https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/07/05/zionism-and-the-academy-revisited/
~~ recommended by dreamjoehill2 ~~
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
The Background
The background should be uncontroversial.
Israel was created by terrorism, facilitated by prior settler colonialism under a British umbrella, and not by the UN General Assembly ‘partition’ Resolution 181 (II) of 29 November 1947 (Suárez 2017a; Suárez 2017b). The majority vote was obtained by great powers realpolitik, by threats (including letter bombs) and bribes, and it carried no authority. The proposed partition was profoundly imbalanced and unworkable.
Israel is not a democracy but an ethnocracy, a pariah state, an apartheid state. In 2021, two human rights organisations, Human Rights Watch and the Israeli B’Tselem, labelled Israel as an apartheid state. Amnesty International followed suit in 2022. Apartheid was knowingly entrenched in the construction of the Israeli state from the beginning (Davis 2003).
Successive Israeli leaders and the pro-Israel lobby claim that Israel has long supported a Palestinian state but it remains unachievable because of Palestinian ‘intransigence’ regarding appropriate concessions and failure to rein in terrorism. The attribution of the failure of the 2000 Camp David summit falsely to the Palestinian side is representative of the misinformation propaganda (c/f Reinhart 2002).
Israeli leaders will never agree to a Palestinian state. A separate Palestinian state with even a modicum of territorial integrity is now impossible, given the extent and strategic placement of settlements in the West Bank and associated violence against people and property, of Jewish infiltration of East Jerusalem and the massive destruction of infrastructure and land expropriation in Gaza. The Zionist imperative has always been the appropriation of Palestine (indeed of contiguous territory) – ‘from the river to the sea’. Ultimately, the entire Palestinian Arab population of the Occupied Territories and subsequently of Israel itself is at risk of expulsion or mass murder. Mass murder is currently the preferred option.
Propaganda and its battlegrounds
Apartheid Israel’s survival in its present form depends fundamentally on propaganda – in defense of the indefensible.
Israel engages in an official propaganda operation designated the hasbara. Representative of the strategic character of the hasbara is a 131-page document published in 2002 (World Union of Jewish Students 2002) titled Hasbara Handbook: Promoting Israel on Campus. A casual perusal of this document unearths transparent re-writing of history.
Zionist Jewish communities globally complement Israeli hasbara by activism within their own country. The scale and density of the propaganda is unparalleled in recent history.
The comprehensive agenda of the hasbara is to subjugate all institutions of power, influence and opinion to the favour of Israel. This agenda is directed at official state institutions, the media (journalists, editors and management), and educational institutions – of which, in particular, the university system.
The Academy is a key battleground because of general deference to its role in establishing ‘enlightened’ opinion, in spite of its flaws towards that end. The Academy is also central to the socialization of future leaders across political, business and social spheres. The hasbara, a misinformation machine, is utterly incompatible with the formal role of the Academy.
Repressing the pro-Palestinian student voice
Initial protests to Israel’s brutal response to Hamas’ 7 October 2023 attack led to Columbia University immediately banning the Jewish Voice for Peace and (as did Brandeis University) Students for Justice in Palestine.
The subsequent protestors’ encampments on US campuses (and calls for divestment in Israel-related investments), briefly tolerated, soon led to attacks and dismantling by city police forces and repressive recriminations regarding student enrolment rights. These took place (among others) at Columbia, New York University, UCLA, University of Michigan, Emory University, Dartmouth, University of North Carolina and Indiana University (the latter in the face of a pronounced Zionist presence). The Public Broadcasting Service mentioned (as at early May 2024) student arrests at 43 US campuses since mid-April. The University of Waterloo is even suing a cohort of protestors. A handful of US universities (Rutgers, Minnesota) have quelled tensions by entering into negotiations with protestors regarding their demands.
Wealthy American Jewish donors have threatened private universities with withdrawal or cessation of donations (Pennsylvania, Harvard). Jewish organizations have demanded that State governments reduce funding to public universities (Rutgers).
A Guardian (UK) investigation exposes the all-encompassing strategic intent of Israeli resources devoted to repressing anti-Israel opinion on US campuses and in US politics generally.
In France, pro-Palestinian demonstrations at the prestigious Sciences-Po (Paris) have been met by condemnation by the militant Zionist UEJF (Union des étudiants juifs de France), backed by the influential peak body CRIF (Conseil représentatif des institutions juives de France). Condemnation was joined by the relevant most senior political figures – the French Higher Education Minister, the Prime Minister and President Macron himself.
In Australia, pro-Palestinian protestors have come under attack by Jewish students at Melbourne’s Monash University, which enrols a significant number of Jewish students and houses a significant Jewish studies department, the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation. Pro-Palestinian encampments have been dismantled under University Administration pressure.
In Britain, Lesley Klaff (Sheffield Hallam University and co-editor of the Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism) views the cleansing of the student body as essential but challenging (Klaff, 2010). Klaff cites reports that ‘… the British academy has become a “mainstreaming” agent in the international effort to deny Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state’. She worries that ‘Students, because of their youth, enthusiasm, and traditional political involvement, are a primary target audience for such anti-Zionist efforts.’ Klaff bizarrely claims that widespread and unchecked Islamic extremism on British campuses is a key source of the situation and recommends ‘legislative intervention’ to tackle this festering problem.
The undermining of the university system has been enhanced by the introduction and dissemination of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. The essential paragraphs in the definition are about equating any criticism of Israel as disguised antisemitism. The IHRA definition is intrinsically fraudulent.
The IHRA definition inevitably arrived at the university’s doorstep. Thus the UK government began pressuring British universities to ‘adopt’ the IHRA definition in 2019. An Australian cross-Party Parliamentary group was established in 2022 and its first order of business was to pressure Australian universities to adopt the definition.
This pressure has achieved results. By late 2021, 95 out of 133 British universities had adopted the IHRA definition, with the non-signing universities being threatened by the Conservative government. Yet a report in September 2023 by a legal body committed to protecting pro-Palestinian opinion found that 38 of the 40 charges arising from the adoption of the IHRA definition had been cleared as without substance, with the two remaining then pending. The IHRA definition adoption is simply a vehicle for harassment and censorship.
The repression of pro-Palestinian opinion on campuses is said to be necessary out of concern for the ‘mental health’ and ‘security of Jewish students (Hillel). However, the health of Jewish students is only threatened if they perceive Israel as integral to their personal self-worth. Yet Israel is a foreign state, a state unique in its criminality. The attachment of Israel’s ‘righteousness’ to Jewish students’ identity is the problem. Here is tribalized socialization, and it’s a pathological condition.
Enrolment in Jewish ‘faith’ schools at the primary and secondary level, whose schools attempt to instill in their charges ‘a love of Israel’, enhances the socialization process. Australia has a significant number of Jewish schools which designate their orientation as Zionist. The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attended Sydney’s Moriah College, 23 February 2017, to a rock star’s welcome. It’s called child abuse.
Academic and journalist Eric Alterman notes the phenomenon in the US (Alterman 2023):
‘Almost all upper-middle-class American Jewish high school students go on to college. Most do so, however, having been educated about Israel in an ideological bubble. In college, they enter an alternative universe in which Israel is understood to be the oppressor and the Palestinians their victims. This caused cognitive dissonance, and the result was often panic. Their parents also often panicked to learn that the hundreds of thousands of dollars of tuition were resulting in their children coming home with arguments they saw as not merely wrong, but personally offensive.’
The delicate sensibilities of Jewish university students is instrumentalized as a means of restricting academic freedom across the entire university system. Jewish students could readily enrol in designated Jewish colleges but they are either theological (Yeshiva) or of very low status (Gratz College, Touro University). Brandeis is the only University established by Jews which has (in spite of a one-third Jewish student population) transcended its sectarian origin and acquired status. The majority of American Jewish university students enrol in non-sectarian institutions, sometimes seeking prestige (the Ivy League cohort) but seeking a broader education and employability in a secular world.
In short, the Israel lobby wants to ‘Zionise’ the general university system – staying cocooned within a Zionist mental ghetto while enjoying the privileges of an open intellectual environment. They want their cake and eat it too.
Repressing the pro-Palestinian academic voice
Many Jewish university academic personnel expose their Zionism in crude defenses of Israel and denigration of their peers who privilege the Palestinian experience and narrative.
As I note in my ‘Zionism and the Academy’ (Counterpunch, 12 January 2024), academics (including Jews) have been sacked after pressure from the Zionist lobby. In Israel itself, Jewish Israeli academics have been forced into exile or threatened over time.
An important exchange of letters took place in the New York Review of Books during November-December 2023. Omer Bartov (Brown University) and 15 others (2023a) claim:
‘We the undersigned are scholars of the Holocaust and antisemitism from different institutions. We write to express our dismay and disappointment at political leaders and notable public figures invoking Holocaust memory to explain the current crisis in Gaza and Israel. … And, as academics, we have a duty to uphold the intellectual integrity of our profession and support others around the world in making sense of this moment.…
‘As academics we have a responsibility to use our words, and our expertise, with judgment and sensitivity – to try and dial down inciteful language that is liable to provoke further discord, and instead to prioritize speech and action aimed at preventing further loss of life.’
The letter met with a condemnatory response from Jeffrey Herf and others (2023) – the group comprising 34 signatories, 32 academically-based. The authors claim that it is appropriate to compare 7 October 2023 with the Jewish Holocaust. Thus:
‘It is not an exaggeration, nor is it a misuse of history or memory, to assert that Hamas is a contemporary expression of ideas that stand in a longer, reactionary tradition of Jew-hatred, racism, and terror [including Nazism]. An unflinching gaze at the connections between past and present in the Hamas dictatorship and its actions is essential.’
The authors, all formally scholars of Israel’s history, remarkably misrepresent the details of 7 October, the origins of the state of Israel and the character of the Gaza enclave. Israel is absolved of original and ongoing sin:
‘None of us would argue that Israeli governments have not made their share of poor decisions in recent years. But again, there are large bodies of archivally based scholarship [citing Morris (2008)] concerning Israel’s history and the Arab-Israeli conflict. The notion of constant Israeli perfidy going back to 1948 does not stand up to [citing Herf (2022)] scholarly scrutiny.’’
The list includes Benny Morris, a celebrated figure amongst ‘the New Historians’ who enriched one’s understanding of the battles surrounding the birth of Israel and the associated Nakba. However, Morris changed his orientation and politics in the early 2000s, following his claim that the failure of the 2000 Camp David meetings should be wholly sheeted home to the Palestinians, and his verdict on the horror of the violent Second Intifada while ignoring the violent Israeli origins of the Second Intifada.
Bartov and others reply to the Herf ensemble (Bartov et al. 2023b):
‘The writers’ claim that “Hamas has had a state in Gaza for seventeen years, five years longer than the Nazis controlled Germany” is specious and tendentious. The Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated and poorest pieces of land in the world, which, according to most international bodies, remains under occupation. It has been under siege for sixteen years and depends completely on Israel …
‘Framing the Gaza war as a war against Nazis, and the horrific events of October 7 as similar to the Holocaust, evades the fundamental issues underlying the conflict and disavows the role of the state of Israel in shaping them. These issues are the Nakba and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of refugees, the lack of equal rights between the river and the sea, the occupation and the settlements, the siege, and the absence of any prospect of positive political change. These are the structural conditions that provide the context for violence and war today, not a handful of “poor decisions” by the Israeli governments, as the misleading response to our letter claims.’
Zionist academics further leverage the academic environment in using select ‘peer-reviewed’ academic journals to promote an unblemished pro-Israel narrative. In my estimation, the journals in this category include Israel Affairs(UK), Israel Studies (US), Journal for the Study of Antisemitism (US), Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism(Germany), Jewish Political Studies Review (Israel) and Antisemitism studies (Canada/US).
Palestinian and Pro-Palestinian voices have outlets, if limited in number. The notable outlet is the Journal of Palestine Studies (previously Beirut, now US); there is also the Holy Land & Palestine Studies (Edinburgh).
Zionist academics persist in trying to delegitimize anti-Zionist academic opinion in general. Representative of this genre is Anti-Zionism on Campus, edited by Andrew Pessin and Doron Ben-Atar (2018).
Itamar Rabinovich (Tel Aviv University and New York University), in a book review, sets out standards for academics with respect to Israel/Palestine conflict (Rabinovich, 2011):
‘For reasons that cannot be elaborated here Israel has lost both the battle for the high brow public opinion and the moral high ground. … [Neil] Caplan himself is one of the few historians of the Israeli Palestinian conflict who manage to maintain high professional standards. …
‘Caplan [defended his “positivist” stance] after describing the work of Sarah Roy, a Harvard faculty member who as the daughter of holocaust survivors advocates what she calls “humanistic scholarship”. Roy, Caplan tells us, “feels morally compelled to expose the causes and agents of repression while giving an empathetic voice to the victims of oppression and dispossession”. This does not meet this reviewer’s definition of scholarship … but [Caplan] ends up giving Roy, Pappe, Massad and other acerbic critics of Israel who have trampled the basic norms of academic standards [my emphasis] too much space in his book.’
Roy’s scholarly sin is to have taken ‘Never Again’ literally, with all the moral baggage that that necessarily entails. Zionist academics are subject to no such constraints. As the French say, ‘two weights, two measures’.
Representative of the Zionist/Anti-Zionist divide is a long book review by Haifa University’s Yoav Gelber of Rashid Khalidi’s (2006) Iron Cage (Gelber, 2007). (Gelber was intimately involved in the Katz/Pappé affair, as below.) Khalidi pays particular attention to what he claims to have been perennial failures of the Palestinian leadership in confronting the Zionist ascendancy under Mandatory Palestine and after the establishment of Israel. Gelber trashes Khalidi’s book as deficient in scholarship, and places the ultimate responsibility for the failure to achieve a Palestinian state purely on the Palestinian leadership itself.
Yet Gelber has persistent clangers of his own (my comments in square brackets):
* ‘[Khalidi infers that] the Israelis are guilty of building up Hamas against the Fatah.’ [True.]
* ‘The question that Khalidi consistently dodges is, therefore, not why the Palestinians lost the war in 1948 (and their proposed state) but why they had started it in the first place.’ [They didn’t.]
* ‘Khalidi disregards the fact that the Balfour Declaration was not given to the Yishuv but to the Jewish People, and the Jewish Agency did not represent the Jews of Palestine but the interest of Jews all around the globe in their national home.’ [Balfour, naturally, had no authority to do so, and this purported open-ended generosity foretold an inevitable catastrophe.]
* ‘Unlike colonial movements, Zionism did not strive to impose a minority on a majority of natives. The Zionist program regarded the attainment of a Jewish majority as a precondition for statehood and believed that this majority could be accomplished by immigration, not by extermination or expulsion as white settlers did elsewhere.’ [So that’s OK? In any case, expulsion was on the agenda from day one; statehood was claimed before Jews established a majority; now extermination with expulsion is the order of the day.]
* ‘The Palestinians rejected the [UN Resolution 181] forthwith, refused to cooperate in its implementation …’ [For good reason, as above; Ben-Gurion and friends leveraged the farce to steal as much land as they could get.]
* ‘The Palestinians should accept that the Jews are in the Land of Israel by historical and internationally recognized legal rights, their presence is legitimate …’ [Historical rights? ah, the ultimate hasbara Royal Flush. Meanwhile, a state that is apartheid by construction and that declines to define its territorial boundaries has a claim to legitimacy?]
* ‘So far, most Israelis have fulfilled their part and are ready to concede, to varying degrees, that the Palestinians have a legitimate case.’ [Where is the evidence?]
Gelber generalises that perhaps the Palestinians didn’t really want a state after all. Sure – they relished the prospect of permanent subjection, and they have it! This scholarly objectivity is to be contrasted with the acerbic critics of Israel who have trampled the basic norms of academic standards. Gelber is a professional historian immersed in his country’s history. What’s going on?
There is also an organization and site called Israel-Academia-Monitor. Its site claims:
‘IAM supports the universal tradition of academic freedom that is an indispensable characteristic of higher education in Israel. At the same time, it is concerned by the activities of a small group of academics–sometimes described as revisionist historians or post-Zionists … Exploiting the prestige (and security) of their positions, such individuals often propound unsubstantiated and, frequently, demonstrably false arguments that defame Israel and call into question its right to existence.’
For example, IAM has closely monitored Tel Aviv University academic Anat Matar in her activism against her country’s crimes. IAM supports the ‘universal tradition’ of academic freedom except when it doesn’t.
IAM published on its site a 101-page book by Ofira Seliktar (Seliktar n.d.). Seliktar claims that Israel has in place greater academic freedom than exists in the US, Great Britain and Germany. This freedom has purportedly facilitated abuse, with Israeli academics treasonously comparing Israel to apartheid South Africa and even Nazi Germany. Seliktar is recommending that this ‘abuse’ be reined in. In a related article (Seliktar 2005), Seliktar claims that a large number of Israeli academics (‘post-Zionist’) have succumbed to various unseemly academic intellectual fads and are endangering the Israeli national interest.
A low point in the denigration of Israel’s critics is an article by the pseudonymous ‘Solomon Socrates’ (Socrates 2001). Socrates rails against ‘leftist extremists’, by contrast with ‘the larger number of legitimate scholars and thinkers’. Socrates claims that ‘… we disagree with the current dogma that open-handed financing of leftist extremism is an automatic entitlement due its practitioners.’.
After 7 October 2023, repression of opinion in Israel has escalated. Legal scholar Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, at the prestigious Hebrew University of Jerusalem, was arrested on 18 April and interrogated following comments she made which directly derive from her expertise. Hundreds of scholars and Hebrew University itself denounced her treatment but she remains under threat.
Particular instances
Two academic-based conflicts provide insight into academic discourse as a site of bitter dispute. Both relate to the attempted construction of a valiant meritorious Israel belatedly providing security for global Jewry and faced with not merely militarised enemies but intellectual detractors on all fronts.
First, the prestigious Journal of Genocide Research (JGR) was called into question by Israel Charny (2016). (Charny is an American-born psychologist and Executive Director of the Jerusalem-based Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide.) Charny claims that the JGR had not given the Jewish Holocaust the significance it deserves and that it carried ‘Anti-Israel Themes’. Genocide scholars associated with the JGR responded (Goldberg et al. 2016).
Charny’s language (‘hate-mongering genocide scholars’) further aroused the JGR scholars against his polemic. Charny continued his attack in the Jerusalem Post Magazine in May 2016 (recounted in Goldberg). A letter in reply condemning Charny’s aggressive ‘partisan orthodoxy’, ‘character assassination’ and sloppy survey work was published in the JPM in June 2016. This letter ultimately attracted over 60 signatories, 7 of whom were Israel-based academics. The JGR came out of this dispute with its reputation enhanced. The unrepentant Charny later continued his assault on academics who he considered to be not sufficiently pro-Israel (Charny 2020).
Thus there are parts of the Academy (and associated academic journals) that retain their integrity in the face of the hasbara.
Second, a significant event regarding the Israeli Academy deserves resuscitation. A Haifa University Masters Student, Teddy Katz, submitted his thesis in 1998 centred on the ‘Tantura Massacre’ affair. Katz interviewed many people present at Tantura in May 1948 – a week after Zionist leaders had declared the establishment of the state of Israel.
Ilan Pappé, then Haifa University academic though not Katz’s supervisor, was sympathetic to his project. Pappé later wrote an entire book about the ensuing controversy (Pappé 2010). Yossi Ben-Artzi, Haifa’s Dean of Humanities, wrote a scathing review of the Pappé book (Ben-Artzi 2011), excoriating Pappé himself. Pappé has been labelled a traitor for his stance.
An instructive article on the affair is that by Basma Fahoum and Arie Dubnov (2013). Oral history is a problematic discipline and Katz was not appropriately trained for the task. However, the weaknesses (Fahoum and Dubnov claim they were marginal) were soon overtaken by the academic and political establishments’ necessity to maintain a favourable history of Israel’s origins. The authors claim:
‘One is prompted to ask, “How is history writing produced in tandem with state-sponsored amnesia? How does history operate once its goal is to belittle, silence, and erase Indigenous voices.” … The Katz affair combined state pressure, a bold legal intervention in the form of a libel claim filed in an attempt to silence, and resulted in an academically manufactured agnotology (sic): a categorical canceling out of victim testimonies in the name of rigorous academic standards. …
‘Until recently, the Palestinian experience in 1948 was transmitted orally and seldom published, making early Israeli filtering relatively easy. Yet these oral traditions helped generate a Palestinian collective memory, and for Palestinians, the massacres in 1948 were never “concealed” and required no historian to uncover them. Of Tantura, Palestinians early recorded a massacre. … The problem was not a lack of information or Palestinian silence but an Israeli filtering system that canceled out Indigenous testimonies. … Worse, the colonial epistemology continues, with Jewish historians presented as spokespeople of “science” and “truth,” while “Oriental imagination,” “fantasy,” and a tendency to “exaggerate” are ascribed to Palestinians.’
In essence, Palestinian memory, voices, are delegitimized and silenced. Pappé himself was forced out of his native Israel following the Katz affair. The academic freedom Pappé now enjoys in Britain has facilitated his scholarly fecundity. How timely that Pappé should just now publish a door-stopping exploration of the origins of the Israel lobby (2024).
Confront the pro-Israel specifics
Pro-Palestinian academics and protestors have argued for the right to academic freedom of thought. David Miller, sacked from Bristol University in 2021 for his critical views on Israel, argued such (successfully) before a Bristol Employment Tribunal in October 2023.
The issue is more profound in its particularity, more far-reaching in its implications than couching the importance of ‘academic freedom’ in the abstract. The nature of the censorship has to be understood concretely.
The task is to censor adverse coverage, in whatever form, of one particular country. The object is to obliterate entirely Israel’s unique character from consciousness, inquiry, analysis and critical action in the name of intelligence and humanity. A visitor from a foreign planet would find this specificity peculiar indeed.
Such misinformation and censorship involve the creation of a significant ‘blank space’, the investigation of which is prohibited to open inquiry. The impact is not limited spatially, but spreads to all international linkages with that ‘space’ that is the state of Israel. Geopolitical analysis is handicapped. There is no limit to which a silence imposed regarding Israel cannot be imposed on the university’s curricula.
The battle for academic freedom to criticise Israel has to be fought in all spheres and at all levels simultaneously where information exchange occurs and influence is being exerted. This means governments, legislatures, mainstream media, social media – all being mutually interdependent with the Academy.
The post-World War II Cold War era of recent memory was a propaganda masterclass. Censorship prevailed in the West as well as in the East. People lost their livelihoods, even their lives, for speaking up out of principle. Cold War propaganda has been rekindled but there is acknowledgement, not least in the Academy, that the Post-World War II era was one of repressive excess, to be regretted. Moreover, some historical subjects, once designated by authorities as clear-cut in their interpretation, can now be acknowledged as controversial (e.g. the legacy of the British Empire; the origins of World War I) and are more freely debated.
And Israel? In spite of the considerable critical academic literature, read mostly only by the like-minded, and the carnage in Gaza, the hasbara (mainstream media assisting) remains dominant in the propaganda war.
The immediate future is not looking optimistic regarding a robust attachment of the university system to the hallowed principle of academic freedom.
References (to review an extensive list of references, please refer to the link at the top)
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