CAMERA - Ha'aretz Launders BDSers

TS..
CAMERA/Snapshots..
25 January '12..

In a page two article this week, Ha'aretz whitewashes two Israeli personalities who have promoted BDS efforts, turning them into victims of an alleged "McCarthyist" campaign while ignoring their own calls to boycott Israel. Talila Nesher reports:

Three self-proclaimed watchdog organizations have labeled about 10 percent of Israeli academics as anti-Zionist, according to a recent study by a group of academics, artists and university students who aim to counter the categorizations. The organizations, which are open about their activities, are Im Tirtzu, IsraCampus and Israel Academia Monitor.

The group's survey came up with the names of more than 1,000 Israelis, 800 of whom are academics but also including authors, journalists, public intellectuals, and past and present cabinet ministers, that appear on a list maintained by the trio of organizations.

Members of the group include political scientist Prof. Neve Gordon of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev; Israeli Film Directors Guild chairman Rani Blair; and the chairman of the Israeli Documentary Filmmakers Forum, Uri Rosenwaks. They recently created the Blacklist website (blacklist.co.il), which invites visitors to check whether they themselves appear on the lists.

"There is a real concern for the future of Israeli democracy and about McCarthyism against anyone who criticizes the government's policies in the occupied territories or social aspects," Gordon said. "Every week new names appear on these sites, and we wanted to examine the extent of the phenomenon. The people who will be hurt most are junior faculty members who are trying for university positions and are wary of being 'marked out,'" Gordon said. . . .

Israel fights the demagogues

Im Tirzu's success shows that after a generation of accepting the Left’s domination of the public discourse the public has had enough.


Caroline B. Glick
Our World/JPost
24 August '10

Israeli academia is in an uproar. And this is a good thing. Last week, the Zionist student movement Im Tirtzu opened a rather modest campaign against Ben- Gurion University’s Politics and Government Department.

And the howls of protest stretched from the Negev to the border with Lebanon.

Im Tirtzu is a grass-roots initiative of university students.

Over the past few years it has managed to amass a modest budget funded by Jewish and non-Jewish Zionists here and in the US.

One of Im Tirtzu’s central goals is to engender an atmosphere of academic freedom and intellectual pluralism on university campuses. Over the past generation or so, those campuses, and particularly the humanities and social sciences faculties, have become hotbeds of anti- Zionist activism and intellectual terror. Stories of professorial intimidation of and discrimination against Zionist students are widespread, as are instances of outright indoctrination in the classrooms.

As Ma’ariv’s Ben Dror Yemini reported this week, at Hebrew University’s law school, Prof. Yehuda Shenhav teaches a class called “Bureaucracy, Governance and Human Rights.” In the course of their studies, the students are expected to participate in the work of anti-Zionist organizations including Machsom Watch and Yesh Din. At the end of the year, the participants – who will be paid NIS 1,450 for their activism – are expected to write an article describing their experiences which will be turned into a booklet edited by Shenhav and anti-Zionist activists Michael Sfard and Yael Barda and published by their anti-Zionist NGOs.

The situation at Ben-Gurion University’s Politics and Government Department is particularly distressing. It is headed by Dr. Neve Gordon, an anti-Zionist activist who has written that Israel is a “proto-fascist state,” has castigated it as an “apartheid state” and has signed petitions calling for international academic, scientific, economic and cultural boycotts of the country.

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Academic Terror - Not a safe environment

JoeSettler
The Muqata
22 August '10

(Excellent!)

Way back when I was in College, I went to a relatively non-politicized university, but it was always easy to tell who was politically right, and who was politically left. Those who kept their political views to themselves were presumably right, while those on the left made it openly clear what their views were, and often enough your grades were a reflection of how closely you toed their line.

I was young and naïve at the time, and didn’t understand how significant and dangerous this was.

With one professor, a few of us decided as a joke (and an experiment) to hand to hand in a series of essays that were very similar enough in content and subject. Some reports were accurate, factual and politically neutral, while others modified the facts and conclusions to match this professor’s worldview. You can guess which reports got the A’s, and which ones didn’t.

I had another professor that regularly started spouting leftwing political nonsense in class and essentially dared anyone to disagree with her. At the beginning of the semester I started to make the mistake of raising my hand to point out her errors in economics and politics when the looks of everyone around me made it clear that silence was going to be a virtue in this class.

There are those that espouse that professors can say what they want and it’s about Academic Freedom, and creating a safe intellectual environment.

But college campuses are not safe intellectual environments. If you dare disagree with a left-wing professor in your political science or history courses, your grades might well reflect that mistake (of disagreeing with them). That was true then, and is very true now, particularly in Israel.

This is academic terror. This stifles academic freedom and intellectual honesty.

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The Nest of Vipers

The Bagelnosher Blog
23 June '10

BGU - Ben Gurion University of the Negev – suffered parallel snake problems this week. On two separate occasions, they had to deal with serpents in their midst.

One of the critters they had captured, bagged and hauled away. But when confronted with the other snake, this one they wanted to keep right where he was -- in front of the classroom.

The first serpent – a black three-foot long species native to Israel – surprised the staff when it was spotted lurking behind a desk at the nanotechnology building on the University’s main campus. Officials called Beersheba’s official snake catcher who responded to the scene. “The snake wasn’t a poisonous variety,” the snake removal man said afterward. “It appeared to have gotten into the building through an improperly secured air vent. The snake was aggressive, but I caught it and later released it in a remote place where it won’t do any harm.”

The second, equally aggressive, snake is far more dangerous. This one, known as Neve Gordon, walks upright on his own two feet, although he, too, lurks behind a desk at BGU where he’s spent almost a decade bombarding students with his anti-Israel, anti-Semitic tirades. This snake in the grass is treated far differently by BGU officials. Not only was Neve Gordon not bagged and hauled away -- instead, the President of BGU, Rivka Carmi, promoted him.

Again.

Up to now, Neve Gordon had been merely a “lecturer” but this week, he was promoted to “Assistant Professor.” For an undistinguished academic, whose writings tend toward hysterical anti-Israel propaganda, how did they justify it? Officials assembled a panel of far-leftist evaluators, who requested letters from other far-leftist anti-Israel radicals, and that did it. Like promotes like.

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Confronting Jews who defame Jews

Isi Leibler
Candidly Speaking from Jeusalem
10 February '10

The time has come to draw red lines between legitimate criticism and initiatives seeking to demonize Israel.

Richard Goldstone’s infamous role as the token head of the UNHRC report accusing the IDF of war crimes is only one example of prominent Jews who exploit their origins as a way to defame their people. In fact, until recently, Goldstone was considered a respectable Jew, even a Zionist. He was blinded by hubris and ego, and allowed himself to be seduced by the bitterest enemies of his people into providing legitimization for a blood libel against the Jewish state.

Unlike Goldstone, most Jewish renegades were driven by desperation to unburden themselves from what they regarded as their repressive ethnic and cultural roots. Historian Jacob Talmon described such deviant behavior as “a Jewish neurosis” in response to centuries of oppression and pariah status.

The purported commitment of these Jews to universal and humanitarian values was usually belied by extreme attacks on their own people and association with sponsors who were outright anti-Semites.

Streams of such Jews emerged during the 19th century in the wake of emancipation. A classic example was Karl Marx, whose anti-Semitic diatribes were reflected in outbursts like “money is the jealous god of Israel, by the side of which no other god may exist… The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism.”

In czarist Russia, some Jewish social revolutionaries even endorsed pogroms against their own kinsmen, hoping that by venting their frustrations on Jews, the masses would ultimately turn on the czar.

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Gordon’s Jinn

Israelinurse
CiF Watch
06 January '10

I have long suspected that Neve Gordon lives in some sort of parallel universe where as if by magic, he manages to turn good into bad, wrong into right, true into false. After reading his CiF article of December 23rd, I’m even more dismayed by the man’s attempts to distort reality into something which serves his purpose.

This is the same Neve Gordon who recently called for boycotts against Israel as well as hosting a convicted Fatah organiser in his own home. Famous for holing himself up with Yasser Arafat in the Mukkata in Ramallah during the Second Intifada whilst the rest of his countrymen were under attack from suicide bombers, Gordon now tries to persuade us that there exists a Palestinian pro-peace movement which Israel is deliberately sabotaging.

“The objective is to put an end to the pro-peace popular resistance in the villages and to crush, once and for all, the Palestinian peace movement.”

Just in case you are now wondering how you managed to overlook this peace movement, Gordon even provides examples: “But over the past five years, Palestinians from scores of villages and towns such as Bil’in and Jayyous have developed new forms of pro-peace resistance that have attracted the attention of the international community.”

In Bil’in this ‘peaceful resistance’ has managed to injure some 170 IDF and police personnel. The weekly demonstrations are orchestrated together with the ISM – a Palestinian founded and led organisation with the following mission statement: “As enshrined in international law and UN resolutions, we recognize the Palestinian right to resist Israeli violence and occupation via legitimate armed struggle”.

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Neve Gordon Is Not The Problem

Daniel Gordis
Guest Columnist:JPost
03 September 09

Intentionally or not, Neve Gordon, senior lecturer and head of the Political Science Department at Ben-Gurion University, has unleashed a firestorm in Israeli academe. His recent op-ed in The Los Angeles Times declared that Israel is an apartheid state, and that it ought to be boycotted to "save Israel from itself."

Sensing a public relations debacle among their American supporters, the president and leadership of BGU distanced themselves from his comments and hinted that he ought to resign. Predictably, other Israeli academics leaped to Gordon's defense. Most interesting, however, was the outrage Gordon's column has evoked among many American Jews. Some are so beside themselves that they are now threatening to withhold their financial support from the university.

To be sure, Gordon's argument is deeply flawed. He writes as if Israel sought or enjoys controlling the Palestinians, making no mention of the fact that it captured the West Bank in a defensive war that it did not seek, or that more than once (most recently with Ehud Olmert's election in 2006) Israelis have chosen leaders whose campaigns called for relinquishing those territories. Add to that his failure to admit that the Palestinians still refuse to recognize Israel's right to exist and continue to call for its destruction, and one can appreciate the fury of Ben-Gurion University's American supporters.

The fury these American Jews are suddenly expressing illustrates how little these very supporters know about the system of higher education in Israel to which they are so deeply committed. Is this really their first glimpse into the widespread and long-standing hostility of Israeli academe to Jewish statehood? Gordon has been espousing this viewpoint for years. He regularly writes for anti-Israel publications, holed up with Yasser Arafat during the siege of Ramallah, and has on more than one occasion likened Israel to Nazi Germany. But he's always enjoyed the steadfast support of the university, to its very highest echelons. His views are widely held among his colleagues.

Nor is BGU unique here. Coming to Gordon's defense, Tel Aviv University professor Shlomo Sand stated outright that Israeli universities are not Zionist institutions and should not be. They are about scholarship, he insisted, not about the Jews or their state.

There are non-Jews and non-Zionists at these universities, he claimed, and the universities must serve them no less than anyone else. And at Hebrew University, the crown jewel of Israeli academe, the long-term influence of the binationalists involved in the university's founding has also been well documented.

Indeed, the only thing that is surprising about this latest turn of events is that American donors are surprised. For, to those who know even a bit about Israeli academe, the anti-Israel posture of many departments is really yesterday's news.

The important question in all this is what American philanthropists who are committed to Zionism and to Israel's higher education ought to do. Surely they can't really believe that universities will suddenly silence their professors or terminate tenure. What, then, are the options?

These philanthropists ought to look close to home for their answers. For many of America's great universities developed from an entirely different tradition. Woodrow Wilson, as president of Princeton, spoke unabashedly of "Princeton in the nation's service." Columbia College instituted its now-classic core curriculum as an explicit defense of Western civilization. Neither Princeton nor Columbia, like many other great American liberal arts colleges, saw any conflict between superb scholarship and inclusiveness on the one hand, and devotion to country and one's own civilization on the other.

Is it at all surprising that these colleges have produced an abundance of America's great leaders?

Israeli education needs more support from American Jews, not less. Rather than withholding their funds, a much more useful response would be to channel their support and their knowledge to create an Israeli version of the "college in the service of the nation."

How?

Those American philanthropists currently wringing their hands probably have no idea that Israel has not a single liberal arts college to its name. Typical Israeli undergraduates get none of the curricular breadth that an American education usually requires, and as a result, they know almost nothing about Western civilization, the majesty of Jewish intellectual history or even the competing philosophic currents inside Zionism.

In today's Israel, the People of the Book do not even read their own books. When they read or hear someone like Neve Gordon, nothing in their education has given them the tools to evaluate what he says, or to take him on. They are helpless.

TODAY'S NARROW model of education, in which students essentially study only one discipline, produces excellence, but excellence as technocrats. It does not produce the broadly read, intellectually nuanced people that the Jewish state so desperately needs.

Without dramatic change, Israeli universities will produce only more Neve Gordon's - scholars of varying quality, who feel no love for the very country that has saved their people. If it learned from American education, Israel might actually begin to cultivate a new wave of leadership, and with it, a generation of Israelis who actually love their nation.

Dr. Gordon is correct - Israel needs to be saved from itself. What Israel needs now is a reconceived notion of the educated Israeli.

It needs a liberal arts college, and the young people prepared to speak constructively about Jewish sovereignty, its challenges, its failures and its future that only that kind of college can produce.

A century ago, who could have imagined that the Jewish state would one day have a world-class army but a failing, collapsing educational system? Whether or not American Jews have the foresight to use their philanthropy to promote genuine change in Israeli academe still remains to be seen. But if they do, Neve Gordon's op-ed may ironically have goaded both Israel and the American Jewish community into taking the first steps needed to begin to save the Jewish state.

The writer is senior vice president of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem and the author of Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win a War That May Never End (Wiley, 2009). He blogs at www.danielgordis.org.
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File Under Chutzpah

By Stephen Pollard August 26, 2009

Stephen Walt, of 'Walt and Mearsheime Israel Lobby' fame, has done more than most people on the planet to make Israel-baiting a mass sport. And it's that atmosphere which has led to the explosion in demands for a boycott.

So you wouldn't expect to read this at the end of a long post on his blog singing the praises of Neve Gordon, the Israeli academic who last week called for a boycott:

I might add that I dont support the "Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions
Movement" myself. This is partly because I'm uncomfortable with even
mild forms of collective punishment and partly because, like Gordon
himself, I do worry about the double-standard issue (i.e., if you think
it's ok to boycott Israel, why not China or Burma or any number of
other countries?). And I'm especially leery of efforts to interfere
with academic exchanges, because I don't like anything that interferes
with free speech or obstructs the free flow of ideas. But I respect
Gordon's motives and his op-ed did make me wonder: what if he's correct
and this is in fact the only way to get a two-state solution? Making
people think is something scholars are supposed to do, right?

So after spending years spewing out bile and giving spurious academic legitimacy to traditional lies about those manipulative, secretive Israelis running US foreign policy, he casually mentions that he doesn't actually support the genie he has let out of the bottle.

Chutzpah is being kind. I can think of other words to use.

ISRAEL: L.A. Times opinion piece on boycott makes waves

Batsheva Sobelman
Los Angeles Times
24 August 09

In an L.A. Times opinion piece last week, Israeli professor Neve Gordon wrote of his painful conclusion that the only way to advance the two-state solution that would save Israel from becoming an apartheid state was massive pressure through boycott. Gordon, who teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University, is not shy about his personal politics.

His extreme position angered many in and outside of Israel. Education Minister Gideon Saar decried the article and called it repugnant. Gordon's own university has conveyed its displeasure too. A statement from its president, Rivka Carmi, expressed shock and outrage at Gordon's "irresponsible and morally reprehensible" remarks, saying the institution "strongly dissociates itself from Gordon's destructive views" and adding that "academics who entertain such resentment toward their country are welcome to consider another professional and personal home."

But the bigger debate this has provoked in Israel is a discussion of academic freedom and freedom of speech. Carmi said Gordon had abused the freedom of speech availed to him in Israel and the university as well. On radio, she said academic freedom was the freedom to research and teach, not the freedom to make harmful and inciting remarks.

The Assn. for Civil Rights in Israel issued its own statement, defending Gordon's right to express his political views and expressing dismay at the university's reaction, which the group urged the academic community to denounce. In a letter sent to university President Carmi, the association's legal advisor, attorney Dan Yakir, said the university's response paid lip service to academic freedom while bluntly trampling it.

The boycott tool, as Gordon himself acknowledged, is a problematic one. Some argue it is a legitimate, nonviolent means of pressuring parties into doing the right thing; others see an inherent flaw in achieving peace through a method that boils down to "don't force it, get a larger hammer."

The university is concerned that the institution could suffer for Gordon's stance. "This kind of Israel-bashing detracts from the wonderful work that is being done at BGU and at all Israeli universities," said Carmi's statement. School officials worry that the only boycott following Gordon's pronouncement could be a boycott of the university, affecting about 25,000 students and faculty and possibly undermining research and work carried out for the enhancement of the diverse communities of Israel's southern Negev area. Such an occurrence would be an ironic disservice to coexistence, they say. Carmi herself, for example, is a geneticist who has focused much of her work on stemming the spread of hereditary diseases among the area's Bedouin community.

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Israelis Denouncing Israel

When Israelis Denounce Israel: Legitimate Criticism of Israel or Arrogant Self-Delusion?

Dr. Alex Grobman
The Galilean Word
24 August 09

Critics of Israel abound. Some are antisemites who seek the demise of the Jewish state. Others have legitimate concerns about particular Israeli policies. Among the most vocal are a number of Israeli intellectuals who challenge the country’s raison d’être.

In an August 20, 2009 editorial in the Los Angeles Times, Neve Gordon, a professor of political science at Ben-Gurion University, accused Israel of being an apartheid state. He said a two-state solution was the “more realistic” way to end this inequity. Since only “massive international pressure,” will bring about this state and thus save Israel, Gordon recently joined the Arab sponsored Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement founded in July 2005.1

Vilification of Israel by Jews is not a new phenomenon. As early as May 1, 1936 Labor Zionist leader Berl Katznelson asked: “Is there another people on earth whose sons are so emotionally twisted that they consider everything their nation does despicable and hateful, while every murder, rape and robbery committed by their enemies fills their hearts with admiration and awe? As long as a Jewish child…can come to the land of Israel, and here catch the virus of self-hate…let not our conscience be still.”2 For Katznelson this was aberrant behavior, not the norm. Today, criticism of Israel has become ubiquitous among a significant portion of Israeli intellectuals.3

In the 1950s, psychologist Gordon Allport explained that Jewish self-hate is the process in which the victim identifies with his aggressor and “sees his own group through their eyes.” The Jew “may hate his historic religion…or he may blame some one class of Jews…or he may hate the Yiddish language. Since he cannot escape his own group, he does in a real sense hate himself—or at least the part of himself that is Jewish.”4 Self-hating Jews play a significant role in anti-Israel campaigns of the Western media. Historian Robert Wistrich noted that Jews highly critical of Israel are featured in the British media.5

Manfred Gerstenfeld, chairman of the Board of Fellows of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, found that the French elite and media adore Jews and Israelis who are highly critical of Israel.

A number of marginal Jews, who are not known in Israel, are presented as part of the Israeli mainstream. 6 Israeli’s condemnation of their country is a result of living under “a state of chronic siege,” posits Kenneth Levin, a historian and psychiatrist. Israelis have been abused for so long, that they escape their pain by espousing anti-Israel sentiments. Appeasing the terrorists, they believe, will end hostilities. Israel only has to acquiesce to Arab demands, cease obsessing about defensible borders and other strategic issues, and peace would ensue and such concerns would become irrelevant.7

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