Here is the beginning of a paper that is the introduction to the
current issue of the Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies:
Introduction to the Special Issue: Palestine—Perspectives on Decolonisation
Salim Vally (University of Johannesburg) and Haidar Eid (Al-Aqsa University, Gaza)
After 20 months of calculated and unrelenting horror aimed at the starving and terrorized population of Gaza, the Israeli/US/UK/EU genocide is being ratchetted-up. As we go to press the official casualty count — 60,000 deaths from traumatic injury — is an immense undercount. It excludes the thousands buried under the rubble and deaths resulting from preventable disease, manufactured famine, malnutrition, the lack of water, inadequate sanitation and the availability of chronic medication. Sadistically, the Israeli Occupation Force and the US have orchestrated ‘death traps’ using food as bait to lure hungry people to areas where scores are routinely and casually murdered, as if the hideous massacres over the past 650 days have not been enough — each new atrocity vying with the previous one in a macabre pattern of inhumanity and brutality.
There is zero relationship between the assertions here and reality.
The rest of the issue makes clear that this isn’t an isolated lapse but a systematic replacement of scholarship with ideology.
Another article, by Haim Bresheeth-Žabner of SOAS, positions Zionism as inherently genocidal and Judaism as racist towards non-Jews.
Jewish historical sources are not just dialectical — they also include some racist examples, something difficult for most Jews to admit and accept. In this, Judaism acts like other monotheistic faiths, also adding a derogatory classification, somewhat reminiscent of the figure of the pagan in the other monotheisms: the Gentile — the non-Jew, or Goy in Hebrew. This is the topic of a monograph examining the historical uses and abuses of the term (Ophir and Rosen-Zvi 2018). The meaning of Goy changes substantially over time. This neutral concept in the Bible, meaning nation, becomes the linguistic marker for the non-Jewish other, the locus of much derogatory sentiments and expressions.
While Goy is used in the European diaspora, it finally flowers in Zionist readings of Jewish history, representing a deep-seated hatred of the non-Jewish other.
What follows is not scholarship but ritual defamation disguised as critical theory The idea that Zionist history books use the word "goy" as a term of hatred is absurd. (It is sometimes used in a derogatory tone in casual conversation but to assume that this is how it was used in history texts is simply antisemitism.)
My TAMAR AI propaganda analyzer, which was created to be non-partisan, describes the first paper: "It masquerades as academic inquiry but is constructed almost entirely of premise-smuggled moral certainty, rhetorical escalation, and selective epistemology. The use of violent metaphors, emotionally manipulative imagery, and dogmatic framing of settler colonialism amounts to advocacy journalism disguised as scholarship." It's analysis of the Bresheeth-Zabner article concludes "Its structure is more consistent with ideological advocacy than with any norm of academic neutrality, rigor, or pluralistic engagement."
Remember when the truth mattered?
Even the University of Johannesburg, where one of the authors of the introductory article teach,
claims "
Honesty, transparency, accountability, openness,
fairness, social justice, and
a commitment to truth, underpin all our endeavours. We earn trust through integrity." Yet they call the IDF the "Israeli Occupation Forces" as if that is their official title - and layers of editors and peer reviewers felt that this was perfectly OK!
The intellectual sources of anti-Israel and antisemitic polemic are universities and academic papers. And all of the supposed controls - peer review, theoretical scholarly pushback - are meaningless when entire fields have been hijacked by ideological haters of Israel, Zionism and - increasingly - Judaism.
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