Robert Besser is a news editor who has worked in television and newspapers in the United States, Asia and the Middle East.
A damning report published August 17 by research and business-intelligence outlet The Olam documents how 50.4 percent of the 2,844 faculty members who were surveyed at Israel’s major universities signed petitions declaring that the Israel Defense Forces committed war crimes in Gaza since October 7, 2023.
The irony is that as Israeli society has become increasingly less ideological in past decades, the opposite has occurred within Israel’s universities.
And while there have always been radical leftists employed by the universities, never have there been so few moderate or conservative faculty members to provide balance. And of course, never have there been so few university instructors who are proud to say they are Zionists.
If a Christian cult had captured Israel’s universities and was indoctrinating our students in Christianity, would all Israel not rise up to demand their expulsion?
Similarly the question must be asked, are these leftist instructors who call Israeli soldiers war criminals spreading the same diseased ideas to our students that, say, a Christian cult might?
Simply put, should Jewish universities in the Jewish state, paid for by Jewish taxpayers, reflect the Zionist and Jewish beliefs of the Jews of Israel?
To no one’s surprise, the largest number of Israeli university faculty supporting the blood libels against the Jews come from the social sciences, the least academically rigorous university departments.
For instance, The Olam reports that humanities faculty members in Israel were about three-and-a-half to five times more likely to sign their names to antisemitic petitions claiming Jewish war crimes. Also in Israel, the Middle Eastern studies faculty signed at an 82 percent rate, sociology at 70 percent, philosophy at 66 percent, and political science at 59 percent of those asked.
It is most telling that a smaller number of instructors signed the petitions from the exact sciences, as opposed to the social sciences, including physics at 27 percent, chemistry at 23 percent, biology at 19 percent, and engineering at 15 percent.
Does calling Israeli soldiers war criminals, even as they fight to defend our lives, mean that the university faculties are anti-Israel? Or that they wish to see the end of the Jewish state?
Based upon my discussions with radical leftists among my acquaintances, I suspect that some of these university instructors would be only too happy to see Israel cease to be a Jewish state.
Now, if we were to say that university administrators have a responsibility to protect our students from the lethal pollution spewed from the self-hating Israeli faculty members, the instructors would scream that we are trying to deny their academic freedom to teach as they choose.
But at the end of the day, the faculty members are only employees of the universities and must behave as dictated by their employers……just as the rest of us must in the real world.
And suppose laws were passed requiring university instructors to only teach their assigned curriculums and banning any discussion of politics in the classrooms?
Also, universities might be required to order faculty members who need to behave like narcissistic children and spew politics to a captive audience to be free to do so outside of the university campus and only on their own time.
Further, it is time to end the practice of granting tenure to university instructors. They do not deserve life-time jobs any more than does the milkman, the carpenter or the baker.
Indeed, there are university instructors who act and speak in outrageous ways and then abuse their tenure to ensure they will not be held accountable for their actions and words.
And here is another idea. How about if parents seek to protect their children by refusing to send their students to universities that employ large numbers of anti-Zionist leftists.
Those self-hating leftist instructors believe in boycotting Israel? So let the Israelis who pay their salaries show the faculty members what real boycotts look like.
Additionally, we must consider that these instructors are destroying the reputations and integrity of excellent Israeli universities, which so many Jews committed their lives - and wealth - to build. Antisemites, however, love to quote them.
Indeed, Israeli anti-Zionist leftist “scholarship" has become so heavily indoctrinated as to be worthless. And wasting time during the school day with such instructors’ leftist nonsense is a misuse of students’ time.
If this anti-Zionist leftist indoctrination is allowed to continue, Israel will one day wake up to find that just as the leftists who engage in politics in the lecture room are not qualified instructors, so our universities will no longer be schools of higher learning. Rather, they will have become centers for the dissemination of woke religious dogmas which have captured every university department, as they have done in the West.
What is the bottom line? Radical leftist university faculties in Israel do not have the right to indoctrinate our students with their anti-Israel woke policies. And if these faculty members find their beliefs and values run contrary to those Israelis who pay their salaries, then they should quit and open falafel stands in Tel Aviv.
If we attempt to muzzle the anti-Israel left wing faculty members they will scream about their sacred academic freedoms being violated. However, these extraordinary hypocrites are not quite as concerned with academic freedoms when they automatically deny employment to any academic in Israel who does not goose step to their left wing opinions. Indeed, few moderate or conservative academics are today hired at left wing Israeli universities. Nor are very many Zionists.
And this they call academic freedom.
I confess to having a more painful personal insight into the motivations of radical eftist professors.
Two of Israel’s well known and more destructive and self-hating Jewish professors are cousins of mine. For 55 years my family has watched in dismay as they screamed insults about Israel and its leaders. And this madness has morphed into today’s younger professor having left the country and being given an international stage to libel Jews and Israel as racist, apartheid, genocidal….and you know the rest.
But what haunts me is that those in my family know that the screaming professor-cousins suffer from multi-generational out-of-the-pale behavior that we can trace back 120 years, characterized by wildly explosive rage, out of control anger, and horrifying abuses directed at many family members.
Indeed, those radical leftist Israeli professors in my family who love to bore us with monologues about their endless searches for truth, cannot face their own truth; that their self-hatred and rage has nothing to do with Israel, but everything to do with deep emotional problems, starting with hatred of their parents.
And although it is impossible to know for sure, one wonders how many other anti-Ziionist leftist university instructors in Israel spew their hatred due to their own problems?
Israel needs to restore academic legitimacy to its university faculties and demand an end to the discussion of all politics in classrooms.
Only the finest academic subject materials must be taught to our students by the best qualified instructors, regardless of their political beliefs.
And taxpayer funded universities must reflect the people of Israel’s principles of Zionism and Judaism, while their faculties must be required to teach our values.
Israeli sovereignty means not only controlling our borders....but also regaining control of our universities to ensure students receive a superior education that is free from the truly sick, self-hating indoctrination of anti-Zionist leftist university instructors.