tell the Israeli narrative. We still post photos of bodies that make people turn away. Death, blood, bodies no longer arouse identification", Salaam's position, according to the authors, may indicate that "the shahīd and the istishhādī as icons have lost some ground." Based on Salaam's account, the authors questioned if there was too much emphasis on blood scenes, part of the "death culture" which invading daily life, and particularly the media. And, that too little attention is being paid to individual choices as well as to the impact of death on bereaved families. For the authors, "the ideas associated with a culture of death may not be understood by a 'foreign audience', nowadays far more exposed to footage coming from the OPT."
In their conclusion, the authors were not sure whether there was a decline in the role of the Shahid as an icon and were "hesitant to argue that the shahīd has lost its symbolic value altogether. We have witnessed the flexibility of this icon, which has taken on a variety of meanings that often seem incompatiable [sic]. Moreover, the shahīd was present in the early days of Palestinian nationalism, waned and re-emerged. It is likely that the shahīd will not disappear altogether, but time will tell what new forms it will acquire."
Conducting research on this matter with Palestinians could be more confusing than expected.
When Ben-Zeev researched for her Ph.D. thesis in the late 1990s, one of her Palestinian interviewees told her: "Whoever comes to talk with us about our problems from the other side, is first and foremost from the other side. We suspect him and keep suspecting all the time... because this data, whatever is written down, will help the other side. Therefore, I mean generally, therefore, people will hide certain things. Certain people will hide things." Strange as it was, Ben-Ze'ev, is a life-long pro-Palestinian activist. For example, she was a signatory to the statement in 2014 by Israeli academics, stating they "wish it to be known that they utterly deplore the aggressive military strategy being deployed by the Israeli government. The slaughter of large numbers of wholly innocent people is placing yet more barriers of blood in the way of the negotiated agreement which is the only alternative to the occupation and endless oppression of the Palestinian people. Israel must agree to an immediate cease-fire, and start negotiating in good faith for the end of the occupation and settlements, through a just peace agreement." It said.
Abdul-Dayyem is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Otago, New Zealand. Her topic is the impact of social media on social movements within the Israel-Palestine conflict. But New Zealand is not really detached from the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
The NZ Palestine Solidarity Network is quite active. In May 2018 it hosted Palestinian author Dr. Ramzy Baroud, who spoke on "Reclaiming the Palestinian Narrative," about his work and his latest book The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story. In similar veins, another lecturer questioned: "Are Palestinian people tangata whenua?" Explaining that "Tangata whenua is a peculiarly Aotearoa New Zealand term used by Maori to self-describe and by non-Maori to describe those whom they believe to be indigenous to the land."
Exploring the issue of Palestinian resistance and Sumud, Dr. Nijmeh Ali completed her Ph.D. thesis last year at the University of Otago, titled "The Hidden Potential of the Palestinian Resistance in Israel: A Grounded Theory Study on Resistance among Palestinian Activists in Israel". According to the abstract,
After nearly seventy years of adopting the same tools of protest, either by taking part in the Israeli political system through participation in elections or practicing cultural resistance, Palestinian activists feel that they are at a critical juncture, questioning their choice of tools for protest and the efficacy of being an integral part of a political system that oppresses them, hoping to bring change from 'inside'. The question of effective resistance methods seems to be more acute in the shadow of political, economic and social changes, both among the Israelis and the Palestinians in Israel. These dynamic contexts invite us to investigate the strengths and weaknesses of the Palestinians in Israel in their ability to bring about social change. After years of employing certain tools within the citizenship approach, and the tension between the most appropriate and the most effective methods of protest, it is timely to evaluate their effectiveness and to look to further possible scenarios. It also opens the door for examining the hidden potential of Palestinians in Israel in reshaping the political power structures in Israel. This project, therefore, influenced by resistance theory and constructivist grounded theory as research method, tracks the experiences of Palestinian activists in Israel, their understanding of Sumud and their potential in constructing Palestinian resistance and its potential in transforming the power structure in Israel.
Ali is a former teacher of civics and pluriculturalism at the Hebrew University Gilo Center for Citizenship, Democracy and Civic Education which was founded and directed by Prof. Dan Avnon.
New Zealand's University of Otago is becoming the center for terrorist sympathizers. Prof. Richard Jackson from the National Centre for Peace & Conflict Studies is the editor-in-chief of the Journal Critical Studies on Terrorism. The journal, "calls for critical reflection on the state and direction of terrorism research... [since] much of the new research – and much of the early research on political terrorism – fails to meet rigorous standards of scholarship. Related to this, it is also possible to discern a growing and deep-seated sense of unease about the progress and consequences of the global war on terror". Having this approach in mind, Jackson published a paper "Confessions of a Terrorist Sympathiser". Where he stated that "I am a terrorist sympathizer because I can understand how a young woman from Gaza might consider that she has no real future, nothing but daily humiliations, the continued threat of being shot by an Israeli soldier or firebombed by a settler, or being arrested and tortured by the police."
There is a question to ask, is New Zealand taking the Palestinian side? In December 2016 a United Nations Security Council resolution, co-sponsored by New Zealand, stated that Israel's settlement activity was a "flagrant violation" of international law and had no legal validity. Shortly after, a number of New Zealand's leading academics on conflict resolution and Israel-Palestine slammed the New Zealand government for "dangerous double standard," for not being harsh enough against Israel.
Stephen Daisley, the renowned New Zealand novelist, wrote in October 2018, in his blog on the Spectator, that "The progressive West must stop fetishizing Palestinian extremists", referring also to New Zealand.
IAM shall report on these developments in due course.
HUJ Political Activist Disguised as Academic: Dr. Ofer Cassif is Hadash Party Knesset Candidate
IAM reported many times about Dr. Ofer Cassif, one of the most radical academics in Israel. For years he took advantages of the lax higher education system to preach his anti-Israel politics. Serving as a member of the political bureau of the Israeli Communist Party, he finally won the third place in the Hadash party, making him a candidate for the Knesset. BGU Dr. Efraim Davidi, Noa Levy, and Dr. Yeela Raanan were also competing.
Cassif's courses in Political Science at the Hebrew University and the Tel Aviv-Jaffa Academic College have mirrored his politics: "Capital and Government"; "Capital, Government and Social Justice"; "Cinema and Politics"; "Fascism - Past and Present". In 2015, Cassif was quoted calling Minister Ayelet Shaked "neo-Nazi scum," and in 2016 he was recorded on tape by a student, claiming that the Israeli government's laws are quite similar to that of Germany in the 1930s.
Cassif has been a long time activist. He was the first army refuser to be jailed during the first Intifada. In 2002 he was among the signatories in a petition by Palestinian activists, "Urgent Call to World Civil Society: Break the Conspiracy of Silence, Act Before it is too Late." The undersigned stated they "believe that a full-scale Israeli offensive throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) is imminent and that such an unprecedented attack demands from global civil society an unprecedented response. For this reason, we urge global civil society – including human rights organizations, solidarity groups, and individuals – to take immediate direct action to stop Israel's all-out war against the Palestinian people".
Cassif's 2006 Ph.D. thesis, On Nationalism and Democracy: A Marxist Examination, at the London School of Economics and Political Science, departs from Rosa Luxemburg's statement that "Historical development toward a universal community of civilization will, like all social development, take place in the midst of a contradiction". In his view, the contradiction is the spreading of nationalist particularism and the support for democracy. He stated that his thesis "shows that both democracy (as we commonly understand it today) and nationalism are strongly embedded in modern conditions (primarily capitalism)" are having "inherent contradictions." His solution is, "What is urgently needed, I argue, is a form of democracy that could transcend the contradictions latent in modern capitalism." Such a democracy "must be a socialist one in which the means of identity production are collectively owned."
As a lecturer at the Hebrew University he was invited, in 2009, to speak in a conference about "Israel between democracy and ethnocracy," at the Institute of Political Science of the University of the Republic, Uruguay. As well as participated in the annual Marx Forum, along with other political-academic comrades.
But the peak of his political career was in 2011, when he participated in a joint Hadash and Communist Party delegation who met with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) in Ramallah. Abbas said in the meeting "The PLO is working to gain UN membership for a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders with Jerusalem as its capital."
IAM reported that in 2012, Cassif was appointed the head of the International Relations Committee of the Communist Party. The Party's announcement stated that "Comrade Cassif is a member of the Political Bureau of CPI. He previously served as parliamentary assistant to the late comrade Meir Vilner, and was the first to be jailed for refusing to serve in the Occupied Palestinian Territories during the first Intifada. On the whole, he was jailed four times in Israeli military prisons."
In 2013 IAM reported on Cassif who was invited, as a member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, to the15th International Meeting of Communist and Workers Parties held in Lisbon, Portugal. In his lecture, Cassif stated that the Israeli colonization of the territories is getting deeper and crueler. "Natural resources like water and land are regularly robbed by Israeli Zionist authorities for the sake of Jewish settlers; Palestinians' freedom of movement, worship and assembly are strictly limited; peaceful demonstrators and non-violent protesters are often arrested, beaten, and occasionally even shot; and trees, fields and other assets owned by Palestinians are burnt and damaged on a daily basis by Jewish settlers, while Israeli soldiers and other officials ignore that fascist vandalism – as if we were talking about KKK in Alabama under George Wallace... The brutal colonialist regime that Israeli Zionist governments have been retaining for decades in the Palestinian occupied territories is accompanied by vicious capitalist and racist policies in Israel proper."
During his long career as a lecturer, Cassif hasn't published anything academic. He has a semi-academic paper in the journal Theory & Event, in 2015 "The War with Gaza Did Not Take Place," postulating there was no war with Gaza, "but an atrocity; no conflict with Hamas but an assault by Israel on the people of Gaza." He charges Israel with war-crimes and determines that "The next stop, then, should be The Hague." For Cassif, it's all Israel's fault. "The Nakba was followed by the imposition of military rule on Arab-Palestinian citizens from 1948 to 1966, and their systematic discrimination and marginalization ever after. Along with the 1967 occupation of yet more Palestinian territories came the criminal establishment of Jewish settlements in 'them. The racism within Israel feeds into justification of the occupation by representing the colonized/occupied as 'inferior,' 'barbarian,' or 'primitive.'"
The fact that Cassif was appointed a lecturer of politics and government at the prestigious Hebrew University, is attesting to the failure of the appointment committee which is marred by political favoritism in contrast to academic values and spirit. The committee should be investigated for the breach of confidence, to make sure that such an abuse of the academic privileges cannot happen again.
Grant Paid by ISF: Israeli "State's Racist Project...Targeting of Palestinian Children" - by HUJ Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian
Last week the media broke out with the story "Hebrew U Professor to Give a Talk on Israel Using Palestinian Kids as 'Arms Laboratories'," about Prof. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, the Lawrence D. Biele Chair in Law at the Faculty of Law-Institute of Criminology and the School of Social Work and Public Welfare at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Chair in Global Law at Queen Mary University of London.
Shalhoub-Kevorkian will be traveling to Amsterdam to give a lecture, on the 22nd of January, about Israeli security agencies who "market their technologies as 'combat proven'", based on "surveying, imprisoning, torturing and killing" then selling the knowledge to clients such as "states, arms companies, and security agencies." Palestinian children are used by Israeli "laboratory," as "unchilded disposable others, whose bodies are used to transfer knowledge and to market technologies of violence." Her lecture is based on the voices and writings of Jerusalemite children who "live under Occupation."
Three groups are organizing the lecture: FFIPP NL, an educational network for human rights in Palestine/Israel; Palestine Link, an organization of Palestinians in the Netherlands; and Gate48, a group of Israelis living in the Netherlands "who oppose the occupation of the Palestinian territories and call for its end."
When asked, the Hebrew University said it didn't fund the trip to Amsterdam and that she "accepted an invitation to speak at the conference on her own time and on her own dime."
But, as can be seen, for this research Shalhoub Kevorkian has received a grant from the Israeli Science Foundation (ISF). Grant number 1019/16, as acknowledged in her latest article, "Arrested Childhood in Spaces of Indifference: The Criminalized Children of Occupied East Jerusalem", co-authored with Shahrazad Odeh, a HUJ human rights lawyer. The article accuses Israel of "colonial violence inflicted upon incarcerated children's bodies" and discusses the "role of the Israeli politico-legal system in framing and constructing the racialization of children." The article demonstrates how the Israeli criminal justice system is "fundamental to the Israeli state's targeting of Palestinian children". The authors argue that child arrest is "a political mechanism" in the "processes of colonial dispossession". The article emphasizes "the core role of the Israeli legal system in the state's racist project," and concludes by claiming that the Israeli legal system dismisses the "basic rights of the Palestinian child."
On the 27 February 2019 Shalhoub-Kevorkian will speak on this topic at the School of Law, Queen Mary University of London.
Her previous work is equally biased against Israel. Her 2009 article argues, "First, that Palestinian children living in the settler colonial conditions of the Palestinian home/land are increasingly targeted in the Israeli state's eliminatory violence. Second, that denying children from their childhood and humanity relegates them to a death zone, a position that not only denies their suffering, but also constructs them as always already terrorist others who should be disciplined and violated." She wishes to place the "practices in a historical continuum of Israeli colonial violence, which has since the Nakba racialized the Palestinian people as 'Others' slated for elimination and attempted to strip them of their humanity. That child arrest practices are legally licensed offer a graphic and visible exercise of state violence, evidencing how laws enable the state and its agents to inflict violence in a 'legal', 'securitized' and 'rational' manner."
Shalhoub-Kevorkian's 2015 book, Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear, examines Palestinian experiences within the context of "Israeli settler colonialism" and explores how "Israeli theologies and ideologies of security, surveillance and fear can obscure violence and power dynamics while perpetuating existing power structures. Drawing from everyday aspects of Palestinian victimization, survival, life and death, and moving between the local and the global." She introduces and defines the "politics of fear" within Palestine/Israel. She examines the "settler colonial state's machineries of surveillance which produce and maintain a political economy of fear that justifies colonial violence."
IAM reported on Shalhoub-Kevorkian anti-Israel approach before, as she was, in fact, working for the Palestinian Authority through the Ministry of Women's Affairs' chapter of the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA). The YWCA reported that in 2007, Shalhoub-Kevorkian published the study "Facing the Wall: Palestinian Children and Adolescents Speak about the Israeli Separation Wall" which showcased the "heavy price Palestinian adolescents have to face, both for being Palestinians and also for living in the shadow of the Wall. The recurring words of the Palestinian teenagers in that study were 'divider', 'apartheid,' 'snake,' 'dangerous disease;' all of which were revolved around the symbolic as well as physical reality of the Wall; a nightmare creeping into the dreams of Palestinians." YWCA also reported on a study by Shalhoub-Kevorkian, launched in Ramallah in 2010, "Military Occupation, Trauma and the Violence of Exclusion: Trapped bodies and lives. IAM reported that during Israel Apartheid Week 2011, Shalhoub-Kevorkian spoke about "Apartheid – Birth and Death in Jerusalem."
It is true that Shalhoub-Kevorkian is traveling "on her own dime" as the Hebrew University has stated. But it is equally true that she received a grant, and uses her position at the top Israeli university to legitimize her radical views. Trying to find a balance between academic freedom and aggressive anti-Israel propaganda is not easy. It is incumbent on the university authorities to initiate a discussion on the subject. HUJ is a public university which is funded by taxpayers and thus is accountable to them and their elected representatives. By ignoring this fact, the university is defaulting on its duty of good citizenship.
Ill-Treatment of a Student-Soldier by HUJ Carola Hilfrich
Last week, Kan TV News broke out with the story of a student in a course by Dr. Carola Hilfrich at the Hebrew University wearing IDF uniform claimed to be harassed by an Arab student. The soldier complained after class to Dr. Hilfrich who, in turn, lambasted her for being a soldier in the Israeli army, which hurts other students' feelings: "You can't be naïve enough to ask to be treated as a civilian when you are in uniform. You are a soldier in the Israeli army and people treat you accordingly," the lecturer said. Then the student asked: "Does it bother you that I'm wearing the uniform in class?" Hilfrich replied: "There are people whose civil society is as important to them as the army is to you, and you must accept their priorities as tolerantly as they accept yours." The video recording of the incident clearly indicates that Hilfrich raised her voice at the student-soldier.
Following the incident, the HUJ placed ads in various newspapers assuring students that they are welcome wearing uniforms and apologizing for the incident. Subsequent media reports revealed that the student-soldier was a former member of the student group Im Tirtzu; some even implied that the woman soldier staged the incident in order to trap the professor. These revelations were enough to prompt some HUJ faculty to circulate petitions in support of Dr. Hilfrich. Professor Asher Cohen, the president of HUJ issued a statement on TV Channel 2 News: "The Hebrew University embraces and supports students who serve as soldiers. Unfortunately, this happened because of the false manipulations and disinformation spread around this video, especially by the truly despicable organization called Im Tirtzu that created these manipulations... The army's most prestigious programs are run by us, we have always supported servicemen and will always support servicemen. And yet we live in very challenging times, of social networks, disinformation and false manipulations which can create a false impression... We did not abandon the lecturer. In my opinion, both the lecturer and the student are victims of the same manipulation done by that organization. There is also a third victim, the Hebrew University, and we wanted to end this saga and clarify. We also did not express an apology in the simplest sense. We said that we were sorry if someone was hurt."
Claims about the alleged stunt operation by the Im Tirtzu is not relevant to the case. The complaint stands on its own; the student claims of harassment by another student and, regardless whether she is a right-winger, left-winger, or centrist, the professor needed to investigate the complaint just like any other complaint of harassment. Students should be treated as equal, regardless of their political affiliation. In fact, the various HUJ codes assure this right. The faculty who signed a petition in support of Dr. Hilfrich should also know that. But as IAM documented over and over again, Israeli social science and humanities faculty are skewed left-wing and tend to protect their radical peers.
Unquestionably, Dr. Hiflrich has a long history of radical activism. In 2003, she was among Israeli Academics who supported students refusing to serve as soldiers in the occupied territories. In 2004, she was among the signatories of the Olga Document, recognizing the right to return. In 2014 she was among the academic signatories in the petition blaming Israel for the war with Gaza.
Hilfrich is also not the only one who took offense to soldiers wearing the uniform. In 2007, IAM reported on a cinematography student at Sapir College who entered the class wearing IDF uniform and was ordered to leave by the Arab lecturer Nizar Hassan. The administration stood by the soldier. Soon-after the story broke out, petitions circulated in support of the lecturer, signed by dozens of Jewish and Arab university lecturers, praising Hassan as "a talented and courageous artist whose only sin was his attempt to maintain universal civic values, [who] pointed to the serious phenomenon of the great involvement of the army in campus life." Quite similar to the case of Hilfrich.
In response to Dr. Hilfrich treatment of the soldier, Shmuel Slavin, a member of a committee monitoring the implementation of the Recovery Plan to the Hebrew University (part of the Planning and Budgeting Committee of the Council for Higher Education), sent a harsh letter in protest and also suspended his membership on the committee. The role of the committee is to supervise the recovery plan initiated by the Ministry of Finance for the Hebrew University, which was facing heavy financial deficits. The plan was launched in February 2018, and the state is expected to transfer to the Hebrew University a total of NIS 700 million over a decade. The plan also includes a reduction in the number of jobs, with the university committing itself to cover deficits in the amount of NIS 900 million, including by selling assets worth NIS 400 million.
While Hebrew University is depended on the state for financial support, it is expected in return to treat with respect the taxpayers. To prevent such incidents reoccurring in the future, university administrations need to emphasize that students in uniform, regardless of their political affiliation, should be afforded equal treatment. Radical academics should be put on notice that they are violating the regulations by taking matters into their own hands.
HUJ Yael Berda Sociology Courses are Political Activism Paid by the Taxpayers
IAM often reports about the new generation of political activists eager to gain tenure in Israeli universities. One such an example is Dr. Yael Berda of the Hebrew University's Sociology Department.
Trained as a lawyer, Berda is a longstanding activist with Machsom Watch, a group that opposes Israeli checkpoints in Judea and Samaria. When studying for a PhD in Princeton University, Berda was a member of the Princeton Committee on Palestine (PCP) which "works to end the occupation in Palestine, defend Palestinian human rights, and raise awareness in the Princeton community about the Palestinian narrative." While in Princeton she also joined other Israeli academics from various American universities, who formed the Israeli Opposition Network, aiming to "oppose current Israeli Leadership" and to warn that the "election results threaten democracy and rule of law in Israel."
Clearly, in her writing and activism Berda turns a blind eye to Palestinian violence against Israelis by opposing Israel's measures to thwart terrorist threats. As she said in an interview, about the years when she took the first legal case as an independent lawyer. "I was shocked by what I saw in the Military Courts. Not only was there a separation of laws for every population, but there was physical separation in the court between the entry of Jewish citizens and the entrance of Palestinian residents, and even separate seating areas. One of the soldiers told me, 'Why are you in shock? This is the territories - there are other laws here.'"
On a regular basis, Berda is the organizer of demonstrations by a group of Israelis who march near the border-fence with Gaza waving banners in against the siege of Gaza. When Berda was interviewed she said "It is important for us that people on the other side see us, that they see there are different voices, and that they know that we think there is a need to talk about the right of return, about the Palestinian refugees. It must be part of an agreement. Until we talk about it - we can not end the conflict."
Berda's political thought brought her to the group "The Two States, One Homeland," sponsored by the New Israel Fund, an initiative by Israeli journalist Meron Rapoport and Palestinian activist Awni Al-Mashni, a Fatah political activist. The group intends to present "a homeland shared by two people [while] each having deep historic, religious and cultural connections to the land."
Already in 2006 Berda was recruiting students to volunteer in organizations such as Yesh Din and Machsom Watch, promising them NIS 1450 grant. As an MA student of Sociology, Berda was a teaching assistant to TAU Prof. Yehuda Shenhav at the Hebrew University's Campus-Community Partnerships for a Social Change, a project initiated by Daphna Golan-Agnon, Faculty of Law. The course "Bureaucracy, Governance and Human Rights" was taught by Shenhav, instructed by Barda with a guest lecturer Adv. Michael Sfard. The course intended to deal with "practice and management theory, while focusing on control techniques that have emerged within the context of the Israeli occupation in the territories." The historical roots, to try to place them within the "colonial context, especially the British and the French ones". In particular, the course focused on the "connection between race and bureaucracy," The course intended especially to "look beyond the shoulder of the worker in the civil service to try to understand the mechanism in which it operates. The course was defined as a seminar that combines theory and practice." In addition to Shenhav, "Sfard joined the course as a guest lecturer and legal adviser to Yesh Din. The students take action every two weeks in observations, in the project of Military Court Observers, a project of Yesh Din and in the Coordination Project of Machsom Watch. The students work with the assistance of the organizations in documenting, representing and liaising with the official authorities, while keeping a travelogue of activities. The students accompanied by Adv. Yael Barda, at the individual level and the group level. The students receive travel fee to the places of activity and an annual grant of NIS 1450. At the end of the year, each student submits an article based on the activities and experiences relating to the theoretical content of the course. Some of these articles were selected for publication in a book edited by Shenhav, Sfard and Barda, in partnership with the organizations."
Clearly, Berda's scholarship is a configuration of her politics, as can be seen in her article published recently in the American Sociological Association's newsletter, Trajectories, based on the conference "Empires, Colonies, Indigenous Peoples". In Berda's paper, "Legacies of Suspicion: From British Colonial Emergency Regulations to the 'War on Terror' in Israel and India" she aligns herself with the latest academic trend accusing British colonialism for the failures of the former colonies.
Berda's one-homeland solution is reflected in the argument, that the 1948 partition between the Jews and the Palestinians has turned the Palestinian minorities in Israel "into foreign and dangerous populations [which] were perceived as hostile because they were on the 'wrong' side of the border." In particular, she claims, the "emergency laws targeted certain problematic or 'dangerous' segments of the subject population". For Berda, Israel treats Palestinian political activists as terrorists. Again turning her argument into the context of race, she suggests that on racial grounds Israel prefers Jews. As "the laws targeted the subjects of the military regime who became Palestinian citizens of Israel. Emergency regulations were used against Jewish citizens only in a handful of cases." Claiming that her comparative study of emergency regulations, "illuminates the inherent tension of the liberal principle of 'the rule of law'", because it gives a "political legitimacy to infringe on civil rights, so long as the infringement abides by institutional standards". In principle, Berda postulates, "laws preserving security include potential infringement of civil and political rights to such a degree that democratic structure becomes hollow." One of her findings is that Palestinian "classification was also according to the degree of loyalty to the regime, or the suspicion of posing a security risk, which I call 'the axis of suspicion'. The classification and monitoring systems were critical because they enabled the colonial bureaucracy to use emergency laws as a practical tool of government."
Berda claims that, "The attitude of the Israeli state apparatus towards the remainder of the Palestinian population blurred the boundaries between a security threat and a political threat, specifically regarding their status as an enemy population whose very citizenship was questioned until as late as 1952, when the Citizenship Law was passed." Berda postulates that Israel confuses between Palestinian terrorism and Palestinian political activities. She claims that Israel's definition of the "boundaries of terrorism, make participation in political activity in general and public events in particular, a risky affair for minority populations already perceived as dangerous by the regime." Berda takes her argument further by claiming that "offenses for supporting, identifying with, and abetting terrorism, are defined so broadly (with terms like 'terrorist act', terrorist organization', and 'membership of a terrorist organization') that political identity, belonging to a particular community, or residence in an area designated as 'terrorist infrastructure', can be enough to suspend one's right to due process."
Berda's conclusion is based on Oren Yiftachel's 2006 book, Ethnocracy: Land and identity politics in Israel/Palestin, as she ends by stating that the "legislation on political belonging and identity in Israel will enable a broad assault on the civil rights of not only Palestinians but also Jewish members of the opposition, changing the "ethnocratic" nature of the political regime." Berda suggests that the Israeli legislation will enable an assault on her and others for being the political opposition.
From an academic perspective, her teaching reflects her political activism. Three course syllabi make a clear case:
Her syllabus "Bureaucracy and State" The course "focuses on state bureaucracies, the institutional practices of the executive Branch and its political influence on the daily life of citizens. our premise is that organizations within state bureaucracy have great political power, that are not politically neutral. We will explore the bureaucracy of the state through a comparative lens and locate daily practices and routines that are created within particular historical, economic and cultural conditions and constraints (In Israel, US, India, The British and Ottoman Empires and more). We will learn to apply institutional and political theory to contemporary cases, particularly the relationship between bureaucracy, sovereignty and violations of citizens rights."
Her syllabus "Sociology of Law" is teaching that "The sociological approach to the law suggests looking at legal structures, how the law turns into culture and ideology, on the political and social power of institutions. In this course, we will learn, through current and sometimes urgent and controversial issues, about how law, social institutions and economic and political practices are building each other. The course is critical of the tradition of the "Law and Society" movement and seeks to challenge concepts that consider the law an independent system that is somehow disconnected from the country's political economy and social life. In addition, the Law and Society movement saw in the law as a significant tool for a broad social and political change, and throughout the course we will also discuss the range of possibilities for social change offered by the reading materials and discussions in the classroom."
Her course "Society in Israel" includes three field tours, The Supreme Court; Musrara - Following the Black Panthers; and The Politics of Archeology Tour of Silwan/City of David.
Berda does not hide her ambition. In an interview about her return to Israel, Berda expressed her views, "I say to myself: 'Everything I do here is a contribution to both the policy and the way people perceive themselves.' I want to open people's mind to alternative thinking. People are afraid to open their mouths not to be accused for not being loyal enough, and I want to be the person they meet and tell them that it is possible to live here and expect full equality of rights for Palestinians, and that it is possible to bridge the gaps. "It's very hard because all day you're busy explaining the obvious, but I have no doubt that my life here means a lot more. It's to take part in the struggles and be active. And it's not just me but my children who go to a bilingual school and study Arabic. It is not enough just to live here, we have to struggle. There is a great struggle for the future, and in the meantime the democratic camp is losing. Therefore, I choose to live here to influence."
Clearly, there is no reason why the taxpayers should sponsor political activism dressed as scholarship.
Learning Conference Organizers Respond to the IAM Post Concerning HUJ Prof. Nurit Elhanan-Peled
IAM received a response concerning the post on a lecture by Prof. Nurit Elhanan-Peled, of July 5, 2018, from Dr. William Cope and Dr. Thomas Babalis, the organizers of the International Conference on Learning which took place in Athens, Greece. Cope is the co-founder and president of Common Ground Research Networks and Babalis professor of Teaching Methodology and Dean of School of Education at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, the host of the conference.
Cope and Babalis argue that Elhanan-Peled's paper was rigorous in its theoretical premise with methodologies of empirical analysis and that "Academic Israeli Monitor evidently represents a different ethico-political perspective from Prof. Elhanan-Peled." Contrary to IAM's assertion, they added, "Elhanan-Peled is entitled to present an argument at the conference, no matter how unpalatable it may seem from the point of view of AIM" and that, we will continue to welcome diversity of perspectives "even if AIM does not welcome such diversity in Israel." Last but not least, they added that "we are disturbed by the nature and tenor of AIM's reporting. We wonder what it means to question state or university sponsorship of critical scholarship—surely critical dialogue is to be valued in a democracy? We also wonder what the effects of 'monitoring' are intended to be in a democratic society?"
While IAM praises Cope and Babalis for accepting only papers that are "solidly grounded in scholarly principles and practices," yet, Cope and Babalis should be aware that in some cases in the social sciences scholars falsify research and invent findings, something unacceptable in rigor research. It is IAM's purpose to investigate when a research in question is fabricated.
For example, IAM has written extensively on the neo-Marxist, critical trend which often ignores evidence contradicting its findings. This trend is normative rather than positivist which is not accepted by mainstream social science presses. IAM is not the only one to make this determination. In 2011 the Israeli Council for Higher Education appointed an International Evaluation Committee to look into the Department of Politics and Government of Ben Gurion University which is known as a hive of neo-Marxist, critical scholars. The Evaluation Committee which included leading scholars such as, Prof. Thomas Risse of the Institute for Political Science, Freie Universität Berlin; Prof. Benjamin Jerry Cohen, Department of Political Science, University of California, Santa Barbara; Prof. Ellen Immergut, School of Social Sciences, Humboldt University Berlin; Prof. Robert Lieber, Department of Government, Georgetown University; among others, concluded that the offering of the Department and the scholarship of several of its faculty were not empirically grounded.
With regards to Elhanan-Peled, IAM has examined her scholarship on numerous occasions over the years. This time, to make the case, IAM has turned to two scholars that have researched the topic of Israeli and Palestinian perception of the 'other' in school books.
Dr. Yael Teff-Seker, researcher at Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-SE), recently wrote the chapter "Textbooks for the State and State-Religious Jewish Sector in Israel". The abstract states the following,
Despite official Israeli government statements to the contrary, Israeli textbooks have repeatedly been accused of being prejudiced, stereotypical and racist towards Arabs, Muslims and, most of all, Palestinians. However, some significant improvements regarding peace and the Arab Other were noted in textbooks published in the later 1980s and in the 1990s by most scholars of Israeli curricula. One would perhaps assume that these positive trends would diminish with the deterioration of Arab–Israeli relations—and particularly Palestinian–Israeli relations—over the past few years (especially since the 2000 Al Aqsa Intifada). However, it is this chapter's claim not only that these trends towards peace and tolerance have persevered but that they were even improved in the Israeli textbooks authorised by the Israeli Ministry of Education for the academic years 2009–2012. With this general trend in mind, the Israeli state-approved textbooks still foster something of a victim mentality in regard to the Arab–Israeli conflict, although more recent textbooks do include the Palestinian point of view regarding the events leading to the 1948 war, and even criticise or take responsibility for some of the harsh consequences for the Palestinian people.
Teff-Seker commented on Elhanan-Peled's scholarship that, "In the past, I have found that Nurit Peled Elhanan's work ignores general trends in Israeli textbooks supported by other reports and academic publications (e.g. support for coexistence, aspiration for peace) and focuses on a few examples, often taken out of context."
IAM also contacted Dr. Arnon Groiss, a scholar of Middle Eastern studies and a retired journalist of Israel's Arabic Radio service, who has been studying, since the year 2000, the attitude to the 'other' and to peace in various Middle Eastern curricula, including the Israeli one. He wrote that,
I have been following Prof. Peled-Elhanan's work for fifteen years. I first met her in 2003 at a European Council panel where I presented the case of Palestinian schoolbooks' attitude to the Jewish-Israeli 'other' while she talked about the Israeli schoolbooks' attitude to Palestinians. Having spent 12 years in Israeli schools I was astonished to hear that the books I had learned from were promoting the massacre of Palestinians. I was further amazed of her accusation that Israeli schoolbooks were teaching territorial expansion while ignoring the Hebrew text of the very source she presented, which described Israel's agreements with its neighbors regarding the determination of their mutual borders. Three years later I decided to trace her sources and got the seven Israeli schoolbooks she had based her findings on and read them thoroughly. I found out that she had created a picture of a racist and murderous Israeli curriculum based on 1) distorted source material - that is, leaving out all pieces of evidence that contradicted her thesis, 2) invented "data" and 3) illogical interpretation of the evidence.
Following are some examples:
1) She claimed that the 7 books she studied were denying Palestinian peoplehood and nationalism. I found over 20 examples to the contrary, including an assignment requiring students to describe the development of Palestinian nationalism in the years 1919-1939. She claimed the Israeli schoolbook never showed Palestinian figures and I found 15 photographs of Palestinians in those 7 books. She said that the Palestinian Arab city of Nazareth did not appear on the map and I found 16 such appearances. She further claimed that Israeli textbooks condoned massacres of Palestinians, in sharp contrast to the books' condemnation of the massacres of Deir Yassin and Kafar Qassem.
2) Peled-Elhanan accused the Israeli schoolbooks of having a racist Euro-centrist perspective, because one of them used the expression "far-away Yemen" when comparing to Russia and the Balkan, wrongly assuming that Yemen was the closest to Israel.
3) She further accused the Israeli textbooks of racism because they used the term "Arab" for the minority population in Israel, suggesting it was derogatory, notwithstanding the fact that that population itself used that very term. She also interpreted a decorative picture of two Israeli soldiers on top of a map as a sign of expansionism since one of them aimed his weapon towards Syria [but the other soldier pointed his rifle at his fellow soldier!]. Finally, she claimed that the Israeli schoolbooks' "positive" view of the massacres against the Palestinians was proved by their discussion of those massacres' benefits to Israel's cause, and she brought as an example the ruling against obeying unlawful orders that was issued following the Kafr Qassem massacre in 1956. But the wide discussion of that ruling in the books contradicts her very thesis of massacre indoctrination!
In short, Prof. Peled-Elhanan's thesis proved to be falsely-based and, accordingly, should not be considered a scholarly work. She stated her preconceived thesis based on her personal political agenda and tried hard to find evidence to support it. She failed, for the simple reason that Israeli schoolbooks do not contain significant racist material, let alone massacre indoctrination. But she was not deterred and made formidable efforts to create evidence.
Both Teff-Seker and Groiss published chapters in the 2018 book Multiple Alterities: Views of Others in Textbooks of the Middle East, (eds.) Elie Podeh and Samira Alayan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
It is not surprising that Elhanan-Peled's research is not included in this respectable compilation of academic articles which deals with her research topic.
Scholars Willful Blindness: HUJ Professor Moshe Amirav as a Case in Point
An international conference on the Question of Jerusalem seeking an independent Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem took place recently. It was sponsored by the United Nations Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People. The conference was held in Rabat, Morocco, between the 26 to 28 June 2018 and among the mostly Palestinian speakers was the Israeli Prof. Moshe Amirav of the Hebrew University Rothberg International School.
As an expert on Jerusalem, Amirav's talk was clearly serving Palestinian interests alone. He ridiculed Israel's dream of Jerusalem's unification and peace by calling it "the pathological phenomenon known as the Jerusalem Syndrome". He requested that Israeli politicians should go through "soul-searching" and his solution was, "I can foresee two cities within Jerusalem. The capital of Palestine, Al Quds, fifty square kilometers on the east side of the current city, and the capital of Israel, Jerusalem, sixty square kilometers on the west side." Blind to Palestinian rejectionism, at times Amirav's narrative was at odds with facts. For example, when he stated that in 1987 "During our meetings we arrived at a mutual agreement based on two capitals in one city. We agreed that the eastern neighborhoods of Jerusalem would be Al Quds, the capital of Palestine." Yet he neglected to note that Sari Nusseibeh, one of the leading Palestinian negotiators, was severely wounded a few days after meeting Amirav and Ehud Olmert, by four masked men on the Birzeit University campus. Such an act of violence should have signaled to Amirav a rejection to the "mutual agreement".
According to the Amirav analysis from his 2002 book, Jerusalem played only a secondary role in the Arab-Israeli conflict. He wrote that after Jordan gave up its demand for sovereignty over the West Bank in 1988 then the PLO became the sole claimant to Jerusalem vis-a-vis Israel. He detailed the Palestinian strategy formulated in the 1990s, which was "to counter the facts on the ground set by Israel in Jerusalem. The essence of this strategy, which was led and guided mostly by Faisal Husseini, can be summed up in one word: 'Zumud'. In light of Israeli experience to deprive the city's Arabs of a physical and symbolic hold to the city, this strategy sought to build physical, demographic, and symbolic infrastructures, which will be facts on the ground to match those of Israel. A formation of a Palestinian community around many national and autonomous institutions, the most prominent among them was the Orient House, created the grounds for the 'becoming capital city.' This strategy, more than relying on self-initiative, was largely based on detecting the weaknesses of the Israeli policy, which demonstrated a long-term weakness in its 'Israelization' policy." If Amirav saw Jerusalem as originally only a secondary issue, why was he pushing Israel to give up Eastern Jerusalem, as he stated in a conversation with Haaretz in December 2002, that sooner or later Israel will be forced to "get rid of the Temple Mount" and give it as a gift to the countries of Islam?
In 2000, Amirav was instrumental during the Camp David II Summit with Yasser Arafat, as an advisor to Ehud Barak. As well known, the Israelis offered the Palestinians a return of virtually the entire West Bank and Gaza, a capital in Abu Dis and a condominium of the Holy Basin, that is the Old City. Much to the surprise of the Israeli delegation and the Clinton administration, Arafat refused, walking away from the best offer which the Palestinians had ever received.
By his own admission, Amirav was devastated by the failure of the summit, but he never lost hope. In one of his more recent interviews on ILTV, the good professor stated that he is still dreaming about a peaceful Jerusalem. On its face, Amirav's dream may sound admirable. But for those with even a passing knowledge of the events which led up to Camp David II show that the professor suffers from a deplorable case of willful blindness.
While Arafat and the PLO were initially ready to clench the deal, they came under tremendous pressure from the Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). A few months after Yitzhak Rabin and Arafat signed the Declaration of Principles in Washington in 1993, the Iranian regime which viewed the liberation of Jerusalem as its foundational principle, decided to act as a spoiler of the peace process. Helped by Hezbollah, the Revolutionary Guards and their foreign operations unit Quds Force, trained Palestinian jihadists in suicide bombing and other tools of terror. As a result, during the 1990s, thousands of Israelis died or were wounded, raising questions about Arafat's ability or willingness to control the militants. In 1999, when Ehud Barak came to power, Iran and its proxies increased the pressure both on the Israeli public and on Arafat who decided that under the circumstances he would not be able to strike a deal. Publicly, he spread the theory that Jews have no right to Jerusalem because their Temple was located in Nablus. According to Dennis Ross, the chief American negotiator, the PLO chairman repeated this version during the Camp David II meeting, much to the astonishment of other participants. Moshe Amirav was one of the participants so he should know and if he forgot he can look at Wikipedia under Temple Denial. It was also during the meeting that Arafat demanded the return of the Palestinians refugees and their descends, a clear deal-breaker as far as the Israelis were concerned. Privately, Arafat began preparations for a new intifada, going as far as asking the Iranians for arms and munitions which were discovered when the Israeli navy intercepted Karine-A, in early 2001. Separately, Hezbollah tried to send weapons through Gaza and Egypt. Palestinian leaders, including Mahmoud Abbas, would later admit that Arafat's decision to launch a new intifada was a mistake. Ahmed Qurie admitted the pressure by the proxies in his book Peace Negotiations in Palestine: From the Second Intifada to the Roadmap, castigating the "persistence of the separate agendas of the militant factions." Qurie explained that as the Palestinian leaders tried to pursue negotiations, the "competing voices from the militant Palestinian factions began to talk about making preparations for a battle of Jerusalem, or even a battle for the liberation and independence of the entirety of the Palestinian territories."
There is abundance of research to indicate that Iran and its proxies acted as spoilers in the Oslo peace process. However, Professor Amirav is not likely to use any of this material because it would undermine his narrative. Unfortunately, Amirav is not the only one to suffer from such willful blindness. Almost two decades after the failure of Camp David II and the bloody Second Intifada which followed it, the role of Iran has not been discussed. Collectively, this willful blindness of many radical Israeli activist-scholars created a "politically correct" version of the recent history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
A Complaint against HUJ Prof. Nurit Elhanan-Peled
Last week Dr. Julia Muchnik-Rozanov of Achva College sent us a complaint about a lecture in a conference in Athens, Greece, by Prof. Nurit Elhanan-Peled of the Hebrew University. The educational conference "25th International Conference on Learning" took place on 21-23 of June.
While the Palestinian-Israeli dispute was not on the agenda, Prof. Elhanan-Peled presented a paper "Society and Its Legitimation in School Books". Her lecture, which included claimed that Israeli school-books make the Israeli children "heterophobic through the use of Holocaust rhetoric of victimhood", by teaching them the "fear of others, extreme nationalism and majoritarianism". Elhanan-Peled claimed that such methods promoted the "development of a predatory identity." Elhanan-Peled also presented Israeli school books as legitimizing the elimination of Palestinians and non-white Jews, and the use of language of Holocaust victimhood of equating Palestinians to Nazis. Terms such as "extermination" "Auschwitz" and accusations of anti-Semitism are used when describing Palestinian resistance.
All this prompted Muchnik-Rozanov to leave the lecture hall being upset. She later wrote IAM and questioned who sponsors such an anti-Israeli activity of Prof. Elhanan-Peled in the conference, and whether it was the State of Israel.
At the conference Elhanan-Peled introduced herself as following: "As an Israeli I feel I must specify my political position:I am a member of the Palestinian-Israeli forum of bereaved parents for peace and was a co-laureate of the 2001 Sakharov Prize for Human Rights and the Freedom of Thought, awarded by the European Parliament." To recall, Elhanan-Peled's 14 year old daughter, Smadar, was killed in a suicide bombing at Ben-Yehuda Street in Jerusalem, on the 4th of September 1997 while walking with her friends Yael Botwin, Sivan Zarka and Daniella Birman to buy school-books at the beginning of the school year. Yael, Sivan and Smadar were killed instantly.
A week after her tragedy, Elhanan-Peled was interviewed at the Los Angeles Times, "Mother Blames Israeli Policies for Child's Death," where she blamed Israel. "This is the fruit of [Israel's] misdoings... It serves their purpose. They want to kill the peace process and blame it on the Arabs." She also said she felt no anger toward the bombers--"they are desperate, insanely desperate, people... The Palestinian Authority can't do anything," she said. "They are on the verge of suicide... We are the strong ones. We have the army and the air force. But we are violating their rights, humiliating them." But since Elhanan-Peled is a political activist who uses her academic platform to preach her political agenda, this is not surprising. Self-admittedly Elhanan-Peled said in that interview that her politics "have always been left to far-left." With her politics she blames Israel for all the ills of the Palestinians.
Elhanan-Peled offered similar harsh accusations in her previous work "The denial of Palestinian National and Territorial Identity in Israeli Schoolbooks of History and Geography 1996-2003" which was countered by Dr. Arnon Groiss, as reported by IAM in 2011. Groiss concluded that Elhanan-Peled was "Motivated by her personal political agenda rather than an investigative spirit," with a "highly selective use of source material, leaving out all references which contradict her thesis... inaccurate, distorted, and even downright false evidence," he wrote.
In her lecture, Elhanan-Peled suggested a comparison of Israel to Nazi Germany. She used the so-called Gardening Metaphor by Zygmunt Bauman who compared the garden (as a metaphor for society) and the gardener (as a social-engineer or manager) to juxtapose the concepts of control and order. The gardener is pulling out weeds, as a metaphorical social gardener rounding up human beings in the interests of a managerial plan. Bauman warned of attempts to equate society and nature and the intentions to manage the former according to the principles of the latter, yielding catastrophic results in the past, pointing to the Holocaust.
She discusses her views in a recent video recorded interview with Robert Martin, a pro-Palestinian Australian activist, where her accusations are bordering on the anti-Semitic. Such a biased nature of research puts in question the credibility of the scholar and the type of education that her students receive.
Muchnik-Rozanov's asks who pays for Elhanan-Peled's travel. We don't know, but she disclosed that her recent research was paid in part by the Leverhulme Trust in London which provides funding across various academic disciplines. She is also a member of the Common Ground Research Networks, the co-organizers of the 25th International Conference on Learning, with them Elhanan-Peled published her 2008 article "The Establishment of Israeli Identity through Racist Discourse".
Her Athens conference lecture served as a basis for an upcoming book and IAM would provide an analysis of her findings in due course.
The Number of Arab Students on the Rise and so is the Apartheid Analogy
Surveys indicate that the number of Arab students enrolled in the Israeli universities is on the rise.
One such a survey was conducted by the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS). "Higher Education in Israel - Selected Data for 2016/17 On the Occasion of the Beginning of the New Academic Year. It concluded that "in recent years, the percentage of Arab students has increased significantly in all levels: undergraduates - from 9.8% in 1999/2000 to 16.5% (17.4% in new students) 13.6% and in postgraduates - from 2.8% to 6.6%, respectively". Another survey, conducted by the Council of Higher Education (CHE) also indicated that the number of Arab students in Israeli universities is on the rise. The number had grown from 26,000 in 2010 to 47,000 in 2017 by 78.5% over the past seven years. Arab students accounted for 16.1% of undergraduate students, rising from 10.2 % in 2010. In the graduate programs the percentage of Arab students since 2010 has doubled from 6.2% to 13%. In the postgraduate programs Arab students rose from 3.9% to 6.3%. The CHE survey was intended to assess the success of a program integrating Arab Israelis into the higher education system. Between 2012-2016 the government spent NIS 300 million ($88 million) on this program.
As a result of this success, the government decided to extend it to the year 2022 totaling a budget of NIS 1 billion ($294 million). This program aims also to prevent Arab students from dropping out of university.
Similarly, in December 2016, Prof. Peretz Lavie, the president of the Technion said of the Technion, that the number of Arab students has tripled over the last decade to 20%. Twelve years ago just 7% of students were Arab, then the Technion began a program for Outstanding Arab Youth, preparing students to meet the admission requirements by offering them free of charge 10 months camp in mathematics, physics, English and Hebrew, paid by Jewish philanthropists.
To encourage Arab candidates, in October 2017 Prof. Rivka Carmi, Ben-Gurion University's president, announced that beginning in next year, the University will be accepting Arab students without having to take the psychometric exam usually required to enter the university.
Despite these impressive statistics, the calls for BDS intensify with charges against Israel of conducting apartheid policies.
Palestinians and pro-Palestinian activists lead such charges. Dahlia Scheindlin, formerly of the BGU Department of Politics and Government published an article on April 3, 2017 "Why 'it's not apartheid' arguments fail: Response to NYT op-ed" arguing that Israel is an apartheid state. She based her argument on the writing of Yael Berda, and wrote "according to Dr. Yael Berda Permits are wielded collectively, racially and demographically. There are no permits governing movement for Jews." Berda, a lawyer representing hundreds of political activists who were denied entry to Israel, is an adjunct professor of Sociology at the Hebrew University. Berda's scholarship focuses on "Israel's Expanding Permit Regime" and its "racial hierarchy". Berda suggests that it is a racial intention that drives Israel to be vigilant to Palestinian acts of terrorism. While studying in Princeton University, Berda was a member of the Princeton Committee on Palestine (PCP) which "works to end the occupation in Palestine, defend Palestinian human rights, and raise awareness in the Princeton community about the Palestinian narrative." As a member of Machsom Watch, "Advs Lea Tsemel and Yael Berda called on the court to recognize the racial discrimination practiced by the Israeli police."
Berda's newly published book Living Emergency, "offers a first-hand account of how the Israeli secret service, government, and military civil administration control the Palestinian population." As Berda sees it, while "terrorism, crime, and immigration are perceived as intertwined security threats, she reveals how the Israeli example informs global homeland security and border control practices, creating a living emergency for targeted populations worldwide."
Berda has also written of checkpoints "Searching and Stripping," that the "perverse relationship between Israelis and Palestinians is a depressing B movie that the entire world daily watches. Many actors, spectators, and producers take part in the Mis-en-Scene: soldiers, civilians, international observes, humanitarian organizations, to name few. Despite the attraction to the action, not many realize that the Israeli occupation is all about the body: sweat, heavy breathing, desire. There are several principles to the erotics of the occupation, such as stripping and searching." For Berda, "the desire for the exotic other and his appropriation. Racism becomes more pronounced the greater the desire for appropriation is. In the delirious colonial encounter, the colonizer wants to separate, enclose and protect himself, yet is attracted to the other through the senses as to entertainment or to a cooking spice."
Berda's work influences many. For example, in Nili Belkind's PhD thesis at Columbia University she adopted Berda's final conclusion that "the occupation bureaucracy does not exist only within the West Bank Occupied Territories. Its racialized principles and practices have 'leaked' into the very core of governmental, judicial, and other sites of centralized, as well as privatized, governmentality practices within the Green Line as well. According to Berda, This includes the IDF central quarters in Tel Aviv, the government offices in Jerusalem, the police stations, the courts, the border patrol jeeps, Israeli buses in which security personnel profile Palestinian passengers via visual indicators – to which one might also add here – the various agents dealing with foreigners who are guilty 'by association.' This too is the byproduct of the spatial management of 'porous borders.' For anyone working under these constrictions, the bureaucratic managerial practices of these borders foreground the mundane banalities of the occupation, as manifestations of its appalling dimensions."
Stephen Lendman cited Berda's calling the measures of Israeli surveillance as "scary and undemocratic…criminalizing an entire population for identifying with an organization that Israel considers terrorist (true or false)." Lendman continues that according to Yael Berda, "(y)ou don't have to do anything to be considered a terrorist. You can publish an article or make a comment in cyberspace, and you will be criminalized... If you are located in the physical environment of terrorist activities, you are guilty."
Currently, Berda is supervising in the department of Sociology at the Hebrew University, the PhD thesis by Leehee Rothschild, a staunch BDS activist, titled "Body Searching and Security" with Prof. Edna Lomsky-Feder. Rothschild BDS activities were described in length in AlJazeera's "Boycotting Israel ... from within." Also, in September 2011 Ali Maniku, a member of the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign (SPSC) published an interview with Lehee Rothschild in Scotland, announcing that "Lehee joined at the weekly SPSC Perth Branch Stall and gave us this wee interview". In her interview Rothschild has said: "Hi, my name is Leehee Rothschild I am 27, I am an Israeli who enjoys the privileges under the Israeli apartheid regime. I may be really persecuted for saying that, since 2011 Israel has passed a law which bans calling to boycott Israel, nonetheless, I am calling you to boycott, divest and sanction Israel until it complies with all three Palestinian basic rights and international law, the right of return, the right for freedom and the right for equality." Rothschild was also celebrated in an article in 2014 "Boycotting the land you love: Israeli activist Leehee Rothschild on BDS and the struggle for Palestinian rights."
Berda's racial allegations against Israel provide the scaffolding for the apartheid analogy. While the Israeli Government spends fortune to encourage Arab students to study, Israeli universities provide positions to political activists masquerading as academics who tarnish Israel's standing in the world.
The New Israel Fund and the Academe: the Case of Avner De-Shalit
The New Israel Fund (NIF) is a multi-million politically engaged, left-leaning foundation designated to transform Israel into a society in which progressive values should trump its Jewish character. As the NIF leadership sees it, democratic and Jewish values in Israel are not compatible. To this end, NIF has donated some $30M annually to progressive and pro-Arab groups. For years large supporter of NIF was the Ford Foundation which launched in 2003 an initial grant of $20 million and in September 2007 another $20 million for extending its partnership in Israel in order to "support civil society, human rights and social justice organizations in Israel."
Both Ford and NIF are considered controversial and were criticized by some American Jews and Israelis.
NIF has strong connection to the Israeli academy. The former Hebrew University professor Naomi Chazan served as its president between 2008-2012 and there are many others involved. Professor Avner De Shalit, a political scientist at the Hebrew University and a former dean of the social sciences has been involved with NIF for about two decades, also by serving on NIF's international board.
His politics is in accordance to NIF's ideology and is quite evident in his writing. In his 2004 "Being Israeli," he writes about Haifa, "one knows that there had been life there before the Jews came. Much of this land was bought for money rather than taken by force, but still . . . Could it be because the price of saving of the Jewish nation – and probably without Zionism preceding the Second World War, most the Jewish nation (at least in Europe) would have vanished in the Nazi gas chambers – was humiliating another nation? Or was it a necessary price? It seems that living with those guilt feelings and hesitations is part of being Israeli. It is morally and emotionally impossible to be indifferent to these feelings. Most Israelis either become obsessed by them or become engaged in a process of denial. So either one tries to prove that, despite what has happened, we Israelis are basically goodhearted, we have been and are ready to divide the land, to negotiate, to compensate, and so on; or one simply denies that a problem exists. 'There is no such thing as a Palestinian nation', Golda Meir, Israel's prime minister between 1969 and 1974, used to say. Some right-wing fanatics in Israeli still claim so. Others admit that saying so would appear ridiculous. Of course there is a Palestinian nation; however, they claim, Israel must not allow this nation to have its own state because it would imply a threat to Israel's sovereignty. Benjamin Netanyahu, Foreign Affairs Minister at the time of writing this paper, argues so."
As a scholar, De-Shalit takes great pride in his alleged academic neutrality and impartiality, according to his 2006 article "Teaching political philosophy and academic neutrality.
He writes: "In 2002, while I was teaching in Israel, I was very worried about the immorality of Israel's policies towards the Palestinians. A group of several colleagues and myself initiated a petition. The petition set out our position, as university lecturers, on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. It was published in the press and we were interviewed about the moral grounds for our view. The next day, when I entered my MA seminar on 'Political Philosophy and Practice', one of the students challenged me: 'How dare you tell us that political philosophy can change the world if you, Israeli political theorists, have failed to put forward the argument that would stop the occupation?' Many students joined him, saying that academics in general, but political theorists in particular, were having rather little impact on the state's policies. As if this was not enough, when I left the classroom I bumped into an ex-student of mine. He was furious: I am so disappointed. You exploited your position as a university professor when you signed this petition as 'Professor so and so'. You must distinguish between your political opinions and your position as a university professor. This is the opposite of what you have always taught us about the profession of teaching politics. 'Is that what I taught them?' I thought to myself while rushing to my room; 'Can't be'. I looked at the textbooks they had read in their first year of undergraduate studies. Indeed, they discussed academic objectivity and neutrality. Funny, because I had been feeling during the years following the collapse of the peace process in the Middle East, that political philosophers couldn't afford the luxury of not referring to the 'situation'. They were even obliged to put forward their moral arguments and provoke the students to use the tools we had given them, such as concepts, theories, and the like, to reflect more profoundly on these issues. In fact, political philosophers were doing so in any case by the very fact that they were teaching political philosophy in the context of the conflict. So were the books wrong?"
De-Shalit concludes that "while university lecturers should not adhere to academic neutrality, they should be impartial."
But a look at some of De-Shalit's actions seem to indicate that, while he talks the talk he does not walk the walk.
De-Shalit harnesses NIF affiliates as Phd students. Noam Hofstadter was part of the Courage to Refuse Signers' List in 2002. As mentioned above, De-Shalit signed the petition "Open Letter from Faculty Members", who wished to "express our appreciation and support for those of our students and lecturers who refuse to serve as soldiers in the occupied territories" and "our readiness to do our best to help students."
Hopstadter is being introduced by a NIF think-tank as a "post-doctoral Fellow at Ben Gurion University, where he teaches political science. Previously, he served as Director of Peace Now and as spokesman for B'tselem." Hopstadter's PhD thesis The Expression of Values in the Practice of Not-for-Profit Human and Civil Rights Organizations, explores three NIF grantees The Association for Civil Rights in Israel; Physicians for Human Rights – Israel; and Yesh Din. He writes, "My own activism has taught me lessons that I as of yet have not found in any book... but nevertheless I wish to convey my deepest appreciation to my partners-in-activism, whose determination, creativity, mistakes, experience and companionship have laid the cornerstones for this thesis."
There is something unethical about it. As a member of the international board of NIF De-Shalit was in conflict of interests and should have not signed on a dissertation which is an academic hagiography of NIF's grantees.
De-Shalit seemed to fail his own advise on impartiality and objectivity in another issue. In 2001, the Council of Higher Education appointed a two member committee to evaluate the Department of Politics and Government of Ben Gurion University's request to offer a BA program. Professor Zeev Maoz, a leading political scientist and a former head of the Jaffe Centre for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, found that the department did not offer core political science courses and that its faculty were ill equipped to fill the void. He recommended closing the department but the second evaluator, Avner De-Shalit disagreed and, in November 2003, the CHE appointed a new committee under De-Shalit which in 2004 decided that the department offered a "unique program" and approved the department's request. The questionable goings-on in the Department came up again when in 2011, the CHE appointed an International Committee for Evaluation of Political Science and International Relations Programs in Israeli universities. Chaired by Professor Thomas Risse of Berlin's Free University, the Committee seemed to side with Maoz's 2001 review. The report identified serious problems in the department: weakness of core political science offerings as well as excessive "community activism" and lack of balanced views in the curriculum and the classroom.
There may be, of course, legitimate explanations as to why De-Shalit's view was at odds with the evaluations of Maoz and the Risse committee. Still, it would be reasonable to question if De-Shalit's service with the NIF had influenced his judgment.
As his 2006 essay on academic neutrality and impartiality indicates, De-Shalit understands that scholars should not be tainted by suspicions of political partiality. Unfortunately, he does not practice what he preaches.
Political Activist at the Hebrew University: Areej Sabbagh-Khoury as a Case in Point
IAM often reports on political activists masquerading as academics. A young cohort of academic activists is now making a debut. For instance, Hebrew University has recently announced that Areej Sabbagh- Khoury was hired by the department of Sociology, commencing her position in the academic year of 2018-2019.
A close look at her CV reveals she mixes academics with political activism:
"Areej Sabbagh-Khoury is the Inaugural Post-doctoral Research Associate in Palestine and Palestinian Studies at Brown University 2016-2017. She is also an associate researcher at Mada al-Carmel – The Arab Center for Applied Social Research. Her current book project, now under contract with Stanford University Press, examines relations between members of leftist Zionists kibbutzim and Palestinian villagers in Northern Palestine within a settler colonial framework. Sabbagh-Khoury completed her Ph.D. in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University. She contributed to several book chapters and articles on citizenship, memory, gender and settler colonialism, among them "Palestinian Predicaments: Jewish Immigration and Refugees Repatriation." She also co-edited two volumes of The Palestinians in Israel: A Guide to History, Politics, and Society: the first volume was published in 2011 and the second on December 2016 (both volumes were published in English, Hebrew and Arabic). She has received several awards and grants for her research, among them the Fulbright Post-doctoral Scholar Award year 2015-2016; the 2015 Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Columbia University; the Meyers Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Taub Center for Israel Studies at NYU year 2016, the Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Center for Humanities at Tufts year 2017-2018 and the Israel Science Foundation (ISF) - Post-doctoral Fellowship in the Social Sciences 2017-2018."
Her lecture at the Center of Middle East Studies at the Watson Institute, Brown University in October 2016 showcases her stance "The Zionist Left: Settler Colonial Practices and the Representation of the Palestinian Nakba in Northern Palestine". The invitation to the lecture reads, "inquiring the responsibility of the Zionist settlers and Israeli society on the displacement of refugees and not less important from controlling the Palestinian lands and property and banning the return of Palestinian refugees. Based on a meticulous examination of local Zionist archives of Ha-Shomer Ha-Tza'ir Kibbutzim in Marj Ibn 'Amer, I will track some of the discussions that accompanied the process of expulsion of 1948 and the pillaging of the Palestinian property from neighboring Palestinian villages. Furthermore, I will explore how the politics of remembering by members of Ha-Shomer Ha-Tzair kibbutzim reconstructed memories of the colonization practices that preceded 1948 Nakba and their role in the Nakba."
This the type of scholarship is advanced at the Middle East Center by Professor Beshara Doumani, a Saudi-born Palestinian who has turned the Center into a platform for anti-Israel activism. He has invited the likes of Ariella Azoulay, Ilan Pappe and Neve Gordon to bash Israel. In 2014 Doumani was among the 100 Middle East studies scholars and librarians who petitioned to boycott Israeli institutions. In 2015 Doumani succumbed to BDS pressure and backed down from an Adi Ophir conference at Brown because Ophir is an Israeli scholar with ties to Tel Aviv University.
Sabbagh-Khoury fits well into the academic-activist milieu; her PhD thesis was co-advised by Yehouda Shenhav (TAU) and Joel Beinin (Stanford), both high profile politically engaged scholars. Sabbagh-Khoury's scholarship examines Israel's settler colonialism and argues it has "discrete characteristics of the colonization processes, predicated on not only relations of domination but the dispossession of the natives and their replacement by a colonizing population." She was hailed by the post-Zionist scholar Gabriel Piterberg who found her PhD dissertation "remarkable" because it illustrated the "centrality of the settler-colonial framework". He has noted that Sabbagh-Khoury "contextualized the Nakba" by focusing on the colonization of land. Piterberg also noted she has used a "critical reconstruction of the formation of settler nations by dissenting" it.
The Hebrew University Sociology Department, like its peers around the country, has been top heavy with scholars who research the Israeli-Palestinian conflict while lacking faculty capable to teach cutting edge subjects in Sociology at large. A number of evaluation committees of the Council of Higher Education lamented this state of affairs, as IAM repeatedly reported. In particular, the evaluation committee to the Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University found that the department lacks quantitative training. The committee found data of the MA programs on recent graduates comprising of 16 in Anthropology, 27 in Organizational Studies, 13 in Sociology, and 4 in Demography. Making Organizational Studies the most desirable subject of learning.
The committee expressed concerns that since the founding cohort of sociologists and anthropologists were very prominent and the subsequent generation who are now approaching retirement are still an impressive and productive group, "The problem that the department now faces is one of maintaining its excellence and intellectual vigor at a time of transition to a younger set of scholars." How would recruiting the likes of Sabbagh-Khoury redress the department anomalies?
The problem is that Israeli social sciences have compared poorly in international indices, but nothing has been done to remedy the situation. It is the university authorities who have an obligation to the Israeli tax payer and the elected officials who foot the bill.
[HUJ] New generation of political activists assume positions in Israeli universities - Yael Berda as a case in point
IAM has written extensively on how political activists in the guise of academics have used their positions to promote their political agenda. IAM has repeatedly noted that after being tenured, some, like Yehouda Shenhav and Anat Matar from Tel Aviv University, essentially devoted all their time to political work.
The older generation of academics-activists is slowly retiring, but, in a move known as co-option, they are hiring new activists. Yael Berda as a case in point. In 2013, while studying for her doctorate at Princeton University, Berda contacted Israeli media to announce she joined a group of Israeli academics at various universities in the United States to form the "Israeli Opposition Network". In a press release Berda stated "We want Israel to be a democracy. We are part a growing opposition in Israel, not only to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza but also to the corrupt and unjust economic policies that have sent the middle classes spiraling into poverty. We care deeply for the public in Israel, are extremely concerned for the residents of the occupied territories and for future of the state in the region. We believe we must raise our voices in the US to show that there is a young and capable democratic opposition to the current Israeli leadership."
Barda wrote a chapter in Anat Matar's book on Palestinian prisoners, "The Security Risk as a Security Risk: Notes on the Classification Practices of the Israeli Security Services" and served as a teaching assistant in Yehouda Shenhav's course Bureaucracy, Governmentality and Human Rights, the course goal was to "primarily 'look over the shoulder' of those working in service of the state, in order to try and understand the mechanisms and the networks of events operating in reality." Berda also co-authored with Shenhav, "The Colonial Foundations of the State of Exception: Juxtaposing the Israeli Occupation of the Palestinian Territories with Colonial Bureaucratic History " in The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: anatomy of israeli rule in the occupied palestinian territories (eds.) Adi Ophir, Michal Givoni, and Sari Hanafi, 2009.
As an expert on the Israeli Secret Service, Berda told a pro-Palestinian news program in 2012: "I call it Fathom Sovereignty because there is a huge control omnipotent army presence form of governmental control that literally controls not only the lines but the physical movement of people and perhaps the most powerful organ in the bureaucracy of the occupation is the secret service, the Shabak... there is no interest specifically only in terrorists or only in people who are involved in military actions but their is a wide interest in all the information about the population that is used to control everything about his life... Now, trying to figure out why this is information was interesting and someone told me that had worked previously in the secret service, he said its a very powerful thing because I can invite someone and I can tell him oh, you have this painting in your wall that so and so gave to you it makes them feel that all their life is open and all their secrets are known to you even when they are not so it gives an extra amount of power to pressure someone to become an informer."
Upon completing her Ph.D Berda assumed a position in the department of Sociology at the Hebrew University. Berda's scholarship focuses on the methods of control Israel impose on the Palestinian population and her latest book explores the regime of work permits. "We tend to associate practices of population surveillance with Western modernity and the intensification of security routines with the last decade defined by the "Global War on Terror." I suggest, however, that proliferation of methods to monitor and control populations are legacies of the practices that were developed in the colonies to manage civilian populations. Here, I outline those institutional colonial legacies."
There is little doubt that Berda is a political activist and would use her position at the Hebrew University to sponsor her activities. IAM pointed out that the social sciences in the Israeli universities have deteriorated because they rely heavily on neo-Marxist, critical approaches. The Sociology Department at the Hebrew University, which boasted on world renowned scholars like S.N. Eisenstadt, is now quite mediocre, according to the international indices of higher education. A Committee that evaluated the department on behalf of the Council for Higher Education noted its weakness in Rational choice theory, quantitative methods, and other cutting edge fields.
By hiring Berda, the department seems to defy the guidance of the CHE. The Israeli public who pays for Israeli universities to excel should not be forced to pay for yet another activist scholar.
[HUJ] German TV compared Palestinian incitement to kill Israelis to Israeli "propaganda," based on a Nurit Peled-Elhanan interview
The German public service television broadcaster ZDF aired on July 5, 2016 on "heute plus" a programme on the propaganda tools that both Israelis and Palestinians use against each other. To prove their case, on the Palestinian side, ZDF showed a clip of a school graduation of young kids in Gaza where the children simulated a war against Israel. On the Israeli side, a ZDF reporter interviewed Nurit Peled-Elhanan, an academic at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who presented Israeli school books as propaganda tool against the Palestinians. This is not the first time that Peled-Elhanan addresses this issue. In 2012 she published a controversial book in which she found that Israeli textbooks teach children hatred of the Palestinians. In her view, when these children grow up and are conscripted into the IDF, they become killers.
A promo describes the ZDF programme as "Educated to hatred? As Israeli and Palestinian children to be persuaded to despise each other."
Stefan Frank in Mena-Watch, an independent Arab-Israeli Think Tank in Vienna, who's goal is "to improve the quality of reporting on the Middle East in general and Israel in particular", offers a scathing review of the ZDF program. Frank cited Israeli journalist Eldad Beck of YNET, who is based in Germany, as stating that "Several research institutes have studied the broadcast content by ZDF and came to the conclusion that they are consistently anti-Israel."
It is highly regrettable that ZDF and other outlets can find unscrupulous Israeli academics like Peled-Elhanan to support their distorted view of Israel.
Commemorating Prof. Robert Wistrich: Hebrew University and the Undermined Research on Antisemitism
We approached today the first yahrzeit of late Professor Robert Wistrich, the renowned historian, who chaired the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA) at the Hebrew University, until his death on the 19th of May 2015. The SICSA website presents his voluminous research, including the conferences he held - all focusing on various aspects of antisemitism.
SICSA was founded in 1982 by Vidal Sassoon, the famous hair-dresser who came to Israel in 1948 to help her fight in the Independence War. Antisemitism was high on his agenda. In his last interview to Voices on Antisemitism published by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Sassoon said: "I was born in Shepherd's Bush, West London, in 1928. And the period of my childhood was very interesting, because Britain never went Fascist or Communist. But antisemitism was absolutely rife. I mean, it was nothing for another kid to say to you, "Dirty Jew." And although England was a good place to be, especially with Churchill and the fight against the Nazis, there was always that sense of the Jews being second-class citizens." The interview was published shortly before his death in 2012.
Professor Dalia Ofer served as SICSA's chair from 1996 and Wistrich replaced her from 2002. In her concluding remarks upon ending her term Ofer wrote, "From its inception, the Sassoon Center has been dedicated to an independent, non-political approach to the accumulation and dissemination of knowledge necessary for understanding the phenomenon of anti-semitism."
Before his death Wistrich privately expressed concerns over where would SICSA be heading. Wistrich was right to be worried, exactly one year after his death, SICSA has not been focusing on the study of antisemitism, as can be seen from the activities listed below.
Things came to a head when some of Wistrich research projects were discontinued soon after his death. For example, the proceedings of a conference hosted by Wistrich were purposed to culminate in a book, two years have gone by and the book is not out yet.
It is worth noting that SICSA's academic committee of eight professors comprises of half specializing in fields not related to antisemitism: Romance and Latin American Studies; Musicology; English; and Law.
Ofer's words on "non-political approach" sound hollow, some members of the academic committee participate in political activism. For example, a conference held by the Minerva Humanities Center at TAU together with the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, a political German foundation, questioned "Are Modern Societies Racist? Racism and Xenophobia in Israel and Europe Today," the new chairperson of SICSA, Prof. Manuela Consonni, included comparisons of antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe. Not a single incident, between 2011 to 2012, organized by Van-Leer, Consonni participated in a discussion group on "Partition and Its Alternatives" promoting a one state solution for Israel/Palestine. By aiming to "examine critically the view that partition is the only logical solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict." Group members questioned "whether separation ... is indeed the only solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict." And questioning to "what extent partition will ensure sustainable peace between Israelis and Palestinians."
Consonni is not the only political activist among SICSA's academic committee. In an interview with Al-Jazeera published in 2012, Yehuda Bauer was questioned on the Israeli demand of the Palestinians to recognise Israel as a Jewish state, Bauer's response was, "I think that is proof of his [Netanyahu's] internal insecurity. If you are secure in your Jewish identity you do not need Abu Mazen or Saeb Erekat to tell you that you are a Jew. Do they need me to fortify their belief that they are Palestinian?"
Another member of the academic committee, Michael Karayanni, a law professor who wrote about his work, "I teach three courses at the Faculty of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and engaged in three main research projects: the first deals with the liberal dilemma associated with the accommodation of religious minorities in nation states given that liberalism will work to back such an accommodation but should also be attuned to vulnerable minority members such as women and children; the second deals with the extraterritorial application of access to justice rights; and the third deals with the history and nature of the recognition accorded to the Palestinian-Arab religious communities in Israel... As to my extra-academic activities I would like to list the fact that I was a member of the board of ACRI – Association for Civil Rights in Israel – the country's major human rights association, and since 2009 serve as a member of the committee awarding the Emil Grunzweig Human Rights Award to organizations and individuals whose work made a significant contribution in the field of human rights in Israel. I have also served as a member in the School of Peace, located in Naveh Shalom – Wahat El Salam that engages in different co-existence activities." He has no background in the study of antisemitism.
Since Wistrich's death, the legacies of Vidal Sassoon and Robert Wistrich have been undermined. While neo-antisemitism is growing among Muslims in Europe and elsewhere, by having academic committee members associated with pro-Palestinian activist groups, the study of antisemitism will be heading nowhere.
[HUJ] Tom Pessah: A Profile of Political Activist Supported by the Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Even by the standards of radical faculty activism, Dr. Tom Pessah is an outlier. A veteran professional activist who tends to sport a kafiya during public events, Pessah obtained a Ph.D. from Berkeley University on the topic of the Nakba. He is an ardent supporter of a binational state, a theory he espoused in "Who's Afraid of the Right of Return?" and favors BDS.
Since returning to Israel Pessah went into an activist overdrive. He has rejoined Zochrot, an organization dedicated to a binational state and the Truth Commission, modeled on the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. Pessah is in charge of organizing a 2016 conference for Zochrot entitled "Third International Conference on the Return of Palestinian Refugees" In his invitation for papers posted on the social science forum he writes, "Zochrot works to promote recognition and responsibility-taking by Jewish Israeli society for its part in the ongoing Nakba and realize the return of Palestinian refugees as the necessary redress of the Nakba. In March 2016, Zochrot will hold its third International Conference on Return to discuss What is currently being done to promote return, and what can be done in the future?"
of course, Pessah, like any other Israeli citizen, is entitled to his political opinions and activism. What is puzzling, however, is the source of financial support that enables Pessah to operate as a full time political activist masquerading as faculty. As it happens, Pessah was the recipient of the Morris Ginsberg fellow in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for 2014-5. The Fellowship was created through a grant of Morris Ginsberg, an eminent British-Jewish sociologist, to nurture young academics in research pertaining to Ginsberg's interest.
The original mandate notwithstanding, over the years the Department offered the Fellowship in a hodgepodge of subjects with no clear direction or rational. Without sounding too negative, one could probably arrive at such a list by picking candidates at random.
What makes this fiasco more noteworthy is the bad review that the Department received from the International Evaluation Committee in 2012. Headed by Prof. Seymour Spilerman of Department of Sociology, Columbia University, the Committee noted that during its heyday, the Sociology Department housed sociologists of international renown, such as Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt.
The Committee found the Department lagging behind in many fields and especially in quantitative methods and innovate approaches such as network analysis, sociology of innovation, sociology of technology and science, and others.
Of course, there are financial constraints on all departments which seek to stay competitive in a fast changing field. But the leaders of the Department could have used the Ginsberg Fellowship to invite post-doctoral students specializing in the cutting edge research fields of the discipline instead of financing Pessah's activism with Zochrot.
Here are a number of topics to consider, based on offering at Ivy League universities: labor market organization; economic sociology; social networks organizations; health and social policy in the context of economic and political globalization; organizational theory; statistical methodology; corporate governance, accountability and social responsibility; sociology of the city ;sociology of science, knowledge, and technology; entrepreneurial and startup companies.
[HUJ] Transitional Justice: A New Way to Vent Old 1948 Grievances
The preoccupation of radical-leftists in the academy with the 1948 War has gone through many stages.
To recall, the New Historians like Ilan Pappe has "found" that Israel committed ethnic cleansing with hints of genocide. Starting with a modest and rather noncontroversial account of 1948 in his first book, Pappe added progressively more dramatic accounts in his subsequent books aimed at creating an Israeli-Nazi equivalency. Based on such accounts, sociologists and social psychologists dwelt on the Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe.
Transitional justice is the newest reincarnation of this preoccupation with 1948. According to the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), a New York based group, it was created to "address legacies of massive human rights violations and build civic trust in state institutions as protectors of human rights. In the aftermath of mass atrocity and repression, we assist institutions and civil society groups—the people who are driving and shaping change in their societies—in considering measures to provide truth, accountability, and redress for past abuses."
Much as this definition seeks to create the impression of a policy neutral humanitarian organization, a perusal of its activities reveals its bias. There is a call to hold the United States accountable for torture committed in the war or terror, specifically the waterboarding of four al-Qaeda operatives responsible for 9/11, but no mention of Iran where massive and ongoing human rights abuses have commanded front page in Western media for decades, or Syria where a brutal dictatorship killed and oppressed its own citizens or ISIS. Indeed, Islamist violence against other Muslims or Westerners is nowhere to be found among the reports. A perfunctory survey of the list of donors reveals the reason for such "politically correct" approach; by and large the ICTJ is financed by progressive organizations such as Open Society of George Soros, the Ford Foundation and progressive governments, notably, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands and the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations. In 2011 it helped promoting the Russel Tribunal on Palestine and equally not surprising, Richard Goldstone is the chair of its Advisory Board.
Transitional Justice is hand-made for academic activists in Israel. As stated on its website, ICTJ's role is to "run workshops and trainings to brief Israeli, Palestinian and international institutions—such as the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and the Human Rights Clinic of al-Quds University."
Indeed, the Transitional Justice Project at the Minerva Center, Hebrew University has followed the International Crimes Tribunals Act (ICTA) model. Dr. Ron Dudai, a Minerva fellow, has teamed up with Zochrot, a group of academics and lay activists dedicated to the Palestinian right to return, to offer a course on the subject. Dudai's course titled "Transitional Justice to Civil Society," is described in the Zochrot annual report as "focused on a range of topics including prosecution mechanisms, truth commissions, reparations programs, vetting mechanisms, and reconciliation initiatives. It also explored the intersection between efforts to achieve justice and accountability, and negotiations to ensure sustainable peace by a grassroots level initiatives like Zochrot." Thirty people participated, representing "Amnesty, New Profile, Baladna, Machsom Watch, Sadaka Reut, and the Public Committee against torture in Israel."
Dudai has the perfect job as he seamlessly transitions (no pun intended) between being an activist at Zochrot and a faculty member. The question is why does the Hebrew University needs to offer "how do classes" for radical-leftist activists? A public university should not advocate for a political solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict even if bears the fancy title of Transitional Justice.
The Flat Earth Theory: HUJ Moshe Zimmermann's Prognostication on Iran
Moshe Zimmermann, a professor of German history at the Hebrew University has reinvented himself again, this time as an expert on Iran. In an interview to a mainstream Swiss radio station he dismissed concerns about Iran's alleged quest to acquire nuclear weapon capability. As Zimmermann sees it, the entire campaign against Iran is the doing of Israel that tries to divert attention from the Palestinian-Israeli conflict: "The Israeli politic tries to somehow marginalize the problem of Israel-Palestine, and this is done by building up a bigger, new enemy. Iran or the nuclear power Iran."
Zimmermann also dismisses what he euphemistically calls, "Iran's unfriendly behavior" toward Israel, stating that "its not so much about Iran's policy, but about the purposes of the Israeli policy."
To reach these conclusions, Zimmermann has to ignore two inconvenient realities. First, the international community has long suspected Tehran of trying to produce a nuclear weapon. The International Atomic Energy Agency has said as much in its numerous Safeguard Reports and imposed an unprecedented sanction regimen on Iran. The sanctions that brought the economy to its knees brought the regime to the negotiation table with the P5+1 countries (permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany) but the prospect of reaching an agreement by its November 24 deadline is not clear. According to reports, Iran still insists on retaining a large enrichment capacity and refused access to Parchin and sites suspected of holding experiments in producing a nuclear warhead that could be mounted on the Sajjil – 2, a medium range missile capable of striking Israel. Clearly, the international community does not think that Tehran's nuclear program is an Israeli bogyman designed to divert attention from the conflict.
Iran's "unfriendly behavior," is not limited to the former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as Zimmermann has alleged. The Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a new guide on how to eliminate Israel that, not incidentally, coincided with the anniversary of Kristallnacht.
Like any other citizen, Zimmermann has the right to express his belief that Israel should not hold on to the territories. But there is something particularly odious about his tactics that ranged from equating Israeli behavior to that of Nazi Germany, to ignoring concerns about Iran's alleged proliferation.
Yet more is expected from a faculty in a respectable academic institution. The Swiss radio station, along with other German media outlets, give Zimmermann a platform because he is employed by the Hebrew University. The special legitimacy accorded to scholars who should be objective bearers of truth is tarnished by Zimmermann's equivalent of flat earth theory.
HUJ Nurit Peled Elhanan and Israeli Social Sciences: A Commentary on a Highly Politicized Discipline
For years now, IAM has reported on the Nurit Peled Elhanan (HUJ) political exploits that break every rule of academic conduct. In her newest venture, Peled Elhanan, the laureate of the politically dubious Human Rights Award of the European Union Parliament, urges to boycott Israel and indeed, expel it from the international community. [See below]
That Peled Elhanan, a tireless anti-Israeli activist, would call for boycott is old hat. She has done in countless times in the past and will do it again. It is also quite clear that neither the university authorities nor the state have any appetite to apply the 2011 anti-boycott law, though Peled Elhanan seems to be its most blatant violator.
What is more surprising is that the social science community has never raised objection to her dubious publication record - a string of political polemics dressed up as academic research. As expected, Peled Elhanan "found empirical evidence" to compare the Israel to the worst of Nazi Germany and South African apartheid. Published by radical European outlets, this material is presented as academic research by a "Hebrew University professor."
For those who may wander as to why scholars - adept at using various discursive forums – have refrained from offering a critique of Peled Elhanan, the answer is simple. Social sciences in Israel are deeply politicized and virtually dominated by leftist academics anxious to protect their radical colleagues. By criticizing Peled Elhanan, they may give succor to right-wing critics of the academy.
No such qualms exist when it comes to perceived "right-wing" scholarship. For instance, when the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya published an survey of Iranian public attitudes toward nuclear weapons in Iran – that, incidentally found a decline in public support for the project - Professor Micha Leshem and Yuval Yonay (Haifa U) offered a scathing attack on Professor Alex Mintz and the HIC accusing them of being a front for the Mossad, published on the social science server. [See below] It is not entirely clear why Leshem – who once attached a classic anti-Semitic cartoon opposing Israeli occupation - and Yonay were so outraged. A short perusal of the relevant opinion polls by Gallop and Zogby polls, easily available on the Internet, would have confirmed that, indeed, the sanctions that devastated the Iranian economy brought down the level of approval for the nuclear weapons. Here are some relevant numbers for Leshem and Yonay to consider: after five years of increasingly harsh sanctions, only 35 percent of Iranian stated that they were better off than five years ago; almost fifty percent said they were worse off. As the high cost for keeping the nuclear development afloat became evident, the virtual 100 percent approval dropped to some 60 and less.
The recent case of Dr. Mordechai Kedar (Bar Ilan University) reflects the same pattern. On the 21st of July a number of scholars accused Kedar of alleging that rape of women in family of Hamas was the only way to deter Hamas. The claim was posted on the social science server, prompting Haaretz to publish an article. Kedar shortly after publish his version on the issue. Bar Ilan University followed up with a clarification, stating that Dr. Kedar explained in response that he does not recommend such despicable acts, and that his intention was to illustrate how difficult it is to deter a suicide bomber.
There is little doubt that Hamas motivation and behavior – a subcategory of Jihadist behavior - is important and should be discussed by social scientists, not just as a bone fide academic topic but also as a service to the military, policy makers and the public. But here again, because of politicization, a dispassionate debate supported by empirical evidence was lost.
Reading the book The Koranic Concept of War, by Brigadier General S.K. Malik would be a good start. Malik, a self-described Islamist, served at the time on the Pakistani general staff. He asserted that the Koran does not make a distinction between combatants in uniforms and civilians on both sides of a war. Killing enemy civilians is, of course, permitted, but Muslim non-combatants should be ready to sacrifice their lives and become martyrs for the cause. Following the Iranian revolution in 1979, the book was adopted as an official doctrine by the Revolution Guards and then taught to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a wholly owned subsidiary of Tehran, and Hamas.
Any respectable debate on deterrence of Jihadists should, at the very least, include Malik's work and its tactical applications. More than a decade ago, Lt. Col. Joseph C. Myers published a highly regarded study on Malik in theleading journal Parameter. The article became the basis of academically sound and sophisticated understanding of the issue.
Social scientists have a duty to produce and disseminate relevant knowledge, not least because they are supported by the tax payer. But this notion has probably never occurred to some Israeli faculty that view their tenured position as an extension of their political agenda.
To the Board of Governors of the Hebrew University Jerusalem
The Board of Governors is urged to act in order to prevent the above faculty from abusing their academic freedom. HUJ should follow the protocol of public universities in the West that are required by law to be accountable to the tax payers who fund their activities. Clearly, the Israeli tax paying public should not support activist faculty who do not teach or research in the fields they were hired for or use their classroom to push their ideological agenda.
[HUJ, Buber Society] Roy Wagner - Upping the Ante: Pinkwashing and Holocaust Equivalency
Gay activist-scholars who describe themselves as queer have been among the most radical critics of Israel. Coined by Aeyal Gross (TAU), pinkwashing became the rallying cry of those who accuse Israel of promoting liberal policies towards gays in order to cover up the occupation.
Roy Wagner (HUJ), a self proclaimed scholar and queer activist, takes the pinkwashing theory one step further in a lengthy "On (not) choosing between mobility and visibility: Crossing sexual and national borders in Israel/Palestine," published in Borderlands, an Australian-based e-journal. Wagner stated that the article derives from activities at Tel Aviv University's Queer Theory Reading Group and its annual LGBT studies and queer theory conference.
Admittedly, Wagner's piece, replete with critical theory language and convoluted prose is a difficult read as the following typical sentence demonstrates: "The term visibility-mobility regime indicates here the Israeli system of technologies organizing mobility and visibility in Israel/Palestine, but also the distributed agents that implement these technologies (this
ambiguity is meant to avoid the assumption of a unified sovereign that exists apart from the implementation of its governance technologies)."
Stripped of its critical verbiage, Wagner theory is simple; there is an inverse relation between visibility and mobility, that it the less "deviant" from the norm a person is, the easier it is for him or her to "pass" and move around. In his view, the 2006 Gay Pride Parade in Jerusalem illustrates this point: the police let the "straight" looking gays to march but confined the "queers" (who sometimes march in drag or semi-nude) to a small lot. Whether straight or queer looking, Palestinian gays were not allowed to march under their banner at all.
Still, it was the case of Palestinian gays that demolished his theory. Wagner admitted that the Israelis were quite lenient in allowing gays from the territories to enter Israel; one such frequent traveler was gay who performed in drag in a Jerusalem bar. Indeed, he was forced to state that Israel's treatment of gays - is more "civilized" than in the Palestinian Authority - where gays are often beaten and persecuted. Contradicting himself even further, Wagner proceeded to chastise the Israeli press for ignoring the near fatal beating of a gay Palestinian by an East Jerusalem man who claimed to represent the Muslim religious authority. It is noted that Gross and other pinkwashers normally complain that Israel highlights the plight of Palestinian gays to score public relations points.
Wagner further undermines his thesis by comparing the treatment of the Palestinians to that of the Jews during the Holocaust - a situation where "passing" was a question of life or death. There is little logic to this comparison, but it is not coherence that Wagner is interested at. In the radical academic community, the goal is to create the Palestinian-Holocaust equivalence, no matter the ontological and epistemic cost.
Needless to say, Wagner can violate all rules of research because he is sailing under the flag of academic freedom while fleecing the tax payer.
In the Service of the PLO - Nurit Peled Elhanan's One-Sided Version of Reality: Blame Israel Only
Previous postings on Nurit Peled Elhanan (HUJ) indicated that this radical activist has never believed in separation between political agenda and scholarship. Her book on textbooks, based on dubious methodology and specious arguments "proves" that Israeli textbooks are violently biased toward Arabs and Palestinians.
This time around she takes on the issue of incitement - first dealt with by the Tripartite Committee on Incitement created in 1998 to facilitate the peace process. Though the level of incitement by the Palestinians has grown since then, Peled Elhanan gives them a good grade. Indeed, she calls Palestinian incitement a "myth" created by the Israel as a "diversionary tactic."
Peled Elhanan writes that "a February 2013, a comprehensive report on textbooks in Israel and Palestine entitled "Victims of Our Own Narratives? Portrayal of the 'Other' in Israeli and Palestinian School Books", sponsored by the US State Department and independently examined at Yale University, the study looked at 94 Palestinian textbooks and 74 Israeli textbooks published between 2009 and 2011. The results of the study formally exposed the Israeli accusation of one-sided extensive Palestinian incitement myth."
This is a highly misleading statement. No one, of course, expects Peled Elhanan to provide accurate details as she has served as an effective spokesperson for the PLO for decades. The PLO press release below proves this point. The only problem is that it is the Israeli taxpayer who pays her salary.
[HUJ Amos Goldberg] Critical Studies Find Converts among Holocaust Studies Scholars: What do Taxpayers Pay For?
IAM has periodically reported on Israeli academics–activists using the critical, neo-Marxist approach to make political points. Comparisons between the Holocaust and the Nakba are very popular in this genre, with Adi Ophir (TAU), Ariella Azoulay (TAU) and Moshe Zuckermann (TAU) leading the field.
Actual Holocaust scholars have been slower to join the ranks. One prominent exception to the rule is Amos Goldberg from Hebrew University. Goldberg, whose doctoral dissertation was on diary writing during the Holocaust, has come under the influence of Dominic LeCapra, professor of intellectual history at Cornell University, School of Theory and Criticism. Less known than the French critical scholars such as Michele Foucault, Jack Derrida or Jean Leoytard, LeCapra adopted the critical approach to the study of historical trauma. Like his more prominent peers, LeCpra denies the uniqueness of Holocaust - either in the moral sense or as a case of murder on a vast industrial scale . He is also quick to accuse positivist scholars for using the label of uniqueness to push an ideological agenda.
Goldberg who spent an year in at Cornell proved himself to be an adeptstudent of LaCapra. As his paper below (co-authored with Bashir Bashir) indicates, the comparison of the Holocaust and the Nakba are never far from the surface.
Scholars are, of course, free to adopt the critical, neo-Marxist approach in their research. The question here - as with other academics profiled by IAM – is whether they engage in "mission creep" that transcends the bounds (liberally defined) of their departments. Goldberg was evidently hired to do research and teach on the Holocaust rather than join the already growing number of scholars who study the Nakba in one guise or other.
In an age of diminished resources in tertiary education, this is one more expense that the tax payer is asked to shoulder.
[HUJ, Poli-Sci] Ofer Cassif's unequivocal battle against Zionism and Israel
Ofer Cassif (Hebrew University in Jerusalem), a high ranking official in the Israeli Communist Party, is arguably one of the most radical academics in Israel. As IAM reported, his syllabus in a course on Israeli society follows closely his ideological views.
The article below reflects Cassif''s penchant for misrepresenting facts to prove that Israel is the worst "brutal, colonial, apartheid, racist, capitalist state," where freedom of speech is brutally suppressed.
Cassif, as the representative of the Israeli Communist Party in Lisbon, Portugal, posed a request to his audience: "I would like to call you to support our struggle against the occupation, against Zionist racism." He then compared Israelis to Ku Klux Klan, "Israeli soldiers and other officials ignore that fascist vandalism – as if we were talking about KKK in Alabama under George Wallace." Cassif's grim views of Israel are evident: "The brutal colonialist regime that Israeli Zionist governments have been retaining for decades in the Palestinian occupied territories is accompanied by vicious capitalist and racist policies in Israel proper".
Cassif's notion of Middle East politics is one-dimensional. His deliberation of Syria's communists is of "their continuous struggle against imperialist and Zionist intervention". Cassif concluded that "in the Middle-East, it means an unequivocal battle against Zionism".
Carried away by the slew of negative adjectives to describe Israel, Cassif evidently missed the irony of his own position. If Israel is such a horrible totalitarian state, how is it that Cassif gets to teach a course using a list of readings that would have made the University of Moscow during the Stalin era proud?
Cassif is not the only radical faculty supported by the Israeli tax payer. As Ziva Shamir, the former head of the School of History at TAU suggested, not only do such academics use academic freedom to peddle their political agenda in class, but turn their offices into branches of their respective party.
Trashing Israel is one things, enjoying the perks of one's academic position is another.
[HUJ Institute of Contemporary Jewry] Amos Goldberg and the Radical Hypocrisy of the Radical Left
Amos Goldberg, a Holocaust researcher from Hebrew University and a political activist, was praised by Louise Bethlehem, a Hebrew University English Literature professor in connection with Zochrot, a group that promotes the memory of the Nakba as the Palestinian equivalent of the Holocaust. As Bethlehem wrote in 2010 "Zochrot ( זוכרות ) is the feminine plural form of the verb to remember – an imperative which is routinely associated with the Holocaust for Jewish Israelis, as activist and Holocaust scholar Amos Goldberg recently pointed out to me."
Goldberg, hired as an expert on Holocaust, has worked hard to create this equivalency. As the previous IAM post indicates, Goldberg adds a moral imperative to his work; as victims of the Holocaust, Jews should support the Palestinian effort to remember their catastrophe.
Goldberg's stand, which is very popular among activist faculty associated with Zochrot, is nothing short of amazing. Adi Ophir and Moshe Zuckermann (TAU) among the leaders of the Nakba memory drive, are the authors of the theory that memorializing the Holocaust has created a psychological "deformity" among Israeli Jews, as the latter put it. Allegedly, the "pathological" need to remember the Jewish genocide -in the word of the former - makes Israeli Jews morally blind to the plight of their Palestinians victims. According to this scenario, the former victims behave like the Nazis in their encounters with the Palestinians.
That radical faculty is reluctant to acknowledge the wisdom of the popular saying "what is good for the goose is good for the gander" has been amply documented by the IAM. That the existence of double standards is at the core of hypocrisy is well understood. What is not well known is that Goldberg has followed many in the radical cohorts to turn his tax supported position to research the Holocaust to "nazify Israel."
[HUJ Political Science] Ofer Cassif's Activism In and Outside the Classroom
Ofer Cassif, a member of the political bureau of the Israeli Communist Party is teaching a course in Political Science "Capital & Government" at HUJ. As IAM reported, Cassif is a vehement critic of Israel who routinely describes Zionism as a racist ideology.
Recently Cassif chaired a meeting of the Central Committee of the party called to deal with current regional developments. The Committee passed a resolution condemning Israel for "warmongering" against Syria and threatening to attack her in the name of American imperialism.
Domestically, the Committee called to overthrow the violent, right-wing government that serves big capital and the settlers. It warned against the "fascist" discourse used to break the power of the labor and union.
Arguably, Cassif, like other citizens, has the right to espouse political views of his choice, including that of the Communist Party which is legal in Israel. What he has no right to do is to turn his classroom into an extension of his party activism.
Yet this is exactly what Cassif has been doing. A syllabus of the same course "Capital & Government" that he offered at the Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo demonstrates this point. IAM's Syllabus Project that tracks syllabi of radical scholars found that Cassif's list of assigned readings was highly partial to a neo-Marxist interpretation of the alleged ills of the Israeli democracy and the exploitation of the masses by the "big capital."
The syllabus makes a mockery of the 2010 resolution of the Council of Higher Education mandating a balanced approach in the social sciences. The HUJ students and the taxpayers deserve better than an exercise in pedagogy lifted from the playbooks of higher education in former Soviet Union.
HUJ Alon Harel and Ethics Code: Misrepresenting Academic Freedom
A recent proposal by Ariel University to pass Ethics Code (eventually postponed to the following year) created a firestorm on the Social Science Network.
Alon Harel has led the charge against the "totalitarian" Ariel University, describing two paragraphs of the proposed Code as "scandalous." One stipulates that faculty's conduct should not be injurious to the good name of the university. The other pertains to the duty of faculty to provide students with a balanced presentation of controversial subjects by - 1) offering a wide variety of views on the issue; - 2) teaching about the sources of the controversy.
Harel's position reflects the view of a large segment of liberal arts faculty in Israel. As Academic Freedom in Israel: A Comparative Perspective found, Israeli academics have fought the notion that academic freedom should be balanced with academic duty. Conversely, public universities in Germany, Great Britain and the United States have Ethic Codes that require faculty to behave in a way that would not tarnish the good name of their institutions. Given that taxpayers fund higher education, sensitivity to public image is part of the larger theme of accountability to the public and its elected representatives.
Harel's argument sounds particularly callous when it comes to sexual misconduct of faculty, a topic of a recent report by the Comptroller General. Yaacov Bergman (HUJ), who helped with the report, pointed out that Professor Eyal Ben-Ari who was fired by Hebrew University for sexual misconduct was accused of tarnishing the good name of his employer. The transcript of the internal trial of Ben Ari mentions "harming the University's good reputation" on seven occasions. Bergman observed that Harel's dismissive approach to the values of institutional reputation contradicts the stand of his university.
Harel's opposition to a balanced teaching of controversial subjects is equally puzzling. While professing to accept the Wilhelm von Humboldt's vision of a classroom as a "marketplace of ideas" - a pedagogy used in liberal arts in the West - he warns that such a Code will punish faculty who do not follow this practice. Needless to say, Harel's position contradicts Resolution 1109/11 of The Council for Higher Education (CHE) which requires that Israeli universities follow the "classroom as a market place of ideas" model. Thus, it is mandated that students in liberal arts (social sciences and humanities) be "exposed to a wide-range of ideas," a "variety of knowledge," and to "relevant claims."
Overwhelming opposition to Ethics code is not limited to Harel. Maltz Committee Report on Higher Education of January 18, 2000 urged creating Ethic Codes, however most universities ignored the recommendation because of faculty opposition.
Harel's shopworn warnings that limiting academic freedom in Israel would hurt higher education are disingenuous at best and deceptive at worst. Israeli liberal arts are trending well below Western averages, not least because the expansive interpretation of intramural freedom makes it easy on tenured faculty to cease publishing in their field to engage in pseudo research to push a political agenda. IAM has repeatedly illustrated that neo-Marxist, critical scholars have switched from researching in the field for which they were hired to engaging in political pamphleteering. The International Committee of Evaluation under Professor Thomas Risse noted that most faculty in the Department of Politics and Government at Ben Gurion University known little about core political science fields and publish in marginal academic venues.
Harel and his peers should know that resisting all efforts to improve liberal arts education comes with a price. The state budget is not a bottomless barrel; when painful cuts are necessary the taxpayers and their political representatives can rightly ask why should they support underperforming programs. This is not a hypothetical question - it was announced last week that, as part of the Maltz Report quest for efficiency,the Hebrew University will eliminate a large number of liberal arts courses.
Alon Harel should realize that such moves are the proverbial "writing on the wall." Most economic estimates predict a decade of slow growth in the economy and more cuts. Humanities and social sciences are not going to be exempt from the general trends and will be forced to implement the Maltz Report, bringing Israeli universities in line with global trends.
Bias at the Hebrew University Social Science Network
Following IAM's Roundtable on "Academic Freedom in Israel" Dr. Rami Kaplan posted his Hebrew review on the Social Science Network, a Hebrew University service for the social science community. As is acceptable in academic discourse, IAM posted on the Network a response to Kaplan, (see below) but our second effort to respond to the burgeoning discussion engendered by Kaplan's post were denied. Instead, the following day in an unprecedented move Dr. Amir Tal, the Network moderator, wrote a letter apologizing for allowing the IAM response to Kaplan in the first place. Tal accused IAM of using "harassing" and "intimidating" language and reminded all network users that they should refrain from ad hominem attacks and disrespectful language. Needless to say, there was nothing "harassing" nor "intimidating" in any of our posts.
Tal's position reflects what IAM has known for years, namely that the Social Science Network is heavily biased toward leftist scholarship. For instance, our posts have been rejected on many occasions; after agreeing to post our invitation to the Roundtable, the moderator rejected a reminder, while organizers of events whom the moderators find more palatable are allowed to post a second or even a third reminder.
The moderators of the Network have allowed plenty of disrespectful and even slanderous language to be used in causes they do not like. For example, posts about Im Tirtzu and Ariel University have included questionable assertions and disrespectful language.
The practices of the moderators of the Hebrew University Social Science Network reflect the lack of pluralism in the social sciences in Israel. Voices that do not tow the "party line" are stifled and silenced. As IAM demonstrated, the social sciences in Israeli universities pay a high price for this state of affair; they trend well below their counterparts in the West and contribute little to academic excellence that Israel needs in the highly competitive global economy.
Yaacov Bergman addresses Michael Walzer [HUJ Governor]: you were dead wrong on the facts!
Dear Michael Walzer,
On October 2, 2012, you wrote a letter to then Education Minister Gidon Saar and to the vice chairman of the Council for Higher Education (CHE), Dr. Shimshon Shoshany, urging them to prevent the CHE from discharging its duties as the Israeli regulator of higher education with regard to the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University. Your letter is copied below within my detailed public response to you of October 21, 2012, which you have not had the integrity to answer. In your public letter, you wrote:
There doesn't seem to be any plausible academic reason for the decision, which is not consistent with the reports of your own committee of international experts [ ]. The closing of the department looks like a political purge by a government that doesn't understand what universities are for.
Well, Michael Walzer, you were dead wrong on the facts!
On October 30, 2012, the CHE sub-committee on quality assurance heard the appeal by the Ben-Gurion University administration during which procedure the chairman of the committee of international experts, Prof Thomas Risse, said thus, according to the minutes (protocol) of that session:
Prof. Thomas Risse: "When the news broke in the newspaper, I immediately went to the press and said that it is an academic issue. The evaluating committee had no intention of getting into a political fight." [ ] "The university hired people who are essentially "more of the same". Most work in one cluster of topics, and political science should be broader. It has nothing to do with politics. They need people in core fields."
Moreover, an investigation that I personally conducted into the matter revealed that the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University was founded and has been maintained by deplorable methods. I wrote an investigative article, which "Haaretz" newspaper published, that summarizes my findings. I urge you, Michael Walzer, and the other recipients of this letter to you, to read the translation into English of that published article which I am copying below. When you read it, please notice the role played in the dishonest plot by your host at the Hebrew University next week, Avner De-Shalit. I should also mention that the Editor in Chief of "Haaretz" newspaper Aluf Benn promised to let De-Shalit respond to my findings, but De-Shalit has never done so, even when he was personally invited to speak at a conference devoted to the issue. Indeed, the facts in the article speak for themselves.
You should also know that following the rejection of its appeal to the CHE and following my revelations in the published article below, the Ben-Gurion administration submitted a letter to the CHE in which it agreed to perform according to all the CHE directives concerning its Department of Politics "precisely as phrased by the CHE and according to their spirit."
More importantly, you and others who wrote baseless protest letters concerning this affair should know that your uncalled for involvement has damaged the academic quality assurance process in Israel, as will soon become clear with regard to that process as it has been applied to the Israeli sociology departments, some of which share the characteristics of the substandard BGU Department of Politics. This is, indeed, the main reason that I am writing to you and to the many other recipients; to inform you that baseless protests are not innocuous. They can and do harm!
Letter to the Hebrew University Board of Governors
Moshe Zimmerman (HUJ, German History) has engaged in a long standing effort to compare Israel to Nazi Germany. He is a favorite among the anti-Semitic left in Germany that uses his work and public appearances to legitimate their own radical stance against Israel. Zimmermann appeared on April 16, 2012 at a meeting sponsored by a radical Palestinian organization "The Palestine Initiative" in Hanover which blames Israel for the Arab-Israeli dispute. On Sept 09, 2012 he wrote to Haaretz equating Israeli treatment of Eritrean refuges to the forced deportation of Polish Jews from Germany in 1938. It is noted that the European Union Monitoring Center (EUMC) had declared that such comparisons - defined as "nazification of Israel" - are part of new form of anti-Semitism. Israel is currently the only Western country in which faculty can engage in "nazification of Israel" under the flag of academic freedom.
Nurit Peled Elhanan (HUJ, Education) has "testified" in South Africa on October 08, 2012 before the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, a self-appointed group of radical leftists who accuse Israel of apartheid and advocate boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS). In 2012 Peled Elhanan published a book of dubious academic value that accused Israeli text-books of widespread racist depictions of Arabs and Palestinians. During the tour to promote her work she told BBC Brazil on August 20, 2012 that the Israeli "education system teaches children to hate Arabs." On June 02, 2013, the Teheran News Agency quoted Peled-Elhanan stating that Israel is a real global threat, "Islam like Judaism and Christianity is in itself not a threat to me or to anyone, but American imperialism is, European indifference is … and Israeli racism and its cruel occupying regime is."
Amiram Goldblum (HUJ, Medicinal chemistry) is among the organizers of an Israeli anti-apartheid movement; the proposed organization plans to replicate the popular Israel Apartheid Week on Western campuses. On February 20, 2013 in an article for "On the Left Side" he quoted a finding from a poll he had commissioned to "prove" that Israelis are racists and likely to support an apartheid regime.
Amos Goldberg (HUJ. Holocaust Studies) and Asaf Angerman (HUJ, Rosenzweig Minerva), have been busy promoting the Holocaust - Nakba equivalency. A popular topic among radical faculty, equating the Holocaust and Nakba is a variant of the "nazification of Israel" theme. On October 29, 2012 Goldberg lectured in New York "The Holocaust and the Nakba: Traumatic Memories and (Bi)National Identities in Israel-Palestine." On February 09, 2013 Angerman participated in a seminar entitled "Israel and Palestine: Zionism and Nakba - Two narratives mutually exclusive?" In 2009 during his stay in Germany, Angerman who described himself as "German Jew" signed a petition titled "German Jews Say No to Murder by Israeli Army."
Ofer Cassif (HUJ, Rothberg), the head of the international committee of the Communist Party of Israel, wrote an article for the CPI on March 14, 2012 which defined Zionism, "Zionism is a surname: A family of racism and nationalism, exclusion and oppression, occupation and warmongering, class exploitation and imperialism." Cassif teaches a course "Capital & Government," an extension of his political views. By offering a syllabus composed of readings depicting Israel as a racist and imperialist society, Cassif contravenes the 2010 decision of the Council of Higher Education (CHE) mandating a balanced discussion of the topic at hand.
Avner de-Shalit (HUJ, Political Science) has played a key role in the scandal surrounding the Department of Politics and Government at Ben Gurion University. According to Dr. Yaacov Bergman, de-Shalit hindered the CHE efforts to improve the substandard department dating back to 2002 when a renowned political scientist reviewed the department and filed a scathing report recommending its closure. De-Shalit served as a second evaluator and filed a favorable report; He was nominated a year later to head a new committee that issued a favorable evaluation. De-Shalit had no moral right to accept this appointment. This unethical and possible illegal behavior should have disqualified him from serving on the Executive Committee of the University.
Tehran News Agency: HUJ Nurit Peled Elhanan Sees Israel as Real Global Threat
The remarks were made by Dr. Nurit Peled-Elhanan addressing a ceremony marking the International Women's Day in Strasbourg, France.
"Islam like Judaism and Christianity is in itself not a threat to me or to anyone, but American imperialism is, European indifference is … and Israeli racism and its cruel occupying regime is," Peled-Elhanan said.
She noted that the US and the UK are infecting their citizens with a blind fear of the Muslims "despite the fact that the people who are destroying the world today are not Muslims".
Peled-Elhanan underlined that Islam is not a threat, but the real threat is Israel and the Israeli army.
Peled-Elhanan is the mother of Smadar Elhanan who was 13 years when killed in a bombing incident in al-Quds (Jerusalem) in September 1997.
HUJ Professor Avner de-Shalit and the Debacle of the BGU Department of Politics and Government
IAM has published a number of editorials on the Department of Politics and Government at Ben Gurion University, exposing the corruption that allowed a substandard department to continue to exist in spite of professional opinion. Dr. Yaacov Bergman (HUJ) has done extensive research and used the Freedom Information Act to obtain most of the available documentation. As should be clear by now, Professor Avner de-Shalit, a former dean and professor of political science from HUJ, has played a leading role in this sordid affair.
Until the expose of Bergman, de-Shalit could play the role of a highly- principled and objective social scientist. Incidentally, the 2005 article below reflects this carefully cultivated persona, a self-portrayed that could not be further away from the truth. Even more astounding is his article "A Blow to Students in the South," a highly misleading piece of writing.
In the IAM roundtable on Academic Freedom in Israel: A Comparative Perspective held on May 5, 2013, at the ZOA House Tel Aviv, Bergman, using a Power Point presentation displaying the relevant documentation, told the real story.
In July 1997, the Council for Higher Education (CHE) approved the Department of Politics and Government as a dual-minors program; in 2001, the Department sought accreditation for its BA program. The CHE appointed Professor Zeev Maoz, the renowned political scientist from Tel Aviv University and a year later, Professor Avner de-Shalit, of the Hebrew University, to evaluate the Department. On January 2, 2002 Maoz submitted a scathing report, writing that there was a "shocking" lack of core political science classes and that faculty members specialized in topics that were marginal to the discipline, as a result, a large number of them taught courses that had little to do with their academic training and research. Among the faculty listed was David Newman, a political geographer who taught a class on electoral system, Rina Poznansky, a historian by training, who offered a class on political parties and Dani Filc (at the time a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at Tel Aviv University and a former MD) who instructed a course in Israeli government. Maoz was especially concerned with the absence of courses in methodology and quantitative methods; he noted that the sole instructor (a doctoral candidate) had no background in the field. Since virtually all senior members did not research in core political science subjects, Maoz asserted that it would be hard for the Department to provide qualified instructors for core course. In conclusion, he urged the CHE to reject the request for accreditation.
But de-Shalit felt that the Department should not be denied accreditation. Given the split decision, in November 2003, the CHE created another committee. In a shocking breach of ethics de-Shalit was appointed, along with Gad Barzilai from the Department of Political Science at Tel Aviv University and Ella Belfer, a historian from Bar Ilan University, to consider anew the accreditation request. In a March 2004 report, the committee praised the Department for offering a "unique program" – a reference to a course in applied political training (hitmachut politit). A co-operative program, the hitmachut students were expected to work for NGOs and participate in workshops and field trips organized by faculty; the report recommended to make the course mandatory. The committee had also formed a favorable opinion of the faculty, praising the "special relations" with students and the collegial atmosphere in the Department. Ignoring Maoz's concerns, the report recommended adding a slot in political philosophy and Israeli government. Acting upon its recommendation, the CHE agreed on a temporary accreditation; by 2009, fully-accredited, the Department was allowed to offer an MA program.
"The Report of the Committee in Charge of Evaluating the Accreditation Request of the Department of Politics and Government at BGU University," obtained through Freedom Information Act by Dr. Yaacov Bergman.
By giving its blessing to a "unique program" as part of a "pluralistic approach to political science," the de-Shalit committee accepted the Department's right to offer a political science program closely modeled on Antioch College in Ohio, a small liberal arts school known for embracing radical causes. Rather than standard political science education, Antioch proffers courses geared toward political activism, which students then use in a co-operative program for what was termed "progressive political activism." Had de-Shalit and his colleagues bothered to review the co-operative program in the Department, they would have learned that the field work – reflecting the activist makeup of the faculty - was heavily skewed toward left wing activism.
In 2011 the International Evaluation Committee chaired by Thomas Risse issued a report on the Department as a routine CHE evaluation of political science departments around the country. The Risse Committee (RC) echoed the misgivings of Maoz; it identified serious problems with the weak political science core and a virtual absence of quantitative method training. The RC noted the imbalance of views in classroom curricula which were heavily weighted toward a critical perspective. This was hardly surprisingly since the Department practiced hiring and promoting instructors based on paradigmatic similarity or previous political connection. The RC found that, as result, there was a paucity of mainstream political science approaches, a "rather eclectic set of courses that…lack a coherent focus," and a tenure-track faculty that had no background in political science.
The criticism proffered by the RC was also a resounding rejection of the de-Shalit recommendation that praised the "unique vision" of the Department. Moreover, the same committee noted that even de-Shalit's own Political Science Department at the Hebrew University lacked a strong offering in quantitative studies. Writing as Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, de-Shalit promised to address this problem, consequently hiring new faculty with a strong background in rational choice theory, a cutting -edge discipline in contemporary political science.
Yet when it came to Ben Gurion University, without revealing his role, de-Shalit was among the first to accuse the CHE of McCarthyism, a theme used to mobilize a huge internal and international protest. De-Shalit also penned a deceptive article on the alleged role of the Department in helping the disadvantaged population of the Negev region to graduate college. Full of cheap sentimentality, the article (below) gushed about how the faculty took a poor Mizrahi student under its wings, turning his life around. Nowhere in the article did this Dean in prestigious university mention merit or academic excellence that both rich and poor students deserve when enrolling in a university. Regrettably, de-Shalit is not the only member of the academic elite that harbors a patronizing attitude towards institutions that serve the less privileged sectors of the society.
Given de-Shalit's unethical behavior in accepting the 2003 appointment, his failure to defend his decision was less than surprising. However, he did much more than that. As detailed in the article by Bergman, de-Shalit claimed being unaware of the Maoz report and, even more egregiously, denied that he was the second expert on the 2001 committee.
The lessons of the de-Shalit story are complex. To begin with, de-Shalit talks the talk but does not walk the walk. This is not surprising, as so many others have engaged in this all too human behavior. What helped de-Shalit to project the aura of moral professionalism are the opaque ways in which the academy operates. Sailing under the flag or academic freedom, the Israeli faculty resists all efforts to force accountability and transparency. Without a serious reform the academic abuse and corruption will continue.
The Hebrew University can take a first step in reforming the academy by removing de-Shalit from its Executive Committee where he now serves.
[HUJ, German] Moshe Zimmermann speaks for a Palestinian organization in Germany in Yom Haatzmaut
Moshe Zimmermann, an expert on German history at Hebrew University, is due to speak on behalf of The Palestine Initiative in Hanover, Germany. The group has invited him as a representative of an Israeli university, but erroneously listed him as being on faculty of Tel Aviv University. The mistake is quite understandable, as Moshe Zuckermann, a professor of German history at Tel Aviv University, is also a frequent invitee to pro-Palestinian events in Germany, as IAM previously reported.
In any event, it really does not matter whether it is Zimmermann or Zuckermann; the Germans are looking for an Israeli professor to legitimize their Israel-bashing events. They can always count on either of them "to deliver the goods."
HUJ Asaf Angermann and the Making of a Radical Activist Scholar in Israel - The German Connection
For the regular readers of the IAM, the names of the Heinrich Boll Foundation and the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation probably sound familiar. Both has supported radical causes and the radical academic community in Israel for more than a decade now. Both support young scholars such as Dr. Asaf Angermann, a research fellow at the HUJ.
Angermann, who graduated in philosophy from Tel Aviv University, received a grant from Heinrich Boll Foundation to study for his MA degree in Germany; his doctoral studies were financed by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. Their financial support probably explains his choice of a topic: research of the Frankfurt School neo-Marxist, critical philosophers such as Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse.
In between, he spent time at Goldsmith College, London, under Professor Alexander Garcia Duttman, a rising star in the critical philosophy movement. Not incidentally, Goldsmith College is a bastion of anti-Zionist scholarship influenced by Eyal Weizman, a former Israeli architect who specializes in "Israel's architecture of occupation."
As many in the neo-Marxist, critical tradition, Angermann ventured into political activism. Describing himself as a "German Jew," in 2009 he signed a petition "German Jews say No to Murder by the Israeli Army" and an Open Letter to German Left Party (Die Linke).
This so called "German Jew" is now a research fellow at another German supported institution - the Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center at the Hebrew University. As indicated below, Angermann has been busy promoting the Holocaust-Nakba moral equivalency program in Germany. Under the guise of conflict resolution, the conference is supported by the Tel Aviv office of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, directed by Angelika Timm.
Timm, a former professor at the then East German Humboldt University, collaborated with the Communist Party in denouncing Israel, as a Der Spiegel article illustrates. (Translated from German by Google: "In 1975, Angelika Timm served as an interpreter to a delegation of the Israeli Communist Party to East Germany and reported to their superiors what the participants told about each other. In their work they examined "the right-wing Israeli social democracy", the "dominant role of the Zionist ideology" and the "reactionary nature of the political system" in which the "Jewish workers" would be prevented to participate in the "class struggle". Naturally Angelika Timm of East Berlin attacked the "Israeli occupation policy", including "Blitzkrieg", "terror" and "expulsion". In the war of 1948/49, they had an easy pass to the historical facts, the "Zionist leaders" prevented the "establishment of an Arab Palestinian state."")
A German investment in Angermann's education pays off. He is a younger and more energetic version of Moshe Zimmermann (HUJ) and Moshe Zuckermann (TAU), It is reasonable to expect that long after Zuckermann and Zimmermann retire, Angermann will be commuting to Germany to bash Israel.
German-Israeli Textbook Commission and HUJ Moshe Zimmermann - Questionable Appointment
The Georg Eckert Institute in Germany and the Mofet Institute in Tel Aviv have created a German-Israeli Textbook Commission to study Israeli and German textbooks. The commission is funded by the German Foreign Ministry and the Israeli Ministry of Education. This is certainly a commendable project, but the appointment of Professor Moshe Zimmermann (HUJ) is troubling.
Zimmermann has a long history of fairly outrageous commentary that could be construed as comparing the behavior of the IDF to that of elements in Nazi Germany. In fact, at one point, Zimmermann was reprimanded by the Anti-Defamation League for engaging in anti-Semitic sloganeering. He has been involved in a number of law suits trying to prove that he was misquoted. But in one ruling in 2004 Judge Yehudit Shevach of the Magistrate Court in Tel Aviv accepted the argument by journalist Anat Peri and Haaretz "that Zimmermann did compare, on various occasions Israelis to the Nazis. Between Hebron youth to the Hitler Jugend; Between the motivation and social benefits of Israeli soldiers in IDF elite units to those enjoyed by the Waffen-SS; Between racist expressions of Israeli soccer fans to those of the Third Reich; And the Bible to Mein Kampf." The Judge also said that Peri's assumption that Zimmermann was paid by German foundations due to those views he expressed, is entirely reasonable given the overall pattern of his conduct. It bears noting that there are circles in Germany that welcome the comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany.
Losing the lawsuit against Anat Peri did not cure Zimmermann from his habits, last year he hinted again that Israel's treatment of illegal immigrants is reminiscent to how Nazi Germany deported East European Jews in 1938.
According to the European Union Monitoring Center's (EUMC) Working Definition of anti-Semitism, "nazification of Israel" (comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany) is a form of anti-Semitism. Since the Working Definition was adopted, the European Union has made considerable progress in rooting out such anti-Semitic expressions from the public arena.
The appointment of Zimmermann raises a question of judgment on the part of the Commission. The fact that Zimmermann is Jewish and Israeli does not make his writing less anti-Semitic according to the EUMC's Working Definition of anti-Semitism.
New School's Critical Scholarship arrives at HUJ Holocaust Studies: Amos Goldberg "The Holocaust & the Nakba"
The march of critical scholarship with its pantheon of icons such as Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben and the posthumously incorporated Hannah Arendt in the Israeli academy is unrelenting. It has currently reached the Department of Holocaust Studies at HUJ where Dr. Amos Goldberg seems to be a devotee.
Like many in the radical activist group, Goldberg who was hired to teach and research the Holocaust, has branched into trying to solve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Indeed, he is a member of Ta'ayush, the Children of Abraham and Solidarity Sheikh Jarach and is currently editing, together with Dr Bashir Bashir, a book on the Holocaust and the Nakba.
HUJ Amiram Goldblum's "Possible Israeli Apartheid" call and other 'Israeli Apartheid Week' events
As the annual series of activities of "Israeli Apartheid Week" get under way around the world, Professor Amiram Goldblum (HUJ) has called to start an anti-Israeli apartheid movement. The opening session is scheduled for February 20, 2013 at Van Leer Jerusalem.
Goldblum explains that the proposed movement will fight apartheid in Israel. He quotes a finding from a poll that he had commissioned to "prove" that Israelis are racists and likely to support an apartheid regime. His other "proof" of apartheid does not pass muster of the European Union Monitoring Center (EUMC). In 2004, the EUMC published a report that made a clear distinction between legitimate criticism of Israel's policy in the West Bank and defaming charges - such as that Israel is an apartheid state or/and that the fate of the Palestinians is equal to that of the Jews during the Holocaust. The latter were included in its "Working Definition of anti-Semitism," which has been widely used in the European Union and adopted by the American State Department.
Needless to say, Goldblum is in good company when advocating for an anti-Israeli apartheid movement. IAM found a list of scheduled 'Israeli Apartheid Week' events in Canada, South Africa and Ireland that showcase similar themes.
Friday Special on HUJ Eva Illouz: Don't pish on me, and tell me it's raining
An old expression goes something like, "Don't pish on me, and tell me it's raining." That is exactly what some Jewish critics of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians and Arabs do when they cry about being called anti-Semitic for their activities and policy positions.
Professor Eva Illouz of the Hebrew University is the latest to take up the cudgel offended at the reaction she is getting from supporters of Israel. In a recent article in The Forward reprinted in Haaretz (November 30, 2012), she lumps herself in with Peter Beinart, Noam Chomsky, Judith Butler, Avi Shlaim, and Shlomo Sand, for doing "nothing more than (exercising) the right to think and evaluate critically the accomplishments and failures of the state of Israel."
There is too little space here to document the depths of depraved criticism her fellow travelers heap on Israel, the one-sided blame they cast, and their calls for actions against Israel that can only lead to Israel's vanquish and disappearance. This is the group that the distinguished Professor proudly claims as her like-minded colleagues.
[HUJ] Democracy and "Real Democracy": A View from the Campus
It has been a long standing custom of radical faculty to claim that Israel is an apartheid state and/or a semi-fascist state that is suppressing Palestinians and Israeli Arabs. Indeed, Oren Yiftachel, (BGU) a self described critical geographer and neo-Gramscian - a follower of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci who urged intellectuals and academics to turn their work into a platform for social change- has made his name by calling Israel a "creeping apartheid" state. His BGU colleague Lev Grinberg described the Israeli system as semi-fascist.
A new group called Real Democracy took this critique one step further. As always these activists have a presence on campus, including Aya Shoshan, a student from the department of Politics and Government at BGU. Real Democracy activists declared that they are volunteering their vote to Palestinians in the territories so they can participate in the Israeli elections by proxy.
A quick search reveals many were active in the 2011 summer protest, military service refusers and employees of Amnesty and NGOs related to New Israel Fund.
Yaron Ezrahi, a political science professor at Hebrew University, was interviewed and spoke favorably about the New Democracy initiative in an article by The National, an Abu Dabi Media, and claimed that this election is not democratic. Ezrahi, a long standing critic of Israeli politics, and the activists of the New Democracy should be made aware of the Freedom in the World 2013 report issued by Freedom House, the US based organization that rates political freedoms around the world. In spite of the difficult domestic and international problems, Israel is classified as a "free" country; the indices in this category include open political competition, free media, respect for human rights and a thriving civil society. In contrast, both the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and the Hamas ruled Gaza are classified as "not free." Turkey under the Islamist rule is classified as "partially free" as the government has jailed hundreds of journalists, academics, human rights activists and military officers.
That radical faculty intent on criticizing Israel and blaming it for the failure of the peace process should avoid Freedom House statistics is logical from the perspective of those who have ideological stakes in the "apartheid theory." That their supporters like Ezrahi should do the same is puzzling, as it exposes the academy to charges of hypocrisy and erodes its credibility as an impartial conveyor of facts.
The problem with Alon Harel's perception of Academic Freedom
Professor Alon Harel (Law School, Hebrew University) is one of the liberal supporters of the radical fraternity. He has a long history of defending radical academics. In 2008, after Neve Gordon published an op-ed in Los Angeles Times, calling for a boycott of Israel, Harel organized a petition urging the university not to punish Gordon. He told a newspaper that: "the issue here is academic freedom and the ability of academics to write articles reflecting their view."
More recently, Harel came out in support of the Department of Politics and Government at Ben Gurion University. In a 2010 article The Anti-Academic Elitophobe Journey: Who Wants to Destroy the Elites and Why, he explains that the attacks on the Department, and by implication liberal arts faculty, are a politically driven anti-elite crusade. These so-called "elitophobes," first attacked the Labor Party, then moved on to the Courts and are currently battling the academic elites. Harel predicts that, after vanquishing the scholars the "elitophobes" will find another elite to victimize. Harel blames right wing organizations - leading "elitophobes" - for driving the crusade against academics.
Harel further contends that Saar broke with a long- standing tradition of apolitical appointment to the Council on Higher Education (CHE); instead, he packed the Council with "right-wingers" not known for their academic accomplishment who delivered the "good," i.e. the censure of the Ben Gurion Department.
Harel's arguments are off mark. Since the creation of CHE, the Minister of Education has a role in picking its members from a list of potential candidates given to him by heads of universities. This was never questioned as long as the Ministry of Education was in the hands of Labor or Meretz. However, in the early 2000s, the then Likud Minister of Education Limor Livnat was attacked from representing "barbarians at the gates" - an euphemism for Likud supporters - and for appointing members sympathetic to her to the CHE.
Harel follows up this assertion with a tongue- and -cheek article titled "CHE Proof for the Existence of God;" a reference to an obscure philosophical theory known as occasionalism. The occasionalist denied the existence of a a connection between cause and effect; they believed in events on separate tracks and it is the role of God to bring them together. Harel says that the Gideon Saar's appointed CHE and the move against the Department of Politics and Government is clearly related; to argue that they are not casually linked would be adopt the occassionalist philosophy and claim that God interviewed to created the connection. Hence, CHE proved the existence of God.
It thus comes as no surprise that in a Panel on Freedom of speech in the academia and politization of the academia Harel rejected the notion that the academy should be accountable to the taxpayers and their representatives. Like many of his peers, Harel warns that outside interference would harm the ability of faculty to research and jeopardize Israel's academic standing in the world.
More to the point, Harel seems to be ignorant about academic freedom. First, in the three comparative cases - Germany, United States and Great Britain - academics have much less freedom than their Israeli counterparts to "write articles reflecting their views." For instance, in the United States, faculty in public universities cannot call for boycott without violating the law. In Stastny v. Board of Trustees of Central Washington University the ruling stated that "Academic freedoms are not a permit for activity at variance with job-related procedures and requirements, nor does it encompass activities which are internally destructive to the proper function of university or disruptive to the educational process." Since boycott is deemed to disrupt the educational process, even during the peak of the Vietnam War, faculty has not called for boycotting the United States.
Second, in all the three comparative cases, public universities are accountable to taxpayers and their political representatives. In the United States, government appoints Boards of Trustees in public (state) universities; in Germany and Britain, boards have a majority of lay persons from the economic and public sector.
Finally, research by Yaacov Bergman indicates that expansive freedom has undermined Israel's global standing. The Israeli social sciences, in particular have scored much lower, according to widely accepted scientific indices. Bergman has argued that universities should be more accountable to the public and their political representatives.
Bergman's sobering statistics should be a wake-up call for the academy and one that needs to be addresses urgently. Incessant talk about "elitophobes" is not going to do the trick.
Hebrew University professor Amiram Goldblum: Israeli Jews would "support apartheid"
Amiram Goldblum (HUJ) served as the spokesperson for Peace Now for 20 years since 1980 and initiated its settlements watch committee in 1990.
In May 2012, during a Peace Now conference, Goldblum predicted that in two years, the Palestinian Authority will voluntarily withdraw from the Oslo Agreement and force Israel to resume direct rule over two million Palestinians- a situation that would be tantamount to apartheid. Goldblum urged a change of strategy by focusing on the international arena to pressure Israel from the outside.
Goldblum's Israela Goldblum Fund - a foundation named after his late wife that is associated with the New Israel Fund - commissioned a poll on Israeli attitudes toward the conflict. The results published in Haaretz with a commentary by Gideon Levy indicated that most Israelis would support an apartheid regime . The so-called apartheid poll" created a public firestorm. BiCOM (British Israel Communications and Research Centre) accused the poll authors of gross distortion of data. Goldlbum demanded an apology and retraction but BICOM issued a six-page scathing report listing the weaknesses of the study.
In a Times of Israel blog, Morris Ostroff likewise discussed what he considered to be the flawed methodology of the poll. Both BICOM and Ostroff chastised the journalist Gideon Levy, on the way he reported the survey.
Ostroff quoted from another study: "Apartheid, today's prime stigmatic code-word for racist evil, has become a potent weapon for delegitimizing and demonizing Israel, especially since it evokes the precedent of powerful external pressure in the form of boycott and sanctions as was applied against the apartheid regime in South Africa.
The scrutiny of the of survey focused attention on Camil Fuchs, the head of the Department of Statistics at Tel Aviv University, who carried out the study as part of his Dialog research group. Fuchs-Dialog have a history of controversial surveys, including the 2010 poll indicating that a majority of Israelis view President Obama in a positive light- a finding that was in odds with other surveys. Some questioned the methodology used in the poll. Specifically, Fuchs used a "push question" - a reference to the hypothetical situation of annexing the West Bank - which generated the "apartheid finding." The group that Fuchs had assembled to draft the questions is also puzzling. Ilan Baruch, who resigned in protest from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mordechai Bar-On member of "Peace Now", Alon Liel has supported BDS and attorney Michael Sfard represents Palestinians in Israeli courts. Almost all are board members of the New Israel Fund.
Hanoch Marmari, the former editor of Haaretz, issued a scathing rebuke of Levy and the newspaper, he cited Goldblum's interview in Haaretz where he said what most survey commissioners would not admit, that the survey was commissioned in order to promote an action that Goldblum believes in: "We need to act fast before the apartheid danger erupts irreversibly".
In spite of serious methodological misgivings and a subsequent correction by Haaretz and Gideon Levy, the article on "apartheid poll" had achieved its main objective of painting Israel as an apartheid state in waiting. Carried by major newspapers such as the Guardian, Arab media and anti-Israel websites, it has further delegitimized Israel in the international arena.
[In the interest of self-disclosure, Goldblum has sued IAM regarding an article published on its website. IAM handed in a defense and counterclaim. The case is awaiting trial.]
HUJ Nurit Peled Elhanan to appear at The Russell Tribunal on Palestine, NY as well as Ilan Pappe Noam Chomsky & Johan Galtung
Editorial Note: The Radical hypocrisy of the Radical Left Series: The Russell Tribunal in New York
Nurit Peled Elhanan (HUJ) is off to New York where she will appeal with Noam Chomsky, Johan Galtung and Ilan Pappe before the self-appointed Russell Tribunal, a group of radical leftists whose only aim is to delegitmize Israel.
The hypocrisy of the Russell Tribunal is more evident than ever before. The Middle East has witnessed a unprecedented wave of violence where Christians are targeted by the newly victorious Islamists, or as in Syria, were citizens are killed by their own government. The Russell Tribunal keeps silent on these issues, depriving it of any moral authority to speak out.
HUJ Moshe Zimmermann's "Between the fences: 1938 & 2012" - Another nazification of Israel analysis, bias, omitting facts
Professor Moshe Zimmermann (HUJ) is a radical academic who made a career out of comparing Israeli behavior toward the Palestinians to that of Nazi Germany. Zimmermann is one of the prime contributors to what the European Union Monitoring Center's (EUMC) Working Definition of anti-Semitism describes as "nazification of Israel," a radical left-wing effort to delegitimize Israel.
He has now found a new way to do that, by equating the 1938 episode whereby thousands of Polish Jews expelled from Germany were stuck on the Polish border, with a group of Eritrean asylum seekers who were trapped between the Israeli and Egyptian border fence.
After piously proclaiming that "a professional historian avoids comparison between past and present events," Zimmermann proceeds to compare the two events.
His biased analysis omits the fact that most of the Eritreans are not political refugees but economic migrants who are escaping the poverty of their homeland. In the past few decades they, and millions like them, are on the move. African migrants have tried to make it to Europe. The genuine plight of these people should not be dismissed lightly, but no Western county has an open border policy with regard to economic refugees. Indeed, in the United States these so-called "illegal aliens" are deported, even if they a forced to leave a family behind. Australian navy intercepts boatloads of prospective migrants and houses them on an uninhabited island before turning them back.
As a rank and file citizen, Zimmermann has the right to conceal this information, but as a scholar he should be held to a higher standard. He could have easily accessed the website of Refugees International to provide background to the story. He chose not to because facts stand in the way of delegitmizing Israel. And what better way to do than to "nazify" it?
HUJ Nurit Peled Elhanan to BBC Brasil: "The Israeli education system teaches children to hate Arabs"
For the educator Nurit Peled Elhanan of Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the behavior of teenagers involved in the attempted lynching is "a direct result of the education they receive in schools and their parents."
In an interview with BBC Brasil, the educator said that "the Israeli education system teaches children to hate Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular."
"Children are taught both by schools, by parents, that all Arabs want to kill them, and grow without developing any sense of human empathy with them," she said.
"Hence, even physical aggression, the distance is not great, and we are now seeing the fruits of education these children receive," added Elhanan
HUJ Hannan Hever's "Reaffirming the Legality of the Occupation...To cry out the cry of the Israeli occupation's victims"
Shortly before the First Intifida in 1987, Hannan Hever (HUJ) and his colleague Adi Ophir (now at TAU) founded The Twenty First Year, a group of academics dedicated to forcing Israel out of the territories through a boycott-cum- civil resistance movement. The Twenty First Year borrowed many of its ideas from Matzpen, then a fringe radical anti-Zionist organization that questioned the legitimacy of the Zionist enterprise and its progeny, the State of Israel.
While faculty members have the right to engage in political activity, Hever has devoted his entire academic career to proving the illegitimacy of Israeli behavior. As IAM reported, Hever is one of the pioneers of "nazification of Israel" which, according to the EU Monitoring Commission (EUMC) held comparisons between Israeli treatment of Palestinians and that fate suffered by Jews during the Holocaust, to be anti-Zionism, that is a new form of new anti-Semitism. The EUMC also included the use of double standards in the definition. Not only did Hever and some of his activist scholars practice double standards but have conducted conferences, workshops and literary events to create an elaborate imagery of "Nakba as Holocaust".
Hever's exchange with David Grossman is telling in this context. Grossman denounces the treatment of the Palestinian prisoner who was dumped by the road by Israeli security services to die, arguably something that should not have happened. Hever finds Grossman's protestations not adequate because, in his opinion, a return to the 1967 borders is not enough. Quite clearly, Hever thinks that the only way to regain legitimacy is to undo the consequences of the 1948 war, as his comments on Smilansky suggest. In other words, to create a bi-national state, something that Hever and his radical academic friends, including his close collaborator, Yehouda Shenahv (TAU) have advocated.
It is this goal of bringing about binationalism that explains why Hever and like-minded faculty have used their academic writings to create the Nakba-as-Holocaust imagery. As the original manifesto of The Twenty First Year explains, exposing the illegitimacy of the occupation dating from 1948 would move Israelis to give up on a national state.
HUJ Rafi Nets, a Daniel Bar-Tal graduate student, offers a highly critical view of "Israeli narratives" of the 1948 war
The singular obsession with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been noticed by critics of the of Middle East Studies Association (MESA); they pointed out that in the past, up to seventy percent of courses offered by its members pertained one way or the other to the subject. A vast majority of such courses were biased toward the Palestinian "narrative," and hostile to Israel. The politicization of Middle East studies has triggered an investigation by Congress and a reform of Title VI which provides federal grants to Middle East program in the United States.
A less known fact is that the obsessive quest to blame Israel is very much alive in the field of peace studies and conflict resolution where, until recently, Johan Galtung, the pioneer of peace research, had reigned supreme. Though Galtung crossed the line into outright anti-Semitism, his various disciples in Israel including Professor Daniel Bar-Tal march on.
The newest arrival on the scene is Dr. Rafi Nets (Hebrew University) who already made a contribution to conflict resolution by offering a highly critical view of "Israeli narratives" of the 1948 war. This should come as no surprise because he was a graduate student of Bar-Tal and adopted the type of critical methodology that makes it possible to evade reality and speak of "narratives." Interesting, Nets uses the work of New Historians, Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim and Ilan Pappe to support his theme of ethnic cleansing, even though Morris recanted his own "narrative."
Nets is now busy with a special issue of The International Journal of Conflict Management, which, like virtually all peace and conflict resolution research, is stamped by anti-Israeli animus. More to the point, with the entire region aflame, would this be a good time to do a special issue on Israel in the Middle East?
Evidently yes, because the Journal shares the obsession with Israel. A perusal of the Journal's data base reveals 4058 entries on Israel, the highest such number. References to Iraq, Iran or Syria pale in comparison, and there is no entry for Christians in the Middle East who have been fleeing the region in droves because of brutal attacks since the Arab Spring.
Some forty years ago, Galtung wrote an article in the Journal of Peace Research in which he referred to Israel as "born in sin." His legacy lives on in the huge field of peace research and conflict resolution.
Palestinian website reviews HUJ Nurit Peled Elhanan's book "How Israeli school textbooks teach kids to hate"
Peled-Elhanan examines 17 Israeli school textbooks on history, geography and civic studies. Her conclusions are an indictment of the Israeli system of indoctrination and its cultivation of anti-Arab racism from an early age: "The books studied here harness the past to the benefit of the … Israeli policy of expansion, whether they were published during leftist or right-wing [education] ministries" (224).
She goes into great detail, examining and exposing the sometimes complex and subtle ways this is achieved. Her expertise in semiotics (the study of signs and symbols) comes to the fore.
Inculcation of anti-Palestinian ideology in the minds of Israel's youth is achieved in the books through the use of exclusion and absence: "none of the textbooks studied here includes, whether verbally or visually, any positive cultural or social aspect of Palestinian life-world: neither literature nor poetry, neither history nor agriculture, neither art nor architecture, neither customs nor traditions are ever mentioned" (49).
Palestinians marginalized, demonized by Israeli textbooks
HUJ David Shulman abuses his position to promote a political agenda: "The present leadership is unworthy of minimum trust"
David Shulman, Renee Lang Professor of Humanistic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an activist of Ta'ayush (www.taayush.org) Arab-Jewish friendship group, has said he has no faith in the current political dispensation of Israel.
"The present leadership is unworthy of minimum trust and is bent on occupying as much Palestinian land as possible which is immoral and completely unacceptable," said the noted Indophile, at present at Nepathya in Moozhikkulam, near Kochi, to enjoy a month-long performance of Anguliyankam Koodiyattom. Prof. Shulman said it is the lure for land that has led Israel, a tiny country, to occupy Palestinian territory. "They appropriate it and build on it… It is a real estate issue."
In occupied areas such as the South Hebron Hills, inhuman treatment is meted out to Palestinians by Israeli soldiers.
Under constant attacks, the population is struggling to survive. Activists of Ta'ayush often visit the occupied territories to protect farmers, who are driven away from olive fields, he said.
"Only when we stand by them can they do some elementary farming activity. We also provide them legal support".
[HUJ, Rothberg] Comrade Ofer Cassif defines Zionism as a central element in the abomination in Israel
Dr. Ofer Cassif, a lecturer at HUJ and Sapir Academic College aka comrade Cassif, is the new head of the International Relations Committee of the Communist Party of Israel (CPI). He is not happy with what he sees as the lack of resolve of his party to define Zionism as a central element in the "abomination" that exists in Israel.
Comrade Cassif proposes a change in the CPI platform that would clearly articulate that from the very beginning Zionism was a racist and fascist movement. Specifically, a change of paragraph 8 of the party's charter would state that we reject Zionism as a "totally racist and nationalist ideology that seeks to elevate Jewish ethnicity to an all encompassing value that needs to be protected almost at all cost."
It looks like the good professor learned from comrades in the former Soviet Union how to twist, lie, exaggerate and otherwise demagogue an issue to the point that reality ceases to exist. What he should have learned though, is that such a disconnect between language and reality caused the demise of the Communist enterprise.
Luckily for Cassif, Israel is a democratic country with a sound economy. More to the point, Israeli tax payers support Cassif, who has virtually no academic record beyond his Ph.D, dissertation, and spent most of his time working for the CPI. Not a bad arrangement for the comrade.
Palestinian Maan News interviews HUJ Nurit Peled-ElHanan: Israeli school books write out Palestinian, Arab story
JERUSALEM (Ma'an) -- Professor of language and education at Hebrew University Nurit Peled-ElHanan recently released a book analyzing the portrayal of Palestinians in 16 history, civics and geography textbooks authorized by the Israeli Ministry of Education
'Palestine in Israeli School Books' argues that the textbooks legitimate Israeli military policy in the eyes of young students, and prepares them for military service upon graduation.
Ma'an spoke to Peled-ElHanan about the ideas behind her latest book.
[HUJ, Literature] Hannan Hever "The Nakba is a question of responsibility"
Hannan Hever, a professor of literature at HUJ and a radical activist, added his comments on the exchange between Yehuda Bauer and Mohammed Bakri on the role of the Holocaust in creating the State of Israel. Hever's arguments are disingenuous at best and deceptive at worse.
As a co-founder in 1988 of "The 21th Year" which issued the first call to "total resistance to occupation," Hever has been a faithful disciple of the anti-Zionist Matzpen line that Arabs and Palestinians have been innocents (and passive) victims of the "nefarious machinations" of the Zionists-colonialist movement. In fact, Hever has devoted a considerable part of his academic career to creating an equation between the Nakba and the Holocaust.
Had Hever been forthcoming about the origin of the 1948 war, he would have to admit that by rejecting the 1947 UN Partition Proposal and starting a war against the Jewish community, the Palestinians were the authors of their own disaster. In terms of International Relations theory (IR), the Palestinians were a "losing belligerent," not unlike Nazi Germany that hosted the Palestinian leader Haj Amin al Husseini in Berlin.
Had Hever been more familiar with IR, he would have to admit that "losing belligerents" do not fare well. Millions of Germans were expelled from territories that Germany lost to the former Soviet Union and Poland. Millions more were expelled from the former Czechoslovakia because they sided with Hitler. Even when belligerency is not the case, major political convulsions can produce huge population shifts as the history of India and Pakistan indicates.
But then again, Hever may have an ulterior motive; by pushing for the right to return of the Palestinians, he hopes to fulfill the long-term Matzpen dream of creating a binational Jewish-Palestinian state.
[HUJ, Buber Fellow & TAU, Minerva Humanities] Roy Wagner in anti-Israel activities, Nakba commemoration and Bil'in
Watch Hebrew U Roy Wagner at 1:57 mins into the program:
Israel Celebrates Independence Day, Arrests Activists
While hundreds of thousands celebrated, the police arrested three activists for trying to question the history of this day.
On Wednesday, Israel celebrated its 64th Day of Independence. While hundreds of thousands celebrated, the police arrested three activists for trying to question the history of this day. Each year the Israeli organization Zochrot organizes a discussion a symbolic peaceful action on this day to commemorate the Nakba. Nakba in Arabic means the "Catastrophe" (of 1948) and refers to the destruction of more than 500 Palestinian villages, the expulsion of two thirds of the Palestinian population from the land that became Israel, and Israel's refusal to allow the refugees to return. This year, while the discussion was underway, police surrounded the building in advance, set up a barrier and detained the activists without letting them leave the building grounds for over two hours. One man, Yuval Halperin, was arrested when he arrived on site and began reading out loud names of destroyed Palestinian villages. Meanwhile, a religious nationalistic march went by. Passersby hackled and threatened the activists, caught inside the police barrier. They were not detained
Nurit Peled Elhanan in a speech full of images designed to convey that Israel is a brutal, Nazi-like racist state
Dr. Nurit Peled Elhanan (School of Education, Hebrew University) has been profiled by IAM in the past. Here is an update on her activities.
A rally of dozens radical protesters in Tel Aviv on June 16, 2102 called for the destruction of the Israeli government after Dr. Nurit Peled Elhanan addressed the crowd. According to a media report, Peled Elhanan's speech was full of images designed to convey that Israel is a brutal, Nazi-like racist state. She called Palestinian security prisoners "freedom fighters of this country" and described the IDF as a the "largest institutionalized terror group in the world."
A number of Tel Aviv University students organized a petition asking the Hebrew University to fire her. In response, the university wrote that "is not responsible for the opinions of a faculty member as long as they do not exploit the academic platform for disseminating such opinions. To the extent that laws are broken, the university is not the address [for complains] but the law enforcement agencies are."
As IAM repeatedly reported, Peled Elhanan has used her academic platform to accuse Israel of running a Nazi-like, apartheid state, of committing heinous violations of human rights; she has called for civil resistance to prevent a totalitarian state from sending dissidents like herself to prison.
She has used her legitimacy as a Hebrew University professor to publish books and articles that accuse Israel of having racist text books that educate young men to become killers upon joining the IDF. She testified before the so-called Russell Tribunal, a body of radical international activists, who supports boycotting Israel.
It is quite clear that over the years Peled Elhanan made a very good use of the good name of Hebrew University to disseminate her views. IAM finds the response of the university authorities highly ingenious; if this is not use of a university platform, what is?
HUJ Moshe Zimmermann: Israel exaggerates Iran's nuclear threat in an effort to marginalize the Palestinian problem
Moshe Zimmermann (HUJ) is one of the most provocative Israeli professors; he had compared children of the settlers to Hitler Youth and declared that Nazi Jews do exist. A fluent German speaker, Zimmermann is popular in Germany where he assures his listeners that Israel is an apartheid state.
Zimmermann, who "remade" himself into a Middle East expert, is now offering punditry on Iran. He suggests that it is Benjamin Netanyahu who is exaggerating the nuclear threat of Iran in an effort to marginalize the Palestinian problem. In other words, Iran is not a genuine threat but rather a tool in the hands of Israeli leadership to manipulate public opinion. Indeed, in his German book Fear of Peace: The Israeli Dilemma, Zimmmermann states that "the policy of deterrence became an existential issue" for Israel because the country is afraid of peace. He suggests it is an assumption in Israel that Hizballah and Hamas are spearheading the effort of those who want to destroy Israel and only by moving away from the "fixation on fear and deterrence" can Israel achieve peace.
Zimmermann, a professor of German history, joins a long list of Israeli academics who decided that writing books bashing Israel is a better use of their time than researching and publishing in the area of their expertise. The question is whether this is a good use of tax payers money.
[Hebrew U, Education] Nurit Peled Elhanan overheated political rhetoric masquerading as academics
Dr. Nurit Peled Elhanan (HUJ), a veteran radical activist, stands out even by the standards of the radical academic fraternity. As IAM reported, Peled Elhanan testified before the Russell Tribunal, a self-appointed body of radical leftist. The "ruling" of the tribunal was recently used by a Palestinian group that advocates boycott against Israel.
As noted by IAM, Peled Elhanan's academic writings are an extension of her political activism.
Her new work on Israeli school textbooks is no exception. She uses critical discourse analysis, part of the neo-Marxist, critical scholarship paradigm to conclude that Israeli textbooks are racist, turning IDF draftees into "monsters." Lacking a rigorous methodology, critical language analysis does not limit itself to a specifics of a text, but relates it thematically to the larger political context. As a result, critical analysis researchers come up with a "narrative" that shows how language reproduces patterns of "domination" and "racism." Not surpassingly, Peled-Elhanan found that Israeli textbooks teach "hatred" and "racism" which turn young IDF draftees into "monsters."
Unfortunately, Peled-Elhanan overheated political rhetoric
masquerading as academics has found a market in Europe where Israel bashing is popular among the "progressive left;" Indeed, in 2001, the European Parliament awarded her a human right prize, a decision that IAM denounced.
It is even more unfortunate that Peled-Elhanan enjoys the legitimacy of a Hebrew University faculty member when pushing her misguided propaganda. As for all those who claim that Israeli universities practice McCarthyism, they are advised to read one of Peled-Elhanan's publications.
To the Governors of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
As you know, academics have taken a lead in a campaign to delegitimize Israel; some of them are employed by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Under the guise of academic freedoms, they have utilized the legitimacy and the good name of the university to launch relentless attacks on Israel.
Those who claim that these and other utterances are protected by academic freedom of research and expression should consult the European Union initiative to fight anti-Semitism. In 2005 the European Union Monitoring Center published guidelines stating that certain anti-Zionist expressions such as equating Israel to Nazi Germany or an apartheid state should be considered a form of "new anti-Semitism." The EU guidelines have been used by law enforcement agencies and influenced legislation such as the British Equality Act of 2010. It is ironic that Israeli scholars are free to contribute to new anti-Semitism, something that their peers in Europe would find hard to do without violating the law. We would urge you to act to remedy this situation at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
HUJ Prof. Hannan Hever, Moran Benit and Zochrot: an alternative to the hegemonic Zionist memory. A conference
A conference on The Palestinian Nakba in Literature and Cinema in Israel
Beit Ha'am, 69 Rotshild St. Tel Aviv
Monday 28/5/2012 10:00 to Tuesday 29/5/2012 at 17:00
Moran Benit is a Hebrew University PhD candidate in Literature under the supervision of Prof. Hannan Hever.
She is also a staff member at the Hebrew University's Scholion - Interdisciplinary Research Center in Jewish Studies.
Benit is a Co- Editor of 2010: Tell it not in Gat – The Naqba in Hebrew Poetry 1948-1958. Hannan Hever (Ed.). Pardess Press, Zochrot, Tel Aviv (Heb.).
Benit is a leading activist with Zochrot:
About Zochrot, taken from their website
Zochrot is an NGO whose goal is to introduce the Palestinian Nakba to the Israeli-Jewish public, to express the Nakba in Hebrew, to enable a place for the Nakba in the language and in the environment. This is in order to promote an alternative memory to the hegemonic Zionist memory. The Nakba is the disaster of the Palestinian people: the destruction of the villages and cities, the killing, the expulsion, the erasure of Palestinian culture.
[HUJ, Comparative Religion] David Shulman - A professor holds forth on Israeli paranoia
So here you have it, from a professor of humanistic studies, no less: Those Jews – at least most of those Israeli Jews – are paranoid idiots who just love to imagine a world full of terrible threats that allows them to fantasize about their "daring and heroic " defense against these threats. Moreover, in their stupidity, those paranoids don't realize that it is their own policies – specifically the capital O Occupation of the West Bank – that pose the greatest peril for Israel's continued existence as a Jewish state.
[HUJ, Education] Nurit Peled Elhanan: Israeli schoolchildren are taught hate and xenophobia towards Palestinians
TEL AVIV // One asserts that Israel's Palestinian citizens shun modernisation and are building houses illegally. Another alleges the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank steals water from Israel. And elsewhere, that Palestinians have been a "terrifying demographic problem" for Israel.
Such statements are part of mainstream schoolbooks in Israel that teach an "anti-Palestinian" approach in a bid to prepare Jewish children to be aggressive towards Palestinians once they serve in the army, according to a new book.
To be released this month in the UK, the book - Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education- is the first to publicly provide evidence that Israeli schools have racist textbooks, said Nurit Peled-Elhanan, a professor at Jerusalem's Hebrew University who has researched dozens of Israeli schoolbooks published since the 1990s.
"I was looking for reasons of why nice Jewish boys turn into monsters when they join the army," said Ms Peled-Elhanan, in an interview at her home just outside Jerusalem.
[HUJ, Philosophy] Roy Wagner, the radical leftist academic use of language in the public sphere is not appropriate
Roy Wagner (HUJ), a radical political activist and activist in the GLBT community. As IAM repeatedly reported, the GLBT, along with assorted feminists, have been very active in pro-Palestinian causes such as Sheikh Jarah Solidarity Movement, Machsom Watch, the Friday demonstrations in Bili'n among others.
This pro-Palestinian camaraderie was shattered when a number of feminists complained about sexual harassment by Palestinian men; one woman writing as Anonymous reported being raped by an Israeli activist. She also noted that the leadership of the pro-Palestinian groups have refused to take action out of concern for the "overall struggle." Wagner was apparently aware of the problems because a year ago he suggested a model for creating a safe zone for women in Anarchist Against the Wall.
Most recently, an activist group created an ad against the Migron settlement which alluded to sexual violence and rape. When other feminists protested, the ad was withdrawn, but the heated debate in the radical circles about the meaning of a "culture of rape" goes on.
Wagner's self- described "thought experiment" is illustrative of this trend. The Hebrew University academic confesses "When I go out clubbing, it happens that a stranger passes by and fondles my ass. To be honest, I enjoy it".
[HUJ] Nurit Peled-Elhanan: Civil Disobedience against the Israeli government, if not, we would be herded into detention camps
In her long career as a radical activist-academic Nurit Peled-Elhanan (HUJ) has liberally mixed facts with fiction to support her contention that Israel is a racist, apartheid state. As IAM reported, even by the loose standards of the of critical language study, a radical academic offshoot that seeks to "deconstruct" language to look for racism, sexism and assorted sins of the Western "colonial and imperialist" states, her descriptions of Israel are most fanciful. So is her testimony before the Russell Tribunal, a group of self-appointed radical leftists who practice hypocrisy and double standards on a grand scale; while presenting Israel as an arch-evil doer, they have turned a blind eye on brutal dictatorships that murder their own people.
Peled-Elhanan drives this analogy even further; she issues a call to "civil disobedience" against the Israeli government. If not - she says - Israelis like herself would be herded into detention camps where, according to her colleague- in arms, Sami Shalom Chetrit,"the poet will no longer versify, he will no longer sing, he won't even chirp."
For those familiar with Peled-Elhanan's writings, her Chicken Little warning that the "the sky is falling" and allusion to Nazi- style concentration camps are nothing new. She has been making these type of predictions for more than two decades while enjoying all the perks of a Hebrew University faculty.
[HUJ, Culture] Roundtable "Skin Tight: Apartheid Literary Culture and Its Aftermath" Louise Bethlehem, March 13
For many years now, radical academics have made the argument that Israel is akin to South Africa under the apartheid regime. As IAM reported, neo-Marxist, critical scholarship that produces "narratives" without regard to actual empirical reality, is the paradigm of choice in these circles.
In her book Skin Tight: Apartheid Literary Culture and Its Aftermath, Louise Bethlehem, a senior lecturer of English and Culture studies at HUJ, found an ingenious way to make the comparison stick. She and a number of Literature researchers will discuss the similarities between the "wounded literature" in Israel and South Africa.
Charging Israel with running an apartheid regime has significance beyond the academy. Research of radicals Israeli scholars has fueled the burgeoning apartheid and BDS movement as it legitimizes claims made by Palestinians and their supporters. Indeed, radical Israeli professors are in much demand during apartheid/BDS events, a fact that IAM has periodically pointed out.
TAU & HUJ Ariel Handel "The Palestinians under the Israeli occupation from the point of view of senses"
Ariel Handel is a fellow of the Lexicon for Political Theory research project, The Minerva Humanities Center under the directorship of Adi Ophir and a research fellow at the Truman Institute of the Hebrew University. He studies the construction of space and its uses in relations of power and violence. His PhD dissertation (abstract), written at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Sciences and Ideas, deals with the movement regime in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and studies the movement restrictions as a distinctive technology of population management and territory appropriation. His supervisors are the radicals Prof. Adi Ophir and Prof. Tovi Fenster.
There is apparently no limit to the "creativeness" of the radical Israeli academics. In July 2012 in Nanterre University, France, Handel and his co-author are going to present a paper which finds that the Israeli authorities use the human senses as a "technology of control" that creates a permanent regime of "uncertainty and disquiet" among the Palestinians. Handel needs to be reminded that only some 40,000 Palestinians still live under direct Israeli rule. How about doing a comparative study of Palestinians who live under the control of the Palestinian Authority or better still, Hamas in Gaza?
[HUJ, Lafer] Merav Amir's neo-Marxist, critical scholarship paradigm viewing Israel as a colonial, apartheid state
Merav Amir, Ph.D. (Lafer Center for Women and Gender Studies, Hebrew University) is an activist involved in Machsom Watch and Who Profits from the Occupation. Like many of her activist peers, Amir adopted the neo-Marxist, critical scholarship paradigm which views Israel as a colonial, apartheid state.
Amir goes one step further; without mentioning terror attacks that had promoted the creation for the barrier, she finds that the Separation Wall in East Jerusalem is part of a "process of racialisation" which she defines as the grip that Israel maintains on the Palestinian community in the capital. Even by the loose standards of critical scholarship, Amir's paper stands out in its misuse of common terminology. Her English is also eye-popping, as, for example, in the following: the paper "examines the ruling praxes which are manifested by, in and around the Wall in East Jerusalem for the purpose of identifying the manners in which border-making praxes are integrated into biopolitical matrixes of control.
It is bad enough that Amir adopts a wacky defintion of "racialisation;" it is even worse that she mangles her English in the process.
Correction to a story from 2008 regarding Professor Amiram Goldblum of the Hebrew University
On July 13, 2008 Israeli channel 2 news presented a story about the return of Adel Hidmi, an Arab student who was convicted for terrorist activity, to the department of Medicinal Chemistry Laboratory at the Hebrew University. The return of the student to the university was decided by an internal committee.
Professor Amiram Goldblum, the head of department at the time, was not involved in the decision making.
Channel 2 wrongly involved professor Goldblum and a year later issued a correction and apology.
IAM was not aware of the correction and this was brought to our attention only recently.
We wish to apologize to Professor Goldblum for involving him in this story.
According to the Hebrew University department of media relations, Adel Hidmi was convicted for being a member in a terrorist organization and was in jail for 3 years. Upon his release he requested to complete his doctorate degree at the Hebrew University. The University objected to let him enter the laboratories and Hidmi was forced to complete his studies based on the experiments he conducted in the past. Hidmi has brought in his doctorate thesis recently and it is now under evaluation.
HUJ Hannan Hever, Berlin: The Jewish Holocaust results in the establishment of a nation state which brings about the Nakba
Hannan Hever (HUJ) is a member in good standing of what can be called "The Nakba as Holocaust Project," an effort by radical academics to equate the suffering of the Jews at the hands of the Germans, to the fate of the Palestinians under Israeli rule. As IAM has reported, these scholars use a wide array of tools of "critical scholarship" to make this comparison stick in the minds of their audience.
In his lecture in a German university, Hever develops the equal reasonability theme by deconstructing a poem by Avot Yeshuron, hardly an instrument for making a reasoned determination of guilt and reasonability. Hever should consider the fact that Jews did nothing to prompt the Nazis to adopt the Final Solution which annihilated six million Jews. On the other hand, the Palestinians, under the leadership of Haj Amin al Husseini, a close ally of Hitler, chose to defy the U.N. Partition Proposal and started a war that they had the misfortune to lose. Although a personal and national tragedy, the loss of sovereignty and the some 700,000 refugees that resulted from this decision should be viewed in the context of international conflicts. In this sense, at least, the fate of the Palestinians, bears at least a passing resembles that of the Germans, another belligerent who started and lost a war.
Maybe Hever, a professor of literature, may not know that, but in international relations decisions have consequences.
[TAU & HUJ] Roy Wagner "Almost Xmas in Bli'in" - Deception and Double Standards
Dr. Roy Wagner (TAU, HUJ), has reached a new low in reporting on an incident in the ongoing protest against the separation fence in Bil'in, a Muslim village in the West Bank. Nowhere does Wagner mention the fact that the barrier was erected to protect Israelis within the Green Line from terrorist attacks that killed and wounded thousands. Even more hypocritical is the use of Christmas symbols to attract Christian support around the world. As Wagner tells it, the IDF met the two Santas who joined the protest with volleys of tear gas, a stark contrast between the theme of "peace on earth" that Christmas represents and the alleged brutality of the solders.
Wagner would have been more credible if he used the occasion to extend his concerns to the Christians in West Bank and Gaza. Under increasing assault by militant Islamism and endemic violence, the Christians have shrank to less than 1.7 of the population. Tens of thousands have been forced to flee to the West, abandoning their property and religious roots in the Holy Land
Double Standards: HUJ Prof. Zeev Sternhell and the student group "Solidarity Against Fascism"
Double Standards Report
A students group "Solidarity Against Fascism" at Tel Aviv University and Professor Zeev Sternhell (Hebrew University) are planning a meeting to discuss the increase in right-wing violence against Palestinians, Israeli Arabs and radical leftist activists.
Right wing violence, like any violence in a democratic society, should be condemned.
The recent attacks on mosques were denounced by politicians and public figures from all sides of the political spectrum. The Israeli police vowed to find the perpetrators and made some arrests.
However, the "Solidarity" group states that right-wing violence takes Israel one step further toward a fascist state. "Solidarity" bases this assertion on two arguments; the attackers, far from being "bad weeds" represent the "way of the right-wing;" right-wing violence is protected by police and the government.
These allegations are emblematic of the exaggerations employed by radical activists in the academy in their ongoing effort to portray Israel as a fascist state or/and an apartheid state. At the same time, radical left- wing activists have always been shy about Palestinian violence which is directed from the top and enjoys solid public support in the territories.
Naturally, admitting this fact would have ruined their ties to what was described as "Palestinian partners." But keeping quite about it carries a price as well: double standards undermine the legitimacy of the "Solidarity" group and beyond.
[HUJ, German] Moshe Zimmermann has made frequent forays into the field of Middle East mostly to condemn Israel
In an interview to a German newspaper Zimmermann suggests that the United Nations should accept the Palestinian bid to nationhood. He chastises the European leaders and President Obama for not lining up behind the PA and/or catering to the right-wing government of Prime Minister Netanyahu. In his customary "visionary" ending, Zimmerman proclaims that change will be possible only when "the entire region starts pursuing policies that are less religious and less fundamentalist;" that is "as long as we [Israel] remain hostages of the settlers and the occupation and collaborate with the hostage-takers, nothing will change." Again, any reference to Islamist fundamentalism is missing.
HUJ Moshe Zimmermann on the fate of Palestinian refugees: "Anybody who wanted to return could return"
This can be further developed, so that one day we may be able to say yes, a Palestinian state may be viable," said Zimmermann.
He also sees no problem when it comes to the unresolved question of the fate of Palestinian refugees. If it were up to him, anybody who wanted to return could return.
"This is of course difficult," he said, "but it is possible. I do not think the majority of the millions of Palestinians who now live elsewhere will choose to return to Israel or an Arab State of Palestine."
Nurit Peled Elhanan - Russell Tribunal on Palestine "the Apartheid imposed on the Palestinians by Israel"
Nurit Peled Elhanan has pushed hard to create the paradigm equating Israel with the apartheid state of South Africa. She says, "the one practiced against Palestinian citizens inside Israel and Palestinian non-citizens outside the Israeli borders, in the occupied territories of Palestine, is legal, supported by laws". For Peled-Elhanan the killing of Jews by Palestinians is permissible, the countless criminal acts by Palestinians against Jews including suicide bombings, must be overlooked, accepted and forgiven. Measures taken to protect Israeli citizens are automatically branded as "apartheid state policies."
She claims that the Israeli apartheid is rooted in education. "Because Apartheid is not only a bunch of racist laws, it is a state of mind, and states of mind are fashioned by education." However, extensive analysis published in 2006 by Dr. Arnon Groiss on Peled Elhanan's arguments about anti-Arab bias in Israeli school books, found no evidence to support her claims.
HUJ Nurit Peled Elhanan to participate in the Russell Tribunal conference on Israeli apartheid
In her upcoming trip, Peled-Elhanan is scheduled to "testify" before the Russell Tribunal on Palestine during its meeting in South Africa. Created in 1966 by the British philosopher Bertrand Russell to call for the investigation of alleged American crimes in Vietnam, it has sought to create an image of neutrality and judicial credibility with a "jury," examining experts and "witnesses." In fact, the Russell Tribunal is a deeply flawed tool of the radical left. The "jury" includes the likes of Cynthia McKinney, a former member of Congress, whose anti-Semitic comments and allegations that President Bush was involved in the 9/11 plot brought her notoriety in the United States. Even more telling, the RT has never held meetings to investigate the egregious human rights violation in Iran, the persecution and killing of Christians in Muslim countries and the mass killings of protesters in Syria.
The blatant bias of the RT is a close match to the world- view of Peled-Elhanan. In her recent research she found that "racist" textbooks educate Israelis to become wanton and violent killers of Palestinians, but discovered no evidence of racism in Palestinian textbooks. Peled-Elhanan has justified the use of terror against Israeli civilians on the grounds that the occupation has pushed the Palestinians who have "no army and no power" to embrace suicide bombing.
There is no doubt that with such credentials Peled-Elhanan makes a perfect "witness" for the Tribunal.
[HUJ] Nurit Peled-Elhanan, European Parliament Sakharov Human Rights Prize recipient: A Case of Mistaken Identity
But it's Peled-Elhanan's view on terror that is most disturbing. She justifies Palestinian use of terrorism on the grounds that they are "pushed to despair" by Israeli occupation. Indeed, when her thirteen year old daughter was killed in a suicide bombing in 1997 she blamed the Israeli government rather than the Palestinian perpetrator. Her statement offended families of terror victims and provoked a huge public outcry.
In awarding the Sakharov Prize for human rights, the European Parliament has legitimized Peled-Elhanan view that terror attacks against innocent civilians are justified under certain conditions. This stands in stark contrast to the unequivocal condemnation of terrorism by the enlightened international community of which the European Parliament is a vital part of.
The Sakharov Prize committee needs to be reminded that Nelson Mandela and other leaders it has honored had never embraced terror. Sharing the prize with Elhanan-Peled cheapens their achievements and tarnishes their names.
[HUJ] Letter signed by Nurit Peled Elhanan: Not to reward Israel for its violent repression of Palestinian rights
Israel's stance in the community of nations.
Those who lead European football must respond to an appeal from Palestinians dismayed at the prospect of Israel hosting Uefa's under-21 tournament in 2013. A state that uses military might to hold sway over land it illegally occupies and exploits, flouts international law and ignores UN resolutions surely forfeits the right to be treated as a member of the community of nations. But western powers continue to embrace Israel as an ally.
Dr. Martin Sherman on [HUJ, religions] Professor David Shulman "A giant pall of shame"
Take for example the good Prof. Shulman, who is listed at Renee Lang Professor of Humanistic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. On his website he details his areas of academic expertise as the history of religion in South India, poetry/poetics in Tamil, Telugu and Sanskrit; Dravidian linguistics; and Carnatic music, none of which appears to have any relevance for the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Yet making use of his academic credentials, he blogs regularly in The New York Review of Books, vilifying Israel and validating much of the vitriol of its detractors.
Thus almost immediately following the IDF interception of the Mavi Marama in its attempt to break the naval quarantine of Gaza, he applied his expertise in South Asian culture to the realm of maritime law and national security.
With dismissive disdain for the official Israel version, and seemingly suggesting that the serious wounds inflicted on the IDF commandos were no more than they deserved, he sneers: "Spokesmen for both the army and the government repeatedly said that the soldiers were in danger of being lynched — as if they were innocent victims of an ambush rather than, in effect, state-sponsored pirates attacking a convoy carrying humanitarian aid in international waters."
This is merely a single example of a myriad of insidious misrepresentations of Israel and Israelis action by a myriad of Israeli academics, abusing the exercise of academic freedom.
After all, this freedom was intended principally to allow them unhindered pursuit of truth in their chosen fields of study, not for malicious misportrayal of their country and its policies.
[HUJ, Rothberg] Creative Memory as Selective Memory: Efrat Ben-Ze'ev "Remembering Palestine in 1948"
It is hardly surprising that Ben- Ze'ev violates the rules of objective inquiry. Like her post-Zionist peers, Ben Ze'ev is part of a cadre of neo-Marxist, critical scholars who view academic research as an extension of their political activism. Indeed, Ben-Ze'ev is an activist in Taayush, an NGO that campaign for a Palestinian narrative and uses language that delegitimizes Israel such as "apartheid wall," as part of its campaign of BDS. Ben-Ze'ev is also known as a passionate advocate for the Palestinian narrative and wants a greater Israeli exposure to the Nakba. Ben- Ze'ev has appeared in conferences whose organizers promise a robust academic discourse but in fact feature some of the most virulent anti-Israel activists, advocates of one state solution and leaders of the BDS campaign.
HUJ Amiel Vardi rejects Israeli court. His racist call to activists: "Join protest against the Judaization of East Jerusalem"
Editor's note: Israel is a Jewish State and East Jerusalem is not supposed to be "Judenrein" (cleansed of Jews).
----- Forwarded Message -----
From: Amiel Vardi
Subject: [Hacampus-lo-shotek] שישי 16 בספטמבר: משמרת מחאה בשייח' ג'ראח Friday September 16: Protest Vigil in Sheikh Jarrah
The residents of Sheikh Jarrah are continuing their protest vigils in the neigbourhood on Fridays, protesting their violent evictions form their homes, the taking over of the neigbourhood by the settlers, and the Judaization of East Jerusalem.
They call upon each and every person who supports their struggle to join them.
This week settlers burned the internationals' tent in the yard of the Al-Kurd family, whose been partly taken over by settlers in November 2009
The residents need you support more then ever. Please make an effort to come and support them.
Please make a special effort to join them tomorrow, September 16 at 4:00 Pm
For a vigil in support of their struggle
Hannan Hever, Yehouda Shenhav: Hebrew Literature & the Palestinian Nakba גם בעברית
Professor Hannan Hever has a long history of political activism; he has written articles and signed petitions accusing Israel of war crimes and supported Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), among others. The Loyalty Law has prompted Hever to declare that Israel is a fascist state. Hever has devoted much of his academic writing to prove that the Palestinian Nakba should be considered at par with the Jewish Holocaust.
Professor Yehouda Shenhav, is a radical political activist who believes that Palestinians should be allowed the right to return to Israel proper and calls for the creation of a bi-national state. Like Hever, he signed numerous petitions to force Israel out of the territories. After making an academic career out of a claim that Zionism has mistreated Arab Jews (his terminology for the Mizrahim), Shenhav has currently "branched out" into the 1948 war.
The Seminar is part of an ongoing effort of post-Zionist academics to elevate the Nakba to the level of the Holocaust.
[HUJ] Symposium of Dr. Louise Bethlehem's book about the "Israeli apartheid" vis-a-vis the S.A apartheid, Zochrot, Tel Aviv 21/09/2011
Zochrot, a radical group dedicated to returning Palestinians refugees to Israel, has a long history of misrepresenting the 1948 conflict and inventing atrocities such as massacres and mass rapes allegedly committed by Israeli troops. Zochrot has also specialized in making comparisons between the apartheid regime of South African and "Israeli apartheid," of which Dr. Louise Bethlehem book is a prime example.
Israeli and Palestinians activists decided in the early 1990s to apply the Boycott Divestment, Sanction (BDS) strategy that successfully forced South Africa to end apartheid, to Israel. Consequently, a number of Israeli academics have published books and articles "demonstrating" that Israel is an apartheid state. Despite the fact that mainstream political science has never categorized Israel as an apartheid state, the alternative radical-leftist publication network, including Journal of Palestine Studies, Zed Books and Olive Press imprint in the United States and Great Britain, among others, have turned the Israel- as- an- apartheid- state theme into a virtual cottage industry.
[HUJ] The Fear of Peace - The Israeli Dilemma. Book presentation with Prof. Moshe Zimmermann, Frankfurt. Aug 29, 2011.
Why the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians increased year after year?
In his new book "Fear of Peace" the Israeli historian Moshe
Zimmerman's provocative thesis that the Israeli society has the powers and is more against giving up of the occupied territories than before the constant state of unrest and insecurity. Zimmermann shows clear and unvarnished picture of the political and social conditions in Israel and describes the actions of the main protagonists: the media, settlers and Military. His lucid and courageous analysis deserves hearing in the German and
International Middle East discourse.
[HUJ] Yaron Ezrahi & Moshe Zimmermann "Radical Nationalism against Democratic Citizenship in Israel" Berlin, Nov 24
The Mosse-Lectures commemorate the German-Jewish heritage of the Mosse Family at the Humboldt University
November 24, 2011
Yaron Ezrahi (Hebrew University Jerusalem)
Radical Nationalism against Democratic Citizenship in Israel
Respondenz: Moshe Zimmermann
"Does Israel Teach Anti-Arab Bigotry?" Anti-Israel Prof. Laurance Davidson cites HUJ Nurit Peled Elhanan's "findings"
Peled-Elhanan has recently written a book titled Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education. The book, which will be published this month in the United Kingdom, covers the content of Israeli textbooks over the past five years and concludes that Palestinians are never referred to as such "unless the context is terrorism." Otherwise, they are referred to as Arabs.
And Arabs are collectively presented as "vile and deviant and criminal, people who do not pay taxes, people who live off the state, who don't want to develop. … You never see [in the textbooks] a Palestinian child or doctor or teacher or engineer or modern farmer."
In contrast, she finds that Palestinian textbooks, even while telling history from a Palestinian point of view, "distinguish between Zionists and Jews"; they tend to take a stand "against Zionists, not against Jews."
Peled-Elhanan makes a link between what Israeli children are taught and how they later behave when drafted into the country's military services.
"One question that bothers many people is how do you explain the cruel behavior of Israeli soldiers towards Palestinians
[HUJ, Rothberg] Anti-Israel activist Efrat Ben Ze'ev sheds "new light" on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict at UC Davis
Efrat Ben Zeev: "I hope to break down false dichotomies between a global category called the Palestinian Arabs and another called the Israeli Jews."
The war of 1948 in Palestine is a conflict whose history has been written primarily from the national point of view. This book asks what happens to these narratives when they arise out of the personal stories of those who were involved, stories that are still unfolding. Efrat Ben-Ze'ev, an Israeli anthropologist, examines the memories of those who participated and were affected by the events of 1948, and how these events have been mythologized over time. This is a three-way conversation between Palestinian villagers, Jewish-Israeli veterans, and British policemen who were stationed in Palestine on the eve of the war. Each has his or her story to tell.
[HUJ, Law] Anti-Israel activists speak in Belgrade on "Peace education": Daphna Golan-Agnon, Nadera Shalhoub-Kervorkian &Rachel Busbridge
Educating for peace is, to say the very least, a challenge in Israel: the enduring and deeply-seated Israeli-Palestinian conflict permeates all aspects of life including the academia, and the segregated nature of primary and secondary education means that the first encounter between Jews and Palestinians typically takes place on campus.
The history of mutual mistrust, the pervasiveness of unequal power relations and the construction of Palestinian and Jewish identities as diametrically opposed to each other means that the possibilities for genuine peace education are constrained.
The presenters: Our guests from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem - Dr. Daphna Golan-Agnon, Dr. Nadera Shalhoub-Kervorkian & Dr. Rachel Busbridge
When? Monday, June 20, 2011 18:30-20:00
Where? The Faculty of Media and Communications, Karadjordjeva 65, Beograd
HUJ Religions & Classics] David Shulman's & Amiel Vardi's association with the convicted rapist Ezra Nawi
According to Ta'ayush founding member Amiel Vardi, his fellow activists only became aware of Nawi's conviction for rape when coverage of Mr Norris's political crisis was published in Israel's Haaretz newspaper last week.
Even now, Vardi claims Nawi has not spoken about the matter and members of the group are still unaware of the specific details.
Nawi's close associate and supporter Professor David Shulman, of the Hebrew University, has described him as "a tough-minded, soft-hearted plumber".
When asked if he knew of his previous convictions for sodomy and drug abuse, Shulman replied: "This is an old thing which happened a long time ago and is therefore irrelevant. People change in life, including Nawi."
[HUJ, Education] Nurit Peled Elhanan: Change will come when the Americans stop providing us with $1m a day to maintain this regime of occupation, racism & supremacy
Peled-Elhanan is deeply pessimistic about her country's future. Change, she says, will only come "when the Americans stop providing us with $1m a day to maintain this regime of occupation and racism and supremacy".
She said that within Israel, "I only see the path to fascism. You have 5.5 million Palestinians controlled by Israel who live in a horrible apartheid with no civil and no human rights. And you have the other half who are Jews who are also losing their rights by the minute," she says, in reference to a series of attempts to restrict Israelis' right to protest and criticise their government.
Responses to HUJ David Shulman's "Goldstone and Gaza: What's Still True"
David Shulman, while agreeing with Richard Goldstone that Israel did not target Gaza civilians, inconsistently claims that the IDF relaxed its rules of engagement to encourage conduct endangering noncombatants ["Goldstone and Gaza: An Exchange," NYR, July 14]. That illogical theory—based on hearsay and anecdotes—is refuted by hard statistical evidence. The ratio of civilian-to-combatant casualties in Gaza was about 1:1, far lower than in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan and, indeed, the lowest ratio in any asymmetric war in recent history.1 The UN finds the typical ratio in such conflicts to be 3:1. The International Red Cross, over a longer time span, estimates 10:1. The historically low ratio in Gaza, ignored by Mr. Shulman, reflects Israel's unprecedented precautions to minimize collateral damage to civilians.
[HUJ, Edu] Nurit Peled-Elhanan: Israeli education is racist. Palestinian can't be because it is monitored by the world
Elhanan: What I found was that all of the racist categories that you could imagine or that are in the literature about the racist representation of people, both verbally and visually, is there in Israeli textbooks. And I thought that it was very important to say that because the whole world slanders Palestinian education, without even knowing anything about it, including Hillary Clinton. And nobody controls and monitors the Israeli education. Now Palestinian education cannot be racist because it is so controlled and monitored by the world, even if they wanted to. So I looked into that and I started to look into Israeli books, and I found where Palestinian textbooks can say the Zionist enemy kills our children and demolishes our houses, which is not racism but fact, in Israel, Palestinians are, if they are represented at all, usually they are not represented at all, twenty percent of the population are Palestinian citizens. Not talking about the non-citizens. They are not represented at all, as if they don't exist. Nothing of their culture, customs, nothing! Only as problems and to represent people as a problem is racism!
[Hebrew U, Education] Nurit Peled-Elhanan: The High Court message to the Israeli Occupation Forces - murder of little Palestinian girls is not a crime
In other words: the High Court has authorized the shedding of the blood of all little Palestinian girls and sent a clear message to the soldiers/police of the Israeli Occupation Forces – the murder of little Palestinian girls, especially those who are buying candy at a kiosk next to their school at nine in the morning, is not a crime. No one has been punished and no one will be punished. The allegations of the prosecution, that is, of the parents, the eyewitnesses, the Yesh Din organization, the proof and the evidence – did not make their way into the ears of the [female] judges. Are they mothers too?
This judgement is the climax of an evidently wonderfully planned and oiled campaign to render permissible the killing of Palestinians that has been conducted for decades now in newspapers, in political speeches, in literature and song, in military plans, in the formulation of the army's ethical code and in the textbooks that explain that every massacre of Palestinians since 1948 was good for the Jews, for the Jewish democracy and for the conservation of the Jewish majority in the State of/Land of Israel in the long, short or middle run. This campaign has gained momentum since the cast lead and phosphorus massacre in Gaza two years ago. Since then everybody has found justification and rationalization for the killing of Palestinians.
[Hebrew U, Religions] David Shulman's call encourages Arabs to hurt right-wing Jews and Settlers "July 15th Marching to Independence"
On July 15 2011 the weekly Solidarity demonstration in Sheikh Jarrah will expand and assume a new, dramatic form. For the first time, all the Palestinian factions and the local neighborhood committees in east Jerusalem will join Solidarity and the Israeli peace camp in a large-scale march through the heart of Jerusalem and around the city walls. The march will have a clear and unambiguous message: "Marching for Independence". An independent Palestinian state in the 1967 borders with its capital in East Jerusalem is a profoundly just and humane goal, redeeming a terrible historical disaster, and also a prime Israeli interest—although the current right-wing government is doing whatever it can to block the establishment of a free Palestine. The historic cooperation of the forces for peace on both sides of the border has generated this joint action, which is endowed with singular symbolic and international resonance. This march will also constitute a response to the mass march of settlers and the right on Jerusalem day, in which tens of thousands chanted slogans of hate like "Death to Leftists" and "Butcher the Arabs."
[Hebrew University, Education] Nurit Peled Elhanan in Al-Jazeera's propaganda against Israel
Nurit Peled, co-founder of Bereaved Parents for Peace and lecturer at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, believes that text books are selected to support feelings of Jewish superiority. "We never teach about the state of Israel, we teach the land of Israel, which includes all of Palestine. It is recognition by denial," she said.
Peled's research also revealed common stereotyping of Arabs in text books; "I could not find one picture of an Arab human being," she said. "They are all of types. They are presented as primitive terrorists or farmers who reject modernity."
HUJ Alon Liel: Israel becoming an apartheid state if stalemate continued "Key Israelis urge Europe to back Palestinian cause"
Among those signing the petition were the former speaker of the Knesset parliament, Avraham Burg, former foreign ministry director general Alon Liel, a Nobel laureate, writers and academics.
Mr Liel said he was worried about Israel becoming an apartheid state if the diplomatic stalemate continued. "I think that if there is no vote in September on recognising a Palestinian state, we shall find ourselves sliding even more rapidly into the slippery slope of a shared state, which I view as a true catastrophe."
The signatories argued that given the mutual suspicions between the sides and current foot-dragging, a Palestinian declaration of independence was not just a right, but also a positive, constructive step.
[Hebrew University, Business] Israel Academia Monitor responds to Prof. Bernard Avishai's "Monitored And Exposed!"
The Israel Academia Monitor has, through tireless investigation, linked me to the Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity organization. I might have saved them the trouble. My admiration for the young leaders of the movement is open, long-standing, and more or less boundless. Solidarity embodies my hopes for Israel as a globalist democracy. If I were the kind to follow leaders, these would be mine.
[Hebrew U, German studies] Moshe Zimmermann the End of America's Umbrella: Netanyahu and co. believe that they will get away with occupation
The first reaction of Israel's policy-makers to the recent uprisings was: "We were right all the way. One shouldn't trust the Arabs or believe in peace-treaties with them". Netanyahu, Lieberman etc., who related to the mounting criticism against Israel in the last years as vicious attempts at a delegitimization of Israel now use the unrest in the Arab world as an excuse for not addressing the cause for this criticism. The fact that even now the US vetoed a Security Council resolution condemning Israel's settlement policy makes Netanyahu and co. believe that they will get away with occupation even under the new circumstances.
[Hebrew U, Truman] Efrat Ben-Zeev, UC Davis: Landscape and Memory: Palestinian refugees' pilgrimage to demolished villages
Anthropology UC Davis
Spring 2011 Sociocultural Wing Colloquium Series - Efrat Ben-Zeev
what Colloquium
when May 02, 2011
from 02:00 PM to 04:00 PM
where 2203 Social Sciences & Humanities Building
Efrat Ben-Zeev, Senior Lecturer
Ruppin Academic Center - Hebrew University
"Landscape and Memory: Palestinian refugees' pilgrimage to demolished villages"
[Hebrew U, Religions] David Shulman disrespectful to Judaism, invites students/activists to "the so-called City of David
A reminder: This Friday there will be a guided tour of Silwan, the so-called City of David, in part as an act of solidarity with Jawad Siam, one of the major activists in the neighborhood. Jawad has been arrested many times in recent months and is being held under house arrest. His trial-- a blatantly political trial by any standard-- begins this week. We will meet Jawad and listen to him, and we will study the harsh situation in the neighborhood and the struggle of the local residents. Members of the Knesset, University scholars, students and Solidarity activists will participate.
[Hebrew U, Law] Daphna Golan's group: The plan for Lifta nullifies the possibility of the Palestinian refugees to return
The village of Lifta is significant for the reason that it reminds us of a time when Muslims, Christians and Jews lived harmoniously on the land. In this sense, Golan asserts that 'It should be used as a place where Jews and Arabs can meet to acknowledge their shared history.' If the ILA plans are approved, it will therefore be removing a powerful symbol of reconciliation. More ominously, the ILA plans which are portrayed as being devoid of any political significance are in fact a painful reminder that the colonial Zionist enterprise is still thriving.
[Hebrew U, IGDC] Iaroslav Youssim supports Palestinians against Israeli apartheid, Israeli police and against the occupation
While the vast majority of us, demonstrators and detainees – due to whom Sheikh Jarrah will be liberated - went to our warm homes and supportive families and friends, Isam Sweyki, remained on the cold street, homeless, without family or friends. While most of us went to our workplaces the next morning, Isam cannot do so. Why does not Isam receive all the due respect, as other heroes of the Sheikh Jarrah struggle? The answer, of course, is very simple in Israel of apartheid: unlike other detainees, Isam does not belong to the privileged 'class of the Jews,' but to the 'class of Arabs.'
Israel Apartheid Week with [Hebrew U, Law] Dr. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, organized by TAU Student Organizations
Tel Aviv University Student Organizations
Haq Movement, Tajamua-Balad, Jabha-Hadash, Abna- Al Balad
With the Coalition of Women for Peace
Israel Apartheid Week 2011
Life and Struggle in Apartheid
Wednesday, 16/03/2011 Saraya Theater in Jaffa at 7 p.m
Screening of the film "Have You Heard From Johannesburg"
Panel and Discussion with:
Director Connie Field
Dr. Nadera Shalhub Kaborkian: Apartheid – Birth and Death in Jerusalem
[Hebrew U, Business] Bernard Avishai's ties with the anti-Zionist Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity Movement, and his support of selected sanctions against Israel
Professor Bernard Avishai of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is an activist associated with the Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity Movement. He was quoted on a Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity Movement brochure asking for donations as stating, "Solidarity is poised to become a transformative movement. Its young leadership instructs and inspires me. Here are the future leaders of Israel's global democracy."
On March 2, 2011, the Jerusalem Post published an article that quoted the Jewish Agency as claiming that the Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity Movement opposes the existence of Israel as "a Jewish homeland" and promotes an "anti-Zionist agenda."...
As Avishai wrote in the Nation, that Boycott and Divestment would accomplish driving Israel into an even greater siege mentality but targeted sanctions, on the other hand, are something that Avishai supports "Foreign governments might well ban consumer products like fruit, flowers and Dead Sea mineral creams and shampoos produced by Israelis in occupied territory, much as Palestinian retail stores do. The EU already requires Israel to distinguish products this way. If Israel continues building in East Jerusalem, and the UN Security Council majority sanctions Israeli tourism, the US government might well choose not to veto the resolution. The Pentagon might sanction, say, Israel Aerospace Industries if, owing to continued settlement, Israeli-Palestinian negotiations break down."
Radical groups seek influence at Hebrew University, Tuesday March 3, 2011: Breaking the Silence, B'Tselem, etc
Mount Scopus Campus Event: Come and Hold Your Own Investigation of Four Left-Wing NGOs
Tuesday, March 1st
Hebrew University
You've read about the Knesset-probe and funding bill in the papers, now we invite you to come hold your own investigation of four prominen tNGOs!
Students are invited to an open debate and Q&A session with four prominent left-wing organizations: Peace Now, the Geneva Iniative, B'Tselem and Breaking the Silence
[Hebrew U] David Shulman on Sheikh Jarrah 65th demo: "Light" Fascism...Anti-democratic laws of the Knesset...racist and fanatically nationalist character put into effect
Here is a small vignette that tells you all you really need to know about the state of civil liberties in Israel today. We are slipping rapidly into a form of "light" Fascism, entirely palatable to the bulk of the Jewish population; democratic institutions such as the courts are still functioning and sometimes act to protect basic rights, but they have little or no power in the face of the anti-democratic laws the Knesset is enacting or of the administrative decisions, of a racist and fanatically nationalist character, that government bodies, such as the Jerusalem municipality, routinely put into effect. "Light" Fascism has a way of turning into its heavier counterpart. We are losing ground day by day.
[Hebrew U, English] in Louise Bethlehem's "Apartheid: A Double -Crossing" nothing about Israel's right for defence from vilolent attacks on its citizens
Where the term "apartheid" brushes against the grain of the Hebrew language which hosts – and is unsettled – by it, its use exceeds the seductions of a purely gestural politics. To invoke "apartheid" as signifier is to render certain signifieds especially salient. Saree Makdisi has enumerated some of them for us, as has Israeli geographer Oren Yiftachel who uses the notion of a "creeping apartheid" to focus on Israeli policy within the Green line as an "undeclared" political order that is continuing to entrench differential citizenship under its sovereignty. Hannan Hever and Yehouda Shenhav have pointed to the potential gains, viewed from the perspective of knowledge production and, implicitly, political agency, that might result from viewing the Occupation through the optic of "colonialism".
Adi Ophir and Ariella Azoulay, for their part, in a crucial recent Hebrew-language volume on the Occupation mobilize the idea of a "regime that is not one" – there is a studied allusion to feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray here – to stress that the governance of the Occupied Palestinian Territories has become integral to the Israeli regime itself. The Occupation, they claim, while historically contingent, should no longer be thought of as extraneous. On the contrary, the bifurcation of the Israeli regime between two forms – the rule of law together with limited ethnic discrimination on the one side of the Green line, and military occupation together with the rigid ethnic stratification of space on the other – itself comes to characterize the consistency of a regime committed neither to permanent annexation of, nor to withdrawal from, the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
David Shulman: The book of 'Breaking the Silence', in my view, is one of the most important books published on Israel/Palestine in this generation
Many Israelis, including those who might acknowledge the accuracy of my description, will readily blame the impasse on the cumulative trauma resulting from Arab, including Palestinian, violence against Jews going back to the beginning of the conflict. There is clearly some truth to this claim, though it does not explain the gratuitous cruelty inflicted by Israel on the Palestinians over the last few decades or the enormous and continuing theft of land that must be seen as the true raison d'être of the occupation. To understand the issue more deeply, it's crucial to see what the occupation really means on the ground—and, apart from actually spending time in the occupied territories, there is no better way to understand this reality than to read the volume of soldiers' testimonies just published by the Israeli peace group known as Breaking the Silence, a book, in my view, that is one of the most important published on Israel/Palestine in this generation.
TAU Adi Ophir, Hebrew U- Yaron Ezrahi, Zeev Sternhell, David Shulman: Israel is not a Democracy due to occupation
Knowledge, Imagination, Democracy: Honoring Professor Yaron Ezrahi's Work---an academic conference sponsored by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Jerusalem Van Leer Institute
First panel featured two academics, Prof. Adi Ophir from Tel Aviv University and Prof. Mordechai Kremnizer of both Hebrew University and the Israel Democracy Institute
Ophir presented a manifestly anti-Zionist perspective. In his view, present-day Israel is not a democracy and is allegedly run by only five men. He claimed that democracy in Israel is in jeopardy both in the present and in the future.
Second panel featured one Palestinian academic, Dr. Sari Nusseibeh, who is President of Al Quds University, and four Israeli academics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Prof. Yaron Ezrahi, Prof. Moshe Halbertal, Prof. Ze'ev Sternhell, and the moderator, Prof. David Shulman.
Shulman recommended that those who have not been arrested for helping Palestinian farmers "should try it, it is liberating."
According to him, these non-governmental organizations Breaking the Silence, B'tselem, Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity Movement, etc. that are being targeted deserve to be "supported and joined in large numbers." Halbertal also referred to the radical left wing extremist non-governmental organizations as "wonderful organizations."
Sternhell concluded by calling for an end to "the occupation of Palestinian lands."
Halbertal asked, "Is civil disobedience the proper approach?"
[Hebrew University, Education] Rabah Halabi: "The Oppressed Meeting the Oppressor"
The Nakba of 1948 forced a new reality on Palestinians who remained in Israel.
From then until 1967, these Palestinians lived under a military government. This reality created problematic and complex relations between them and the Jewish occupier, which the writer Emile Habibi brilliantly described in his book The Opsimist. Already from the beginning, the Zionist establishment sought to uproot the Palestinians and sever them from their historical roots and from their connection with their people, and, by doing so, create the Arab-Israeli. This difficult period created a sense of trauma and loss among the Palestinians who, in most instances, submitted to the "strong, unbeatable Jew." Relations between
Jews and Palestinians during that period were those of master-servant.
[Hebrew University, Truman] Maya Rosenfeld promotes anti-Israel political activities at Hebrew U " PCATI Report on Incommunicado Detention"
As many as 90 percent of Palestinian prisoners being interrogated by the Shin Bet security service are prevented from consulting with an attorney, even though civilian and military legislation state clearly that such prohibition should be rarely applied, according to a report published by the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel and the Palestinian Prisoners' Society.
The Shin Bet says it has legal clearance to keep certain detainees from lawyers.
Among these interrogation methods are tying prisoners for a long time to a chair with their hands behind the back, sleep deprivation, threats (usually of harming family members ), humiliation and being kept for long periods in unsanitary cells.According to Dr. Maya Rosenfeld, the author of the study, during prolonged periods when prisoners are kept from meeting with lawyers, the Shin Bet utilizes interrogation methods that run contrary to international law, Israeli laws and Israeli commitments to avoid such methods.
The Shin Bet has refused in the past to provide data on the numbers of prisoners who are prevented from meeting with a lawyer.
[Hebrew U, Law] Prof' Daphna Golan Agnon speaks against Israel as a Jewish State "It's our duty to challenge Israel's law of segregation"
As long as we do not have agreed-upon borders, weare living in an occupying country that discriminates between the rights of different groups based on their ethnicity.
In such a country, just like in South Africa under apartheid, it is our right and our duty to challenge the legality of the law.
[Political Science, Hebrew U] Bashir Bashir proposes binational solution over the division of land that comprises Israel and its occupied territories
Bashir Bashir, an adjunct lecturer in the department of political
science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Leila Farsakh,
associate professor of political science at the University of
Massachusetts, Boston, proposed a binational solution to the conflict over the division of land that comprises Israel and its occupied territories during a talk at the Kennedy School of Government
Palestinians celebrating the film of Tamar Yarom, Hebrew U: [ePalestine] FILM & ARTICLE: To See If I Am Smiling
From: Sam BAHOUR
To: email@example.com
Sent: Sunday, December 05, 2010 8:12 PM
Subject: [ePalestine] FILM/ & ARTICLE: To See If I Am Smiling (A MUST VIEW/READ)
"...I served there because my parents brought me up on the values of Zionism, on the idea that wherever I'm most needed is where I should go. I wanted to make a difference and I'd do it again despite everything."
Doc-Debut, a series on Link TV
To See If I Am Smiling
Israel is the only country in the world where 18-year-old girls are drafted for compulsory military service. In the award-winning documentary To See If I Am Smiling, the frank testimonials of six female Israeli soldiers stationed in Gaza and the West Bank pack a powerful emotional punch. The young women revisit their tours of duty in the occupied territories with surprising honesty and strip bare stereotypes of gender differences in the military. The former soldiers share shocking moments of negligence, flippancy, immaturity and power-tripping as they describe atrocities they witnessed and participated in.
[Hebrew U] Nurit Peled-Elhanan: We must teach our children to refuse to a criminal organization (IDF) that is led by war criminals, murderers. "ON THE APPOINTMENT OF YAIR NAVEH AS DEPUTY CHIEF OF STAFF "
The appointment of Yair Naveh is a fitting one. None is more suitable than he to stand nearly at the head of the most immoral army in the world, the cruellest army in the world that considers itself enlightened. An army with unlimited supplies of money and power and periodically mercenaries (have they judaized all of them yet?), a mob immersed in impulses and interests not one of which is moral. That is the meaning of an army. For that reason it is not Yair Naveh but us – who have to resign from the role of creating soldiers, providing soldiers, giving birth to soldiers and educating future soldiers. We must gather up our courage and teach our children to refuse. Refuse to take part in an organization that is led by war criminals, murderers of children. An organization like that cannot be anything but a crime organization.
[Hebrew U, Law] Dr. Nadera Shalhoub Kevorkian's study: "Military Occupation, Trauma and the Violence of Exclusion: Trapped bodies and lives."
The study has been completed at a very significant time for Jerusalem, and could well serve as crucial documentation for the current distress and grievance of Palestinian Jerusalemites today. In her presentation, as well as throughout the study, Dr. Nadera brings one example after another revealing Palestinians' day-to-day experiences of military occupation, their methods of surviving and the strategies of coping in the face of psycho-social and economic-political traps and restraints imposed by Israel on Arab Jerusalem. The study also sheds a light on the main hardships that Palestinians encounter when facing Israel's urban politics, demographic policies, economic, political and social restrictions and political violence. It also makes some suggestions for directions in future research, and a number of policy recommendations for human rights and feminist activists and organisations to consider.
With direct quotations gathered in interviews conducted for the study, young Palestinian voices of men and women from Jerusalem express a strong sense that their bodies, daily movements, and actions are under tight control, or are "trapped." Dr. Nadera's theoretical analysis for understanding these quotations require "that we theorise globality and post-coloniality in order to fully comprehend how global forces and conditions – including "the war on terror," the development of "security justifications," the politics and industry of fear and proliferating violence – and local forces – internal displacement, geo politics and house demolitions – all of which have shaped the contours of Palestinian daily life in Occupied East Jerusalem."
[Hebrew U] Hannan Hever: Only external interventions such as the BDS can stop the growth of "Israeli fascism"
In November 2010, Dr. Hever published an article in the Hebrew edition of Haaretz where he argued that supporting a loyalty oath for new Israeli citizens is paramount to fascism, that supporting the existence of a Jewish state is contrary to democracy, and that only external interventions such as the BDS movement can stop the growth of "Israeli fascism."
[East Asian Studies, Hebrew U] Prof' Yuri Pines supports Palestinian stone throwers at Israeli cars. "A kid throws a stone in East Jerusalem, and a village is locked down"
The situation in Isawiya began to deteriorate last Friday (5 November) when the local youths stoned a Jewish vehicle which came (apparently by accident) within the boundaries of the village. As a result of this, the police decided "to teach the village a lesson" in the manner remembered by many of us from the first years of the Second Intifada. What follows are some of the actions of the police over the past two days
[Hebrew University, Classics] Amiel Vardi was taken away by the army handcuffed, again, for distubance
Editor's note: When watching the video filmed by Taayush members, one can see two Israeli men being arrested. The second man, is Dr. Amiel Vardi, a lecturer of Classics at the Hebrew University. The account below tells a story of those two men as if they didn't do anything except for protecting Palestinians picking olives and grapes, but, it were the Israelis who weren't allowed to be there. The Palestinians were not arrested, just the two Israelis. Dr. Vardi has been already arrested a few times this year and in previous years, on similar grounds. He is signaling to his Palestinian friends, they can trust him, he is on their side, he is willing to be arrested for them! The question is, if Vardi needs to prove himself to the Palestinians every couple of months, does it mean, that if he stops, he wouldn't be trusted anymore? Is it not embarrasing for the Hebrew University that their lecturer is being arrested every so often by the police or the army for disturbance?
[Hebrew U, Political Science] Yaron Ezrahi to Arab media: "Israel is deteriorating to the level of a fascist state"
Speaking to the rally, Professor Yaron Ezrachi said that "Israel is deteriorating to the level of a fascist state and that "the children of Israel will either leave the country, be imprisoned or just fight in the streets."
[HebrewU, Education] Nurit Peled-Elhanan: It was the same monstrous soldiers. [UHaifa] Zvia Shapira: I don't trust the IDF
Nurit Peled-Elhanan is the wife of Rami Elhanan, who was on the Jewish boat to Gaza: ..It was the same monstrous soldiers who attacked the Marmara...The whole world should support Yonatan and Itamar Shapira now because the security forces are surely after them and there are no limits to what these soldiers would do if ordered...
The State won't even let prosthesis into Gaza, although the State is the one which caused their disability," said Zvia Shapira, the mother of two of the boat's passengers....I don't trust the IDF
[Hebrew U] Daphna Golan's speech incites Palestinians against Israel at the U.N Question of Palestine Forum, Istanbul
Yet in Sheikh Jarrah, Israelis and Palestinians are protesting against the evictions while seeds of partnership between Israelis and Palestinians are beginning to sprout.
Could you help Um Nabil who was evicted from her house in Haifa in 1948, to stop living in fear of second eviction in Sheikh Jarrah? Maybe instead of more UN committees and more UN reports you could help create truth committees that would allow Um Nabil to tell her story of her first eviction from her house in Haifa in 1948, how she settled with other 27 Palestinian families of refugees, in Sheikh Jarrah, and why she thinks that another
Jewish settlement at the heart of Palestinian East Jerusalem will create more tensions and hate in the city.
Like most Palestinians, the people in Sheikh Jarrah who were evicted form their houses, and those who receive eviction orders- are refugees who were displaced from their
houses and lands in 1948 when the state of Israel was established.
Israeli law does not recognize the right of Palestinians to sue in a similar manner for the return of their properties which they lost during the 1948 War, in West Jerusalem in particular and in Israel in general.
[Hebrew U, History] Moshe Zimmermann for a German-Muslim website: The real anti-Israelis sit in the government
Why has the peace process in the Middle East stagnated? In his new book, Moshe Zimmermann claims that the reason is that the Israelis fear peace more than they fear the state of war.
Amiel Vardi in the service of Bedouins against the state of Israel
An email from Amiel Vardi, Sheih Jarrah and Hebron anti-Israel activist, inviting his colleagues, other radical activists, to come and support Bedouins in the Negev against the Israeli police forces while evacuating illegal Bedouin villages.
Anti-Israel journalist writes in memoriam of anti-Israel activist Prof' Israel Shahak of the Hebrew U, Chemistry
A de-Zionisation, the removal of Apartheid and discrimination. For many years I have been saying that Israel is an Apartheid country that discriminates against non-Jews. The first thing I wish for Israel is that the official discrimination of all non-Jews cease. I am not a utopian. I mean legal discrimination and official oppression. I think that this would be good basis for a "cold peace" in the Middle East. I don´t expect a "warm peace" in the region based on love. I wish for a "cold peace" like, let us say, exists between Greece and Macedonia. They don´t like each other but they don´t make war. The first condition for this peace is de-Zionisation of Israel.
Ishai Menuchin "An assault on democracy": Attacks are spearheaded by NGO Monitor, Israel Academia Monitor & Im Tirtzu
The recent attacks are spearheaded by such organizations as NGO Monitor, Israel Academia Monitor and Im Tirtzu, but they apparently enjoy the backing of the government and of many right-wing Knesset members. They constitute a new phenomenon in Israel - civil-society organizations whose main activity is to attack other organizations. Their efforts go beyond the normal give-and-take of democratic discourse, and seems to be directed at halting human-rights advocacy and having the HROs legislated out of existence....
[Hebrew U, Law] Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian: We meet to commemorate the Nakba which was waged against our people and has not yet ended
Dr. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian who received a grant of CAD 379800 to promote education for Palestinian women in Israel smears Israel : Dr. Shalhoub-Kevorkian spoke about the case of Ameer Mahkoul and Dr. Omar Saeed, stating that, "We meet today to commemorate the Nakba, which was waged against our people and has not yet ended, just as the system of persecution, domination, and attempted silencing has not ended. For Ameer and Omar continue to be imprisoned by this state, reminding them and reminding us of the continuing Nakba, and of our unending efforts to reject and resist it."
Amos Goldberg and Assaf Sharon, longtime activists with the Palestinian struggle against their mutual enemy...the Jewish state. No Palestinian Terrorism
I was always left wing, but also a soldier. Suddenly I saw an elderly Palestinian who wanted to plow his field being chased away by a soldier. You identify instinctively with the old man, and you say, 'That soldier is a brute,'" says Goldberg, a doctoral student who is writing his dissertation on Holocaust survivors.
Suddenly you're in reverse mode: My solidarity is unequivocally not with the state, not with its symbols and not with the police. I consider them ... I hold myself back from saying 'the enemy.' After that you can no longer see things as you did beforehand. I have not switched sides, but one's map of identification changes and once it does, there is no going back."
As a researcher who deals mainly with the Holocaust, Goldberg lets history direct his conscience: "At the personal psychological level, this is a matter of moral duty, the duty of those who are bystanders. It might be a large or a small injustice, but there is no need to wait until the situation becomes so extreme. When one sees injustice and racism such as we have here, you have to intervene."
[Hebrew U] Lecturers express their political views when teaching: Students aren't taught to think for themselves but fed views by their activist professors
On May 26th, some Hebrew University students took to the streets, under the slogan 'Occupation Is Here', walking from HU campus to Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem. Besides the students, several lecturers were planned to participate in the protest....
Academic staff should have all the rights of expression every citizen of Israel enjoys. The staff protesting together with the students, though, casts grave doubt over the objectivity of said lecturers, as well as their ability to keep politics away from class. Just as the organizers claim, some lecturers express their political views while educating their students, thus it is likely their worldview is slanted towards the Left-wing, liberal side. Such bias is unacceptable in an academic institution, whose goal it is to educate students to keep an open mind and think for themselves.
Israelis can learn this lesson from the Americans: radicalism, anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is now deeply rooted in some liberal colleges and universities in the Land of the Free. It now seems that Israeli students will not be taught to think for themselves, but would be fed views by activist professors.
[Hebrew U, Language and Education] Taken from 'Australians for Palestine': Israeli Prof Nurit Peled-Elhanan's reaction to the slaughter 31 May 10
The chieftains of Sodom, representing the folk of Gomorrah, the disciples of corrupt ravagers, have ravaged again. This time they attacked boats of good doers who devoted their time and their resources, who risked their life in order to come to the rescue of the ravaged, of the oppressed, of the starved. People who came to defend orphans and widows, were brutally attacked by the ruthluess soldiers of Israel. And the soldiers of Israel, who are always frightened to death by sticks and stones, reacted the only way they know how – by killing. Because this is what they have learned from their highest commander, to kill and kill and kill even more. The master-mind behind the siege of all sieges, the maestro of barriers and checkpoints, of tortures and deprivation has shown us once more what he is capable of. And we, the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah, have nothing but impotent words to protest once more against the horror inflicted on the world by Israel, to deplore Jerusalem that has failed and Judea that has fallen and ourselves who are all falling with it.
[Hebrew U, Minerva] Daphna Golan-Agnon addresses the UN Forum in Support of the Palestinians: Naming and shaming Israel was no longer enough
ISTANBUL, Turkey, 27 May — With tensions high in Jerusalem, and public criticism growing worldwide over the lack of action to alleviate the desperate situation of Palestinians clinging to survival there, experts, students and representatives of non-governmental organizations attending a United Nations Forum called today for an end to Israel's repressive policies in that city, urging fellow members of civil society to mobilize a coordinated, rights-based response.
The United Nations Public Forum in Support of the Palestinian People followed the International Meeting in Support of the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process, held in Istanbul from 25 to 26 May. Participants in both events shared the view that solving the complex and sensitive question of Jerusalem was vital to tackling the wider conflicts and unresolved issues in the Middle East. They similarly decried illegal expansion and consolidation of Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem, as well as provocative measures against Palestinian residents, including house demolitions, evictions and land confiscation.
DAPHNA GOLAN-AGNON, Researcher, Minerva Centre for Human Rights, Hebrew University, said Jerusalem was strictly divided. Palestinian children attended schools largely in rented apartments, and rainwater was not distributed equally. She recalled that, as a child, her son had been confused by the stark differences between East and West Jerusalem, wondering why the East had no sidewalks and why all the street signs were in Hebrew. Jerusalem was a symbol of what should happen in the wider context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; people there were beginning to say "enough is enough."
Pointing out that demonstrations were now taking place on a regular basis, she said her own 20-year-old son had been arrested during an anti-police protest in Jerusalem just two weeks ago. The police had broken his hand but not his spirit, she said, stressing that things were becoming so untenable, that "naming and shaming" Israel was no longer enough. It was time for everyone to start developing a vision of a shared Jerusalem, and examining the past in order to devise a shared future.
[Hebrew U] "I will mourn on Nakba Day" Nurit Elhanan: For those who live here like monsterous golems...the twisted love of a land that isn't theirs
I will mourn on Nakba Day. I will mourn for vanished Palestine most of which I never knew. I will mourn for the holy land that is losing its humanity, its landscape, its beauty and its children on the altar of racism and evil. I will mourn for the Jewish youngsters who invade and desecrate the homes of families in Chikh Jarakh, throw the inhabitants into the street, and then sing and dance in memory of Baruch Goldstein, the infamous murderer of Palestinian children, while the owners of the desecrated houses with their children and old people are sleeping in the rain, on the street, opposite their own homes.
I will mourn for the soldiers and police who protect those wicked Jewish orthodox invaders without any pangs of conscience. I will mourn for the lands of Bil'in and Ni'lin and for the heroes of Bil'in and Ni'lin, many of whom are children aged 10 and 12, who fearlessly stand up for their right to live in dignity on the land of their fathers. I will mourn for the human rights that have been buried for a long time now in this country, for the blood that is dispensable with impunity, for the killings committed with blessings, for the mendacious Zionist myth on which I was educated and for the crushed Palestinian narrative that is forbidden to express itself but the truth of which has returned and the green shoots of which are poking out through the weeds and the racist laws.
[Hebrew U] Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian: Women in the ME and Islamic countries must also fight another tool of colonization: Western propaganda
When discussing violence against women in the Middle East and in Muslim societies, Western Empire propaganda claims that oppression of women is part of the culture and is supported by the women themselves. I have often heard the accusation that the reason for violence against women is religious fundamentalism and Islam. But the logical, corresponding question as to why there has been such a rapid growth of fundamentalist movements is only rarely asked… one should not forget that the failure of capitalism and communism to provide material, spiritual, emotional, and social safety for people encouraged the global rise of religious fundamentalism. We end up with a situation wherein women in the Middle East and Islamic countries need not only fight for equality, anti-discrimination, and social justice, but must also fight another tool of colonization: the Western propaganda machine."
—Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian
Inappropriate behavior by Dr. Alon Liel, lecturer at the Hebrew University and former Foreign Ministry Director General at UN Sponsored anti-Israel conference
Here are a few choice extracts from the UN official release of Liel's contribution to the debate.
Mr. Liel said that everything Mr. Erakat said was true. It looked like the Palestinians had nothing and the Israelis had everything, but Israelis knew they were doomed, too, and dependent on the fate of the Palestinians, he said, adding, "If you will have nothing in the future, we will also have nothing in the future." But at the moment, Israelis did not have that feeling, and they were overconfident....
"We don't have a Mandela in Israel; we have a Netanyahu and a Lieberman," and unless something dramatic happened, things would not work, he lamented.
As for the situation on the ground, Liel said it was unacceptable, both in Gaza and the West Bank. In fact, it was immoral and would only lead to more violence. At the same time, for Israel, the creation of one State with Palestinians - where they had voting rights and so forth - was an even bigger nightmare than the two-state solution. So he proffered to the conference that perhaps the Palestinians should propose that to the Israeli leadership today, adding: "They'll start shivering, I'm telling you."
[Hebrew U, Education] "Israeli Racist Education: Discussion with Nurit Peled-Elhanan" was on Feb 2nd, 2010. Alternative Information Center
The AICafé
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010
Israeli Racist Education:
Discussion with Nurit Peled
Nurit Peled-Elhanan is an Israeli peace activist and professor at Hebrew University.
She's one of the most prominent critical voices against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
[Hebrew University, Political Science] On the attacks on the New Israel Fund and its chair Prof' Naomi Chazan
Washington – Ma'an – Israel's Peace Now movement and Americans for Peace Now on Monday condemned attacks on the New Israel Fund, which has come under fire for funding human rights organizations whose reports appeared in South African jurist Richard Goldstone's UN report on Gaza.
[Hebrew University, School of Social Work & Social Welfare] Prof' Muhammad M. Haj-Yahia Blames Palestinian Wife-Beating on Israel
Their study [3] is titled: "Association between exposure to political violence and intimate-partner violence in the occupied Palestinian territory: a cross-sectional study." And yes, they have found that Palestinian husbands are more violent towards Palestinian wives as a functi'on of the Israeli "occupation"—and that the violence increases significantly when the husbands are "directly" as opposed to "indirectly" exposed to political violence.
...This study was funded by the Palestinian National Authority as well as by the Core Funding Group at the University of Minnesota. The Palestinian Authority is not a disinterested party. But even worse: The data was collected by the Palestinian Central Bureau. These are the people who told the world that Israeli soldiers shot young Mohammed al-Dura, committed a massacre in Jenin, and purposely attacked Palestinian civilians (who just happened to be jihadists dressed in civilian clothing or hostage-civilians behind whom the jihadists hid).
Second, let's note that the study has a political goal which trumps any objective academic or feminist goal. (These researchers claim to have a "feminist" perspective). In my view, this study wishes to present Palestinian men as victims, even when those men are battering their wives. And, it wishes to present Palestinian cultural barbarism, which includes severe child abuse, as also related to the alleged Israeli occupation.
Third, therefore, the study has purposely omitted the violence, including femicide, which is routinely perpetrated against daughters and sisters in "occupied Palestine" and has, instead, chosen to focus only on husband-wife violence and only on couples who are currently married. The honor murders of daughters and sisters by their parents and brothers is a well known phenomenon in Gaza and on the West Bank.
[Hebrew U, Education] Yoel Elizur who analysed "atrocities" committed by soldiers during the first Intifada, is chairman of the psychologists council
The psychologists council recommended Yoel Elitzur of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's School of Education.as chairman, Deputy Health Minister Yaakov Litzman's office was pressured to nominate Elitzur.
Participation in Atrocities Among Israeli Soldiers During the First Intifada: A Qualitative Analysis
Yoel Elizur
School of Education, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, email@example.com
Nuphar Yishay-Krien
Department of Psychology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Atrocities committed by soldiers are a common occurrence that harms not only victims, but also perpetrators, armies, and nations. However, censorship, limited access to information, and the tendency to deny one's evil and project it onto the other impede investigation into how ordinary soldiers cross the line between legitimate fighting and excessive violence. This study examined processes associated with Israeli soldiers' brutal behaviors during the first Intifada. Participants were 21 male combat veterans of two companies stationed in Gaza whose sampling reflected diversity in Israeli society and a wide range of behaviors in the Intifada. Situational factors and social—psychological processes (i.e. modeling, moral disengagement, dehumanization, and deindividuation) were powerful inducers of brutality. The data also showed individual differences in violence, inner—outer directedness, and moral standards. Consequently, five subgroups were identified: Callous/Impulsive, Ideologically Violent, Followers, Restrained, and Incorruptible. The use of these categories to examine the soldiers' unfolding experience over time generated a unique perspective into two less studied dynamics. The first was a synergistic interaction between dispositional and situational factors, manifested in level of brutality and differential subgroup stability of violent behaviors over time. The second was the company as a family-like primary social system that developed inner culture and structural patterns characterized by alignments and social power. Initially, there evolved a culture of brutality with an associated leadership that escalated the violence. A later clash with soldiers who adhered to the army's professional culture transformed the company's culture and structure. This analysis has implications for preventive measures, including the development of morally committed and resolute leadership at both lower and higher echelons of command.
The Price of Ignoring Reality: The Example of Hebrew University's Professor Daphna Golan-Agnon
In sum, for Professor Golan, Israel is a renegade "apartheid" state, and she does not hesitate to draw an odious parallel with the former struggle of the Black population of South Africa against their White oppressors. And, while she opposes academic boycotts--giving the reason that this might affect her own foreign funding--she has no problem with boycotts that would deny Israel material required for its defense or equipment such as bulldozers that could be used to bolster the occupation.
Toward the end of the interview, Professor Golan responds to questions about the nature of Israel and the outlook for the future. "Why is a Jewish majority important?" she asks. She goes on, "When was it a Jewish state? Who invented [this] notion?" And more: "It cannot be a Jewish state, certainly not Jewish and democratic." Perhaps, she ponders, what is called for is "a federation" of Jews and Arabs.
[Hebrew U, Jewish Studies] Book by Hannan Hever: A collection of Hebrew poetry, news & Palestinian testimonies mentioning the Palestinian Nakba
The Palestinian Nakba in the Hebrew Poetery, 1948-1958, is a collection of Hebrew poetry written between the months of January 1948 and December 1958 in which traces of the Palestinian Nakba are present.
Tell not in Gath is an outcome of a long and extensive archival research in which book of Hebrew poetry as well as Hebrew newspaper and periodicals have been searched. The collection also includes testimonies of Palestinians who had lived in Palestine prior to 1948, who tell, in first person, of their lives in Palestine, their deportation from the land, and their lives after it. All testimonies are taken from the Zochrot booklets on the erased Palestinian towns and villages. The book starts with an essay by Prof. Hannan Hever, who also edited the collection.
Tell it not in Gath is a book published by Zochrot, Parrhesia and the Pardes Publishing House, and is the first book published by Sedek: A Journal on the Ongoing Nakba.
[Hebrew University, Religions & Classics] David Shulman and Amiel Vardi in support of Palestinians against Israelis in "Christmas in Sheikh Jarrah"
Below also Vardi's call for action and thank you letter in Hebrew to the local Palesinians and Israeli fellow-activists for supporting him while in Jail.
...I see it in the young people who bear the brunt of this demonstration, who organize it and lead it and cheerfully face the Border Police and the blue police and, much worse, the clandestine Shabak operators week after week. Once again, many of my students are here. They, I am sure, are our future, and I trust them to see it through. They are clearly feeling the bizarre happiness that so often floods you at such moments—the happiness that naturally flows from saying "no" to self-evident evil.
Hebrew U, Education] Nurit Peled-Elhanan: "A year after the Gaza War - Speech at the protest rally". [TAU, History] Shlomo Sand was there too
Good evening to all who came to mark the first anniversary of the Gaza carnage, and to protest on the comfortable complacence which inhabitants of this city and this country exhibit in face of the slow annihilation which goes on and on in Gaza and throughout Palestine.
[Hebrew University, Minerva] Pro-Palestinian activist Daphna Golan singing against 'as many Jews as possible' in Jerusalem: "Everyone can drum"
The Israel Police arrests drums and drummers in order to keep order. And order in Jerusalem means that Jews are by law more equal than Arabs. The Jerusalem Municipality awards the third of its citizens who are Palestinian less than 14 percent of its budget, and its declared policy is segregation and discrimination: the construction of Jewish neighborhoods on land expropriated from Palestinians, the razing of Palestinian homes that were built without a permit, the building of Jewish but not Palestinian schools, the creation of Jewish settlements, protected by security guards and police, in the middle of Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem.
The policy of "preserving a demographic majority" means as few Palestinians in Jerusalem as possible, and as many Jews as possible.
This is the crux of Israel's entire policy. And the police arrest drummers so that the voices challenging this racist order are silenced
[Hebrew University, Hebrew Literature Dept.] Galit Hasan-Rokem on marching with Palestinians in opposition to populate Jerusalem with Jews
Last Friday I participated in a march that started at the Hamshbir square in the center of Jerusalem and ended in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. This is a neighborhood on the "seam line" between the eastern and western sides of the city, near a prayer site at a tomb from the end of the Roman period or the beginning of Byzantine times, a tomb that Jewish tradition dating from the 13th century ascribes to the grave of Simeon the Just. He is a rather anonymous figure, mentioned in the Mishna at the beginning of the Ethics of the Fathers. The Mishna and the historian Josephus Flavius state that Simeon the Just lived several hundred years before the tomb was built.
The march, which was also a quasi-demonstration that took place with police approval, was intended to express opposition to the removal of Palestinian families from the site historically known as Batei Navon, named after the leader of the Sephardi Jews in Jerusalem who bought the houses at the end of the 19th century.
The Palestinian families have lived there since 1948. They were removed not to house the descendants of the land's original owners, but for settlers from an extremist organization working to populate Jerusalem - all of Jerusalem - with Jews.
[Hebrew U, Education] Dr. Nurit Peled-Elhanan to participate in Gaza Freedom March / Nurit Peled on Iran Daily: Israeli Schools Breed Racism
Dr. Nurit Peled-Elhanan, an Israeli mother and recipient of the Sacharov Prize and her brother, writer and peace activist Miko Peled (mikopeled.wordpress.com) will be participating in the Free Gaza March (www.gazafreedommarch.org) this month. Nurit will be on the Israeli side of the wall while Miko, who lives in California, will be marching inside the wall on the Gaza side.
Their father was the late Israeli General turned peace activist Matti Peled. Nurit's daughter, Smadar, was killed by Palestinians in a suicide attack in 1997.
They released the following statement:
"The appeal to march for Gaza even as the killing of innocents continues, reminds us of the appeal by the Jewish poet Bialik, more than a hundred years ago after a massacre of the Jews of Kishinev:
"Arise and go now to the city of slaughter;
Into its courtyard wind your way;
There with your own hand touch, and with the eyes in your head,
Behold on tree, on stone, on fence, on mural clay,
The spattered blood and dried brains of the dead."
In its shameless indignation, only sixty years after Auschwitz, the State of the Jews confines people in ghettoes surrounded by walls and barbed wires, supervised by armed soldiers and their ferocious dogs, and the world looks on in silence.
The blood of the children of Gaza will forever stain those who allow the killing in Gaza today. Israeli leaders and generals must know that they will not be exonerated.
[Hebrew University, Classics & Religions] Ta'ayush Members Dr. Amos Goldberg and Prof. David Shulman in a call to fellow activists on Sheikh Jarrah
The weekly march to Sheikh Jarrah, to the Palestinian houses that have been invaded by Israeli settlers. ...
I look around me: mostly young people, gentle but tough—many students, some I know from my classes,
[Hebrew University, Education] Dr. Nurit Peled-Elhanan in favor of Palestinians, Muslims and Arabs and against Israel, America and Great Britain
Islam in itself, like Judaism in itself and Christianity in itself, is
not a threat to me or to anyone. American imperialism is, European indifference and co-operation is and Israeli racism and its cruel regime of occupation is.
[Hebrew U, Law] Daphna Golan: For more than 42 years...soldiers have obeyed orders and made another people wretched, in "Israel opposition to Goldstone report reflects layers of denial"
For more than 42 years, mothers have fled bad news and soldiers have obeyed orders and made another people wretched. This isn't happening because there is no other way, but because in the view of the generals who lead the army into unnecessary wars, there is no one to talk to, no other way, and it's better not to know.
[Hebrew University, Professor of Humanistic Studies] David Shulman supports terrorists' civil disobedience, in "Palestinians Return to Bir al-'Id"
We speak of the Goldstone report on Gaza and of Abu Mazen's call, this week, for a third, popular Intifada, a non-violent one, like at Bil'in and Na'alin. For years we've been saying that a Palestinian campaign of Gandhian-style civil disobedience is the one thing that could bring the occupation to an end. Israel has no answer to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians marching in non-violent resistance in the territories; if this happens, and the Palestinians declare their state, as I hope and believe they will, the Israeli peace groups—what's left of them—will be marching beside them. Perhaps the Israeli peace camp will rise from the ashes. Happy early-afternoon thoughts: the tender, scary tang of hope.
Dr. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian of Mada Al Carmel complains to Jewish Chronicle concerning "Outrage over the 'rape' poster that demonises Israel"
Mada al-Carmel, published an article in a local newspaper, and sent a press release together with the Arab Forum for Sexuality.
The Arab Forum for Sexuality alone produced and disseminated the poster depicted in the report.
We would like to clarify that Mada al-Carmel supports the right to free expression, including the right of NGO's and other civil society organizations to produce posters and other artistic devices on this and other topics.
We would appreciate it if you make the required retraction to your published article.
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Ph.D.
Director, Gender Studies Program
Mada Al-Carmel, Arab Center for Applied Social Research
[Hebrew U] Daphna Golan: "Apartheid and Occupation, providing an Israeli peace activist perspective", Saturday 21 November 2009
APY Foundation for Co-operation and ICAHD cordially invite you to a conference and discussion on:
South Africa's Apartheid Regime vs Israeli policies and practices in the Palestinian Territory
When: 4-8pm, Saturday 21 November 2009
Where: Notre Dame Centre, Jerusalem (Opposite New Gate)
The conference will explore the definition of Apartheid alongside the South African experience, aiming to provide a more detailed and comprehensive analysis of the Israeli occupation regime. Speakers will explore experiences and strategies of resistance practiced under both regimes and look at different means of opposing the discriminatory, racist and colonial policies and practices pursued by the Israeli State and those affiliated with it.
Dr. Daphna Golan – Director, Partnership for Social Change, Hebrew University Law School and long term Israeli peace activist
Classics at hebrew university: Amiel Vardi calls for activists
volunteers needed in East Jerusalem and high court
[Law, Hebrew University] Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian: Women under Occupation
The issue of education -- when you are really affecting women's choices, women's access to education, women's abilities to develop, you are affecting everything. There is a kind of necropolitics: Israel is controlling life and death. . . .
[Hebrew University, Law] Watch on YouTube: Dr. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, university professor and author blames Israel for Palestinian violence
The Israeli occupation affects the daily lives of Palestinians, especially for women.
The deterioration of the economic, social and health conditions in Palestine is directly linked with violence inside the home. The militarization of space and restrictions imposed upon women is causing a growing crisis in violence against women.
Dr. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, university Professor and author of recent book Militarization and Violence Against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East, speaks about the ordeals of Palestinian women under occupation.
[Hebrew University, Business] Bernard Avishai and his wife Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi [Hebrew University, Literature] attack Israel
The enduring image of the victimized Jew in Western culture was indeed earned by a long history capped by the Holocaust, but the reality of Jews exercising power—financial, cultural and, in Israel, political and military—is what has defined Jews in the last fifty years. Yet we are being asked, in the film and in Goldberg's presentation of it, to accept that the most adequate expression of Jewish power is vengeful and brutally violent. As if the Elephant in the Room is not the fact that Jews actually use sovereign power, among other things, to maintain a settlement regime and an occupation.
[Hebrew U, Law] Daphna Golan: Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid? A Re-Assesment of Israel's Practices in the OPT Under International Law
Thirty years later, I am teaching at the Hebrew University and those invisible dividing lines – unseen yet palpable – separate the campus from its surroundings in the heart of Arab East Jerusalem. The magic line that could not be legitimised in South Africa, between those who have rights and those who do not, runs through the heart of Jerusalem, separating Jews and Palestinians. Israel is perceived as a democratic state, while the Occupied Territories (or "administered territories" as they are officially called in Israel) are under military rule – just for now, until we find a political solution that Israel can live with. Meanwhile, Palestinians have been living in occupied territory for over forty years, with no rights, and Israel, which existed for only 19 years before it conquered the Palestinian Territories and instituted military rule, is still considered a democracy.
For most Israelis, the comparison of Israel with apartheid South Africa is unacceptable. It angers and threatens Israelis in general and liberal Israelis in particular; because it challenges the basic belief that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was imposed upon Israel, and is so unique that it cannot be compared with any other conflict in the world
Yet, even among Israelis, the comparison that was virtually taboo during the eighties and nineties is being heard more and more.
[Hebrew U, English] Louise Bethlehem speaks of Edward Said, Shoah, Nakba, Zochrot, Zionist amnesia, apartheid
I would like to offer as coda and recoding a performance of witness that arises from the latest Israeli war on Gaza (December 2008/January 2009). On January 28th 2009, the dissident organization Zochrot opened an exhibition in Tel Aviv whose substance was the destruction of Gaza but whose sub-text was, plainly, also--witness. The installation came into being around the photographs of the Palestinian artist Sareef Sarhan who photographed Gaza City during and after Israel's bombardment. During the brief intervals when electricity was restored to Gaza, Sarhan distributed these images on the internet. The curator of the eventual exhibition Norma Musih, a longstanding Zochrot activist, responded to the photographs by relaying them to approximately 30 Israeli artists, who then responded in turn. This collective portfolio, a group portrait across a chasm if you like, or better still, across a security fence, an apartheid wall, formed the body of the exhibition. In Musih's words: ―A link to Sarhan's photographs was sent to artists, appealing for their response, their reaction. Some of the artists chose to focus on transforming a single image, while others responded with a different image or a text. All of them viewed Sarhan's photographs. Looked at them, and then looked at them again. The artists' works are evidence of their viewing, as well as being part of it. They serve as a kind of testimony, saying, ‗We saw what is happening in Gaza, we saw and we are responding
Ta'ayush activist [Hebrew U, Comparative Religion] David Shulman reports of disorderly behavior of [Hebrew U, Classics] Amiel Vardi and his student
The prosecution, sensing this atmosphere of impatience, decides to withdraw the charges, and Barkali dismisses the case. For three years the threat of punishment, even prison, has been hanging over Amiel and Eli. For a moment, the threat lifts. But it won't go away so quickly; Amiel has more trials coming up in a week (for being in a Closed Military Zone, countless times). And things are getting harder, consistently harder and more violent, on the ground. It's not so hard to see what lies ahead.
[Hebrew University, Social Work] Iaroslav Youssim promises to fight the present-day Israeli dictatorship through civil disobedience
I am Russian-born Israeli. I was brainwashed during many years by the smart Israeli propaganda machine. I believed that Israel is just fighting terror committed by the "evil people of Palestinians." Still being brainwashed, I served in the Israeli Occupation Forces during the Gaza War. But now my eyes are open: during the last half a year I saw the injustices made to Palestinians by the Israeli establishment in East Jerusalem and elsewhere. And now I promise to fight the present-day Israeli dictatorship through civil disobedience, (even under attacks I subjected to in Israel: police, blackmails, violations of my freedom of speech, etc.) and incite the flame of civil disobedience in other people.
Iaroslav Youssim , Israel
[Hebrew U, The Paul Baerwald School of Social Work] Iaroslav Youssim: Solidarity against the Israeli Occupation's policies in occupied East Jerusalem
Civil society organizations and popular movements call for a weekly march under the title "Standup for Jerusalem". The aim is to create international and local solidarity against the Israeli Occupation's policies in occupied East Jerusalem. In the last recent years, Israel displaced thousands of Palestinians through home demolitions and forced eviction.
[Hebrew University, Classics] Watch Amiel Vardi confronts Israeli army comander and ignores instructions not to enter closed military zone
The activist is filled with passion and upset, and his heart is in his mouth. "You have to give a reason," he says. "I think more than anything you owe it to yourself."
At last the impenetrable commander says, "I have no intention of explaining this to you."
I know my klezmer performances put off some visitors to this site, but boy does my Jewish heart leap up when I hear an Israeli taking on authority with such passion. Israeli Jews also have universalist dreams; the world can be saved, and the Jews are not lost. Let this man find a legion of followers! I asked Dana who my hero is, and he indicated it is Amiel Vardi, a professor of Classics at Hebrew University.
Jewish, Israeli born and speaking Hebrew. He is an amazing guy indeed. One of the driving people in Ta'ayush from the beginning.
Dr. Daphna Golan [Director, Minerva Center, Hebrew University] consultant to Palestinian legal study "Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid?"
Conference participants in photographs:
John Reynolds, Legal Researcher, Al Haq; Dr. Daphna Golan, Minerva Center, Hebrew University; and Dr. Shane Darcy, National University of Ireland – Galway
On Sunday, 16 August 2009, Al-Haq and Adalah held a symposium at the Palestinian Red Crescent Society headquarters in Al-Bireh, West Bank to discuss the recent report of the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa (HSRC), "Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid?: A Re-Assessment of Israel's practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territories under International Law". The symposium was held with the participation of researchers, lawyers and academics from several countries, including Israel, Palestine, South Africa, Ireland and the United Kingdom who wrote the study. The symposium was attended by around 150 lawyers, academics, human rights and political activists, representatives of civil society institutions, and various government and political bodies....The 300-page study was published in May 2009. The researchers concluded that the Israeli occupation, through its laws and practices in the 1967 OPT, has breached the international legal prohibitions of both colonialism and apartheid. According to the study, these findings entail legal consequences not just for the Palestinians and the Israelis, but also for the UN, individual States, and the international community as a whole
[Hebrew University] Daphna Golan, Minerva Center for Human Rights, participated a UN bash-Israel conference
Daphna Golan-Agnon, a senior researcher at Hebrew University's Minerva Center and founder of B'Tselem, alleged that Israel cynically uses international law to pose as a "democratic state" when, according to her, it is not. She asserted that Gaza is an "artificial, invented zone controlled by Israel," claimed that Israel "controls" the "population registry" and "legal system" that are run by Hamas, and advocated for a bi-national state. As mentioned, Golan-Agnon was a consultant to a pseudo-academic study initiated by John Dugard (see below) that demonized Israel as an "apartheid" state.
[Ex- Hebrew University, Law and now, Hartman Institute for Judaic Studies] Dr. Orit Kamir: The enemy is us.
In other words, we are the enemy; the cause of the problem and the suffering, and the source of the solution.
There is a naive charm to such an effusion, motivated--one must suppose--by the author's "tireless" idealism. But the charm is deceptive. Coming as it does from a politically-active academic, it is a further demonstration of the perverted "blame Israel" outlook of the far Left in Israel's intellectual community. Well-meaning and "idealistic" as some of the adherents might be, their outlook provides fodder to those in the international arena who "know what needs to be done" and seek to pressure Israel to surrender its vital interests, and it causes grave harm to the country as it struggles to advance its safety and security.
Yuri Pines [Head Dept of East Asia Studies, Hebrew U] wants Homes of Maj. Klein and 'Terrorist Settlers' Razed
Replying to an e-mail petition against the planned demolition of Klein's home, Pines wrote: "I hope that not only the Major's home will be destroyed, but the entire settlement, and that the mitnachablim will all be gone with the wind."
Mitnachablim is a word invented by Israeli leftists as a slur against Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria. It is a combination of the words mitnachalim (settlers) and mechablim (terrorists).
[Hebrew University, Law] Daphna Golan-Agnon speaks at The UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, Geneva
The Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People will convene a United Nations International Meeting on the Question of Palestine on 22 and 23 July 2009 at the United Nations Office at Geneva. The theme of the Meeting is "Responsibility of the international community to uphold international humanitarian law to ensure the protection of civilians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory in the wake of the war in Gaza".
The objective of the Meeting is to discuss questions related to Israeli violations of international humanitarian law during the recent hostilities in the Gaza Strip
[Hebrew University, Law] Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian blames Israel for the poor state of Palestinian women, in: "Checkpoints and counter spaces"
In the book I look at the day to day life of Palestinian women and try to uncover the effects of militarization and occupation, and the global denial of the ordeals of the Palestinian women in
both the private and the pubic sphere. I try to show that you can never divorce the private sphere from the public sphere and discuss the way that the bodies of Palestinian women are a
battlefield for the occupation.
Hebrew University law courses made to change Israel to a non-Jewish state during academic years 2008/9 and 2009/10
The activities were interesting and also fury-raising. I've learned about the history of oppression in the country, about the media, about the Druze community and about the recent incidents in Peqiin. I saw a movie by 'Breaking the Silent' and learned to look especially about that the things I'm not been told about, and why there are 'black holes' in out knowledge. The different activities refined my understanding that there is always a man with an interest, and that everything has a broader social-cultural connection. I learned, listened and got angry. Mostly, I found out how much I don't know. I wondered if all those emotions meant 'activism': Was I an activist? Have I changed anything?
I like to say I have, that I promoted Jewish-Arab partnership, that I've initiate projects and got to the headlines. Unfortunately, it didn't happened, but I was encouraged to keep on learning, to change my consciousness and that of those around my. Apparently, this is where 'activism' starts, in the will of being active and to refuse to accept thing as they are. During the seminar, a few students from Tel-Hai College had the idea of creating 'activist cells' of students in the academic institutes across Israel. To keep on learning; so that eventually, the fury will raise so high, that we would have to do something in order to change it.
[Sociology, Hebrew University] Nura Resh pretends 'MachsomWatch' Women Fight for Human Rights in Occupied Territories
We are still a small group, mocked by many Israelis and often derided as "unpatriotic," "Arab lovers," or "traitors." Most Israelis believe that the checkpoints are essential as a major contribution to security and we have not been able to change Israeli policy in regard to the Checkpoint regime, let alone the occupation.
[Hebrew University, Law] Prof' Eyal Benvenisti, materials showing why he, supreme court judge candidate is dangerous for Israel
He says that although Israel is not responsible for the acts of the Palestinian Authority toward its citizens, according to the Fourth Geneva Convention, Israel is responsible for its own acts toward Palestinian civilians. In contrast to Shamas, Benvenisti argues that because closing Gaza and the West Bank is a security precaution, one cannot distinguish between collective punishment and security concerns. In contrast to Ratner, Benvenisti says the settlers are not combatants and that if they shoot to kill, they should be tried as murders, not for war crimes.
[Hebrew University, Faculty of Law] Dr. Nadra Shalhub-Quarquian: State oppression called main obstacle to freedom for Beduin women
The oppressive laws and policies implemented by the State of Israel since its creation are the main obstacle to personal and economic freedom for thousands of Beduin women here, according to Dr. Nadra Shalhub-Quarquian, project director of research on women's issues at Mada Al-Carmel Institute and lecturer in the Hebrew University's social work and criminology departments.
[Hebrew University, Psychology Dept.] Eyal Niv: End Police Presence in Holy Places
Today (June 23, 2009), Israeli Minister for Public Security Yitzhak Aharanovitch (Avigdor Lieberman's party) visited the Temple Mount/Haram Assharif, only days after publicly using a racist slur ("arabush") against Arabs. Large police forces, armed to the teeth, descended on the Temple Mount without any real justification, with the sole purpose of creating strife. As we all remember, Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount nine years ago led to wide protest across the Muslim world, protest that culminated in the al-Aqsa Intifada (the Second Intifada or the Intifada of 2000), which claimed many lives on both sides of the Green Line. While Obama reaches out to the Muslim world with a gesture of peace, Aharanovitch makes a rude gesture and a boastful show of power, which is not only unnecessary but also dangerous.
[Institute of Chemistry, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem] Victoria Buch died
Professor Victoria Buch, the key figure behind Occupation Magazine, died on Sunday, 21 June in Jerusalem after long illness.
[Hebrew University] Lecture by Dr. Adel Manna. Symposium at the Zochrot Gallery
The historian, Dr. Adel Manna will discuss the range of effects of the 1948 war on the Arab/Palestinian minority remaining in Israel (1949-2009). In addition to the general national aspects of losing a homeland, freedom, home, land and citizenship in an independent state, the special meanings of the Nakba for various sectors will be emphasized, such as the "present absentees", the loss of the Palestinian city and the fact that, at best, the Arabs in Israel became "present absentees", but more usually, representatives of the enemy within the state (a fifth column). Indeed, it is clear that the Nakba was not only a historic event, but also a primordial "inferior" status to which the Palestinians in Israel have been pushed since 1948 and up to the present.
[Hebrew University] Roni Hammermann's organization is accused of publishing lies on their website and thus undermining ongoing investigation
Our reports of the last months reflect our struggle to uphold the standing of a due trial and the stubborn attempt of the police to circumvent it. The judges, as you can see, play an ambiguous role. Some of them stand up for the principle of a public trial, but unfortunately, the majority surrenders to the demands of the police.
Prof. David Shulman [HUJI, Comparative Religion] and [Ben Gurion University, teaching assistant, Social Work] Ofra Ben Porat fight against Israel
There are the long metal poles, and Amiel hunted all over Jerusalem for the cloth panels, in the color of the Palestinian flag, to tie the poles together. If we get the damned thing up before the settlers and the soldiers attack, it will be a bright burst of red-green-black- white against the stark backdrop of the brown, baked hills....
My colleague David Loy, philosopher of Buddhism from Xavier University, in south Hebron for the first time, smiles at me: "I haven't had so much fun since the 60's!" We pass the well—last month's goal—and keep going into the Security Zone, and by now we can see, not far from us, jeeps unloading heavily armed soldiers and groups of settlers in their Shabbat white, all converging on us from above....
I seek out the commanding officer, a heavy-set career soldier, now standing a little apart, and I say to him: "Look at what you've just done, look at the absurdity of it. Forget about the Closed Military Zone and your piece of paper with or without the signature of your superior. Just look at the facts. These settlers have stolen this land from its rightful owners, and you've helped them do it. It's totally crazy. They have no right to be here, and you know it."
[Hebrew University, Senior Lecturer in Classics] Amiel Vardi remains in Jail and taken to the Jerusalem court after anti-Israel provocations this weekend
Two of the Israeli activists Amiel V. and Shai G. remain in jail. They will be taken to the Jerusalem court tomorrow morning.
During July 2008 two Hebrew University students were indicted for being members of Al-Qaeda, planned to carry out terrorist attacks in Israel
The six, some of them students at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem , were members of a closed religious network in Jerusalem which planned to set up an Al-Qaeda network and carry out terrorist attacks against Israel . On July 18 they were indicted in the Jerusalem district magistrate's court.
The Israel security forces recently detained six Israeli and East Jerusalem Arabs, some of them students. They planned to set up an Al-Qaeda network and planned to carry out terrorist attacks in Israel, including downing the helicopter of the American president during his visit to Jerusalem.
Ibrahim Nashef , 22, from Taibeh , studying physics and computers at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem .
Muhammad Nijm , 24, from Nazareth , studying chemistry at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Interrogation of the six revealed that they belonged to a radical Muslim group which customarily met in Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem . They planned to establish an Al-Qaeda network in Israel to implement the organization's ideology. In February 2008 the group joined Al-Qaeda.
[Hebrew University] Amiel Vardi and Amos Goldberg were arrested by Israeli police for entering closed military zone
There were six members of the Israeli anti-occupation organisations, Ta'ayush and Sons of Abraham, who refused to retreat with the group and remained at the outpost site in the "closed military zone," and the Police responded by arresting the six Israelis. These six were Yehuda Agos (Ta'ayush), Amos Goldmen (Sons of Abraham), Miriam (Ta'ayush), Dorit Gadmen (Ta'ayush), Omar Sheri (Ta'ayush) & Amiel Vardi (Ta'ayush). A Palestinian man, Wael Al-Zater, was also briefly detained for unknown reasons but was released within the hour. At the time this article was written it was uncertain whether the six Israelis were charged or had been released.
[Hebrew University, Education] Nurit Peled Elhanan to speak in Vienna, Austria. Topic: Racism in Israel. Israeli education vis-a-vis the Palestinians
As a professor of education Peled-Elhanan has conducted extensive research on the textbooks used in Israel. She is involved with the new association ICEO (International Committee on Education and Occupation), a joint educational project called Education as Dialogue, which she co-chairs with Professor Sami Adwan of Bethlehem University.
Ofer Neiman [Hebrew University, Computer Science] calls for refusal and mutiny amongst Israeli teenagers
Dear Teenager,
If you too understand that the siege on Gaza and the occupation of the west bank are immoral, If you too refuse to take a part in the policies of oppression and killing, if you too are thinking of not joining the army, If you want to raise your voice and act against the occupation, and in favor of peace - Join the Shministim letter 2009-2010 !
[Hebrew University and Tel Aviv University, Sociology Departments] Maya Rosenfeld: System of Aid to Palestinian Refugees
Above all, the perpetuation of UNRWA is indicative of the ongoing failure of the international community to use the power necessary to bring about a comprehensive solution to the Israeli –Palestinian conflict in accordance with the premises of international law and with the relevant UN resolutions. In fact, in light of that failure and with more than a grain of irony it may be argued that the continuation of UNRWA does a great service to the international community. After all, if not for the "cushioning" presence of UNRWA, the adoption of measures that the main international players have so far been reluctant to employ, like sanctions against Israel and the deployment of a UN force throughout the oPt, would have become unavoidable.
[Hebrew University, Law] Dr. Nadera Shalhoub Kevorkian participates The Palestine Right to Return Coalition convention May 2009
JOIN US to work together to bring the days of RETURN closer!
Featured Speakers:
Strategy & tactics discussions: Expert panel discussions will include activists accomplished in the following campaigns: boycotts, divestment and sanctions, refugee support, student/youth activism, Al-Awda educational resources, and chapter building and registration.
Exiled Archbishop of Jerusalem Hilarion Cappucci, Al-Jazeera commentators/correspondents Ghassan Ben Jeddo and Khaled Dawoud, Ittijah founder Dr. Hatim Kanaaneh, Law professor and Mada al-Carmel researcher (Haifa) Dr. Nadera Shalhoub Kevorkian,
[Hebrew University, Language and Education] Dr. Nurit Peled Elhanan is a post-Zionist. Did I say "post"? She is more Palestinian than Arafat. Interview
It is a racist act that is happening here now. Destroying a race, destroying a people, destroying a culture by erasing villages, by having no linguistic landscape in Arabic, by not respecting the language and by universities being unwilling to give a single day off on an Arab holiday. Once I gave a day off and they nearly booted me out. You understand? When verbal attacks are tolerated physical attacks become acceptable. On television there is no report about those who are harmed, what happens to them. And no one asks. What happens with those children who are dying there by the dozens, but 'the [Israeli] cattleman was lightly wounded.' The cattleman was lightly wounded and because of that it is necessary to kill the whole world. On al-Jazeera I saw a mother sitting with the three small bodies of her children beside her and she doesn't know what to do. No one knows about it, there is no hospital, no medicines and no one takes an interest because it is them. It's shocking. That's what I am crying about. It's not a political matter, it's a human matter."
Your identification with them is total. What is happening to the residents of the south does not seem to interest you. It's just them, them and them.
"Right, because I am ideologically and overtly on the side of the weak, and now it is them."
And what about the residents of the south?
"As well".
But I don't hear the same fervour from you.
"Because there the cattleman was lightly wounded and in Gaza children are getting killed by the hundreds."
[Hebrew University, Gilo Center] Professor Bashir Bashir: I am surprised at the TRIBALISM & PATHOLOGICAL NARCISSION practised in Israel
Palestinians today are not after a viable state as is often discussed in the international media. The Palestinians want an 'independent sovereign state' that answers their minimal aspirations. Today, Palestinians are realistic enough to concede that Israel exists on 78 per cent of their historic homeland. The demand is not for claim, revenge or for the return of this land. The demand is for a sovereign state on the 22 per cent of the land which including the Gaza, West Bank and East Jerusalem. Even Hamas is prepared to accept this proposal.
Instead, what is proposed now is only about 70 per cent of this 22 per cent.
This is not acceptable to the Palestinian people. If Jerusalem cannot be divided and the two state solution is not working - primarily if not exclusively due to Israel's lack of sincere intent - then I say, let us look at other ways of settling the conflict.
The other possible and innovative solution that comes to mind is a 'bi-national state'. I propose one state for Arabs and Jews with equal rights.
[Department of Economics, The Hebrew University] "The Gaza war" By Dr. Shmuel Amir
There is a background and a history to this killing, this slaughter that is taking place in Gaza: the colonial relations between Jews and Palestinians in Israel that began many years before the creation of the State of Israel. Particularly astonishing is the ratio of killed over the years and especially in the Gaza war, which stands at about 1 (Israeli) to 100 (Palestinians). That ratio is not coincidental, but well describes the balance that is considered normal in colonial wars.
Debate over [Hebrew U, Chemistry Dept.] Victoria Buch's "History and 'morals' of ethnic cleansing: Reflections after Gaza invasion"
Dear Victoria Buch,
You might be pleased to know that your article has appeared on a number of websites, apart from "Occupation Magazine."
But I get the impression from your writing that the Jews of this land are indeed guilty of Original Sin. That we have no right to have our own state and no matter what we do or omit to do, we are always wrong. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
You mention correctly that this land was "already inhabited by another nation." But hadn't there always been Jews living here? Or were we a totally alien nation that suddenly descended upon that other nation? And isn't it true to say that the Arabs hadn't ruled Palestine long before the start of Ottoman rule in 1518? So, did the Arabs have more rights to this land than the Jews when the Ottoman Empire crumbled?
The Hebrew University Law School's Radical-Leftist Statewide Seminar for Student-Activists
Witness testimonies of soldiers who have served in Hebron – Ilan Fathi, Breaking the Silence
- Fadi Shbeita, Reut-Sadaka
Sustainable economy: the ecological footstep and the culture of consumption
- Tomer Lavi, Mahapach-Taghir, Uriel Ne'eman, Green Course
It makes me mad, and I'll say that on the internet
- Hanan Cohen, SHATIL
Rehabilitation of women working in prostitution - the dilemmas of everyday therapeutic and legal work
- Carlos Sztyglic, SHATIL
Security and the threat of nuclear weapons from a feminist viewpoint
- Amani Dayif, Isha L'Isha – Haifa Feminist Center
The Arrangements (Hesderim) Law – Valeria Nahmoud, Forum of Organizations to Abolish the Arrangements Law
The struggle over higher education in Israel
- Panel: Prof. Gadi Algazi, Tel-Aviv University, Sharaf Hassan, Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Yonatan Green, Student Association at Ben-Gurion University
- Hanan Hadad, Mossawa Center
The global economic crisis and its implications
- Dr. Efraim Davidi, Social Economic Academy
Responsibility, sitting on the fence and other "easy" solutions
- Dr. Ishai Menuhin, The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel
White gold, black labor
- Conversation with Jacki Edri
Tour 1 – to the unrecognized villages in the Negev - The Forum for Coexistence in the Negev - Dukium
[Dept. of Physical Chemistry, Hebrew University] Victoria Buch: "History and 'morals' of ethnic cleansing: Reflections after Gaza invasion"
I arrived in Israel 40 years ago. It took me many years to understand that the very existence of my country, as it is today, is based on an ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. The project started many years ago. Its seed can be traced to the basic fallacy of the Zionist movement, which set out to establish a Jewish-national state in a location already inhabited by another nation. Under these conditions, one has, at most, a moral right to strive for a bi-national state; establishing a national state implies, more or less by definition, ethnic cleansing of the previous inhabitants.
[Hebrew University, Education] Nurit Peled Elhanan: "The pogrom carried out by the thugs of the Occupation"
The pogrom being carried out by the thugs of the Occupation army against the residents of the Gaza Strip is known to everyone and yet the world is impotent as always. I call upon all of us, who have won a privilege as well as duty by receiving the Sakharov prize, to arise and go to Gaza and any other city of oppression and slaughter; to defy all blockades and high walls and not to give up until all barriers are broken.
[Hebrew U, Spinoza Institute] Ishay Menuchin: "The silence of the Israeli public in the face of oppression" rampant in Israeli society
We expect individuals in a democratic society to act "when horror descends upon us like the rain". We expect that they will assume responsibility not only for themselves and their individual acts, but also for the behavior of their society and its members.
In our society there is a steady increase of oppression against its exploited and weakened members – women, minority groups, disabled, and those living under the Occupation.
[Hebrew U] Adal Manna and Israeli legal team support Palestinian propaganda: "Association for Civil Rights published report probing bias in Israel in 2008, says Israeli Arabs systematically discriminated against
Exploring the matter of discrimination, the report states that since the inception of the State of Israel, Israeli Arabs have been subject to discrimination via legislation, the allocation of resources and through the existence of bodies such as the Jewish Agency and Jewish National Fund.
With some 90,000 Arabs living in mixed cities, the differences between the Jewish and Arab neighborhoods is evident is all aspects of life and the fabric of the relations between the Arab and Jews living in these cities is riddled with violence and racism, as seen in the Yom Kippur riots in Akko.
The report goes on to note severe discrimination in the allocation of housing land, saying that while the Arab population had grown seven times over since 1948, about 50% of the land previously owned by Arab has been confiscated.
Alex Sinclair [Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies, Hebrew University]: "Obama must help Israel break its territorial addiction"
Israel is like an alcoholic, except we are addicted to territories, not to tequila.
Just as an alcoholic denies that he has an addiction, we too deny ours by talking about 'painful compromises' without making any, or by waiting until we have already resigned from politics before daring to tell truth, or by moaning about religious extremists while voting for factions which in turn give these fundamentalists our money.
[Hebrew University, The Institute of Contemporary Jewry] Amos Goldberg / Hebron like you've never imagined it
A bi-national mode of thinking may be more appropriate for Hebron, one that will recognise both the Jewish and Palestinian claims over the city.
Likewise a settlement should recognise some sort of joint sovereignty both on the municipal and national levels. Moreover, perhaps this is the best settlement not only for Hebron but for all of Israel.
[Hebrew U] David Shulman's new chapter to his 'Dark Hope' activist dairy- "Samu'a and Asa'el", supporting Palestinians against Israel
since we know we're officially persona non grata in these parts, classed by the army command as troublemakers and provocateurs. Mixed parties of Palestinian-Israeli peace activists unsettle the natural order of things....
I kept wanting to scream out: what about the real act of violence at Um al-Kheir, the brutal destruction on government orders of those miserable tin shacks and the further impoverishment of innocent people?
Michael M Karayanni, Faculty of Law, Hebrew University / Choice of Law Under Occupation: How Israeli Law Came to Serve Palestinian Plaintiffs
Conflict of laws doctrines can evolve in a manner that accommodates special inter-jurisdictional relations, such as federal and confederate schemes of government. Apparently, such doctrines also evolve in order to accommodate yet another mode of inter-jurisdictional relation, namely that of occupation. This article seeks to explore the molding of Israeli choice-of-law doctrine in respect of civil disputes implicating litigants from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip when these territories were still under total Israeli occupation. Beyond the special conflicts concerns articulated in this context, the articles reveals how choice-of-law fairness concerns could be of special value in the context of territorial occupation - a direction in which two recent Israeli Supreme Court decisions seems to be heading.
[Hebrew U] Israel Law Review/Forty Years after 1967: Reappraising the Role and Limits of the Legal Discourse on the Occupation
The latest issue of the Israel Law Review (Vol. 41, no. 1, 2008) contains a symposium (based on papers presented at this conference) on "Forty Years after 1967: Reappraising the Role and Limits of the Legal Discourse on Occupation in the Israeli-Palestinian Context." Contents include:
Yuval Shany, Introduction
Martti Koskenniemi, Occupied Zone - A Zone of Reasonableness?
Amichai Cohen, Rules and Standards in the Application of International Humanitarian Law
Yuval Shany, Binary Law Meets Complex Reality: The Occupation of Gaza Debate
Grant Harris, Human Rights, Israel, and the Political Realities of Occupation
Kenneth Watkin, Maintaining Law and Order during Occupation: Breaking the Normative Chains
Yaël Ronen, Illegal Occupation and Its Consequences
Rotem Giladi, The Jus Ad Bellum/Jus in Bello Distinction and the Law of Occupation
Neomi Gal-Or, Suspending Sovereignty: An Alternative to Occupation in the 21st Century?
Tristan Ferraro, Enforcement of Occupation Law in Domestic Courts: Issues and Opportunities
Dr. Rabah Halabi [Hebrew U] participated in a workshop "The Roles of Palestinian Intellectuals in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories"
Dr. Rabah Halabi from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem opened the workshop with a review of the effects of the 1967 Israeli occupation on the relations between Palestinians in Israel and the OPT. Halabi argued that it is through the physical-military separation between the two areas that psychological differences grew between the two groups of Palestinians. Halabi also detailed how Israel implements socio-economic policies that further drive a wedge between 1948 and 1967 Palestinians and have a detrimental impact on the identity of Palestinians within Israel.
[Hebrew U, Senior Lecturer in Classics] Amiel Vardi: We urgently need volunteers able to stay some hours with the Da'ana family in Hebron
We urgently need volunteers able to stay some hours with the Da'anafamily in Hebron. The house is the nearest to Federman's outpost, and is underconstant attacks by settlers since last Saturday. Israeli activistswho were there tonight report heavy stoning and attempts to break intothe house. The settlers websites call for an even large event theretoday at 10 AM We urgently need people to replace those already there, to takephotos and help the family in their contact with security forces.
Yael Ronen [postdoctoral fellow, Minerva Center for Human Rights, Hebrew University] STATUS OF SETTLERS IMPLANTED BY ILLEGAL REGIMES UNDER INTERNATIONAL LAW
This is not an exhaustive catalogue of regimes that were or still are refused recognition because of their illegality. Conspicuously absent from its coverage is Israel's purported annexation of East Jerusalem in 1967 and of Golan Heights in 1981. This case differs from others in a number of aspects. Two are particularly important. First, there has been no concrete negotiation over these areas, and therefore there has been absolutely no attempt to regulate the status of Israeli settlers in them. Accordingly, the present study may shed light on potential avenues of discussion, but there is as yet nothing to learn from this case.
Second, the present study concerns situations where the settlers brought in under the illegal regime wish to remain in the territory when sovereignty over it reverts or transfers to a legal
regime. In contrast, Israeli settlers are unlikely to wish to remain in territory under Syrian or Palestinian sovereignty. Thus, their status will raise different questions to those examined
[Hebrew U, Senior Lecturer in Classics] Amiel Vardi encouraged his daughter to refuse since the age of 12
But Sahar Vardi, 18, from Jerusalem who, like Mr Nir, refuses to serve because she disagrees with the occupation, said she felt less safe due to Israeli soldiers' presence in the West Bank.
"I don't see what they do as protecting me," she said. "I have no doubt that, at the end of the day, the army's operations lead more Palestinians to want to commit terror acts against Israelis."
Ms Vardi, encouraged to become an activist by her father – a university lecturer and activist in a group promoting Arab-Jewish co-operation – participated in her first peace protest at age 12. Since then she has been arrested by police five times in demonstrations whose causes ranged from Palestinian rights to animal protection and teachers' rights. Her activism on Palestinian issues made her realise she does not want to join the army.
"The more time I spent in the occupied territories, the more I encountered soldiers from their not-so-friendly sides – including shooting at us protesters – the more I realised that this wasn't a system I wanted to be part of," she said.
[Hebrew U, Politics] Zeev Sternhell / Colonial Zionism
In Zeev Sternhell's latest article, he might consider some kind of apology to the Jewish "settlers" of Judea and Samaria for writing the following in his Haaretz column in 2001:
"...No doubt about the legitimacy of the armed resistance in the territories themselves. If only the Palestinians had a bit sense, they would have been concentrating their struggle against the settlements, not hurting women and children and would avoid shooting at Gilo, Nahal Oz and Sderot. They should also avoid detonating explosives on the western side of the Green Line. This way the Palestinians themselves would delineate the outline for a solution that will be undoubtedly achieved in the future".
Now Sternhell is saying:
"I explained my position regarding the settlers: The lives of Jews living on both sides of the Green Line are "equally precious."
Hebrew U, Computer Science] About conscientious objector Ofer Neiman who was kicked out of an intelligence unit of the Israeli Air Force
While hundreds of Yesh Gvul activists have been jailed for being
conscientious objectors, Ofer Neiman, 37, a computer science lecturer from Jerusalem, was kicked out of an intelligence unit of the Israeli Air Force (AIF) where he served.
"I refused to be part of an intelligence unit which provided information on the possible bombing of civilian targets in the territories," Neiman told IPS. "I also began a campaign of letter writing to the then IDF chief of staff, Dan Halutz."
Halutz was responsible for ordering the dropping of a one-tonne bomb on a crowded residential apartment building in a densely populated Gaza neighbourhood in 2002. The bomb killed Hamas leader Salah Shehade. Amongst the civilian casualties were 14 children.
Bashir Bashir [Hebrew U, Political theory] promotes one-state solution and right of return
Palestinians are not only after a workable, sustainable, and viable Palestinian state. This is not what we want. Palestinians are after a sustainable and viable Palestinian state that secures and answers their national right -- that brings them emancipation, national determination, the return of their lands, the 1967 borders, and a solution to the refugee problem including the honoring of the right of return.
If we look at what is happening on the ground, and we look in terms of coming to terms with reconciliation and historical injustice, I think we remain with very few options to come to terms with these historical and empirical de facto things on the ground.
We will come to realize that the one-state solution in the form of a bi-national state where the bi-national state is securing and honoring the collective rights of the Jewish Israelis and the collective rights of the Palestinian Arabs and guaranteeing universal citizenship rights to everyone seems to be the most appealing and desirable solution.
Israel Academia Monitor denounce the attack against Prof' Zeev Sternhell
Prominent Israeli historian Professor Ze'ev Sternhell was lightly woundedin the early hours of the morning on Thursday after a pipe bomb went offoutside his front door on Shai Agnon St. in Jerusalem. The explosionoccurred as Sternhell was locking the outer gate of his home at around 1:00am, he sustained minor injuries to his legs and was evacuated to the ShaareZedek Hospital for treatment. Police were alerted to the scene.
About Ze'ev Sternhell [Political Science at the Hebrew U] in "Zionism's dying - a change in Israeli perspective?"
When the public finally realized that if the Jewish national movement does not absorb universal foundations of human rights, democracy and the rule of law it will doom itself to destruction, a force had already arisen over the Green Line that now threatens to drown all of Israel. Thus a minority took control of the fate of the entire society and held it hostage, due both to the left's ideological impotence and a lack of character, determination and leadership. If society does not find the emotional strength to remove the noose of the settlements, nothing but a sad memory will remain of the Jewish state as it still exists."
Whether Sternhell's realizations are the harbinger of a change in
perspective of the Israeli public can be judged from the comments - a very curious mix of supportive realism and antagonistic hyperbole. I'll go with comment 107 by
Margot Salom: "its really good to hear about the imminent death of Zionism - let it be quick and allow Jewish ethics to return to Israel."
Anti-Israel David Kretzmer [emeritus, international law, Hebrew U]: Shaul Mofaz committed offences, some of which fall into the category of war crimes
David Kretzmer, emeritus professor of international law at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, says that accounts of the briefing by Mr Mofaz give rise "to a grave suspicion" that he "committed serious offences, some of which at least, fall into the category of war crimes".
The letter to the Attorney General, Menachem Mazuz, refers to a book by two Israeli journalists, Raviv Drucker and Ofer Shelah, which says that Mr Mofaz, after ensuring he was not being officially recorded, called for a Palestinian death toll of 70 per day.
Professor Kretzmer tells Mr Mazuz that one lesson of the corruption inquiry into Mr Olmert is that it is best to investigate candidates for high office before they reach it.
Palestinian conference was held in Paris with Israeli academics such as Ilan Pappe and Zeev Sternhell
Zeev Sternhell, an Israeli historian of right-wing European mass movements, professor at the Hebrew University, author of a very important recent book on the myths of Israeli society (the main ones of which -- that it is a liberal, socialist, democratic state -- he demolished completely in an extraordinarily detailed analysis of its illiberal, quasi-fascist, and profoundly anti-socialist character as evidenced by the Labour Party generally, and the Histadrut in particular). ...
Sternhell during the final session admitted that a grave injustice was committed against the Palestinians, and that the essence of Zionism was that it was a movement for conquest, then went on to say that it was a "necessary" conquest.
Israel? The mother of all evil - by The Hebrew University's N.Zoagada
In an attempt "to out-shine" the senior post-Zionist lecturers in their campus, a group of young academics from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem established a new left-wing organization that put the onus on Israel for all the ills in the region and see almost nothing wrong on the other side.
[Hebrew U, Political Science] Prof' Ze'ev Sternhell spreads his poison in Haaretz, again: "Zionism's dying between Hebron and Yitzhar"
The Zionist Enterprise," said Berl Katznelson in 1929, when he summed up the first 10 years of the Ahdut Ha'Avoda movement, is a "conquest enterprise." And in the same breath he added: "It is not by chance that I am using military terms to describe the settlement of the country." And in fact, Zionism was a movement of conquest, and all means were permitted to carry out the task.
However, what was essential and therefore justified in the pre-state days is now assuming an ugly and violent form of colonial occupation: the authoritarian regime in the territories, the creation of two legal systems, the placing of the army and police at the service of the settlement movement, the robbing of Palestinian lands. These all symbolize not the fulfillment of Zionism but rather its burial. It is there, between Hebron and Yitzhar, that the settlements are burying the democratic Jewish state.
HU won't let terrorist finish his doctorate due to security considerations
Channel 2 had also reported that a table in the lab had been cleared for Hadmi's return and that the lab director, Prof. Amiram Goldblum, had intimated that Hadmi could potentially return to his studies.
However, Sulitzeanu clarified that while a student had been asked to vacate the office he used once a week, it was not for Hadmi but for a full-time university employee who needed an office five days a week.
"Prof. Goldblum was misquoted by Channel 2 and he plays no part in the decision-making process regarding this matter," the university said in a statement.
Hebrew U. to allow convicted terrorist to finish his doctorate
Hebrew University wants to allow a convicted Arab terrorist to be allowed back, Channel 2 TV reported Sunday.
"Hadmi will not be returning to the laboratories or to the university. The Hebrew University has agreed to review his thesis to determine if he is eligible to continue on to a PhD, but he has been specifically barred from the laboratory due to security considerations," university spokeswoman Orit Sulitzeanu told the Post Tuesday.
[Hebrew University] Zeev Sternhell speaks of Israel's "Occupation" in: "The ever-rising price"
The Six Day War took Israel back an entire generation. It has now become clear that colonial rule encourages the mixture of populations, and occupation requires seeking destructive solutions in terms of human rights. We should not delude ourselves: A democracy of lords will not last long. If we consciously create second-class citizens, if we anchor discrimination in a law armed against the intervention of the Supreme Court - the only gatekeeper of our liberty - we necessarily undermine the foundations of democracy. Universal rights are the heart and soul of a democracy; the moment these are denied to some segments of the population, they will eventually wither away for everyone.
The worst thing of all is anchoring discrimination in law: then it becomes the norm, and society becomes accustomed to it. People will be able to sleep peacefully then, too.
Turning students into anti-israel activists: Hebrew University, Academy-Community Partnership for Social Change
Dr. Daphna Golan, teaches the course "Human Rights in Israeli Society", and directs the The Human Rights Fellows Program, The Minerva Center for Human Rights, Faculty of Law, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Leah Even
Najwan Khateeb
Moran Roy
Steering Committee
Khuloud Aderis, Co-Director, Mahapach
Jaber Asaqla, Director of Arab Community Programs, SHATIL
Eyad Barghoty, Baladna
Dalia Dromi, Director, Bimkom
Haggith Gor Ziv, Director, Center for Critical Pedagogy, Kibbuzim College of Education
Iman Kassis, Director of Educational Programs, Sawa – Rape Crisis Center, Jerusalem
Enass Masri, SHATIL – Be'er Sheva
Nadem Nashef, Director, Baladna
Fadi Shbeita, Director, Sadaka-Reut
Carlos Sztyglic, Associate Director, SHATIL
Dr. Haim Yacobi, Department of Politics and Government, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Adv. Sharon Zionov Arad, Clinical Legal Education Center, Faculty of Law, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
[Political Science] Dr. Yishai Menuhin, director of PCATI: Eradicate soldier violence against Palestinian detainees
A report by the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI)
published this morning reveals the widespread phenomenon of violence against bound Palestinian detainees by IDF soldiers and the almost absolute indifference of the IDF, the Ministry of Defense and the Knesset towards the existence of this henomenon and the need to take action in order to eradicate it completely.
[Sociology Dept.] Moshe Zuckermann - A translate from German of "Internal lines separating"
The fact that the raison d'etre of the state given hegemony of the Jews are simply not tolerate with the civil claim of a "state of all its citizens."
Without therefore legally to be officially enshrined, in Israel live large Arab minority in practice and in the context of established political institutions to this day as it structurally as a category of second-class citizens. This is not only in the normative angezweifelten legitimacy of Arab parliamentarians as a coalition artner Zionist established parties in crucial issues, such as the radical promotion of the peace process with the
Palestinians, but also to the discrimination against the Arab sector in the development of its infrastructure, the distribution of state economic resources and the general occupation of socially, politically, economically and culturally important items of power and control positions.
Daphna Golan: Israelis imagine they are living in a democracy
She argued that people within both the Israeli and Palestinian communities are in denial. Israelis still deny that Arabs were dispossessed of their homes and land when the Israeli state was founded in 1948
[General and Comparative Literature] Ilana Hammerman and her group curse soldiers at check points
Moreover, curses and replies like those you gave to the soldiers who were present at the scene shame your position. You are showing weakness and abase yourselves when you curse soldiers. There is no place for a group of people like you for the purpose of observation.
[Hebrew U, Computer Science] Ofer Neiman, in an interview, supports selective sunctions against Israel
Ofer Neiman, an activist with Yesh Gvul, at an outdoor cafe just outside the gates of Jerusalem's Old City. The 37-year-old served three years' active duty and nine years as a reservist in an elite intelligence unit of the Israeli Air Force. After observing the role of the Air Force in carrying out operations against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories in violation of international law, Neiman requested and was granted transfer to a non-active unit and later received a standard discharge letter. He was not prosecuted.
Neiman said his group still pursues its original goal of supporting military resisters, but has expanded its efforts to enlist support from people around the world to put pressure on Israel to end its occupation of Palestinian lands.
About Late Baruch Kimmerling, Professor of sociology at the Hebrew U, taken from his essay "My Holiday, Their Tragedy"
The Jewish - Arab conflict, and the Jewish - Palestinian conflict in particular, has had many victims and caused great suffering. I admit that I am closer to the victims from my own people, for personal reasons and because of my familiarity and personal experience with many of them or members of their families. What can I do? A person is closer to his own friends, tribe, and people...
Independence Day is a holiday for me, but also an opportunity for intense self-introspection. A person needs a state and land, and this is my land, my homeland, despite the fact that I was not born here.
And it is also א propos to briefly juxtapose the underlined sentimental statements of Kimmerling's "My Holiday", with those a bit more poignantly expressive of "Their Tragedy" than simply " Jewish - Arab conflict, and the Jewish - Palestinian conflict in particular, has had many victims and caused great suffering", of the late Israeli scholar, Tanya Reinhart, professor of linguistics, also at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, from her 2002 book "How to end the war of 1948":
[Hebrew U] David Shulman work with Palestinian villagers against the Jewish settlers, in: Reading Between the Lines: Celebrating complexity
Khirbet Khizeh is important for its context - who wrote it and when - not merely its content. S. Yizhar was, of course, the pen name of Yizhar Smilansky, a professor, Knesset member and one of the great scribes of modern Hebrew. Yizhar was a Zionist who helped to shape Israel, politically and culturally. That someone of this ilk could publish Khirbet Khizeh - and in 1949, no less - proves that the founding myths of Israel were not destroyed by the occupation of the West Bank or by the New Historians. The founding myths of Israel were themselves myths. The moral complexities of Israel's birth were clear from the outset, and we can thank Khirbet Khizeh for reminding us of this.
Which is why I must take issue with one aspect of Ibis's Khirbet Khizeh: David Shulman's afterword. Shulman, a professor of Sanskrit at the Hebrew University, is a long-time peace activist. He writes about rereading Khirbet Khizeh in the Palestinian village of Twaneh, where he works with "the villagers, along with other like-minded Israelis, against their common foes, the Jewish settlers intent on terrorizing these people and driving them off their land."
Why include such an ideologically specific essay in a volume that so laudably subverts politics as we know it? I asked Ibis's Hoffman and Cole this in an e-mail, and they acknowledged that Shulman's afterword may be off-putting for some. But they defended the decision.
Dr. Goldberg Amos in solidarity with Palestinians tours Hebron, covered by Arab media
We first wish to thank you again for joining us in this tour which marked 40 years of violent Israeli settlement in Hebron.
This tour evolved into something we did not wish or plan for. We therefore apologize for those of you who found themselves in a situation they did not really expect to be. However, as a solidarity tour it succeeded beyond our expectations. It became the talk of the day in Hebron and was covered by some of the most important Palestinian newspapers as well as by Aljazeera. In addition this tour delivered a massage to the police, the army and the settlers that they are not the only ones to set the rules in Hebron . There are also Palestinians who wish to non-violently protest and there are Israelis who are willing to join them in that.
The 1970s: The Transformation of Zionism / By Bernard Avishai and Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, [Comparative Jewish Literature]
Judaism is a religion disdained in the Christian West, which imposed Israel on Palestine because of guilt
[Language Education, Hebrew U] Nurit Peled Elhanan, invited activist to Holland with 'A Different Jewish Voice' for May 7 Forum
In Holland, the group A Different Jewish Voice is marking the anniversary by inviting eight Israeli peace activists to a May 7 forum in Amsterdam and a speaking tour of the country. Its Web site says the group "tries to broaden the public debate in the Netherlands about the Middle East conflict and its still one-sided pro-Israel approach."
The invited activists include Nurit Peled-Elhanan, a founder of the International Committee on Education and Occupation who lost her daughter in a suicide bombing; Esther Goldenberg of Zochrot, which educates the Israeli public about the 1948 Palestinian exodus; and representatives of Combatants for Peace, ex-Israeli soldiers and ex-Palestinian combatants seeking nonviolent solutions to the conflict.
[Education, Hebrew U] Nurit Elhanan-Peled / The Establishment of Israeli Identity through Racist Discourse
The paper shows the ways in which 'others' (such as Palestinians, Ethiopian Jews or ex-Soviet Union Jews), are represented both in schoolbooks and in teachers' talk. The paper will argue that Israeli education promotes 'Elite Racism' both towards the Palestinian citizens and subjects and towards Jewish new-comers.
Aviv Tatarsky [Math, Hebrew U] a demonstrator in Bilin against the security wall, where every Friday Israeli security forces are being attacked
The army lost, the demonstration made it to the fence and also proved that it is nonviolent. Clearly it cannot end this way. We return through a gate that is part of the complex of the fence. The riot police men face us. The final act. We stand in front of them and continue our demonstration. A few dozens of us take stones and start banging on a metal railing that is there – the din is deafening. And then it explodes. The policemen launch into us. When my turn arrives I am surprised by the force with which they yank me away. It's scary. Other demonstrators grab me and manage to pull me to them. Border policemen jump on a single demonstrator, beating, throwing down, with truncheons too. I go to the side. All the wind is out of my sails. I don't want to give in to them, but I also don't want to get beaten up. After this release of rage, a few of the demonstrators go back to the railing and renew the din. Some of the demonstrators were injured by the truncheons, one has fainted. The demonstration is over.
About Amiel Vardi [Classics Dept.] in "Maon infiltrated by Ta'yush activists last Saturday, 23.2.08"
Since I am a member of emergency squad of the settlement, I carry a two-way radio to ensure constant contact between members of the emergency squad. I contacted the Chief security officer of the settlement and informed him that leftist activists had infiltrated the settlement. We continued on our way, believing that this would put an end to the incident. A few minutes later, I got a summons from the Chief security officer of the settlement Chief security officer on the two-way radio calling all members of emergency squad of the settlement to start moving towards the football field. The noise in the background sounded like a pursuit or a confrontation of some kind. We arrived at the football field, where, at that very same time, an assembly of the Bnei Akiva youth movement was taking place. All the children of the settlement were either on the field or close by. I ran into the field, and saw a skinny, mustached activist, apparently the leader of the group. Later on, it transpired that this was Dr. Amiel Vardi, a history lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. We discovered this because the photographer, the Chief security officer daughter, was one of Dr Vardi's students at the university. 5 activists, some of whom were not even Israelis, accompanied Dr. Vardi.
Noa Epstein, MA student: such a decision to close October 2000 riots case has no place in a civilized, democratic state
We, the Zionist Israelis who feel the Arab minority's pain, believe such a decision has no place in a civilized, democratic state," said Noa Epstein, who met one of the victims, Asil Asala, during a "Seeds of Peace" summer camp in 1997.
"As friends of Asil and as citizens of this country, we hoped the
investigation would point to the guilty parties," she said. "It's
inconceivable that no one was found to be at fault for what happened. This decision endangers Israel's democracy." Epstein continued to say "I know for a fact that Asil was murdered. (During the riots) he was sitting at the Lotam Junction (near Sakhnin), wearing a shirt reading 'Seeds of Peace'. He wasn't demonstrating - he was just an observer. Asil believed in co-existence."
Nurit Peled-Elhanan and activists in "Israeli Coalition Against the Siege organizes nation-wide relief convoy to Gaza border and simultaneous, cross-border demonstrations against the siege with Palestinians in Gaza and Ramallah."
Unlike what we have been made to believe, residents of Sderot and residents of Gaza are not to be seen as opponents: both are victims of a stupid and vicious policy of the Government of Israel.
"On the Necessity of Refusal" / by Nurit Peled-Elhanan
It is time to tell Jewish children that the only way to discourage anti-Semitism is by condemning the only government in the world who deliberately sends young Jewish boys and girls to their certain death and who persecutes to the point of genocide a whole Semitic nation, explain to them that this government and the actions of its army, not some primordial hatred for the Jewish race, are the reasons for the invention of the new sign where t he Star of David is equated with the swastika.
[Hebrew University] Late Dr. Israel Shahak, 'The Wicked Son'
He went on to become a professor of organic chemistry (he taught at Jerusalem's Hebrew University for 25 years), but it was as a so-called human rights activist that he made a name for himself.
This, however, was no garden variety bleeding-heart leftist. Shahak not only came to despise Zionism and consider the establishment of the State of Israel a criminal act; he also set out to expose what he considered the depravities and hypocrisies of rabbinic Judaism – and to do so in as public a manner as possible.
Because he downplayed Jewish suffering in favor of painting Jews and Israelis as serial oppressors, Shahak had little patience with the notion that the Holocaust had a profound impact on either the Israeli psyche or Israeli policy-making. To him, Jews were victimizers, not victims.
Dr. Roni Hammermann, MachsomWatch - Israeli women against the Israeli Occupation of the territories and the systematic repression of the Palestinian nation
Issa received a phone call. Soldiers have invaded a house in the Kasba, performed searches, rummaged in the wardrobe, broke furniture, and left the house in havoc. Issa was expected there in order to take testimonies and to document what happened. We have asked to accompany him...When we left at about 17:00 we realized that we have received a tiny taster of the famous 'Hebron mix' -- life between fanatic, unscrupulous Settlers and bored, power thirsty soldiers
Nurit Peled-Elhanan's study about the presentation of the Palestinians in Israeli schoolbooks
The denial of Palestinian national and territorial identity is still one of the core messages of Israeli textbooks. In a recent study of Israeli textbooks Firer (2004:75) claims that "as political correctness has reached Israel it is no longer appropriate to use blunt, discriminatory language in textbooks", and then adds that in the years 1967-1990 "the stereotypes of Arabs and Palestinians almost disappear" (ibid. p. 92). However, examining mainstream school books that were published after 1994, including the ones Firer praises most for political correctness, one cannot avoid seeing that visually and verbally, Palestinians are still represented either in a racist stereotypical way, or as absent people, namely as an 'impersonalized' or excluded element.
The Palestinian citizens of the state of Israel are always depicted dichotomously as "Israel' Arabs" vs. the Israelis, or as the "Non-Jewish population" vs. the Jewish one.
Nurit Peled-Elhanan: "In the State of Israel the Jewish mother is disappearing"
Dr. Haggai Katriel, Mathematics Department, Hebrew University claims to live in "Palestine" in anti-Israel petition
In an anti-Israel petition Haggai Katriel, an Activist who lives in Palestine (Haifa)
Tamar Yarom, professor at the Hebrew University, produces anti-Israel propaganda film
Yarom has chosen six Israeli female soldiers out of dozens who served in the occupied Palestinian territories and incorporated their testimonies and experience in the film.
"I am very grateful for these six girls who had a great amount of courage to perform self-criticism in front of the camera, making one of my dreams come true," says Yarom. She adds, "I have served in the West Bank during the first Intifada in 1987 - 1988, and when I finished my service I wondered 'how would a woman like me take part in suppressing and oppressing another nation, how can a gentle woman remain silent regarding this cruel violence against the Palestinian people?'
The number of Israeli soldiers who refused to serve in the occupied territories is growing, slowly though. It has reached up to 629 according to an Israeli group called, Courage to Refuse.
The Minerva Center for Human Rights at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem proposes a summer program for future American diplomats that will cast Israel as a "human rights abuser"
Clearly, this summer program is a propaganda course with some of Israel's worst internal and subversive enemies from academia who prefer to not be recognized as Jews, but as communist, anarchists, or whatever who will help dismantle the state for some utopian replacement where the Arabs will rule all the land and welcome the Jews into their bosom with peace, harmony and love. Anyone who knows how Jews have been treated in Muslim countries for the last 2,000 years would consider that delusional. The Minerva Center program certainly won't be balanced or scholarly accurate and students who go through such a program will come away with the idea that Israel is the worst abuser of human rights in the world when things are the opposite.
But then again, that is the intent of the program and the University Denver needs to know the truth about it before such a program is allowed on its campus. Hebrew University needs to scrap this proposal, as well, as an embarrassment to the academic community in Israel.
Daphna Golan, Law Faculty, Hebrew University, wants the public schools to be turned into extremist indoctrination centers
It's unclear whether they managed to study about Palestinian civilian democratic society, which Israel destroyed in the 1990s.
But the future of the youngsters who are sitting in jail, far from their families, is tied up with the future of Israeli youth who are about to take the bagrut exam in Civics. Will they find the way to a respectful citizenship and one that respects all other human beings - which makes it possible for everyone to participate in a democratic way of life and observes their rights as individuals and as part of a group? How I hope that they will find another way to earn citizenship in the country or in countries of peace, and not a life under occupation or in a country that is neither Jewish nor democratic.
THE Hebrew University ACADEMIC EXTREMIST WHO BOYCOTTED THE USA
Professor Daniel Amit, a prominent scientist at the universities of Jerusalem and Rome, known for its anti Zionist and anti-American views, passed away on the day of Rabin's assassination. The Israeli media ignored it.
Daniel Amit captured some headlines after the outbreak of the Iraqi war when he refused to review an article for the American journal Physical Review. In a letter to Martin Blume, the editor in Chief of the Physical Society, he wrote bluntly:" I will not, at this point, correspond with any American institution. Some of us lived through 1939".
In the exchange that followed his refusal, he wrote to the stunned editor of his motives. "What we are watching today, I believe, is a culmination of 10 to 15 years of mounting barbarism of the American culture the world over. It is crowned by achievements of science and technology as major weapons of mass destruction". He labeled the war as a "manhunt and wanton killing of a type and scale not seen since the raids on American-Indian population…".
Amit's radical views did not surprise his colleagues in both Israel and Italy, but they caught the attention of the Arab Media. The Saudi owned website Arab News was quick to interview him shortly afterwards without mentioning his Israeli citizenship. but by emphasizing his Jewishness. In that interview Amit attacked American academic and scientific institutions for making themselves available in the service of their country's war machine.
Daphna Golan-Agnon, advocate of anti-Israelism
The first Intifada was at its peak when I completed my PhD and I became actively involved in establishing B'Tselem, The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, established in February 1989. I was its founding Research Director, in charge of establishing the data collection, research, and publication of the organization. I also researched and wrote some of the reports myself.
"I felt that my contribution to a human rights culture in Israel was more important than my research on South Africa and that learning and teaching the universal language of human rights was particularly important at that time of social disruption and violence. In 1989 I applied and was accepted for an international intensive program on Human Rights and International Law at the International School for Human Rights in Strasbourg, designed for University teachers outside the legal profession.
(Law) Daphna Golan-Agnon's Political indoctrination seminar sponsored by Hebrew University
The seminar consisted of 37 workshops, held throughout the different time units. During each time unit 6 parallel sessions were held, and students were able to choose in which workshop they wish to participate. Further to the workshops, study tours were held to two Palestinian villages uprooted in 1948, and movie space was organized for viewing and discussion of documentaries. The workshops discussed issues such as: education, media, environment and ecology, Israeli society, economy, and feminism. About half of the workshops were facilitated by students, while the other half was facilitated by representatives of social change organizations and faculty members. Jewish and Palestinian partnership was emphasized in the seminar, expressed in the issues discussed in the workshops, and in the participation of Palestinian civil society organizations.
A "Palestine conference" celebrating the anti-Israel "research" of the late Hebrew University "Post-Zionist" sociologist Baruch Kimmerling
"The 'Politicide' of the Palestinian People"
Friday 2 November 2007
The 2007 Palestine Center Annual Conference will examine these events and analyze their consequences and Israel's policies in dealing with the Palestinians' struggle for their existence. The conference is based on the work of Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling. In his book, Politicide: Ariel Sharon's War against the Palestinian People, (Verso, 2003), he defines "Politicide" as the "process that has, as its ultimate goal, the dissolution of Palestinians' existence as a legitimate social, political and economic entity."
Yuval Shany, law school, celebrates Prosecution of Israeli Soldiers and Leaders as "War Criminals"
It would appear that the message coming now from New York is that in an age when the enforcement of international law, both on the civil and criminal level, has become a global matter, the state's eschewal of conducting a serious investigation into the complaints of suspicion of international crimes being committed by its citizens, and the denial of the right to file claims of damages by the victims of Israel's military actions, does not grant broad legal protection to its soldiers and citizens, as might have been assumed. On the contrary, broadening the state's immunity considerably increases the risk of having suits filed against Israeli soldiers and citizens in less friendly legal forums and under far harsher legal conditions. As a result, there is a serious likelihood that Almog and Dichter will not be the last Israelis to find themselves open to "intifada suits" abroad.
Hebrew University summer seminar denounces Israel one-sidedly for "human rights abuses"
Israel's Human Rights Problems from an International Perspective
The course will be taught by Dr. Yuval Shany, Hersch Lauterpacht Chair in International Law, Faculty of Law, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Academic Director, Minerva Center for Human Rights, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
The course will introduce the students to Israel's legal system and will critically evaluate whether the protections it affords to human rights meet international standards (in particular, the six major human rights treaties to which Israel is party). It will specifically address the following issues: the application of human rights treaties in the occupied territories, security-based restrictions upon human rights (e.g., the 'ticking bomb' scenario), the duty to respect the rights of enemy citizens, the status of the Arab minority within Israel, the status of women in Israel, trafficking in persons and freedom of religion and cultural relativity problems. Reading material to the course will include Israeli Supreme Court Decisions, UN and NGO reports, academic book segments and articles and some comparative law sources.
Hebrew University's Victoria Buch (chemistry) claims Israel is a criminal state conducting "ethnic cleansing" on anti-Semitic Counterpunch web site
The stage for ethnic cleansing of Palestinians has been set in the Occupied Territories, and ethnic cleansing is in progress. At present, this is the major project of the State of Israel. For an impartial person of medium intelligence, a tour of the Occupied Territories may be sufficient to understand this fact. The prime ethnic cleansing tool is, forever, Palestinian land grab in conjunction with settlement expansion. Various stages of annexation process are in evidence in the originally rural part of the West Bank, constituting 60% of its area. By now, nine percent of the West Bank land has been transferred to the direct control of the settlements [1]. A recent Peace Now investigation revealed that only 12 percent of this land is being used at all.
Nurit Peled-Elhanan denounces Israelis for being violent murdering racists
Well done, IDF! Well done, Israeli Jewish education, that has succeeded nearly perfectly in bestowing the values of racism, nearly without opposition.
And if my son Yigal really does want to participate in the military programs that they impose on high school students starting in grade 10, or God forbid, to enlist in the army of occupation and torment, I will see it as a dreadful educational failure. A terrible maternal failure. And if I do not do everything I can to prevent him from becoming a murderer or a corpse at age of 18 I will know that I betrayed him and my vocation as a mother.
Nina Mayorek with MachsomWatch [Senior Biochemist In the Department of Human Nutrition]
The occupier 'generously' arranged such a well signed-posted parking lot with clear markings in blue and white colors where parking is allowed ...Israel is really happy with the present situation –the economy is booming, Palestinian suicide bombing is nil for over a year, some shelling on Sderot provides a pleasant boost for a constant feeling of victim-hood and a very much needed argument that 'we also suffer'.
David Shulman (Sanskrit Studies) shills for Taayoush and similar anti-Israel groups
Israeli peace activists don't expect to be popular. Although by all accounts most Israelis do want peace and would accept any reasonable compromise, they normally react with bitter scorn and hatred for anyone who seems to cross the lines. Organizations like mine, Ta'ayush—"Jewish-Arab Partnership," one of the most effective of the peace groups operating at the grassroots level in the occupied territories—are viewed as naïve at best, treasonous at worst. Last month's events in Gaza confirmed everyone's worst prejudices. "You want to make peace with them?" my neighbors asked me in supercilious tones. "Can't you see that they're all violent thugs? Why are you helping them?"
Dudy Tzfati, a genetics researcher in 'Bonded in Resistance to the Barrier Palestinian Villagers, Jewish Neighbors Warily Join Forces'
Why is there this wall? Why is there this trouble?" asked Tzfati, who moved to Tzur Hadassah three years ago. "Because people do not see Wadi Fukin."
Nurit Peled-Elhanan (education, Hebrew U): A Jerusalem Mother's Statement about how Israel is the Kingdom of Evil
But today I know that there is yet another division in Israel: On the face of the earth there rules the kingdom of evil, where for the last 34 years, people who call themselves leaders have earned, through democratic means, the right to kill and destroy and be as vile and corrupt as they please, to have young boys become expert killers, whether in the name of God, of the good of the nation, or in the name of honour and of courage. But these evil people have created yet another kingdom, a glorious kingdom that flourishes and grows larger and larger every day - a kingdom that lives and breathes under our feet, under the earth we walk on.
Ofer Neiman, Institute of Computer Science, Hebrew University, finds some "state terrorism." Not by Iran, but by Israel.
Neiman said that both sides were guilty of "state-sponsored terrorism, whether it's shooting an unarmed civilian or being a suicide bomber."
Hebrew University capitulates to its campus anti-Zionists!
Professors at the Hebrew University have been jihading against the plan to open a special program for officers in Israel's intelligence services. Yesterday they got their way. The Hebrew University's administration yesterday voted to cancel the program.
A One-Sided anti-Israel Propaganda course by Baruch Kimmerling, Hebrew University, Department of Sociology
The encounter between the Jewish immigrant-settler society and native Arabs of Palestine had enormous impact on the historical and social development of both people. The local Arab society (that later defined themselves as Palestinians) and that fragment of the Jewish people that immigrated to Zion and felt as homecoming after 2,000 years of exile both had strong sense of belongings to the land and regarded it as their exclusive land. Both felt existentially threaten by the political aims and desires of the other people. Retrospectively, the relations between both people appear to be an inevitable zero-sum total conflict, of "either we or they". However, the dynamics of the relations was much more complex, and the aim of this course is to examine in a
systematic way the major developments and impacts of the Jewish-Palestinian conflict within some comparative and theoretical context (free from ideological bias).
Reuven Kaminer, Vice-Provost of the School for Overseas Students, doesn't think Critics of Israeli Leftists should be entitled to express their opinions
The hired intellectuals here had been programmed to answer charges of genocide, but they were thrown into total confusion when Kimmerling refined the charge and accused Israel of perpetrating the major crime of politicide against the Palestinian people. This charge is clear: Israel's policies are calculated to eliminate the Palestinian people's aspirations for national survival. Some of you may have come across a group of right wing Jewish loonies on the internet by the name "Israel-academic-monitors". Well, the loonies have a zombie machine that scans the net for any appearance by a democratic Israeli academician. Automatically, they send out links to what they consider "anti-Israeli" or anti-Semitic statements made by that academician. Well, the loonies' zombie machine sighted Baruch Kimmerling's name in articles on his death and sure enough, the emails warning the world about Baruch Kimmerling are now scattered all over the net. Of course, they – the monitors - would explain that it is all automatic. Even so, I ask them, gentlemen, have you no shame?
Moshe Zimmerman (history) denounces Israelis for being racists
"The Israeli youth sees Poles as second-class humans, and treat them as potential enemies", said Professor Moshe Zimmerman of the Hebrew University's History Department
Yaron Ezrahi, Department of Political Science finds some apartheid and some colonialism -- endorsing Jimmy Carter's anti-Semitic book
Appearing recently in a debate on Israeli television, Ezrahi called the occupation — now in its 40th year — "a classic colonial enterprise" that uses an "apartheid system" of economic and political discrimination to separate Israeli Jews and Palestinians in the territory. He readily defends a book by former President Jimmy Carter, whose title —"Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid" — provoked American Jewish critics to vilify the 39th president as an anti-Semite.
"If Carter were to give a lecture in Jerusalem and he were to say this is apartheid in the West Bank, I would say, yes, I support you. This is exactly the case," Ezrahi said in an interview.
Ofer Neiman from Hacampus-lo-shotek calls to prevent Israeli army from catching terrorists
[Hacampus-lo-shotek] Fwd:**EMERGENCY ACTION NEDDED** 17 years old kidnapped by the Israeli army
On April 18, around midnight, the Israeli army attacked the home of peace activist Refai Fayyed in the village of Zbabdeh near Jenin. The IDF terrorized the Fayyed family with attack dogs, beat them, forced them out of their home, trashed their home, destroyed computers and personal property, and kidnapped Refai's brother Mohammad Abdulla Asaad Fayyad who is 17 years old high school student.
Nurit Peled-Elhanan (education) in: "Two schools of thought" - Both of them Anti-Israel?
The Israeli narrative is a very stable, fixed -- ancient, almost -- narrative. I think it's very racist because Palestinians don't exist in this narrative at all," said Nurit Peled-Elhanan, a professor in Tel Aviv University's School of Education.
Professor David Schulman, a lecturer in Sanskrit at the Hebrew University, Claims Israel is bulldozing Palestinian homes for the fun of it.
The Israeli Army continued its efforts to drive them away. "There was repeated harassment," said Professor Schulman, a lecturer in Sanskrit at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
What should one call Israel? "Apartheid," answers Victoria Buch, Department of Physical Chemistry, Hebrew University
The State of Israel calls it "fight for existence" or "fight against terror". Its detractors call it "colonization", "apartheid", or "ethnic cleansing". Baruch Kimmerling coined the term "politicide of Palestinians". Edward Said spoke of slow bleeding. Recently, even words such as "genocide"[1] have been used. Let us try to define the Israeli policy, and then grapple with the question of proper naming.
Nurit Peled-Elhanan (education) and Friends Call for a "Cultural Boycott of Israel"
We, the undersigned Palestinian filmmakers and artists, appeal to all artists and filmmakers of good conscience around the world to cancel all exhibitions and other cultural events that are scheduled to occur in Israel, to mobilize immediately and not allow the continuation of the Israeli offensive to breed complacency. Like the boycott of South African art institutions during apartheid, cultural workers must speak out against the current Israeli war crimes and atrocities.
We call upon the International community to join us in the boycott of Israeli film festivals, Israeli public venues, and Israeli institutions supported by the government, and to end all cooperation with these cultural and artistic institutions that to date have refused to take a stand against the Occupation, the root cause for this colonial conflict.
236.Nurit Peled-Elhanan, Israel
Amiel Vardi [Senior Lecturer in Classics], invites people to go for "Nakba tours" to learn why Israel should not Exist
During the Nakba of 1948, 17,000 Palestinians were expelled from Al-Ramle, nearly all of the city's inhabitants, despite it was not included in the Jewish territory according to the 1947 UN Partition Plan. One can not understand the origins of racism expressed by Ramle's Mayor Mr. Yoel Lavi, without being familiar with the ethnic cleansing of Al-Ramle in July 1948.
Israel's racist policies towards Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian who was stopped at the airport and wasn't allowed to to fly to Tunisia
Dear friends, The following messages is a chilling reminder of what does it mean to live in a Jewish state. It is urgent that we do all we can to let the Israeli authorities know that their racist policies are not done in our name. As you can see being an "israeli citizen" does not protect you from abuse at the airport if you happen (God forbid) not to be Jewish!!! Some time ago it was the other way around!!!
Nobody deserves to be humiliated.
Nurit Peled-Elhanan (education): Israelis and Americans are Running around Performing Massacres
Not only American soldiers but also Israeli soldiers who actually perform massacres of 'Arabs' - Palestinian or Lebanese - may never see an Arab human face until they are drafted to the army, but they learn, for 12 long years, that these people are primitive, bear children in order to send them to the streets and throw stones at our peace-keeping soldiers, uneducated because they don't receive our education, conniving and dirty because they have different notions about politeness, they dress differently and cover their heads with different pieces of cloth. Well, from my experience there are many more Kafiehs in the camp of peace lovers than there are kippas. Israeli children are deprived from knowing their immediate neighbours, their history and their culture and their merits. Israeli children are educated to see their neighbours as an unwanted element. This is not education, this is mind infection.
Ofer Neiman from computer science supports the Irish boycott of Israel
"...If you support the letter, please contact the Irish embassy, and let them know that such *SELECTIVE* sanctions against the occupation are justified, and that the Irish government should do much more to oppose the current racist and violent Israeli policies..."
Zeev Sternhell (political Science) says Israel is trying to destroy Lebanon at US Request
And a word about the price of American support. Sometimes it seems as if U.S. President George W. Bush wants Israel both to destroy Lebanon and to sustain painful losses. That way, Israel provides him with an excellent alibi for the war in Iraq: The fight against terror is global, the blood price is the same, the methods of operation and the means are identical, and the time needed for victory is long. The Israeli vassal is serving its master no less than the master is providing for its needs.
Louise Bethlehem Praises Haaretz' Gideon Levy (who wants Israel to be annihilated) for his "highlight the shameful capitulation of Jewish-Israeli civil society to "chauvinism and ruthlessness",
' At times of "moral blackout" Gideon Levy's insistence on reminding us of the importance--and vulnerability--of Lebanese civil society and Nazir Majali's corresponding focus on Palestinian citizens of Israel in the north, are especially valuable. Together they highlight the shameful capitulation of Jewish-Israeli civil society to "chauvinism and ruthlessness", with some notable exceptions.'
Classics Professor Amiel Vardi is with the Israeli/Palestinian Human Rights Group Ta'Ayush
Prof. VARDI: Well, it is quite clear that the fence-the (unintelligible) fence- is used to an annex land, to extend settlements and very often to make the lives of the Palestinians that are included within it so impossible that they are forced to leave. And to tell you the truth, it's working.
Et tu, Hebrew U? A Student describes anti-Israel Brainwashing at the Hebrew University
Labeling Israel an aggressive "Goliath" victimizing the helpless Palestinian "David" distorts the conflict's true scope – that of a tiny island of Jewish sovereignty surrounded by more than a few genocidal extremists. Like every democracy on Earth, Israel is flawed. Does this mean the Jewish state has no more intrinsic value than a "Jewish chair," as my professor implied?
I respect the academic freedom and vigorous discourse abundant at my school; however, the international division of Israel's flagship university bears a special responsibility to students and supporters. If Israel cannot receive a fair hearing in the hallowed halls of Mt. Scopus, where can it?
Victoria Buch (chemistry) invents some New History
'My country Israel chose to forgo a historic opportunity for peace with the Palestinians. The Palestinian President Abbas was willing to make a compromise, based on reasonable principles. '
It is a lie that "Israeli Jews are a peace-loving people. In recent times, they have been regretfully forced to fight for their very existence, with the help of a moral and heroic army," she says.
Haggai Katriel, Mathematics department , gets arrested while part of violent demonstration - His anarchist friends are outraged!
Haggai Katriel joins the violent anarchist thugs who attack soliders and policemen
Baruch Kimmerling (sociology) denounces Patriotism on Campus - thinks only Anti-Israel Leftists are entitled to Freedom of Speech
In fact every faculty member who appears in the public sphere and doesn't adopt an ultra-nationalist stance has an excellent chance of having his or her words taken out of context or reinterpreted and of being labeled a "self-hating Jew" or a "traitor."
Dr. Haggai Katriel, Mathematics department at HU, is facing prosecution for violation of public order and violence
Here is a letter posted by Haggai's parents, Tamar Katriel a professor of communication at University of Haifa, who also prefers a Palestinian State rather than an Israeli one, and her husband Jacob Katriel, Emeritus form the Technion who demonstrates in Billin every Friday against the construction of the security fence, are calling for moral support as Haggai Katriel was arrested while demonstrating and now is facing trial. Strangely enough, Haggai works at the Hebrew University, school of Mathematics under professor Matania Ben- Artzi who also calls for the destruction of Israel and is the father of Yoni Ben-Artzi who is a Refusnik.
What is this title supposed to mean / Victoria Buch
Dear Haaretz - what is this title "Settlers torch two Palestinian homes in Hebron in protest" supposed to mean!? You do not use titles such as "Palestinian suicide bomber bombed an Israeli bus in protest". And justly so, although Palestinians surely have more to protest about than state-subsidized hoodlooms in Hebron.
Prof. Victoria Buch shills for jailed Terrorist Accomplice Tali Fahima
Solitary confinement for Tali Fahima is a disgrace
But a punishment for an unarmed Israeli activist for the "crime" of befriending Palestinians is administrative detention, torture, and solitary confinement. And let us recall hundreds of Palestinians currently under admistrative detention, without a prospect for a fair trial, with rubber-stamp judges obediently extending every few months their incarceration. And the mainstream Israeli citizens who do not want to know anything about it, and who keep repeating propaganda mantras to justify their collaboration with the Occupation. That is Israel 2005 for you, in a nutshell.
DAPHNA GOLAN-AGNON (law, Hebrew University) criticizes boycotters of Israel for not boycotting Israel ENOUGH!!!
This year, she says, students have worked with Amnesty International, the Israel Commission Against Torture, teaching other students and poor youth about empowerment, with the Association for the Rights of the Child and the Association for Civil Rights.
Asked for her views on the recent vote, which has since been overturned, by the UK Association of University Teachers to boycott Israeli universities Bar-Ilan and Haifa, she replies: "As somebody who was active in the anti-apartheid movement, I see the strength of boycotts. But I have a problem with this one in a few ways. In taking on only Bar-Ilan and Haifa - well, I think you do a boycott or you don't do one. You cannot be half-pregnant.
"I also wouldn't start with an academic boycott. I would start with an economic boycott, like South Africa.
Maybe I'm naive. But I think that this war on Islam that the US is leading now - it's a terrible war. I'm hoping that they'll understand that it is better to have some gift to the Islamic world, peace in Jerusalem.
"The sad point," she adds, "is that many Israelis think that the wall is a help. It's not only evil but it's also stupid. In the year 2005, you think that you can build a wall and it's going to save you? How stupid can you be?"
Dalya Markovich, Hebrew University of Jerusalem's school of education., thinks Israeli universities are dens of oppression and discrimination
What has become of the Israeli university since the days of Brith Shalom, a movement founded by a group of Hebrew University intellectuals to promote Jewish-Arab bi-nationalism? Who are the successors of Yesh, a socialist group that sprang up at the University of Haifa, or Campus, a radical organization at Tel Aviv University? How is it that the university has become the executive arm of state goals? Why are students identifying with "the system" and allowing the learning process to be turned into an instrument of utilitarianism? How did the university become both the goods and the guild? How has academic research become subservient to the needs of the army, industry and financiers?
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian claims Palestinian girls are often subjected to harassment by Israeli soldiers
Any Palestinian over the age of 12 must have a permit to cross gates in the wall that are only open 55 minutes of the day," Kevorkian explained. "This puts a special burden on young girls who must line up every day to go through the wall to their schools and who often are subjected to harassment by [Israeli] soldiers.
"Fathers are humiliated to stand by helplessly as their daughters are searched," she noted. "So they keep their daughters at home to avoid the searches, and they force them to marry early.
Baruch Kimmerling (sociology) reverses cause (terrorism) and effect (Israeli military response) in Orwellian fashion
The Israeli conditions, however, are based on an incorrect perception of the causality and logic of the conflict-the presumption that the root of the violence lies in 'Palestinian terrorism', rather than in Israel's generation-long occupation and illegal colonization of Palestinian lands and its exploitation and harassment of the entire people.
When the anti-Israel sentiment comes from within
For years, Jewish organizations and their leaders seeking to contend with blatant anti-Israel statements have encountered the response, "What do you mean? Similar statements are made in Israel, by Israelis."
Help! Rape!
If one just records a bunch of interviews, and then ignores what is inconvenient to one's thesis, then there is no point in doing any research. The conclusions will be the same at the end of the "study" as they were before you started. If Nitzan had examined a thousand soldiers picked at random and asked them a few dozen questions, quantified the results and perhaps compared those results to those of civilians and to American soldiers in Iraq, we might have some real answers to her question. On the other hand, for all we know, the real real answer may lie in the amount of saltpeter that is put in the army food.
This study was given an award by the Israel sociology association. We can imagine what the others are like. In my most humble opinion, because this paper lacks scientific method or any attempt at objectivity, it is not worthy of a Masters thesis or even an undergraduate seminar work in a scientific discipline. It might be entertaining reading. However, the definition of what is science and what is not science is up to the practitioners of a particular discipline and it varies between disciplines and in different eras. Phrenology used to be thought to be science, and Lysenkoism was accepted in the USSR. Barely intelligible functionalist jargon ruled US sociology departments. My opinion is now generally thought to be an example of "positivist empiricist facticity." If the Hebrew University says it is science, and the sociologists insist it is good science, who am I to challenge them?
For all its faults and contradictions and shoddy and tendentious logic, however, this work is not really as blatantly absurd as Fendel and Lord try to make out, and they would have a tough time proving their point from the actual text.
MOSHE ZIMMERMAN (history): The Torah is comparable to Hitler's "Mein Kampf"
"Professor Moshe Zimmerman of Hebrew University compared the Torah with "Mein Kampf," as a racist blueprint for the destruction of other peoples and likened the children of Kiryat Arba, the Jewish community outside Hebron, to Hitler Youth. How was Professor Zimmerman's hateful extremism answered? He was recruited to the Ministry of Education and placed in charge of developing history curriculum for Israeli schools."
Deconstructing the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Deconstructionism has long been linked with Marxism, a rather strange combination - given the insistence by deconstructionists that they should never claim to "know" anything. Marxists claim to know everything, based on ridiculous "theories" by Marx disproved 150 years ago, making the Marxist-Deconstructionist axis rather queer. It also sometimes calls itself post-colonialism, apparently because some of its Frenchie inventors came from Algeria, although I have never understood how it can be certain that anything or anyone was ever colonized or colonizer.
MOSHE ZIMMERMAN (history): The children of the settlers in Hebron are exactly like the Hitler Youth
"Since I was three or four years old I have been put off by those people," he said as we slowly walked in the narrow streets of Me'a She'arim, "already as a child I did not like to come here."
Shame on the Hebrew University
"Invoking academic freedom, the heads of Israeli academe defend venomous expressions against Israel. But the Rector of the Hebrew University has mustered his authority to silence criticism of the venom spreaders. "
BARUCH KIMMERLING (sociology): The Hebrew University's Leading anti-Zionist
A review of Baruch Kimmerling's two books on Palestine, The Palestinian People and Politicide:
"But the most important reason to pass over Kimmerling's book is its Orwellism. There is indeed a political entity in the Middle East whose entire raison d'etre is the "politicide" or destruction of another nation: the PLO. The Middle East conflict is indeed all about attempted annihilation of a nation, but Kimmerling -- characteristically -- has things exactly in reverse."
ADL wants Hebrew U. professor Moshe Zimmerman (history) to be Prosecuted for anti-Semitic Incitement
Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, wants Hebrew University to take action in response to statements made by the chair of the institution's German Studies department, Prof. Moshe Zimmerman, who likened Israel Defense Forces soldiers and other Israeli authorities to Nazis.
In a letter sent to Hebrew University President Prof.
Menachem Magidor, Foxman writes that while every professor has the right to express his or her opinion, the university administration is obliged to consider taking action when certain opinions cross the line and are damaging to the institution and the Jewish people.
Nurit Peled-Elhanan bashing Israel in a speech on International Women's Day at the EU Parliament
I must admit I believe you should have invited a Palestinian woman at my stead, because the women who suffer most from violence in my county are the Palestinian women. And I would like to dedicate my speech to Miriam R'aban and her husband Kamal, from Bet Lahiya in the Gazza strip, whose five small children were killed by Israeli soldiers while picking strawberries at the family's strawberry field. No one will ever stand trial for this murder.
Victoria Buch (chemistry): Israel's "Racism" is the Worst in the World
"....The text tier of the mental "separation fence"
is composed of the paranoia-cum-victim-complex,
which is diligently cultivated by our
government. For example Israelis are told that
Europe is anti-Semitic and there are many people
there who want to destroy us.Certainly, one
can find Jew-haters in Europe. But the European
racism is directed much more against Muslims
and Africans than against Jews, and in any
case the level of racism is nothing compared
to that practiced by Israel towards Palestinians.
MEIRA WEISS - a Feminist Liar?
This racialist nonsense, it goes without saying, has already been picked up by anti-Semitic and neonazi web sites as "evidence" of the depravity and racism of Jews.
About BARUCH KIMMERLING (sociology) in "The Tale of the Reversed Narrative"
Post-Zionism I consider the most deconstructionist (no pun intended) unarmed threat to Israel's security and future existence. The Hebrew University's Baruch Kimmerling, a leading icon of this camp, published an example of its outlook this December at the trendy Salon.com web site. Entitled "The Two Catastrophes", he asserted, in a claim of fatuous equivalency, that both Israelis and Palestinians have memories "marked by inconceivable tragedy" that need be understood so that each can move beyond the past.
About Baruch Kimmerling in "False Narrative of Post Zionism" (Jerusalem Post)
Kimmerling and too many other post-Zionists promote the false idea that Israel was founded upon the ruins of an Arab society and culture.
The truth is just the other way around.
BARUCH KIMMERLING (sociology): Israel's Very Culture is Violent and Evil
The remembrance of Trumpeldor's death at Tel Hai, argues Zertal, marked the beginning of a cult of death among Israeli Jews. The "new Jewish man," in this ideology, was ready to make the ultimate sacrifice, to die defending his land and people, in stark contrast with Diaspora Jews, who would later be depicted as weaker souls who went "like lambs to the slaughter" in the Holocaust. The voices arguing that it is better to live for one's country than to die for it were accordingly stifled and silenced. It is deeply ironic that the very same society now claims to be shocked by the "martyrdom culture" in the occupied territories.
BARUCH KIMMERLING (sociology) thinks suicide attacks were "appropriate" although boomeranged by making Israel even more oppressive
Four and a half years of systematic destruction of the infrastructures of the Palestinian society, the physical and political liquidation of their leadership and the unrelenting injury to the population were intended to demonstrate the real balance of forces on the ground and to get the Palestinians to accept a kind of "Versailles treaty" in which they would agree to any Israeli "peace formula." The Palestinian use of suicide bombers, which at first looked, from the Palestinian side, as an appropriate response, supposedly able to offset Israel's total military superiority, turned out to be a boomerang, because it gave Israel internal and external legitimacy to make use of unrestrained force and to describe the Palestinians' desperate war for independence as part of international terrorism.
BARUCH KIMMERLING (sociology) thinks the "catastrophe" that befell the Arabs when Israel was created is equivalent to the Nazi Holocaust
In 1948, the Jews carried out ethnic cleansing. Most
of the Arab inhabitants of the territory upon which
the Israeli state was constituted were brutally
uprooted from their homes, often accompanied by
incidents of massacre, rape and looting. As a result
of this, the Palestinian collectivity collapsed as a
social and political entity and became largely a
refugee-camp people and a people of exiles."
When Arabs murder Arabs, BARUCH KIMMERLING (sociology) thinks that all Jews are to Blame
I accuse everyone-mainly the majority of Jewish intellectuals in Israel and the United States-who sees and knows these things of doing nothing to prevent the impending catastrophe. The Sabra and Shatila massacres were nothing compared to what has happened-and what will happen-to us, Jews and Arabs, following this ethnic war ...
AMIRAM GOLDBLUM (School of Pharmacy) finds the REAL threat to Israel, and it is not Arab Aggression and Terror
I think that messianic Judaism is becoming as dangerous to the existence of Israel, if not more, than Palestinian ROR, and certainly more than Iran.
BARUCH KIMMERLING (sociology) says there is no difference between Israeli "occupation" (of the West Bank and Gaza) and the Nazi Occupation of Europe
All occupation regimes have a lot of common patterns
(and also some uniqueness), especially when portions of
occupied people exercise their right to oppose by violent
resistance, and chain of violence from both sides tend to
increase and to be brutal.
MOSHE ZIMMERMAN (history) in Aljazeera insists that anti-Semitism is alright as long as it is only anti-Israel
Professor Moshe Zimmerman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a prominent historian and expert on the holocaust and Nazism, told Aljazeera.net that the Berlin conference was an Israeli government effort to ward off international criticism of Israeli policies and actions against the Palestinians.
"We have to differentiate between classical anti-Semitism and criticisms of Israeli policies and practices. The first is hating Jews for being Jews while the second represents rejection of certain objectionable policies and actions," he said.
Asked if comparing some Israeli leaders like Ariel Sharon to Nazi leaders was legitimate under certain circumstances, Zimmerman said the admissibility or inadmissibility of such a comparison depended on the facts at hand.
ISRAEL SHAHAK (chemistry) hated Jews
Dr. Shahak says that he wants Jews to change their ways and to stop the atrocities associated with Zionism and Orthodox Jewish religion. As a first step, he wants us to face the terrible crimes that were committed by of our ancestors.
Anti-Semitic Quotes from the late ISRAEL SHAHAK's book
The actual policies Israel pursued after the Six Day War, and in particular the apartheid character of the Israeli regime in the Occupied Territories and the attitude of the majority of Jews to the issue of the rights of the Palestinians, even in the abstract, have merely strengthened this conviction.
The late ISRAEL SHAHAK (chemistry) hated Zionism
Intellectual Jews opposing Zionism include Elmer Berger, Norton Mezvinsky, Mosh Menuhin, Mick Ashley, Israel Shahak and Maxime Rodinson. Israel Shahak was the head of the league in1970 and he was the first Jew to record detailed information about the number of children, elderly and woman killed, including Arab villages demolished by Hagana and Stern terrorist movements
ISRAEL SHAHAK (chemistry) - Writes in Commnetary that Jews are nothing but Nazis
Just as it was the Nazi ideology which was primary cause of the extermination of the Jews, which took place when the German Nazis had the power to do it, and not before, so the Zionist ideology of Labor and the religious kind; of the two groups which are chief proponents of the ideal of "pure" Jewish society, which may lose its "Jewish character" by being "contaminated" through too great contact with non Jews (the Arabs in the Middle East) believes in separation, otherwise called "apartheid".
MOSHE ZIMMERMAN (history) finds some Fascism
Moshe Zimmerman, a professor of German history at Hebrew University and self-described Zionist, answered Herf's charges of Islamic fascism by answering that there is also "Israeli fascism, Israeli terror and Israeli criminality."
MOSHE ZIMMERMAN (history) refuses to give exemptions to students serving in reserves
"There is a group of students which cannot come today due to the excuse that its members are guarding at checkpoints, and the like. Such an excuse is not acceptable to me. Were they to be missing because they were serving in jail due to a refusal to serve in the territories, that would be satisfactory to me."
Anti-Semite ISRAEL SHAHAK endorsed MOSHE ZIMMERMAN (history)
"I would like to express my agreement with the views of professor Moshe Zimmerman...It can not be doubted that an enormous majority of the Jews of Kiryat Arba (and even more of the Jews settled in Hebron itself) who supported the building of the magnificent memorial on the grave of the Jewish Nazi Baruch Goldstein5 did so because they believe in the same Judeo-Nazi ideology as he did. Had a German city constructed now a magnificent memorial on the grave of a Nazi who committed a murder similar to that of Goldstein we would label it a Nazi city, disregarding the exceptions that might exist in it. In exactly the same way we should regard Kiryat Arba as a Judeo-Nazi city and the Jewish settlers of Hebron as Judeo-Nazis of an even worse kind.
BARUCH KIMMERLING (sociology) regrets that Nazi Germany did not Finish the Job
"If the Nazi programme for the final solution of the Jewish problem had been complete, for sure there would be peace today in Palestine. "
BARUCH KIMMERLING (sociology) supports Arab terrorism against Jews
"I would like to add that every nation have the legitimate right for self-determination as well to armed presence against
occupation....Settlers can't be included (among those entitled to civilian protection from terror)".
MICHAEL DAHAN (political science) gets caught plagiarizing
No less astonishing, during research for the case, Ms. Blumenfeld discovered that Dahans sworn testimony was plagiarized from two sources, one taken completely out of context."
EMMANUEL FARJOUN (math) Joins Call For an American Ban On Investments in Israel
MIT graduate and mathematics professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Emmanuel Farjoun, signed up to support his former American colleagues. Although complete divestment from Israel is unlikely, he says, a reduction in economic investment into Israel is realistic. One of the initiators of the Israeli academics' petition supporting conscientious objectors, Farjoun says he supports all forms of nonviolent, international pressure on Israel to give up "its addiction to the occupation," be it "commercial, diplomatic or even educational." Israel, he adds, should be made into an "international pariah."
A letter by AMIRAM GOLDBLUM (School of Pharmacy), demanding that people whose views he dislikes be denied basic civil rights
"Protecting the civil rights of Noam Federman is like protecting
the rights of the murderers in Stanley Kubrik's Clockwork Orange."
Dear Shaul,
My heart is really broken and my eyes weep when I read the stories of Haetzni (a well known objective observer.....) about the wonders of Federman.
Just a little more than a decade ago, while I was running after stone-throwers in Gaza during the first intifada, the feeble and weak Federman attacked my family in Jerusalem on a daily basis, organized threats to kill my daughter,
and demolished my car ----- and was sent to jail for that and for
attacks on Dan Meridor's home, Teddy Kolek's, and the Baptist
Church ----- for only 6 months. The amount of suffering that this
hoodlum inflicted on others should have already put him in jail for a lifetime.
I also wonder how come that you are so sensitive to human suffering =only when settlers are involved.
AMIRAM GOLDBLUM (School of Pharmacy) Smears Ariel Sharon and Israel on anti-Israel show on National Public Radio
an interview with "peace activist" Amiram Goldblum, who was allowed to demonize Sharon as building a "career out of the politics and the culture of hatred," and looking at everything as a "battlefield where he has to conquer something." Ludden added to the vilification, telling listeners that Goldblum "considers Sharon's candidacy immoral, given his long military record
MOSHE ZIMMERMAN (history) Invokes Himmler - but he means Jews
"There is an entire sector in the Jewish public which I unhesitatingly define as a copy of the German Nazis. Look at the children of the Jewish Hebron settlers: they are exactly like the Hitler Youth,"
"Bringing together the Himmler speech with the question of citizenship was very audacious. We should take it up and think about it. It means the comparison [presumably between Nazi Germany and Israeli actions] is relevant . . ."
MOSHE ZIMMERMAN (history) sees Nazis when he looks at Jews
Moshe Zimmerman: "The Children of Hebron are exactly like Hitlers Youth." - "Look at the children of Hebron, they are exactly like Hitlers Youth. They are inundated from the earliest age with the evil Arabs, and anti-Semitism, how everyone is against them. They are turned into paranoids who think that they are the supreme race, exactly like Hitlers Youth."
MOSHE ZIMMERMAN (history) understands the terrorists who bombed his own campus
"A university which is located 100 metres from occupied territory should not be surprised when it becomes part of the war," says Professor Moshe Zimmerman, chairperson of the department of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem."
About NIMROD KAMER and OHAD ShEM-TOV Hebrew University humanities students, held for anti-Semitic Yom Kippur graffiti
Jerusalem police on Tuesday arrested two Jewish humanities students from the Hebrew University
Massive Calls for the Firing of Moshe ZImmerman (history) because of his smearing Jews, calling them Nazis
A group of professors from the Hebrew University published as a huge advertisement in Haaretz and sent a letter to the president and rector of the university by which they are employed. After paying some hypocritical lip-service to academic freedom they called - "for the honor of the Jewish people in general and for the university's honor" - for the firing of the expert on the history of Nazism, Prof. Moshe Zimmerman. The reason: the comparison that he drew between Jewish "hooliganism" in the territories and the acts of the Nazi youth movement.
Developed by
& Powered by
Blueweb Internet Services
Visitors: 257180388
Send to Friend
Add To Favorites
Make It Homepage
Print version