Eugene Kontorovich: Anthropology group votes to boycott Israel despite major donors’ — including Intel and Yahoo — thick Israeli ties
The annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association has approved a resolution to boycott Israel, which must now be voted on by the group’s membership. There are some unappreciated ironies that arise from the AAA’s efforts, and its interaction with private businesses that the AAA contracts with and takes donations from.Richard Landes: In an Age of Terror, How Thinking Right Can Save the Left
The resolution seeks to enlist a major academic publisher in excluding Israeli institutions from access to scholarly publications. And while the AAA is doing this, the AAA’s major donors are among the most important companies in Israel — which probably have not yet caught on to what is being done with their money.
For it turns out that the AAA does not mind getting funding from companies that, by the AAA’s logic, “maintain perpetuate the occupation.” Two of the group’s most “significant” donors are Intel and Yahoo! Labs.
Intel does not just do business in Israel, it is a big part of the Jewish State’s economy, and vice versa. Its Israel division is the country’s largest private employer, while accounting in recent years for up to 40 percent of Intel’s profit.
Intel is deeply tied in to Israeli academic institutions and has facilities all over the country. If Israel’s obscure anthropology departments “have been directly and indirectly complicit in the Israeli state’s systematic maintenance of the occupation and denial of basic rights to Palestinians, by providing planning, policy, and technological expertise for furthering Palestinian dispossession,” as the AAA resolution claims, surely Intel must be the Great Dispossessor.
Among the responses in Israel to the Paris Terror Attacks, there has emerged a divide that deserves attention. Depending on where you spend your political time, one or the other response will appear predictable (and lamentable).How The New York Times whitewashes Palestinian terror
First, there are the self-referential Zionists who think, as they did after the attacks of Sept. 11 and the London bombings of July 7, 2005, and so many other moments: “Now, maybe they’ll understand our plight, and realize we have the same enemies,” and “We Israelis have a lot to teach you.” Their battle-hardened cousins further to the right reply, “Don’t bother trying, they’re all anti-Semitic and judge us by a double standard” or even “The West deserves what they’re getting, as a punishment for their hypocrisy.”
On the other hand, we have those who see this entire range of responses as distasteful, to say the least. Instead, they urge an expression of sympathy and solidarity unclouded by words of reproach, by displaying the French flag online as a way to declare #JeSuisFrançais. It’s really not cool for Israelis to complain about a double standard at a time like this, they scold. It’s not about us—it’s about France. As for those people, like the prime minister, who compare ISIS to Palestinian terrorists, they are engaging in a low form of propaganda, trying to use the victims of other wars in other places to wash away the sins of Israeli occupation.
In a deeply disturbing and repeating 21st-century, paradox, however, the approach of Israel’s generous and selfless ones has worked to the benefit of most regressive forces on the planet—while on the contrary, the voice that awakening Europe needs most to heed in the current crisis is that of those self-centered Israelis who relate European woes to their own pain. The failure to understand this paradox explains both why Western elites are so poor at resisting global jihad, and why, for a disaffected youth—Muslim by birth or by choice—it makes sense to join that jihad. Indeed, this split in Israeli discourse about the Paris attacks illustrates the disproportionate impact of a peculiar Jewish dispute on the current cognitive disorientation of the West.
And so was the newspaper’s recent suggestion that there might never have been a temple on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, despite unanimity among serious scholars to the contrary. The timing of this attack on Jewish history was no coincidence. Palestinians have explained that the wave of violence is fueled by rumors that Israel plans to change the status quo on the Mount, and by continued Jewish visits to the site.
Instead of explaining the historical connection between the Jewish people and their holiest site, the newspaper chose to rewrite history to better fit with a Palestinian narrative that Jews are foreign to the Temple Mount. (This article and the one about the Boy Scout knife were eventually corrected.)
The newspaper has long been criticized for its obsessive scrutiny of Israeli flaws, real and imagined, coupled with soft-glove treatment of Palestinians. Even its own public editor has urged reporters to strengthen coverage of Palestinians because, she incredibly had to remind colleagues, “They are more than just victims.” Clearly, the message hasn’t been heeded.
This journalism-gone-wild isn’t good for Israel, of course. But it’s also bad for the newspaper’s readers, who want an honest account of what’s happening across the world. It’s bad for students, who risk harassment and ostracism on campus if they come out in support for the Jewish state. And if our democracy, and by extension our foreign policy, depends on a well-informed electorate, it’s bad for us all. (h/t Yenta Press)