When I was growing up in America, it was
not uncommon to hear negative comments about Israel! However,
until I made Aliyah to Israel, I could not imagine that even here I would be
exposed to anti-Israel propaganda and even face intimidation from fellow
Jews. All this happened when I joined the MA program in the
Middle East Studies Department at Ben Gurion University in the academic year
2009-2010.
For starters, the social
coordinator for the international MA students Noah Slor was a very big pro-Palestinian
activist on campus. Indeed, during our very first meeting,
Slor was encouraging international students to support
the radical left wing party Hadash. While it was Slor’s
responsibility to expose international students to Israel by showing them
natural beauty, sharing Israeli culture and history, and in general
enriching their experience in Israel, she instead decided to focus almost
exclusively on taking them to parties and trips to Palestinian areas.
As a result, it should come as no surprise that the international students from
the US, Canada, and Germany become more pro-Palestinian.
For the first major trip, which was held
on January 20, 2010, Slor decided to take our group on a tour of East
Jerusalem. The e-mail claimed that the tour would be given from
“two different perspectives: that of a Palestinian who lives in one of the
neighborhoods that we will visit in, and that of a Jewish
settler.” In reality, the tour guide was Daniel Seideiman
from Ir
Amim, a left wing activist who only demonstrated that
perspective during the tour, while Arieh King of the Israel Land Fund was given
only a couple of hours to share his perspective inside of a café in the Jewish
Quarter and was not given the opportunity to show us different sites in East
Jerusalem from his perspective. By the time that he was given the
chance to speak, Seideiman basically had already convinced the audience of the
merits of the left wing perspective.
The second major trip, which was held on
April 23, 2010, was even less balanced than the East Jerusalem
tour. During this particular trip, Noah Slor arranged for the
international students to visit Hebron to meet with Breaking the Silence, which is an organization
monitoring the IDF. According to the original e-mail, the goals of the tour was
to “witness the harsh situation in the region and to learn more about the power
relations between Palestinians and Jews in Hebron in the context of the Israeli
occupation of the Palestinian territories.” After this e-mail, I sent out
a string of e-mails criticizing this tour for not even trying to create balance.
Only after a long exchange of e-mails amongst me and other classmates did Noah
Slor decide to make the trip more balanced by including a Jewish resident of
Hebron, Noam Amon, for one hour, and even still, the balance was still tipped
in favor of Breaking the Silence, which resulted in most of
the international students becoming more pro-Palestinian after the Hebron
tour.
To add insult to injury, Slor justified
her initial position in an e-mail sent to the entire class where she
explained her reluctance to include members of the Hebron Jewish community.
She claimed that Hebron’s Jews are an “extremely violent group that have
routinely abused the city’s Palestinian residents” and that given this, she has
a “hard time to give legitimacy to such a violent group, by enabling them to
speak up and to express their opinions.” She went on to claim that
“Breaking the Silence” is a “legitimate NGO that does have an agenda, but that
has never endorsed violence or racism as part of its discourse or
strategy.” In conclusion, Slor compared giving Hebron’s Jewish
residents the right to speak alongside “Breaking the Silence” to giving rapists
the right to speak alongside rape victims.
Unfortunately, Noah Slor was not the only radical
left-wing activist who held a prominent position in my program. For
my “Selected Topics in the Geography of the Middle East Class,” I studied under
Prof. Oren Yiftachel, who taught international students that “Israel is in a colonial situation with
the Palestinians,” “the whole Israeli state is what you call an ethnocracy,”
“Ashkenazis colonize the Mizrahim,” “Israeli Arabs have ghetto citizenship,”
“Israel is like Sudan in ethnocratic structure,” and that “Israel imposes
Judaism on her Palestinian citizens.” He also compared Israel to
apartheid in South Africa and claimed that those who opposed MK Haneen Zoabi’s
participation in the Gaza Flotilla were “fascists” and that Israeli society was
“racist” for being upset about what she did. It was due to statements like these by Prof. Yiftachel that
I decided to get involved with Israel Academia Monitor.
After sitting through about a month’s worth of classes, I
felt that the way that Prof. Yiftachel was teaching this class was very
one-sided and thus unprofessional. So, after doing an Internet
search, I discovered Israel Academia Monitor and decided to give Dana Barnett a
phone call. She asked me to write about my experience studying in
his class, in the hopes that public exposure would encourage Yiftachel to teach
in a more objective manner. However, even though I published my
first two exposes anonymously, Prof. Yiftachel figured out that the person who
was writing the exposes was me and arranged to have me intimidated by the head
of the Middle Eastern Studies department at the time, Dr. Avi Rubin.
Upon the publication of my second expose, Dr. Rubin sent me
an e-mail stating, “Your
defamatory web postings re Professor Yiftachel and Dr. Cohen’s class have been
brought to my attention. I wish to meet with you and discuss the possible
ramifications of this.” Both Israel Academia Monitor and I
interpreted this e-mail as an attempt to silence my freedom of
speech. As a result, I was advised not to respond to this
e-mail and was put in touch with the well-known attorney, Dr. Haim
Misgav. I also followed Misgav’s advice not to respond to Dr. Rubin’s second
e-mail.
Then, on April 25, 2010, I received a
phone call from Dr. Rubin, where he demanded an explanation for why I did not
answer him. On the phone, he pretended that he just wanted to
mediate between Prof. Yiftachel and myself, and didn’t mean me any harm.
However, after I received Dr. Rubin’s response to my attorney’s letter, it
became clear that Dr. Rubin did not have my best intentions at
heart. He accused me of lying, refused requests to remain impartial
on this issue until hearing my side of the story, and decided to side with
Prof. Yiftachel before even hearing what I had to say. It was
decided that there would be a meeting between Prof. Yiftachel, the university’s
legal department, and Dr. Cohen, who was Yiftachel’s assistant. My
attorney, a pro-Israel professor, and a sympathetic member of the Board of
Governors would also be present.
Fortunately, the pressure wore off after
this exchange, thanks to the fact that I met with Prof. Yiftachel, where he
refused to help me with my final paper before lecturing me about how I hurt his
feelings. Nevertheless, he backed off after this meeting when I said that
I would try to understand where he was coming from. But the pressure
started up again after the publication of the Im Tirtzu Report
to the Knesset Education Committee, where my story was featured
prominently. During our next meeting to discuss my final paper, he more
or less refused to help me at all and instead lectured me on how what I was
doing was unethical. He claimed that I had violated university policies,
that this had the potential to be a war between the two of us, that what Israel
Academia Monitor was doing was like McCarthyism, that I was guilty of
slandering him and that I had no right to criticize him unless I had a
PHD. I was so scared and intimidated during that meeting.
I found that only through lying to him would I be able to complete the
class in peace, so that is what I did. I honestly believe that the only
reason why I was not significantly down-graded was the fact that a sympathetic
member of the Board of Governors arranged with BGU President Prof. Rivka Carmi
to have a neutral professor check my paper and override Prof. Yiftachel’s grade
if I felt at all that I was downgraded.
Unfortunately, Prof. Yiftachel’s class
was not the only instance where I faced intimidation because of my views at
Ben-Gurion University. At BGU, I also attended a human rights conference
that was organized especially for BGU students. At this BGU
human rights conference, Prof. Neve Gordon tried to intimidate me into leaving
by interrupting one of the speakers by blurting out in front of every one that
I work for some monitor and that I was recording the event. Later
on, between sessions, he emphasized that I could not publish any thing about
the BGU human rights conference without the permission of the conference
organizers. Prof. Gordon did this despite the fact that I am an MA
student at BGU and thus just had as much right to be there as any other student
at BGU, as well as to write about what happened on university property.
But as if this was not bad enough, while
I was a student, other anti-Israel professors were recruited to teach
international students Middle Eastern Studies. Dr. Maya Rosenfeld
was recruited to teach a course for international students at BGU titled
“Palestinian Society in the Diaspora and in the Occupied Territories: Trends of
Social and Political Change.” In this class, Dr. Rosenfeld taught
international students that Palestinians have a right of return, called upon
the international community to impose a solution, asserted that Israel is
violating international law, that Gaza and Judea and Samaria are “occupied
territories,” that Israel is the main impediment for peace, has promoted
certain terrorists, such as Ghassan Kanafani and Abu Iyyad, and referred to
Fatah and its affiliates as “resistance organizations.” She also has
discussed her anti-Israel activism with the class and intimidated the one
outspoken pro-Israel student in the class, even though he is a left-winger.
This past year, BGU’s international masters
program in Middle Eastern Studies was canceled. I very much support the
idea of international students coming to Israel to learn about the Middle
East. However, it is important that less knowledgeable young people
are not exploited and brainwashed into becoming anti-Israel
activists. International students should be exposed to many
opinions and professors should leave it to the students to decide what they
believe, and not to teach their own political positions as
facts.
Thank you.
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