When in 2007 Professor Hillel Weiss of Bar Ilan University was captured on film cursing the IDF regional commander during the expulsion of Hebron’s Jewish residents, the well- known scholar, a leading expert on the works of Nobel Laureate author Shai Agnon, was pulverized in the Israeli media.
The public opinion later discovered that Weiss’ anger was the reasonable reaction of a father protesting against the (twice) eviction of his children and grandchildren from their homes.
Weiss didn’t call on anyone to act upon his words. He called upon G-d. But Professor Weiss is a patriarch of the right wing movement.
Somehow, the Israeli media doesn't pay the same attention to the legion of Israeli professors and lecturers from the Jewish Left who daily take the side of Israel’s existential enemies.
From the 1970s, Israel’s universities had become home to a new generation of leftist intellectuals who demonize Israel and the undermine the struggle for survival of the Jewish people.
A study by Im Tirtzu claimed that more than 90% of the allegations of “Israeli war crimes” cited in the shameful Goldstone Report were provided by 16 NGOs who received close to $8 million from the New Israel Fund between 2006 and 2008, an organization headed by former Meretz MK Professor Naomi Chazan.
A few days ago, a criminal investigation was opened against Dr. Ayal Nir, a lecturer at Ben- Gurion University in Be’er Sheva, over a status on his Facebook page in which he called to “break the necks of right-wing activists”. It’s an open call for murder of those who reject his far-leftist opinions.
Today there is a predominance of Israeli academics within the NGOs that discredit Israel, such as Gush Shalom, B’Tselem, Yesh Gvul, the Committee to Stop Demolition of Houses in Palestine and the Committee to Stop Torture.
Steve Plaut has just drawn up a thorough list of them for the Middle East Quarterly.
The phenomenon goes back to Karl Marx, whose anti-Semitic diatribes were reflected in outbursts like “money is the jealous god of Israel, by the side of which no other god may exist... The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism”.
Whether it is Professor Shlomo Sand, who achieved celebrity status in Europe by publishing a book denying the existence of the Jewish people, or Professor Oren Yiftachel, who called Israel “a white... pure settlement colonial society”, these Israeli celebrities gained fame and fortune by trashing their own country and people.
The same phenomenon happened in czarist Russia, when some Jewish social agitators endorsed pogroms against their own kinsmen, hoping that by venting their frustrations on Jews, the masses would ultimately turn on the czar.
At the Ben-Gurion University, Neve Gordon accused the IDF of being “war criminals” and promoted the boycott of Israel in a Los Angeles Times editorial. Gordon’s articles have also been published on the web site of Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel and in Iran’s state media.
Ze’ev Sternhell, in the midst of the Second Intifada, when his own students were being butchered on buses and restaurants, declared that Palestinians should “concentrate their struggle against the settlements”.
In May 2001, after Arabs sadistically bashed the skulls of two “settler kids” in Tekoa, Israeli psychiatrist Ruchama Marton declared that “the settlers raise little monsters”.
Anat Matar of Tel Aviv University openly supported boycotts of her own university. You find professors such as Moshe Zimmermann and other members of the progressive community who compared the Israelis to the Nazis. Also professors such as Idith Zertal, who thinks that the Zionist absorption of Holocaust refugees was a form of rape.
In May 2001, after Arabs sadistically bashed the skulls of two “settler kids” in Tekoa, Israeli psychiatrist Ruchama Marton declared that “the settlers raise little monsters”.
Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, whose anti-Semithic book “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy” has become a bible for Israel-bashers in the West,, in 2008 were allowed to deliver a lecture at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
University of Haifa political science professor Ilan Pappe brackets Israelis with Nazis and urges academics to delegitimize Israel. Ran Hacohen from Tel Aviv University described “Israel as fulfilling Hitler’s dream” and referred to the assassination of Hamas leader and inciter to murder, Ahmed Yassin, as “a milestone in the process of the barbarization of mankind”.
Lev Grinberg, director of the Humphries Institute for Social Research at Ben-Gurion University, accused the Israeli government, in a Belgian media, of “state terrorism”.
These Israeli academics abuse academic freedom by utilizing their universities as launching pads to delegitimize their own country and people. The extreme damage to Israel’s reputation and Jewish identity inflicted by these and other Jewish intellectuals has been greatly underestimated.
Indeed, with their words and actions, they are boosting pernicious and deadly Judeophobic propaganda.