[Peace-discuss] Israel Studies at the University of Illinois: A Fraud and a Sham

[David Green]

For those who don't take the N-G, this Guest Commentary was published this morning:

Israel Studies at the University of Illinois: A Fraud and a Sham
 
David Green
 
On a visit to Israel in 2007, former Chancellor Richard Herman expressed his opposition to a boycott of Israeli academics supported by Great Britain’s University and College Union.
 
Herman stated that “Scholarship and research must remain fluid and borderless, unconstrained by geopolitical boundaries and ideological disagreements.…
We … value our deep and meaningful connections with all nations, including Israel. Our Israel Studies Program brings Israeli academics to campus, along with journalists and writers. The program promotes and supports the academic study of Jewish culture and society in the spirit of free and open inquiry.”
 
Referring to the British boycott, Herman concluded: “The irony is hardly lost on me.”
 
Indeed there is much irony not to be lost in considering the Israel Studies Program on our campus, sponsored by the Program for Jewish Culture and Society, in the light of alleged free and open inquiry.
 
The ISP is funded by Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago. Given these financial strings, its “spirit of free and open inquiry” has in practice been severely limited. It has invited only Israeli Jews, excluding Palestinian citizens of Israel on the basis of their religion. Invitees never seriously dissent from Israeli government policies, as do many uninvited but distinguished Israeli Jewish critics of their own government. The function of Israel Studies on our campus can be briefly summarized: The promotion of Israeli government policies and the sanitization of Israeli culture.
 
Fittingly in regard to both of these functions, Israeli writer Irit Linur will speak on campus on “Making TV Drama in Israel” on November 17th. In 2002, Linur used her radio program to call for a boycott of Israel’s Ha'aretz (liberal) newspaper “until it fires (dissident) journalists Amira Hass and Gideon Levy.” Hass and Levy are the most courageous and incisive Jewish Israeli journalistic critics of Israel’s policies, and it is therefore inconceivable that either would receive an invitation from the Israel Studies Program, as has boycott-proposing Ms. Linur.
 
The irony continues. Earlier this year, after the organization “Breaking the Silence” published soldier testimonies about IDF conduct in Gaza, Linur said on her show, “They’re garbage. It’s not worth wasting punches on weaklings and cowards like “Breaking the Silence.”
 
The Israeli Director of the (liberal) New Israel Fund responded: “Irit Linur is a dangerous person. She behaves on her program like a quick-thinking intellectual to give the impression of intellectual integrity. She gives violence an aesthetic wrapping.”
 
The invitation extended to Ms. Linur does not exhaust the irony. An October 21, 2009 news-release from Gisha, the Palestinian Legal Center for the Freedom of Movement, was headlined “As the Academic Year Opens in Israel: 838 Students Still Trying to Leave Gaza for Study Abroad.”
 
In an October 25th story titled “The 'guardians' of Israeli academia,” Ha’aretz reported:
“Israeli academics are being watched. Vigilantes check what they say or write - and, if they are judged ‘anti-Israel,’ incite donors to the universities and colleges where they teach to act against them. Students are encouraged to spy on their teachers and to report what they say. Academics on the left are the targets. They are vilified as ‘Israel's academic fifth column’ and ‘our inner scourge.’ They are called ‘traitors’ and are accused of ‘treasonous betrayal’ and of wanting ‘to suck up to and be accepted by the enemy.’”
 
With this invitation, the Israel Studies Program continues its tradition of rich irony, as well as that of being a fraud and a sham in relation to its academic and scholarly mission of “free and open inquiry.”


      
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