Hebrew University and Van Leer Institute - Amos Goldberg (Dept of Holocaust Studies) discovers a Moral Equivalent to the Holocaust.

Goldberg promotes the 'Nakba' as the equivalent of the Holocaust in an alarming trend that starts once he joined the semi-Marxist Van Leer Institute.

Goldberg's PhD dissertation concentrated on diary writing by victims during the Holocaust. But since joining Van Leer he has devoted much of his energies and attention to the idea that Israel should give "equal recognition" to the "Nakba," the supposed "catastrophe" that befell Arabs when they failed in their attempt in 1948-9 to conduct genocidal ethnic cleansing of Jews in Israel.

"Nakba" today sums up the Palestinian narrative about the "tragedy" of the founding of Israel. Goldberg writes widely about the need to convert Israel into a Rwanda-style bi-national state. Goldberg is involved with Zochrot("Remembering"), an ultra-anti-Israel leftist NGO seeking to removing Jewish names from towns and villages in Israel and "restoring" their Arab identities. It isbasically an Erase-Israel group. In other words, Zochrot seeks to undermine Jewish sovereignty and promote the idea of the Nakba, as well as the "right of return" of Palestinian "refugees" to Israel, destroying it demographically from within… He today insists it is important to give equal footing to Arab "suffering" and to the "narrative" that asserts they underwent a catastrophe because Israel won the war against it in 1948-9. Goldberg's writings constantly compare the Holocaust with the "Nakba."

Quoting Goldberg in an abstract:

"This article develops a theoretical framework for shared and inclusive Jewish and Palestinian deliberation on the memories of the Holocaust and the Nakba. It argues that a joint Arab-Jewish public deliberation on the traumatic memories of these two events is not only possible, however challenging and disruptive it may be, but also fundamental for producing an egalitarian and inclusive ethics of bi-nationalism in Israel/Palestine… The figure of the refugee, constitutive of Palestinian and Jewish histories and identities, we suggest, serves as a herald of this binational and disruptive ethics. We conclude that 'empathic unsettlement' also has a productive and transformative potential which gives further (however partial and initial) meaning, shape and content to the ethics and democratic politics of bi-nationalism heralded by the refugee."

Hebrew University's Amos Goldberg (Holocaust Studies) discovers a Moral Equivalent to the Holocaust. Guess who the Analogue to the Stormtroopers is!

By Lee Kaplan. www.isracampus.org.il
6/6/2014

Amos Goldberg teaches and researches "Holocaust Studies" as a senior lecturer at Hebrew University. He has a respectable curriculum vitae in studying the Holocaust. But there is an interesting trend in his career, which seems to have begun once he established ties with the semi-Marxist Van Leer Institute.

The Van Leer Institute is a non-university think tank that is invariably far-leftist and Marxist. Among its leading associates have been people like Yehouda Shenhav, a Tel Aviv University anti-Zionist communist sociologist. Van Leer sponsors the only openly-Marxist pseudo-academic "journal" in Israel, "Theory and Criticism." Van Leer was involved with the infamous graduate thesis by Tal Nitzan that maintained that IDF soldiers do not rape Arab women because they are so racist. Nitzan, a translator at Van Leer, was even given an award for this "thesis" by Van Leer. Just why is a Holocaust researcher like Goldberg tying himself to the same group?

Goldberg spent his early years even working at Yad Vashem. Goldberg's PhD dissertation concentrated on diary writing by victims during the Holocaust. But since joining Van Leer he has devoted much of his energies and attention to the idea that Israel should give "equal recognition" to the "Nakba," the supposed "catastrophe" that befell Arabs when they failed in their attempt in 1948-9 to conduct genocidal ethnic cleansing of Jews in Israel.

"Nakba" today sums up the Palestinian narrative about the "tragedy" of the founding of Israel. Goldberg writes widely about the need to convert Israel into a Rwanda-style bi-national state. Goldberg isinvolved with Zochrot ("Remembering"), an ultra-anti-Israel leftist NGO seeking to removing Jewish names from towns and villages in Israel and "restoring" their Arab identities. It is basically an Erase-Israel group. In other words, Zochrot seeks to undermine Jewish sovereignty and promote the idea of the Nakba, as well as the "right of return" of Palestinian "refugees" to Israel, destroying it demographically from within. Zochrot is funded entirely from outside Israel, primarily by the EU and the New Israel Fund. It recently lost funding from a German source because it is so openly anti-Israel. It is particularly hostile to the Jewish National Fund because it has a history of purchasing lands from Arabs and converts them into Israeli public and private lands.

Goldberg spent a year at Cornell in the US under a mentor, Dominic LeCapra, professor of intellectual history in the, School of Theory and Criticism. Theory and Criticism is a euphemism for Marxism. While there he also studied the philosophical darlings of the anti-Semitic left, especially in Israel such as the French critical scholars Michel Foucault, deconstructionist Jaques "Words do not Mean anything and There is no Truth" Derrida or Jean Leoytard. LeCapra denies the uniqueness of the Holocaust - either in the moral sense or as a case of murder on a vast industrial scale, and accuses those who assert the uniqueness of Jewish suffering. Goldberg seems to have joined their bandwagon. He today insists it is important to give equal footing to Arab "suffering" and to the "narrative" that asserts they underwent a catastrophe because Israel won the war against it in 1948-9. Goldberg's writings constantly compare the Holocaust with the "Nakba."

Quoting Goldberg in an abstract:

"This article develops a theoretical framework for shared and inclusive Jewish and Palestinian deliberation on the memories of the Holocaust and the Nakba. It argues that a joint Arab-Jewish public deliberation on the traumatic memories of these two events is not only possible, however challenging and disruptive it may be, but also fundamental for producing an egalitarian and inclusive ethics of bi-nationalism in Israel/Palestine. In order to develop this conceptual framework, we first present some examples, most notably Elias Khoury's epic novel Gate of the Sun (Bab al-Shams), which bring the memories of the Holocaust and the Nakba together in a fashion that disrupts the dominant, antagonistic and exclusionary Israeli and Palestinian national narratives. We then interpret Dominick LaCapra's notion of 'empathic unsettlement', which transforms 'otherness' from a problem to be disposed of into a moral and emotional challenge, as a political concept that best captures and explains the disruptive potential of a joint deliberation on these traumatic events. The figure of the refugee, constitutive of Palestinian and Jewish histories and identities, we suggest, serves as a herald of this binational and disruptive ethics. We conclude that 'empathic unsettlement' also has a productive and transformative potential which gives further (however partial and initial) meaning, shape and content to the ethics and democratic politics of bi-nationalism heralded by the refugee."

Of course had the Arabs succeeded in 1948 to drive the Jews into the sea, as they intended, there would have been another Holocaust for Goldberg to study, had he himself managed to survive it.

Goldberg uses the touchy-feely term of "otherness" to describe his equating the Holocaust and Arab propaganda rants about a catastrophe or Nakba among the Arab-Israeli population. Here he explains why he writes as he does:

"Firstly, the Holocaust and the Nakba are defining events in the political consciousness and collective identity of the two increasingly intertwined peoples, and both generate a dominant collective awareness that incorporates elements of victimhood. Thus, in Arab-Jewish debates and conversations it has become very hard to address one without mentioning the other.

'Secondly, the two events are historically related. It is beyond the scope of this article to fully discuss the exact ways in which this is the case, but it is clear that the events of 1947–48 in Palestine/Israel—namely, the establishment of the State of Israel and the Palestinian Nakba—were in various direct and indirect ways strongly influenced by the events in Europe between 1933 and 1945. They have emerged as inseparable in light of the seeming intractability of the conflict.

'Thirdly, the "ethics of catastrophe", for which the Holocaust serves as its major trope and symbol, is mainly premised on the 'rejection of the metaphysics of comprehension'. Therefore, while "the metaphysics of comprehension" demands and emphasizes closure, consensus and unity, the 'ethics of catastrophe' insists on acknowledging the constitutive yet disruptive role of various forms of "otherness" in the social and political domains. The mainstream and endorsed national narratives of the Holocaust and the Nakba largely operate according to 'the metaphysics of comprehension' rather than the "ethics of catastrophe". Stated differently, they produce and reinforce total comprehension and essentialist identities that oppress the disruptive 'otherness'. One way of restoring the critical and ethical force and meaning of these two catastrophic events, we argue, is by discussing them together in a disruptive fashion.

'Fourthly, and intimately linked to the previous point, these two "foundational pasts" are deeply exclusionary and conflicting in current dominant Jewish and Palestinian identity politics. They are often used to demonize the other side and establish a complete self-justification. Hence, they further widen the gap between the two peoples and disable the possibilities of conducive Jewish-Arab discussion on the question of Israel/Palestine. The unavoidable inseparability and interdependence of Arab and Jew means that productive engagement between the two memories, histories and identities has become both inevitable and timely. This productive engagement, we argue, produces a conceptual frame within which these two mutually and radically exclusionary traumatic memories can become politically and ethically transformative in establishing a common, even if minimal, binational 'we' and ethics.^"

Goldberg does acknowledge that the Holocaust was far worse, bloodier and vicious than the "Nakba" (how nice of him!), but then he would have us believe the Arabs acknowledge this in their discourse. Show us where!

One has only to read his political writings in support of the likes of the ISM and Anarchists Against the Wall. He writes of Jewish attempts and the "Judaization of Jerusalem," in referring to the situation in Sheikh Jarrah, where a twenty-year long lawsuit ultimately found that Jewish plaintiffs had their homes stolen by Arabs in 1948:

"Saleh Diab, depicted in this photo, is one of the leading activists in the joint Palestinian-Jewish struggle against the Judaization of the Palestinian neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem. His family, originally from Jaffa, was expelled during the Nakba events of 1948. Together with some twenty-seven other families, they settled in Sheikh Jarrah in 1953. Following long juridical discussions in Israeli courts in which the alleged (prior to 1948) Jewish land owners claimed back their property in the neighborhood, some of these Palestinian families were recently evicted from their homes while others remain under this threat. The photo was taken in May 2013 during a joint Jewish and Palestinian demonstration against these processes. As Saleh noted, they deliberately chose the slogan (i.e. Nakba survivor) on his shirt because the word 'survivor' is automatically associated in Israeli as well as in American culture with Holocaust survivors. It seems that while the slogan implicitly acknowledges the catastrophic fate of the Jews, it also wishes to provoke a moral reaction to the Nakba."

He also uses the rhetoric of the Arabs. He refers to the security fence as the "separation barrier" (thank goodness he avoids saying the falsely coined "apartheid wall"), about an edifice that stopped 95% of the suicide bombings that have also killed so many Holocaust survivors in Arab attacks:

"Another interesting case is the Holocaust exhibition displayed on 27 January 2009 in the village of Na'alin—a village that has become the symbol for the Palestinians' struggle (supported by Israelis against Israel's construction of the separation wall in the West Bank). To mark the international Holocaust day of remembrance, the village, whose inhabitants suffer severely from the Israeli military oppressive measures against their ongoing struggle against the wall, erected a display of photographs purchased from Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum and invited the public to learn more about the persecution of the Jews (see Figure 2).⁵² This exhibition was initiated by Khaled Kasab Mahameed, a lawyer from Nazareth, who mounted a small Holocaust exhibition on the ground floor of his home. He dedicated many years of his life to promoting historical knowledge of the Holocaust among Palestinians. He believed that without understanding the Holocaust, the Palestinians could not really understand the Israeli Jewish society and politics, and therefore could never reach an agreement with them.

'The exhibition in Na'alin was indeed unsettling in two ways. On the one hand, and as the photo demonstrates, the Palestinian inhabitants who suffer tremendously because of their struggle against the wall were willing to confront the catastrophic history of their enemy. On the other hand, the sign in this exhibition stated: "Merkel, why should we Palestinians continue to pay the price for the Holocaust?". The message of this exhibition to Israeli Jews was: yes, we are willing, however hard and challenging it may be for us, to engage with your history but we do not abide by your narrative. "

Na'alin isn't that far from An-Najah University, which hosted an exhibition in praise of the Sbarro Pizza house bombing in Jerusalem, replete with simulated bloody limbs and other body parts of Jewish children. The woman responsible for the bombing is out free now, attending university in Turkey and proclaiming she has no regrets and would do it all over again. We wonder why she did not stay home and attend courses by Goldberg.

Pizza, Amos?

   There is an old joke that everyone talks about the weather but no one does anything about it.   Well, probably the most widely discussed but poorly understood subject in Israeli social science is ethnic inequality.  The number of people with an opinion exceeds the number of people who have actually analyzed the data by several orders of magnitude.

    As in so many things, too many commentators on the subject in Israel rely on "what everyone knows."  Except most of "what everyone knows" is wrong.

    Anyone interested in what the data actually show about ethnic inequality in Israel might find this interesting.  Because it is long, I will not post the text here but leave it in your hands to open it if it interests you:

http://www.meforum.org/3839/israel-inequality

Middle East Quarterly

SUMMER 2014 • VOLUME XXI: NUMBER 3