I’m not supposed to know anything about foreign policy.

— GOP Presidential candidate Herman Cain

Not everything, mind you, but anything, which would put him on par with the dumbest American living under the heaviest and mossiest rock. Hell, he’s running neck to neck with that boulder. Though Cain knows nothing, he has enough political sense to bluster, “If you mess with Israel you’re messing with the United States of America.”

That’s been the mantra in Washington, Wall Street and Madison Avenue. Iran knows this as well, and that’s why it is, in all likelihood, trying to develop the nuclear bomb, not to strike New York or Washington, but Tel Aviv. It only makes sense, since that’s the only deterrence it has against an American invasion.

Clueless Cain thinks the Iranians have warships off our shore, but it’s America who has Iran surrounded, with troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. The US Fifth Fleet also operates from Bahrain, a mere 120 miles from the Iranian coast. Washington has been itching for a fight with Iran ever since it had the (Muslim) balls to depose the CIA-installed Shah and kept 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. Iran is also the largest Islamic country to openly defy the United States. By the way, it also has a lot of oil and natural gas.

Threatened for three decades by the biggest empire on earth, what can Iran do but strive to aim a nuclear warhead at Israel? You mess with us, we’ll kill your daddy!

A few days ago, I was a guest on Iran’s Press TV to talk about the anti-Wall Street protest. On the same show was Joel Kovel, author of Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine. A year after his book came out, Kovel was fired from Bard College. Seeing a causal effect, Kovel issued a statement charging that he was terminated because of “differences between [himself] and the Bard administration on the issue of Zionism.” At that time, I was teaching creative writing at Bard, so I tried to drag this controversy onto its listserv, but no one, absolutely no one, responded, to my astonishment. Hey, a college teaching job isn’t easy to come by, so why rock the boat? President Botstein will kick your ass. A few months earlier, the same listserv was orgasmic with cheering for Obama, but then again, nearly all of the American Left were. Ah, how idyllic and delightful it is to be a tenured liberal in the waning days of empire!

2011, at another supposedly radical bastion, Berkeley, cops wacked students with the chancellor’s approval. Protesting outrageous tuition hikes, these students correctly blamed banks for their university’s and state’s budget crises, but banks and universities have been in cahoots for a long time now. Schools jack up rates, knowing they can send students to banks for loans, but no matter what one’s major these days, the jobs are simply not there, but one’s debts are, for life!

Is it a surprise, then, that so many of the Occupy Wall Street protesters are recent college graduates? Spat out by the system, they know that they’ve been had. Like investment banks, American colleges are also purveyors of ponzi schemes. Beaten to the ground, flattened, these protesters are suspicious of all hierarchies, of all pyramids, and that’s why they’ve refused to elevate leaders or even to prioritize key issues, but these reluctances must be overcome, I think, for this movement to move forward.

Its success, so far, can be attributed to two crucial decisions, to have an open-ended occupation, not a one-day march, and to target Wall Street. This movement, then, is about the looting and corruption of the money manipulators, so it’s important that the public be educated and constantly reminded about the abuses of the Federal Reserve, Goldman Sachs, Citibank and the rest of the banking cartel.

As Americans endure actual or symbolic homelessness across this land, their government is hankering for yet another war. To distract attention from problems at home, the US wants to attack Iran and/or Syria. This is madness, certainly, but not to the war profiteers. Having bought off all of our politicians, these money masters own the Pentagon and its obscene budget that eats up half of our tax money.

When Michael Avery of Suffolk University pointed out, in a leaked email, that it was irrational to support troops sent overseas by a war-prone country to kill, he was met with considerable abuse and hostility. Unsurprisingly, his school’s president quickly distanced himself from Avery’s lucid remarks by saying that he himself was sending a care package to the troops. So, yes, if you don’t die by the time this box arrives, have a bar of chocolate on me!

How can anyone in his right mind not be against corruption, since corruption is just stealing public money, but unfortunately, many of the 99% are still misled into supporting our military. They cannot see that the Pentagon, like the banks, is also a nexus of corruption, that its main task is not to defend our republic but to funnel money from the 99% to the 1%.

Do not lose sight that our main battle is against the corrupt banking cartel and equally corrupt Pentagon. Much of our financial, political, social and ecological ills can be traced to these monsters. Winter is coming. Time is running out.

Rather, one of Sheehi’s primary aims was to challenge the Left, so-called “progressives” and liberals to face an uncomfortable truth, their own Islamophobia. “When people ask me at conferences, ‘What should be done?’ I tell them to stop asking questions about Islam. Just stop. It is racist to ask ‘Why are the Muslims different?’ or ‘I want to understand the Muslims so I am going to read the Qur’an’,” said Sheehi in Beirut.

Indeed, as if people read the Vedas to understand militant Hinduism, the Torah to comprehend the mindset of Jewish colonial settlers in the West Bank or the Bible to make sense of the Tea Party movement. But such seemingly well-meaning questions about Islam by leftists and liberals of all stripes just goes to reinforce the notion of Muslims as the “Other,” set apart in need of “tolerance” and “understanding.”

“Despite the genuine and scholarly research into the topic, the questions must stop being about Islam and democracy, Islam and modernity, Islam and human rights, Islam and women, and so forth,” writes Sheehi. “We must stop searching for answers, or making accusations for that matter, based on the binaries of Islam and the Whatever. We must reach beyond the Jihad vs. McWorld dichotomy.”²

Coming to terms with the widespread prevalence of Islamophobia in the US mainstream and how it has been adopted consciously and unconsciously by the populace, the unsaid fears of Anglo-Saxon America of “brown people empowering themselves”, as Sheehi put it, and the myth of US exceptionalism all plays into the lengthy history of America’s racism, from the days of slavery to the Monroe Doctrine to the current racial profiling. “The US has to look at itself and ask, why are we so racist?” said Sheehi.

He writes that “Islamophobia is the ideological foil that allows the state to control its population, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, as well as institute military and political policies abroad (if not at the US’s own southern border).”³ Sheehi goes on: “Cultural Islamophobia and legislation are two of these mechanisms. The plight of non-American Muslims and Arab defendants is a more severe version of the plight of Muslims and Arabs in America.”⁴

For behind this foil is systemic racism and symbolic violence towards the minority, such as through structural exclusion or marginalization of those that do not embrace hegemonic ideologies.

As Sheehi observes in his work, this was manifest in the number of non-Muslims beaten up, abused and profiled in the wake of 9/11 because they “looked” Arab or Muslim. “In the end, Islamophobia is not about Muslims, for next up is Latinophobia,” said Sheehi.

So-called liberals always look for a scapegoat to justify Islamophobia and cling to the notion that it isn’t “us” perpetuating this divisiveness and ideology, it is someone else, another group, the right wing, the Neo-Conservatives, the Jews, Evangelical Christians and so on. Indeed, some presumed Sheehi would put the blame for Islamophobia squarely on the shoulders of the pro-Israel lobby.

The pro-Israel lobby and Zionist political action groups are of course a factor in shaping the discourse and ideology of Islamophobia, but that gives them too much credit. Islamophobia is more insidious, more widespread than that, and blaming “the Jews” is too easy as well as being off the mark. The same goes for lumping all the blame on the right wing. Sheehi doesn’t want the liberal conscious to be soothed as they are in fact a part of the problem.

“The Neo-Cons, the Republicans and the rampant racists got a raw deal with regard to Islamophobia, because they are a comfortable container of white liberal America to cordon off their own prejudices. Liberals state that they are “not against Muslims but only terrorists,” yet at the same time supporting the renewal of the Patriot Act, supporting the war in Afghanistan and believing Iraq is no longer occupied as the number of troops was reduced,” said Sheehi.⁵

The spirit of Islamophobia

Sheehi argues that Islamophobia was around well before 9/11 and Bush Jr’s administration, but the 2001 attacks proved to be a catalyst for Islamophobia to run wild. “9/11 allowed views that were on the fringe during the 1980s and even the 1990s to be seamlessly inserted into the American mainstream,” writes Sheehi. Pseudo-scholar Daniel Pipes “demonstrates how old racist and Orientalist tropes can be re-invented and inserted into a new political atmosphere with newness and urgency. In effect, the rants of the right create the conditions by which these diatribes then become relevant and lose their air of bigotry, if not lunacy.”⁶

One reason there are 54 pages of footnotes accompanying the 227 page text is that Sheehi, like hounded academic Churchill Ward, who wrote the foreword (the preface is by Mumia Abu Jamal), is to back up research in the face of legal action over opinions on Islamophobia and Islamophobes. Such are the times American academia is living in, superbly illustrated in chapters “Teaching and Activism in the Teeth of Power,” and “Living in a State of Fear.”

It was the post-Cold war era, global financialization and 9/11 that brought Islamophobia truly into the collective consciousness. Sheehi writes, “Ideological Islamophobia arises from the global era. Not only does it arise from the US desire to control global oil resources but also from its cultural Islamophobia and the willingness of the American public to stereotype, target, and violate the rights and humanity of Muslims and Arabs. American culture has evolved from a settler culture to become an imperial culture. Arabs and Muslims are perceived as the latest cultural holdouts that are resistant to its global hegemony, which the US purveys as offering modernity, democracy and capitalist prosperity.”⁴

This is a crucial point and one that many liberals and Leftists frequently overlook. This is not to suggest – and Sheehi doesn’t – that the Left make strategic alliances with, or vocally support, Islamist political groups because they are also resisting globalization and US imperialism. That would be akin to saying that you have to be pro Hamas, Fatah or Hizbullah to support the Palestinian cause and oppose Israel.

As Sheehi observed: “Critics will say that the arguments of this book exonerate those who are involved in truly terrorist action against civilians, whether they live in North America, Europe or the Middle East. They prefer to cast such aspersions rather than understand the historical and political motivations behind desperate and violent acts such as the bombings of 9/11, the public transportation bombings in London and Madrid, or the car bombing of an apartment complex in Riyadh in 2003, which killed not US soldiers but largely expatriate Arab and Asian families and workers.”⁷

That many liberals and leftists fall for Islamophobic ideology is reflective of how many people bought into Samuel Huntington’s racist notion of the “Clash of Civilizations.” Rooted in this Islamophobia is blatant ignorance, a lack of understanding of history and an unwillingness to understand political Islam.

“A critical misunderstanding of political Islam often comes from the inability to differentiate between political Islam’s many strains that materialized as a component of modernity rather than strictly as a reactive gesture to it…The problem comes from the fact that the American commentators have no understanding of the force and meaning of modernity as it impacts the developing, colonized world. A critical understanding of political Islam as a complicated and multifaceted social, historical, economic and political phenomenon would not apologize for political violence but instead, serve to clarify its origins, logic and inspirations,” writes Sheehi.⁸

Islamophobia reinvents itself

“Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden became a vessel, a psychological manifestation that is part of the Islamophobic world paradigm for the US to justify its policies. The whole point of Islamophobia is that the image of Bin Laden is a manifestation of Islamophobic stereotypes that were reproduced and grafted onto every Muslim as US foreign policy needs that,” said Sheehi.

Bin Laden’s assassination in May in this sense is irrelevant to keeping the stereotypes and Islamophobia alive. But the overwhelming jubilance of the American population’s reaction to his demise, and the name of the operation itself – Geronimo – speaks volumes about how deep Islamophobia has penetrated America, how it was symbolized in the burning hatred of one man, as well as the establishment’s ongoing disregard of America’s indigenous culture and people.

The ability of the ideology of Islamophobia to adapt is similar to capitalism’s ability to re-invent itself despite systemic setbacks and how factors change on the ground. This is not surprising as the two are inter-related, Islamophobia used to justify imperialist and capitalist ventures.

The uprisings in the Arab world this year are a case in point, as the revolts discredit the vitriol of Bernard Lewis and Fareed Zakaria when they say things like there is no civil society in the Arab world (both writers come in for substantial criticism in the book).

“The “Arab Spring” discredits the Lewis style stereotypes of the “Arab Street,” of a complacent, dormant, passive mass led by emotion and reliant on the rentier state system. It shows that this is completely false. Yet you hear the other side, of ‘Oh my God, there’s a bunch of Arabs in the streets, what shall we do?’ There is this fear of instability as the dictators were always convenient for providing security. There is a fear of brown people empowering themselves,” said Sheehi.

And when it comes to other portrayals of the Arab uprisings – depending on who the official enemy is, Bahrain no, Libya, Syria etc. yes – it is easy to play into stereotypes, such as the ludicrous story about Muammar Gaddafi ordering a container load of Viagra so his soldiers could rape women. The story was picked up worldwide as a sensationalist example of Gaddafi’s despotism and even cited by the International Criminal Court to indict the Libyan leader despite there being no credible evidence. Indeed, a senior crisis response officer for Amnesty International that spent three months in Libya said last month there was no evidence at all of soldiers using Viagra — indeed, when have soldiers ever needed sexual stimulants to commit rape? “The Viagra story played into the racial stereotype of over-sexualized brown men,” said Sheehi.⁹

Essentially, Sheehi is saying that liberals, leftists etc are not willing to challenge some of their conscious or unconscious racist feelings of not just the US being undermined on the world stage, but that the white man will no longer rule the planet. That President Barrack Obama is not white is not relevant in this regard, argues Sheehi, as he is just a new face, a more acceptable front man of American imperialism than Bush Jr. was (Sheehi’s analysis of Obama’s speech to the Muslim world in Cairo in June, 2009, and the Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech are especially biting).

“It has never been about whether, say, the Egyptians are capable of ruling themselves or not, it is about if the Egyptians can be managed under the same economic and political system as before,” said Sheehi. “The US would throw the Bahraini royal family under a bus quicker than you could sneeze if the monarchy lost their relevance to the US. If all the Sunnis and Shias suddenly get along there would be no need for the US Fifth Fleet [to be in Bahrain]. That is the point and how the US stays relevant in the Middle East.”

Just as America has actively worked with the Saudis and the region’s monarchies to perpetuate discord between the Sunni and Shia on a macro Islamic level – what some on the Hill off-handedly call the “Sushi war” – Islamophobia creates a further wedge between the left on how to effectively tackle issues like the erosion of civil liberties, women’s rights, classism, and imperialist wars.

The US’s cultural, economic and military hegemony also enables the ideology of Islamophobia to be adopted on a wider level, as witnessed in the rest of the West, India and anywhere Islamophobia can be used as a political tool, and must be challenged as much as in the US.

This was glaring apparent as news broke on July 22 of the attacks in Norway. The immediate suspect in European and American media was Al Qaeda, with journalists scrambling to make a tangible link to “Islamic terrorism” and garner quotes from pundits as to why this was likely. Islamophobes had a field day. As we know it turned out to be a right-wing Norwegian apparently operating solo, but it took time for the discourse to switch away from the bogeymen of our time, particularly in the US.¹⁰

The late Edward Said taught us about Orientalism in literature and the need to de-colonize our minds. Sheehi in his work challenges us to intellectually confront Islamophobia and wake up to its prevalence in the mainstream as well as in “alternative” movements.

1. Stephen Sheehi is Associate Professor of Arabic and Arab Culture and Director of the Arabic Program at the University of South Carolina.
2. Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign Against Muslims, Stephen Sheehi, Clarity Press, Atlanta (2011), p 225.
3. P. 222.
4. P. 166.
5. Indicative of this is that in Iraq, while US troop levels have dropped since 2008, private military contractors actually increased by 39 percent, or 3,500 personnel, by the end of 2010 to reach approximately 13,000 personnel, or 18 percent of all contractors, according to a recent report by the Congressional Research Service.
6. P. 140.
7. P. 170.
8. P. 23.
9. “What’s really at stake in Libya,” Pepe Escobar, June 30, 2011.
10. See “Blaming Muslims – Yet Again,” D Parvaz, June 23, 2001.

Their letter and with a copy of the op-ed I wrote in the Finger Lakes Times are attached.

Allow me to refute the lies and innuendos that these “colleagues” have levied against me, behind my back. Since each of you received the detractors’ letter, I am sending you this rebuttal.

1. The purpose of my op-ed was to define Holocaust denial. That should be clear from the byline “What do deniers really mean?” It was submitted in response to the media frenzy and demonization of President Ahmadinejad who addressed the UN General Assembly and whose picture was shown above my guest appearance piece. Instead of acknowledging this, my faculty detractors feigned outrage that it appeared on the eve of Yom Kippur. I had nothing to do with the timing of the article and make no apology for when it appeared vis-à-vis a Jewish holiday.

2. More egregiously these faculty detractors claimed to know my “personal beliefs” and claimed that I mis-used my title of professor emeritus at Hobart and William Smith Colleges to lend them credence. That is simply a lie. Nowhere are my personal beliefs stated. Moreover my op-ed included an exceptionally long disclaimer showing The Colleges neither condone nor condemn what I had written.

3. The faculty detractors claim that “Holocaust denial carries absolutely no weight among academic scholars in any field whatsoever.” That is simply not true. There are a number of scholars who write about the typical Holocaust narrative and are willing to fight the slime hurled at them by ardent Zionists and by others who feel it their duty to protect the narrative which serves as the sword and shield of apartheid Israel. (BTW, our former provost and former William Smith Dean both demanded that I not use the word “apartheid” in connection with Israel; granted the term was used in the Israeli press and later by President Carter, but it was not “suitable discourse” on our campus where we routinely claim to support free speech and diversity of opinion.)

4. The faculty detractors write that “denying undisputed facts of the holocaust (sic) is not a way to show support for the Palestinians.” First, the three tenets of Holocaust revisionism are clearly not “undisputed. To the contrary, they are hotly and passionately disputed; people’s lives are ruined when they even question these “facts.” In fourteen countries you can get jail time for disputing “facts” surrounding the Holocaust.

Second, disputing “facts” is what science and historical analysis is all about. We academics have no problem discussing and disputing whether or not Jesus Christ is truly the son of God, or if President Obama’s birth certificate is real, or if President Roosevelt knew a Japanese attack on Hawaii was imminent, but we are not allowed to discuss or dispute the six-million figure.

Third, what gives these detractors the credentials to pontificate on what supports or hurts Palestinians? Some of them have been responsible for feting at Hobart and William Smith Colleges anti-Palestinian demagogues including Wiesel and even Netanyahu. They helped give Madeleine Albright our highest humanitarian award, which is a disgrace in light of her statement that the death of over 500,000 Iraqi children was “worth it.” Was I the only one to protest that award?

I have team-taught a senior course on the Palestinians. I have published books and articles on the Palestinian Naqba and the massacre of Arab civilians by Jewish terrorists at Deir Yassin. I have built the only United States memorial to their dispossession and ethnic cleansing. I don’t need, nor accept, biased comments on how to support Palestinians.

5. Calling Holocaust historical revisionism “Holocaust denial” is unnecessarily pejorative. It might be fine for Fox News, but it is not conducive to academic discourse. To call Holocaust revisionism “thinly veiled anti-Semitism” is simply untrue and it demeans scholars and others, including Jews, who question the Holocaust doctrine as we are fed it in hundreds of films, books, articles, and commentaries. Terms like Holocaust Industry, Holocaust Fatigue, Holocaust professional, Holocaust wannabes, and Holocaust High Priest were not coined by “deniers” or anti-Semites; they were coined by Jews. (The High Priest quip is an obvious reference to Wiesel; it was made by Tova Reich in her book My Holocaust. Tova’s husband, Walter Reich, was the former director of the US Holocaust Museum in Washington.)

In 1946 the US government told us that over 20 million people were murdered by Hitler. Now that figure is said to be 11 million; it is literally carved in stone at the US Holocaust Memorial. For years we were told that over 4 million were killed at Auschwitz, but by the early 1990s that figure was reduced to 1.5 million. Wiesel tells us that people were thrown alive onto pyres; he claims to have seen it with his own eyes; today Yad Vashem trained guides at Auschwitz say that is not true. These are examples of historical revisionism and they are not inherently anti-Semitic.

6. It is most interesting to see academic colleagues say, “(a)s we all know … the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ was introduced to make genocide sound more palatable.” That means they either deny that Palestinians have been (and continue to be) ethnically cleansed or they agree that Israel is performing genocide of the Palestinian people.

7. While the faculty detractors found my speech to be “abhorrent,” they seemed unable to find fault with a single fact I presented. So they resorted to name-calling and labeled the piece “hate speech” and “unsupported vitriol” and smeared my name to hundreds of people. I am surprised that Abe Foxman or the Mossad did not come calling.

8. The detractors genuinely were concerned about the op-ed’s impact on our Jewish students, staff, and faculty. But maybe it is time for all members of the community to see the Holocaust for what it really was and not the unquestionable, unimpeachable, doctrine that makes Jewish suffering superior to that of other people. Maybe it is time to recognize that Zionism as a political movement to create a Jewish state in Palestine began long before the Holocaust and that Zionist discrimination, dehumanization, and dispossession of the Palestinian people should not be excused by it. Maybe it is time to see that since over half the population (within the borders controlled by Israel) is not Jewish, the dream of creating a Jewish state has failed. Walling in the non-Jews or putting them in Bantustans or driving them into Jordan will not make it a purely Jewish state. The nationalist allegiance to “blood and soil” has been a failure and that should be the real lesson of the Holocaust.

9. To say that my op-ed “does not meet our expectation of minimally rational and minimally humane discourse’ is nonsense. The piece is well written, well substantiated, and quite humane.

10. But the faculty detractors are quite right about one thing; they were deeply disturbed and saddened to see a Hobart and William Smith title attached to it. Diversity and perspectives outside the mainstream are to be encouraged, but not if they question Jewish power, Israel, or Holocaust doctrine. Apparently that is beyond the pale.

11. The demand to President Gearan to remove my title of Professor Emeritus is both classic and stupid. Consider how little it would accomplish. I would be supposedly ashamed and I would have to buy a walking pass at the gym that would cost me $40 a year. Would it save HWS from being associated with my writings? Of course not; I would simply use the title of “Former Professor Emeritus at Hobart and William Smith Colleges” with no disclaimer.

But what it would really do is to cast me into the briar bush with Norm Finkelstein, Marc Ellis, Paul Eisen, Henry Herskovitz, Gilad Atzmon, Rich Siegel, and Hedy Epstein (a Holocaust survivor), all friends of mine and all anti-Zionists. Professors Ost, Linton, and Mertens apparently saw this and I credit (or blame) them for my still having the emeritus title.

Lest I seem irreverent or unscathed by this widely-circulated smear letter from my detractors, allow me to admit that I have been hurt by it. Many faculty and other HWS folks now shun me as a persona non grata largely because they only read the slime and never a rebuttal. Of course until now there could be no rebuttal because the smear letter was withheld from me. (Even the Provost’s request to send me a copy was refused.)

My former student and long-time friend, David Deming, who is now the Chair of the HWS Board does not answer my letters. President Gearan does not answer them either. Board member, Roy Dexheimer, disparages me and wonders if I fell “off my meds.” Another Board member, Stuart Pilch, took it a step further and made a threatening phone call to my home and a promise “to hunt me down.”

But the biggest disappointment is with those faculty detractors who never came to discuss or complain about what I had written, but instead chose to spin their own interpretation, which was full of lies and half truths, and then disseminate their smear as widely as possible. Should any of you be one of the signatories, my door is open for further discussion. And if you know the names of the other signatories, I would appreciate your sharing that information with me.

They pressured the Hastings Board of Directors into an emergency meeting in which the board decided to “take all steps necessary to remove the UC Hastings name and brand” from the conference. Frank Wu, dean and chancellor, was barred from giving a welcoming talk; a major foundation withdrew funding.

Professors dislike academic intimidation, and this case is no exception. Nearly all of UC Hastings’ tenured professors signed a letter warning that the board’s capitulation to outside pressure on academic freedom risked “great damage to Hastings’ reputation.”

The elected student government, joined by 30 student organizations, charged the board with “stifling their academic freedom” and “prospectively chilling free speech” at future academic conferences.

They are right, of course. But there are bigger issues at stake.

Why were these mainstream Jewish organizations so troubled by the academic pursuit of legal approaches to securing Palestinian rights and freedom?

Perhaps for the first time in U.S. history, there is an aggressive challenge to a one-sided narrative that covers up or justifies ongoing Israeli repression of Palestinians, and U.S. culpability for that repression. The center of that challenge is on campuses, which is why those who have traditionally adopted knee-jerk defenses of Israeli policies are attempting to stigmatize or shut down alternative viewpoints.

In this case, the conference in question was about the legal rights of Palestinians. Its lead convener was former San Francisco public defender and Hastings law professor George Bisharat. He was joined by numerous legal scholars and human rights lawyers, including many Jews, from the United States and Israel.

Yet JCRC head Doug Kahn dubbed the conference, which was focused on nonviolent legal strategies to address the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, “anti-Israel.” He’s right, however, only if you regard Thurgood Marshall’s efforts on behalf of the civil rights movement to be “anti-American.”

Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, a lecturer at UC Santa Cruz, indicated in a letter of complaint that UC Hastings could lose federal funds if the conference proceeded.

Rossman-Benjamin, who has long tried to silence speakers and academics who are critical of Israeli policies, many of them Jewish and even Israeli, recently filed a complaint about alleged anti-Semitism at UC Santa Cruz focusing on educational programming related to Israel and Palestine. The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, the target of a multi-year campaign to criminalize pro-Palestinian student activism led by the Zionist Organization of America, began an investigation. Ominously, such moves suggest that legitimate criticism of Israeli policy is being conflated with anti-Semitism.

If this is allowed to happen, then serious debate on Israel’s illegal actions in the Palestinian territories will be shut down. That is a threat not just to academic freedom but to American free speech and our ability to help secure the rights of everyone in Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Tripathi, a former BBC producer, is immensely proud of his latest volume, even while it is associated with a tumultuous experience at the University of Sussex, a renowned British university.

For a while, things had gone according to plan, and the future seemed promising. Tripathi was told to prepare for his graduation by his supervisor, Dr. Stephen Burman, Dean of the School of Humanities.

Tripathi is an accomplished researcher and a prolific writer. He had every reason to believe his research, which began in 2002, would lead to earning his PhD from the university’s American Studies Program. His findings, which partly relied on the Cold War International History Archive material of the Smithsonian Institute, were praised by such intellectuals as Walter LaFeber, Howard Zinn and Johan Galtung.

Moreover, Tripathi already had an impressive and well-respected background in the field. His career at BBC News (1977-2000) would have gone on longer, were it not for him falling seriously ill with heart disease. Some of his noteworthy achievements have included setting up the BBC Bureau in Kabul in the early 1990s, covering conflict in India and Sir Lanka, and contributing to public understanding of many matters involving this part of the world. His previous book, Overcoming the Bush Legacy in Iraq and Afghanistan (Potomac Books, March 2010) helped many to decipher the power rivalries in South and West Asia, and specially US foreign policy regarding these regions.

Tripathi’s latest work, Breeding Ground was initially slated as his doctoral dissertation. That work was already well-received in many circles and yet failed to meet the examiners’ expectations suggests to Tripathi that biased political agendas were involved.

Despite the triumphant release of his book, the author feels it is important to revisit the academic ordeal, as both issues are intrinsically linked.

The “Viva”, or the oral examination of a doctoral thesis, usually takes an hour. In Tripathi’s case, it involved nearly two hours of “sheer hostility”. “Viva was not an oral examination, but an-hour-and-fifty-minutes of sustained interrogation during which the external examiner shouted throughout, not allowing me to answer, while objecting to matters of trivial importance.” All of this seemed to negate not only the feedback of Tripathi’s supervisor, but also the rules of the university.

Tripathi further alleges that the internal examiner didn’t read the thesis, as “no markings or signs of handling were found on any of pages.” As for the external examiner, he seems to have read only a third of what took years for Tripathi to studiously research and write. This was evident by the “angry notes on about a third of the pages, then nothing.”

Tripathi speculates that what has taken place has less to do with his research or writing skills, but more on his take on the subject matter and the affiliation of the examiners.

The internal examiner was newly appointed Pro-Vice Chancellor, whose academic interests include the Northern Ireland conflict. She has co-authored a book on the subject of policing, and has ties with security establishments in Britain and the United States, where she became an advisor to the Homeland Security Management Institute, University of Long Island, New York. She also regularly ran training courses for the British military.

When contacted regarding this matter, the internal examiner, who had since then left her post at the University of Sussex, declined to comment — possibly because of academic confidentiality associated with such cases.

The external examiner, a career military officer, specialized in British military doctrines, the application of force and counterinsurgency. He had joined the Northern Ireland security service at the height of the conflict in the 1970s. Upon retiring from the British military in 2003, he was immediately appointed Professor of Politics and International Law and Head of the Department at Royal Holloway.

The external examiner too declined to comment “on the basis of confidentiality as between the University and the candidate.” He is also no longer affiliated with the university.

Tripathi’s thesis was submitted in early December 2006, with his supervisor’s blessings. However, Dr. Stephen Burman was absent from the viva, where Tripathi found himself defending his ideas to “two academics with strong ties to the military”. Considering Tripathi’s approach, which shows little enthusiasm for military solutions to convoluted conflicts, he felt that his research stood little chance. “It was more of an assault, than a discussion,” he said. “It was as if I was accused of some wrong-doing and had to defend myself.” Even the Cold War International History Archive material of the Smithsonian Institute was deemed “unacceptable” by his examiners, according to Tripathi.

To rectify the problem, Tripathi was told by the external examiner that he “would have to rewrite the thesis in a year, without the Cold War History Archive that gave (him) access to the Russian and East German archives, and resubmit only for MPhil.” Even then, Tripathi would still need to endure another viva.

Tripathi feels betrayed. For a man who has spent most of his adult life helping many understand the nature of conflict in areas where the US, Britain and other major powers have played a seminal role, the rejection — and the style in which it was expressed — has come as a major shock.

For Tripathi, there is no question that he was punished for daring to chart a course deemed unfavorable from the viewpoint of academics with links to the military. In some countries, government interference in academic matters is hardly shocking. But in this case – especially if Tripathi’s assertions are indicative of a larger phenomenon – the matter is of immense urgency.

For Tripathi’s readers, the story may still have a happy ending. Although the author is yet to receive his academic degree, the book is now widely available for all to read.

When the University of Toronto recently accepted a Master’s thesis critical of Jewish privilege, the Lobby, the media, and politicians, immediately condemned it as ‘hate’. Some of these legislators declared the University should not have awarded the M.A. to Sociology and Equity Studies student Jennifer Peto, an unprecedented interference of the government in academic freedom.

When a Jewish anti-Zionist like Peto is physically threatened by Zionists and denounced by politicians, the first thing is obviously to defend her and her freedom of speech. But there is a danger in giving extra credit to her argument because it has come under such vicious attack from the Lobby.

The extreme reaction of the Lobby to any criticism has the effect of encouraging narcissism in critics, especially Jewish ones – there is nothing like persecution to make people self-righteous, and Zionists know this better than anyone! To be a Jewish critic of Zionism in a Western country today is less risky than to have joined the white anti-apartheid activists in South Africa, who were on the receiving end of letter-bombs as well as abuse. Still, Peto is a brave woman, and her thesis honestly describes her difficult break with her Zionist upbringing.

Her thesis, ‘The Victimhood of the Powerful: White Jews, Zionism and the Racism of Hegemonic Holocaust Education’, is a development of the tradition of left-wing criticism of various kinds of ‘privilege’ – white, male, etc.¹ She reviews How Jews Became White Folks.² She thinks that race is socially constructed: “race, whiteness and ethnicity produce, and are produced by, nationalist discourses.” She uncritically repeats the idea that Israel is a US ‘client state’ but admits “the discourses that are used in defence of Israel are different than those used to excuse or deny American, Canadian and other Western imperial violence.” It’s not that complicated. Never mind ‘discourses.’ Is it in the interests of the other Western capitalist countries to give unconditional support to Israel, or not? In short, she has no critique of Jewish power.

Peto states, “My work is based in the understanding that Zionism – the belief that Jewish people have a right to a nation-state built on top of the ruins of Palestine – is a racist, imperialist ideology that can only effectively be challenged through anti-racist, anti-imperialist theory and activism.” I argue the exact opposite – I want to challenge her and the left in general to ask why this approach was so effective in the case of South Africa, and so ineffective against Israel. She has nothing to say about ‘the chosen people’ and the festivals which celebrate massacres of gentiles – she makes no attempt to answer the question “is Zionism an expression of Judaism”? She explicitly says, “Jews of European descent now enjoy white privilege,” which implies a) they didn’t used to enjoy privilege at all, and b) the privilege they now enjoy is not specifically Jewish. She compares Canada’s history of ethnic cleansing with Israel’s. This is not how to undermine Zionism.

A thesis is not a political manifesto, but obviously, Jennifer Peto is an activist, and her paper’s argument leads to certain conclusions, certain tactics, for the growing campaign to reduce uncritical support for the apartheid state in the rest of the world. Therefore, I think it is appropriate to criticize it from a tactical point of view.

My argument is, quite simply, that left-wing anti-oppression politics is inadequate for combating Zionism. Telling the white European majority of the Western countries that Jewish privilege is essentially a variant of their own is not only false, it leads logically to solidarity with Israel. Surely it would be more effective to point out that most Americans have no interest in supporting Jewish supremacy, rather than telling them they are ‘complicit’ in racism? Concern with the history of white European racism assisted the dismantling of apartheid in Africa, desegregation, affirmative action, busing and African-American studies, but it doesn’t lead to opposing the Jewish apartheid state.

The Palestine solidarity movement should be trying to drive a wedge between supporters of the Jewish state and everyone else. This involves emphasizing the differences between the former and the latter, putting forward the overwhelming case that a) Israel is morally worse than all the other Western countries, and b) most of their inhabitants, rich or poor, have no reason to support it. It implies showing, in complete contrast to the dogmas of modern leftism, how Western countries are the most egalitarian societies which have ever existed – except Israel. Trying to fit opposition to Zionism into the general framework of opposing oppression in general doesn’t work. For example, feminist and gay politics don’t aid opponents of Jewish apartheid; its defenders point out that Israel is by far the most liberal country in the Middle East. Analyses derived from Marxism are also unhelpful; Western support for Israel is not based on material interests, and the conflict in Palestine is about race, not class.

Instead of trying to fit the square peg of opposition to Jewish ethnocentrism into the round hole of political correctness, we should list the ways in which Jewish power is more powerful than white supremacy:

1. The open advocacy of white power – in any country – is taboo – no politician in the world does it
2. The open advocacy of Jewish power – in Israel – is mandatory for all Western politicians
3. The Western countries boycotted, and caused the end of, white apartheid, thirty years ago
4. The Western countries support Jewish apartheid today, uncritically and very expensively
5. Desmond Tutu has stated that Israeli policies are at least as bad as apartheid
6. Apartheid South Africa fought for US interests against Soviet-backed forces
7. Apartheid Israel has never fought for US interests
8. There has been no violence against Jews in any Western country for sixty-five years – unless you count Palestinian resistance, which is the result of Jewish supremacy
9. When US colleges, co-operatives and other bodies initiated a boycott of South Africa over thirty years ago, no white supremacists tried to stop them
10. When, today, US colleges, co-operatives and other bodies tentatively discuss a boycott of Israel today, right-wing Jewish activists issue lawsuits and stage protests, and left-wing Jewish activists try to undermine their efforts from within, complaining of ‘oppression’ and ‘anti-Semitism’

Jewish power is so much more important than white privilege that I argue that concern with the latter works, consciously or otherwise, to the benefit of the former. Critics of white privilege, for example critical race theorist Stanley Fish, often claim that Zionism is not a form of racism, by emphasizing how Jews have suffered at the hands of white supremacists.³ Peto boldly challenges the use of the holocaust to reinforce Jewish self-righteousness. She describes The March of Remembrance, a Zionist project aimed at making gentiles aware of the holocaust, but, because of her perspective, she doesn’t go so far as to see it as part of the culture of ‘white guilt’. I would criticize it as such, and advocate, and organize, open discussion about the holocaust and the rest of the larger Holocaust of World War II. Canada’s laws against questioning aspects of the Shoah are a clear expression of Jewish privilege. Opposing that privilege by defending freedom of speech means trying to overturn those laws as much as defending Jennifer Peto and her comrades against Jewish power.

1. Jennifer Peto (2010) “The Victimhood of the Powerful: White Jews, Zionism and the Racism of Hegemonic Holocaust Education,” Master of Arts thesis, University of Toronto.
2. Karen Brodkin (1998). How Jews Became White Folks: and what that says about race in America. Rutgers University Press.
3. Stanley Fish (1994). There’s No Such Thing As Free Speech: And It’s a Good Thing, Too. Oxford University Press.

No, school superintendents. President Obama has it wrong to say that the single most important factor determining whether a student succeeds is not skin color, zip code, or parents’ income. In fact, one who sends their kids to Sidwell Friends and has gone and taught at prestigious and private universities is in no position whatsoever to cast aside these enormous factors in determining the success of our children. His elitism goes beyond the pale as it is used as a basis to further engage in teacher-bashing.

Implicit in this manifesto was an attack on teachers’ unions, being a major stumbling block against ridding our schools of bad teachers. A basic duty of a union is to protect the worker from unfair labor practices and to see that a fair process is at work in the firing of a bad teacher. Teachers have seen over and over again that they are often targeted by principals who are petty, vindictive, not one of their ‘pets’, and are inefficient in carrying out their own duties, and with little or no feedback from those he or she supervises. There is often very little professional collegiality between principal and teacher. The relationship is often not collaborative but combative. As a result, it is often very difficult to find good principals from the ranks of teachers and many now do not come from public school education but the field of business.

Mr. Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education, does not understand the philosophy or history of public education and it’s a shame that superintendents fall in line with his thinking. Schools are not a place to produce successful students. Schools are places where successful education and learning take place. Lucy and Ethel might have been held accountable for how many chocolate candies they could wrap but teachers do not see their job as wrapping up their students for the job market beyond high school.

Income matters. Funding for schools matters. Open enrollment matters.

Students come with an enormous set of issues that impact their ability to learn. Can they count on a steady diet of healthy food all the way up to the end of the month when food stamps have been exhausted? Are they secure in their own home every night, especially in light of the epidemic of home foreclosures and homelessness? Do they have parents at home supervising their behavior? Or, are the parents delinquent in their duties or working like dogs on the night shift just to be able to keep a roof over their heads?

Are the English Language Learners getting enough academic training before taking high stakes tests or is there a plan to simply push them out into night school or GED programs, and thus, no longer count for lower scores? Are parents savvy enough to advocate for their children for that lottery slot for that charter school that more likely than not will not be any better performing than their own neighborhood school? Elementary school teachers do see the students for the whole day, but are they to be held accountable for what does or doesn’t go on in the home? What about high school teachers? At best, they might see them for only one period a day.

The manifesto claims that business in America wouldn’t survive if it didn’t make personnel decisions based on performance. It is an absolutely correct statement. But why apply it to education? What is the basis for evaluating a teacher? Offering merit pay to the ‘exceptional’ teacher and a pink slip to another should never be dependent on how their students perform, based on present criteria. Is a high school teacher who keeps a particular student in class through fantastic teaching of music and mentoring more or less an asset to a school? Should a mediocre math teacher of that same student get the credit because that student was motivated to stay in school and did fairly well in the High School Assessment? Perhaps the music teacher was able to show the connection between math and music. But it is the math teacher whose job performance is based on that student’s test result.

Counselors, including mental health personnel, ought to be working with students to prevent suicide or gang involvement. The former, however, is inundated with schedule changes from Day 1. For every student that succeeds in staying in school and staying alive, the English teacher gets credit or not for his or her performance. The student as a person is apparently irrelevant. What’s clearly missing in the business model approach to education is the professional collaboration that is essential for ‘producing’ a high quality student.

The superintendents’ manifesto made some obvious claims. Yes, of course you need the best technology available and a restructuring of class time. That costs money. My county, like so many, has issued furloughs for most employees this year. Our schools’ computers are no longer under warranty. Paper is doled out. Outside teacher-training and workshops have been all but eliminated. This is occurring all over. School districts are considering 4 days a week to save money or shutting down in May. How can we improve the quality of our teachers when we have so few resources?

Much of the problem of funding is political. Clearly, our nation’s leaders’ priorities are on endless wars of aggression and corporate bailouts. Our president cheers when a city shuts down its schools. Our pundits wage verbal war on our teachers and blockbuster movies like “Waiting for Superman” provide the proverbial billy clubs that are wielded by corporate thugs who see big dollars in testing.

What is a teacher’s job? Is it our job to train widget producers (or chocolate candy wrappers) or is it to produce creative-thinking, problem-solving young adults that would excel in business as well as the arts? All the performance tests that are being promoted and actually in use do virtually nothing to expand or highlight the creative side of the student. Art is not even tested; nor music, physical education, foreign languages, etc. In the state of Maryland, for the High School Assessments, writing has been eliminated altogether. Is it that the costs of grading them too high or too many of the wealthier communities not passing at the high levels expected? Except for algebra which requires calculations, all tests are random bubble sheets. The odds of bubbling in “This school sucks” resulting in a high school diploma is probably as high as blind bubbling which could have the same result. Sorry, but my field is not math or probability.

Success in education is not always quantitative and assigned a dollar figure. Being an educator used to have meaning. It used to be an honorable profession. Mr. Duncan and his cohorts have ruined it for us. An old episode of The Twilight Zone was about putting an old, venerated professor out to pasture. He didn’t know what he made of his life and was ready to shoot himself. But he saw the images of his former students who did remarkable, as well as mundane, achievements in life who remembered his passion for the arts and the classics. This shook him out of his malaise and he saw what his value truly was and was ready to pass the baton to a younger group of educators.

Are teachers being asked to pass the baton or are we just simply expendable?

Located on the outskirts of Tel-Aviv, Bar Ilan likes to boast that it is the largest university in Israel. Its official goal is to cultivate and combine “Jewish identity and tradition with modern technologies and research.”

Fifteen years ago, however, the university became infamous after one of its students assassinated former Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin in what turned out to be a successful attempt to arrest the Oslo peace process. The administration was appalled by the criminal act and consequently appears to have adopted a strategic decision to temper its conservative and right-wing proclivities. On the one hand, Bar Ilan continued to provide accreditation for two colleges located in illegal West Bank settlements, yet, on the other, it also developed an excellent gender program and hired a number of faculty members with well known left-wing credentials. It aspired to become a liberal institution guided by ostensibly neutral professional processes and regulations, like all major universities around the world.

It was during this period that philosophy professor, Avi Sagi, of Bar Ilan hired Ariella Azoulay. From an academic standpoint, he made a wise decision, since over the past decade Azoulay has become one of Israel’s foremost cultural theorists, specializing in visual culture. In addition to publishing scores of journal articles and book chapters, editing journals, translating classic texts, and serving as the curator of numerous art shows, during her ten-year career she has managed to write nine academic books, four of which came out with prestigious presses like MIT, Zone Books, Verso and Stanford University Press (forthcoming). On top of all of this, she is also the supervisor of more than ten PhD students.

Azoulay is one of those rare academics who can produce exceptionally high quality research, and do so as if she is working on a conveyor belt. She is precisely the kind of scholar top rate universities recruit and attempt to retain.

Last month, Bar Ilan decided to deny Azoulay’s bid for tenure, effectively firing her. While the protocols of the university committees that reached this pitiful decision have not been made public, Azoulay’s curriculum vitae and academic accomplishments are on the web, and anyone who is familiar with academic promotion procedures can readily see that the university’s verdict is illogical. But, then again, maybe matters are more complicated; maybe there is a method to the madness.

One important fact that does not appear on Azoulay’s written CV is her political activism and public visibility. She was, for instance, the curator of a photography exhibition “Act of State – 1967-2007,” which included hundreds of pictures that for the first time visually exposed four decades of occupation. The show was held in a gallery at the heart of Tel-Aviv. To be sure, a significant part of her work offers a critique of Israeli rights abusive policy and of Zionism. This is the real reason – no other plausible one exists – that most of the people on the university committees decided to vote against her bid for tenure. Bar Ilan, it seems, could not stomach tenuring a vocal Zionist apostate. It therefore abandoned the liberal maxim of a neutral professional process, and demonstrated that cultural theorists are right: everything is indeed political.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century perhaps the most important thorn in the side of the capitalist anthropological community was a Jewish political radical named Franz Boas (1858-1942); an individual who had emigrated to America in 1887 as a result “of Bismarck’s antiliberal policies and rising anti-Semitism in Germany.”¹ Boaz became an assistant editor at Science, the publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and he courted controversy as soon as he arrived in the United States, providing important though oft ignored, criticisms of hegemonic cultural evolutionary thought and environmental determinism. His antagonistic relationship to reigning orthodoxy meant that gaining paid employment was not always easy, and at times “Boas was only sporadically employed,” that is at least until Frederick W. Putnam (1839-1915) “succeeded in getting Boas an appointment” at Columbia University for the 1896/97 academic year.² From then on Boas rose to become an important though controversial academic authority, as for example in 1907, when he was employed by the US Immigration Commission to investigate “the effects of the American environment on immigrants and their children.” Boas’s findings from this study challenged the racist “established views in the wider society and in the emerging profession” and not surprisingly the Commission “dismissed Boas’s claims” without good reason. This however did not hold Boas back and he began working more closely with W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963), arguing in favour of racial equality and integration. This “put him in opposition to the faction led by Booker T. Washington at the Carnegie-supported Tuskegee Institute, which stressed the acquisition of skills and property as well as the maintenance of the existing social order.”³

Determined to challenge the racism of Booker T. Washington, who was strongly backed by white wealth and their newly formed philanthropic foundations, in 1910 Boas helped form the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, but prior to this, in “the fall of 1906, he [had also] attempted to establish an African American Museum in New York to counteract racism.” Perhaps owing to his relatively privileged position within the elite educational establishment Boas tried his luck at “solicit[ing] funds from Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and two supporters of Negro education, George Peabody and Robert Ogden.” However, given the norm of elite support for Tuskegee-styled education, they all declined to fund his project.⁴ Not deterred by his rejection, Boas “then turned to the Bureau of American Ethnology, which also declined to support [his Museum project], because it might arouse ‘race feeling’ in Congress and jeopardize the Bureau’s appropriations.” But Boas persisted in his fund-raising efforts and “finally got some financial support from Carter J. Woodson, Elsie Clews Parsons, and George Peabody to support and train African American students at Columbia.”⁵

The turn of the century was a busy time for academia, and the field of anthropology underwent a significant period of restructuring and professionalization which was facilitated by the formation of the American Anthropological Association in 1902. Graduate training programs in anthropology were established at a handful of universities and by 1912 twenty men had been awarded doctorates in anthropology. Boas quickly rose to dominance within the field and by 1928 a further thirty-three men and nine women had obtained Ph.D. degrees in anthropology, with Boas himself having successfully “supervised the dissertations of fifteen men and seven women at Columbia.”⁶ Yet the processes of reorganization and centralization proceeded slowly in the early decades of the twentieth century, and Boas’s growing “intellectual leadership” in the field was strongly challenged by powerful individuals working through regional anthropological societies, like for example Edgar Lee Hewett (1865-1946).⁶

In 1909, Boas and some of his colleagues had been critical of Edgar Lee Hewett’s “research and opportunism” especially with regard to Hewett’s allocation of monies for archaeological research, but had been unable to repeal the funders’ decisions to support Hewett. The hostility between Boas and Hewett led to a series of heated exchanges, which resulted in Hewett’s friend, William H. Holmes (who also “had his own axe to grind”) coming to Hewett’s aid and working to ensure that the Bureau of American Ethnology’s cut off “financial support for Boas’s ongoing linguistic research.” “As a result of his political connections and tactics,” Hewett continued to have “a shaping effect on the development of American anthropology from 1904 through the mid-1920s”; and his “influence and prominence, especially in the Midwest and West, were virtually unchallenged until he tangled with John D. Rockefeller, Jr. over the fate of [his School of American Archaeology in] Santa Fe in the mid-1920s.”⁷

The Carnegie Institution of Washington’s president, Robert S. Woodward, had “consulted with Boas and other former colleagues at Columbia” about funding their work, and by 1911, “he was convinced that a department of anthropology should be formed”. This political movement toward Columbia was however opposed by various other Carnegie trustees who were led by William Barclay Parsons and were able to bypass Boas to push an alternative bid to promote archaeological research in Central America. In 1914, Sylvanus Morley was chosen to commence work on this research, which he had proposed to undertake at Chichen Itza in southern Mexico.⁸ Ironically, it turned out that Morley and three of his American colleagues, while engaged on this project, “were spies who used anthropology as a front for their espionage activities in Central America and Mexico during the First World War.” Having already opposed the War as a committed pacifist Boas was “outraged” when he made this discovery.

That anthropologists whom he knew or supported — Morley, H. E. Mechling who attended the International School in Mexico City, Herbert Spinden (1879-1967) of the American Museum of Natural History, and J. Alden Mason (1885-1967) of the University of Pennsylvania — were spies was seen by Boas as more than a personal betrayal; without naming them, he told the readers of The Nation (December 20,1919) that they “had prostituted science by using it as a cover for their activities as spies” (Boas 1919/1974:336). (p.53)⁹

Although Boas had supporters, his article in The Nation “incensed a majority of the anthropological community in the United States.” Consequently in early 1920, “Boas was forced to withdraw his candidacy for a seat on the National Research Council which was presided over by John C. Merriam, who would soon become president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.” This act of political retribution would have a significant influence on the National Research Council (which had been “established in 1916 as a means of mobilizing science and research for the war effort”), and on the future of anthropology especially. This is because of the “[t]hree distinct conceptions of anthropology existed during and after the First World War,” Boas and his students represented the only progressive stream of thought, “argu[ing] that culture rather than race determined behavior and stressed the interconnections of ethnology, linguistics, folklore, archaeology, and physical anthropology.” The other two views which assumed ascendency during these years were those of eugenicists like Charles B. Davenport (1866-1944), and the ideas “crafted by Ales Hrdlicka (1869-1943) of the National Museum, [which] asserted the primacy of the biology and attempted to establish physical anthropology as an autonomous academic discipline.”¹⁰ The National Research Council (NRC)…

…would acquire a permanent status in 1918 as a result of an Executive Order (Number 2859) signed by President Woodrow Wilson; the Executive Order was engineered by Elihu Root (1845-1937) and George E. Hale (1868-1938), both of whom were affiliated with the Carnegie Corporation, the umbrella organization which linked together Andrew Carnegie’s various philanthropies, and whose board of trustees had publicly “acknowledged its wish to preserve Anglo-Saxon prerogatives, customs, and genes”. The formation of the NRC coincided with the heyday of the eugenics movement in the United States, whose proponents claimed that the Anglo-Saxon race was being swamped by all of the babies that were being born to the members of inferior races — e.g. Mediterraneans, East Europeans, Jews, American Indians, Asians, Blacks, and poor people. At a practical level, the eugenicists argued for sterilization, selective breeding, and restricting the immigration of peoples from Eastern and Southern Europe and of individuals with dark skins.” The formation of the NRC also coincided with radical union organizing and labor agitation by workers who were drawn largely from the races deemed inferior by the eugenicists and by the wealthy capitalists who supported them — e.g. Carnegie, Mary Harriman, John D. Rockefeller, the Kellogg family which made breakfast cereal, and Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857-1935) who was president of the American Museum of Natural History. (pp.55-6).

Henry Fairfield Osborn, a “friend and confidant” of George E. Hale, the National Research Committee’s founding director, happened to also be a friend to Madison Grant (1865-1938), “a wealthy New York lawyer, racist propagandist, and virulent antisemite” who was the author of the best-selling Passage of the Great Race (1916). Thus in April 1917, “presumably” as a result of Osborn’s activism, Grant “offered to provide financial assistance” for the NRC’s Committee on Anthropology’s “work in exchange for membership on it.” The Committee’s chair William H. Holmes (1846-1933) who worked closely with Hrdlicka reluctantly accepted Grant’s membership on the committee. Furthermore, when Hrdlicka was informed of Boas’s “outrage over Grant’s inclusion in the Committee on Anthropology” he “asked Holmes to fill the remaining slot on the committee with Davenport.”¹¹

By December 1917, Grant and Davenport were disgruntled. Grant perceived correctly that Hrdlicka only wanted his money, and Davenport realized that Hrdlicka had no interest in his eugenic investigations. Grant complained to Hale that the committee was unable to implement the survey because it could not agree on the design of the anthropometric form that should be used. In Grant’s opinion, the committee had become pre-occupied with establishing Hrdlicka’s physical anthropology journal. Holmes and Hrdlicka met with Hale on January 4, 1918 in order to clarify and resolve the issues. Hale supported Davenport’s proposals and told them to use the anthropometric schedule Davenport employed at the Eugenics Record Office, because it would give “scientifically comparable results”. Holmes attempted to resign, pointing out that he had been appointed “Chairman of the Committee on Anthropology not of the Committee on Anthropology and Eugenics”; Hrdlicka also threatened to resign, but Hale asked him to explain in detail his objections to Davenport’s research project. Hale did not accept their resignations immediately in order to forestall embarrassing questions. (p.57)

Hale continued to prioritize eugenics and succeeded in delaying the resignations, and when Holmes “resubmitted his resignation” in April 1918 “Hrdlicka responded by requesting that Clark Wissler (1870-1947), a student of Boas who was employed at the American Museum of Natural History, be added to the committee and by adding Boas and two of his allies… to the editorial board of his American Journal of Physical Anthropology.”¹²

In March, Davenport and Grant attempted to consolidate their position on the Committee on Anthropology and to eliminate possible interference from Boas and the American Anthropological Association. With the backing of Henry F. Osborn, they established a rival anthropological society, the Galton Society for the Study of the Origin and Evolution of Man, which was centered in New York City at the American Museum of Natural History. Grant wrote that the membership of the new society would be “self elected and self perpetuating, and very limited in members, and also confined to native Americans, who are anthropologically, socially, and politically sound, no Bolsheviks need apply”. Davenport chaired the new society which included prominent eugenicists on the NRC, at the American Museum of Natural History, and in universities; its membership was soon expanded to include Clark Wissler of the American Museum of Natural History and Harvard physical anthropologist Earnest A. Hooton (1887-1954). (p.58)

Such eugenic influences were not to the liking of Hrdlicka, and when Galton Society member John C. Merriam “was named in May 1918 to oversee the NRC’s peacetime conversion” it did not take long for Merriam to send Hrdlicka off to New York — where he worked under the direction of Isaiah Bowman (at the American Geographical Society). In a bid to further undermine Boas’s influence on the field, Merriam “decided that [anthropology] should have a close relation with psychology” and in July 1919 he created within the NRC, a body known as the Division of Anthropology and Psychology. Boas was subsequently elected to this body, but was “forced to resign” when his controversial article in The Nation later that year.¹³

Tragically by the mid-1920s, Davenport’s racist views had come to further dominate elite knowledge networks, and his well-funded eugenic activism provided the “ideological justification” for establishing various harsh immigration quotas (like the Johnson Act of 1924), were which supplemented by the “enactment of sterilization and miscegenation laws in numerous states during the 1920s and 1930s.”¹⁴ Indeed, between 1904 and 1929, just the Carnegie Institution of Washington alone had invested nearly $3,000,000 in Davenport’s eugenic research programs.

With an increasing number of geneticists “raising serious objections to eugenics as a field of inquiry”; in 1929, Merriam who now headed the Carnegie Institution, set up a committee to assess the validity of Davenport’s research. This committee made a number of suggestions that his work needed to be tested more rigorously, and when Merriam “convened a second panel in 1936” they “concluded that Davenport’s data were virtually worthless.” Yet old and ideologically fruitful elite habits die hard, and it took a further three years before the Carnegie Institution terminated their support for Davenport’s projects. Mainstream funding of eugenics was no longer considered acceptable, and so the the “eugenics movement was transformed with Rockefeller support as its focus shifted from heredity to population control and to birth-control experiments on an international scale.”¹⁵

Now returning to the dominant factors “shap[ing] the direction of anthropological research in the United States after the First World War”; Patterson suggests that in addition to the National Research Council, the major liberal foundations played a critical role in facilitating the professionalization of the field, most notably the Rockefeller philanthropies and the American Council of Learned Societies’ (ACLS) Committee on Research in American Native Languages (which was “funded mainly by an $80,000 grant from the Carnegie Corporation in 1927”).¹⁶

It turns out that the Rockefeller fund “had the most profound effect on the development of anthropology and the other social sciences” directing tens of millions of dollars to this purpose during the 1920s and early 1930s. This influence was especially strong at the University of Chicago (which John D. Rockefeller had founded in 1892), where anthropologists “such as Fay-Cooper Cole (1881-1961), Melville J. Herskovits, Ralph Linton, Robert Redfield (1897-1958), and Edward Sapir” were to assume prominent roles in the development of the field. (For more on this, see “Foundations and the Racial Politics Of Knowledge.”) Given the key influence of elite philanthropies in guiding the evolution of the social sciences, it should not come as too much of a surprise that the sort of critical “anthropology led by anti-imperialist critic Frederick W. Starr (1858-1933) languished after the turn of the century”; even more so when he retired in 1923.¹⁷

The interest of the Rockefeller philanthropies in anthropology, especially in colonial policies and the social management of natives, was apparent by 1926, when they invited Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942) and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1952) to discuss their views with colleagues at selected universities in the United States. At the end of the summer, Radcliffe-Brown sailed to Australia to assume the newly created, Rockefeller-funded chair in social anthropology at the University of Sydney. (p.73)

Radcliffe-Brown then “saw to it” that W. Lloyd Warner (1898-1970) was able to study “aboriginal society in northern Australia” with Rockefeller aid provided via the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial (LSRM). In 1930, Warner would go on to work with the Australian psychiatrist Elton Mayo (1880-1949) at the latter’s Committee on Industrial Physiology which was based at Harvard University and “whose research in the 1920s and 1930s was completely underwritten by the LSRM.” Here Warner worked as a consultant on Mayo’s controversial Hawthorne project (see “Liberal Elites and the Pacification of Workers”), and then had his research directly funded by Mayo’s Committee on Industrial Physiology, and in the late 1930s went on to co-found the University of Chicago’s interdisciplinary Committee on Industrial Relations.¹⁸

The Great Depression of 1929 had a large influence on the evolution of anthropology and many practitioners applied their academic knowledge to various relief agencies to set up to help ameliorate the poverty now inflicted upon the majority of American citizens. This in turn led some anthropologists, who might otherwise have not come into so much contact with grass-roots organizations and leftist political parties, to become “outspoken critics of the racism and classism of American society, while others spoke out against fascism in Germany, Italy, Spain and the United States.” Likewise, during the New Deal (1933-41), many anthropologists were employed by the Department of Agriculture or in bodies like the Bureau of Indian Affairs “bring[ing] their knowledge to bear on problems facing government agencies.” This applied approach then led to the formation of the Society for Applied Anthropology in 1941. However, one should note that the “first anthropologists to benefit from New Deal legislation” were archaeologists, whose field of research “appealed to the relief agencies, because it was labor-intensive and did not produce a commodity that competed with the private sector.”¹⁹

During the 1930s, American anthropologists were concerned with various problems but perhaps one of the most significant one revolved around their work on race relations. Under the direction of Gunnar Myrdal, in 1937 the Carnegie Corporation funded the “Negro in America” project which involved many leading often radical anthropologists from around New York City.²⁰ Thus despite the fact that many socialists were consulted on this project, the end product — Myrdal’s book An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944) — war far from radical as far as its conclusions were concerned. (For detailed criticism of this project, see “Liberal Foundations and Anti-Racism Activism”)

Around this time when the US government was planning how best to continue its ideological war on the domestic front (in the 1930s), the Rockefeller philanthropies, including the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies, “were already acutely aware that the United States was ill-prepared to wage war on a global basis.” To counter this problem, these “two foundations advocated the need to develop inter-disciplinary area studies in American universities”; and they quickly set about coordinating research and resources in preparation for war.²¹ For example, various committee were set to progress Latin America Studies, and bodies like the NRC’s Committee on Latin American Anthropology “whose charge was to coordinate research and resources with government needs” like those of the Office of the Coordinator of Interamerican Affairs (OCIAA). Set up in 1940, Nelson Rockefeller (1908-79) was the founding director of OCIAA and while in this position:

He implemented a series of policies that involved anthropologists. He provided $114,000 in federal funding for ten archaeological projects in Latin America in 1940-1941, which were coordinated by Wendell Bennett (1905-53) and George Vaillant (1901-45) of the American Museum of Natural History. He lobbied Congress for funds to publish the Handbook of South American Indians as a symbol of hemispheric unity during the war; Julian Steward edited the Handbook for the BAE and the Smithsonian Institution. Rockefeller and John Collier supported the formation of the Inter-American Indian Institute in 1941 to carry out research on “Indian problems” of countries in the Western Hemisphere. (p.95)

From the late 1940s onwards, it was almost natural by now that transformations within the realm of anthropology should be fuelled by Cold War priorities. In this way, the “discourses of established areas of learning were shaped and transformed in tandem with the changing needs of the state” as facilitated by the Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie Foundations. These big three foundations likewise “supported lines of inquiry — such as behavioralism or functionalism — that countered more radical social theories which had gained prominence during the Depression.” Furthermore, the foundations influence over academia was so extreme that “certain subjects, such as Marxist contributions to anthropology or social thought, could not be discussed openly in the academy for fear of political reprisal.”²² Later in the 1960s, such funding induced silences were broken down as anthropologists began to “recognize the inadequacies or limitations of prevailing theoretical perspectives” and explored the viability of Marxist and feminist approaches to explaining the massive problems evident all around them. Such questioning of methods was intensified in 1965 with the “public disclosure of and reaction to Project Camelot” which since 1957 had “serve[d] the needs of the psychological warfare directorate of the American Army.” However, while Project Camelot has been terminated, the work of some anthropologists was still being yoked to imperialism, and in March 1970 students liberated personal files from a UCLA anthropologist “which indicated that the professional expertise of several anthropologists working in Southeast Asia was being harnessed to counterinsurgency efforts in Thailand.”²³

In this latest controversy three prominent anti-war anthropologists/activists (Gerald Berreman, Eric Wolf, and Joseph Jorgensen) who were also members of the American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) ethics committee spoke out against the linkages between counterinsurgency and anthropology. This in turn led the Executive Board of the AAA to set up an ad hoc committee of inquiry, which was chaired by Margaret Mead. Released in November 1971 to deal with the controversy, the Mead Report “whitewash[ed] the activities of the anthropologists involved in the counterinsurgency research” and concluded that such work was “well within the traditional canons of acceptable behavior for the applied anthropologist”. Soon after its publication the validity of the Mead Report was discussed at the AAA’s annual meeting, and after much debate “the voting members of the Association rejected the report section by section.” A few days later the Executive Board then “passed a motion stating that the issues raised by the Thailand Controversy remained unresolved”; and they still remained “unresolved thirty years later.”²⁴

Needless to say, despite the cynical manner by which philanthropic elites have dominated the field of anthropology, the fruits of its study are essential to any radical movement which is intent on eradicating capitalism. The point made in this article is a general one, because in anthropology, as in many other fields of scholarship, class conscious elites have used the power of capital to manage and harness the power of knowledge. What is clear is that knowledge producing networks must be reclaimed by the majority to serve the needs of all humans. Unfortunately, to date, within many radical circles there is a collective amnesia as to the manner by which this power has been exerted; but with ample knowledge now at our fingertips this need not be the case any longer.

1. Patterson, A Social History of Anthropology in the United States, p.45. Patterson suggests that Boas’s “most perceptive biographer” is William S. Willis, Jr., who published “Franz Boas and the Study of Black Folklore,” In: John W. Bennett (ed.), The New Ethnicity: Perspectives from Ethnology (West Publishing Company, 1975).
2. Patterson, p.48. Until his death in 1915, Frederick W. Putnam “was the driving force behind the growth and access of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnography at Harvard University.” (p.41)
3. Patterson, p.49, p.50.
4. Patterson, p.50. With respect to the evolution of anthropology prior to the advent of the twentieth century, Patterson notes: “The anthropological tradition that developed in the United States in the wake of the Revolutionary War was shaped by three overriding concerns: creating a national identity, episodic westward expansion and settlement in the Indian territories, and consolidating a slave-based economy in the southern states.” (p.7)
5. Patterson, p.50.
6. Patterson, p.51.
7. Patterson, p.52. On Hewett’s tangle with John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Patterson refers to: George W. Stocking, Jr., “Philanthropoids and Vanishing Cultures: Rockefeller Funding and the End of the Museum Era in Anglo-American Anthropology,” In: George W. Stocking, Jr. (ed.), Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture (University of Wisconsin Press, 1985).
8. Patterson, p.52, p.53.
9. Other anthropologists “to serve with Army or Navy Intelligence during the First World War” included: William C. Farabee (1865-1925) of the University of Pennsylvania, Marshall Saville (1867-1935) “who was Boas’s erstwhile colleague at Columbia,” Samuel Lothrop (1892-1965), and Alfred V. Kidder (who in 1929 became the director of the Carnegie Institution of Washington’s new Division of Historical Research and of its Middle American research program). Patterson, p.54, p.53.

   For further details Patterson refers to Paul Sullivan, Unfinished Conversations: Mayas and Foreigners between Two Wars (University of California Press, 1989), pp.132-7; and David H. Price, “Anthropologists as Spies,” The Nation, 272 (16), pp.24-7.

10. Patterson, p.54, pp.54-5. Here one might note that “Davenport was the Director of the Carnegie-sponsored Eugenics Record Office and Station for the Experimental Study of Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor and a leading proponent of eugenics in the United States.” (p.69)
11. Patterson, p.57. In this section Patterson draws heavily upon an unpublished Ph.D. thesis; Frank Spencer, Ales Hrdlicka, M.D., 1869-1943: A Chronicle of the Life and Work of an American Physical Anthropologist, Ph.D. Dissertation in Anthropology, University of Michigan, 1979.
12. Patterson, p.58.
13. Patterson, p.58, p.59.
14. Patterson, p.60. “Boas was understandably outraged in 1924 when Congress passed the Immigration Restriction Act, whose nationalism, xenophobia, and racism he deplored as ‘nordic nonsense.’” (p.49) Franz Boas, “This Nordic Nonsense,” The Forum, 74 (4), 1925, pp.502-11.
15. Patterson, p.60. Patterson list the following concerned geneticists: L. C. Dunn (1893-1964) and H. J. Muller (1890-1967) in the United States and J. B. Haldane (1892-1964) in England.
16. Patterson, p.72. “A few anthropologists — notably Edward Sapir and, to a lesser extent, Franz Boas — were involved with more than one of the initiatives in the 1920s and 1930s. During this period, Sapir, for example, was a member of the [Rockefeller's] Social Science Research Council (1928-34) and the ACLS’s Committee on Research in American Native Languages (1927-37) and chaired the NRC’s Division of Psychology and Anthropology (1934-36) when the SSRC projects that he proposed on the study of acculturation and the relationship of the individual and culture came to fruition.” (p.72)
17. Patterson, p.73, p.78.
18. Patterson, p.73, p.74. “Psychologists supported by corporations and by the Rockefeller philanthropies in the 1920s were at the center of the industrial relations movement that sought to control shop-floor inefficiency and worker discontent.” (p.99)
19. Patterson, p.80, p.81.
20. Patterson, p.89. Myrdal “solicited criticisms and suggestions from anthropologists including Boas, Benedict [??], Herskovits, Linton, and Powdermaker. In addition, he employed Columbia-trained anthropologists Ashley Montagu (1905-99) and Bernhard J. Stern (1894-1956) among others to prepare research memoranda on particular subjects.” (p.89)
21. Patterson, p.95.
22. Patterson, p.104. On these points Patterson refers to Edward Berman’s book The Influence of the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller Foundations on American Foreign Policy: The Ideology of Philanthropy (State University of New York Press, 1983); and Eleanor B. Leacock, “Marxism and Anthropology,” In: Bertell Ollman and Edward Vernoff (eds.), The Left Academy: Marxist Scholarship on American Campuses (McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1982).
23. Patterson, p.125, p.126. “By 1964, projects involving anthropologists or individuals representing themselves as anthropologists had been launched in Chile, Colombia, and Peru. The existence of Project Camelot — the research in Chile — became public in June 1965.” The project was then immediately canceled. (pp.124-5)
24. Patterson, p.127, p.126, p.127. “Kathleen Gough (1925-90) had already captured another facet of the problem in 1968 in her now-famous article ‘Anthropology: Child of Imperialism’ which appeared in Monthly Review, the most influential of the American Marxist journals. Gough pointed out that many Third World peoples involved in decolonization or national liberation movements saw anthropologists as part of the larger problem of American interference in the internal affairs of their countries.” (p.127) In a follow-up paper titled “New Proposals for Anthropologists,” Gough “argued that it was time for anthropologists to reassess critically the roots of their discipline and to examine the social and political interests which its practitioners have traditionally served. The concerns of this paper, controversial at the time, resonated with sentiments expressed in the pages of Current Anthropology and in three edited collections that were published between 1969 and 1973: Dell Hymes’s (1969) Reinventing Anthropology; Robin Blackburn’s (1972) Ideology in Social Science: Readings in Critical Social Theory; and Tala1 Asad’s (1973) Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter.” (p.127)

    In recent years the imperialist abuse of anthropology again rose to the fore as documented by the excellent research undertaken by radical anthropologist, David Price.

Some are sensible like banning reports beneficial to adversaries. Others aren’t by suppressing information the public has a right to know. For example, whatever affects their welfare and when officials commit crimes. In addition, various Supreme Court decisions limit content suppression to “tangible (or) near certain” instances of public endangerment. Of course, interpretations are crucial, authorities increasingly hardline to get their way.

It shows up in prohibited protests, free expression erosion against government policies, a booklet about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights because freedom of religion and asylum-seeker protection is included, suppressing nonviolent resistance, promoting patriotism over truth, attacking academic freedom, and sanitizing history among other ways, the latter issue addressed in an August 31 Haaretz editorial headlined, “Educating toward indoctrination,” saying:

Frequent Education Ministry school curricula changes “share one common denominator… the same kind of crass, shallow patriotism that glosses over any complicated issue, forcing students to swallow the same rote, sanitized version of the multifaceted, paradoxical Israeli story (while) silenc(ing) all critical thought.”

History books have been rewritten. Nakba teaching is banned, Netanyahu once calling its use tantamount to spreading propaganda against Israel. Yet for Palestinians, it’s their defining issue, the catastrophic mass slaughter and theft of their homeland. Not taught in Jewish schools, it was introduced in Arab Israeli ones in 2007 for children aged eight and nine.

In July 2009, Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar’s spokesman, Yisrael Twito, said:

“After studying the matter with education experts it was decided that the term nakba should be removed. It is inconceivable that in Israel we would talk about the establishment of the state as a catastrophe.”

Henceforth, only praise for the Jewish state is allowed. Yet a passage in the “offending” textbook said the following:

“The Arabs call (the 1948) war the nakba — a war of catastrophe, loss and humiliation — and the Jews call it the Independence War.”

Distorting and suppressing truth by “nakba” denial doesn’t change it. It’s the Palestinian “Holocaust,” six months of horrific slaughter, mass atrocities, land theft, and displacement, turning historic Palestine into Israel, the crime and its importance never erased from the collective consciousness of new generations who teach it to their children.

In today’s Israel, even the Oslo Accords have been erased, while “Holocaust” studies are expanded “to strengthen Jewish identity. According to Haaretz, “Now the school system’s main civics textbook will be modified because it states that ‘since its establishment, the State of Israel has engaged in a policy of discrimination against its Arab citizens.’ ”

In other words, truth and critical thought are anathema in Israeli schools, by order of the Netanyahu government’s Zvi Zameret, the Education Ministry Pedagogic Secretariat head. As minister of censorship, he intends indoctrination and a “patronizing version of the past,” insulting students by denying them real education, the kind Haaretz journalists and editorial writers still offer, but for how long given disturbing trends, covered in earlier articles accessed through the following links: here, here, and here.

Most recently on August 21, an article covered academic freedom, under attack and threatened because hardline Israeli extremists favor McCathyist censorship against free expression. As a result, anger in academia was aroused, the latest example reported on August 29 by International Middle East Media Center writer Saed Bannoura headlining, “Israeli universities condemn ‘witch hunt’ by right-wing groups,” saying:

“In a joint statement by Israel’s largest and most prominent universities, the academic leadership challenged a foreign-funded campaign to undermine academic freedom in the name of Zionism, led by radical Israeli rightists and Christian fundamentalists,” a threatening sinister partnership.

University officials condemned “this dangerous attempt to create a thought police,” targeting professors considered too left-leaning. The Institute for Zionist Strategies demands review of their assigned readings and class content as well as “balancing” them with hardliners, saying otherwise pressure will be put on major donors to cease support. To their credit, university authorities refused to accede to extortion or threats backed by scholars, intellectuals and Haaretz editorial writers, another August 20 effort headlined, “Protecting academia,” saying:

“a pluralistic, democratic society is incompatible with external interference in course curricula of lecturers’ political views.” Censorship has no place in academia, the media or anywhere in a free society if it’s to stay that way. As in America, in Israel, it’s fast eroding.

Historical Revisionism in Textbooks

Nurit Peled-Elhannan is an Israeli peace activist, Hebrew University Professor, and one of the founders of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine. She’s also a recipient of the Sakharov Prize for Human Rights and Freedom of Speech, awarded annually by the European Parliament to honor individuals or organizations active in the defense of human rights and freedom.

Earlier in 2010, her article titled “Legitimation of massacres in Israeli school history books… examine(d) reports about massacres in eight Israeli secondary school history books, published between 1998 and 2009.”

It explained how they’re legitimized verbally and visually, rewriting history to justify the “killing of Palestinians as an effective tool to preserve a secure Jewish state with a Jewish majority,” as well as prepare Israeli youths to be good soldiers, and to justify a repressive occupation.

Some textbooks, especially more recent ones, explain massacres as “routine battles or successful military operations.” Others present them as “transgression(s)” or diversions “from official plans” but nonetheless legitimated by their positive outcome, benefitting Jews over Arabs.

Yet massacres are defined as barbarous wanton murder of “usually helpless or unresisting human beings under circumstances of atrocity or cruelty,” Israeli history strewn with examples, worst of all its so-called “war of independence,” but many others also, involving cold-blooded murder of innocent civilians.

An earlier article covered some of the most egregious.

Today, they’re sanitized and forgotten. Earlier they were wrongly justified as they are today, including decades of extreme repression, ethnic cleansing, imperial wars, and repeated attacks against noncombatants, ideologically committed for an ethnically pure Greater Israel, the end justifying the means no matter how barbaric or criminal.

For example, the October 1953 Kibya massacre, ordered by Ariel Sharon, when Israeli forces attacked the Jordanian village, northwest of Jerusalem. Using mortars, machine guns, rifles and explosives, they blew up 42 houses, local schools and the mosque, killing every man, woman and child found — in total, 75 noncombatant villagers, slaughtered in cold blood, an atrocity by any standard portrayed as a “success (that) restored the morale and dignity of the army and helped it become a deterring vigorous (force) whose long arm can reach the enemy deep in its own territory.”

The moral — killing is good, slaughter is better, and in great enough numbers combined with atrocities best of all, a lesson taught Israeli youths preparing them to be soldiers.

Like all imperial states, Israel specializes in historical revisionism, legitimizing massacres in school texts, transforming the outrageous into liberating heroism, “align(ed) with the goals of Zionism and with Jewish creed.” They become acceptable acts in times of conflicts. Utility is all that matters, justifying the unjustifiable for a greater good, manipulating young minds to believe it and Jewish exceptionalism, including the mythology about Israel’s “war of independence.”

Portrayed as outgunned and outnumbered by Arab armies, the truth is mirror opposite. Zionist forces neutralized the Jordanians, the strongest regional army, bribing them not to fight with 20% of historic Palestine, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

In 1948, on the eve of battle, Jewish forces numbered around 50,000 against a hopelessly outmanned, outgunned irregular Palestinian force of about 7,000. Until May 15, 1948, when Israel was established, other Arab nations deferred, acting belatedly with token forces proving no match for the superior Israelis.

It was a walkover, 78% of Palestine seized; the Jewish state created; 800,000 Palestinians massacred or displaced; 531 villages and 11 urban neighborhoods destroyed; no quarter given in committing mass murder; ethnic cleaning; vast destruction of villages, communities and crops; rapes and other atrocities.

Yet Israeli historiography portrays the war as liberating, including the myth that Palestinians left voluntarily, fearing harm from invading Arab armies — the same token ones never showing up until it was too late to matter, ill-equipped, fighting with no commitment. Proving no match for superior Israelis, they exited and went home. The war’s outcome was never in doubt, the fate of Palestinians sealed, atrocities against them to this day sanitized, including memoricide of the Nakba, fortress Israel and revisionist history enforcing it.

Another myth as well about the region’s only democracy, affording rights solely to Jews, and increasingly less of them, Israel solidifying the same elitist society as in America, assuring most rights to the privileged, eroding ones to ordinary Israelis, becoming more like Arabs on their own and out of luck under hardline governance no longer caring.

Israeli thought control enforces it, including crackdowns on dissent — an open, just, free society eroding to conceal growing harshness against anyone challenging injustice, including journalists and academics unwilling to support wrong over right and saying so. As in America, it’s now a crime.

One student even proceeded to create a Facebook group whose sole goal is to have me sacked. So far over 2,100 people (many of them nonstudents) have joined. In addition to death wishes and declarations that I should be exiled, the site includes a call on students to spy on me during class. “We believe,” ends a message written to the group, “that if we conduct serious and profound work, we can, with the help of each and every one of you, gather enough material to influence … Neve Gordon’s status at the university, and maybe even bring about his dismissal.”

Such personal attacks are part of a much broader assault on Israeli higher education and its professors. Two recent incidents exemplify the protofascist logic that is being deployed to undermine the pillars of academic freedom in Israel, while also revealing that the assault on Israeli academe is being backed by neoconservative forces in the United States.

The first incident involves a report published by the Institute for Zionist Strategies, in Israel, which analyzed course syllabi in Israeli sociology departments and accused professors of a “post-Zionist” bias. The institute defines post-Zionism as “the pretense to undermine the foundations of the Zionist ethos and an affinity with the radical leftist stream.” In addition to the usual Israeli leftist suspects, intellectuals like Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm also figure in as post-Zionists in the report.

The institute sent the report to the Israel Council for Higher Education, which is the statutory body responsible for Israeli universities, and the council, in turn, sent it to all of the university presidents. Joseph Klafter, president of Tel-Aviv University, actually asked several professors to hand over their syllabi for his perusal, though he later asserted that he had no intention of policing faculty members and was appalled by the report.

A few days later, the top headline of the Israeli daily Haaretz revealed that another right-wing organization, Im Tirtzu (If You Will It), had threatened Ben-Gurion University, where I am a professor and a former chair of the government and politics department. Im Tirtzu told the university’s president, Rivka Carmi, that it would persuade donors to place funds in escrow unless the university took steps “to put an end to the anti-Zionist tilt” in its politics and government department. The organization demanded a change “in the makeup of the department’s faculty and the content of its syllabi,” giving the president a month to meet its ultimatum. This time my head was not the only one it wanted.

President Carmi immediately asserted that Im Tirtzu’s demands were a serious threat to academic freedom. However, Minister of Education Gideon Sa’ar, who is also chairman of the Council for Higher Education, restricted his response to a cursory statement that any move aimed at harming donations to universities must be stopped. Mr. Sa’ar’s response was disturbingly predictable. Only a few months earlier, he had spoken at an Im Tirtzu gathering, following its publication of a report about the so-called leftist slant of syllabi in Israeli political-science departments. At the gathering, he asserted that even though he had not read the report, its conclusions would be taken very seriously.

Although the recent scuffle seems to be about academic freedom, the assault on the Israeli academe is actually part of a much wider offensive against liberal values. Numerous forces in Israel are mobilizing in order to press forward an extreme-right political agenda.

They have chosen the universities as their prime target for two main reasons. First, even though Israeli universities as institutions have never condemned any government policy—not least the restrictions on Palestinian universities’ academic freedom—they are home to many vocal critics of Israel’s rights-abusive policies. Those voices are considered traitorous and consequently in need of being stifled. Joining such attacks are Americans like Alan M. Dershowitz, who in a recent visit to Tel-Aviv University called for the resignations of professors who supported the Palestinian call for a boycott of Israeli goods and divestment from Israeli companies until the country abides by international human-rights law. He named Rachel Giora and Anat Matar, both tenured professors at Tel Aviv University, as part of that group.

Second, all Israeli universities depend on public funds for about 90 percent of their budget. This has been identified as an Achilles heel. The idea is to exploit the firm alliance those right-wing organizations have with government members and provide the ammunition necessary to make financial support for universities conditional on the dissemination of nationalist thought and the suppression of “subversive ideas.” Thus, in the eyes of those right-wing Israeli organizations, the universities are merely arms of the government.

And, yet, Im Tirtzu and other such organizations would not have been effective on their own; they depend on financial support from backers in the United States. As it turns out, some of their ideological allies are willing to dig deep into their pockets to support the cause.

The Rev. John C. Hagee, the leader of Christians United for Israel, has been Im Tirtzu’s sugar daddy, and his ministries have provided the organization with at least $100,000. After Im Tirtzu’s most recent attack, however, even Mr. Hagee concluded that it had gone overboard and decided to stop giving funds. The Hudson Institute, a neoconservative think tank that helped shape the Bush administration’s Middle East policies, has funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Institute for Zionist Strategies over the past few years, and was practically its only donor. For Christians United and the Hudson Institute, the attack on academic freedom is clearly also a way of advancing much broader objectives.

The Hudson Institute, for example, has neo-imperialist objectives in the Middle East, and a member of its Board of Trustees is in favor of attacking Iran. Christian United’s eschatological position (whereby the Second Coming is dependent on the gathering of all Jews in Israel), includes support for such an attack. The scary partnership between such Israeli and American organizations helps reveal the true aims of this current assault on academic freedom: to influence Israeli policy and eliminate the few liberal forces that are still active in the country. The atmosphere within Israel is conducive to such intervention.

Nonetheless, Im Tirtzu’s latest threat backfired, as did that of the Institute for Zionist Strategies’ report; the assaults have been foiled for now. The presidents of all the universities in Israel condemned the reports and promised never to bow down to this version of McCarthyism.

Despite those declarations, the rightist organizations have actually made considerable headway. Judging from comments on numerous online news sites, the populist claim that the public’s tax money is being used to criticize Israel has convinced many readers that the universities should be more closely monitored by the government and that “dissident” professors must be fired. Moreover, the fact that the structure of Israeli universities has changed significantly over the past five years, and that now most of the power lies in the hands of presidents rather than the faculty, will no doubt be exploited to continue the assault on academic freedom. Top university administrators are already stating that if the Israeli Knesset approves a law against the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement for Palestine, the law will be used to fire faculty members who support the movement.

More importantly, there is now the sense among many faculty members that a thought police has been formed—and that many of its officers are actually members of the academic community. The fact that students are turning themselves into spies and that syllabi are being collected sends a chilling message to faculty members across the country. I, for one, have decided to include in my syllabi a notice restricting the use of recording devices during class without my prior consent. And many of my friends are now using Gmail instead of the university e-mail accounts for fear that their correspondence will in some way upset administrators.

Israeli academe, which was once considered a bastion of free speech, has become the testing ground for the success of the assault on liberal values. And although it is still extremely difficult to hurt those who have managed to enter the academic gates, those who have not yet passed the threshold are clearly being monitored.

I know of one case in which a young academic was not hired due to his membership in Courage to Refuse, an organization of reserve soldiers who refuse to do military duty in the West Bank. In a Google and Facebook age, the thought police can easily disqualify a candidate based on petitions signed and even online “friends” one has. Israeli graduate students are following such developments, and for them the message is clear.

While in politics nothing is predetermined, Israel is heading down a slippery slope. Israeli academe is now an arena where some of the most fundamental struggles of a society are being played out. The problem is that instead of struggling over basic human rights, we are now struggling over the right to struggle.

Yeshayahu Leibowitz, the renowned scholar of Judaism and philosophy and the editor of several volumes of the Encyclopedia Hebraica had the following to say about Zionism and Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians:

The big crisis of the Jewish people is that the overwhelming majority of the Jews genuinely desire to be Jewish ‑‑ but they have no content for their Judaism other than a piece of colored rag attached to the end of a pole and a military uniform. The consciousness and the desire to be Jewish did not vanish, rather they are transformed today into a Judeo‑Nazi mentality.³

Gideon Levy, the highly regarded columnist from the Israeli daily Haaretz, has also made a comparison between Germany in the 1930′s and Israel today.

Thus comparing Germany of the 1920s and early ’30s to Israel at the start of the third millennium is not only permissible but imperative ‑ for gaining an insight into how barbarous regimes develop, grasping the differences (and there are many profound ones), and discerning the similarities, which ought to worry us.⁴

Another Israeli intellectual Yitzhak Laor in an article, “The soft underbelly and the victim,” published in Haaretz also makes an interesting allusion to the past.

The name of this Israeli ethos is “who are you to tell us?” We are destroying Arab East Jerusalem? Who are you to tell us that it is wrong? We killed masses of Palestinians in Gaza? Who are you to tell us anything? We have maintained a brutal dictatorship in the territories for 42 years — longer than any other military occupation of the post‑World War II era? Who are you to tell us? We’re allowed. We’re your victims. The past belongs to us. We will do as we please with it.⁵

Here is what Gideon Levy writes on the prevalence of racism in Israeli society:

Now that we can use the term “racism,” the time has come to admit our society is absolutely racist, that all its components are racist. The legal system, for example, is no less tainted than Petah Tikva’s Morasha school. In many cases there is one law for a Jew and another for an Arab. The Bank of Israel, a state institution no less than the Morasha school, with 900 employees, has always been “clean” of Arab employees except sometimes one or two. Some 70,000 Israeli citizens, all Arab of course, are living in unrecognized villages, without electricity or running water, without an access road and sometimes without a school. Why? Because they are Arabs. Every week at soccer matches we hear racist epithets and chants, the kind teams in Europe are severely penalized for. Here, the referees do not even bother reporting them….

And we have said nothing yet about the attitude toward foreign workers, the occupation (the greatest racist curse) nor about the attitude toward Mizrahim since the founding of the state. The list is long and shameful.⁶

Here are the words of Yael Lotan, another Israeli author and journalist, on the subject of racism and criticism of Israel.

It should be perfectly legitimate to criticize Israel. Giving it uncritical, unqualified support in all its actions, its violations of dozens of UN Security Council resolutions, its policy of assassination and destruction ‑ that is a racist position, a position that says “Arabs don’t count, Arabs have no rights, Arabs are vermin and whatever is done to them ‑ in Palestine, Syria, Iraq or Lebanon ‑ is legitimate. And Islam is the same as Fascism.”

Now that is real anti‑Semitism.⁷

There was an interesting book review published in Haaretz, on February 29, 2008, written by Tom Segev. It was a review of a book titled, When and How Was the Jewish People Invented? (published by Resling in Hebrew). It is authored by Israeli historian Shlomo Zand (also spelled Sand). Prof. Zand teaches history at Tel Aviv University. The book became a best seller in Israel.⁸ Segev writes:

…in one of the most fascinating and challenging books published here in a long time. There never was a Jewish people, only a Jewish religion, and the exile also never happened — hence there was no return. Zand rejects most of the stories of national‑identity formation in the Bible, including the exodus from Egypt and, most satisfactorily, the horrors of the conquest under Joshua. It’s all fiction and myth that served as an excuse for the establishment of the State of Israel, he asserts.⁹

This information and arguments have been around for a long time but it is interesting to see them published in one of Israel’s leading daily newspapers and presented in a best seller written by an Israeli historian.¹⁰ Segev summarizes the arguments in Zand’s book as referencing many existing studies on groups that converted to Judaism, “some of which were written in Israel but shunted out of the central discourse.” According to Segev the book describes the Jewish kingdom of Himyar in the southern Arabian Peninsula, the Jewish Berbers in North Africa, Jews in Spain that arose from the Arab conquest, and European‑born individuals who had also become Jews. Zand also discusses the large Jewish Khazar Kingdom in the Caucasus. Segev writes,

We find, then, that the members of a variety of peoples and races, blond and black, brown and yellow, became Jews in large numbers. According to Zand, the Zionist need to devise for them a shared ethnicity and historical continuity produced a long series of inventions and fictions, along with an invocation of racist theses. Some were concocted in the minds of those who conceived the Zionist movement, while others were offered as the findings of genetic studies conducted in Israel.¹¹

It is somewhat ironic that issues and subjects that relate to the Palestinians and Zionism that are virtually taboo in North America are openly discussed in Israel. These same subjects are much more openly discussed in Europe and in the rest of the World.¹²

The journalist Gideon Levy wrote the following commentary on Zionism and the Israeli Left in the Israeli daily Haaretz. Can you ever imagine seeing a similar opinion piece in the mainstream North American media? Levy wrote:

And what is Zionism nowadays? An archaic and outdated concept born in a different reality, a vague and delusive concept marking the difference between the permitted and the proscribed. Does Zionism mean settlement in the territories? Occupation? The legitimization of every act of violence and injustice? The left stammered. Any statement critical of Zionism, even the Zionism of the occupation, was considered a taboo that the left did not dare break. The right grabbed a monopoly on Zionism, leaving the left with its self‑righteousness.

A Jewish and democratic state? The Zionist left said yes automatically, fudging the difference between the two and not daring to give either priority. Legitimization for every war? The Zionist left stammered again — yes to the beginning and no to the continuation, or something like that. Solving the refugee problem and the right of return? Acknowledgment of the wrongdoing of 1948? Unmentionable. This left has now, rightly, reached the end of its road.¹³

One of the most prominent Israeli critics is Avi Shlaim. He is professor of international relations at Oxford University. Shlaim is one of the world’s foremost authorities on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and the author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World and many other books.¹⁴ Shlaim has commented on the character of the debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in North America,

On the other side of the Atlantic, on the other hand, the public debate on the subject of Israel is much more fierce and partisan, leaving relatively little space for the dignity of difference. The passion with which many prominent American Jews defend Israel betrays an atavistic attitude of “my country, right or wrong.”¹⁵

In an article published in the International Herald Tribune the Oxford professor addressed the question, “Is Zionism today the real enemy of the Jews?” His answer was Yes:

Sharon’s government is waging a savage war against the Palestinian people. Its policies include the confiscation of land; the demolition of houses; the uprooting of trees; curfews, roadblocks and 736 checkpoints that inflict horrendous hardships; the systematic abuse of Palestinian human rights; and the building of the illegal wall on the West Bank, a wall that is as much about land‑grabbing as it is about security.

It is this brand of cruel Zionism that is the real enemy of what remains of liberal Israel and of the Jews outside Israel. It is the enemy because it fuels the flames of virulent and sometimes violent anti‑Semitism. Israel’s policies are the cause; hatred of Israel and anti‑Semitism are the consequences …

Israel’s image today is negative not because it is a Jewish state but because it habitually transgresses the norms of acceptable international behavior. Indeed, Israel is increasingly perceived as a rogue state, as an international pariah, and as a threat to world peace.

This perception of Israel is a major factor in the recent resurgence of anti‑Semitism in Europe and in the rest of the world. In this sense, Zionism today is the real enemy of the Jews. It is a tragedy that a state that was built as a haven for the Jewish people after the Holocaust is now one of the least safe places on earth for Jews to live in. Israel ought to withdraw from the occupied territories not as a favor to the Palestinians but as a favor to itself and to world Jewry for, as Karl Marx noted, “a people that oppresses another cannot itself remain free.”¹⁶

After Israel launched its attack on Gaza on December 27, 2009 Shlaim published the following statement criticizing Israel’s actions.

The only way to make sense of Israel’s senseless war in Gaza is through understanding the historical context. Establishing the state of Israel in May 1948 involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians. British officials bitterly resented American partisanship on behalf of the infant state. On 2 June 1948, Sir John Troutbeck wrote to the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, that the Americans were responsible for the creation of a gangster state headed by “an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders”. I used to think that this judgment was too harsh but Israel’s vicious assault on the people of Gaza, and the Bush administration’s complicity in this assault, have reopened the question….

This brief review of Israel’s record over the past four decades makes it difficult to resist the conclusion that it has become a rogue state with “an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders”. A rogue state habitually violates international law, possesses weapons of mass destruction and practises terrorism — the use of violence against civilians for political purposes. Israel fulfils all of these three criteria; the cap fits and it must wear it. Israel’s real aim is not peaceful coexistence with its Palestinian neighbours but military domination. It keeps compounding the mistakes of the past with new and more disastrous ones. Politicians, like everyone else, are of course free to repeat the lies and mistakes of the past. But it is not mandatory to do so.¹⁷

Many other Israelis also protested the Israeli assault on Gaza. For example there is a letter from 22 prominent Israelis who published an appeal in The Guardian. They wrote:

We, as Israeli citizens, raise our voices to call on EU leaders: use sanctions against Israel’s brutal policies and join the active protests of Bolivia and Venezuela. We appeal to the citizens of Europe: please attend to the Palestinian Human Rights Organisation’s call, supported by more than 540 Israeli citizens (www.freegaza.org/en/home/): boycott Israeli goods and Israeli institutions; follow resolutions such as those made by the cities of Athens, Birmingham and Cambridge (US). This is the only road left. Help us all, please!”¹⁸

Judge Richard Goldstone’s UN Commission of Inquiry which investigated the December 27, 2008 Israeli attack on Gaza and the Palestinian response made a number of findings that were critical of both Israel and Hamas. As reported in the New York Times, when, “Asked about accusations that he was anti‑Israel,” Judge Goldstone acknowledged he was Jewish and said, “It is grossly wrong to label a mission or to label a report critical of Israel as being anti‑Israel.”¹⁹ While the UN Commission of Inquiry was widely attacked in Israel there were a number of Israelis who supported its critical findings.²⁰

One of the most outspoken and courageous Israeli journalists is Amira Hass. Since 2000, Amira Hass has been the only Jewish Israeli reporter living in Occupied Palestine — formerly in Gaza City, and now based out of Ramallah. She is a correspondent for the Israeli daily Haaretz.²¹

There are many Israeli academics and intellectuals who are extremely critical of Zionism and of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians.²² To quote a study published by a group affiliated with the Israel Academia Monitor:

…The opinions and claims of Israel academics against Jews, Zionism and Israel are discussed and analyzed in this study. It is estimated that some 20 to 25% of people who teach the Humanities and Social Sciences in Israel’s universities and colleges have expressed extreme anti‑Zionist positions, largely, though not exclusively, in regard to Israel’s policies and actions vis‑à‑vis the Arab Palestinians … ²³

The fact is that many Israelis academics and activists have voiced strong criticism of Zionism and Israeli state policy toward the Palestinians.

Other critical voices from Israel’s academia and activists circles include the late Professor Israel Shahak former Chair of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights;²⁴ the late Baruch Kimmerling, Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Hebrew University of Jerusalem;²⁵ retired Anthropology professor Jeff Halper now head of Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions;²⁶ Tel Aviv University professor Gary Sussman;²⁷ Felica Langer, a well known human rights lawyer who left Israel and now resides in Germany;²⁸ Michael Warschawski, co-founder of the Alternative Information Center;²⁹ Eitan Bronstein Chair of Zochrot, which means “Remember,” and works to remind Israelis about the Nakba or Palestinian catastrophe;³⁰ the late linguist and journalist Tanya Reinhart, Professor of theoretical linguistics and Media and Cultural Studies at Tel Aviv University and at the University of Utrecht;³¹ the late Victoria Buch professor at Hebrew University;³² Avi Kleinberg, professor of History at Tel Aviv University;³³ Dr. Yossi Dahan, Chair of the Adva Centre, manager of the Human Rights Division at the Academic College of Law in Ramat Gan, and an editor of Ha’Oketz;³⁴ author Gershom Gorenberg;³⁵ Sammy Smooha a sociologist who served as Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Haifa;³⁶ Yossi Swartz professor at the Tel Aviv University Law School;³⁷ Allegra Pacheco, an Israeli human rights attorney, noted for prosecuting the first Israeli torture trial;³⁸ Rabbi Arik Ascherman, head of Rabbis for Human Rights;³⁹ Hannah Mermelstein, co‑founder and co‑director of Birthright Unplugged;⁴⁰ Carlo Strenger, professor of psychology at Tel Aviv University;⁴¹ Oren Yiftachel, Geography professor Ben-Gurion University;⁴² New Israeli Historian Ilan Pappe, presently the Chair of the History Department at the University of Essex in England, and formerly of history department of the University of Haifa in Israel;⁴³ world renown author Jacobo Timerman;⁴⁴ Neve Gordon Chair of the Political Science Department at Ben-Gurion University;⁴⁵ Avraham Oz, associate professor of theater at the University of Haifa;⁴⁶ Dror Etkes, who headed Peace Now’s Settlements Watch Project for five years and now heads the Land Advocacy Project of Yesh Din, a group working against violation of Palestinians’ rights by settlers;⁴⁷ Erik Schechter, the former military correspondent for The Jerusalem Post;⁴⁸ Yosefa Loshitzky, Professor of Film, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of East London;⁴⁹ Yacov Ben Efrat of Challenge Magazine;⁵⁰ Amos Oz, who Steven Plaut describes as “arguably Israel’s best‑known writer;”⁵¹ and another famous Israeli writer with an international reputation, A.B. Yehoshua;⁵² Tikva Honig-Parnass, editor of Between the Lines;⁵³ author and journalist Amnon Kapeliouk;⁵⁴ Oren Ben-Dor, professor of Legal and Political Philosophy at the School of Law, University of Southampton, UK;⁵⁵ Amia Lieblich, professor of Psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and author of numerous books on the psychology of Israeli society including Tin Soldiers on Jerusalem Beach;⁵⁶ Haaretz columnist Nehema Shtrasler;⁵⁷ Israeli‑American human rights lawyer Sari Bashi;⁵⁸ Adam Atsan an Israeli‑American who is involved in Kesher Enoshi: Progressives For Activism in Israel;⁵⁹ author Akiva Orr;⁶⁰ David Newman, professor of political geography at Ben‑Gurion University and editor of the International journal, Geopolitics;⁶¹ author Susan Nathan;⁶² author and journalist Yael Lotan;⁶³ Israeli Television correspondent Yigal Laviv;⁶⁴ professor of political science at Tel Aviv university Ze’ev Maoz;⁶⁵ Haaretz publisher Amos Schocken;⁶⁶ Haaretz editor Danny Rubinstein;⁶⁷ and Yitzhak Laor, one of Israel’s most distinguished poets, novelists and a longtime editor and writer for the daily newspaper Haaretz, who also edits an independent journal of literature and political thought, Mita’am;⁶⁸ Adi Opir professor of philosophy at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University and also a fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute;⁶⁹ Akiva Eldar, Israeli journalist and author, currently chief political columnist and editorial writer for Haaretz;⁷⁰ journalist Meron Rapoport;⁷¹ an orthodox Jewish studies professor who writes under the nom de plume of Jeremiah (Jerry) Haber and runs the Magnes Zionist blog;⁷² B. Michael one of Israel’s most respected journalists who until recently with writing for Yedioth Aharonoth;⁷³ Ran HaCohen professor at Tel Aviv University’s Department of Comparative Literature and a literary critic for the Israeli daily Yedioth Achronoth;⁷⁴ journalist Shraga Elam;⁷⁵ Hillel Cohen Research Fellow at the Harry S. Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem;⁷⁶ Haaretz journalist and editorial Board member Avirama Golan;⁷⁷ Shai Lahav Editor of the art and culture supplement to Ma’ariv, the country’s most right‑wing newspaper;⁷⁸ journalist and former IDF conscript Seth Freeman;⁷⁹ Yehouda Shenhav professor at Tel Aviv University and the editor of Theory Criticism, an Israeli journal in the area of critical theory and cultural studies;⁸⁰ Eyal Sivan, one of Israel’s leading film makers;⁸¹ Elana Maryles Sztokman, author, educator, writer, researcher and regular contributor to The Jerusalem Post;⁸² Adam Keller journalist and a founder of The Other Israel;⁸³ and Gideon Spiro, a former Israeli Sergeant and journalist;⁸⁴ Israeli Professor Ada Yonath 2009 Nobel Prize winner for chemistry;⁸⁵ to name only a few of the many Israelis who are anti-Zionist, non-Zionist or extremely critical of Zionism and Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians.⁸⁶

Occupation Magazine which is published by a group of anti-Occupation Israelis has an archive of over 36,000 articles, many written by anti-occupation Israelis and Jews from around the world. It also provides links to dozens of Israeli human rights organizations, many not listed in this article. These Israeli human rights organizations include B’Tselem,⁸⁷ Machsom Watch, Rabbis for Human Rights,⁸⁸ and The Israeli Public Committee Against Torture,⁸⁹ Yesh Gvul, the movement for soldiers of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) refusing to serve in the Occupied Territories,⁹⁰ and Refusniks, young Israelis who refuse to serve in the Israeli military.⁹¹

For a collection of Israeli opposition to Zionism and opposition to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians one can review The Other Israel: Voices of Refusal and Dissent, edited by Roane Carey and Jonathan Shainin. It contains articles very critical of Israel’s policies, written by 27 prominent Israelis. The Forward was written by a prominent Israeli author and journalist Tom Segev.⁹²

The list of writers in The Other Israel include Ami Ayalon, former head of Israel’s General Security Service or Shin Bet; Yigal Bonner professor at Tel Aviv University; author David Grossman; Aviv Lavie Haaretz media reporter; attorney Shamai Leibowitz; Ishai Menuchin, a major in the Israeli Defense Forces Reserves and head of Yesh Gvul (the Israelis organization of selective refusal); Dr. Yigal Shocat former Surgeon General for the Israeli Airforce; Gila Svirsky chair of B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories; and Sergio Yahni co-director of the Alternative Information Centre, among others already cited in this article.⁹³

There is a growing concern amongst some Israelis that there is a growing rift between diaspora Jews and Israeli Jews. Professor Yehezkel Dror, the founding president of the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute (JPPPI), “offered a somber take on relations between Israel and Diaspora Jewry” and pointed “the finger of blame at Israel’s leadership for the growing rift between the two.” Professor Dror stated that, “There is no ignoring the fact … that at the heart of the rift between Israel and Jewish communities abroad lies the notion that Diaspora youth have a negative views of Israel politically, nationally and socially.”⁹⁴

Gideon Levy in an interview with Mario Vargas Llosa, the prize‑winning Peruvian writer and a laureate of the prestigious Jerusalem Prize, published in Haaretz quoted the distinguished author saying that “only the dissidents will save the State of Israel.”⁹⁵

1. See “Jewish Criticism of Zionism,” by Edward C. Corrigan, American Arab Affairs, Winter 1990‑91, Number 35, pp. 94-116.
2. Charles Glass, “Jews Against Zionism: Israeli Jewish Anti‑Zionism,” Journal of Palestine Studies, Autumn 1975/ Winter 1976, p. 57.
3. “Professor Leibowitz Called for Counter Terror: ‘Had I been Younger I Would Have Done It My Self,’” Yediot Aharonot, February 13, 1983, cited in Uri Davis, “Israel’s Zionist Society: Consequences for Internal Opposition and the Necessity for External Intervention,” Judaism or Zionism, eds. EAFORD and AJAZ, (London: Zed Books, 1986), p. 200. For more of his views see Joe Franklin, “Interview with Yeshayahu Leibowitz,” American‑Arab Affairs, Fall 1988, pp. 75‑77.
4. “Elsewhere, perhaps,” by Gideon Levy, Haaretz, September 9, 2003. See also “One racist nation,” by Gideon Levy, Haaretz, March 26, 2006; and “The threat of the demographic threat,” by Gideon Levy, Haaretz, July 22, 2007.
5. “The soft underbelly and the victim,” by Yitzhak Laor, Haaretz, August 26, 2009.
6. “Ethiopian students affair shows prevalent racism in Israel,” by Gideon Levy, Haaretz, September 3, 2009.
7. “Who is anti‑Semitic?,” by Yael Lotan, Hagada Hasmalit, November 13, 2007.
8. “Controversial Bestseller Shakes the Foundation of the Israeli State,” by Joshua Holland, AlterNet, January 28, 2009.
9. “An Invention Called ‘The Jewish People,’” by Tom Segev, Haaretz, February 29, 2008.
10. For a somewhat critical review of the book see, “Jewish History Inventing an invention,” by Israel Bartal, Haaretz, July 2, 2008. It is interesting that this author also confirms many of the facts listed by Zand but contests the claim that this information was deliberately hidden as a way to promote the development of the concept of a common “national” origin of the Jewish people.
11. Ibid. There is extensive documentation on Khazars’ conversion to Judaism. See for example D.M. Dunlop, The History of the Jewish Khazars, (Princeton University Press, 1954). Also See Arthur Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe, (New York: Random House, 1976); Peter B. Golden, Kharar Studies: A Historico-Philological Inquiry into the Origins of the Khazars: Vol 1, (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 1980); “The Grand Illusion of Jewish Ethnicity,” by Alfred Lilienthal, Middle East Policy, Fall 1992, Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 106-117; Martin Gilbert, The Dent Atlas of Jewish History (5th ed.) (J. M. Dent: London, 1993) p.24. The Gilbert map shows Khazaria as being approximately the same size the present day Ukraine; Kevin Alan Brook, The Jews of Khazaria, (New York: Jason Aronson, Inc., 1999). The conversion of the Khazars is readily acknowledged in a number of Jewish Encyclopedias. See for example The Jewish Encyclopedia Vol IV, (Ktav Publishing House), “The Chazars,” pp. 1-7; “Khazars,” The Encyclopaedia Judaica, (The MacMillian Company) Vol. 10, pp. 944-954; “The Himyarites and the Khazar Kings,” Medieval Jewish Civilization: An Encyclopedia, Norman Roth, Editor, (Routledge: New York and London, 2003), pp. 385-386; “Khazars,” The New Standard Jewish Encvyclopedia,( 7th Edition), Geoffrey Wigoder Editor in Chief, (Facts on File: New York and Oxford, 1992) pp. 554-555.
12. For example see, “Across West Bank daily tragedies go unseen,” by Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian, April 27, 2002; “New Israeli Scholars Face up to Israel’s Origins,” by Eric Rouleau and “Are the Jews an Invented People” by Eric Rouleau, Le Monde diplomatique, 10 May, 2008; “Israel’s Lies,” by Henry Siegman, London Review of Books, January 29, 2009; “A crisis in Judaism: For many Jews today, Israel is not a normal state — it is a cause or ideal, and therein lies the problem,” by Brian Klug, The Guardian, January 15, 2009; “Israel’s war crimes,” by Richard Falk, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, March, 2009; “Gaza, One More Bantustan: Palestine the view from South Africa,” by Alain Gresh, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, August, 2009, pp. 4‑5; “Israel’s state sponsored injustice,” by Seth Freedman, The Guardian, August 17, 2009; and “Israel’s culture of impunity,” by Sharon Weill, Le Monde diplomatique, September 2009.
13. “Does Zionism legitimize every act of violence,” by Gideon Levy, Haaretz, February 12, 2009. For a similar opinion see, “Who is a terrorist?,” by Gideon Levy, Haaretz, April 16, 2006; and “Someone must stop Israel’s rampant madness in Gaza,” by Gideon Levy, Haaretz, January 16, 2009.
14. Among his books are Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World, (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2001); and (as co-editor) The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). His most recent book is Lion of Jordan: the Life of King Hussein in War and Peace, (London: Allan Lane/Penguin, 2007).
15. “Israel free speech and the Oxford Union,” by Avi Shalim, Alternet and Informed Comment, November 13, 2007.
16. “Is Zionism today the real enemy of the Jews: Yes,” by Avi Shlaim, International Herald Tribune, February 4, 2005.
17. “How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe,” by Avi Shlaim, The Guardian, January 7, 2009.
18. See, “Words and deeds in the Middle East,” The Guardian, January 17, 2009.
19. “Inquiry Finds Gaza War Crimes From Both Sides,” by Neil Macfarquhar, New York Times, September 15, 2009.
20. For an opinion article critical of Goldstone’s findings see, “Goldstone report unfair to Israel,” by Jeremy Sharon, Los Angeles Times, September 18, 2009. Jeremy Sharon is a researcher and writer based in Jerusalem. He has worked at a number of Israeli think tanks and served in the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit. See also “Disgrace in The Hague,” by Gideon Levy, Haaretz, September 17, 2009. For a discussion of articles published in the Israeli press supporting Judge Goldstone see “The Goldstone Report and the Debate in Israel, ” by Edward C. Corrigan, Dissident Voice, December 2, 2009. http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/12/the-goldstone-report-and-the-debate-in-israel/. It was also published in Occupation Magazine in Israel.
21. See for example her articles, “The founders of apartheid would be proud, The High Court of Justice is in no hurry,” by Amira Hass, Haaretz, Janaury 17, 2007; “Pots of urine feces on walls how IDF troops vandalized Gaza homes,” by Amira Hass, Haaretz, March 6, 2009; “Out of bounds?,” by Amira Hass, Haaretz, September 3, 2009; “Mahmoud Abbas’ chronic submissiveness,” by Amira Hass, Haaretz, October 6, 2009. Amira Hass is the Haaretz correspondent for the Occupied Territories. Born in Jerusalem in 1956, Hass joined Haaretz in 1989, and has been in her current position since 1993. As correspondent for the Territories, she has spent three years living in Gaza, which served of the basis of her widely acclaimed book, Drinking the Sea at Gaza. She has lived in the West Bank city of Ramallah since 1997. Hass is also the author of two other books, both of which are compilations of her articles.
22. See ALEF WATCH IsraCampus.Org “Big brother is watching, and “Monitoring Israel’s Academic Fifth Column Following anti‑Israel Extremism on the Israeli Campus.” The site lists 119 Israeli academics who are targeted by the organization and deemed to be “extreme critics.” Their web site is http://www.isracampus.org.il/index.htm. For an example an article critical of attacks made against Israeli academic’s who are opposed to Israeli policies toward the Palestinians see, “A McCarthyite attempt to brand academics,” by Lily Galili, Haaretz, November 30, 2007.
23. “Our Inner Scourge: The Catastrophe of Israel Academics,” by Shlomo Sharan, ACPR Policy Paper No, 171, 2007 in cooperation with the Israel Academia Monitor.
24. Israel Shahak, “The Racist Nature of Zionism and the Zionistic State of Israel,” The Link, Winter 1975‑1976; and also Israel Shahak Jewish History, Jewish Religion, (London: Pluto Press, 1994); Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky, Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, 2nd ed. (London: Pluto Press, 2003). For an example of the work of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights see Report on the Violation of Human Rights in the Territories during the Uprising, 1988, (Tel Aviv: The Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights, 1988). For a more recent report see “Civil rights group: Israel has reached new heights of racism,” by Yuval Yoaz and Jack Khoury, Haaretz, December 9, 2007.
25. “The Politicide of Palestinian People,” by Baruch Kimmerling, Dissident Voice, June 11, 2002. See also Baruch Kimmerling, Politicide: Ariel Sharon’s War Against the Palestinians, (London: Verso, 2003).
26. “The 94 Percent Solution A Matrix of Control,” by Jeff Halper, Middle East Report 116, Fall 2000; see also “An Israeli Jew in Gaza,” by Jeff Halper, Counterpunch, August 5, 2008. Also “Dismantling the Matrix of Control,” by Jeff Halper, Middle East Report, September 11, 2009.
27. “The Challenge to the Two‑State Solution,” by Gary Sussman, Middle East Report 231, (Summer 2004).
28. Felicia Langer, With My Own Eyes: Israel and the Occupied Territories 1967-1973, (London: Ithaca Press, 1975).
29. Michel Warschawski, Toward an Open Tomb: The Crisis of Israeli Society, trans. Peter Drucker (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004); also see “Citizenship Zionism and separation of religion and state,” by Michael Warschawski, Alternative Information Center (AIC), December 31, 2007. Reprinted in Occupation Magazine, January 8, 2008. “Normalization or Sanctions?,” by Michael Warschawski, Alternative Information Center (AIC), May 18, 2009.
30. “Eitan Bronstein Israelis confront Nakba denial,” Institute for Middle East Understanding, March 10, 2008; see also “A response to the proposal to ban commemoration of the Nakba on Independence Day,” by Eitan Bronstein, Zochrot, YNet News, May 28, 2009 (in Hebrew) republished in Occupation Magazine, Translated by Yuval Orr and Talia Fried.
31. “Don’t say You Didn’t Know,” by Tanya Reinhart, Yediot Aharonot, November 6, 2000; and Tanya Reinhart, Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948, (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002).
32. “Israel’s Agenda For Ethnic Cleansing and Transfer,” by Victoria Buch, Counterpunch, September 19, 2007.
33. “Sale of JNF land to Jews only is blatant discrimination that must be stopped,” by Avi Kleinberg, YNet News, September 26, 2007; “Nation of citations,” Aviad Kleinberg disturbed by citations given to IDF soldiers for avoiding innocent casualties,” by Aviad Kleinberg, YNet News, April 7, 2009.
34. See IsraCampus.org.il and “Subversive Organizations” and Forbidden Words,” by Yossi Dahan, Ha’Oketz, July 20, 2005, reprinted in Occupation Magazine, June 23, 2005; “Invasion of the Settlers,” by Dr. Yossi Dahan, Ma`ariv/NRG, July 31, 2005 reprinted in Occupation Magazine, August 1, 2005.
35. “The collapse began today,” by Gershom Gorenberg, Haaretz, July 15, 2008. Gershom Gorenberg is the author of The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977. He blogs at southjerusalem.com. See also “The War to Begin All Wars,” by Gershom Gorenberg, New York Review of Books, Volume 56 Number 9, May 28, 2009. See also “Settling for Radicalism : How the Israeli government has fostered religious extremism and fractured its own democracy,” by Gershom Gorenberg, The American Prospect, June 15, 2009.
36. Sammy Smooha, author of Israel: Pluralism and Conflict, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978); The Orientation and Politicization of the Arab Minority in Israel, (Haifa: The Jewish‑Arab Center, University of Haifa, 1984); Arabs and Jews in Israel. Vol. 1: Conflicting and Shared Attitudes in a Divided Society, (Boulder and London: Westview Press, 1989); and Arabs and Jews in Israel. Vol. 2: Change and Continuity in Mutual Intolerance, (Boulder and London: Westview Press, 1992).
37. “Tired but Satisfied Israels Strategies in the Demographic War Against the Palestinians from 1948 to the Present,” by Yossi Schwartz, Alternative Information Center (AIC), October 7, 2008.
38. “Closure and Apartheid: Eight Years of “Peace” through Separation,” by Allegra Pacheco, Media Monitors Network, February 15, 2001. Allegra Pacheco, an Israeli human rights attorney practicing in Bethlehem, is a founder of the Freedom of Movement Project.
39. “If All Rabbis Were Like Arik Ascherman, Middle East Peace Would Be Attainable,” by Pat McDonnell Twair, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October 2001, page 15.
40. “The end of Israel,” by Hannah Mermelstein, The Electronic Intifada, December 19, 2007; see also, “This land was theirs,” by Hannah Mermelstein, The Jewish Advocate (Boston), March 22, 2008. Hannah Mermelstein is co‑founder and co‑director of Birthright Unplugged, which takes mostly Jewish North American people into the West Bank to meet with Palestinian people and to equip them to return to their own communities and work for justice; and takes Palestinian children from refugee camps to Jerusalem, the sea, and the villages their grandparents fled in 1948, and supports them to document their experiences and create photography exhibits to share with their communities and with the world.
41. “On the way to a pariah state,” by Carlo Strenger, Haaretz, September 25, 2007; “Zionism? Post‑Zionism? Just give arguments,” by Carlo Strenger, Haaretz, December 20, 2007; and “I accuse,” by Carlo Strenger, Haaretz, September 29, 2008.
42. Oren Yiftachel, “The Jailer State,” New Matilida.com, January 12, 2009, republished in Jewish Peace News, January 17, 2009. Professor Oren Yiftachel teaches political geography and urban planning at Ben‑Gurion University, Beersheba. Yiftachel has written extensively on the political geography of ethnic conflict. Among his books are: Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine, (2006, Penn Press), and Israelis in Conflict, ed. (Sussex Academic Press, 2004). He is an occasional contributor to Israel’s leading newspapers Haaretz and YNet News. Yiftachel is an active member in several peace and civil society organizations, including B’tselem, the Bedouin Council of Unrecognized Villages, Adva and is a founding member of Faculty for Israel‑ Palestine Peace (FFIPP).
43. Ilan Pappe, Britain and the Arab‑Israeli Conflict, 1948‑51, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988); and The Making of the Arab‑Israeli Conflict, 1947‑1951, (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 1994).
44. Jacobo Timerman, The Longest War: Israel in Lebanon, translated by Miguel Acoca, (New York: Vintage Books, 1982). He is the author of the best selling book Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number.
45. “A state of all its citizens,” by Neve Gordon, The Guardian, April 20, 2007. See also, “Boycott Israel: An Israeli comes to the painful conclusion that it’s the only way to save his country,” by Neve Gordon, Los Angeles Times, August 20, 2009. For the reaction this opinion piece evoked see, “Hysteria follows LA Times op-ed,” MuzzleWatch http://www.muzzlewatch.com/2009/08/23/hysteria‑follows‑la‑times‑op‑ed/. See also “Education Minister slams Israeli lecturer’s ‘apartheid’ op‑ed,” by Barak Ravid, Haaretz, Correspondent and Haaretz Services, Haaretz, August 23, 2009. For a balanced article see “University urges lecturer who endorsed boycott to resign,” by Ilana Curiel, YNet News, August 28, 2009. For an Israel academic opinion in support of Gordon see, “Israeli academics must pay the price to end occupation,” by Anat Matar, Haaretz, August 27, 2009. See also letter from the Middle East Studies Association Committee on Academic Freedom in Support of Professor Neve Gordon, dated August 27, 2009. See also “Ben-Gurion U. Debates Cost of Academic Freedom,” by Nathan Jeffay, The Forward, September 11, 2009.
46. See IsraCampus.org.il and see “How much blood should be spilled in vain?,” by Avraham Oz, Occupation Magazine, August 23, 2005; “This is my country. As it is commonly known, “the only democracy in the Middle East,” by Avraham Oz, Occupation Magazine, September 20, 2005; and “Toughts of an Israeli War Resister,” by Avraham Oz, Occupation Magazine, July 25, 2006.
47. “JNF’s blatant hypocrisy: Why can JNF land be leased to non‑Jewish immigrants, but not to Arabs?,” by Dror Etkes, YNet News, October 4, 2007.
48. “Say goodbye to the JNF,” by Erik Schechter, The Jerusalem Post, August 5, 2007. The writer is the former military correspondent for The Jerusalem Post and is based in Tel Aviv.
49. See, “Israel’s blonde bombshells and real bombs in Gaza,” by Yosefa Loshitzky, Electronic Intafada, January 5, 2009. Her most recent books are Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen, (2001) and (as editor) Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler’s List, (1997).
50. “A Palestinian State Within Two Years,” by Yacov Ben Efrat, Challenge Magazine, August 31, 2009. Challenge Magazine is an electronic publication which “covers the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
51. See, “Good Morning, Elijah: Amos Oz Does The Peace Tour,” by Steven Plaut, The Jewish Press, May 21, 2008; “Israel partly at fault ‑ We must assume partial blame for refugee problem in order to resolve it,” by Amos Oz, YNet News, April 29, 2007; “Amos Oz against Gaza invasion: `Ceasefire with Hamas`: “Kol Israel radio [interview], noted down [not verbatim] by Adam Keller, February. 12, 2008, interview on the occasion of Amos Oz receiving the Dan David Prize,” published in Occupation Magazine, February 12, 2008; and “Don’t march into Gaza,” by Amos Oz, YNet News, February 13, 2008.
52. See for example “Separating Religion from National Identity Interview with Avraham B.Yehoshua: How the link between religion and nationality is unhealthy and immoral, and why nationality cannot depend on religion,” Palestine-Israel Journal, Vol. 8, No 4, 2001 and Vol. 9, No 1, 2002; “A.B. Yehoshua: Bush should recall ambassador until outposts dismantled Israeli novelist says Israel deceiving international community into focusing solely on illegal outposts, thus legitimizing settlement enterprise,” by Menachem Gantz, YNet News, January 20, 2008; see also “An open letter to Gideon Levy,” by A.B. Yehoshua, Haaretz, January 16, 2009; and reply “An open response to A.B. Yehoshua,” by Gideon Levy, Haaretz, January 18, 2009; and “Lend an Ear to Breaking the Silence,” by A. B. Yehoshua, Yedioth Ahronoth, July 21, 2009.
53. See “Israeli Writer‑Activist Tikva Honig‑Parnass, Who Fought for Israel’s Founding in 1948, on 60 Years of Palestinian Dispossession and Occupation,” Amy Goodman Interview, Democracy Now, May 16, 2008. Between the Lines address is P.O. Box 681, Jerusalem, Israel.
54. See Sabra & Shatila, inquiry into a massacre, by Amnon Kapeliouk, (Belmont, Mass: Association of Arab‑American University Graduates, 1984); “The changing pattern of Israeli immigration,” by Amnon Kapeliouk, Le Monde diplomatique, November 1997; and “The Sharon plan Gaza: why Israel wants to leave;” by Amnon Kapeliouk, Le Monde diplomatique, December 2004; “Israel’s failed invasion,” by Amnon Kapeliouk, Le Monde diplomatique, September 4, 2006; also see “Israel: an army in power: Israel’s army no longer represents the Israeli people (religious exemptions have narrowed its conscript basis), while the people have lost confidence in the army. It has grown used to being an army of occupation and a police force for the settler movement, not to fighting wars – especially unwarranted wars,” by Amnon Kapeliouk, Le Monde diplomatique, November 2007; also see “A Fearless Israeli Journalist: Remembering Amnon Kapeliouk,” by Franklin Lamb, CounterPunch, July 1, 2009.
55. “The Root Causes of Tragedy: The Ethical and Legal Challenges Facing Palestine,” by Oren Ben‑Dor, CounterPunch, December 15, 2005; “Israeli Apartheid is the Core of the Crisis,” by Oren Ben‑Dor, CounterPunch, June 23 / 24, 2007; “Despite It’s Military Might Israel is a Weak and Dying State: The Self Defense of Suicide,” by Oren Ben‑Dor, CounterPunch, January 1, 2009. His latest book, Thinking About Law: In Silence with Heidegger, was published in 2007 by Hart Publishing.
56. “Sign of a society losing its mind,” by Amia Lieblich, Haaretz, June 30, 2007. Prof. Amia Lieblich’s book, Yaldey kfar etzion (“The Children of Kfar Etzion”) was published by Keter and the University of Haifa (in Hebrew).
57. See, “How Israel’s gung‑ho leaders turned victory into calamity: Our government, in its desperation to outgun its predecessor, spurned a glorious chance to come out of this with honour,” by Nehemia Shtrasler, The Guardian, August 3, 2006; ” So what have we done to them,” by Nehemia Shtrasler, Haaretz, December 19, 2007.
58. See “Amid broad Israeli support for Gaza war a rare dissenting voice,” by Joshua Mitnick, Christian Science Monitor, January 16, 2009.
59. “Coming Face To Face With Israeli Racism,” by Adam Astan, Mondoweiss, 3 August, 2009. Astan is an undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley.
60. Akiva Orr, The unJewish State, (London: Ithaca Press, 1983) and Akiva Orr, Israel: Politics, Myths and Identity Crisis, (London and Boulder, CO: Pluto Press, 1994). Akiva was born in Berlin in 1931 and immigrated to Palestine with his family in 1934, growing up in Tel Aviv. He served in the Israeli Navy in 1948 and after the war studied mathematics and physics at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In the early 1950s, he became critical of Zionism, joining the Israeli Communist Party in 1953. However, in 1962, he broke from the party and jointly founded the anti‑Zionist Israeli organization Matzpen. He has written several other books including The Other Israel: The Radical Case Against Zionism and the Direct Democracy Manifesto.
61. See “Israel’s democracy and its Arab population,” by David Newman, The Jerusalem Post, October 5, 2009.
62. Susan Nathan, The Other Side of Israel: My Journey Across the Jewish/Arab Divide, (New York and London: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2005); see also “Author no longer ‘in love with the Zionist narrative,’” by Deaglan de Breadun, Irish Times, July 28, 2005.
63. “Antisemites!,” by Yael Lotan, Hagada Hasmalit, March 10, 2007; “Who is anti‑Semitic?,” by Yael Lotan, Hagada Hasmalit, November 13, 2007; “Messing with the Public Mind,” by Yael Lotan, Hagada Hasmalit, September 3, 2009, republished in Occupation Magazine, September 7, 2009.
64. “The fascistization of Israel,” by Yigal Laviv, Al Tzad Smol, January 24, 2008, translated and reprinted in Occupation Magazine, January 27, 2008; see also ‘Still Small Voice’ of Israeli Media Dissent Over Syrian Nuclear Story September 17th, 2007at Richard Silverstein’s Tikun Olam web site.
65. “Morality is not on our side,” by Ze’ev Maoz, Haaretz, July 25, 2006. He was commenting on the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
66. “Citizenship law makes Israel an apartheid state,” by Amos Schocken, Haaretz, June 27, 2008.
67. “No writing on the wall,” by Danny Rubinstein, Haaretz, September 27, 2006; also see, “Haaretz Editor Refuses to Retract Israel Apartheid Statements,” by Ezra HaLevi, Israel National News, July 31, 2008.
68. “You are terrorists, we are virtuous,” by Yitzhak Laor, London Review of Books, Vol. 28, No. 16, August 17, 2006; “Democracy for Jews only,” by Yitzhak Laor, Haaretz, May 30, 2007; see also, “A history of discrimination,” by Yitzhak Laor, Haaretz, May 27, 2009. Yitzhak Laor, is an Israeli poet, author, and journalist. He was born in Pardes Hanna, Israel in 1948. He is the author of five poetry books, 19 novels, plays, and article collections. He is mostly known for his poetry of political protest, particularly about the Lebanese War of 1982 and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. In his poem, “In a Village whose Name I don’t even know,” he imagines himself stranded in a Lebanese village: “For a moment I hoped that I would be caught.” He has published several collections of poetry, as well as short stories, essays, a play and two novels. His book The Myths of Liberal Zionism was published in English by Verso Books in February 2009.
69. “A Response to Benny Morris: Genocide Hides Behind Expulsion,” by Adi Ophir, CounterPunch, January 16, 2004.
70. See for example, “Palestinian state is not synonym for terrorist entity,” by Akiva Eldar, Haaretz, August 17, 2009. See also “U.S. is blind to limits of Palestinian politics,” by Akiva Eldar, Haaretz, September 14, 2009. Eldar’s columns also appear regularly in the Haaretz‑International Herald Tribune edition, as well as in the Japanese daily Mainichi Shimbun. He has lectured at the School of Journalism in Tel Aviv University and is also a consultant at CBS News. Eldar graduated from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he majored in Economics, Political Science and Psychology. After that he served as spokesperson for former Mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek. Then he was reporter and editor at the Israeli Public Radio. Eldar has been with Haaretz since 1978, in 1983‑1993 he was the diplomatic correspondent for Haaretz. In 1993‑1996 he served as Haaretz United States Bureau Chief and Washington, D.C. correspondent, covering the peace process, Israel‑United States relations, American issues and Israel‑Diaspora relations. He was a special consultant to Abba Eban’s PBS television documentaries on the history of Israel and the Oslo accords. In October 2007 Akiva Eldar has won the annual Eliav‑Sartawi award for Middle Eastern journalism, awarded by Search for Common Ground, an international conflict transformation organization, sharing it with Jordanian journalist Salameh Nematt. Akiva Eldar is the co‑author of the biography of Shimon Peres; he is also the co‑author (with Prof. Idith Zertal) of book Lords of the Land: The War Over Israel’s Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967‑2007, (Nation Books, 2007).
71. “Was 1967 a victory too far for Israel?,” by Meron Rapoport, Le Monde diplomatique, June 2007; “History Erased,” by Meron Rapoport, Haaretz, July 6, 2007; and also “Fifteen minutes of hate in Silwan,” by Meron Rapoport, The Guardian, August 31, 2009.
72. “Zionism without a Jewish State,” The Magnes Zionist, August 12, 2007. “Self‑Criticism from an Israeli, American, and Orthodox Jewish Perspective.” http://themagneszionist.blogspot.com The picture is not of him, but of his kind of Zionist, Judah Magnes.
73. “We didn t mean to kill them Israel says it doesn t mean to kill Palestinian children yet they keep on dying,” by B. Michael, YNet News, May 4, 2008; “Stop the Lying,” by B. Michael, Yedioth Aharonoth, September 5, 2008. To my knowledge this article was not published in English on Yedioth Aharonoth’s English internet site YNet News. B. Michael is one of Israel’s most respected journalists. Article was translated by George Malent and published by the Israeli peace activist publication Occupation Magazine on September 10, 2008. Here is a quote from the article. “Everybody knows they all lie. And they all lie under oath. Because that’s the procedure.” If only the North American press would report what is written in the Israeli press. However, B. Michael was later fired from Yedioth Aharonoth see “B. Michael’s last column was censored by the newspaper,” Occupation Magazine, June 7, 2009. See also “Anti occupation columnist B. Michael fired ‑ please protest to Yediot Aharonot by phone,” Occupation Magazine, June 2, 2009. See also “What about the real sins?” B. Michael, YNetNews, March 6, 2009, republished by Occupation Magazine, March 3, 2009.
74. See for example, “The Seeds of Fascism,” by Ran HaCohen, Antiwar.com, July 2, 2005; “Pacifying Gaza,” by Ran HaCohen, Antiwar.com., December 30, 2008; “Abe Foxman’s ‘Anti‑Semitic Pandemic,’” by Ran HaCohen, Antiwar.com., February 17, 2009.
75. “Peace” with Violence or Transfer,” by Shraga Elam, Between the Lines, December 2000; “The Holocaust Industry Doesn’t act Against Israel as it did Against Switzerland,” by Shraga Elam, Al‑Majdal, (Autumn 2005); “Hamas’s Electoral Victory Serves the Israeli Government,” by Shraga Elam, Global Research, February 3, 2006. “The courage to refuse,” by Shraga Elam, Haaretz, September 20, 2007.
76. “How has Israel dealt with the Internally Displaced?,” by Hillel Cohen, “Palestinian Internally Displaced Persons,” Al Majdal, (Summer‑Autumn 2006); see also Army of Shadows, Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917‑1948, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008).
77. See for example, “Enough of this demographic panic,” by Avirama Golan, Haaretz, February 17, 2004; “Caught between Jewish character and Jewish law,” by Avirama Golan, Haaretz, June 4, 2004; “Invitation to a kulturkampf,” by Avirama Golan, Haaretz, September 10, 2004; “Answers for the confused Israeli soul,” by Avirama Golan, Haaretz, October 12, 2004; “The Jews versus the Israelis,” by Avirama Golan, Haaretz, October 26, 2004; `Jew’ or `Israeli’?,” by Avirama Golan, Haaretz, February 9, 2005; “Where the ‘alliance of blood’ has led,” by Avirama Golan, Haaretz, February 17, 2005; “Less democratic, more `Jewish’,” by Avirama Golan, Haaretz, November 1, 2005; “The failure of multiculturalism,” by Avirama Golan, Haaretz, November 14, 2006; “Report: Israeli Jews increasingly anti‑Arab,” by Avirama Golan, Haaretz, March 19, 2008; “Racist? Us?,” by Avirama Golan, Haaretz, March 19, 2008; “Democracy in a panic,”by Avirama Golan, Haaretz, January 14, 2009; “Zionism for Arabs,” by Avirama Golan, Haaretz, June 17, 2009; “Don’t convert,” by Avirama Golan, Haaretz, September 9, 2009; “When Judaism and Zionism lose all meaning,” by Avirama Golan, Haaretz, August 28, 2009.
78. “Israelis who care,” by Shai Lahav, Breaking the Silence, July 29, 2009; “With baton in hand: that`s us,” by Shai Lahav, Maariv/Middle East News Service, original in Hebrew English translation August 23, 2009 published in Occupation Magazine.
79. “Betraying our history,” by Seth Freedman, The Guardian, March 19, 2008; “All citizens must be equal,” by Seth Freeman, The Guardian, July 30, 2008; “Remove the blinkers and see the truth,” by Seth Freedman, The Guardian, December 17, 2008; and “How Israel drowns dissent, Firefighters turned their hoses on a peaceful anti‑war protester last week: Their attitude reflects a worrying shift in public opinion,” by Seth Freedman, The Guardian, January 21, 2009.
80. See “Arab Jews, Palestinian Refugees and Israel’s Folly Politics,” by Yehouda Shenhav, Sephardic Heritage Update, 13 December 2006. He is the author of The Arab Jews, (Stanford University Press, 2006).
81. “Filmmaker: Israel regime like East German Stasi,” Interview in Yedioth Ahronoth Magazine Seven Days, November 6, 2006; and “Anti‑Zionist Israeli to direct movie for Israel’s 60th birthday,” by Haaretz Service, Haaretz, April 29, 2007.
82. “Racism in the name of religion,”by Elana Maryles Sztokman, The Jerusalem Post, September. 23, 2008.
83. See “Paving the Way to the Abyss: The Gaza War and the wall of denial,” by Adam Keller, The Other Israel, May 2009.
84. “The Israeli soldiers who say ‘There is a limit,’”by Gideon Spiro, Middle East International, September 9, 1988, pp. 18‑19. “Bad things happen when we are silent,” by Gideon Spiro, Red Rag Weekly, November 3, 2008, Translated and published in Occupation Magazine. See also, “Did it happen or not?,” by Gideon Spiro, Red Rag Weekly, August 24, 2009, translated and published in Occupation Magazine, August 27, 2009.
85. “Israeli Nobel Laureate calls for release of all Hamas prisoners,” by Haaretz Service and Army Radio, Haaretz, October 10, 2009.
86. See ALEF WATCH IsraCampus.Org “Big brother is watching,” and “Monitoring Israel’s Academic Fifth Column Following anti‑Israel Extremism on the Israeli Campus.” The site lists 119 Israeli academics who are targeted by the organization and deemed to be “extreme critics.” Some of the Israeli critics I have listed are not even on their list. Isracampus web site is http://www.isracampus.org.il/index.htm. For a viewpoint criticizing the attacks against Israeli academics who criticize policies toward the Palestinians see, “A McCarthyite attempt to brand academics,” by Lily Galili, Haaretz, November 30, 2007. For more examples of writings see for example, “The Strategy Behind Israel’s Migrant Labor Policies,” by Yonatan Preminger, CounterPunch, August 20, 2009; and also see Michael Jansen, Dissonance in Zion, (New Jersey: Zed Books, 1987); see also “Key Zionist pioneer renounces Zionism,” by Helena Cobban, ‘Just World News‘, August 4, 2009. Also see also “Israel’s Own Psyche,” by Uri Avnery, Kaaleji Times, August 11, 2009.
87. See, “One Big Prison: Freedom of Movement to and from the Gaza Strip on the Eve of the Disengagement Plan,” B’Tselem Report, March , 2005; and “Utterly Forbidden: The Torture and Ill-treatment of Palestinian Detainees,” B’Tselem Report, April 2007. “Beating & Abuse: B’Tselem and ACRI demand investigation of officers who testified to a policy of routine use of violence against Palestinian civilians,” B’Tselem, May 21, 2009.
88. “Counterpoint: Rabbis for Human Rights the 20th anniversary,” by David Forman, The Jerusalem Post, August 28, 2008; “Rabbis call for immediate truce in Gaza: Dozens of members of Rabbis for Human Rights organization issue letter urging all those involved in fighting to work for immediate, comprehensive ceasefire in Gaza Strip, southern Israel. ‘The sanctity of life is a supreme value in Jewish tradition,’ letter says,” by Yaheli Moran Zelikovich, YNet News, January 13, 2009; “Authors Oz, Grossman sign petition calling for external probe of Gaza op: Following publication of soldiers’ testimonies according to which commanders in Gaza told them to shoot first and worry later, Rabbis for Human Rights calls on Netanyahu, Barak to order non‑military probe of IDF offensive,” by Tal Rabinovsky, YNet News, July 22, 2009.
89. “Ticking Bombs” Testimonies of Torture Victims in Israel,” Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI), May, 2007. “Shackling as a Form of Torture and Abuse,” PCATI Report, June 2009.”HCJ: Using threats, false promises and false presentations relating to the welfare of relatives of interrogees is prohibited,” PCATI Report, September 9, 2009. For examples of major articles published in Israeli media based on PCATI work see “Gazans detained in ‘giant pit’ during Cast Lead,” by Amira Hass, Haaretz, August 15, 2009; and “Out of bounds?,” by Amira Hass, Haaretz, September 3, 2009.
90. Yesh Gvul’s web site.
91. At the time of writing 628 young Israelis had signed the pledge not to serve.
92. See my review, “The Other Israel, Voices of Refusal and Dissent,” Foreword by Tom Segev and Introduction by Anthony Lewis, edited by Roane Carey and Jonathan Shainin. (New York: New Press, 2002), Middle East Policy, Fall 2006, Number 3, pp. 140‑150.
93. The Other Israel, Voices of Refusal and Dissent, Foreword by Tom Segev and Introduction by Anthony Lewis, edited by Roane Carey and Jonathan Shainin. (New York: New Press, 2002), pp. 207-208.
94. “Prof Dror Israel, world Jewry drifting apart,” YNet News, January 23, 2008.
95. “A writer’s reality,” by Gideon Levy, Haaretz, September 16, 2005.

Human beings also have spirits. In Arizona, bigot forces are not content with simply getting rid of as many brown bodies as possible, but also ensuring that those that remain become assimilated into intolerant copies of themselves.

The world appears to be knowledgeable about the effort – via SB 1070 – to legalize hate, fear and racial profiling in Arizona. What most seem to be unaware of is that there is also an effort by state schools superintendent, Tom Horne, to brainwash the state’s school children via HB 2281 – the anti-Ethnic/Raza Studies law that unless stopped – will go into effect on Jan 1, 2011.

There is a third law in the works; the effort by state rep. Russell Pierce, chief sponsor of the state’s apartheid laws, to nullify the 14th Amendment in Arizona [guarantees U.S. birthright citizenship].

Tolteka, a renowned Los Angeles hip hop artist – inspired by a recent column – “From Manifest Destiny to Manifest Insanity” – has penned a rhyme called: “The Trilogy of Terror.” It breaks down these so-called laws that are intended to destroy our minds and spirits.

Those of us here in Arizona do not recognize these apartheid schemes as laws. At least not as moral or legitimate laws. Even the courts have already struck down the most odious parts of SB 1070.

But back to HB 2281. This is the one people are paying least attention to. While denouncing SB 1070 in May, five UN Special Rapporteurs also denounced HB 2281. They said: “Such law and attitude are at odds with the State’s responsibility to respect the right of everyone to have access to his or her own cultural and linguistic heritage and to participate in cultural life… Everyone has the right to seek and develop cultural knowledge and to know and understand his or her own culture and that of others through education and information.”

They further pointed out that controlling immigration and adhering to fundamental principles of non-discrimination are not mutually exclusive. “States are obligated to not only eradicate racial discrimination, but also to promote a social and political environment conducive to respect for ethnic and cultural diversity.”

Their report is self-evident, yet, we should pay close attention to the illogic of the bigoted forces; they claim they are not against immigration: only illegal immigration. So what does anti-bilingualism and Ethnic Studies have to do with illegal immigration?

There is an equal danger to both SB 1070 and HB 2281; one attacks our bodies, the other our minds and spirits. HB 2281 targets Tucson’s highly successful Raza Studies program. But as written, it applies to the entire state, and it can become copycat legislation – state by state – not simply targeting k-12 education, but universities as well. The authors erroneously claim Ethnic Studies result in hate, segregation, anti-Americanism and advocates the violent overthrow of the U.S. government.

What’s at stake with HB 2281 is not simply an attack on a program (Raza Studies), but on the right to teach/learn and the right of students to succeed as a result. As signed, HB 2281 creates a mechanism by which books and curricula will be subject to approval by the state. The premise is that only Greco-Roman culture (“Western Civilization”) is acceptable for Arizona curriculums. Knowledge from other cultures is henceforth deemed to be “un-American.” Books such as Occupied America (Acuña) and Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire) have already been singled out.

In Arizona, the state superintendent of schools has appointed himself not simply education czar (opposing local control), but also, royal cosmographer – determining that not only is maize-based or Maya-Nahua culture and knowledge – the philosophical foundation for Raza Studies – outside of Western Civilization, but also outside of humanity. In effect, he also fancies himself head of the BIA – determining who/what is Indigenous.

While singling out people of color, these Inquisition-era “laws” in reality, are an attack against all people. The legalization of racial profiling and cultural mind-control belongs in the Dark Ages and the battle against the sanctioning of hate, censorship and forbidden curricula is being fought right here in Arizona (This is the subject of a forthcoming conference in December at the University of Arizona). Within weeks, this battle will step into the courtroom via a lawsuit against the state. We are confident we will easily win against the forces of fear, hate and ignorance.

BDS is also not about a particular solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but rather the demand that Israel abide by international law and UN resolutions. It is accordingly something that you can support if you are for a two state solution or a one state solution. You can even support it as a Zionist. It arises from the realization, following years of experience, that the Occupation will not end unless Israelis understand that it has a price.

In a sense, the fact that a boycott is required is a sign of weakness following the polaristaion and marginalisation of the left in Israel. On the one hand, we have more or less used all the other weapons we have in the arsenal of non-violent resistance and the situation on the ground is only getting worse. On the other hand, we are witnessing the development of a proto-fascist mindset in Israel. I am, for example, extremely anxious about the extent that the space for public debate in Israel is shrinking.

One of the ways of silencing any dissent is the through the demand for loyalty, so that a slogans you hear a lot now is “no citizenship without loyalty.” This slogan reflects the inversion of the republican idea that the state should be loyal to the citizen and is accountable for inequities and injustices. It is a manifestation of the complete reversal of the republican relationship between state and loyalty and the adoption, instead, of a logic similar to the one that informed Mussolini’s Italy. It is — as Gramsci once said — part of the morbid symptoms of our times.

One of the expressions of these symptoms is the increasingly violent attitude towards any kind of dissent within Israel. I have received more death threats following my criticism of the flotilla fiasco than ever before. When I walk on campus people ask in jest if I am wearing a bullet proof vest. Such jokes have a menacing undertone. Therefore it is not all that surprising that only three professors in Israel openly support a boycott; many others are in the closet because supporting BDS is not considered to be a legitimate form of critique and people who back it are in danger of being punished.

And yet, there is also a sense that the pro-government proponents have gone too far. They are not only targeting people on the far left, but practically everyone who is even slightly critical of government policies. A couple of months ago a high school principle who objected to military officers coming in to speak to his pupils, was all but crucified. Clearly the outrage of so many Israeli academics against the assault on academic freedom has little to do with the boycott, but is rather against the attempt to silence any kind of critique. There is an ever-growing sense that public discourse in Israel is dramatically shrinking. Thus, the provost of Haifa University, who courageously criticized the Minister of Education and the assault on academic freedom, is by no means a left-winger but is simply outraged at the current developments. He would never otherwise support my stance on the boycott.

The backlash against Gideon Saar, a member of the prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, comes after a series of moves suggesting he is trying to stamp a more stridently right-wing agenda on the Israeli education system.

The education minister has outraged the 540 professors who signed the petition by his open backing of a nationalist youth movement, Im Tirtzu, which demands that teachers be required to prove their commitment to right-wing Zionism.

Two of Mr Saar’s predecessors, Yossi Sarid and Yuli Tamir, are among those who signed the petition, which calls on the minister to “come to your senses … before it’s too late to save higher education in Israel”.

Mr Saar’s campaign to “re-Zionise” the education system, including introducing a new right-wing Jewish studies syllabus and bringing soldiers into classrooms, has heightened concerns that he is stoking an atmosphere increasingly hostile to left-wing academics and human-rights activists.

Neve Gordon, a politics professor at Ben Gurion University in Beersheva who called for an academic boycott of Israel last year, has reported receiving death threats, as has a school teacher who refused to participate in Mr Saar’s flagship programme to encourage high-school recruitment to the Israeli military.

Daniel Gutwein, a professor of Jewish history at Haifa University, said: “A serious red flag is raised when the education minister joins in the de-legitimisation of the academic establishment. This is a method to castrate and abolish Israeli academia.”

Mr Saar’s sympathies for Im Tirtzu were first revealed earlier this year when he addressed one of its conferences, telling delegates the organisation would be “blessed” for its “hugely vital” work.

The youth movement emerged in 2006 among students demanding that the government rather than ordinary soldiers be held to account for what was seen as Israel’s failure to crush Hizbollah during that year’s attack on Lebanon. It has rapidly evolved into a potent right-wing pressure group.

Its biggest success to date has been a campaign last year against Israeli human rights groups that assisted a United Nations inquiry led by Judge Richard Goldstone in investigating war crimes committed during Israel’s assault on Gaza in 2008. The human rights organisations are now facing possible government legislation to restrict their activities.

Im Tirtzu’s latest campaign, against what it calls “the reign of left-wing terror” in the education system, was backed by Mr Saar during a parliamentary debate last month. He told MPs he took very seriously a report by the movement claiming that anti-Zionist professors have taken over university politics departments and are silencing right-wing colleagues and students.

Mr Saar also warned that calls for boycotts against Israel were “impossible to accept” and that he was talking to higher education officials about taking “action” this summer, hinting that he would cut funds for the professors involved and their institutions.

Yossi Ben Artzi, the rector of Haifa University and the most senior university official to criticise Mr Saar, warned him against “monitoring and denouncing” academics. He added that the Im Tirtzu report “smells of McCarthyism”.

The universities are already disturbed by a bill submitted by 25 MPs last month that would make it a criminal offence for Israelis to “initiate, encourage, or aid” a boycott against Israel and require them to pay compensation to those harmed by it.

The bill is likely to be treated sympathetically by the government, which is worried about the growing momentum of boycott drives both internationally and in the occupied West Bank. Mr Netanyahu has called the emergence of a boycott movement inside Israel a “national scandal”.

Prof Gordon, who wrote a commentary in the Los Angeles Times a year ago supporting a boycott, said Im Tirtzu had contributed to a growing “atmosphere of violence” in the country and on campuses.

Hundreds of students at his university have staged demonstrations demanding his dismissal. He was also recently sent a letter from someone signing himself “Im Tirtzu” calling the professor a “traitor” and warning: “I will reach Ben Gurion [University] to kill you.”

Prof Gordon said: “I have tenure and Im Tirtzu cannot easily get me fired. But they are trying to become the ‘guards at the gate’ to make sure other academics do not follow in my path.”

Only three Israeli acadmics have so far openly endorsed a boycott, he added, with many others fearful that they will be punished if they do so. But Im Tirtzu and its supporters were using the issue as a pretext for cracking down on academics critical of rightwing policy. He called Israel an increasingly “proto-fascist” state.

Prof Gordon cited the recent case of Assaf Oren, a statistics lecturer and peace activist who had been told he was the leading candidate for a post in Ben Gurion’s industrial engineering department until right-wing groups launched a campaign against him.

In a further sign of what Prof Gordon and others have labelled a McCarthyite climate, MPs in the parliamentary education committee — which has come to closely reflect Mr Saar’s views — summoned for questioning two head teachers of prestigious schools after they criticised official policies.

One, Ram Cohen, has condemned Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians, while the other, Zeev Dagani, has spoken against the programme to send army officers into classrooms to encourage pupils to enlist.

Mr Dagani was the only head teacher in the 270 selected schools to reject the programme, saying he opposed “the blurring of boundaries when officers come and teach the teachers how to educate”. He subsequently received a flood of death threats.

The education ministry has announced a new core curriculum subject of Jewish studies in schools that concentrates on nationalist and religious themes and is likely to be taught by private rightwing and settler organisations.

Avi Sagi, a philosopher at Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv, warned in the liberal Haaretz newspaper that the syllabus offered “an opening for dangerous indoctrination”.

A modern history curriculum published this month has been similarly criticised for leaving out study of the Oslo peace process and Palestinian politics.

Also in the sights of education officials are hundreds of Arab nursery schools, many of them established by the Islamic Movement. Zevulun Orlev, head of the education committee, has accused the schools of “poisoning the minds” of Arab children in Israel.

Mr Saar appointed a special committee last month to inspect the schools and shut them down if they were found to be teaching “anti-Israel” material.

Arab MPs have called the claims “ridiculous”, pointing out that the schools were set up after the education ministry failed to build nursery schools in Arab communities.

When Liberal Party heavyweight Allan Rock took over as president at the University of Ottawa this September [2008], many wondered what would be in store for Denis Rancourt.

– Jesse Freeston, journalist¹

We conclude that the charges advanced against Denis Rancourt are a contrived pretext, that they are preposterous as reasons to summarily remove a tenured professor, and that, therefore, the real reasons must lie elsewhere.

– Members of College and University Workers United²

I have been following, with interest, the case of Marc Kelly — an under-graduate at the University of Ottawa who appears to be the victim of an outrageous vendetta brought against him by the President of that University, Allan Rock.”

–blogger (sophos)

It is difficult to know how decisions are made because hierarchical institutions do everything they can to hide their true inner workings.

Nonetheless the chronology of events and the leakages of some documents allow one to advance plausible versions.

Until Rock became president of the University of Ottawa in 2008, the previous administration, starting in 2005, was involved only in relatively moderate schemes to contain radical physics professor Denis Rancourt in his incessant applications of pedagogical advances and social justice and community outreach practices.

Pre-Rock containment attempts included: removing the professor from all large first-year courses which he had developed, barring him from reserving an auditorium for his popular weekly documentary film and discussion series, arbitrarily imposing new academic rules in violation of Senate procedures (until overturned via a union grievance), an in-class dean’s intervention for which the university was later forced to apologize, allowing unethical attacks by a departmental chairman until the university was forced to intervene, fabrication of a student complaint (which the university withdrew), multiple contrived disciplinary campaigns that were dropped without explanation, and unjustified discipline for course content that was overturned by a labour law arbitrator.³

In all of this tug of war over academic freedom the previous administration did not appear to contemplate outright dismissal and did not ever threaten dismissal. The first threats of dismissal came with Rock.

Only after Rock’s arrival did the administration’s methods become much more severe and physical, to include everything up to denial of due process, complete banning from all teaching, an unannounced laboratory lockout, unjustified firing of a research associate of 12-years (later settled out of court), threatening graduate students with loss of scholarships, banning of the professor from his weekly campus radio show using threat of police arrest, and forceful police arrest with handcuffs and removal while attending a campus event.⁴,⁵

Although the professor had received several disciplinary attempts and internal criticisms for hosting invited speakers who were critical of Israel in his classes in 2005 and 2006 and had widely expressed and published his own criticisms of Israel, and although Allan Rock is a known staunch supporter of Israeli policies and has directly intervened on campus on multiple occasions to impose his views on Israel,⁶ ,⁷ ,⁸ the sudden and fast-tracked decision to fire Rancourt may not have been primarily driven by Israel-Palestine politics, as is often the case in high-profile firings in North America.⁹

In hind-sight, the chronology of events suggests otherwise, suggests that something suddenly irked Rock at an even more visceral level than his allegiance to the Israel lobby.

It was more than the Israel lobby that drove Rock to his extremes of both urgency and intensity.

Let’s examine the chronology, including key campus events that involved Allan Rock. Here is how it went down.

Physics-mathematics student Marc Kelly (now of YouTube fame) took a fourth-year quantum mechanics course that Rancourt gave in the winter semester of 2008. The pedagogical method was unusual for a physics course and involved a non-competitive student-centered approach with an emphasis on in-class discussions. This caused some students in the class to question the pedagogical methods being used in their other courses.

Marc Kelly questioned the nature of the tests and assignments in a statistical physics course that he was taking concurrently with professor James Harden. Harden, was not receptive to the student’s questions and belittled Marc in front of the class and verbally intimidated him out of his office while nonetheless allowing the student to do a project instead of the final examination, only to refuse the project after the course was over and to attribute a failing grade without considering the project.

Student Kelly appealed this first to Harden, then to the physics department chairman Bela Joos, then to the vice-dean of science Leonard Kleine, then to the dean of science André E. Lalonde, then to the vice-president academic Robert Major, and finally to the president Allan Rock. In these appeals Kelly documented every step and put all those concerned and their superiors in cc. The saga is reported in a series of posts on UofOWatch and elsewhere.

Rock chose to not acknowledge or respond to Kelly’s emails. So, on Monday November 3, 2008, Kelly went to Rock’s office to chat with him about his ordeal.

That is when things took a nasty turn. Rock went ballistic on Kelly and repeatedly yelled at him to verbally intimidate him away in a disrespectful episode that could be enough to get a professor fired.

Fortunately, Kelly voice recorded the encounter and was therefore able to defend himself. Kelly posted the voice recording on the web and sent the link¹⁰ by mass email to all the students and staff at the University of Ottawa (over 40,000 emails). (Even this exposed culmination of mistreatment did not result in justice for Kelly and his final project in the statistical physics course was never considered.)

Rock in turn sent a message to the university community in which he expressed “regret” by blaming Kelly. What followed was uninterrupted persecution of Mark Kelly. He was arbitrarily barred from his student-nominated position on a key university committee, unilaterally deregistered from a physics project course, pursued on multiple (a dozen or so) bogus criminal charges that were dropped, arrested in a class where he was invited to speak, arrested at an event where he was the main presenter (then let go without charges), barred from registering for all courses required to complete his degree, trespassed from campus, and ultimately pursued criminally again for allegedly violating his trespass. Concerted formal protests from both the student union and the union of teacher assistant have been to no avail. [12]

Following the November 3, 2008, verbal intimidation event in Rock’s office, Rancourt was coincidently invited on a pre-scheduled TV talk show (Talk Ottawa) to discuss his academic freedom struggles at the University of Ottawa. The TV interview was held live on the evening of November 12, 2008.¹¹ During the call-in segment of the show, Mark Kelly called the studio and was put on air. The host had heard of the incident with Rock and the recording of Rock’s verbal intimidation was played on air from the web.

Rancourt then commented on air that he was appalled at the president’s behaviour and stated that a professor would be fired for treating a student that way.

Within days of this TV show Rancourt and his eight graduate students and research employee were locked out of their laboratory without any notice or forewarning on November 21, 2008. Following this, Rancourt was banned from campus and removed of all his functions on December 10, 2008, when he was escorted off the grounds by campus police. In an accelerated process like has never been seen at the University of Ottawa, Rancourt was then stripped of his tenure and fired on March 31, 2009, by an executive committee that included the membership of a prominent Ottawa Zionist organizer and Allan Rock himself.

It therefore appears that Rancourt was fired under public Israel lobby pressures because Allan Rock was irked beyond rational response by scholarship and award-nominated student and published scientific author Marc Kelly who remains banned from campus like a dangerous criminal.

The Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) chief, Nathalie Des Rosiers, who continues to receive a salary from the University of Ottawa after serving under Rock as a vice president, has a different opinion about why Rancourt was fired.¹²

1. Opening line in “Dismissing critical pedagogy – Denis Rancourt vs. University of Ottawa”, best of rabble.ca 3 – book, Jenn Watt (Ed.) (First posted on web January 12, 2009.)
2. Open letter from members of College and University Workers United (CUWU).
3. List of outstanding and resolved labour law grievances and outcomes.
4. Background information at AcademicFreedom.ca.
5. Report by workplace mobbing expert Dr. Kenneth Westhues.
6. Statement by Denis Rancourt regarding his dismissal.
7. Allan Rock background and actions at the University of Ottawa.
8. Allan Rock and the Israel lobby – on and off campus.
9. Nocella et al. (Eds.), Academic Repression, 2010, AK Press.
10. The true face of Allan Rock – post on UofOVoice blog.
11. Talk Ottawa with James Hendricks, Rogers TV (Ottawa), Wednesday November 12, 2008, 9pm to 10pm.
12. CCLA’s Nathalie Des Rosiers on why Rancourt was fired.

Michael Barker:  Could you explain what you see as the main differences between hard and soft power?

Denis Rancourt: Hard power is direct hierarchical control over our lives, such as via our jobs at work and via school as students. Hard power is the master’s hand in controlling our access to work and in controlling what our work will be. Hard power is hierarchical and undemocratic. Hard power is the main force in our lives as individuals.

Soft power is all the side-door things we can do with our spare time, participating in culture and interpretation, creating political alliances and resisting at work and at school, practicing sabotage, offering support to targeted colleagues, and so on.

That is the most useful distinction between “soft power” and “hard power” that I can make. It’s about the individual’s authentic rebellion via a Freirian praxis of resistance in which solidarity is a coalescence of individual fighters seeking liberation.

MB:  I tend to think that most writers have neglected emphasizing the importance of soft power, most specifically that of philanthropy, in legitimizing and extending capitalist relations.  What are your thoughts on this matter?

DR: There are two main classes of slaves. Those that need only be obedient and are controlled by direct force and harsh physical conditions, by a constant fear of loss of economic subsistence; and those (the managers, professionals and service intellectuals) who, beyond obedience, need to be indoctrinated, need to adopt and project the dominant ideology of their profession and of the system of exploitation.

The “soft power” of foundations and government grants is just one perfected form of control in which the indoctrinated slave must show that he/she understands the grantor’s intentions and that he/she “authentically” has the same noble intentions. This is brilliantly explained in Jeff Schmidt’s book “Disciplined Minds,” a book that more professional workers and intellectuals need to read. Schmidt points out that if one million dollars worth of funding is made available to do blah, then one million dollars worth of blah will get done. And the doer will be happy to have “freely” done blah.

MB: As a result of publishing your own work, what sort of opposition or support have you obtained from elite knowledge producing networks?

DR: I published more than 100 scientific articles in leading scientific journals. This had the effect of padding my CV, assuring promotions and continued grant support, providing invited and keynote talks at specialized conferences to further pad my CV, assuring me a high rank in the academic pecking order, and wasting a large chunk of my life.

I also write social science essays as part of my liberation and to help me reflect about my liberation. As far as I can tell, this has had no impact in generating liberation in others. It has helped me discover and organize my interpretations about the world, and it has helped me in my discussions with activists, but as a product out there in the mental environment it has probably had a negative impact because it mostly serves the castrated intellectualizations of neutralized-by-design thought activists. (See my essay “Against Chomsky”.)

I’m also looking for ways to use language to jolt readers into discomfort in the hope that this might catalyze a reaction out of the norm, that it might cause readers to glimpse at what rebellion might look like. A recent example of this ends with “Fucking Jesus” and is  posted here.

In addition, I run a blog that directly exposes and critiques administrative malfeasance of my former employer, the University of Ottawa, the “U of O Watch” blog. My published writings here have contributed to causing an “elite knowledge producing” institution, my employer, to fire me. This writing does have an impact via what I have called “image leverage.” As seen in access to information documents, the upper administration reads and discusses every post. The executives change their behaviours and their institutional plans in response to the blog. It keeps them on their toes and corrects some of the more flagrant abuses of authority and nepotism.

MB:  When do you first remember reading or hearing about critiques of liberal philanthropists and their foundations? What were your initial reactions to such criticisms? Here I am predominantly thinking about the former “big three,” the Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations.

DR:  My first encounters with these critiques were via Jeff Schmidt’s 2000 book and the 2002 essay by Andrea del Moral “The revolution will not be funded.”

My immediate reactions were that these critiques sounded true. I believed these analyses.

MB: Following on from the last question, could you briefly explain what you think about the academic/activist literature that is critical of liberal philanthropy?

DR: Useful as an aid to reflection for those practicing a praxis of liberation. Useless and probably harmful otherwise?

It’s like most heavy metals (such as iron and arsenic): They are both essential nutrients (if too little) and toxic (if too much). Iron deficiency versus iron overload disease…

MB: Following on from this, could you please explain in what respect you see critiques of liberal philanthropy to be “useless and probably harmful”?

DR: I mean that virtually all progressive or radical or liberal or other intellectuals are primarily intellectuals who have in practice divorced commentary and analysis from reform via direct challenges to the system at the point of their strongest connection to the system, at work. The point at which the individual has the most leverage in changing the system, in actually changing the system, is the point at which the system has the most power over the individual, the point of the individual’s strongest connection to the economy, at work (university, think tank, law office, etc.).

To refuse to challenge one’s employer, to refuse to fight one’s own oppression, and to mask this refusal with rationalizations and intellectualizations is to do more harm than good. To pretend that the world is somehow changed by “good” ideas, to want to participate in the reflection without significantly participating in the action, is to contribute to hiding the truth about societal change: That change results from directly fighting one’s own oppression and that opposing power in this way has real consequences beyond a difficulty to publish or negative reviews.

Virtually all intellectuals write for other intellectuals in a musical chairs game of ideas that is disconnected from oppression’s realities.

For example, if I come to understand the instrument of my own oppression that are liberal foundations, then I might fight this by publicly ridiculing the foundation’s work, by publicly and institutionally challenging my colleagues’ use of foundation funds, by publicly campaigning to exclude foundation funding from my campus, by publicly campaigning to change promotional criteria based of research funding, by publicly challenging my own denial of promotion, etc. These real actions and others will put me in conflict with my colleagues in which my leverage is applied against their influence to preserve the system. This will have some influence where writing a theoretical paper about foundations would not. Worse, writing that paper alleviates one’s guilt of not actually doing anything and creates the illusion with one’s self-selected readers that “we” are collectively doing something about the problem, that somehow our common opinion will have an influence.

MB: Why do you think that written criticisms of liberal foundations are so few and far between?

DR: A slave does not bite the hand that feeds him/her. Most radical intellectuals are tied within certain bounds. For example, note the radical intellectual’s aversion to “conspiracy theories.” Radical professors play the important role of co-opting activist students and delegitimizing threatening observers.

MB: These are very interesting points, could you expand upon your thoughts on these matters?

DR: Criticism of liberal foundations is akin to criticism of tenure. Most academics that benefit from, or have ties with, colleagues that benefit from these instruments of indoctrination do not feel it would be a strategically clever move, in terms of the class ties that provide them the security of their class privilege, to critique these instruments.

Service intellectuals instinctively know the bounds of discourse, beyond which the full fury of power’s opinion mill and influence will be aimed against the heretic. What happened to Ward Churchill was flexing of ideological muscle well within those bounds. Imagine if Churchill had suggested that 911 was a “black op” and focussed his research on this possibility. Indeed, what was done to Churchill effectively reduces the possibility that the black op research option can be considered among academic researchers.

There are exceptions that push the limits and that may not be publicly executed for fear of further exposure. For these individuals they are simply removed from influential posts and relegated to academic oblivion. I am thinking of William K. Black (e.g., “Exposing the Banksters: The Bill Black Mystery…?”).

Regarding radical professors, it is clear that they serve to co-opt activist students away from activism and reform and towards ideas and radical writing. They bring activist students into the fold of radical intellectuals and take them on as graduate students. The language is classic: The pen is mightier than the sword, a great idea can change the world, good analysis will take us out of darkness… But the radical professor’s example and stance are even more powerful than the contrived rationalizations: A complete separation of thought and action, without ever challenging local structures of oppression, accompanied by a position of privilege and high class status, under the guilt-alleviating and self-congratulatory cover of radical analysis.

MB: How would you describe the general impact of liberal foundations on the evolution of research within universities and on intellectuals more generally?

DR: The maintenance of the hierarchical structures that control our lives depends on a “vast tapestry of lies upon which we feed” (Harold Pinter, Nobel Lecture, 2005). The main institutions that embed us into the hierarchy, such as schools, universities, and mass media and entertainment corporations, have a primary function to create and maintain this tapestry. This includes establishment scientists and all service intellectuals in charge of “interpreting” reality. In fact, the scientists and “experts” define reality in order to bring it into conformation with the always-adapting dominant mental tapestry of the moment. They also invent and build new branches of the tapestry that serve specific power groups by providing new avenues of exploitation.

If we accept this, then it follows that all systemic instruments (such as liberal foundations) that enable service intellectuals are part of the same program.

MB: Can you describe how liberal foundations and/or individual liberal philanthropists have influenced your own work, and if so how?

DR: Given Canadian academic science granting councils and the exigencies of the tenure track, I ended up doing nuclear spectroscopy of metallic alloys and organic compounds and then in my environmental science phase quantitative analysis of lake and ocean muds rather than the cosmology that got me into physics in the first place and the educational activism that eventually got me into life.

These days I continue to (freely) collaborate with leading soil scientists because I believe I can learn useful things that will allow me to critique mainstream assertions about soil depletion as part of my critique of the environmental science establishment. Also because I bring a unique and much appreciated technical expertise that is helpful in solving the scientific puzzle of soils; something that is intellectually satisfying at times.

Once a US philanthropic science agency that was doing the rounds flirted with me about my work on the Invar problem of physics and meteoritics. I got a sense that they were interested in being able to say that they “seeded genius,” as a way to prop themselves up and maintain their “track record.” They had no way to recognize value other than what their “trusted advisor scientists” told them, all based on superficial (read relevant) impressions of course.

MB: Do you think anti-capitalist activists can strategically utilize liberal foundation funding to develop an anti-hegemonic movement for social change?

DR:  No I do not. I am not an “anti-capitalist activist”. I am an individualist anarchist and I feel much more affinity to individualist libertarians than to anything right or left. I believe that the capitalism of Adam Smith is more consistent (but not consistent) with human freedom than the communism of Marx. I don’t believe that the anarchic ideal can be achieved via socialism or communism (or capitalism). And I believe that what we have now is closer to fascism than anything else.

I believe that the essential ingredient that is missing from our First World middle-class activism is individual rebellion in which individuals fight their own oppressions via a Freirian praxis of liberation. To take an analogy from physics, the essential element for a critical mass is the radioactive isotope. Without it, there can be no critical mass. A majority opinion is just that, nothing more.

And the new law has teeth; any violations of its provisions will be punished by having 10% of their state funds withheld from the school district or charter school.

This new law comes on the heels of Arizona’s reactionary anti-immigrant law, SB1070, which legalizes racial profiling by requiring police to stop and question anyone who they suspect is undocumented. That was followed by an announcement by the state’s Department of Education that teachers with heavy accents must be removed from classes for students still learning English. Many have interpreted this as targeting immigrant teachers who were first hired under a program to teach bilingual education, a program later abolished as part of the overall anti-immigrant climate. This attack on ethnic studies represents yet another “brick in the wall” of an officially sanctioned white supremacy and American chauvinism in Arizona, while encouraging its spread around the country. Arizona has become an ugly battleground, and testing ground, for a new “Jim Crow,” reviving an official second-class status for the 30% of the people of Arizona who are Latino.

The author of this new law is Tom Horne, Superintendent of Public Instruction for the State of Arizona’s Department of Education, and Republican candidate for state attorney general. Horne has made it no secret that the law is specifically aimed at eliminating the Tucson Unified School District’s (TUSD) Mexican-American Studies program and ethnic studies programs in general. Roughly 56% of the TUSD district’s 55,000 students are Latino, and about 3% of the students take these classes, which offer a rigorous course of study that gives students college qualifying credit. But Horne said the new law will put an end to this; it “would ban La Raza (Mexican-American) studies because it’s a course that’s aimed primarily at members of one race, and we have testimony that this has promoted resentment toward one race.” And he also said the law would end other ethnic studies courses as well.¹

Students “should not be taught that they are oppressed”

Horne has been point-man for a years-long campaign to wipe out ethnic studies classes and courses in the secondary schools. In June 2007, on official state Department of Education stationary, Horne wrote “An Open Letter to the Citizens of Tucson,” arguing that the TUSD Ethnic Studies Program should be terminated. He charged that “ethnic studies in the TUSD teaches a kind of destructive ethnic chauvinism…” He said “…students should be taught that this is the land of opportunity, and that if they work hard they can achieve their goals. They should not be taught that they are oppressed.”

In other words, in the view of Arizona’s Superintendent of Public Instruction the purpose of public education is to tell students what to think — not to enable them to develop the ability to be critical thinkers. “Truth” — for Horne and those like him whose starting point is protecting and preserving this system — is whatever set of ideas correspond to achieving their goals. What is being demonstrated now in Arizona is that raw power dictates what “narrative” about this country’s history and present-day reality will be taught — that “might makes right.”

Horne’s letter went further; it singled out for attack particular books used in the curriculum, including Occupied America: A History of Chicanos by historian Rudolfo Acuña, a book which received the Gustavus Myers Award for an Outstanding Book on Race Relations in North America, and has been used as a standard text in college-level curricula for Chicano (Mexican-American) Studies for many years. And Horne targeted the student group MEChA for attack as well.

State Senator Russell Pearce, author of SB 1070, made this point even more openly in his amendments to a bill in the state Senate, SB 1108 — a bill that had nothing to do with education — approved by the Arizona Senate’s House Appropriations Committee in mid-April. It would withhold funding to schools, including on the college level, whose courses “denigrate American values and the teachings of Western civilization,” and would bar teaching practices that “overtly encourage dissent” from those values, including “democracy, capitalism, pluralism and religious tolerance.”

Pearce too targeted Mexican-American Studies at the TUSD, and included provisions that would ban student groups like MEChA on any public campuses. The Senate bill would have confiscated books and teaching materials that are deemed “anti-American.” Pearce also singled out Acuna’s Occupied America, saying it amounted to “sedition.” It appears these provisions did not make it into this final law, but they reveal the whole climate around this dangerous offensive.

The origin and importance of ethnic studies

As the national liberation and anti-imperialist struggles of the 1960s developed and a revolutionary current emerged, one powerful expression was the hard-fought student strikes demanding courses, departments and schools of ethnic studies. While the students of oppressed nationalities had to fight just to get into the universities, what they confronted when they got there was an educational system which distorted or suppressed those aspects of history and present-day reality that challenged and put the lie to the bullshit about America’s “shining example,” and its “special place” in the world. They began at San Francisco State University in 1968, which saw the longest student strike in U.S. history, led by the Third World Liberation Front (a joint effort of African American, Asian American, Chicano, and student organizations of other nationalities). That strike established the first School of Ethnic Studies.

Ethnic studies programs, which later expanded to include women’s studies, gender studies, etc., established a foothold where oppressed nationality students especially could for the first time learn about, and be part of, discovering their own history; the struggle and resistance; and the contributions to art, culture, science, etc. of Black, Chicano, Native American, Asian and other oppressed peoples in this country. This contributed significantly to bringing to light the truth that America’s ultimate global domination rested on the foundation of the kidnap of millions and millions of African peoples and their enslavement in the “new world,” the genocidal destruction of the Native American peoples, and the theft through war of 40% of the territory of Mexico as the start of a process of conquest that ultimately spanned the globe.

An essential element in the reassertion of the white supremacy and American patriotism on the rise today is the need to restore that “official narrative” about America and its “special role” as the “good guys” in the world. To these reactionary forces, the Mexican-American and other ethnic studies programs on the secondary school and college campuses are an obstacle that must be eliminated.

Whether or not those in power in Arizona succeed in banning ethnic studies outright, the reactionary assault on education that’s now been given the official stamp of approval by Arizona’s new law, is already having a chilling affect on those coming under attack, and it is taking a tremendous toll. In the face of attempts to put them on the defensive, the faculty and administrators have denied the charges against their programs with assurances that the allegations are untrue. Now each teacher entering a classroom will have to teach while looking over one shoulder, facing the choice of self-censorship, or risking state intervention for telling the truth. It is the responsibility of people everywhere to strenuously oppose the whole reactionary offensive that is gaining momentum in Arizona.

1. 5/1/10 Arizona Republic.

Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:

(a) freedom of conscience and religion;

(b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;

(c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and

(d) freedom of association.

Article 7 assures “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person and the right not to be deprived thereof in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.”

According to Yale Law Professor and constitutional scholar Thomas I. Emerson (1908-1981):

Maintenance of a system of free expression is necessary (1) as assuring individual self-fulfillment, (2) as a means of attaining the truth, (3) as a method of securing participation by the members of society in social, including political, decision-making, and (4) as maintaining the balance between stability and change in society.

With no free expression right, all others are at risk at a time dissent is called a threat to national security, terrorism, or treason. Howard Zinn called it “the highest form of patriotism,” and according to the Friends of Voltaire, “I may disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

In a post-9/11 climate, it’s more than ever endangered, academic tenure affording no protection; to wit, Professor Denis Rancourt’s University of Ottawa (U of O) March 31, 2009 firing, ostensibly for pedagogical reasons, but as he said:

I was fired under the false pretext of having arbitrarily assigned high grades in one course in the winter 2008 semester. (To do so), the university had to dispense with due process. In the words of the professors’ union’s lawyer, my dismissal was ‘both a denial of substantive and procedural rights… and a contravention of the basic principles of natural justice.’

He states:

Most students agree to give up their independence of thought and enquiry and to serve the insane system of due dates and senseless assignments in exchange for the certificate (a degree. They spend four years) to be certified persistently obedient. (In return, they get) access to a privileged position in the wage hierarchy and professional social status. It’s a trade…. It requires survival… that, in turn, requires adopting the ideology of the profession… and self-indoctrination” to expunge the impulse to learn. Your soul (is exchanged) for a place in the sun.

Rancount’s “critical pedagogy” focuses on learning, not regurgitating professorial views for high grades, or as he said in a January 5, 2009 letter to Marc Jolicoeur, Chairman of the University Board of Governors:

His focus shifted “from evaluation to education, from rank ordering of students to learning (to remove) intimidation and anxiety from the educational equation. As a result, student performances in my courses have improved significantly and in fact have been excellent.” University interference was “politically motivated and resisted in the name of academic freedom and in defence of the best education for my students.”

His political activism lay behind “the university’s attempts to discipline (him) since September 2005;” specifically over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “in articles, on radio, in blog postings, at public venues, and in classes.”

In 2007, after criticizing the university’s position on academically boycotting Israel, repression against him intensified after Allan Rock became president on June 3, 2008 — a former Canadian politician, UN ambassador, and staunch Israeli supporter.

On his March 8 U of O Watch blog posting, Rancourt said Rock, as UN ambassador, “abruptly changed Canada’s longstanding policy on Israel,” henceforth “vot(ing) against UN resolutions for Palestinian human rights along with the US and Israel,” contrary to virtually all other UN members save for a Pacific island or two.

As U of O president, he was “reprimanded by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association for banning a student poster about Israeli Apartheid Week, (then) strong-armed a student union president into distancing the (organization) from the student-run Ontario Public Interest Research Group (OPIRG) which had expressed a principled stance towards Israel.”

In September 2008 at Rock’s urging, the Executive Committee of the Board of Governors (EBOG) suspended Rancourt, recommended dismissing him in December, barred him from campus, then fired him in March 2009.

A University of Ottawa physics professor, he was tenured, a full professor since 1997, a recognized expert in his field, and a “phenomenal teacher” according to members of the Environmental Studies Student Association for providing an “extremely enriching individualized… empower(ing and) positive learning environment where inspired students gained confidence and courage.”

How could his pedagogical approach and grading methods “justify ordering the university police to remove (and ban him) from campus, (assign) his graduate students to other faculty, fir(e) his post doctoral research fellow, and summarily fir(e) him without due process?”

It’s “particularly ironic given its Vision 2010 strategic plan (stating) that the university will “Support and recognize initiatives designed to implement a range of new and diversified strategies for learning and evaluation.”

Rancourt wanted a stronger, more democratic U of O — better pedagogically with a new syllabus, community service offerings, course content, and right to challenge established practices.

He was also vocal on environmental concerns, professional ethics, lobbying, media influence, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In response, university officials tried to silence him, finally by dismissal, the same disposition for others like Bard College’s Joel Kovel, De Paul University’s Norman Finkelstein, and University of Colorado’s Ward Churchill, each distinguished academicians, scholars, and outspoken critics of injustice.

Until his July 2007 firing, Churchill was an award-winning tenured professor. He sued, prevailed, was reversed at the district court level, appealed, and was supported by National Lawyers Guild, Center for Constitutional Rights, Society of American Law Teachers, Latina/O Critical Legal Theory, and Law Professors and Attorneys through amici curiae filings to reverse the lower court’s ruling. In summary of argument comments, they stated:

Academic freedom, a central component of the First Amendment (similar to Section 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms) and essential to a thriving democracy, is imperiled when state university officials succumb to political pressure to fire a tenured professor over constitutionally protected statements. Affording the shield of absolute immunity to university officials and vacating a jury finding of wrongful discharge in violation of the First Amendment threatens the fundamental rights of all faculty members.

Such action “will have a chilling effect on professors, students, and citizens whose speech is unpopular but constitutionally protected. The resultant suppression of free inquiry and critical thinking vitiates the First Amendment and undermines the foundation of higher learning in this country.”

It holds for Canada under constitutionally protected freedoms, Rancourt saying tenure produces obedient academics who won’t challenge injustices in society or their university environs. He wrote:

One antidote to the university as boot camp in the service of capital is for tenured professors to use their tenure. This would turn tenure on its head, as it is free society’s coercive tool of choice for fabricating aligned and docile academics. Not the job security itself… but the filtering and moulding process known as the tenure track…. Tenure is death, risk is life, and collaboration is criminal. Collaborating in an institutionalized system of resource looting, labour exploitation, and genocidal demographic engineering is criminal, especially when its ultimate weapon is the foremost crime known as war, such as the present Canadian war in Afghanistan.

In a detailed February 23, 2009 brief (five weeks before his firing), he said university officials used a “fast track process” against him, wouldn’t engage in dialogue, and refused to evaluate him by a committee of his peers to facilitate his firing:

“on a first offence without ever having the right to be heard at any stage, including the final decision meeting of the Executive Committee of the Board of Governors….Canadian society is witnessing the contrived and intentional firing of an outspoken dissident professor, as harsh as the most prominent recent cases in the US under Bush” that continue under Obama.

Freedom of information (FOI) documents showed intense illegal university surveillance, “including an extensive use of a student spy and the hiring of professional reporters to produce commented transcripts of my academic and conference talks at other universities.”

Methods used included;

• covertly recording conversations of others;
• covertly attending a presentation… under false pretense and covertly voice recording the event and preparing reports;
• using a false Facebook identity (Maureen Robinson = Nathalie page) to covertly join activist student events and discussion groups;
• using a false Facebook identity to covertly make enquiries about student events;
• using a false gmail account… to make covert email enquiries;
• making false pretense enquiries to outside (blog) editors and outside conference organizers;” and other methods.

Rancourt concluded, “This may be the first time in North American academic history that a university administration (through its highest legal office) hire(d) a student to practice extensive covert surveillance of a professor and (other) students” in violation of Canadian and international law.

Part VI – Invasion of Privacy under the Criminal Code of Canada prohibits “private communication” intercepts from one person to another within Canada. Provision 184(1) states:

Every one who, by means of any electro-magnetic, acocustic, mechanical or other device, willfully intercepts a private communication is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years.

Provision 193(1) prohibits disclosure of illegal intercepts, subjecting offenders to imprisonment for up to two years.

Article 17 of the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights states:

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his honour and reputation (and) Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Article 19 states: “Everyone shall have the right to hold opinions without interference.”

FOI evidence also revealed interference to prevent Rancourt from reserving an auditorium, secure computing services, participate in campus demonstrations, enlist students for research projects, accept new graduate students, negotiate his teaching load, propose new courses and curriculum changes among other things. In addition, since 2005, measures “included a multitude of tenuous and invalid disciplinary attempts and interventions including and not limited to… the Dean barging into” his… Physics and the Environment course to close it down.”

In 19 prior U of O teaching years, he hadn’t once encountered discipline. Thereafter it became intense, malicious, repeated, and wholly unjustified, culminating in his dismissal because of Allan Rock’s collusion with Israeli Lobby efforts to “enforce (its) ideological alignment within the University….”

As a result, “At a snap (December 10, 2008) meeting, (he) was effectively summarily dismissed, physically barred from campus, and escorted off the premises by university police” for bogus reasons. Then on January 23, 2009, he was “arrested, cuffed and removed from campus by Ottawa Police” by order of the university administration, “and charged with trespass to property — while hosting (his) weekly Cinema Academica event.”

In a December 2009 activisteacher.blogspot.com posting, he called the actions against him “an indicator of emergent fascism. (It’s) not a distant historical anomaly. It is an optimum end-state towards which large-scale disruptive and predatory economic hierarchies tend. It is the state of total and unchallenged control of every facet of life by corporate masters of the economy, achieved by an optimized balance of force and a designed mental and social environment. Independent thought is eliminated (and its) influence rendered foreign.”

America is already in an advanced state, Canada close behind toward a dark future, prevented only by “authentic (determined) rebellion.”

Letters Supporting Professor Rancourt

Ones from U of O included:

Adjunct Professor Valerie Whiffen, School of Psychology, calling the university’s action “an appalling and unprecedented lack of respect for both academic freedom and due process” in urging his immediate reinstatement.

Department of Criminology Adjunct Professor Robert Gaucher calling the attack on academic freedom “extremely upsetting….I am appalled by it…. If a colleague with such outstanding credentials can be treated (this way), then the academic freedom of all of us is threatened.”

Instructor and doctoral candidate Claire Delisle, Department of Criminology, expressing concern about the university “exercising rigid control over the staff and the students” and for subverting academic freedom.

Ones from other universities included:

Members of College and University Workers United (CUWU) calling Rancourt “a dedicated educator and a fearless defender of justice (for his) stand for human rights and students’ rights. We are thankful to count Denis Rancourt among the rare public intellectuals who do not compromise their principles when they become aware of institutional folly; but instead use their positions to expose and correct flawed practices…. We conclude that the charges (against him) are a contrived pretext, that they are preposterous as reasons to summarily remove a tenured professor….”

University of Manitoba Mineralogy and Crystallography Professor, Frank C. Hawthorne, calling Rancourt “an outstanding scientist (among the very) few of his calibre, (a man) the community can ill afford to lose….”

Ryerson University Professor Emeritus Helmut Burkhardt calling the action against him “totally inadmissible…”

Drexel University Assistant Professor of Sociology Mary Ebeling calling Rancourt’s firing “truly shocking (for having) violated, with impunity, the very principle of academic freedom” U of O claims to uphold.

Babes-Bolyai University (Romania) Faculty of Economics and Business Administration Assistant Edmond Nawrotzky-Torok saying he was “appalled by the violation of academic freedom and the totalitarianism which seems to characterize a university that allegedly stands for ‘freedom of expression in an atmosphere of open dialogue, enabling critical thought.’ ”

Retired McGill University Biology Professor John Southin expressed academic freedom concerns.

University of Western Ontario Professor Emeritus Arthur Jutan, Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, said:

“It takes an extreme level of courage to stand up to the Emperor. I congratulate you for this. Long after these Houses of cards come falling down, and they will some day, and new more solid structures to replace them are built….your name will be remembered, as someone who had the courage to stand up to all the administrative hacks, that tried to hang onto their little deck chairs as the Titanic slowly slipped under the sea.”

University of Calgary Associate English Professor, Aruna Srivastava “express(ed) not simply dismay but shock that a university would adopt such heavy-handed tactics to eliminate (a colleague) whose opinions and ideas were (to some) abrasive and unpopular.”

Guelph University & Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, University Professor Emeritus John McMurtry, described a similar “harrowing witch-hunt” he once endured, saying “It will be an enduring disgrace if this shocking administrator persecution is permitted to stand.”

University of Lethbridge Professor of Globalization Studies, Anthony Hall, compared Rancourt’s persecution “to a twenty-first century Canadian version of the Spanish Inquisition.”

Others expressed their alarm and disgust as should we all in condemning assaults on academic and speech freedoms, democratic principles, and inalienable liberty in a free and open society.

Mark Twain called “irreverence… the champion of liberty and its only sure defense.” Benjamin Franklin explained that “Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.” John Stuart Mill called the “evil of silencing the expression of an opinion… robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation…”

US Supreme Court William O. Douglas spoke for others in calling “Restriction on free thought and free speech….the most dangerous of all subversions…. It is our attitude toward free thought and free expression that will determine our fate. There must be no limit on the range of temperate discussion, no limits on thought. No subject must be taboo. No censor must preside at our assemblies. (There must be no restraint against the right to) protest even against the moral code that the standard of the day sets…”

From the web site wewon’tbesilenced.com, “My free speech is not negotiable.”

Nor are human and civil rights, social justice, and democratic freedoms, ones that tolerate no subversion of constitutionally guaranteed rights because the alternative is repugnant despotism.

On the other hand, freedom to express oneself is not absolute. Libel, slander and disinformation cannot be defended or justified under Article 2. Nowhere do these illegitimate forms of expression find greater expression than on the subject of Israel and Palestine.

It’s fitting that this debate should take place soon after Israeli Apartheid Week. As the annual event attracts increasing numbers of supporters on university campuses, Israel’s defenders resort to more militant countermeasures to stifle it. This year, for example, a government MP even introduced a bill to condemn Israeli Apartheid Week on the grounds that it’s ‘anti-Semitic.’ Of course, he failed.

Tonight’s show focuses on the new concept of “lawfare,” a term recently coined by zionists to charge Israel’s critics with abusing freedom of speech to single out Israel for criticism. Now, let’s meet our guests: Speaking on behalf of Israel is Canadian MP Irwin Cotler, who comes to us from Ottawa via satellite. Mr. Cotler is a former justice minister, and on March 11 in New York City was one of three co-chairman of the inaugural conference of The Lawfare Project.

In the studio to defend legal actions against Israel is Stan Rice. Mr. Rice is a Carleton graduate student in history and researching how Israel uses the holocaust and demonized Arab stereotypes to support its occupation of Palestine. Welcome to both of you. Let’s begin with Irwin Cotler. Tell us what exactly “lawfare” is.

Irwin Cotler: Thank you, Brian. The Lawfare Project has been created to raise awareness about the abuse of the law as a weapon of war and the exploitation of human rights law. The term refers to the use of law as a form of warfare.

For example, “human rights” ought to apply to all peoples of all nations, yet international organizations like the United Nations and anti-Israel activists use the term as a political weapon to demonize Israel. Time and again the UN has used legalistic-sounding language to single it out as a pariah state. Let’s not forget that 35 years ago the UN passed its infamous resolution equating Zionism with Racism. It gave the abomination of anti-Semitism the appearance of international legal sanction.

A more recent example is the UN’s notorious Goldstone Report. By accusing Israel of committing war crimes during its military operations in Gaza last year, the UN again singled out one member state for disproportionate condemnation, thereby clearly discriminating against Israel. Such behaviour diminishes the credibility of the UN and it diminishes respect for international law.

In addition, there is the more pervasive problem of using pseudo-legalistic language to refer to Israel as an “apartheid state” at events like the 2001 United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban. Such abuse undermines the struggle against racism worldwide. So you see, the use of legalistic language and procedures to serve biased political ends has a long history.

Cohen: Stan, how in your mind does lawfare fit into the larger picture of free expression?

Stan Rice: It doesn’t. It has no place in a democratic society governed by the rule of law. Contrary to what Irwin Cotler would have us believe, lawfare strips human rights and freedom of expression of any independent worth by reducing them to instruments of Israeli propaganda. You will note that at no time does Mr. Cotler address the substance of the charge that zionism is form of racism, or that Israel did commit war crimes.…

Cotler: You see, this is precisely what I mean! Your student guest is demonizing Israel and…

Cohen: …Hold on. Hold on. Let him finish.

Rice: What Mr. Cotler fails to mention is that the author of the report, Richard Goldstone, is a Zionist Jew with great affection for Israel who deliberately understated the magnitude of Israel’s atrocities.…

Cotler: There! This is precisely…

Rice: …Moreover, Ehud Barak admitted that the decision to attack Gaza had been planned for six months and that Hamas rockets had nothing to do with it. A premeditated attack on a civilian population is by definition a war crime, yet Mr. Cotler and The Lawfare Project attack those who want to these Israeli war criminals prosecuted.

Cohen: Irwin, what Stan said about the cause of the Gaza attack is true—it’s documented—so how does using legal methods to have those responsible brought to justice amount to an abuse of the legal system?

Cotler: Israel has an absolute right to defend itself, and its politicians deserve the same rights as those of any other country.

Rice: That’s right—the same rights, not preferential rights! The applicability of international law is universal, and all countries have a duty to uphold the law and seek the arrest of those suspected of committing war crimes. But Israel is deathly afraid of the law so it sabotages the law wherever it can. (Cotler tries to interrupt). It coerces countries like Spain, Belgium and now the U.K. to rewrite their laws to allow Israelis to evade arrest. “Lawfare” is designed to hobble the law by perpetuating the double-standard of one law for Israel and one for the rest of the world.

Cotler: How dare you speak of double-standards! Israel is the greatest victim of double…

Rice: …Do you deny the facts in the Goldstone Report?

Cotler: That report is biased and illegitimate.

Rice: How can it be biased against Israel if Goldstone admitted that he biased his report to favour Israel?! Is this the sort of thinking The Lawfare Project endorses? Like the David Project and the Israel Project, this is just another zionist propaganda make-work project.

Cotler: Brian, are you interested in a debate or an Israel-bashing session?!

Cohen: Nobody’s bashing Israel, Irwin. Moving on to the subject of boycotts… Irwin, why is The Lawfare Project taking aim at the Boycott Divestment and Sanction movement? Aren’t these legitimate forms of political protest?

Cotler: This is prime example of how the world is ganging up on Israel. Any singling out of Israel amounts to demonization and anti-Semitism.

Rice: Oh, here we go…

Cotler: You endorse anti-Semitism, do you?

Rice: I think you need to check yourself back into the National Centre for Psychiatric Abnormality. (Cotler looks furious and starts raising his voice)

Cohen: Okayyyy, that sounds like the cue for a commercial break. (turns to the camera) We’ll be right back!” (2.5-minute pause) Now that we’ve had a chance to cool down, I want to return to the subject of BDS and the law. The BDS campaign against Israel is gathering steam one could argue that Israel is under selective attack. How would you respond, Stan?

Rice: I agree. Israel is under attack, but it’s a legitimate attack, just as the boycott against apartheid South Africa was a legitimate…

Cotler: …Equating Israel with South Africa is classic anti-Semitism and I won’t stand for…!

Cohen: …Irwin, we can’t have a productive debate if you continually go off on anti-Semitism. It makes intelligent discussion impossible. We’re here to talk about The Lawfare Project.

Rice: (cutting in) The Lawfare Project is designed in part to savage anyone who makes the case that Israel is an apartheid state, something that the editors of Ha’aretz newspaper and former Israeli cabinet minister Shulamit Aloni have already done, as if Irwin Cotler didn’t know. The Project goes after Israel’s condemners not because they are wrong, but because they are right!

Cohen: Irwin, does the Lawfare Project act on behalf of any other country that feels unfairly targeted by legal strategies?

Cotler: No. No other country is subjected to the kind of vilification and hatred that Israel must endure!

Cohen: I’m not so sure the government of China would agree, Toward the end of March, the Ontario Superior Court began hearing arguments on a 2004 civil case brought by six Falun Gong plaintiffs, including a Canadian citizen, against the government of Jiang Zemin for redress of torture. One of the intervenors for the plaintiffs is B’nai Brith lawyer David Matas, who rejected the defendants’ claim that they are immune from prosecution because they were state officials. Why has The Lawfare Project not come to China’s defence and what makes this case any different, legalistically, from human rights cases brought against Israel?

Cotler: There is absolutely no connection between legitimate human rights cases brought against an odious regime like China’s and illegitimate human rights cases brought against a democracy like Israel! I am surprised you would even bring up such an obviously inappropriate comparison!

Rice: Can I pick up on that?

Cohen: Sure.

Rice: The notion that Israel is somehow a special case permeates every aspect of the Middle East and makes a mockery of the very law Mr.Cotler purports to uphold. To give another example, did you know that the U.S. Department of Commerce acts as Israel’s proxy to sabotage boycotts?

Cohen: Hold on. What do you mean “proxy”?

Rice: The Bureau of Industry and Security in the Department of Commerce goes after U.S. companies that co-operate with businesses and countries that boycott Israeli goods. On June 25, 2003, The Kansas City Star reported that the bureau filed charges against Cook Composites and Polymers Co. because it confirmed to a customer in Bahrain that the goods being shipped did not contain any Israeli materials. Cook was forced to paying a $6,000 fine for violating U.S. Commerce Department regulations to counter the Arab boycott of Israel. All the company did was answer a question!

The article went on to say: “Knowing violators of the anti-boycott provisions face fines of up to $50,000, or five times the value of the exports at issue, and possible imprisonment. Offenders can also be denied export privileges.”

This is a perfect example of how Israel wages “Lawfare” to persecute individuals and groups who want to prosecute criminals. What we need is a “Lawfair” Project to defend individuals and groups from harassment and malicious propaganda. In a free society, “all’s fair in law and war.”

Cohen: (to the camera) On that pithy note, we’ll have to wrap things up. I’d like to thank my guests Irwin Cotler, and Carleton graduate student Stan Rice. See you next time on Face of the Nation. Good night.