Original articles on Israel and related issues written by Steven Plaut, a professor at an Israeli university.
![[Powered by Blogger]](http://buttons.blogger.com/bloggerbutton1.gif){kind=small}
1. A Jewish liberal is someone who thinks that Mexicans with no US visa have the right to move to East Los Angeles but Jews must be prevented from moving to East Jerusalem.
2. The "Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research" is a semi-academic center at Tel Aviv University run by the political Left. (http://www.tau.ac.il/peace/) It may be best known for publishing what it calls a "peace index," which is actually a measure of how many Israelis agree this week with the political agenda of the Left. That a leftist center should be operating on the campus of Tel Aviv University should not be a big surprise at all.
The Steinmetz Center has been in the news the last few days because of a public opinion survey it ran, and to which then the Bash-the-Joos crowd gave an anti-Israel spin.
The Steinmetz Center is itself largely responsible for this damage and misrepresentation. The Center is biased and one should always be suspicious of "surveys" conducted by agencies with a political axe to grind. That includes leftists and also rightists. It is also why surveys about teenage drinking collected by anti-drinking advocates are suspect (one such survey recently claimed Israeli teenagers drink more than Belarussian sailors!), or feminist groups doing surveys on women students getting groped. And so on.
Be that as it may, the new survey by Steinmetz Center was waved about all week by Haaretz and its fellow anti-Zionists. Gideon Levy at Haaretz today insists the survey proves that Israel is a fascist country. So do countless Bloggers for a Second Holocaust of Jews. The Survey in question was presented to the public and was evidently supervised by Tel Aviv University professor Daniel Bar-Tal, an anti-Zionist Marxist with a long track record of pseudo-research trying to prove that Jews are racists. See this http://www.isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/TAU%20-%20Daniel%20Bar-Tal%20-%20conveniently%20omits.htm
The Haaretz story is here: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1165910.html Note the headline: Israelis demand that human rights groups be gagged.
Well, as always, we could use an online translator every time we look at Haaretz headlines or articles.
The world is crawling with anti-Israel propaganda groups, many operating in Israel by the local Left seeking the country's destruction. These pretend to be "human rights groups," but almost all Israelis understand that they are anti-Israel and anti-Semitic seditious and belligerent groups collaborating with Israel's enemies and seeking the country's annihilation. These groups have never heard of a human right of a Jew that deserves respect.
When polled what they think about "human rights groups," the bulk of Israelis understand the question as asking about these hostile anti-Israel propagandists. 58% of those polled said they would like to see these groups muzzled. I would have been part of the 58% if asked. In the small print, the very same survey found that 98% of Israelis believe freedom of speech is very important. The problem is that they do not believe these seditious groups are engaging in debate but rather in espionage and sedition (bear in mind the survey was taken days after the Kamm-Blau affair).
Here is a Bar-Tal-Haaretz "finding"r: "They found that 57.6 percent of the respondents agreed that human rights organizations that expose immoral conduct by Israel should not be allowed to operate freely." Translation of the "finding": 57.6% think anti-Israel treasonous groups pretending to be concerned with human rights should not be allowed….
The poll also found that large majorities of Israelis support prosecuting those who engage in espionage and treason, and think Israelis calling for boycotts against their own country should be punished. Bar-Tal insists this shows Israelis are anti-democratic. Actually it shows that Israelis consider the Left to be anti-democratic.
Gideon Levy at Haaretz says all that proves Israel is fascist – I think his article proves that Gideon Levy is a leftwing fascist. Israeli leftists toss about "fascist" more easily than the leftist moonbats attacking the Arizona governor for policing the border.
By the way, here is an interesting quote from the New Israel Fund: New Israel Fund (from Prof. Shlomo Sharan)
http://www.nif.org/about/frequently-asked-questions.html#14
NIF supports an end to the occupation of Palestinian territories as a central tenet of the strategic framework in which we operate. The tactics known as 'boycott, divestment and sanctions' (BDS) are designed to pressure Israel to end the occupation, but NIF believes these tactics to be unproductive, inflammatory and ineffective because of the difficulties in defining an approach that is not overly broad, does not delegitimize Israel and will achieve the long-term goal.
Although we will continue to communicate publicly and privately to our allies and grantees that NIF does not support BDS (boycotts, divestment, sanctions) as a strategy or tactic, we will not reduce or eliminate our funding for grantees that differ with us on a tactical matter. NIF will not fund BDS activities nor support organizations for which BDS is a substantial element of their activities, but will support organizations that conform to our grant requirements if their support for BDS is incidental or subsidiary to their significant programs.
In other words, New Israel Fund, the foundation which funds all the "human rights" organizations in Israel, approves Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against....Israel. They are certainly not supporters of human rights for Israelis.
3. Once again, the Israel Prize under a Likud government goes to an anti-Israel leftist academic:
Hebrew University – Avishai Margalit (Dept of Philosophy) joins the growing streak of Israel-Bashing Israel Prize recipients
Avishai Margalit? Yes, the very Hebrew University philosopher who, two days earlier, had the audacity to accept the Israeli Prize without even blinking. For this is the same Margalit who many years earlier branded Elie Wiesel "Kitschman of Genius" in a scurrilous article, in which he described Yad Vashem Holocaust Center as a memorial that "has become an element of state kitsch."
What can you say about a country that – once again - awarded its most prestigious prize on its most important day to a radical leftist? One who mocked the memory of the Holocaust and poked fun at Israel's fallen soldiers?
It's Israeli Masochism, Stupid!
Alon Ben Shaul
28/4/2010
It all started with an ad titled, "For Jerusalem," which author Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Prize laureate, published in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. It addressed President Obama and said, inter alia: "For me, the Jew that I am, Jerusalem is above politics…It is mentioned more than six hundred times in Scripture - and not a single time in the Koran...the first song I heard was my mother's lullaby about and for Jerusalem."
Wiesel also wrote that Jews, Christians and Muslims were able to build their homes anywhere in Jerusalem and that only under Israeli sovereignty had freedom of worship for all religions been assured in the city. "The anguish over Jerusalem is not about real estate, but about memory," he stressed.
A Leftist group of activists responded to this ad by saying that as long as Jerusalem remains "occupied" it cannot be holy. "Jerusalem must be shared by both Israelis and Palestinians," they insisted in an open letter published after Independence Day. They emphasized that they wanted to express their "frustration, even outrage" at Wiesel's letter, demanding that Jerusalem must be shared by the people of the two nations residing in it. "Only a shared city will live up to the prophet's vision: Zion shall be redeemed with justice," their letter proclaimed. (1)
The signatories maintained that while their Jerusalem is "concrete," that of Wiesel is an ideal, an object of prayer. "Our Jerusalem is populated with people, young and old, women and men, who wish their city to be a symbol of dignity - not of hubris, inequality and discrimination. You speak of the celestial Jerusalem; we live in the earthly one," the letter said. "For every Jew, you say, a visit to Jerusalem is a homecoming, yet it is our commitment that makes your homecoming possible. We prefer the hardship of realizing citizenship in this city to the convenience of merely yearning for it."
The signatories culminated their response by appealing to Wiesel to visit Jerusalem for himself, thus seeing "with your own eyes the catastrophic effects of the frenzy of construction." The letter reiterated the chant used by Simon-the-Righteous neighborhood (Sheikh Jarrah) activists in their weekly rallies, demanding that Jews be prohibited from moving into that area: "Nothing can be holy in an occupied city!" (2)
The activists call themselves "Just Jerusalem" and include Israel Prize laureate professors Avishai Margalit and Zeev Sternhell, as well as former Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg.
Avishai Margalit? Yes, the very Hebrew University philosopher who, two days earlier, had the audacity to accept the Israeli Prize without even blinking. For this is the same Margalit who many years earlier branded Elie Wiesel "Kitschman of Genius" in a scurrilous article, in which he described Yad Vashem Holocaust Center as a memorial that "has become an element of state kitsch."
It was in the anti-Israeli weekly, New York Review of Books, where Margalit wrote that the Holocaust has its amusing sides. "Israel's shrine of kitsch is not, as may have been expected, the Wailing Wall, but a place that should have been furthest away from any trace of kitsch: Yad Vashem, the memorial for the Holocaust. A 'children's room' has been dedicated there recently, a pitch-dark room with tape-recorded voices of children crying out in Yiddish, 'Mama, Tate.' This kind of kitsch even a kitschman of genius like Elie Wiesel would find hard to surpass." (3)
In response, Menahem Fogel, Yad Vashem's director of commemoration, wrote to NYRB that "we will offer a prize of one million dollars if Mr. Margalit can prove that there exist or ever have existed in the Children's Memorial tape recorded voices of children crying out in Yiddish, 'Mama, Tate.'" Fogel accused Margalit of being the victim of figments of his own imagination. "Otherwise we would be forced to conclude that malice and Jewish self-hatred had brought about his blatant lie…." (4)
In his reply Margalit stated: "In my article I incorrectly described what one hears in the children's memorial room at Yad Vashem, for this I apologize…." In fact, it was not much of an apology. Margalit insisted that there was such a recording, and it may have been removed at the request of the architect who may have found it "kitschy." He added that. Yes, Mr. Fogel can keep the money for other projects whose refined taste had been demonstrated in his letter. Even when he made a grossly defamatory error, Margalit could not resist the temptation to bait Yad Vashem. He also likes to drone on about how Israel "misuses" the Holocaust, a view that he shares with the notorious American academic anti-Semite Norman Finkelstein. (5)
In that same NYRB article, "The Kitsch of Israel," Margalit's sarcasm was also directed against the Israel Defense Forces. He took a satirical stab at Israel's commemorations of its fallen soldiers by mocking "the thriving industry of books dedicated to the memory of fallen soldiers." The philosopher from Mount Scopus nastily ridiculed the way Israeli families mourn their beloved lost ones: "It was almost invariably pointed out that they secretly read the poetry of Rachel or Alterman…. These soldiers never got much credit for their love of poetry while alive, only after their premature deaths." (5)
In other words, Margalit holds the view that the Kitschy element in the "Israel death industry" stretches from the Holocaust to the last Israeli fallen soldier. Needless to say, that "industry" is littered with bad taste, self rightness, overt emotions, lack of sophistication and absence of self-restraint. (6)
He also calls to lift the "siege" on Gaza
Prof. Avishai Margalit is considered to be the country's foremost leftist philosopher. In granting him this year's Israel Prize for Philosophy, the prize committee described Margalit as "one of the most important philosophers in the State of Israel and one of the most valued in the world today." Gideon Sa'ar, the Likud education minister, parroted these words in his press release about the Prize. Ironically, one of Margalit's partners in the earlier-mentioned open letter about Jerusalem is Ze'ev Sternhell, who received his own Israel Prize two years earlier. One can find a striking similarity between these two academics, one that clearly illustrates the moral bankruptcy of the Israel Prize.
In another NYRB rant Margalit wrote about the outbreak of the Second Intifada and went out of his way to rationalize Palestinian terrorism. "If the Palestinians were to stop the violence tomorrow," he argued, "there is no question that Israel would stop its violence at once. But if Israel stops the violence tomorrow, there is no chance the Palestinians will stop theirs. This I believe is largely true. But the argument neglects the basic asymmetry between the Israelis and the Palestinians. As things stand, a cease-fire would greatly favor Israel; it would leave the Israelis with their heavily patrolled West Bank and Gaza settlements and their punitive border controls; and it would leave the Palestinians without a state. So as defenders of the status quo ante, the Israelis would be more willing to stop the feud than the Palestinians."
That brings to mind some statements by that OTHER Israel Prize laureate, Sternhell. In a notorious article around the same time, Sternhell advised Hamas to attack Israeli Jewish targets outside the Green Line, rather than within Israel proper, if it wanted to "win hearts and minds" in the region and around the world. No wonder both these "academics" share their "ideas" about Jerusalem in their joint response to Elie Wiessel.
Margalit likes to claim the moral high ground without taking into account any facts on the ground. He is oblivious of the true nature of Hamas and entirely naןve when it comes to analyzing it. In his simple mind, lifting the "siege" of Gaza will relieve Israel of a moral burden. (7) Never mind that it will trigger terrorist activity and leave Gilad Shalit abandoned. Typically Margalit is indifferent to the implications of such a measure upon the Israeli residents who live around the Strip, such as in Sderot. He has nothing to say about the aftermath of the IDF disengagement from Gaza, and the thousands of rockets on Israelis that Israel's withdrawal triggered. (8) To the contrary, he made a specific appeal to the government, as Israel marked Independence Day, to "lift the blockade." "To create this huge jail and believe that something good will emerge because now it's quiet, that's an illusion," he says. "Actually, it's moral bankruptcy and a terrible illusion."(9)
Margalit is currently the George F. Kennan Professor at Princeton's Institute of Advanced Studies. He was a founding member of Peace Now in 1978, and later served on the board of the radical anti-Israel NGO B'Tselem. He used to spend much of his time researching and writing at the post-Zionist Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem. He is best known, however, for his anti-Israeli articles published in The New York Review of Books, where he has been writing for decades.
In the summer of 2008 Margalit's signature appeared on a petition that unreservedly accused the Israeli state of responsibility for the deterioration of the academic educational system in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
"There, checkpoints, blockades, walls and fences," he and his colleagues claimed, "prevent thousands of students and teachers from leading a normal academic life, and lecturers with non-Palestinian passports, who wish to teach in those institutions, are prevented from staying for long enough to carry out meaningful continuous teaching." They called upon the Government of Israel to honor and implement the right of freedom of movement, academic study and instruction in the State of Israel and the territories controlled by it. "Academic freedom is not divisible and cannot be selective. The State of Israel and we its citizens are directly responsible for upholding that freedom."
The signatories did not bother to mention the security issues that stem from these restrictions. One gets the impression that all the Palestinian students are innocent civilians who just want to reach their classrooms in time. The fact that Bir Zeit University and its ilk serve as training hotbeds for suicide bombers and anti-Semitic incitement somehow escapes their attention.
No less revealing are the names that appeared on this petition. Besides Margalit himself and his wife Edna Ullman-Margalit, also a professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University, we find the name of Yehuda "Judd" Ne'eman. Yes, the same Ne'eman who expressed loyalty with the Palestinian armed struggle, the same Neeman who was awarded the Israel Prize a year ago.
One year after Sternhell, and a year before Margalit himself.
And who else was on the list? Eli Friedlander, who was a member of the committee that recommended the granting the prize to Margalit.
One left hand washes the other left hand. This should be called political incest.
Wait for next year's Israel Prize announcement.
----------------------------------------------
1. "Occupied Jerusalem can not be holy." Haaretz, 22nd April 2010.
2. Leftist websites were delighted at the response by Margalit and his friends who were described as the "crטme de la crטme" of the liberal establishment in Israel. Larry Stillman on www.webstylus.net. 24 April 2010.
3. Bloggers on the infamous Nation website were delighted by the response to Wiesel. One of them, Eric Alterman, wrote that "numerous Jerusalemites, among them, the admirable Avishai Margalit, and Zeev Sternhell, tell Non-Jerusalemite Elie Wiesel to shut the hell up about his alleged rights to occupy Jerusalem. Ron Lauder should also shut the hell up…"
4. A. Margalit. "The Kitsch of Israel." New York Review of Books." 24 November 1988.
5. M. Fogel. The Kitsch of Israel." New York Review of Books. 30 March 1989.
6. The assertion that the Holocaust became an "element of State kitsch, is supported by Marc Ellis who writes approvingly about Margalit. "The Holocaust is becoming a kind of politicized Jewish kitsch"' he writes in his book Beyond Innocence and Redemption: Confronting the Holocaust and Israeli Power, by Marc H. Ellis. New York: Harper & Row (Harper Collins), 1990.
7. Margalit's call to lift the siege off Gaza caught the eye of the Arab media. The American Task Force on Palestine wrote on its website on 24 April 2010 that this call was one of the reasons Israel had a somber 62nd Independence Day. Another reason was Hamas' pledge on that day not to recognize Israel.
8. A. Margalit. "Lift the Siege." Jerusalem Post, 19 April 2010.
9. A. Margalit. "Snakes and Ladders," NYRB, May 2001.
4. What is "controversial" at Brandeis these days: http://www.forward.com/articles/127613/
5. Dersh on the Goldstone Bar Mitzvah: http://cgis.jpost.com/Blogs/dershowitz/entry/it_is_goldstone_who_is
6. For the record, I thought that Jim Jones' joke about the Jew and the Afghan was pretty funny and not offensive at all (http://www.jpost.com/International/Article.aspx?id=174217). The assimilated libs among US Jews who are making a big deal about it, including the ADL, should move to Israel if they are so "sensitive," or else just find themselves a hobby.
Dueling Professors: Goldmeier Vs. Plaut
Finally, Plaut applauds the Israeli military for planning to ignore the Supreme Court's ruling prohibiting targeted assassinations of terrorists. Plaut may disagree politically and know of a legal basis that justifies his position, but he is not the final arbiter of law in a democracy. It is the courts that set the rule of law. We abhor it when certain rabbis - whether they are kippa seruga, black hat, or Neturei Karta - tell Israeli soldiers to disobey orders. To claim "The court has no legitimate standing to dictate to the military how it should pursue its tasks" suggests that generals should run the country. Does Plaut really want to make Israel just another banana republic or worse?
Dr. Harold Goldmeier
The Israel voter has never granted the Supreme Court the right to interfere with the military's operations that defend Israeli civilians from terrorists. That has not stopped the court activists from doing so. The Israeli voter elected representatives and an executive that overwhelmingly approve of targeted assassinations of terrorists (polls indicate that almost all Israeli Jews approve of those measures). The Israeli Supreme Court judges who advocate judicial activism claim it does not matter what voters want. Like them, Goldmeier would substitute his own feel-good sentiments for the will of the voters.
2. http://www.jewishpress.com/pageroute.do/43513
By: Richard L. Cravatts, Ph.D.
Date: Wednesday, April 28 2010
Concern for the Palestinians may be a commendable effort, but the exclusion and demonization of Israeli speakers and government officials as a tool for seeking social justice for that one group "represents a profound betrayal of the cardinal principle of intellectual endeavor," observed commentator Melanie Phillips, "which is freedom of speech and debate," something universities should never stop diligently defending. And they should certainly never abandon that pursuit to the baleful whining of ideological bullies intent on suppressing the views of others.
Richard L. Cravatts, Ph.D., is director of Boston University's Program in Publishing. He just finished writing "Genocidal Liberalism: The University's Jihad Against Israel," a book about the worldwide assault on Israel taking place on college campuses.
(He also has a really cool tux!!)
3. http://www.wiesenthal.com/toptenlies The Top Ten Lies about Israel
4. http://townhall.com/columnists/BenShapiro/2010/04/28/an_open_letter_to_american_jews
An Open Letter to American Jews
Ben Shapiro
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
5. Challenging Obama over Jerusalem: http://www.jewishpress.com/pageroute.do/43512
6. But, Abu Mazen is a Man of Peace.
Tel Aviv University - Taking a Hard 'GAZE' at the anti-Israel NewSpeak and Gobbledygook of Dr. Orly Lubin (Dept of Comparative Literature)
By Lee Kaplan, www.Isracampus.org.il
26/4/2010
A senior lecturer in Comparative Literature and "Women's Studies" at Tel Aviv University, Orly Lubin is what could be called a compulsive "joiner." She joined Tel Aviv University, a matter we still find a bit puzzling. She joins any group and signs almost any petition that bashes Israel, particularly when such involve so-called "feminist" and "peace" groups. These include "New Profile," which specializes in fabricating "war crimes" by the Israeli army, and the Coalition of Women for Peace, with its intimate ties to Israel's communist party. She got her PhD in 1989. Have a look at her "academic record" since then and make up your mind for yourself as to what her credentials are (we were able to find only one English article by her in a refereed bona fide academic journal).
Reading Lubin is like reading an essay that received a failing grade written by a student in an inner city high school. It is unreadable pabulum. Lubin has a fetish about "power": she claims it is held by what she calls the "community" that oppresses "the Other." This is all postmodernist Newspeak and PC gobbledygook. She is trained in comparative literature so just what could she possibly know about power?
Just what do we know about her "community." The one with which she identifies? It pretty much consists of Israel bashers, anti-Semites and terrorists. For openers, she signed petition put out by the PFLP-backed Alternative Information Center complaining that leftists in Germany are not sufficiently anti-Semitic and anti-Israel enough because they actually sided with Israel's defensive war in Gaza to stop the rocket attacks. She signed on to the call for Germany to boycott Israel, and disarm it. The petition accepts at face value all the smears in the discredited Goldstone Report accusing Israel of war crimes.
The statement she signed then goes on say that "Germany's diplomatic and military action throughout the region couples with its active support of Israel's occupation policies represent sufficient reason to view the FRG as an additional actor responsible for the violations of international law and war crimes committed by the Israeli government."
You will be astounded to hear that Orly Lubin has never signed any petitions objecting to Kassem rockets landing on Sderot.
Another petition signed by her called for "international intervention" to erase Israeli sovereignty and to pressure Israel to stop defending itself in time of war; it was sent to embassies in Israel. One other petition voiced support for ultra-anti-Semite Neve Gordon, who had served as a human shield for terrorists, who writes a column for the Iranian government newspaper, and who leads the campaign of Israelis for an Elimination of Israel to boycott and "divest" from Israel. Lubin has also endorsed calls for a boycott against Israeli universities, including the very university TAU in which Lubin is employed.
But by far the best way to appreciate the "thinking" of Lubin is to consider an article she wrote in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, while in the US as a visiting scholar. It was titled, "Masked Power: An Encounter with the Social Body in the Flesh." The article describes mourning the dead of the 9/11 attacks as "…a way to maintain the innocence, namely the innocence of the victim suffering an unjust injury inflicted on her for reasons that she can grasp but are beyond her control. She mourns from the bottom of her heart and in the very act of mourning proves herself to be the good person she always knew she was, that we all were." (Note the obsessive misuse of "she" rather than "he" as the neutral third person pronoun.)
Lubin then continues, "But mourning, even when it does not need to have meaning, does need to be framed. This framing becomes 'the community'; and the notion of the community seems to be a prism through which one can view the trauma, as community becomes the containment of the trauma."
She drones on: "After 9/11, 'community' became the magic word. The sense of community born at the very moment the event has become, already, an object of nostalgic lament. Very quickly people began to reminisce nostalgically about both the shock and sense of togetherness; the terrible sense of vulnerability and the birth of new friendships; the feeling of isolation and the ability to rely on others for company and help. It is this construction of the near sacredness of the community, though, that also enabled discourse of revenge, military action, violations of civil rights, and 'the post 9/11 hush', [that] …labels the lack of civic activism."
In case you missed it above, Ms. Lubin rejects the right of the US and allies to go after al-Qaeda terrorists or state sponsors of terrorism. She considers such anti-terror operations after 9/11 as simple "revenge," and "military action." They are not so much as a way to protect Americans and others (even Israelis) from terrorism. Instead they are reaction by the terrorist "community" to perceived injustice against what she describes as "the Other." She shrilly complains of violations of civil rights of supporters of terrorism. She laments how even mentioning 9/11 serves to prevent the pro-terror forces in the Islamic world from coming to terms with the western "community."
Of course, she has no problem with the Hamas and PLO attacking the Israeli "community," to which she testily belongs. Instead, Israel, and by extension the US and the West, are the worst violators imaginable of her "sense of oppression." She couldn't care less that Israel's community provides her with a cushy academic post at the taxpayers' expense.
In summing up 9/11, Lubin wrote: "September 11 created a traumatic shock not so much in the realization of actually having power, but in the realization of the horror of being in power. Students of culture, colonialism and postcolonialism [sic], of feminism and queer [sic] studies, have been theorizing and demonstrating in the last two decades the position of the victims of the gaze [sic]." "Gaze" is another of her nonsense words; by gaze she means ogling someone until they drop their eyes, in this case using power over the oppressed individual. She then explains, "The owner of power, the owner of the gaze, has to encounter herself as a source of violence, inherent in her status. which she more often than not, has not chosen to confront her own positioning…Her only way out, her only option to get rid of the objectifying power of the gaze, is to move—metaphorically when the literal move 'to the other side' is impossible—to the side of the Other."
Reading her prose is enough to convince would-be undergraduates to sign up for carpentry shop. "An altogether different understanding of the very notion of Otherness, of how to get rid of power and the gaze by defying the 'demand' to have an Other in order to maintain one's identity, by never gazing long enough so as to objectify the gazed at, never standing long enough in one identity positioning so as to have to create an Other for that positioning to imagine itself as a position. As abstract as it sounds, this is the task that the shock of recognition of power brings. It requires one to be on the move constantly, never being 'one' long enough for the creation of the Other." Finally, "In a community one is never moving, one is always static, one is always a part of something, which is by definition an Other of an Other."
We suggest that the heads of Tel Aviv University need to take a nice solid GAZE at what Lubin is inflicting on her hapless students.
Tel Aviv University – Gerardo Leibner (Dept of General History) Battles against "Judaizing" and for Communism
He spends much of his time churning out semi-communist articles for the Ultra-Left, chanting mantras about "class struggle," in Israel and around the world. Over the years Dr. Leibner has signed petitions to free and support terrorist Tali Fahima, to stop Israeli "war crimes" in Gaza; to send an armed international force to fight the Israeli army; to celebrate the traitor/spy Azmi Bishara, accuses Israel of being a terrorist entity, denounces Israel as an apartheid entity and endorses all the calls for world boycotts against Israel. He especially likes to rant against the racism of "Ashkenazim" and to wring his hands over the supposed "mistreatment" of the Sephardim, rather amusing coming from someone with the obviously Ashkenazi name Leibner.
Tel Aviv University – Gerardo Leibner (Dept of General History) Battles against "Judaizing" and for Communism
by Joel Amitai
23/4/10
At the founding conference of the Jewish-Arab movement Hit'habrut-Tarabut in 'Arara, an Arab township near Haifa, the radical Israeli activist Reuven Abergil (a one-time founder of the Israeli "Black Panthers" and a far leftist) gave a talk that Dr. Gerardo Leibner described as "moving." Leibner, a member of the coordinating committee of Hit'habrut-Tarabut, was at the conference and devoted an article to it. He is also a lecturer in the Department of General History at Tel Aviv University, where he specializes in Latin American Marxism and Communism. By "specializes," we mean he engages in preaching it. His rather thin academic record consists entirely of articles in Spanish about communists and similar "radicals." He spends much of his time churning out semi-communist articles for the Ultra-Left, chanting mantras about "class struggle," in Israel and around the world.
Over the years Dr. Leibner has signed petitions to free and support terrorist Tali Fahima; to stop Israeli "war crimes" in Gaza; to send an armed international force to fight the Israeli army; to celebrate the traitor/spy Azmi Bishara, accuses Israel of being a terrorist entity, denounces Israel as an apartheid entity and endorses all the calls for world boycotts against Israel. He especially likes to rant against the racism of "Ashkenazim" and to wring his hands over the supposed "mistreatment" of the Sephardim, rather amusing coming from someone with the obviously Ashkenazi name Leibner.
As paraphrased by Leibner, Abergil focused in his "moving" speech on "the need to build a counterforce that will stand against the Zionist movement…. The urgent task is to be freed from the control of the foreign forces of the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organization…. It must also be stated that Shimon Peres…is basically an enemy of peace…and one of those who Judaizes the Negev and the Galilee…."
This is indeed "moving"—if you have fundamental loyalty to Israel's core values, it will move you to rage. In his account of the meeting Leibner adoringly quotes additional anti-Zionist and Marxist drivel from other speakers—"an analysis of the regional situation, which centers on the struggle against imperialism"; "the goal of forming a movement that will be both popular and radical"; "the struggle against the Judaization of Jaffa"; "the existing, racist and alienated political system…." No, it wasn't a meeting of the Comintern in the 1920s; it happened in Israel two years ago, and Dr. Leibner admiringly recorded the proceedings.
No one aware of Dr. Leibner's milieu at Tel Aviv University, which includes fellow Communist and anti-Zionist historians like Gadi Algazi, Shlomo Sand, Yoav Peled, Yossi Schwartz, and Yehouda Shenhav, will be surprised. Along with his academic work, Leibner is identified as a "political and social activist"—which in his case involves agitating against core Israeli values and needs and, not infrequently, clashing with the security forces.
In addition to Hit'habrut-Tarabut, Leibner is a member of Ta'ayush, an Arab-Jewish NGO that was founded in the autumn of 2000 just as the terror war was intensifying. Ta'ayush supports the so-called "BDS" (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) campaign against Israel. It was at a Ta'ayush demonstration in Umm al-Fahm in 2001 that Leibner was arrested along with five others, including his colleague Algazi.
A few years later Leibner penned a laudatory article called "They Are A-F-R-A-I-D" about another demonstration in which he took part, this time in Bil'in in the West Bank against the security fence. (Violent demonstrations there and in Nil'in have long been a weekly fixture). The "They" in Leibner's title refers to the Israeli army and government—or what people with Leibner's mindset, mired in juvenile rebellion, might call the "establishment." The event, in Leibner's telling, was "a rare display of brotherhood and friendship" among "about 1000 demonstrators—700 Palestinians and 300 Israelis"—until the "'security forces' [he uses scare quotes around that term] decided to create a confrontation at any price." At that point "two masked thugs began to throw stones at the uniformed ones…." In other words, Leibner informs us—without a shred of substantiation—that the "masked thugs" were actually provocateurs working for the bad guys, the "security forces," that is, Israel, while he and his friends could not have been more nobly peaceful. As he explains:
(S)omebody was so alarmed by the joint demonstration and the possibility of the expansion of popular protest against the fence that he decided to create the conditions…in which the new methods of repression could be implemented. Up there, on the level of the military command or the political elite, there is someone who is very afraid…. Somebody wants blood to be spilt….
I used to see such things, and hear such talk—conspiracy-mongering, anti-establishment, smugly self-righteous—as an American college student in the late hippie era. That a taxpayer-funded Israeli academic employs people who indulge in such narcissistic self-aggrandizement, such calumny of basic Israeli institutions, in an agitation against the security fence—and this was in 2005, not long after it began to be built in response to waves of suicide bombings—is incredible!
About a year ago Leibner was at it again, this time in a demonstration in Tel Aviv against the Gaza War. (Clearly, there's not much Israel can do to defend itself—build a fence to keep bombers out, react militarily to thousands of rockets fired at its civilians—that Dr. Leibner won't demonstrate against.) This time, in his telling, it was the police who saved him—after he received a sock in the face from a "bourgeois rightist." But then a woman drew near, and one of the policemen expressed surprise when it turned out she was Leibner's daughter. Leibner doesn't hesitate—again, with no actual basis—to ascribe it to ethnic stereotyping on the officer's part: "'This low-level Sephardi girl - the daughter of an Ashkenazi leftist?' he no doubt thought to himself."
Supposed solidarity with the working class—Israeli policemen are hardly high-wage earners—doesn't stop Dr. Leibner from making this nasty imputation to a policeman who helped him; it's trumped by his hatred of Israeli "uniformed ones." Note also that Leibner projects his own tendency toward crude stereotyping: he is the one who speaks of the "bourgeois rightist," the "low-level Sephardi girl," the "Ashkenazi left."
There is no evil that Leibner won't attribute to Israel and no limit to his hostility towards his own country. In 2005, a few months before the disengagement from Gaza, he wrote that it was all a trick by then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to "expand the zone of military control a little more, to strengthen Israel's internal nationalist and racist glue, to embark on new settlement ventures after the crushing of the enemy…. That is what Ben-Gurion wanted to achieve between 1948 and 1967." The wickedness of racist Israel, for Leibner, goes back long before Sharon to the earliest years of state-building and is constitutive and axiomatic. Leibner's is the basic anti-Zionist creed now wildly popular among Israel-haters and anti-Semites all over the world, but it makes you wonder: why are professors at Tel Aviv University espousing it?
Not surprisingly, on the international plane Leibner is a proud Chavista, an admirer of the notorious anti-Semitic, pro-Iranian Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. Asked by Ynet last year what he thought of the ouster in Honduras of the Chavez-ally Manuel Zelaya, who had illegally tried to change the country's constitution to get himself reelected as president, Leibner said the cause of "defending democracy" required U.S. president Obama to back Zelaya. A few years earlier Leibner spoke admiringly of Chavez to Ynet as someone who "doesn't have to grovel" and "dares to confront America head-on."
Whether it is Israel "Judaizing" the Galilee and the Negev, controlling violent demonstrations, fighting and defending against terrors, or daring to exist at all, Dr. Gerardo Leibner comes down squarely on the side of Israel's enemies and works to undermine, destabilize, and delegitimize it. The wonder is that Tel Aviv University and Israeli society are giving him a cushy, prestigious job in which he can do this.
Joel Amitai is an independent researcher and filmmaker. Reach him at jamitai40@gmail.com.
Tel Aviv University – TAU hosts Ilan Pappe in an anti-Israel propaganda event on campus
In the fall of 2009, Ilan Pappe was scheduled to speak before the Municipality of Munich, Germany. Pappe is best known for his fraudulent invention of a non-existent massacre of Arabs by the Hagana near Haifa in Tantora in 1948, and for other notorious lies. He writes "books'" claiming falsely that Israel carried out "ethnic cleansing" against Arabs in 1948. His most famous fabrication has become known as the Katz Affair, named after the MA student directed by Pappe to invent the Tantora "massacre" in his thesis. … Pappe resigned from his post at the University of Haifa and has been jihading against the existence of Israel from his new perch in the UK at the University of Exeter. … Once the Munich people found out who and what Pappe is, they cancelled the invitation, disinviting him. The Germans cancelled on grounds that any talk by Pappe would be nothing more than an "anti-Israel propaganda show."… The very same Pappe is to be the featured speaker at a "conference" to be held at Tel Aviv University on April 29, 2010, where he will again be calling for a worldwide campaign to boycott Israel. … The officials of Tel Aviv University evidently do not have the courage of the Munich Germans. They are refusing to cancel this atrocious anti-Israel propaganda event misrepresented as an academic conference. They are refusing to disinvite Ilan Pappe.
http://thejewishpress.blogspot.com/2010/04/why-munich-is-more-zionist-and-pro.html
Why Munich is More Zionist and pro-Jewish than Tel Aviv University
Posted by Steven Plaut
Friday, April 23, 2010
Quick: What is the Difference between the City Officials of Munich, Germany and the Campus Heads of Tel Aviv University?
Answer: The city officials in Munich respect Jews and have a sense of honor and integrity!
To complain, write
Tel Aviv University:
President, Professor Joseph Klafter
Email klafter@post.tau.ac.il
Tel Aviv University
P.O. Box 39040
Tel Aviv 69978
ISRAEL
Tel: 972-3-6408254
Fax: 972-3-6406466
Rector: Prof. Dany Leviatan
Email: leviatan@post.tau.ac.il
Tel Aviv University
P.O. Box 39040
Tel Aviv 69978
ISRAEL
American Friends Offices of Tel Aviv University:
http://www.aftau.org/site/PageServer?pagename=about_contact
Other "Friends of" Groups: http://www.tau.ac.il/friends-eng.html
4. J Street Treason: http://frontpagemag.com/2010/04/23/the-anti-israel-lobby/
5. At long last - a REAL peace program: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3880735,00.html
6. The REAL Middle East Apartheid Regime: http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=173919