Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Saturday, December 18, 2010

Nothing's Changed: The Video

Last year I posted a fantastic Swiss cartoon from 1956 that described Israel's relations with its neighbors perfectly.

I just made it into a video:

URGENT: Write to YouTube to reinstate Palestinian Media Watch channel

I received this email from Itamar Marcus, director of the essential site Palestinian Media Watch:

For years there have been PA backers trying to get You Tube to close down the PMW video account by complaining that we are involved in hate speech. Now they succeeded. They complained to the administrators about a farewell video of a suicide terrorist from a few years ago who boasted he would drink the blood of Jews. You Tube sent us notice that this video is "violation of terms" by promoting hate speech and closed our entire account. Most of the hundreds of videos on our web site are not running.

PMW has been excellent at revealing the truth about incitement in the Palestinian Arab media, thoroughly documenting literally hundreds of examples of hate broadcasts and publication in recent years.

It is not easy to find a good email address for YouTube, but I think that the best way to contact them might be "service@youtube.com". You can also try some of their on-line contact information.

Please write to them and let them know how important this resource has been to you and asking that they should reinstate it. Pro-terrorist cyber-bullies should not be able to censor valuable educational resources like PMW.

Cairo Film Festival excluded Israeli films

Last week Egypt hosted the Cairo International Film Festival, and a smattering of Hollywood stars attended like Richard Gere and Juliette Binoche.

Were they aware that the festival was engaging in blacklisting?

From Al Masry al-Youm:

Organizer of the Cairo International Film Festival, Ezzat Abu Auf has said that he will not allow Israel to participate.

"I will not allow Israel to intrude into the festival even if I have to sleep on the doorstep to keep them out," Abu Auf told reporters on Thursday evening,

In Arabic, he said it a little stronger: "I will not allow this to happen [any Israeli films at the festival] as long as I live."

It is a shame that this was not publicized in the English-language media before the festival. It would have been interesting to ask the stars whether they felt it was appropriate for them to support an event where Israelis are banned.

Israel outsourcing computer work to Palestinian Arabs

From AP:

Within the pastel walls of a modest suburban office, Israeli high-tech workers have accomplished a feat that still eludes their political leaders: They have created a partnership with the Palestinians.

Israeli-Palestinian peace talks may be stalled, but that hasn't stopped a small but steady trickle of Israeli technology companies from seeking to work with people on the other side of the decades-old conflict.

Israeli CEOs say it's their way of bringing a little bit of peace to their troubled corner of the world. But the real reason they're hiring Palestinians, they acknowledge, is because it simply makes good business sense.

"The cultural gap is much smaller than we would think," said Gai Anbar, chief executive of Comply, an Israeli start-up in this central Israeli town that develops software for global pharmaceutical companies like Merck and Teva.

At a previous job, he worked with engineers in India and eastern Europe, but found communication difficult. So in 2007, when he was looking to outsource work at his new start-up, he turned to Palestinian engineers. He said they speak like Israelis do -- they are direct and uninhibited. Today, Comply employs four Palestinians.

Palestinian engineers have also warmed up to the idea. "I doubt you would find a company who says, 'I am closed for business'" to Israelis, said Ala Alaeddin, chairman of the Palestinian Information Technology Association.

So when is the BDS movement going to protest this?

Erekat declares US Congress "an obstacle to peace"

From Palestine News Network:

Chief Palestinian Negotiator, Dr. Saeb Erakat, stated on Friday that he “deeply regrets” the resolution passed by the United States House of Representatives opposing international efforts at resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

“We have devoted ourselves to negotiations for nearly two decades and today we are trapped in a framework that thus far has not yet lifted the occupation. Unlike the Israeli government, which is comfortable with the status quo of occupation and continued colonization, the Palestinian people must seek their freedom through any peaceful channel available to us.” Erakat said in a press statement today.

Just as a reminder, no less a leader than Mahmoud Abbas said last year "in the West Bank we have a good reality . . . the people are living a normal life."

“The U.S. Congress has placed one more obstacle towards achieving peace between Palestine and Israel....Israel has done nothing but sabotage the efforts of the Obama administration to restart meaningful negotiations by refusing to freeze settlement expansion and negotiate based on clear terms of reference. Through the passage of this resolution, the US Congress is contradicting the policy of the American government to create a Palestinian state by hindering the ability of the Palestinians to navigate around the Israeli government’s obstructionist policies."

Just as another reminder, the PA refused to negotiate during the last building freeze until the very end, under pressure from the US. And the demand for a settlement freeze as a precondition to negotiations is a brand new tactic that did not exist before the PA perceived a White House that would pressure Israel for them.

So who is adhering to obstructionist policies?

The real obstacles to peace (Moshe Ya'alon)

From Foreign Policy, by MK Moshe Ya'alon:

The Middle East peace process is once again stalled, while Palestinian leaders sadly continue to propagate the myth that Israeli construction impedes progress. Only last Friday, Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said in Washington that "the Israeli government had a choice between settlements and peace, and they chose settlements."

Unfortunately, what stands between the Palestinians and eventual statehood is their insincerity when it comes to real peace. Israel has repeatedly proposed the independence that the Palestinians ostensibly desire. But instead of concluding a deal with Israel, they have demonstrated a total unwillingness to compromise, often favoring terrorism, as witnessed in the barrage of terrorist attacks that followed the Camp David negotiations of 2000. Is it any wonder Israelis find it ever more difficult to trust the Palestinians?

If there is to be a stable and lasting peace, Israel's recognition of the Palestinians' right to self-determination -- which successive Israeli governments have affirmed -- cannot go unreciprocated. The Jewish people are no less entitled to a state in their homeland, the land of Israel, or to their right to defend it.

The fundamental problem is that the Palestinians continue to reject these inherent rights of the Jewish people. That's indeed why we do not yet have two states for two peoples: The Palestinians remain steadfast in their refusal to accept that there even exists a Jewish nation that lays legitimate claim to its land. They reject the entire premise of a state for the Jewish people -- not only beyond the pre-1967 lines of the state of Israel, but even within its original 1948 boundaries. This, of course, explains why the Palestinians did not pursue independence prior to 1967, when Israel was within the 1949 Armistice lines.

Read the whole thing.

(h/t Silke)

Latest Latma (12/17/10)

I liked this one:

What "peace" would look like in a two-state scenario

From Ma'an:

Shortly before midnight on Friday morning residents of the Salfit-district village of Kifl Haris reported dozens of Israeli military vehicles and bus-loads of what were described by locals as "settlers" entering the area.

Locals estimated some 3,000 "settlers" - religious Jews, many from settlements in the occupied West Bank - entered the area as protecting troops set up checkpoints and barricades around a small tomb in the village.

Locals say the tomb belongs to a sheikh from the village, while religious Jews visiting the site say it is the final resting place of Joshua ben Nun, leader of early Jewish tribes.

An Israeli military spokeswoman said there were 800 visitors accompanied by Israeli soldiers. The group stayed in the area from midnight to 5 a.m.

According to Israeli news site Ynet, the visitors found the tomb "desecrated" by Arabic graffiti with slogans like "we are the defenders of the national project" and "conciliation, speak to you enemy through bullets."

Similarly, when Jews want to visit Joseph's Tomb in Shechem (Nablus), they are forced to also come in the middle of the night, limited to once a month, in armored buses that get stoned by local residents.

If a two-state "solution" should ever materialize, this is what "free access to religious shrines" would look like. The very best scenario that the Palestinian Arab leaders would allow would be that Jews visiting the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron and Rachel's Tomb in Bethlehem would also come once a month or so, in the dead of night, to visit their holy places. (If it was up to the PA, this is how they would let Jews visit the Kotel/Western Wall as well. And, of course, Jews would never be allowed to the Temple Mount.)

It would actually be worse, because the IDF would not be able to defend Jews wanting to visit their shrines in "Palestine," so the Jews would be at the mercy of the Palestinian Arab police's whims as far as when or if they could ever visit.

This is what the world is demanding for "peace" - ripping out all Jewish access to Jewish heritage and historic sites. Soothing words about how a peace agreement would allow free access to religious shrines would become quickly as meaningless as they became when Jordan took over the West Bank in 1949 (ironically violating the same UN Resolution 194 that Palestinian Arabs now claim as giving them the fake "right to return.")

AFP puts a moderate face on a Jew-hating terrorist leader

Last month, Hamas' co-founder and ideological leader Mahmoud Zahar said:

The Jews will soon be expelled from Palestine that same way they were kicked out by France, Britain, Belgium, Russia and Germany, Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar said over the weekend.

..."They have no place here amongst us because of their crimes. They will soon be expelled from here and we will pray at the Aqsa Mosque [in Jerusalem].”

Zahar claimed that Jews were expelled in the past “because they betrayed, stole and corrupted these countries.”

And last week he said publicly at a Hamas rally, as he burned an Israeli flag:

The [Hamas] movement was launched to continue the jihad until the liberation of all Palestine...The journey of jihad and martyrdom began 23 years ago and will continue until the liquidation of the masses of aggression, treachery and even high banners of faith and bring us day after day, year after year from Palestine .. all of Palestine. The Jihad will continue until the liberation of the Palestinian city of Jerusalem to pray a prayer of thanks after the liberation of all Palestine.

So when AFP spoke to him yesterday, did they ask him about his violent, anti-semitic and jihadist rhetoric?

Of course not!

AFP's Sara Hussein puts as moderate a spin as she can on Zahar:

Palestinians have time in their fight for a state, and a victory will come through nation-building rather than military confrontation with Israel, a senior Hamas leader said.

Zahar derided peace talks as a waste of time, heaping scorn on Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas for engaging in negotiations, and ruled out recognition of Israel.

But he also stressed Hamas has no plans to launch new attacks on the state and was instead focusing its efforts on state-building and providing an example of honest Palestinian governance.

"We are not saying 'wait,' because we are not just sitting here," he said. "We are reconstructing everything... For the first time, we are really administrating real progress in different ways, on all kinds of things.

"We are giving a good example of purified administration."

Zahar laid out a platform with similarities to that of Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad, who is implementing a two-year plan to build infrastructure in the West Bank.

Hamas rejects peace talks because negotiations have failed, he said.

"We are ready to talk to everybody, but about what? About eating falafel?"

Zahar joked about the years of failed negotiations.

"They left no city without negotiations -- they started in Madrid, Sharm Ash-Sheikh many times, Wye River -- many talks," he said.

He pledged Hamas would continue to "resist the occupation" but insisted resistance was more than military confrontation.

"One of the methods of resistance is to reject the occupation as an idea, one is to educate yourself and your people in their culture, one is to prepare yourself for the war if it happens.

"This," he said, "is resistance."

The reporter refrains from asking about Hamas' closing of charities, or its violence against other Palestinian Arab groups in Gaza, or torture in its jails, or corruption where Hamas steals aid and sells it, or Zahar's anti-semitic statements, or his jihadist rhetoric, or his own personal corruption. No, AFP takes everything he says at face value, propping him up as a moderate Islamic alternative to the PA's Fayyad.

The exception that proves the rule: An Arab speaks against Helen Thomas

I have mentioned a couple of times that I could not find a single prominent Arab American who did not defend Helen Thomas' anti-semitic comments, by either denying they were anti-semitic and/or confirming that they were true. I also showed that major Arab American organizations specifically went out of their way to honor her because of, not in spite of, her anti-Jewish outburst.

A single exception has just appeared.

Hussein Ibish, a quite prominent Arab American, has written a pretty good essay on the topic. He spends much of it going rebutting Thomas' and her acolytes' false definition of "anti-semitism" and gives a history of the term as well as of both Christian and Arab anti-semitism. He then goes into the Thomas affair as well:

I really had intended to stay out of this altogether, and I'm not going to ultimately pass any definitive judgment on her recently expressed sentiments, but some observations seem necessary. Her initial comment was very disturbing, but could certainly have been dismissed as an off-the-cuff remark to a hectoring videographer by an exasperated and elderly journalist who was trying to be deliberately obnoxious to someone it seems may have been pestering her. The explanation offered at the time that she was referring to the occupation was never very convincing because she referred to Jews getting out of Palestine and going home to Germany, Poland or the United States, but not to Israel. But had it been isolated and off-the-cuff, as it first appeared, it really shouldn't have been that big a deal, especially since she apologized right away.

Unfortunately, Ibish refrains from mentioning that the full video shows that Thomas seemed to be happy to answer the initial question from Rabbi Nesenoff about journalism as a career and she did not seem irritated at all, and even laughed heartily as she went onto her anti-semitic rant.

Ms. Thomas decided to make some additional remarks that got her into even deeper trouble. Parsing whether or not any of it descends to the level of anti-Semitism seems utterly beside the point. But to suggest, as she did in her subsequent remarks, that "Congress, the White House and Hollywood, Wall Street are owned by Zionists" is just silly, and it's indefensible. Let's take them one by one.

Later he writes

I do think it's possible to read Thomas' most recent comments as a rallying cry to Arab-Americans to get more involved, and that's certainly good advice. But the phraseology is extremely unfortunate and, indeed, inaccurate. And certainly she didn't do anything to contradict the impression that was created in many minds by her original off-the-cuff ill-advised remarks, and more than reversed whatever corrective had been accomplished by her well-advised apology. The debate over whether her original or follow-up comments are anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist or simply inaccurate isn't particularly interesting. But it needs to be clearly stated that the idea that because Thomas is of a Semitic Arab heritage she therefore cannot be anti-Semitic herself by definition holds no water at all. Sadly, there is far too much genuine anti-Semitism among Arabs and Arab-Americans, just as there is a disturbing plethora of anti-Arab and Islamophobic sentiment among Israelis and Jews around the world, including the United States.

Ibish falls short of the clear-cut condemnation of Thomas that is sorely needed in the Arab American community. But at least he recognizes that she was wrong, something that makes him utterly unique - and which highlights that the vast majority of Arab American leaders really either do support Thomas' remarks wholeheartedly or are too cowed by institutional anti-semtism in their community to say anything against them.

Ibish's attempts to draw a parallel between Jew-hatred among Arabs and "Islamophobia" among Jews are unsatisfying as well, simply because the former is apparently endemic while the latter is anything but, especially in the United States. It is possible to find (way too) many Jews whose positions on the Arab/Israeli conflict are in perfect consonance with the official positions in the Arab world, but it is nearly impossible to find any Arabs whose public positions align with Israel's.

So while his essay is flawed, it at least is a belated acknowledgment of the issue, it is thoughtful, and it is welcome as a worthy addition to the debate.

(h/t Alex)

Status of anti-semitism/anti-Zionism on US campuses

A pretty comprehensive report at Hudson-NY by Alexander Joffe. Here's how it begins:

The situation on campus continues to change for Israel's supporters: abuse is now almost everyplace. There have been important successes, like upholding the recent veto of a "boycott, divestment and sanctions" (BDS) proposal at the University of California at Berkeley's student council, and the U.S. Civil Rights Commission's recent definition of anti-Semitism on campus as a violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But there have also been notable failures, such as the continuing unwillingness of the administration of the University of California at Irvine to take harassment of Jewish and Israeli students and speakers seriously. Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren was heckled and silenced there by a group of students from the Muslim Student Association before university security stepped in and removed them. These students later accused the university administration of denying them their First Amendment rights.

At Evergreen State University Jewish students have felt compelled to transfer to other schools after overt harassment. Sukkahs have been vandalized in recent years at Stanford, the University of Colorado, the University of Southern California, and other campuses. "Israel Apartheid Week" is now an established part of the calendar at colleges across the country, bringing verbal harassment and even physical assaults against Jewish students. At these events, "Jews" are assumed to be "Zionists" and are subject to abuse on this basis, as well as because they are Jews. Worse, universities and the community at large are getting accustomed to it all.

Read the whole thing.

"The Oral Historian of Israel’s Terror War" (Totten)

Michael Totten scores with another great interview, with the author of a new book about Israel's victims of terrorism, Giulio Meotti. Here are some excerpts where this non-Jewish author talks about the book, and about European anti-semitism and anti-Zionism:

Giulio Meotti: What’s the difference between a Western democracy, such as France or the United States, and Israel’s democracy? It’s not the start-up nation, the job opportunities, the scientific progress, or the number of Nobel laureates. The most important difference between Israel and the other Western countries lies in the young men and women killed for what they are: Israelis living as free human beings in their historical homeland.

The Jewish state is the only member of the United Nations condemned to death. Its existence is the only one widely considered temporary by a large number of countries in the world. In 2003 I decided to investigate the great black hole that in the last fifteen years has snuffed out thousands of lives, Jews killed because they are Jews.

The book is the result of many years of research inside the painful heart and soul of Israel. There were no books devoted to this single dramatic question. I give a voice to dozens of families and survivors of terrorism who have been neglected by an arrogant media industry. I think the blood spilled by terrorism is the most precious and fragile story that Israel has today, a story that even Israeli writers have neglected.

MJT: Why do you suppose the Western media, especially European media, are so biased against Israel? And why are you different?

Giulio Meotti: Europe is an anti-Semitic continent. The wave of hatred from the European and American ruling classes, the “mainstream” international press with its headlines that repeat diabolical condemnations without appeal, and the satisfied hate of academics is like a pile of straw that waits only for the match to be struck before it will burst into flames.

In Italy the National Order of Journalists, which is a state funded institution, is hosting the presentation of the “Freedom Flotilla 2,” the so-called “humanitarian” ship that will be sent to break the Israeli siege of Hamas in Gaza. Among the speakers are Turkish militants of the IHH group, which is now on Germany’s black list of terrorist organizations. A few weeks ago hundreds of writers and personalities from Norway promoted a massive boycott of Israel. Spain decided to ban the homosexual Israeli movement. Israeli politicians are afraid to land in London’s airports because they might be arrested for “war crimes.” In Sweden the popular newspaper Aftonbladet wrote that Israeli soldiers ripped out the organs of Palestinians in order to sell them.

In the Netherlands the former European Commissioner Frits Bolkestein just invited the Dutch Jews to emigrate to Israel or the United States. There is no future for them in Netherlands due to Islamic anti-Semitism. The Netherlands is hosting the United Nations International Court of Justice. Its condemnation of the Israeli security barrier in 2004 and the Goldstone Report against Israel in 2009 simply forbids Israel to defend itself. The most important Dutch writer, Leon de Winter, who is also of Jewish descent, recently explained in a magnificent essay forStandpoint magazine why he decided to move to the United States. It’s much better to live in California, a place without history, than in a country where the synagogues are protected by the police and Jews can not wear their religious symbols in public. The beautiful Holland of Galileo, Spinoza, and Descartes, the shelter of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews fleeing the Inquisition, is dying. In its place there is fear, intimidation, and subjugation. There is so much darkness in Europe and in its newspapers and books.

...We have an indifferent majority of people about the fate of Israel and the Jews and a very powerful minority in the newspapers, political parties, universities, televisions and public arena that is extremely hostile.

America has historical, religious, cultural, political, and economic links with Israel. It’s sad to say, but Europe is probably lost to Israel.

Think about Spain. It has a very small Jewish community and its ancient synagogues are empty monuments, but it has a virulent anti-Israel ideology. In Norway and Sweden the anti-Israel hatred has become mainstream among prime ministers and best-selling writers such as Jostein Gaardner. He is the author of the global literary phenomenon Sophie’s World and he wrote an article in the Aftenposten newspaper where he said, “We no longer recognize the State of Israel… Do not worry, Israel will go to exile again.”

For the commemoration of the Nazi’s Kristallnacht, the city of Frankfurt has just chosen as speaker the Jewish essayist Alfred Grosser, author of the violent anti-Israeli pamphlet Von Auschwitz nach Jerusalem. Grosser compared what the Nazis did to the Jews to what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians. I agree with the great American writer Cynthia Ozick when she says it would be best to abolish Holocaust memorial days in Europe.

As you can see, Michael, the anti-Israel ideology is now mainstream, fashionable, and even sexy all over Europe. Israel is overwhelmed by a tsunami of delegitimization. A group of Israeli tennis players was only allowed to play behind closed doors in a Swedish stadium. In Hanover an Israeli dance group was stoned by demonstrators shouting “Juden Raus.” The British Trade Union has called to boycott Israel. European supermarkets, even in Italy this year, have more than once decided to boycott Israeli goods. Israeli movies are ousted from international festivals, as in Edinburgh. Israeli academics are expelled from European universities and conferences.

Karel De Gucht, the European Union’s trade commissioner and a former foreign minister of Belgium, said in an interview in October that the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations were sure to founder on two accounts; first, because Jews are excessively influential in the U.S., and second because they are not the sorts to be reasoned with. If this isn’t anti-Semitism, the term has no meaning.

MJT: You’re not Jewish. (Neither am I, by the way.) What is it that draws you to Israel and the tragedy of the Jewish experience in this world?

Giulio Meotti: If some day Israel were to fall into the hands of its enemies, the West as we know it would cease to exist. The West is what it is thanks to Rome, Jerusalem, and Athens–Rome’s rule of law, the Bible’s morality, and Greek democracy. If the Jewish part of those roots is overturned and Israel is lost, then we are lost too. Israel is a lighthouse of life at a time when life is our most endangered value. A New Shoah is an affirmation of life in the kingdom of death.

A special friend of mine said the book is the Dead Sea Scrolls of modern Israel. It may take some years before the book’s stories have an effect, and for me the most important would be to change the world’s conscience about Israel. It’s a hard task, but one worth attempting. My enduring consolation will be to give an everlasting name and voice to those who have been murdered.

Read the whole thing.

(h/t Silke)

Mel Gibson innovates a new slur against Jews

From GQ, in an interview with Winona Ryder:

A Mel Gibson anecdote: "I remember, like, fifteen years ago, I was at one of those big Hollywood parties. And he was really drunk. I was with my friend, who's gay. He made a really horrible gay joke. And somehow it came up that I was Jewish. He said something about 'oven dodgers,' but I didn't get it. I'd never heard that before. It was just this weird, weird moment. I was like, 'He's anti-Semitic and he's homophobic.' No one believed me!"

"Oven Dodgers"? Too bad the interview came out today, or else Gibson could have beat out Helen Thomas in the #1 spot of the year's Top Ten Anti-Semitic Slurs, just released by the Wiesenthal Center.

Columbia's Center for Palestine Studies - Politics masked as academia

An illuminating article in The New Republic looks at the new Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia, and finds that it is not what it is supposed to be:

Given the highly sensitive subject matter of this dialogue, the CPS faces an important choice. It can host academics interested in serious Palestine-related scholarship, or it can advance political interests under the guise of Palestine studies. Should it move in the latter direction, it could make the boundary between politics and scholarship more meaningless than ever. And there are already troubling signs that this is exactly what is happening.

To be sure, the Center represents a crucial development in a nascent field. “Very simply, there’s never been a dedicated space … for this kind of research,”says CPS co-director and anthropologist Brinkley Messick. Rashid Khalidi,the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia and fellow CPS co-director, hopes that the Center will help broaden a “tiny, narrow, not well-established” field by building an archive, hosting events, and awarding doctoral fellowships to Palestinian scholars. By pursuing these admirable goals, the CPS has the potential to cast new light on the Palestinian people, who are too often only known within the context of their relationship with Israel. And the leaders of the Center are aware that they must ensure that the Center’s activities fall within a scholarly mandate. “The last thing you want is a Middle East Institute or a center for Israel or Palestine that isn’t within the university mission,” Khalidi says. “We’d avoid doing is anything that’s directly related to any political activism.”

But there are signs that politics have already infiltrated the CPS. Take, for example, the fact that Joseph Massad (the professor accused of bullying students in 2004) is associated with the center. Massad’s body of work is a postmodern mash-up of high-minded critical theory and base innuendo. His book Desiring Arabs theorizes that homosexuality is a western construct that imperial powers imposed upon the Middle East and that a “gay international” cabal (consisting of groups like Amnesty International and the Human Rights Campaign) uses the rhetoric of minority rights to unfairly vilify Muslim regimes.

More troubling than this vilification of human rights organizations is that much of Massad’s work is overtly political—exactly the type of scholarship that the CPS purportedly intends to avoid.

...[U]naccompanied by a dedication to real expertise, the CPS will be little more than a clique of like-minded academics whose defining commonality is hostility toward Israel. In its current form, it’s likely that the first Palestine Center at an American university will lead the way not in “a new era of civility,” but, rather, in politicizing Middle East studies further than ever before.

...[Legal scholar Katherine] Franke’s own work reveals the perils of such uncertainty in mission. She told us that she focuses on “gender and sexuality and how the rights of LGBT people in Israel are being used to punish Israel’s Arab neighbors.” For her, one of Israel’s greatest accomplishments (the creation of one of the most tolerant societies in the Middle East) is linked to the country’s ceaseless persecution of Palestinian Arabs. The association of Mahmood Mamdani—the former directorof Columbia’s Institute of African Studies—with the CPS further illustrates the dangers of mission-creep. Mamdani justifies his involvement by pointing to a conference he helped to organize titled “Post-Apartheid Reflections on Israel and Palestine,” which taught him “how a thematic focus [on Palestine] could bring African scholars … into the mainstream of intellectual discussions.” Mamdani associates with Palestine studies, it seems, to increase the profile of his primary field. Moreover, he has used his background as an Africanist to attack Israel. In a 2002 speech at a pro-divestment teach-in, Mamdani argued that Israel was an apartheid state and a settler-colonial enterprise comparable to Liberia.

Both Franke and Mamdani use hostility toward Israel as a jumping-off point for specific academic inquiries—issues of sexual identity politics for Franke and comparative colonialism for Mamdani. Their involvement with the CPS helps elevate this reductive and opportunistic treatment of Israel and Palestine to the cutting-edge of a new academic field, turning the CPS into a platform for niche interests that, together, share an anti-Israel agenda.

I am more skeptical than the authors are about the chances that the CPS could ever be anything but political and anti-Israel. The authors say that "the Palestinian people... are too often only known within the context of their relationship with Israel" - but this is how they define themselves to begin with! The very history of the Palestinian Arabs, as such, cannot be said to have started before the era of modern Zionism. They were never a cohesive people after the Arab nations collectively decided to treat them as such for their own political purposes. They never defined their "ancient homeland" in terms outside of whatever lands Jews have political control over.

Yes, there were costumes sewn in Bethlehem and soap made in Nablus but there was, simply, no specifically"Palestinian" Arab culture before the 20th century. Any institute that attempts to be a center for Palestine studies cannot avoid these facts - either it has to make up a new, older culture and history or it needs to start this "history" in terms of Zionism. Either way, it becomes an inherently political institution.

(h/t Jordan Hirsch, one of the authors.)