http://www.thecommentator.com/article/939/harvard_s_shameful_and_biased_one_state_conference_joins_the_call_to_destroy_israel
Henry Kopel is a counter-terrorism prosecutor with the US Department of Justice in Connecticut. The views here are his own, and do not reflect the views of the Justice Department
In the intellectuals’ war against Israel, there is no truth in labelling. To paraphrase Orwell, War is Peace, Ignorance is Enrichment, and Genocide is Liberal Democracy
The campaign among western intellectuals to delegitimize Israel’s existence scored a major symbolic victory this month, with the announcement that Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government will host on March 3-4, a conference advocating a “One State Solution” for Israel and the Palestinians.
“One State Solution” is the latest fashion among Israel’s enemies. If implemented, Israel would be merged into a single country with the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and both Jews and Palestinians living elsewhere would have a “right of return.”
Conveniently unmentioned in the Harvard conference brochure is that an influx of millions of Palestinians would create a majority vote for dismantling Israel and replacing it with a Palestinian-Arab state.
Palestinians may call this “One State,” but for Israeli Jews, the more accurate caption for this “solution” would seem to be “Final.”
That Harvard’s conferees have no intention of presenting a fair and honest debate on the implications of “One State” is made clear by the speakers list, which consists mostly of militant Palestinian advocates, plus a few left-wing Jewish extremists who question the validity of Israel’s existence. Such as:
– Ali Abunimah, the Palestinian-American Executive Director of the anti-Israel website “Electronic Intifadah,” who campaigns for “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” against Israel, and claims that Palestinian terrorism is all caused by Israel’s alleged “ongoing orgy of violence.”
– Sa’ed Atshan, a Harvard graduate student and pro-Palestinian activist, who condemns the United States as “the most anti-Palestinian country in the world after Israel,” and claims that Israel is an “apartheid state” comparable to the former South Africa.
– Diana Buttu, a Canadian lawyer of Palestinian descent, who has served as Mahmoud Abbas’s legal advisor, and has falsely claimed, among other things, that Israel “ethnically cleansed” millions of Palestinians in 1948, that no Israelis died from Palestinian suicide bombers in the late 1990’s, and that the thousands of Palestinian rockets launched into Israel contain no explosives.