EclectEcon

The staged appearance of the killing of al-Dura, staged to make it appear the boy was killed by Israeli troops, set off a wave of fury:

On September 30 2000, two days after Ariel Sharon, then the leader of Israel’s opposition Likud Party, went for a walk on Temple Mount, Palestinians mounted a demonstration at Gaza’s Netzarim Junction. A 55-second piece of video footage of that demonstration, transmitted that day by the French TV station France 2, was to cause unprecedented violence in the Middle East and throughout the world.

The footage, with a voice-over by France 2’s Jerusalem correspondent, Charles Enderlin, showed what was said to be the killing of 12-year-old Mohammed al-Dura by Israeli marksmen. Viewers saw the child crouching in terror behind his father, Jamal, as they sheltered next to a barrel under what Enderlin said was Israeli gunfire, and then slumping to the ground as Enderlin pronounced that he was dead.

That image of the boy screaming in terror before being killed was uniquely incendiary. It portrayed the Israelis as diabolically gunning down a child in cold blood, even as he cowered for his life. It ignited the Arab and Muslim world with apparent proof that the Israelis were deliberately killing their children, inciting a murderous frenzy.

Al-Dura became a poster boy for the Palestinian and Islamist war against Israel and the West. The day after the France 2 broadcast, the second intifada erupted in its full fury; according to the 2001 Mitchell report, the two events were directly connected. Twelve days later, a mob of Palestinians shouting, ‘Revenge for the blood of Mohammed al-Dura’ lynched two Israeli army reservists and dragged their mutilated bodies through the streets of Ramallah.

When al-Qaeda decapitated the journalist Daniel Pearl, the video of this atrocity was punctuated with references to al-Dura. After September 11 2001, Osama bin Laden said: ‘Bush must not forget the image of Mohammed al-Dura.’ Several Arab countries issued postage stamps with his picture. On Palestinian Authority TV and in its school books, al-Dura’s example is used to encourage other children to emulate his spirit of ’sacrifice’.

But we now know that this whole fiesta of violence and incitement was based on a lie. For whatever people think they saw in those 55 seconds, it was not the death of that boy. He was not killed by Israeli bullets; he was not killed at all. At the end of France 2’s famous footage, he was still alive and unharmed. The whole thing was staged, a fantastic piece of play-acting, an elaborate fabrication designed to blacken Israel’s name, and incite the Arab and Muslim mobs to mass murder.

Melanie Phillips has a very detailed account of the entire affair. I highly recommend reading the whole thing.

In addition, Alan Adamson links to some insightful comments about the media trial that ensued, in which France 2 and Charles Enderlin sued Phillipe Karsenty for libel when he exposed the sloppiness, bias, and outright untruths in the original story as reported on France2 by Enderlin.

To understand the al-Dura affair, it helps to keep one thing in mind: In France, you can't own up to a mistake.

Not even if it contributes to intifadas, death, anti-Semitism, and more hatred.

For links (omitted here), see this.

My favourite drug dealer, JB, has some amusing speculation about why the University and College Union of England has been trying to implement a boycott of Israeli scholars:

Unions are about, at least in part, protectionism (protecting the jobs of people who would lose them in a completely open market). The UCU are merely protecting themselves against being shown up by Jewish scholars, since no intelligent, self-respecting Jew would now want to go to Britain on an exchange basis, whether or not the UCU sanctions a boycott.

Next on the UCU list will be Americans and then Germans if number of Nobel laureates by country is used as a metric for sanctions.

From Reuters [h/t to BenS]:

Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi said on Wednesday that U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's expressed support for Israel stems from his fear that the Mossad would assassinate him, just as it did President John F. Kennedy.

"We suspect he may fear being killed by Israeli agents and meet the same fate as Kennedy when he promised to look into Israel's nuclear program," Gaddafi said.

The University and College Union of the United Kingdom is still trying to implement a boycott of Israeli scholars. Norm Geras, of NormBlog points out very effectively that anti-Semitism is the only logical explanation for their persistent attack on Israeli scholars (h/t to MA):

In posting once again on this matter, it's not my purpose to repeat the arguments I've made at length in the past opposing an academic boycott of Israel. ...

It is rather to register what I think is the political meaning of this latest decision by the principal union of British academics. No one should be misled by talk of solidarity with the Palestinians. Solidarity is expressible with any people that has suffered, or is suffering, an historical injustice without the add-on attempt to ostracize and/or punish academics of one nationality. The boycotters understand this perfectly well, in as much as their solidarity statements and efforts in relation to all other peoples than the Palestinians are free of the ostracizing and punitive add-on. The latter is seen by them as relevant to Israelis and Israelis only, for reasons that have never been persuasively explained. [emphasis added]

The University and College Union is now therefore committed to a policy which is anti-Semitic: aimed at Israeli Jews alone and at no other academic community on the entire planet, irrespective of the gravity of the crimes committed by the governments of the countries such academic communities inhabit. According to one account of the proceedings that led to the most recent UCU decision, a speaker who raised the issue of anti-Semitism was jeered for doing so, 'albeit mildly'. Perhaps we should draw comfort from the fact that the jeering was merely mild and not raucous. The conclusion is, in any case, now unavoidable that the UCU is a union that is morally tainted. Containing a core of activists who will keep returning with boycott motions so long as their previous efforts have failed; who will try to bypass clear legal advice by reformulating their aims in a more surreptitious way; who are unwilling to have this issue put before the union membership as a whole; and who are so insensible of the historical weight of anti-Semitism and its consequences as well as of its contemporary resurgence that some of them see fit to mock the very mention of it as being a diversion; the union appears to lack what is necessary to deliver them the defeat that they deserve.

Where is the international outrage this time [h/t to Jack]?

Iran's president said on Monday Israel would soon disappear off the map and that the "satanic power" of the United States faced destruction, in his latest verbal attack on the Islamic Republic's arch-foes. ...

Opposition to Israel is a fundamental principle in Shi'ite Muslim Iran, which backs Palestinian militants opposed to peace with the Jewish state.

A 2005 statement by Ahmadinejad saying that Israel should be "wiped off the map" outraged the international community.

This past Sunday evening I attended a dinner in honour of Paul Davenport, president of The Univesity of Western Ontario. He was being honoured by the Jewish National Fund for his continued strong support of openness, freedom, and tolerance. For more details, please see this.

The guest speaker was Alan Dershowitz, a man with a strong presence and a brilliant mind, and author of The Case for Israel. At one point during his address, he said (loosely paraphrased, with apologies):

Some time ago, I spoke at the University of California at Irvine. There were 1200 people there to hear me. Of course most of them were there to see if I would say that OJ really did it. But there was a small group over on one side who were strong supporters of Israel, and there was a small group on the other side who were strong supporters of the Palestinians....

I asked the supporters of Israel how many would be willing to accept a negociated, secure two-state solution, and they all raised their hands. I asked the supporters of Palestine the same question, and not one of them raised their hands.

And that example says more than you might imagine about why so many of my postings are pro-Israel. Two-state solutions of various forms have been offered intermittently for over 70 years, and Israel (even before it existed as a country) has always been willing (albeit sometimes reluctantly) to accept them. The Arabs living in Jordan, Syria, and Egypt were, for the most part, unwilling to accept them.

And then Dershowitz dropped a bombshell: he said he suspects that Yassir Arafat eventually rejected the negotiated settlement of 2000-2001 on the advice of ex-president, Jimmy Carter. If his suspicions are correct, Carter has even more to answer for.

There were perhaps 30-50 usual-suspect protestors outside the venue where President Davenport received his honour and Professor Dershowitz spoke. Before the ceremonies began, and in keeping with the spirit of the evening, Dershowitz went out to speak with some of the protestors and gave them a copy of his book.

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It looks as if some of the leaders of the UK's UCU will be attempting to implement a formal boycott of Israeli universities and academics again this Wednesday at the UCU's annual congress. This boycott has never made any sense to me since it castigates academics and universities in a country that does more for democracy, freedom, and human rights than any other country in the region. Why doesn't the UCU go after Saudi Arabia or Iran or Syria or, for that matter, China? One plausible explanation for the behaviour of those promoting the boycott is simple: anti-Semitism.

For more, see the excellent work by Engage. As David Hirsch says in an article recently reproduced in Engage,

No antiracist and no scholar should need the case to be explicitly set out against a campaign to exclude Israelis from the cultural and economic life of humanity; especially from the global academic community. There is no campaign to exclude anybody else; only Israelis. That a reputable scholarly journal feels it has to commission an article giving reasons why such an exclusion is a bad idea should tell us something worrying about the depth and scope of contemporary antisemitism.

Despite his protectionism, despite his fiscal profligacy, despite his over-reliance on Cheney et al. and the lack of WMD in Iraq, I like Bush's sense of history when he recently said this, quoted in Reuters:
[h/t Ted Belman]

"Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along," Bush said.

Without mentioning Obama by name, Bush compared "this foolish delusion" to the prelude to World War Two.

"As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is -- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history," he said.

It isn't surprising, but it is disappointing, that democratic leaders were outraged by Bush's remarks.

Today's Globe and Mail carries a scurrilous opinion piece, billed as a web-exclusive comment, asserting that Israel's war in 1948 was an act of ethnic cleansing.

What the piece does not mention is that

• It is not "ethnic cleansing" when one country whose existence is threatened fights wars to hold off the aggressors; why do so many writers keep forgetting or refusing to refect upon the implications of what the Arab-Israeli wars were about?
• Israel's actions were the result of the Arab countries' refusal to acknowledge the creation of the state of Israel. The shelling and the fighting by the Israelis would not have taken place if Jordan, Syria, and Egypt had accepted the existence of Israel in 1948.
• Israel did not set out to cleanse the area of its former residents. Those residents left primarily because of (a) the war that was started by the Arab countries, and (b) assurances by those Arab countries that Israel would soon be driven out of existence and they would be able to return to their homes in a matter of days or weeks or months. And,
• these Arab countries themselves were carved out of the former Ottoman empire. What about all the Jews who were forced to leave their homes and possessions in Arab countries by the anti-Semitic regimes in those countries? Their losses have by far outweighed those of the Arabs who left Israel.

I can easily be convinced that the Israelis made mistakes in their early years. But to emphasize those mistakes without granting Israel the right to fight for its very existence gets to the heart of most writings that castigate Israeli policies. If the Israelis had not fought hard and wisely in 1948, 1967, and 1973, they would not exist as a country today. And most of the displacement that has followed during the 60 years of Israel's existence would not have occurred had Jordan, Syria, and Egypt been willing to accept their new neighbour.

Update: Eric, a friend and former colleague, writes,

Here are useful antidotes to this, on Israel's sixtieth anniversary:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200403u/int2004-03-25

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/1948--israel--and-the-palestinians-br--the-true-story-11355?page=all

1948 was a big mess, and if it had not been Israel, it might have been worse for the Palestinians--with all of the mistakes made. A two-state solution, with the right security moves, is the way to go. Even though Israel has accepted this and the Arab world has refused it several times. Don't forget that Israel's national anthem, Hatikvah means 'hope'.

From Bruce Smith, quoted by the Israpundit:

Criticism leveled at Israel for her response to terrorist attacks by Hamas in the Gaza says more about those who criticize Israel than it does about the legality of the reprisals.

Given the restraint shown by Israel so often when under attack, we should be praising the Israeli gubmnt, not condemning it.

Reductio Ad Absurdum or is it just too close to the truth to be funny [h/t to BenS]? As usual, click on the image to see it larger and clearer.

From the Sandbox [links omitted in this excerpt],

The Boston Globe has just run an op-ed under the headline "Ending the Stranglehold on Gaza." The authors are Eyad al-Sarraj, identified as founder of the Gaza Community Mental Health Program, and Sara Roy, identified as senior research scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. The bias of the op-ed speaks for itself, and I won't even dwell on it. But I do want to call attention to this sentence:

Although Gaza daily requires 680,000 tons of flour to feed its population, Israel had cut this to 90 tons per day by November 2007, a reduction of 99 percent.

You don't need to be a math genius to figure out that if Gaza has a population of 1.5 million, as the authors also note, then 680,000 tons of flour a day come out to almost half a ton of flour per Gazan, per day.

A typographical error at the Boston Globe? Hardly. The two authors used the same "statistic" in an earlier piece. They copied it from an article published in the Ahram Weekly last November, which reported that "the price of a bag of flour has risen 80 per cent, because of the 680,000 tonnes the Gaza Strip needs daily, only 90 tonnes are permitted to enter." Sarraj and Roy added the bit about this being "a reduction of 99 percent."

Note how an absurd and impossible "statistic" has made its way up the media food chain. It begins in an Egyptian newspaper, is cycled through a Palestinian activist, is submitted under the shared byline of a Harvard "research scholar," and finally appears in the Boston Globe, whose editors apparently can't do basic math. Now, in a viral contagion, this spreads across the Internet, where that "reduction of 99 percent" becomes a well-attested fact.

What's the truth? I see from a 2007 UN document that Gaza consumes 450 tons of flour daily. The Palestinian Ministry of Economy, according to another source, puts daily consumption at 350 tons. So the figure for total consumption retailed by Sarraj and Roy is off by more than three orders of magnitude, i.e. a factor of 1,000. No doubt, there's less flour shipped from Israel into Gaza--maybe it's those rocket barrages from Gaza into Israel?--but even if it's only the 90 tons claimed by Sarraj and Roy, it isn't anything near a "reduction of 99 percent."

Canada has opted out of the 2009 United Nations Human Rights conference. The reason? Canada actually cares about human rights.

The Stephen Harper government has withdrawn its support for a UN anti-racism conference scheduled to take place next year in South Africa, according to a media release today from the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade.

Jason Kenney, secretary of state for multiculturalism and Canadian identity, said today that the conference, like its predecessor in 2001, "has gone completely off the rails... Canada is interested in combating racism, not promoting it. We'll attend any conference that is opposed to racism and intolerance, not those that actually promote racism and intolerance".

... The last UN anti-racism conference held in Durban in 2001 degenerated into a hate-fest of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel vitriol, while the most egregious human rights violators escaped criticism. The Toronto Star today reported that "all of the non-governmental organizations invited to the first conference have been invited back to the second, including those that were at the 'forefront of the hatred', some of which posted pro-Hitler posters at the 2001 gathering."

The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) is in charge of planning for the conference, an entity that has directed 93% of its resolutions on human rights violations at just one nation - Israel. Iran is a member of the organizing committee, despite its government's open call to wipe the Jewish homeland off the face of the earth.

"The Stephen Harper government has again demonstrated that Canada can project power as a moral leader in international affairs," added [Alistair] Gordon [Director of the Canadian Coalition for Democracies]. "A nation does not need a massive military to provide the moral leadership and clarity that denies legitimacy to Orwellian UN agencies that hijack the language of human rights to promote Jew-hatred.

"Stephen Harper has signaled that Canada will act on principle, regardless of UN consensus. This is the stuff of global leadership."

Also, yesterday, Canada was the only country to vote against an anti-Israel motion before the UN kangaroo Human Rights Council. A youtube of the votes (30-1, with 15 abstentions) is here. Check out the 30 countries that voted in favour of the condemnation.

[T]he Arab and Islamic states, represented by Syria and Pakistan, have called an emergency “Special Session” of the UN Human Rights Council for this Wednesday, January 23, 2008.

The proposed resolution would condemn Israel yet say nothing about the Hamas attacks. This inverts the simple reality whereby Hamas and its terrorist allies are deliberately targeting civilians, while Israel in its defensive measures takes pains to avoid harming civilians.

From UN Watch.

From an article by Alan Dershowitz in Front Page, concerning the Oxford Union biased structure of the debates about Israel [h/t to BenS]:

It [the Oxford Union] has scheduled a debate on January 24 on whether Israel has the right to exist. Both speakers on the supposed pro-Israel side are virulent Israel-haters and strong supporters of Palestinian terrorism.

One is Norman Finkelstein, who is currently joining hands with the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah, whose goal is the military destruction of Israel. Finkelstein supports Hezbollah and says that this terrorist organization “represents the hope.” He has previously regretted not being more supportive of Hezbollah in its military attacks on Israel. And he was selected to be one of the two pro-Israel advocates. With friends like these…

The other invited speaker is just as bad. He is a philosophy professor named Ted Honderich, who believes that the Palestinian terrorists have “a moral right in their terrorism against Israelis.” He analogizes Israel to Apartheid South Africa, which he of course said did not have a right to exist. Yet he too has been selected to speak on behalf of Israel.

The Oxford Union had it within their power to select a genuine advocate of Israel’s right to exist, since even in England there are a few of those. I know, because I have been getting outraged letters from Oxford students, alumni and ordinary citizens about the forthcoming debate. For example, one of Great Britain’s most distinguished lawyers and writers is Anthony Julius. He could make an effective case for Israel’s right to exist, as could many other prominent individuals.

But at the Oxford Union, the only debate permitted is over the means used to end Israel’s existence; whether Israel should be destroyed by Palestinian suicide bombers, by Hezbollah rockets or by some other means. This is not a public debate. It is a public execution.

The ledes of the coverage of George Bush's statements in the Middle East were truly horrid. From the opening paragraph in the coverage by Washington Post,

JERUSALEM, Jan. 10 — President Bush said Thursday that Palestinian refugees should receive compensation for the loss of homes they fled or were forced to flee during the establishment of Israel and declared that there should be an end to Israel's "occupation" of lands seized in war four decades ago.

Bush tied his remarks about ending the occupation to statements expressing concern for Israel's security. In fact, he expressed an understanding that so long as Israelis are experiencing rocket attacks and suicide (and other) bombings, there would good reasons for Israel not to want to pull back to the pre-1967 borders. But we see that only much later in the story:

"These negotiations must ensure that Israel has secure, recognized and defensible borders."

He also said,

"I can also understand that until confidence is gained on both sides, why the Israelis would want there to be a sense of security."

These are important qualifications to "end the occupation." The stories could just as easily have led with "Bush defends Israel's right to security," and have captured the essence of much of his speech.

If I were an Israeli leader, I would say something like this:

We, too, want peace in our land. We have tried time and again to negotiate a withdrawal from the west bank territories, but every time we reach an agreement, the arabs renege and our security is threatened once again. Until the rest of the world can guarantee our security, we must hang onto those territories and maintain the security fence.

And as for compensation, keep in mind that most of the arabs who fled Israel nearly 60 years ago did so not out of fear of the Jews. They did so because the arab nations (in particular, Jordan, Syria, and Egypt) told them to leave, promising they would drive the Jews into the sea in a few days. I.e., don't blame Israel for most of the dislocations.

I understand that paying compensation is probably preferable to the "right of return" that the region's arabs are demanding. But if there is to be compensation, make the surrounding arab nations pay it. And not just because of the bad advice they gave in 1948, but also because they refused to allow, much less encourage, the refugees to integrate into their new countries. But of course the western media don't mention these little items.

For a solid analysis of Bush's speech and of the situation, see this.

For more on media anti-Israel bias, see this about the BBC.

Many of us, in the name of seeking a lasting middle eastern peace treaty, have long wondered whether Israel could negotiate such a peace by agreeing to give up all the land they have occupied since their decisive victory in the war of 1967. They offered to give up that land then, in exchange for peace and recognition by their Arab neighbours of Israel's right to exist, but their offer was rejected.

Those who think Israel can "buy" peace by giving up those territories should read this.

...[I]n 1967, Egypt, Syria and Jordan again attacked Israel, again with the repeated announcement that the objective was its "annihilation." Israel turned the tables and won the war. Soon after that victory, Israel offered the Arabs to hand them all the territory it had regained, in return for peace. At a conference in Khartoum the unanimous Arab reply was: No negotiations. No peace. No recognition....

It was shortly afterward that the movement of Jewish settlers was launched. It is noteworthy that the last defining document that underwrites the legality was the Geneva Convention of 1949. It dealt with occupied territories. Its second clause, stating its scope, makes it clear that it does not apply to the Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria - because Jordan was not a sovereign possessor but an illegal invader, and similarly was Egypt an illegal invader of Gaza. Israel liberated both areas, restoring them to the territory of the Palestine Mandate of 1922.

From the point of view of international law these settlers are as legal as any resident of Manhattan or of Shreveport, Louisiana.

[h/t to BenS]

How does NOT raping women de-humanize them? Or how does it mean that the women are already de-humanized in the eyes of the soldiers? Beats me. From Israel National News [h/t to Acad Ronin]:

A research paper that won a Hebrew University teachers' committee prize finds that the lack of IDF rapes of Palestinian women is designed to serve a political purpose.

..."In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it can be seen that the lack of military rape merely strengthens the ethnic boundaries and clarifies the inter-ethnic differences - just as organized military rape would have done."

The paper further theorizes that Arab women in Judea and Samaria are not raped by IDF soldiers because the women are de-humanized in the soldiers' eyes.

A better explanation might be that the soldiers recognize that rape is wrong. It might also point out that Israeli soldiers know very well there would be negative repercussions for their entire country if they were to rape Arab women.

Melanie Phillips has a recent item by this same title. Here are some excerpts, dealing with the exodus of Christians from Bethlehem:

... the only reason the Palestinians are suffering from the security barrier is that it was erected solely to stop them from murdering any more Israelis. If they abandoned their terrorism, the barrier would immediately come down.

Such moral blindness apart, it is truly remarkable that these mindless bigots never pause to ask themselves the obvious question. If it really is Israel that is driving out Bethlehem’s Christians, then why isn’t it equally driving out Bethlehem’s Muslims? Same Israeli ‘occupying’ forces; same separation barrier; same hardship, brutality, economic sanctions etc. Are we to assume, perhaps, that Israel has a particular problem with Christians, rather than the Muslims or Arabs in general, that the rest of the world has somehow missed?

(In which case, might they not also scratch their heads at the fact that Israel is the only country in the Middle East where Christians have thrived and multiplied, rising in number from 34,000 in 1948 to nearly 130,000 in 2005?) Might there not be the teensiest, weensiest morsel of a clue in the fact that, whereas a few years ago Bethlehem was mainly Christian, now it is 80 per cent Muslim? Might the fact that such a dramatic change occurred simultaneously with Bethlehem coming under Muslim control after Oslo (thus making all those responsible for that satirically named 'peace process' accessories to the persecution of Bethlehem's Christians) just possibly have something to do with it?

From Melanie Phillips,

[T]he iconic image of the child Mohammed al Durah, pictured crouching with his father behind a barrel next to a concrete wall in an apparently vain attempt to shelter from the gun-battle between Israel and the Palestinians that was raging around them before he was allegedly shot dead by the Israelis, served to incite terrorist violence and atrocities around the world after it was transmitted by France 2 at the beginning of the second intifada. Yet it is clear to anyone looking at this in detail that the whole thing was staged, not least from the devastating evidence here which shows the boy raising his arm and peeping through his fingers seconds after the France 2 correspondent Charles Enderlin said he had been shot dead.

Philippe Karsenty, who runs a French media watchdog, criticized the France 2 report and was successfully sued for libel. That case is now under appeal, and the additional evidence that is coming out strongly indicates that France 2, its journalist(s), and its managers all had/have a strong anti-Israel bias that smacks of anti-Semitism. As Phillips says,

There were many very strange things about this footage which just didn’t add up. When it came to the footage of the ‘killing’ of Mohammed al Durah, the following stood out:

* This sequence was not a continuous narrative but was repeatedly broken up and spliced onto footage of other scenes from the demonstration
* Although the France 2 cameraman had told a German film-maker, Esther Shapira, that he had filmed six minutes of the al Durah father and son under continuous Israeli fire, the footage of them lasted for less than one minute

* There was a camera tripod next to them
* There was no evidence of the boy actually being hit
* At one point, people in the crowd cried out that the boy was dead, while he was sitting up large as life clinging onto his father with his mouth wide open
* After he was said to be dead, he moved his arm (the sequence I have already reported which has been available on the web for years)....

The ‘killing’ of Mohammed al Durah was swallowed uncritically by the western media, despite the manifold unlikeliness and contradictions which were apparent from the start, because it accorded with the murderous prejudice against Israel which is the prism through which the Middle East conflict is habitually refracted. This scandal has the most profound implications not just for the media, not just for the Middle East conflict but for the western world’s relationship to reason, which seems to grow more tenuous by the day.

One of the clearest cases for limiting free speech is the famous phrase from Oliver Wendell Holmes about, "...falsely shouting 'fire' in a crowded theatre... " Another is the instigation to commit murder or other crimes. And a related case might involve urging genocide and supporting those who espouse it. From Melanie Phillips,

This is what happened on the streets of London yesterday. A demonstration organised by Iranian Islamists promoting the destruction of Israel, in which people called for the killing of Jews and waved Hezbollah flags. The police provide protection for such a demonstration on the basis that people are entitled to march provided they are not breaking the law. They ignore the fact that such incitement to murder is indeed against the law; they fail to grasp that a parade of Hezbollah flags is a recruiting device for Islamists; they refuse to acknowledge that such a demonstration is an flagrant act of intimidation by proxies for a terrorist regime which is currently blowing up our troops in Iraq, threatening genocide against Israel and intent on defeating the west in war. Welcome once again to Londonistan.

While this situation falls short of the "clear and imminent danger" criterion for abrogating free speech, I see no reason to permit the demonstrators to use public property while promoting their ideas. After all, freedom of speech does not require that all taxpayers provide scarce resources for the exercise of that free speech.

Click on the cartoon to see a larger, more legible version.

The British union of academics, the UCU, has, under legal advice, called off it's boycott of Israeli Scholars. From an announcement made by the International Advisory Board for Academic Freedom (of which I am a member),

UK Boycott of Israeli Academics Ruled Illegal

IAB is pleased to announce that the UK based University and College Union (UCU) has declared today, 28/9/07, that an academic boycott of Israel is illegal and cannot be implemented.

After receiving legal advice that cleared that “a call to boycott Israeli institutions would run a serious risk of infringing discrimination legislation”… and “is also considered to be outside the aims and objects of the UCU”, the UCU’s strategy and finance committee recommended unanimously today, to immediately inform branches and members that:

• A boycott call would be unlawful and cannot be implemented
• UCU members' opinions cannot be tested at local meetings
• The proposed regional tour cannot go ahead under current arrangements and is therefore suspended.

As you might expect, this announcement leaves me both elated and yet concerned. Of course I am elated that the boycott has been called off, even if for the wrong reason. At the same time, though, I'm still disturbed that it might ever have happened in the first place, and I worry about the continuing anti-semitism and rabid anti-Israeli views that made this boycott more than rants of a few extremists.

My friend Eric Litwack, a colleague at the International Study Centre in England, has an article in the most recent edition of Engage.
The article deals with historical truth, holocaust denial, and anti-Zionism. To me, the most pithy portion of the article is summarized as,

...[A]nti-Zionism and Holocaust denial are different contemporary expressions of antisemitism that exploit pervasive historical ignorance and radical relativism in the promotion of their social designs: the destruction of Israel and the rehabilitation of Nazism, respectively.

At the heart of his article is a discussion of "truth". My own perspective is somewhat different from Eric's in this regard, and is probably best represented by discussions in Richard Posner's work on the Economic Analysis of Law. Essentially, this perspective acknowledges that historically, perceptions of truth have varied through time. A classic example is the morphing of "the world is flat" to "the sun is the centre of the universe" to "the universe has no centre". Posner asserts, as a result of his work, that truth is whatever people agree it is.

This perspective, while frustrating, is extremely empirical and is even a bit frightening to those of us (like me) who tend toward absolutism and wanting definitive answers to everything. And yet I find the perspective extremely compelling.

Also, this perspective has extremely important implications for the history of the holocaust and for political views concerning Israel. If truth is whatever people agree it is, then holocaust deniers must constantly be confronted with the best evidence available. We cannot rest and relax, confident in our knowledge (or belief) that the truth will prevail, since the truth could well be transformed in content to something else without constant diligence and work.

My own perceptions of truth about Israel have been heavily influenced by the writings of Sir Martin Gilbert. These are careful documentations of events leading up to the creation of Israel, and they deserve much wider dissemination and reading, especially in the pursuit of truth and in the continuing mission to head off untruths promulgated by anti-Semites.

Eric Litwack is a scholar. He does not put forward only his support for Israel in his writings. He also cautions,

... [S]upporters of Israel must ensure that their claims and arguments are securely moored to the mast of historical truth, and this will sometimes imply both opposition to propaganda and fanaticism from within our own ranks, as well as a possible qualification of some long cherished beliefs. No comparable school of self-critical historiography on the subject of Zionism exists elsewhere in the Middle East, and this is a tribute to Israeli democracy and scholarship.

From my perspective, since there are no such things as "historical truths", I interpret Eric's statement to mean that we must continue to provide the best evidence we have of holocaust events and of the formation of Israel. We must also meet head-on claims of evidence that are contradicted by the best evidence and logic that we have at our disposal.

From a letter to The Globe (h/t to Alex):

It is ironic that black Africans from Sudan are fleeing from murderous Muslim Arab racists of Sudan and Egypt. Their destination is Israel, a country slandered repeatedly at the United Nations and in the "liberal" media as an "apartheid" state.

From Ynet news:

A UN conference, held at the European Parliament in Brussels, heard an array of speakers call for a boycott against Israel and strategize on ways to achieve its international isolation, during the first day of an event billed by organizers as a gathering to promote "Middle East peace".

The 'International Conference of Civil Society in Support of Israeli-Palestinian Peace' has been organized by the UN's Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, and attracted political figures and pro-Palestinian members of non governmental organizations (NGOs).

WHAT? The UN actually has such a committee?

The loaded language of such rhetoric is very disturbing. It is the same people dragging out the same tired arguments we heard from Durban in 2001. They were wrong then and they are still wrong.

[h/t to Scoop]

From the Telegraph back in June [h/t to Judith]:

In the Gaza Strip's Jab aliya refugee camp, Aref Suleiman was raised on Palestinian struggle against the Jewish state. Today he lies in an Israeli hospital bed, his body riddled with Palestinian bullets, his wounds tended daily by Israeli nurses.

For the 22-year-old Mr Suleiman, who was shot five times point blank by Hamas militants last month during a renewed bout of Palestinian infighting, this is not the Arab-Israeli conflict he learnt about as a child growing up in Gaza's desperate, rubbish-strewn alleys.

"Palestinians shoot me and Jews treat me," he laughs bitterly. "It was supposed to be different." ...

"The Jews are like honey, like flowers," he says theatrically. "They wash me, clean me, and change my gown every day. Even in my home, my own family wouldn't change me every day."

"Here, everything is beseder," he adds, using the Hebrew word for "okay".

For the young Israeli nurses, most from nearby communities that live in constant fear of the Palestinian rocket fire, the cultural exchange flows both ways. The Palestinian patients they treat put a human face on the conflict. Nurse and patient can even find a shred of common cause now that the Islamist Hamas movement, which has killed dozens of Israelis in suicide bombings, is locked in a deadly power struggle with the more moderate Fatah movement.

It sure looks as if they are. From the Telegraph [h/t to BenS],

Over the weekend, the BBC was forced to remove a highly offensive message about Jesus from its website... [W]hy had this message been allowed to remain there for a week, despite complaints?

Anti-Muslim comments vanish instantly. Meanwhile, it emerged yesterday that the BBC has refused to allow Casualty [an ER-type programme] to carry a storyline featuring a terrorist attack by a Muslim suicide bomber. The editorial guidelines department decreed that, instead, the terrorists should be animal rights extremists.

The BBC's coverage of Islamic affairs has been unsatisfactory for many years.

In its international and domestic news reporting, the corporation has consistently come across as naïve and partial, rather than sensitive and unbiased. Its reporting of Israel and Palestine, in particular, tends to underplay the hate-filled Islamist ideology that inspires Hamas and other factions, while never giving Israel the benefit of the doubt. (Disgracefully, the BBC is still refusing to publish the Balen Report, which it commissioned to investigate allegations of anti-Israel bias.)

In its coverage of British Muslims, the BBC has been inspired by two laudable aims: to treat their beliefs respectfully; and to avoid stereotyping ordinary Muslims as terrorist supporters. In the process, however, it has done two rather different things.

First, it has presented Islam on its own terms, as if only Muslims had the authority to describe their religion.

Mohammed remains an intensely controversial figure. Yet the BBC shies away from proper historical investigation of "the Prophet", as it insists on calling him.

Second, the BBC has only scratched the surface of one of the biggest news stories of the decade: the penetration of Muslim youth by Islamic supremacist groups.

Indeed, the corporation has even helped this to happen.

Again and again, it has wheeled on Islamic "moderates" who belong to hard-line sects that real moderate Muslims are desperate to stop their children joining.

It has been left to Channel 4 to conduct undercover investigations in radical mosques and to commission a 2007 GFK/NOP opinion poll revealing that almost a quarter of British Muslims believe that the Government helped stage the London bombings of July 7, 2005.

We live in a world in which, although the vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists, the vast majority of terrorists are Muslim. [emphasis added]...

To ban a storyline featuring Islamic terrorists not only misrepresents reality; it is also an insult to licence-payers whose family, friends or colleagues were blown to pieces on July 7 - and not by animal rights activists.

As Richard Littlejohn writes in The Daily Mail,

"Good morning, this is the news from the BBC. A group of animal rights activists has hijacked four airliners and flown them into the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington."

I'm sorry, I'll read that again. "Four members of the anti-vivisection movement have blown themselves up on the London Transport network, killing 52 people and injuring hundreds more."

I don't think so. "Two doctors have attempted a suicide car bomb attack on Glasgow airport. The League Against Cruel Sports has claimed responsibility."

As the late Bill Deedes might have said: shurely shome mishtake.

But it all makes about as much sense as the BBC's decision to can an episode of Casualty which starts with a young Muslim blowing himself up in a crowded bus station - and rewrite it so that the bombing is carried out by animal rights extremists.

The Casualty plotline was rejected by the Beeb's "editorial and ethical standards" commissars, who were worried that it was stereotyping young Muslims as terrorists.

The BBC likes to boast about the gritty reality of its dramas. But if that were the case, they'd have stuck with the original script.

In real life, it's Muslims committing all the terrorist atrocities in Britain these days.

That's not to say that all Muslims are terrorists, far from it, but to pretend that the bunny liberation brigade are bombing bus stations is preposterous. ...

I would love to see a major political party advocate the abolition of the BBC. Or at the very least a major cutback in their funding.

A large contingent of U.S. unions have issued a joint statement criticizing the British UCU proposed boycott of Israeli academics:

Over 30 American trade unions ranging from the American Federation of Teachers to the American Postal Workers have condemned the spate of boycott initiatives by trade union movements in the UK, branding them "inimical" and questioning the motives for singling out Israel.

The University and College Union motion to boycott Israeli academic institutions came in for strong criticism.

"Calls for academic boycotts of Israel are inimical to and counter to the principles of academic freedom and freedom of association, key principles for which academics and educational unions have struggled over many years. Rather than limiting interactions with Israeli educators, academics and educational institutions, we see the importance of maximizing, rather than proscribing, the free flow of ideas and academic interaction between peoples, cultures, religions and countries," the unions said in a statement issued late Thursday evening [July 22nd].

With atrocities occurring around the globe, the trade unionists questioned the motivations of the boycotters and asked why the motions are by nature one-sided: "With the large number of local, regional and international conflicts, with the diverse range of oppressive regimes around the world about which there is almost universal silence, we have to question the motives of these resolutions that single out one country in one conflict.

"We note with increasing concern that virtually all of these resolutions focus solely on objections to actions or policies of the Israeli government, and never on actions or policies of Palestinian or other Arab governments, parties or movements. We notice with increasing concern that characterization of the Palestinians as victims and Israel as victimizer is a staple of such resolutions. That there are victims and victimizers on all sides, and that many if not most of the victims of violence and repression on all sides are civilians, are essential items often not mentioned in these resolutions."

[h/t to BenS]

By a Druze student from Israel [h/t to MA]:

As a holder of two degrees from the University of Haifa and a PhD student at the University of London, I traveled to Bournemouth for the meeting of the British University and College Union (UCU) as an Israeli delegate on behalf of the Israeli Council for Academic Freedom.

The discussions at the meeting regarding the imposition of a boycott on Israeli academia took place in a hostile environment while ignoring all the facts we presented regarding freedom of expression and academic freedom at Israeli institutions of higher learning.

Evidence that Israeli lecturers who hold pro-Palestinian views are able to express their positions uninterrupted both in their research work and lectures, as well as in the media, had no effect whatsoever on the discussions.

Even when we presented a list of organizations and research centers that operate in the framework of Israeli universities and boast Israeli-Palestinian or Israeli-Arab cooperation, with the promotion of ties between the peoples their top agenda, it did not make a difference.

... The truth is that it is clear to this group of lecturers that Israeli academia is least at fault for what is happening in our region, certainly when compared to the freedom of expression at our neighbors' academic institutions. After all, the English know full well that the technological, academic, and cultural achievements in the State of Israel stem first and foremost from the freedom of expression and research in every field in Israel.

Therefore, the figures we presented were futile, because all they cared about was their one and only objective: De-legitimizing the State of Israel with no relation to its academia; presenting it as an apartheid state that deprives its minorities of elementary rights such as education and the freedom of expression.

The UCU: a bunch of scary non-scholars.

Scholars for Peace in the Middle East [SPME] have issued a scathing criticism of the UCU's motions proposing a boycott of Israeli academics. SPME seems to me to be somewhat leftwing, with many members opposed to the west-bank settlements; nevertheless they have spoken out against the boycott. Here, in part, is the SPME reaction:

[T]his action [was] instigated by a small group of anti-Israel union delegates who appear not to represent the views of the union membership and who have singled out Israel for opprobrium. The motion is an attempt to delegitimize and to silence the only Jewish state in the world, one of a tiny minority of states in the Middle East that truly honor academic freedom. In Israel's prestigious universities, faculty members represent all religious and political persuasions. Many Israeli professors are Arabs; many are Muslims. How professors at universities in Arab countries are Jews? How many are non-Muslims? How many belong to nondominant Muslim denominations?

In Iran, professors have been purged from universities for ideological and religious reasons, and an American academic, Haleh Esfandiari, was recently imprisoned while visiting her 93-year-old mother. Despite the gargantuan scale of human rights abuses in Sudan, Syria, China, Saudi Arabia, and, yes, Gaza, the UCU is not considering a boycott against any of them. Why not?


The proposed boycott is immoral and antithetical to academic principles. It shuts off dialogue, when one of the key purposes of universities is to promote dialogue and thereby the pursuit of truth. It ignores existing projects where Israeli and Palestinian academics cooperate. It requires academics to hew to one ideological line. And it constitutes discrimination on the basis of nationality.

That is the title of this piece by Bradley Burston [h/t to MA]. Here is an excerpt, but it is very well-written. rtwt [read the whole thing].

Just for the sake of argument, let's suppose that you're a British academic. You believe strongly that the occupation must end, that the Palestinians should have an independent state, that Israel's military and diplomatic policies are wrongheaded to the point of immorality.

What to do? Simple. Find the one group within Israeli society which has consistently, vigorously and courageously campaigned against the occupation since its inception.

Then attack them.

...No matter that in the whole of the 1991 Gulf war, Saddam Hussein managed to hit all of Israel with a total of 39 missiles, and that two weeks ago, Hamas sent 40 rockets into the Sderot area in the space of a single day.

No matter that the Sapir College, Israel's largest public college, has for years been a primary target of Qassam crews.

No matter that in boycotting all Israeli academics on the basis of their being Israelis, the measure is patently racist, a grotesque reprise of the history of curbing academic freedom.

No matter that Israeli Arab academics who are staunchly opposed to the occupation are vehement opponents of the boycott as well.

No matter, even, that opposition to the boycott runs strong within the British University and College Union itself. In fact, all the more reason to press on.

For the genuine elitist, the unpopularity of an opinion is the best assurance of its real value.

Perhaps this is why the whole boycott campaign smacks of a uniquely far-left British brand of moral masturbation, a desperate, delusional, sterile, supremely self-contained form of non-activism that risks nothing even as it changes nothing.

Update: For more analysis and discussion, check out Lower Education from the New Republic by Marty Peretz. His article, along with comments there, offer some additional insights about the nature of the institutions that have been pushing the boycott.

First it was the AUT leadership, voting a boycott of Israeli scholars, and they were rebuffed, to say the least, by their general membership.

Then it was NATFHE, another union of academics, voting to boycott Israeli scholars, but they soon merged with the AUT, leaving a vote of their directors as meaningless.

But now the leadership of the combined unions, under the general grouping, the UCU, have voted to support a boycott of Israeli academics.

I strongly oppose their views on two grounds:

1. First, I am not convinced that Israel is doing much wrong with its occupation of the west bank. Failure to occupy the west bank would have been like telling robbers that if they get caught, the only punishment is that they must give back what they have stolen and that there will be no further deterrence. That's just plain silly because it doesn't discourage robbers from trying to steal again and again.
   
   Israel repelled an attack in 1967, only to have to fight another war in 1973. After that war, they said (and quite rightly under both international law and following just plain common sense) if you folks are going to keep using these lands as launching pads, both literally and figuratively, we're going to hold them until you renounce such plans. Such renunciation has not occurred.
   
   Nevertheless, Israel has been open and democratic. Yes, it cut off payments to the Palestinian Authority once Hamas was elected, and for bloody good reason: Hamas has as one of its primary goals the eradication of Israel (and, incidentally, the Jews who live there). There is no earthly reason why the UCU should expect Israel to continue making payments to a sworn enemy. If they really disagree, let them all contribute 10% of their salaries to the US Republican party.
2. But even if you don't accept my first point, this one is compelling: in the name of academic freedom, there is no justifiable reason for this boycott. If the UCU wants to single out academics for boycott, let them single out those from China or Iraq or Iran or Egypt or any other place where there are documented human rights abuses or flagrant violations of the concept of academic freedom. Academic freedom says that we scholars should assess the works of others on their merits, not on the basis of the politics of their home country.
   
   Instead, the UCU picks on Israeli academics. There can be only one reason for this: anti-semitism, pure and simple. And it is frightening.

For more, please see this, which summarizes the motions that were passed by the UCU Congress.

Also, please see this from Engage, which says

1 This is not a decision to institute a boycott. That decision can only be made by the whole membership through a ballot. That was the commitment on which Sally Hunt was elected as General Secretary. Congress also backed a policy which does not allow a boycott of Israeli academic institutions unless it is called for by Israeli campus trade unions. Which it won't be.

2 UCU Congress has today voted for a roadshow touring colleges and universities drumming up support for an exclusion of Israelis - and only Israelis - from our campuses, our conferences and our journals. The union is mandated to finance this tour and to stack the debate in favour of a pro-boycott outcome.

And also see this for a reaction.

And one final point: where is the outrage from non-Jewish, non-Israeli organizations? I am embarrassed and appalled by the (so far) lack of responses from such groups. Am I the only gentile in the universe who sees things this way?

[h/t to MA for the links]

Update #1: also see this from Melanie Phillips and this from Little Green Footballs.

Update #2: Both Melanie Phillips and Normblog quote this from Ha'aretz:

On Wednesday, representatives of the new British University and College Union (UCU) will be meeting in Bournemouth. On the agenda is another proposal to boycott Israel's academic institutions. These proposals have become as regular and as predictable as Qassam attacks on Sderot. The fact that studies at the Sapir Academic College in Sderot are not taking place because of the constant rocket fire from Gaza, even though the college is not in occupied territory and Gaza is no longer occupied, apparently does not bother British academia. The fact that Hamas, which controls the Palestinian Authority, does not recognize even pre-1967 Israel, and commits acts of terror against civilians, does not matter either. These nuances did not stop one boycott initiator from saying last week that justice in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is entirely on one side.

Norm continued,

This editorial in Haaretz rightly identifies the thinking of the would-be boycotters as impelled by a desire to de-legitimize Israel - identifies it with 'the position that the very birth of the Jewish state was a mistake'.

Update #3: And check out Stephen Pollard's column about boycotts of Israel.

Update #4: Rénald writes,

I find this totally ridiculous! Why of all people attack the scholars??? Why not the bakers, bankers and doughnut makers? It would make as much sense.

Boycotting scholars is like boycotting knowledge...it can only lead to ignorance or maybe they are already there!

to which BenS adds,

Of course, but why boycott any Jewish institution? The boycotters are playing copycat and operating like an ignorant herd….which they are. I’ll make one exception for these ignorant hypocrites: let them boycott for themselves and their families any medical or scientific advancement created or produced by Jews -— but being hypocrites, they won’t do that.

Update #5 Tim Worstall says that English academic unions are not worth worrying about.

The academic unions are well known to be populated and run by people with any number of very peculiar bees buzzing under their bonnets. The rest of us look upon them almost fondly, as examples of a well meaning but possibly futile form of Care in the Community.

The idea that we should take seriously anything that comes from such obvious nutters simply never occurs to those of us outside the hallowed halls of academe.

I hope he's right, but the UCU is still wrong and very unscholarly.

Why is it that so many members of the left-wing (we're gonna find something about some establishment to protest) spend so much time and effort attacking Israel for its alleged human rights abuses? There are so many much more deserving targets, as Perry de Havilland points out:

There is an article on the Guardian site called Throw a pebble at Goliath: don't buy Israeli produce, by Yvonne Roberts, in which she urges people to boycott Israel because of its human rights record.

Now I know nothing about Yvonne Robert and have never even heard of her before, but I assume she also an avid campaigner for people to boycott products from Cuba, Burma, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, China (good luck doing that), Iran, Syria, Belorus, Zimbabwe, North Korea (assuming they actually produce any products) etc. etc. etc... after all, if she is such a tireless campaigner for human rights, surely she could not possibly feel it was alright for people to trade with all those places, given the state of human rights in those places. Right?

Anyone want to take any bets on this? [links are in the original]

As one of the commenters there said,

The day when those regimes become predominantly Jewish is the day that these people will start criticizing them, regardless of whether their human-rights records get better or worse.

Oh, oh. Now the British architects are getting into the act. What a bunch of ignoramuses. Read the comments there to get a good idea of just how ignorant they are.

Anyone who says,

This is not against Israel, it's for Palestine,... I think the Palestinians are living in a prison.

has not been paying attention to Middle Eastern events for the past five years and what it means to be pro-Palestinian. The suicide bombings, the kidnappings, the rockets, the promises to drive Israel into the sea... these count for nothing?

[h/t BenS]

It is so difficult to understand how scholars worthy of the name got to these views. Click here for a complete list of the motions that are to be discussed at the Bournemouth meetings later this week. I will not reproduce them here.

My recommendation: find out which schools support such anti-Semitic drivel, such blind one-sidedness, and boycott academics from those institutions. My guess is that such a retaliatory boycott would be totally unnecessary; I cannot imagine the authors of these motions produce much, if any, work that is truly scholarly in nature.

I see from the SPME website that there will be a booth at the Congress, operated by a combination of Israeli and Palestinian students, presenting examples of Israeli/Palestinian co-operation.

This week, the new union of post-secondary educators in the UK will be meeting, and one of the agenda items will be a proposed boycott of Israel and Israeli academics.

Why not a boycott of China for its treatment of Tibet? Why not a boycott of Palestine (and the other Arab-Muslim states) for their treatment of Jews? Why single out the country that has more democracy and more human rights (and, in many ways, less aggression) than any other country in the Middle East?

Even if you think Israel should not have occupied the west bank (and should have left it for the Jordanians and Syrians to use as a further launching pad for additional raids and rocket attacks on Israel), read this by David Hirsh, who believes Israel should withdraw from the west bank but who strongly opposes the boycott.

The boycott rhetoric does not help Palestinians. But it is seductive because it functions as a way to help boycotters feel better about living in a world in which horrors continue to happen. The boycott rhetoric doesn't stop the horrors and it doesn't make the world fair, but perhaps it can absolve us from the existential guilt that we bear because the world is what it is.

Perhaps it can do something about our terrifying feelings of powerlessness? In a post-national and a post-imperial world, the guilt of nationalism and imperialism can be focused on to Israel and we can thereby feel absolved ourselves. It is the ultimate "not in my name" gesture politics. It doesn't change anything but it enables us to step outside of the tear-stained reality of anti-semitism and empire, Holocaust and Nakba, aggressive settlement and nightclub bombing. But the dream of stepping outside history is vain and is intimately related to the nightmare of totalitarianism.

My own view is that academic freedom is more important than these types of political statements. But I've said all this before. Michael Yudkin makes the case quite well in one of his recent articles at Engage.

More on boycotts of Israel to follow this afternoon.

A couple of weeks ago, we were driving along a narrow lane (aka a highway) in western Ireland, County Clare, when all the sudden we came across this building with the Israeli and US flags flying on either side of the entrance:



What a surprise. We couldn't figure out what the building might be. It turns out to be a hotel.

The proposed boycotts of Israeli scholars by some members of UK teachers' unions have always seemed wrong to me. I oppose them on two grounds:

1. they are anathema to academic freedom, which I prize very highly no matter how much some "scholarly" research offends me, and
2. it seems so unfair and unreasonable to single out Israel when that country has so much more freedom than any other country in the middle east and there are so many other countries (China, anyone??) that restrict freedoms so much more seriously.

Recently I re-watched the 1960 movie, Exodus. (Actually, I much preferred the book). I was struck by how much, during the 1960s, the entire liberal left supported Israel then in contrast with their views now. What has changed? The main thing that has changed is that Jordan, Syria, and Egypt lost two wars and the Israelis took steps to protect themselves against future possible attacks. Odd, isn't it.

And while we're on the topic, why haven't the UK leftie academics called for a boycott of Arab academics because of the treatment of Jews and Christians in so many Arab countries?

.

The article below by Prof. Kellner (Professor of Jewish Thought at the University of Haifa and of the IAB executive committee), has appeared on Babylon (Norwegian based journal about the Middle East and North-Africa), vol. 5, nr. 1, April 2007, pp. 122-131. It is reproduced in whole with the permission of the author. The lower-case Roman numerals in brackets are endnotes, which are well-worth reading.

Kellner's important article "Resisting Falsehood and Protecting Integrity" is a reply to Omar Barghouti's call for an academic and cultural boycott: "Resisting Israeli Apartheid: Why the Academic and Cultural Boycott?" that also appeared in Babylon.
-------------------------------------------

"Resisting Falsehood and Protecting Integrity"

Menachem Kellner, University of Haifa[i]

Omar Barghouti's call for an academic and cultural boycott, "Resisting Israeli Apartheid: Why the Academic and Cultural Boycott?" is a sustained attempt to demonize Israel, intended to bring about its destruction.


I shall reply to Mr. Barghouti's essay calling for an academic and cultural boycott of Israel. At the outset, let me grant him one important point. If, for a moment, I believed that Israel was as bad as he describes, I would support his call for a boycott. Unlike many of my colleagues, I do not believe that such boycotts are never justified. But I do believe that such boycotts are destructive of the trust upon which the scientific endeavor must be based, and may be used only in the most extreme cases and if there is some reasonable expectation that they will accomplish something positive. So, the question between us boils down to the following: is Israel the evil incarnate that Mr. Barghouti pretends it to be — or not?


Mr. Barghouti seeks to convince his readers that Israeli Jews are inveterate racists, and that Israel is an apartheid state. In the space allotted to me, I cannot possibly correct all of the deceptive falsehoods he uses — as the Hebrew expression has it, it is easier to throw mud than clean it up. By characterizing more accurately than Mr.
Barghouti the true nature and history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and then addressing his two main charges, racism and apartheid, I will undermine his call for a boycott.


ACADEMIC LIFE IN ISRAEL


Reading Omar Barghouti's essay brought to mind a series of experiences I had when serving as Dean of Students at the University of Haifa in the 1990's. I used to organize various sorts of Arab-Jewish dialogues and discussions. Conducted by persons of good will from both communities, the discussions invariably foundered on questions of perception and context. Arab students saw themselves as a beleaguered minority on a campus in which roughly 80% of the students were Jewish (about the same ratio as in the general population), at which the language of instruction was not their own, and in a country which seemed to them to field a huge and frightening army. The Jewish students saw themselves as a beleaguered and threatened minority in a Middle East in which the vast majority of states not only refused to recognize Israel's right to exist, but remained in a state of war with Israel, supported terror organizations which wrought death and destruction on Israelis in school, on buses, and in cafés, and which drew upon the support of a billion or so Muslims around the world. Even then, a period of relative peace and optimism with the Oslo process in full swing, Jews and Arabs each saw themselves as victims of the other. Over the last seven years, since the late (unlamented by me) Yasir Arafat launched the so-called 'al-Aksa Intifada'[ii] the situation has grown markedly worse, and the conflict of perceptions has grown deeper. Over these same years, my own perception of the world has grown closer to that of those Jewish students whom only a decade ago I thought were paranoid.[iii] Unlike the Arab students at the University of Haifa who sincerely sought for an honorable and constructive modus vivendi with their Jewish colleagues, Mr. Barghouti seeks for the utter destruction of Israel and has put together a pastiche of distortions to generate support for that aim among readers of his article.[iv]


PALESTINIAN VS. ISRAEL ATTITUDES - A FUNDAMENTAL ASYMMETRY


Mr. Barghouti's essay reflects the fundamental asymmetry of the Israel-Palestine conflict. I am not referring to the asymmetry of military power between Israel and the Palestinians, but to the asymmetry of objectives. Ever since the Camp David accords of 1978, Israeli governments and Israeli society have more and more come to accept the inevitability and rightness of there being two states west of the Jordan River, one predominantly Israeli-Jewish and one exclusively Palestinian-Arab.[v] But, in contrast, ever since the year 2000, it has become painfully evident that Palestinian society has overwhelmingly rejected the right of Israel to exist at all.[vi] Thus, the 'al-Aksa Intifada' was not launched in order to undo the results of the 1967, but to undo the results of 1948.[vii]


This fundamental asymmetry is reflected in other ways. Every Israeli withdrawal from territory it had occupied has repeatedly been misconstrued by its enemies as a sign of weakness and has had devastating consequences for Israel. Israel under Sharon withdrew from the Gaza Strip, uprooting 8,000 Israelis and destroying two dozen towns and villages,[viii] and Hamas responded by increasing its daily shelling of Israeli settlements in the Western Negev.[ix] Earlier, Israel under Barak withdrew from Southern Lebanon and Hezbollah moved 10,000 katyusha rockets into the area, turning every resident of Lebanon into a hostage for its adventurism.


But the most chilling asymmetry is that of ultimate ends: what would Israel do if Hezbollah disarmed? Turn its back on Lebanon. What would Hezbollah do were Israel to disarm? The repeated pronouncements of their leadership leave no doubt: those Jews who were not butchered would be drowned in the sea. This asymmetry finds expression in a chilling fact which never ceases to bother me: every kindergarten in Israel has and needs an armed guard to protect it from Palestinian terrorists. Not a single Palestinian school has or needs such a guard (unless it is to protect the children in the school from rival Palestinian factions).[x]


The Israeli view of the world has room for Lebanon, for Jordan, for Egypt, for Saudi Arabia, and even, for the majority of Israelis, for a free and independent Palestine. For more and more Palestinians, there is no room in the world for Israel.


Finding Israelis (Jews and Arabs) to criticize Israel is no problem for Mr. Barghouti — Israel is indeed a lively democracy. In contrast, one can occasionally find a Palestinian who will admit that terror attacks against Israeli citizens are counter-productive but finding a Palestinian willing to condemn the out and out murder of children, when the murderers are Arabs and the children are Jewish, is next to impossible — Another asymmetry.


Asymmetries exist in the way that outsiders view the conflict too.
Israel is held to standards of behavior to which no other country in the world is held, and when it fails to live up to those standards, it is condemned in absolutist, Manichean terms as thoroughly depraved and corrupted. In the eyes of its enemies,[xi] the Israeli cup must be brimming over with goodness; otherwise it is empty of all redeeming value. Palestinians, on the other hand, are consistently forgiven their excesses. Often this forgiveness is on the grounds that the Palestinians, being militarily inferior, have no choice but to use means which, if used by any other group in the world, would be condemned (and rightly so) as uncivilized war crimes and crimes against humanity. For all its faults, Israel is the only country in the Middle East in which Arab citizens are truly free and safe to criticize their government, being protected by law and by a court system well-known for forcing the government to back down when it infringes upon their rights. It is also the only country in the Middle East in which Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims and Christians of every persuasion are free to worship without discrimination. The Palestinians, on the other hand, have created a form of government unique in the world, a kind of kleptocratic thuggocracy.
In the eyes of those who support Mr. Barghouti, Israel gets no credit, Palestinians gets no blame.




RACISM?


Mr. Barghouti's argument rests upon a number of incendiary claims, not one of which can stand examination. Barghouti opens by accusing the "overwhelming majority of Jewish-Israelis" of "unbridled racism." How does he know this? Because of their "fervent support" for recent IDF "atrocities" in "occupied Palestinian territory" and in Lebanon. It is rather rich for a man who gives at least tacit support for a truly racist organization (Hamas[xii]), to accuse others of the same crime.[xiii] Certainly horrible things have happened to innocent Palestinians in Gaza and to innocent Lebanese.[xiv] But were the deaths in Kfar Kana[xv] last summer and in Khan Yunis last month tragic accidents of war or the result of callous calculation on the part of Israeli planners?[xvi] To demonstrate the mendacity of the latter claim, let us start by examining the context in which these events took place.
Barghouti ignores the fact that after Israel withdrew from every square centimeter of the Gaza Strip and announced its intention of making further withdrawals from the West Bank, Hamas continued its rocket and guerilla attacks on the Western Negev, culminating in the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit on June 25, 2006 and the murder of 2 of his comrades. Two weeks later, Hezbollah, in a wholly unprovoked assault, crossed the internationally recognized border from Lebanon to attack Israeli reservists on routine patrol, killed 8 and kidnapped two, whose fate remains unknown to this day. Hezbollah simultaneously launched deadly rocket attacks on Israeli towns near the Lebanese border. That is the context ignored by Mr. Barghouti, but without which one cannot judge Israeli reactions to subsequent events.[xvii] Hamas and Hezbollah both like to place their rocket launchers in civilian areas,[xviii] in the hope of either protecting them from Israeli attack, or, and this I take to be more likely, in the expectation that Israel's attempts to protect its citizens (my children among them) will result in Arab casualties, so that cynics can use this in their propaganda war against Israel.[xix] Terrible things happen in war-time. If Israelis are racists for deploring but failing to condemn unfortunate and unplanned tragedies, what does that make of Palestinians who enthusiastically enshrine as martyrs and national heroes people who calmly walk in to restaurants, pat little children sitting there with their families on their heads, and then blow them up?


Let us look at this a little more deeply. Mr. Barghouti claims that it is racist for Israelis not to condemn their army when it accidentally brings about the death of Palestinian civilians while in his view it is not racist for Palestinians publicly to applaud the purposeful murder of Jewish children. Underlying this claim is the assumption that while Palestinian nationalism is a legitimate expression of the national aspirations of the Palestinian people, Jewish nationalism must be racism.[xx] One can applaud nationalism or deplore it, but for the life of me I cannot understand why Palestinian nationalism is appropriate and Jewish nationalism is not. That smacks of racism![xxi]


APARTHEID?


Of course, Mr. Barghouti needs to claim that Israelis are racists, in order to justify his claim that Israel pursues a policy of apartheid. I always have to scratch my head over that one. I live in a city (Haifa) in which Jews and Arabs live in the same neighborhoods, in the same blocks of flats, frequent each other's businesses, and cheer the home town football team together. The week that I am writing this Haifa is celebrating "the festival of festivals," marking Hanukkah and Christmas.[xxii] I live next door to an absorption center for black immigrants to Israel from Ethiopia. I swim every day in a pool at the Technion with, I assume, Arab colleagues and students. I often eat out in (kosher!) restaurants owned and operated by Arabs.[xxiii] One of my physicians is an Arab and were I to be hospitalized it is likely that I would be treated by Arab physicians and nurses. The pharmacist at my local branch of an Israeli drugstore chain has an Arabic name. Last night on the TV news I watched the Vice-Speaker of the Knesset (Israel's
parliament) commenting on recent events (Palestinians killing each other over political power and division of spoils in Gaza). Who was that Vice-Speaker? Dr. Ahmad Tibi, one-time personal advisor to and spokesman for Yasir Arafat. I teach at a university of about 17,000 students, over 20% of whom are Arabs (more than their relative population in the country as a whole). A quarter of the students in the university dorms are Arabs, and a similar percentage of the student body receiving student aid are Arabs. Until recently, the chair of one of the most prestigious departments on our campus was an Arab, and now the most powerful Dean at our university (the person responsible for all research
funds) is an Arab. Neither of these gentlemen, it hardly needs saying, is an enthusiastic Zionist; but they are both fair-minded individuals who earned their posts through distinguished academic work. All this in an "apartheid" state![xxiv]


Pots seem to enjoy calling kettles black. If I were to look for truly apartheid societies in the world, it is not to Israel that I would look, but to many countries in the Arab world. The genocide in Darfur, the fact that not a single Jewish community exists in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, or Egypt, the fact that no Christians or Jews can be citizens in Saudi Arabia[xxv] (or even bring a bible into the country temporarily)[xxvi], the persecution of Copts in Egypt, the persecution of Christians in Bethlehem,[xxvii] the list goes on and on, but of course, it is only Israel which is tarred with the apartheid brush.


In order to make his implausible charge look prima facie reasonable, Mr.
Barghouti quotes anti-Zionist Israelis like Ilan Pappe and Tanya Reinhart. Ilan Pappe has made a career of ignoring evidence inconvenient to his theses, of promising but never actually providing evidence to back up his wild accusations, and of simply lying whenever the spirit moves him.[xxviii] Pappe has the gall to make reference to Israel's "killing fields" — in one shot, both lying cynically about Israel and diminishing the horrors of Pol Pot's regime.


COLONIAL WALL?


Just as the accusation of apartheid bursts apart at the merest glance, so also the claims about "Israel's colonial Wall, built mostly on occupied territory and condemned as illegal … by the ICJ." Mr. Barghouti is nothing if not a clever controversialist. Note the insertion of the world "colonial,"[xxix] the capitalization of the word "Wall,"[xxx] and the failure to mention that the ICJ ruling, rejected as politicized by many European states,[xxxi] was predicated upon the prima facie absurd notion that Israel has no right to defend itself against non-state actors.[xxxii] Why is this barrier being built? Did the government of Israel simply decide one day to invest billions of dollars in the construction of a fence (97% of the barrier is chain linking fencing, not concrete walls) in order to make life difficult for Palestinians?
Reading Mr. Barghouti, one would think so. Not a word about the endless stream of mass murderers flowing across the Green Line in order to wreak havoc and death among Israelis (Jews, Muslims, and Christians); it is to stem that tide that the barrier is being erected and so far, thank God, it seems to be working pretty well.[xxxiii]


REFUGEES


An important element in Mr. Barghouti's call for the academic and cultural boycott of Israel focuses on "Israel and Palestinian Refugee Rights." No decent human being could fail to be moved by the plight of Palestinians living in slums in Gaza. But the question which must be asked, and which Mr. Barghouti carefully ignores, is: why are they confined to those camps and slums? Palestinian spokespersons have found it useful to present themselves as the ultimate victims of the Twentieth Century — in this way they garner support from well-meaning people in the West who have an admirable tendency to support the weak and down-trodden. This strategy has been extraordinarily successful (and underlies the obscene use of Holocaust imagery by those Palestinian apologists who do not deny that it occurred). But it comes with a very high price: people who consistently present themselves as victims soon come to see themselves in that way alone. They take no responsibility for their own fates and blame all their misfortunes exclusively on others. Omar Barghouti appears to be a classic example of this unfortunate syndrome.


In order to understand this, it is necessary to present a quick survey of the history of the Palestinian refugees. In 1948 Israel was created by a UN decision; it was the Arab states which rejected that decision, invaded the nascent state, were defeated, and thus brought about the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. Ilan Pappe and other propagandists to the contrary,[xxxiv] there is absolutely no real evidence that there was any general policy of expelling Arabs from their villages. Huge populations were displaced by and after World War II; in all cases but the 1948 Arab refugees those displaced were eventually resettled in new homes. These poor miserable people were forced by the very states which precipitated their catastrophe, and which were legally and morally responsible for it, to fester in squalid refugee camps, without being granted equal rights as citizens, or even as residents, of these same countries whose invasion turned them into refugees. Their Arab brethren have manipulated them for decades as pawns in their ongoing war against Israel.


At the same time that Arab refugees were being cruelly and cynically abused by their supposed protectors, close to a million Jews, driven from their homes by government-inspired or tolerated pogroms, were being welcomed and resettled in Israel.[xxxv] The majority of Israeli Jews today are the children and grandchildren of these refugees from Arab persecution.


Jordan illegally absorbed the West Bank (after 1948), consciously sabotaged the UN-mandated Palestinian Arab state, and kept its Palestinian majority subjugated to a Bedouin minority. In 1967 it was the decision of Jordan's King Hussein to join Egypt and Syria in their attempt to wipe Israel off the face of the map which led to Israel's occupation of the West Bank. It was the Arab states meeting in Khartoum after that war which rejected all negotiations with Israel, guaranteeing that Israel would continue its occupation, and condemning the local population to live under occupation. Had the Arab states been willing to negotiate with Israel after 1967, there would have been no occupation and no Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. It was the Palestinians in the 1970's who chose the route of murderous attacks aimed at civilian targets (such as airliners and Olympic athletes) as opposed to what would clearly have been a more effective route, namely civil disobedience — think of what Arafat as Gandhi could have accomplished! Repeated massacres of innocent men, women and children invite armed responses and harden positions.


In Mr. Barghouti's zeal to absolve Palestinians of all responsibility for their fate, and in his hatred for Israel, he ignores all this, and also fails to take up an interesting question. Many Palestinian Arabs live in festering refugee camps in areas from which Israel withdrew after Arafat's return to Palestine in 1994. For the following seven years, when the attacks of the 'al-Aksa Intifada' forced Israel to reoccupy much of the West Bank, these refugee camps were under an internationally recognized Palestinian government, showered with largesse by the world at large. Why were none of the billions of euros that were transferred to the Palestinian Authority used to ameliorate the lot of these people?[xxxvi] There is a simple answer. Just as Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt kept Arab refugees in camps instead of absorbing them into their countries, in order to use them as pawns against Israel, so also has Palestinian leadership kept its own population in conditions of misery to use them as pawns against Israel.[xxxvii] This is cynicism of the highest order; what can one say of Mr. Barghouti's purposeful failure to even take note of it?


BOYCOTT ISRAEL?!


In closing, I would like to address those Europeans actively supporting Mr. Barghouti's call for an academic and cultural boycott of Israel.
Such individuals have been convinced that Palestinians are passive victims, wholly innocent of any responsibility for their plight. This ultimately expresses disrespect for Palestinians, treating them like children. It encourages irresponsible behavior on their part — European supporters of the Palestinians have encouraged them to believe that political and military adventurism carries no price. No matter what Israel does (withdrawing from Gaza, uprooting 8,000 Jews from their homes, electing a government publicly committed to withdrawing from much of the West Bank), Palestinian supporters will condemn us in hysterical and outrageous terms and seek to demonize Israel and Israelis, turning us into pariahs; no matter what the Palestinians do excuses will be found for their behavior. Having been turned into entirely passive and innocent victims, with no accountability for their actions, the Palestinians behave as if they can do no wrong.


The only reason why there is no Palestinian state thriving next to Israel (to which Palestinians the world over would have the right of
return) is because the Palestinians do not want such a state: they would rather destroy Israel than build Palestine - and often well-meaning Europeans encourage them in that idee fixe.


Palestinians are playing a zero-sum game while Israeli governments have finally become reconciled to the reality of Palestinian national aspirations and are thus not playing a similar game. That is the true asymmetry of the conflict here in the Middle East — not primitive kassam rockets vs. F-16's, but Israeli Jews willing to live with and next door to Palestinians vs. Palestinians unwilling to live with or next door to Israeli Jews. If I considered myself a friend of the Palestinians, as do those who support boycott calls, I would not encourage delusions of victimization by crudely misusing terms like 'apartheid'; I would remind them that barriers and checkpoints are Israeli responses to a terror campaign initiated on their behalf and with their overwhelming support; I would urge them to build rather than to destroy; I would remonstrate with them for creating a regime of unparalleled sleaze and violence in which billions of euros of aid money have been squandered on corruption and murder instead of on construction and education. I would treat them as equals.


Well-intentioned people often paint Israel in the darkest of colors (and, by implication white-wash every really murderous regime on the face of the planet), condemn us in the harshest of terms for every sin - real or imagined - which we commit, minimize anything right which we might do. What message does this behavior transmit? To myself, and people like me, this automatic response to Israel and to Israeli behavior, good or bad, squelches any tendency we might have to criticize our own faults and our own government more loudly. To the Palestinians it reinforces the message: be as corrupt and as murderous as you like, treat every Israeli withdrawal or peace overture as a sign of weakness
-- whatever you do, we will find ways to justify it while blaming Israel for it. Is this the behavior of a true friend of either side? I hardly think so.


Like many apologists for the Palestinians, Omar Barghouti argues as if the end justifies all means, and truth must be sacrificed; thus the Nazi analogy.[xxxviii] But beyond that, by telling Palestinians that Israeli Jews are Nazis, he tells them that the fight against Israel is a Manichean struggle against ultimate evil, a fight which justifies all means, and a fight against an enemy who must be destroyed before it destroys them; in other words, he tells Palestinians not to negotiate, not to compromise, not to seek to live with and next to Israeli Jews, but to kill and kill and kill. Just as he is no friend of truth, he is certainly no friend of the Palestinians. Indeed, for the reasons I have just outlined, he is a greater danger to the Palestinian people than any Israeli. It is a tragedy that he and his supporters abroad do not channel their considerable energies and talents into activities which might conceivably lead towards peace, rather than towards more war.


Mr. Barghouti wants to boycott Israeli academic institutions, institutions in which Jews and Arabs work together for the common good, and for the good of all humankind. There is one sanction already in place, to which Mr. Barghouti would rather not draw attention: upon entering any Israeli university campus, one must surrender one's bags for inspection (like at an airport) — for fear that someone influenced and supported by Mr. Barghouti might set off a bomb on campus.[xxxix] To join in a boycott of these institutions is literally to add insult to injury.

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[i] My thanks to Paul Bogdanor, Harvey Chisick, Ofir Frankel, Linda Montag, Jonathan Rynhold, Wendy Sandler, Edwin Slonim, and especially Amy Rosenbaum.

[ii] I write "launched" and not "broke out" because of the widely accepted Palestinian claim that Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount (the holiest site for Jews as well as the location of the Al-Aksa mosque, third holiest site for Muslims) on September 28, 2000 was deliberately provocative, triggering the subsequent violence. Less well known is that Sharon's visit occurred after assurances were made by Yasir Arafat to then-Prime Minister Barak that the visit would go smoothly as long as Sharon did not attempt to enter the mosques.
Further, in a speech made in December 2000 by Imad Falouji, PA Communications Minister, Falouji explains that the violence had been pre-planned since Arafat's return from Camp David in July, months before Sharon's visit. (The speech can be viewed at
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Qb5flP-MfAc.) The day before Sharon's visit, IDF Sgt. David Biri was killed, arguably the start of the Intifada.
Further on this, see Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin, Yasir Arafat: A Political Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp.
203-207.

[iii] For an account of the changes in my thinking, see my essay, "Daniel Boyarin and the Herd of Independent Minds," in Edward Alexander and Paul Bogdanor (eds.), The Jewish Divide Over Israel: Accusers and Defenders (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2006): 167-176. Other essays in this book refute charges brought against Israel by many of the people whom Mr. Barghouti cites as authorities, such as Ilan Pappe, Tanya Reinhart, and Noam Chomsky, among many others. See also:
http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomskyquotes.html

[iv] In what is arguably his most horrifically untrue statement, Mr.
Barghouti avers that “Israel treated Palestinian children as dispensable creatures.” And the horror of it is only exceeded by its hypocrisy. If any group has treated Palestinian children as dispensable creatures, it is Palestinians. USA Today correspondent Jack Kelley reported:
“Children serve as infantry in the confrontations between Israeli and Palestinian soldiers. In scenes reminiscent of Iranian children sent to the Iraqi front equipped with plastic keys to heaven, Palestinian children are sent close to Israeli positions with rocks and molotov cocktails, while the gunmen and snipers fire from positions hundreds of yards back” (10/23/00). The Jordanian newspaper “Al-Rai” (citing an interview with the Kuwaiti newspaper “Al-Zaman” on June 20, 2002), quotes Abu Mazen, then deputy chairman of the Palestinian authority, who spoke of how Palestinian children are being exploited into carrying out terror attacks: ‘at least 40 children from the city of Raphah have lost their arms as a result of the explosions of pipe bombs. They received five Israeli shekels (about one US dollar) for throwing them.” The PA has provided children with military training. The New York Times reports that 25,000 children were trained in the summer of 2000 in PA camps in the use of firearms, the making of molotov cocktails, the methods of kidnapping Israeli leaders, and conducting ambush