Richard L. Cravatts, PhD
Seeming to confirm a world view that the brilliant British commentator Melanie Phillips describes in her new book as “a world turned upside down,” Brandeis University is hosting a troubling series of events in the tellingly-named “Israeli Occupation Awareness Week,” being held from November 8-11 and advertised on a Facebook page with a vile composite photograph of Louis Brandeis with a keffiyeh draped around his neck. Co-sponsored by the radical group Students for Justice in Palestine and the self-righteous, self-loathing Jews of Jewish Voice for Peace, the events once again demonstrate the moral incoherence seen on college campuses whenever there is debate about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
Brandeis University, of course, was named for Justice Brandeis, who, though he was a secular Jew raised in the comfort of the social elite, still asserted that “Zionism finds in it, for the Jews, a reason to raise their heads, and, taking their stand upon the past, to gaze straightforwardly into the future,” a notion that might well have informed the thinking on the University’s campuses for much of the 20th century.
But that was before campus ideology was hijacked by the Left’s obsessive reverence for something that came to be known as “social justice,” a Leftist way of thinking that informs the very educational mission of Brandeis today (or “social action,” a term which Brandeis uses in its Diversity Statement). Students, and liberal faculty on campus, as well, are urged to advocate for social and economic goals described in decidedly liberal intellectual formulations such as ‘social and economic justice,’ ‘distributive justice,’ and ‘the global interconnections of oppression,’ this latter view ideal for conflating, at least in liberal imaginations, the shared complicity of America and Israel in their long-term oppression of the indigenous people of Palestine and the “occupation” of their land.
So it should come as no surprise that the list of guest speakers for the repellant “Israeli Occupation Awareness Week” includes a galaxy of notorious anti-Israel Jew-haters whose contribution to the week’s awareness-raising will not be an animated discussion of alternate views of the Israeli/Palestine conflict, but a one-sided, biased, inflammatory series of exhortations calling for the continued murder of Jews in the name of “resistance” and the eventual extirpation of the Jewish state.
Headlining at Brandeis will be a speech entitled “Israel’s Escalating Policies of Apartheid” by Israel's Escalating Policies of ApartheidIsrael's Escalating Policies of ApartheidIsrael's Escalating Policies of ApartheidIsrael's Escalating Policies of Apartheidthe intellectually notorious Noam Chomsky, who clearly lives in an academic netherworld of political fantasies, conspiracies, and intellectually-disingenuous distortions of history and fact. If Chomsky’s vituperation against America has been a defining theme in his intellectual jihad, an obsessive, apoplectic hatred for Israel has more completely dominated his screeds and spurious scholarship. Like other anti-Zionists in the West and in the Arab world, Chomsky does not even recognize the legitimacy of Israel, believing that its very existence was, and is, a moral transgression against an indigenous people, and that the creation of Israel was “wrong and disastrous . . . There is not now and never will be democracy in Israel.”
Chomsky denounces Israel’s identity as a Jewish state as being essentially racist on its face, and decries the very notion of its Jewishness as necessarily violating the concept of social equity by being exclusionary and elitist. While he is happy to, and regularly does, ignore the murder of Jews by Arabs, Chomsky never hesitates to point to the perfidy of Israel, and its barbarous assault on its Arab neighbors who, in his socialist fantasies, wish for nothing more than to live in peace.
A second odious guest at the Brandeis event will be Alice Rothchild, a physician, activist, and member of Jewish Voice for Peace, a far-Left, pro-Palestinian group that seeks to weaken Israel for it alleged human-rights violations through targeted boycotts, divestment, and sanctions. Its stated goal in promoting a divestment campaign is to prevent companies from “[profiting] from the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem,” and while it regularly excuses the murderous behavior of Palestinians, it scolds the U.S. to “stop supporting repressive policies in Israel and elsewhere.”
Rothchild not only believes that Israel has no moral right to exist as a Jewish state, she has written that Jews are not even a people, so of course are undeserving of a state of their own. “It is important to stress that the historic hatred of Jews was traditionally not part of the Arabic-speaking world until Jews began to claim Palestine for themselves,” she wrote in a letter to the Boston Globe, “and that the ‘return of land to Jewish people’ involves a particular reading of history, obliterates the several thousand years of others’ claims to this land, and ignores the academic questions regarding the probable multiple origins of the ‘Jewish people.’”
Rounding off the one-sided dialogue about the faults inherent in Israel’s so-called occupation of the West Bank will be Diana Buttu, whose reason for being at the Brandeis event is her credentials as a former legal advisor to the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and whose stream of anti-Israel propaganda is characterized by misstatements, contortions of history, and lies. In 2009, for instance, after some 6000 rockets had rained into southern Israeli towns from Gaza, Buttu repeatedly claimed “that none of these rockets actually [had] an explosive head on them, unlike the Israeli weaponry.” And the actual lethality of the “crude, homemade rockets” aside, “the reason that they have been launched,” she asserted, is not because of any genocidal impulses on the part of Hamas, but “is because of the fact that Israel has maintained a siege and a blockade against the Gaza Strip for the past three years, in addition to military operations in the Gaza Strip”—in other words, the rocket attacks were Israel’s fault. In a CNN interview with Rick Sanchez, Buttu also suggested that Israel’s initiatives to protect its citizenry from being murdered by random terrorist attack were unjustified. “Israel has a right to protect itself,” she admitted, but “it doesn't have a right to protect its occupation. And what it has done is, it's protecting its occupation.”
Of course, if the organizers of Brandeis’ Israeli Occupation Awareness Week actually wanted different views of the situation on the ground in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, they might have invited participants with opposing, alternate views. Such speakers might call into question the repeated, though mistaken, references to the West Bank and Gaza, as well as East Jerusalem, as “Arab” land, encumbered only by Israeli oppression, the dreaded occupation, and those pesky settlers.
That is a convenient fable, as is the fictive people that the Palestinians have been conjured up to be: an indigenous nation that had sovereignty, a coherent society, leadership, and some form of continuous government— none of which, obviously, have ever existed. More to the point, it is historically and legally incorrect to overlook the fact that not only all of the land that is current-day Israel, but also Gaza, the West Bank, and, in fact, the land east of the Jordan River that became Jordan, is part of the land granted to the Jews as part of the League of Nations Palestine Mandate, and that no “occupation” by Israel therefore exists. According to Eugene V. Rostow, the late legal scholar and one of the authors of UN Security Council Resolution 242 written after the 1967 war to outline peace negotiations, “the Jewish right of settlement in Palestine west of the Jordan River, that is, in Israel, the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, was made unassailable.
So if the Brandeis community wants to make itself collectively feel better by seeking to bring “social justice” to the long-suffering Palestinians by demonizing, delegitimizing, and libeling Israel, they will have achieved that objective with the noxious, Israel-hating event. But the only awareness that such events create is the realization that much of what tries to pass as scholarly debate on campuses today is nothing more than propaganda and ideology dressed up as true intellectual inquiry.
Richard L. Cravatts, Ph.D., Director
Program in Publishing
Center For Professional Education
Boston University
617 345-1022
cravatts@bu.edu
http://smgnet.bu.edu/mgmt_new/profiles/CravattsRichard.html
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