STEVEN PLAUT: ISRAEL’S TENURED EXTREMISTS
Israel’s Tenured Extremists: The Decade since “Socrates” by Steven Plaut
The following article appears in the Fall 2011 issue of the Middle
East Quarterly: http://www.meforum.org/meq/
Israel is under assault from within, and not just from the usual
suspects. Its legitimacy and, in many cases, its very existence are
being attacked by a domestic academic Fifth Column. Hundreds of
professors and lecturers, employed by Israel’s state-financed
universities, are building careers as full-time activists working
against the very country in which they live. And the problem is
growing. Fortunately, the Israeli public has become aware of the
problem and is increasingly demanding that something be done about it.
A not-inconsiderable part of the credit for this belongs to the Middle
East Quarterly, probably the first serious journal to discuss the
problem a decade ago, sparking a debate that continues to challenge
the Israeli academy’s offensive against the Jewish state.
“Socrates” Blows the Whistle
In fall 2001, the Middle East Quarterly ran a major exposé of
anti-Israel academics based inside Israeli universities. Titled
“Israel’s Academic Extremists,” it shattered the conspiracy of
silence that had long been observed in the Israeli media and on
Israeli campuses about scholars working against their own country and
in support of its enemies. And it opened a floodgate.
The article was attributed to “Solomon Socrates,” described as “the
pen name for a watchdog team of researchers keeping an eye on Israel’s
universities.” The very fact that the authors felt they needed the
cloak of anonymity to protect themselves from retaliation from their
colleagues within higher education may have been the most dramatic
illustration of the sorry state of academic freedom and pluralism in
Israel’s universities.
Noting that hiring and promotion procedures at Israeli universities
were commonly politicized, with leftist faculty who had poor academic
publication records getting hired and promoted as acts of political
solidarity, the article offered thumbnail characterizations of about
two dozen Israeli academic extremists. Today that list seems tame and
thin, at least when compared with the dimensions of the problem as it
is now understood. A few of the names were of obscure academicians of
little interest, evidently spotlighted as a result of some outlandish
statements and positions. Two of those named, Benny Morris and Ilan
Gur-Ze’ev, would no longer make the list and are generally considered
today to be important defenders of Zionism and critics of
“post-Zionist” historical revisionism of which they were once key
articulators. Morris appears to have jettisoned most of his earlier
Israel-bashing and New History revisionism regarding the period of
Israel’s war of independence, though not everyone is persuaded the
rehabilitation is sincere. As a result he has become the favorite
whipping boy for much of the anti-Zionist Left, incensed that he no
longer spends his days denouncing Israel as the ultimate evil in the
world. In February 2010, Morris was even denied the right to speak at
a Cambridge University student event on the grounds that he was too
pro-Israel and thus supposedly anti-Arab. In June 2011 he was
physically attacked by anti-Israel activists while on his way to
lecture in the London School of Economics. Gur-Ze’ev, meanwhile, has
been speaking out forcefully against the anti-Semitism and
totalitarian inclinations of the radical Left, to the chagrin of those
who oppose him.
From Socrates’ 2001 list, Baruch Kimmerling, Dan Bar-On, and Israel
Shahak are no longer alive while Ilan Pappé and Gabriel Piterberg have
emigrated and built careers elsewhere as full-time Israel bashers. The
remaining names have, however, been joined by scores, perhaps
hundreds, of home-grown academic bashers of Israel over the past
decade.
The Internal War against Israel
Most of Israel’s anti-Israel academics hold tenured faculty positions
at the country’s tax-funded public universities. They include people
who justify and celebrate Arab terrorism and who help initiate
campaigns of boycott and economic divestment directed against their
own country in time of war. Today many of the leaders of the so-called
BDS movement (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions [against Israel]) are
Israeli academics. The phenomenon is near pandemic at the four main
Israeli liberal arts universities: Tel Aviv University, the Hebrew
University, the University of Haifa, and Ben-Gurion University. At the
two scientific-engineering institutions, the Technion and the Weizmann
Institute, there are small numbers of faculty involved in such
political activity but they are a minor presence, and this is also
true of the religious university, Bar-Ilan. Israeli colleges are less
generously funded by the government than universities and so are more
dependent on competing for student tuition. This may explain why
extremist faculty is more unusual there than in universities, though
Sapir College in the Negev may be an exception.
On the eve of the 2003 Iraq war, dozens of Israeli academics warned
the world that Israel was planning massive war crimes and genocidal
massacres against the Palestinians the moment the first coalition
troops were to land in Iraq. When the actual fighting took place and
no such crimes were perpetrated by Israel, not a single signer of the
petition issued an apology for the smears against the Jewish state.
In other petitions, Israeli academics routinely denounce Israel for
carrying out war crimes and human rights violations. In some, they
call for suppressing Israeli sovereignty by imposing political
solutions on the country that they favor but which are opposed by the
vast majority of Israelis. Hundreds of Israeli university professors
have been involved in organizing mutiny and insurrection among Israeli
soldiers, and some have been arrested for violently attacking police
and soldiers or for similar forms of law breaking. For example, Tel
Aviv University’s Anat Matar, the Hebrew University’s Amiel Vardi,
math lecturer Kobi Snitz (who has taught at several institutions),
and others have been arrested for lawbreaking and for participating in
violent, illegal demonstrations. At least one faculty member at Ben
Gurion University has openly called for murder of those who reject his
far-leftist opinions. The Israeli university authorities wink at
such behavior and sometimes even collaborate with and promote it.
Scores of Israeli academics openly advocate the so-called Palestinian
right of return, which would effectively end Israel’s existence,
while others openly call for Israel to be annihilated altogether.
Other Israeli academics signed the so-called Olga document demanding
that Israel grant the Palestinians an unrestricted “right of return.”
Such people often claim to favor a “one-state solution,” in which
Israel’s existence as a sovereign nation would end, to be enfolded
within a larger state with an Arab and Muslim government and majority.
A few Israeli academics even campaign on behalf of and promote
Holocaust deniers. Articles by Ben-Gurion University’s Neve Gordon
have been published on the web site of Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel
and in Iran’s state newspaper. Neve has also endorsed Norman
Finkelstein, often regarded as a Holocaust denier or at least a
Holocaust trivializer while other Israeli academics have praised
Holocaust revisionist David Irving.
During the Cast Lead military operation against Hamas in Gaza (winter
2008-09), the visibility of this group grew. While polls showed
near-unanimous support for the operations among Israeli Jews, a high
proportion of Israeli academics opposed the operation. The Hebrew
University professor of linguistic education, Nurit Elhanan-Peled, has
devoted much of her career to promoting the political agenda of the
very same Palestinian terrorists who murdered her own daughter in a
suicide bombing of a civilian Israeli bus. Many anti-Israel academics
cheered on Hamas as it launched rockets at the civilians in Israel’s
south. Others publicly endorsed Hezbollah’s “legitimate resistance,”
when northern Israel was showered by Katyusha rockets during the
summer war of 2006. Some are currently among the leaders of marches
that call upon the world to prevent Jews from living in neighborhoods
of East Jerusalem, where, they believe, Jews just do not belong.
The Dershowitz Counterattack
Probably the most dramatic exhibition of the problem came at the
national assembly of the governors of Tel Aviv University (TAU) in the
spring of 2010. The keynote speaker invited to the affair was Harvard
law professor Alan Dershowitz. While left of center, Dershowitz is
passionately pro-Israel and, at the same time, vehemently opposed to
infringements upon academic freedom.
Upon receiving an honorary doctoral degree at Tel Aviv University,
Dershowitz gave a dramatic speech denouncing the home-grown,
anti-Israel cadre of lecturers dominating Israeli universities. He
defended the rights of these academics to exercise freedom of
speech—or, in his words, the “right to be wrong.” But he also defended
the rights of others to denounce and criticize them.
In no time, Dershowitz confronted the all-too-common refrain sounded
by these scholars that they are only engaging in legitimate criticism
of Israel. To the contrary, Dershowitz contended, these people were
actually often engaged in delegitimizing Israel itself, calling for
world boycotts against the Jewish state, and at times calling for its
annihilation. They go so far, he stated, as to organize boycott
campaigns by recruiting and leading teams of anti-Israel radicals. ]
Dershowitz then named several Tel Aviv University faculty, including
some who were in Boston that same week attempting to organize a
boycott against the Technion, Israel’s main engineering university,
for supposedly being a cog in the Israeli “war machine.”
Without naming names, Dershowitz heaped scorn on TAU professor Shlomo
Sand for his recent book, The Invention of the Jewish People, which
claims that there is actually no such thing as a Jewish people.
Dershowitz went on to denounce those who insist that freedom of speech
belongs only to people who agree with them and assailed those at
Israeli universities who harass students who dare to disagree with
forced-fed ideology, comparing this behavior to teachers who sexually
harass students. He insisted that students too are entitled to
academic freedom, which includes the right to disagree with their
professors.
While such a peroration would ignite controversy anywhere, it was
downright incendiary at Tel Aviv University (TAU), arguably home to
the greatest concentration of tenured leftists teaching in Israel.
While the audience repeatedly interrupted him with loud applause,
faculty members reportedly squirmed in their seats.
It did not take long for these academics to open fire in retaliation;
within days, a group of TAU professors denounced Dershowitz and
challenged his right to criticize them. Signatures for a petition were
collected and published on a left-wing website. The petition
essentially denied Dershowitz’s right to freedom of speech, despite
the pretence of some signatories to the contrary, by deriding his
charges against specific academics as “bordering on incitement that
can pose a clear and present danger to these members of staff.”
A quick look at the names on the petition illustrates the nature of
the problem. Among the signatories claiming that Dershowitz’s words
criticizing the anti-Israel camp reminded them of “the dark regimes”
in human history were:
Chaim Gans of TAU law school, who organized a petition demanding that
Col. Pnina Baruch-Sharvit, head of the Israel Defense Forces
international law division, be prevented from teaching a course in the
school after her retirement from military service because her
department (allegedly) legitimized strikes in which civilians were
hurt or killed during Operation Cast Lead.
Gadi Algazi, a historian at TAU who, among other activities, led a
march of Israeli Arabs supporting Hezbollah terror.
Uri Hadar, a psychology professor, who recently organized a conference
at TAU to support Hamas and Hezbollah.
Daniel Bar-Tal, an educational psychologist, who produces anti-Jewish
propaganda for the U.N. and believes Zionism is an obstacle to peace.
The Attack against Freedom of Speech
As starkly demonstrated by the anti- Dershowitz petition, Israel’s
tenured radicals are not only vehemently anti-Israel but also
staunchly anti-democratic. For them, academic freedom and freedom of
speech means absolute protection of the right to “criticize” Israel
but not to defend it.
McCarthyism has become the favorite rhetorical bludgeon wielded by
Israeli academics to deny their critics the freedom of speech. This
McCarthyism, they charge, endangers freedom of speech and democracy.
So tenured academics should have the sacrosanct right to denounce and
demonize all of Israel and also to smear non-leftist Israelis,
including private citizens such as army officers, in the most lurid
and vulgar ways. But those who respond by criticizing these critics
are endangering democracy. In particular, the radical academics have
denounced the watchdog web sites that monitor and cite what they say,
as well as the Zionist student organization Im Tirtzu (“If you will
it”) and Knesset members who have criticized the behavior of the
radicals. In the strange world of Israeli academic radicals, the worst
offense against academic freedom is the verbatim citing of what they
actually say or write.
Some professors, most notoriously David Newman, dean of social
sciences and humanities at Ben-Gurion University, and Daniel Bar-Tal
of the School of Education at Tel Aviv University, have published
calls for the suppression and silencing of critics. The president of
TAU censored Mark Tanenbaum , a governor of his own university’s
board, when the latter proposed an investigation into professors who
use the school’s name and funds when participating in forums of
political nature —behavior that is incidentally barred by the
university’s own bylaws. The Israeli media have also reported a
growing number of demands from academics that the freedom of
expression of their critics, and for that matter—of scholars deviating
from politically correct dogmas—be suppressed.
Thus, for example, when Yeruham Leavitt was teaching a class in
medical ethics at Ben-Gurion University, he questioned the assertion
that children raised by homosexual couples experience no adverse
effects. For this he was not only fired for “unacceptable thinking,”
but the president of Ben-Gurion University, Rivka Carmi, went out of
her way to defend the firing. On the other hand, when a professor of
sociology at the Hebrew University, Eyal Ben-Ari, was accused by
several female students of having raped and sexually molested them,
the university at first circled the wagons around him and only years
later suspended him for two years without pay.
Tel Aviv University faculty members have participated in protests
demanding that the campus Center for Iranian Studies be shut down
because radical faculty members said they feared its work could assist
the United States and Israel in confronting Tehran. The radicals also
opposed allowing an Israel ex-general to speak there. A few years
back some radical faculty protested against the opening of a campus
synagogue, claiming its presence on campus would contribute to
“religious coercion” and suppression of “religious pluralism.”
Obviously no student would be coerced into attending religious
ceremony at the synagogue. But the absence of a synagogue before this
one was opened did not strike the radical faculty members as
infringing upon student freedom of expression and religion. In 2008,
the student union at Tel Aviv University wanted to hold an exhibit
protesting human rights abuses in China, but university officials
ordered it shut down lest it offend Chinese diplomats. Meanwhile, TAU
has repeatedly hosted events organized by the Israeli Communist Party,
held in campus facilities.
Academics from all across the country are now calling for a boycott of
Ariel University Center in Samaria because it is located across the
“Green Line.” There have been no petitions though to eliminate
politicized programs of ideological indoctrination run by the radical
Left inside many university departments. There have been petitions by
left-wing faculty members to eliminate university programs for Israeli
army officers, intelligence service officers, and police, as well as
petitions to bar army officers from holding academic positions.
Similarly, a group of University of Haifa faculty from its school of
education organized a petition to demand that army officers be barred
from speaking in schools.
All too often, university administrations have colluded with this
mindset. When Neve Gordon of Ben-Gurion University filed a harassment
“strategic lawsuit against public participation” (SLAPP) lawsuit
against this author for criticizing his public, political activities
and writings, he was backed by the highest officials at the
university. These evidently see nothing amiss with such attempts at
suppressing freedom of speech for other academics who happen to
dislike Gordon’s extremist opinions.
Hiring for Uniformity in Thought
The Israeli campus has become thoroughly politicized with faculty
hiring and promotion decisions subordinated to political bias. As
noted in the 2001 MEQ article, scholars with mediocre academic records
are often hired and promoted as acts of solidarity with the Left.
There have also been allegations of malicious blocking and sabotaging
of the academic careers of those with political views on the Right.
Israeli academics recruited through this politicized process have
misused their podiums to impose courses consisting of anti-Israel
libel and venom on students.
The manner in which this ideological hegemony is maintained over
campuses is well known within the Israeli academic institutions, even
if the corruption has rarely been aired publicly. Consider a typical
hiring or promotion procedure for an academic whose publication record
consists mainly, or exclusively, of propaganda articles that bash
Israel. Evaluation procedures are typically corrupted and politicized:
An evaluation committee for the candidate is appointed, consisting
entirely of like-minded faculty members who then typically requests
assessments from eight to ten “referees” from Israel and around the
world. But all, or nearly all, of the referee letter-writers will
themselves have identical anti-Israel sympathies and can generally be
counted upon to write glowing letters of support out of a sense of
political solidarity. Ben-Gurion University seems to be the most
accomplished institution in such practices.
Faculty chat lists in which Israeli professors post comments,
especially in the social sciences, are invariably dominated by the
self-defined “progressives.” The author was personally summoned by a
rector of the University of Haifa, Yossi Ben Artzi, and threatened
with disciplinary actions for using sarcasm in response to
“bash-Israel” postings placed on the local professors’ chat list. The
“Israel Social Science” chat list is routinely censored to limit
postings critical of the Left while ideological postings by
anti-Israel faculty members suffer from no such handicap and dominate
the list. For example, an ideological article by the left-leaning
Hebrew University professor Yitzhak Galnoor attacking the exercise of
academic freedom by critics of leftists in Israeli universities was
posted on the list, while list manager David Levi-Faur refused to
permit any response to it to appear.
Would-be non-leftist faculty can clearly see the political writing on
the wall. They must choose either to toe the political line out of
career self-interest or to muzzle themselves and maintain a low
profile, at least until they reach senior academic ranks and often
after that as well. Thus political uniformity and the campus hegemony
are perpetuated.
Abuses inside the Classroom
Israeli administrators have long turned a blind eye to anti-Israel
courses which are often mandatory for students. They have ignored
growing reports that students are being harassed and penalized by
faculty members when they dare to disagree with faculty political
opining and indoctrination. When the Im Tirtzu movement issued
reports documenting classroom intimidation and indoctrination of
students, they were denounced by scores of faculty members and by the
rectors at Ben-Gurion University, University of Haifa, and Tel Aviv
University as McCarthyists and fascists.
Administrators have also refused to speak out against anti-Israel
rallies, misrepresented as academic conferences, which take place
almost weekly on Israeli campuses. When Islamist cleric Sheik Ra’ed
Salah spoke at the University of Haifa in June 2009, the university
heads ordered that Jewish students be physically barred from entering
the auditorium in which he spoke. The cleric then called upon Arab
students attending the lecture to become “martyrs.” The following year
the University of Haifa barred the sheik from speaking, but Tel Aviv
University responded by hosting him.
Meanwhile the level of in-classroom anti-Israel indoctrination
conducted in Israeli universities has been steadily growing. Crusading
against Israel has become the chief scholarly credential of a growing
number of tenured Israeli academics. Rigid, anti-Israel uniformity
and monolithic far-left consensus are to be found in many academic
departments in Israeli universities, especially in the humanities, the
softer social sciences, law, and education. There are some departments
in which no Zionist or non-leftist is, in effect, permitted to teach.
Perhaps the most notorious example of this was the 2005 firing of the
single non-leftist in the politics department at Ben-Gurion
University, despite his impressive record of academic and scholarly
publications.
In many university departments in Israel, academic pluralism means
that anti-Israel opinion is preached and taught by a diverse set of
faculty members—leftist Jews, Arabs, men, and women, all holding the
same opinions—but not pluralism of ideas and ideological outlooks. All
Israeli universities strive to expand the presence of Arab and female
faculty members in the name of diversity, using affirmative action
preferences. Yet none of them see anything wrong with the existence of
entire departments in which there is not a single religiously
observant faculty member or someone with writings from the Right side
of the political spectrum.
The anti-Israel political activities of faculty often border on open
support for treason. Dozens of tenured extremists were active in
celebrating Tali Fahima, an Israeli woman arrested for collaborating
with terrorists and helping plan terror attacks. Many openly
identified with convicted nuclear spy and traitor Mordecai Vanunu, or
with the former Arab Knesset member Azmi Bishara, wanted for espionage
and now in hiding outside Israel.
In a few cases, Israeli faculty members who have defamed army
officers and other public figures as war criminals have caused their
targets to cancel study and travel plans outside Israel for fear of
being prosecuted on the weight of these smears. Some of the most
openly anti-Semitic propaganda on the planet, including much produced
by Neo-Nazis as well as open calls for the annihilation of Israel, is
currently being disseminated via the ALEF List, an anti-Israel chat
list operating under the auspices of the University of Haifa. Many of
the worst anti-Semitic pronouncements disseminated by that list appear
on the “ALEF WATCH” web site, run by Isracampus. These include
endorsements of terrorism, calls for Israel to be exterminated, and
even Holocaust Denial.
This anti-Israel bias and the accompanying suppression of dissident,
pro-Israel opinion has been the focus of several recent studies
receiving wide attention in the media. These include a survey of
syllabi in political science courses, collected by the Im Tirtzu
student organization, and a similar report on sociology departments
prepared by the Institute for Zionist Strategies. Both studies claim
to detect extreme bias and one-sided indoctrination in departmental
courses, including mandatory courses.
Change in the Air?
The biggest change that has occurred since the 2001 Socrates article
is that the Israeli public now is aware of tenured extremism. Public
figures, members of the parliament, journalists, students, alumni,
donors, and other academics are speaking up courageously, criticizing
anti-Israel academics, challenging the hegemony of the far Left over
Israel’s four main liberal arts universities. There have been
proposals in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, to require disclosure
of sources of funding for radical, anti-Israel nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs). Israeli radical academics are active in all
such groups. There have also been proposals for a law that would deny
citizenship to those refusing to declare loyalty to Israel or who
engage in extremist anti-Israel activities. A number of Knesset
members and other political leaders in Israel have repeatedly spoken
out against the political activities of radical academics, including
in NGOs, among them Danny Danon, Gideon Sa’ar (the Israeli minister of
education), Alex Miller, and Michael Ben-Ari. Sa’ar held special
Knesset committee hearings on the seditious activities of faculty and
political biases in Israeli universities.
The Knesset has considered bills directed against Israeli academics
who issue calls for anti-Israel boycotts and probing human rights
NGOs involved in anti-Israel propaganda activities. Other public
figures, such as the mayor of the town of Omer in which many faculty
members of Ben-Gurion University reside, have called for sanctions
against universities that refuse to act against tenured radicals.
One sign of how far things have been transformed is the widespread
willingness today to criticize Israel’s tenured foes by name in all of
the Israeli mainstream media, with the daily Ma’ariv the most
aggressive. The most consistent and effective critics of the
anti-Israel radicals have been Ben-Dror Yemini and Kalman Liebskind,
both at Ma’ariv. Watchdog web sites have arisen that monitor and
document the anti-Israel activities of Israeli faculty members. The
main such group is IsraCampus, operating as a sort of Israeli cousin
to the Middle East Forum’s Campus Watch. Other groups and websites
also follow the anti-Israel political activities of academics,
including NGO Monitor headed by Gerald M. Steinberg of Bar-Ilan
University.
But perhaps the most dramatic change on Israeli campus has been the
emergence over the past few years of a radical, patriotic, Zionist
student movement. Until three or four years ago, it was unusual to see
Israeli university students take to the barricades except over the
price of tuition or cafeteria food. The Arab student unions would
regularly hold small anti-Israel protests and political activities,
but Jewish students were rarely involved in campus political
expression. Thanks to the Im Tirtzu movement, all that has changed.
Largely the initiative of two eloquent and prolific Hebrew University
students, Ronen Shoval and Erez Tadmor, Im Tirtzu is the dominant
student ideological movement today on most Israeli campuses.
The term Im Tirtzu, means, “If you will it,” and it is part of a
longer mantra originally coined by Theodore Herzl as part of his
proposal for creation of a Jewish state. The Im Tirtzu student
movement has emerged as the most effective and vocal force drawing
public attention to the abuses stemming from campus politicization.
Im Tirtu leaders have testified in the Knesset, write frequently in
the media, and the movement regularly organizes counter-protests with
Israeli flags and patriotic slogans in response to every anti-Israel
demonstration organized by Arab and Jewish leftist students. Its
members wear T-shirts to class with images of Herzl and Jabotinsky. It
has called for pressure on Israeli universities, especially Ben-Gurion
University, to force campus officials to act against classroom
politicization, and it has threatened to file Supreme Court petitions
to achieve this.
Left-wing academics increasingly complain about Im Tirtzu students
cataloguing information about political bias, gleaned from course
descriptions and syllabi. The group’s leaders have highlighted the
fact that students from the center and right of the Israeli spectrum
experience harassment from left-wing faculty. In one infamous
incident, a student at Ben-Gurion University, Rachel Abraham, was
threatened with penalties and a lowered grade by the anti-Zionist
geography professor Oren Yiftachel if she refused to toe his
ideological line. Other harassment of student Zionists is even worse.
In one famous incident, leftist students at Ben-Gurion University were
photographed giving Heil Hitler Nazi salutes to pro-Zionist students
at a campus rally following the Turkish flotilla raid while Hebrew
University students used the Nazi salute during student council
electioneering.
The Israeli taxpaying public is losing patience with radical
anti-Israel academics and demanding accountability from the
universities regarding the use and misuse of taxpayer funds. Indeed,
the awakening of public awareness in Israel (and outside it) over the
past decade has been breathtaking. Internet web searches about the
subject yield thousands of articles on numerous websites, both inside
and outside of Israel, leading many leftist professors increasingly to
complain about being “spied upon.” Other radicals are exercising
greater caution and circumspection as a result. Still others complain
about a sharp drop in the willingness on the part of their fellow
travelers in the anti-Israel camp to engage in open incitement against
Israel, or to sign their names to openly anti-Israel and anti-Semitic
petitions. While difficult to prove numerically, far-leftist academics
now seem to perceive and complain more about the reluctance of their
colleagues to go public these days with anti-Israel statements and
actions.
Still the battle rages on. Depoliticizing the Israeli campus is yet a
far-off dream. But as anger grows against Israel’s tenured extremists,
change is in the air.
Steven Plaut teaches at the Graduate School of Business Administration
at the University of Haifa.
Footnotes:
Solomon Socrates, “Israel’s Academic Extremists,” Middle East
Quarterly, Fall 2001, pp. 5-14.
See, for example, Efraim Karsh, “Benny Morris and the Reign of
Error, Revisited,” Middle East Quarterly, Spring 2005, pp. 31-42;
idem, “Revisiting Israel’s ‘Original Sin,’” Commentary, Sept. 2003,
pp. 46-50.
The Jerusalem Post, Feb. 7, 2010.
Makor Rishon, June 24, 2011.
Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, The Possibility/Impossibility of a New Critical
Language in Education (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2010).
Avraham Oz, “Urgent warning: The Israeli government may be
contemplating crimes against humanity,“ LabourNet.UK, Sept. 24, 2002.
“Anti-Israel Petitions Signed by Israeli Academics,” IsraCampus
(Haifa), accessed May 27, 2011.
Israel Academic Monitor (Even Yehuda), Sept. 9, 2005.
“PSP Supports Kobi Snitz, an Israeli Activist Beginning Short Prison
Term for Anti-Occupation Activity,” International Campaign of
Solidarity with the Palestinian Prisoners, Sept. 21, 2009.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4080623,00.html June 6, 2011.
Lee Kaplan, “Rivka Carmi, President of Ben Gurion University, hails
anti-Israel activity on her campus,” IsraCampus, accessed May 27,
2011.
“President of Ben-Gurion University Collaborating with Communist
Ideologue Jacob Katriel,” The Jewish Press Blog, Sept. 29, 2007.
“Jewish supporters of Refugee Rights Including the Palestinian Right
of Return,” The Middle East Crisis Committee, Woodbridge, Conn., Nov.
8, 2003.
“Anti-Israel Petitions Signed by Israeli Academics,” IsraCampus,
July 12, 2004.
See, for example, “Join the One-State Initiative,” Palestine
Justice Network, Apr. 23, 2011.
See for example, “Where Truth Is Destiny,” Zundelsite, Oct. 27, 2000.
The Tehran Times, Apr. 6, 2009.
Neve Gordon, “Cloud-after-Auschwitz,” The Nation, Nov. 13, 2000.
“Shraga Elam and David Irving,” Paul Bogdanor website, Mar. 13, 2003.
The Jerusalem Post, Dec. 31, 2008.
Seth J. Frantzman, “The Israeli Academy and the Gaza War,
IsraCampus, Mar. 2009.
Gary Katz, “The Case of Nurit Peled-Elhanan,” IsraCampus, Jan. 6, 2008.
Shlomo Sharan, “Our Inner Scourge: The Catastrophe of Israel
Academic,” The Ariel Center for Policy Research (ACPR, Shaarei Tikva),
Sept. 2007. See also Arnon Soffer, “In the Trap of Academic
Radicalism,” University of Haifa,
http://web.hevra.haifa.ac.il/~ch-strategy/images/publications/academy_radical_trap.pdf
(Hebrew) , 123 pages.
Ran HaCohen, “A Case for Hizbullah?“ Antiwar.com (Palo Alto,
Calif.), Aug. 13, 2003.
“Full Text of Alan Dershowitz’s Tel Aviv Speech,” Ha’aretz (Tel
Aviv), May, 12, 2010.
Ibid.
New York and London: Verso, 2010.
Shlomo Sharan, “Our Inner Scourge: The Catastrophe of Israel
Academic,” The Ariel Center for Policy Research (ACPR, Shaarei Tikva),
Sept. 2007.
For a webcast of the lecture, see “Opening Night, May 7,” Tel Aviv
University, May 7, 2010.
“Mikhtav Havrei Segel Beuniversitat Tel Aviv Beinyan Neum Habela
shel Alan D Dershowitz,” Kibbush Magazine, May 11, 2010.
Ha’aretz, May 21, 2011.
Ynet News (Tel Aviv), Mar. 31, 2010.
Ben-Dror Yemini, “Incitement at Tel Aviv University or ‘Voices from
Gaza’?“ Ma’ariv (Tel Aviv), Apr. 15, 2010.
Alon Ben Shaul, “It’s the Zionists, Stupid,” IsraCampus, accessed
May 27, 2011.
See, for example, David Newman, “Bashing the Academic Left,” The
Jerusalem Post, Apr. 14, 2011; “Ben-Gurion University-David Newman,”
IsraCampus, Apr. 24, 2009.
Gerald Steinberg, “Right of Reply: Israel’s Academic Left on the
Attack,” The Jerusalem Post, May 17, 2010.
The Jerusalem Post, May 12, 2010.
See Benjamin Pogrund, “The Guardians of Israeli Academia,” Ha’aretz,
Oct. 23, 2009; Nitza Berkovitch, “ McCarthyism in Tel Aviv,” YNet
News, Aug 17, 2010.
YNet News, July 4, 2010.
Ha’aretz, Aug. 1, 2008, Aug. 5, 2008, Feb. 24, 2011.
[] http://www.israel-academia-monitor.com/index.php?type=large_advic&advice_id=3660&page_data%5Bid%5D=174&cookie_lang=en&the_session_id=f35938b89ed81f71d6e1729f8003b6fe&BLUEWEBSESSIONSID=8df1b40a844dffbf000da38f11f97c97
YNet News, Nov. 6, 2006; Israel Academia Monitor, Apr. 23, 2006.
[.
Epoch Times (New York), Mar. 8, 2008.
The Jerusalem Post, Sept. 1, 2011 01/09/2011.
Seth Frantzman, “Ivory Towers of Critique: The Philosophy and
Political Science Departments at Tel Aviv University,” IsraCampus,
Oct. 15, 2009. 15/10/2009.
Rivka Carmi, “Universities Are in the Footnotes,” The Jerusalem
Post, May, 28, 2011; Ha’aretz, Sept. 15, 2010. A SLAPP is an
anti-democratic lawsuit that is intended to censor, intimidate, and
silence critics by forcing them to bear costs involved in a legal
defense. Its use by one academic against another would be regarded as
an anti-democratic harassment tactic in any democratic regime.
Jacob Benshimon, “In-Classroom Indoctrination at the University of
Michigan,” FrontPage Magazine, Apr. 29, 2008; Israel Academia Monitor,
accessed June 7, 2011.
Steven Plaut, “The Leftwing McCarthyism of Prof. Itzhak Galnoor,”
IsraCampus, Oct. 13, 2009; Examples of post-Zionist domination of that
list (in Hebrew) : http://www.socialscienceisrael.org/archives/136
and http://www.socialscienceisrael.org/archives/162
Itzhak Galnoor, “Academic Freedom under Political Duress: Israel,”
Social Research, Summer 2009, pp. 541-60.
Rivka Carmi, “Universities Are in the Footnotes,” The Jerusalem
Post, May, 28, 2011; Ha’aretz, Sept. 15, 2010.
Examples of indoctrination courses can be seen here:
http://law.huji.ac.il/upload/AK_bureaucracygovernmentalityhumanrights.pdf
; http://summer.ucsc.edu/classes/syllabus/reader.php?f=65c2e804c276ea12e32a129fb9213455[;
Jacob Benshimon, “In-Classroom Indoctrination at the University of
Michigan,” FrontPage Magazine, Apr. 29, 2008; Israel Academia Monitor,
accessed June 7, 2011.
Ha’aretz, Nov. 9, 2009.
Dan Illouz, “True Academic Freedom in Israel,” Arutz Sheva (Beit El
and Petah Tikva), July 23, 2010.
Ha’aretz, Aug. 19, 2010. For negative responses, see The New
Centrist, Feb. 7, 2010; “Israel’s Drift toward Fascism—More on Im
Tirtzu,” Jews for Justice for Palestinians (London), Sept. 21, 2010;
“When Zionism Is Portrayed at Fascism,” Dan Illouz website, Apr. 6,
2010.
Canada Free Press, June 19, 2009.
YNet News (Tel Aviv), June 24, 2009; ibid., May 24, 2011.
Benshimon, “In-Classroom Indoctrination at the University of
Michigan,” FrontPage Magazine, Apr. 29, 2008.
Ha’aretz, Aug. 19, 2010.
Free Tali Fahima petition, Oct. 4, 2004.
YNet News, June 8, 2010.
Mordechai Vanunu petition, accessed June 8, 2011.
Here is a petition supporting Bishara signed by Israeli
academics: http://oznik.com/petitions/010613.html List of its
signers is here: http://oznik.com/petitions/010613_signers.html
http://archive.arabnews.com/?page=4§ion=0&article=95727&d=3&m=5&y=2007
, May 3, 2007
The Yesh Gvul and other anti-Israel groups used the materials
provided to them by Israeli academics. The most notorious is Neve
Gordon’s smear of Kohavi. By the way, the anti-Israel groups in the
UK that were behind the attempts at prosecution are also led by
“Israeli academics,” including Machover. See
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/27/olmert-could-face-warcrimes-arrest
and http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/134138 The
material on Gordon and Kohavi is all by me.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3221339,00.html Feb 27,
2006 and http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3140750,00.html
Sept 11, 2005
ALEF Watch, IsraCampus, accessed June 8, 2011.
Ha’aretz, Aug.17, 2010.
“Post-Zionism in the Academy,” Institute for Zionist Strategies,
Jerusalem, accessed June 1, 2011.
Alana Goodman, “Is Israel’s Controversial NGO Law Simply a Foreign
Agent Registration Act,” Jan. 6, 2011.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Oct. 12, 2010; YNet News, Feb. 14, 2011.
YNet News, Jan. 5, 2011.
YNet News, Nov. 2, 2010.
The Guardian (London), Jan. 5, 2011; Joseph Dana, “Will It Soon Be
Illegal for Israelis to Support BDS?” +972 website, Feb. 15, 2011.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Jan. 12, 2011.
NRG website (Ma’ariv), June 2, 2011.
Ben-Dror Yemini, “Academic Brainwashing,” Ma’ariv, IsraCampus
trans., Aug. 20, 2010.
Arutz Sheva, Jan. 11, 2011.
Ibid., June 17, 2009.
The Jerusalem Post, Aug. 18, 2010.
Ha’aretz, Aug. 18, 2010.
Martin Sherman, “Channel 10 :Hamakor” on Im Tirtzu’s Efforts in
Combating Post/anti-Zionist Perspectives in Israeli Academe,” Israel
Academia Monitor, Feb. 9, 2011.
Dan Illouz, “True Aacademic Freedon in Israel,” Arutz Sheva, July
23, 2010; RACHEL AVRAHAM, “Studying under Dr. Oren Yiftachel,” Israel
Academia Monitor, accessed June 8, 2011.
Haim Misgav, “Freedom to Give Nazi Salute,” YNet News, Aug. 19, 2010.
Arutz Sheva, June 9, 2009.
Lincoln Z. Shlensky, “Neve Gordon: Assault on Academic Freedom,”
Jewish Peace News, Sept. 1, 2010; Neve Gordon, “Struggling over the
Right to Struggle—An Assault on Israeli Academic Freedom and Liberal
Values,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Aug. 26, 2010, and
Occupation Magazine, Aug. 30, 2010.
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