The assault on academic freedom on Israeli campuses continues apace with a slimy report in Yediot Achronot which brays about a review of the department of politics and government at Ben Gurion University.  The committee appointed by the Israeli Council for Higher Education recommended closing the department for its so-called “extreme leftist tendency” if it didn’t mend the errors its ways.

The report, as portrayed in the article, seems astonishing in a number of ways (Dahlia Scheindlin has written about it here).  First, its contents seem heavily influenced by student evaluations of the program.  While student opinion should perhaps be a factor in such an evaluation, it should be a minor one at best since there are far more important factors in determining the quality of program.  But one thing the large amount of student input tells us is that the committee collaborated in ways large or small with Im Tirzu and other pro-Zionist academic advocacy groups which have been on the warpath regarding Ben Gurion in general and this program in particular.

I’ve written here about the University president’s invitation to faculty member Neve Gordon, to quit the school after he wrote a Los Angeles Times calling supporting the BDS movement.  Shortly after this controversy, the department responded to her high-handed tactics by appointing him its chair.  Now, it appears some in the University, Im Tirtzu and the Israeli far-right are taking the battle to a new venue.

Here are some of the real doozies in the Yediot article:

The department is known to have no small number of researchers with extreme leftist tendencies, who have expressed controversial views.

Among the views they featured were Neve Gordon’s supposed comments (and “radical ones” at that) during a class, that Gilad Shalit’s capture was not an act of terror, but rather a military attack.  Another faculty member, Danny Filk, organized official University meetings at which Im Tirzu claims only those from the “left camp” were permitted to address the gathering.

Another issue that bothered the committee was the faculty’s lack of care in making clear to students what their personal political views were in the course of classroom teaching.  Apparently, it believes that students aren’t able to distinguish between a professor’s politics and the course subject matter.  Nor did the reviewers like at all the supposed emphasis faculty made on political activism, which would distract from the serious pursuit of scholarly research.  They also claim that teachers do not represent a diverse set of views in their classrooms, but rather tend to present their own views and omit those conflicting with them.

Prof. Galia Golan, a member of the committee, disputed its findings, saying that the claim that the professors inserted their own views too prominently into the curriculum violated the fundamental value of academic freedom.

Scheindlin, in her 972Magazine post asked how could they know what ideas or values were espoused by professors in class when all of them, except for Golan, neither spoke nor read Hebrew.  Did they have classroom presentations translated for them into their native languages so they could evaluate?

She points out another coincidence: Education minister Gideon Saar is the chair of the Israeli Council on Higher Education and a devout supporter of Im Tirzu.  Could it be possible that the appointment of the committee was done at the behest of the minister and his friends in the far-right Israeli group?

The current department chair, Prof. Filk, dismissed the committee’s findings as a political witch hunt and noted that it was the most popular of its kind in any Israeli university.  He also noted that the evidence offered in the report was often faulty and simply wrong.  A senior member of the faculty went event farther:

This was an outside committee a portion of whose members have pronounced extreme right-wing views that created a reported fundamentally flawed.  Theirs is a political report whose agenda was to damage the department through exploitation of outside extremist groups [like Im Tirzu].

Prof. Carmi defended the department from charges that it wasn’t focussed enough on the traditional elements of the political science discipline by saying that this was precisely the mission of its program: to see the academic field from non-conventional, non-traditional viewpoints. This is why the faculty includes a medical doctor and architect among its members.

The truth is that for years now Im Tirzu and rightist Israeli academics have had it in for both the University and this department claiming it isn’t sufficiently “Zionist.”  That because it entertains views critical of Zionism or, God forbid, even anti-Zionist, that it departs from the national consensus.  Therefore a call for shutting down the program is music to their ears.  But as Galia Golan noted in her demurral, there is an even more important issue here: the critical need to support free inquiry and academic freedom.  In presenting their subjects to students and the wider world, they must do so in ways that are true to their own sense of themselves as academics and researchers.  They must not be pressured to present a certain point of view to the exclusion of others.

After Facebook groups boasting of hundreds of Israeli members have sprouted urging the hanging of Israeli Palestinian MKs and real settler brutes have killed Palestinian farmers and maimed Israeli Jewish activists helping them, all of which ended in not just no criminal charges but not even an investigation, the State prosecutor will open a criminal investigation (and in English) against Eyal Nir, a Ben Gurion University chemistry lecturer.

Israeli Facebook incitement to murder MK Haneen Zoabi

His “crime?” He posted on his Facebook account, in response to a provocative far-right “flag dance” Jerusalem Day march through Palestinian East Jerusalem, that “someone should break the necks of these scoundrels.”  He linked in his post to a YouTube video in which marchers called “death to Arabs” and “Muhammad is dead” (this through the heart of the most Palestinian neighborhood in the city).  24 marchers were arrested.  None, I’m sure, were prosecuted.  Despite all this, instead of the marchers being considered provocateurs of violence, Nir is.

Eyal Nir's Facebbook post: 'Gangs of bandits roaming our land. I call upon the world to help break the necks of these scoundrels.'

A note on Nir’s Facebook posting–his reference to “gangs of bandits roaming through our land” was a sly reference to a defining speech by Yeshaia Leibowitz, Israel’s most famous 20th century public intellectual, in which he thundered:

“Against the gangs of bandits who roam our streets today, why can’t we form groups of people who will break their bones, as simple as that…and if you say that this is a call for a civil war, I say ‘yes’…and those who are afraid of doing so should not portray themselves as activists fighting against the threat of fascism in Israel”

All of which means that Prof. Nir was in essence paraphrasing one of Israel’s most distinguished academic figures of the past century.  Now let’s see the Israeli State prosecute the good professor for his incitment!  As usual, such prosecution will show the state police and justice apparatus and the far-right groups on whose behalf they act, to be utter fools.  Leading the state prosecution will be none other than Shai Nitzan, the legal “brains” behind the railroading of Dirar Abusisi.

Now, keep in mind that the very brutes who were flagrantly provoking violence by tramping through East Jerusalem are the ones who don’t just provoke, but commit acts of extreme violence, and they do so routinely.

So this is how Israeli society works, it offers immunity from prosecution to the far-right and comes down like a ton o’ bricks on the progressive activist communty.  This, of course is a travesty of democracy in which comments considered free speech in any other western society are criminalized.

Ben Gurion University, known for standing ‘firmly’ by its faculty and their rights of free speech as they did (faintly) in the case of Neve Gordon, issued a statement saying that the University had no role in this matter and that the legal process should proceed apace.  Another faculty member enjoyed receiving a death wish from a University trustee.  Not a word about free speech or academic freedom for Prof. Nir from Pres. Rivka Carmi and the spineless academocrats at the University.

The Hudson Institute, founded by Herman “Thinking the Unthinkable” Kahn and peopled by the hottest names in neocon-dom, is attempting to work its magic on Israel.  According to Didi Remez’s Coteret blog, Hudson is heavily funding two Israeli extremist groups which are targeting Israeli higher education by demanding the firing of “left-wing” professors considered hostile to Zionism.  They also want to “reform” the teaching of Zionism in the social sciences by removing “anti-Zionist” materials from the syllabi and removing unconventional or dissident ideas as well.  This is the thought police run amok.  This is David Horowitz with a Hebrew accent.  This is Campus Watch and the David Project translated to an Israeli context.

The right-wing Institute is providing $500,000 to the Institute for Zionist Strategies, an Im Tirzu look-alike which is, like its ideological twin, pressuring Israeli universities (in IZS’s case Tel Aviv University) to review and adjust its curricular offerings corresponding to the former’s partisan orientation.  The pressure has worked in the case of TAU, whose president has asked to review the course offering of the sociology department after a complaint that it was infested by “post-Zionist” thinking.  The group defines the latter as:

…The pretense to undermine the foundations of the Zionist ethos and an affinity with the radical leftist stream.

IZS was founded by Yisrael Harel, a settlement leader and (wonders never cease) a Haaretz columnist.  Harel’s got TAU’s knickers in such a knot that the University president is actually reviewing individual course syllabi:

The university has stated that since this is Klafter’s first year as president, he is intensively studying what is being taught at the university, and this includes reviewing course syllabi.

One wonders whether there isn’t an Israeli institute for new university presidents where they can go to learn how to do their jobs.  Leadership 101 would teach them that this isn’t their job, but rather the job of the department heads who are designated by him and his subordinates.  When presidents are doing what this guy is doing they’re either running way scared or simply don’t know shit from shinola about being a president.

For those of you who studied the McCarthy era in your American history classes, the following quotation will remind you of that speech in Wheeling, WVA where the senator screamed there were 53 known Communists (the number kept increasing with each speech he made thereafter) in the State Department.  Here Haaretz is referring to a “report” written by IZS “analyzing” sources used by the sociology department:

The paper says final figures from the courses examined shows syllabi contained 146 sources the authors defined as Zionist and 440 sources deemed post-Zionist.

Those of you who know the courageous role that Yehuda Shenhav has played both as a TAU professor and human rights activist will gather that the following was intended as a bitterly ironic statement:

…Shenhav, one of the professors whose course reading list was requested, said: “I have no doubt that the president…requested [the syllabi] to protect academic freedom against McCarthyism.”

As they say in Hebrew: Ha’levay (roughly translated as “I’ll bet”).

If any of this is reminiscent of the work of Im Tirzu, which has been busy wreaking similar havoc on the political science department at Ben Gurion University, it could be because Ronen Shoval, the group’s founder, learned his trade at workshops sponsored by IZS.  What makes this even stranger is that Shoval has previous denied such collaboration between the groups as has IZS.  But the fact of the matter is that the terms of the attacks, the concepts utilized in the reports which criticize the various academic departments, all of this points to the groups aping each other’s tactics:

Not only is the methodology of the two reports identical (an examination of syllabi and a classification of lecturers into categories such as “Zionist” and “anti-Zionist” ), but the conclusions they reached about the state of Israeli academia are similar.

IZS’ advisor committee includes such noteworthy Israeli neocons as Michael Oren, Moshe “Bogie” Yaalon, Natan Sharansky, and Ron Baratz.  Baratz was the academic fig leaf who served as mashgiach for the Im Tirzu hit job on Ben Gurion University.  Baratz also let out a geshrei when the Hebrew University’s philosophy department declined to renew his one-year adjunct lecturer appointment, claiming his “firing” resulted from ideological bias (interesting that the subject of ancient Greek philosophy could be approached through an ideological bias).

Meyrav Wurmser, doyenne of pro-Israel neocondom, funder of attacks on Israeli academia

Hudson’s generosity toward IZS stems at least in part from the former’s senior fellow, Meyrav Wurmser, one of the foremost pro-Israel neocons in Washington, a former Bush administration apparachik, former director of the anti-Arab media outlet, MEMRI, and wife of David Wurmser.  The latter was a colleague of Doug Feith in the Bush Defense Department.  Or to paraphrase Stan Laurel: “That’s a fine kettle of pro-Israel fish you’ve gotten us into, Ollie.”  Ms. Wurmser is the founder and director of Hudson’s Center for Middle East Policy.

Remez writes that neither IZS nor Hudson note on their respective websites the web of financial support woven between the two groups.  The former’s website notes in Hebrew that its donor data is “private,” while in English it claims that support derives from an IZS Friends group.  You’d have to examine the IRS 990 report and Israeli government funder report in order to learn this information.  Certainly not the finest example of philanthropic transparency.

Ironically, Im Tirzu, NGO Monitor and none other than IZS are the godfathers of the new Knesset bill which will require “transparency” from Israeli NGOs like the New Israel Fund and B’Tselem, which allegedly receive “tainted” donations from foreign sources hostile to Israeli Zionism.  One wonders whether the law will somehow exclude IZS from its scrutiny or whether the latter will suddenly get religion and bring its own accounting into line with the proposed law.

Uzi Arad, Bibi's national security Rasputin, gone over to the Dark Side

Hudson also donated $600,000 to the Atlantic Forum of Israel in 2007, which Didi characterizes as “an opaque, security oriented organization” founded by Bibi Netanyahu’s national security Rasputin, Uzi Arad.  Arad, in his past life a Mossad operative, is accused of being instrumental in the Larry Franklin/Aipac spy case.  For a time during the Bush administration, Arad was persona non grata in Washington.  In one of its less intelligent moves, Obama opened its arms to Arad after Bibi elevated him to the national security advisor role in his new government.  We can charitably say about Arad that he long ago went over to the Dark Side.

Though the Atlantic Forum’s website is under construction, the American Jewish Congress described the former as Israel’s “non-governmental representative to NATO.”  In other words, a repository for all manner of Israeli spookdom on European soil.

What is interesting here is that the Hudson Institute clearly favors attacking Iran.  Uzi Arad, who stepped down from his leadership role at the Forum on joining the government, favors attacking Iran.  U.S. government policy (at this time) opposes attacking Iran.  Which means that a U.S. neocon think tank has teamed up with the current Israeli national security advisor to advocate a position at odds with U.S. foreign policy.  Nothing illegal about that.  But Didi and I think both the U.S. and Israeli publics deserve the right to know about such tag team wrestling duos attempting to wreak havoc with U.S. policy.  Further, I think this makes Hudson an agent of Israeli influence (and vice versa).

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• Hudson Inst primary financial backer of NGO behind campaign to purge Israeli universities of “leftists” (coteret.com)

Gifts by John Hagee and Central Fund of Israel to Im Tirzu

What do the Houston Jewish federation, the Jewish Agency, John Hagee, and Im Tirzu have in common?  They’re all either directly or indirectly funding a major assault on academic freedom on Israeli campuses.

Im Tirzu is on the warpath once again.  Not to be outdone by the BDS movement, one of whose tools is an academic boycott of Israel, the Israeli rightist group has threatened the president of Ben Gurion University–if she doesn’t depose the current leadership of the political science department and reform the “anti-Zionist” syllabi of its courses that it will begin a campaign to convince donors to stop giving and students to stop enrolling.

Since the Knesset is considering a cockamamie bill punishing any Israeli who supports a boycott of Israel, perhaps the good solons might want to consider including Im Tirzu in the list of those who could be punished.  I’d think that supporting an academic/fundraising boycott of Ben Gurion University might enable faculty there to make a plausible legal case that their institution suffered tangible damaged by Im Tirzu’s assault.

The Israeli finance website, Calcalist, reports (Hebrew) that John Hagee donated $120,000 to Im Tirzu in 2009 through the Jewish Agency.  The money had been transferred to the Agency by the Houston Jewish Federation as part of an overall $5-million gift.  $3-million of that came from CUFI and went towards its largely pro-settler Israel philanthropy.  Hagee passed the gift through the Agency in order to qualify for a U.S. tax deduction.  The Israeli site also notes that the Central Fund of Israel, a pro-settler fund supported by American Jews, donated $35,000 as well.  I reported some of this earlier in this post.  But what I’m trying to discover is whether the funds reported on by the Calcalist are independent of the $200,000 in Hagee gifts I reported earlier.  I suspect that they may be since there was no mention concerning the earlier gift that it was a pass-through via the Jewish Agency.

The Israeli website notes that the Agency is only supposed to act as pass-through for donations to “non-political” Israeli groups.  I wonder how they fudge this one concerning one of the most hardline political groups currently functioning in Israel?  Further the Agency is only supposed to accept funds for projects that are directly connected to its work.  So does this mean that Im Tirzu is a project under the official auspices of the Agency?  Or has someone there fudged those inconvenient rules again?  Further, the funds provided to the Zionist-Brut group were supposed to be used for “educational” purposes.  Instead, they were used to support political activism.  They went for salaries and covering other organizational expenses.

Is it any accident that the Jewish Agency’s chair is Natan Sharansky, doyen of the Israeli right, and affiliated with the Likudist Shalem Center.  The latter is heavily funded by American Jewish gambling magnate Shelly Adelson, an ardent funder of Bibi Netnayahu’s political career.

A second article in the Calcalist makes this important point:

The Jewish Agency supports organization’s from the Israeli lunatic right, which are attempting to destroy the values of academic freedom in Israeli higher education.  The Agency, a body whose mission it is to bring new immigrants to settle in the Holy Land, instead transfers very large sums to poisonous organizations which seek legitimacy in attacking academics who’ve actually done something in their lives, having not just written propaganda exposes divorced from any reality.

The columnist concludes by noting the absolute insanity of the Jewish Agency providing funding to an organization that wishes to unleash the thought police on Israeli universities.  You’d think the Agency’s mandate would be to improve the quality of life in Israel rather than attempt to destroy one of the jewels of the Israeli state (well, perhaps a bit tarnished, but still the universities are key national institutions).

Will anyone in Israel make Ronen Shoval and his jackbooted friends in Im Tirzu explain why they are accepting a single kopek from a crazy Texas preacher who says Hitler was half-Jewish, that the latter and the Holocaust were sent by God in order to create the State of Israel, and that the Rothschild’s were part of an international economic conspiracy???

Assaf Oron is a research statistician at the University of Washington.  He is also an Israeli peace and human rights activist who blogs at Daily Kos, the Villages Group, and was an IDF sarban, refusing to serve in the Occupied Territories.  Before he was named to his current academic post, he applied for a tenure track position as a statistician in Ben Gurion University’s department of industrial engineering.  He was told a year ago he was the department’s top candidate.  What he did not reckon was that his candidacy would generate a firestorm of controversy due to the machinations of a far-right member of the department nominations committee.

Prof. Israel David publicized internal departmental deliberations to smear BGU job candidate

Prof. Israel David is an industrial engineer who teaches operations research at BGU.  He was a major in the IDF before he retired after 11 years of service, and lives in an Orthodox suburb of Tel Aviv.  He has worked for the Israeli defense industry and a significant portion of his research is funded by either the IDF or military contractors.  Prof. David’s political screeds are published regularly by  Daniel Pipes-Campus Watch-type groups in Israel called Israel Academia Monitor and Isracampus.  They take upon themselves the weighty responsibility of ridding Israeli campuses of Arab-loving, Israel-hating faculty like Dr. Oron.  David’s views are also congenial to another far-right Israeli gang which targets Israeli academics with progressive political views, Im Tirzu.

Once David caught wind of Oron’s candidacy he went into high gear.  Sitting on the department appointments committee, he lobbied his colleagues hard to deny the former the position.  In meetings, he noted Oron’s political engagements and cited them as grounds for not hiring him.  It rapidly became clear to the department chair, Dr. Gadi Rabinowitz that David was biased against the candidate and would not restrict his consideration to academic-professional criteria alone.

So Rabinowitz disbanded the appointment committee, created a new one and left David out of it.  This infuriated the latter.  He went to the media.  He placed a story in Globes, the Israeli Wall Street Journal, in September 2009 for which he was an anonymous source.  The article called Oron “a second Neve Gordon.”

This was shortly after Prof. Gordon wrote a controversial op-ed in the Los Angeles Times supporting the global BDS movement.  After the latter published his article, the University’s president publicly invited Gordon to quit his position, which he uncooperatively refused to do.   Prof. Rivka Carmi explicitly stated that academic freedom did not give a professor the right to support such an enterprise which posed a danger to the State of Israel.

Undoubtedly, Prof. David was emboldened by Carmi’s attacks on Gordon and saw an opportunity to continue the controversy by opening a second front against Oron.

But that first Globes story did not drum up the brouhaha that the engineering professor expected so he wrote his own story under his own name at the News1 site.  In it, he quoted from confidential internal committee deliberations about Dr. Oron’s record, including his political views.  Here is just a nugget:

The department chair summarized the proceedings by saying that Dr. Oron matched the position’s professional requirements but that he suffers from other “personality problems” [so reads the transcript of the meeting].  The committee asked one of the senior members of the department to take advantage of his summer sabbatical in the U.S. by speaking with Oron and asking whether he’d be willing to restrain his political activism in order to better assimilate into the department.

In most universities (though apparently not BGU), this is among the most sensitive functions that faculty members and a department can perform.  Such transcripts are treated with sensitivity and guarded jealously.  In most universities where I have studied or worked, publishing such material publicly would be grounds for disciplinary action.  Not so Ben Gurion.  Apparently there, faculty can skewer job candidates, smear their reputation, dredge up personal matters and political involvement, and use them as ground for denying someone a job.

In his article David levels a full frontal assault on the notion of confidentiality and claims that the concept violates court rulings.  I have never heard of any such ruling either here in the U.S. or Israel and I’m reasonably certain that no court has ever ruled that enforcing confidentiality in such circumstances is a violation of law.  Further, he argues that non-academic and even political considerations are rightfully within the purview of such committee discussions.   In fact, I believe that David is here daring the University to either discipline him or take legal action against him.  Which of course it would never do.  A University dean confirmed to me that no disciplinary action is contemplated against David.

I also find it astonishing that an academic department would ask a job candidate to restrain his private political statements.  What business is that of anyone either in academia or outside?  Does this department and Ben Gurion as a whole not cringe in embarrassment at the thought that such a discussion occurred during deliberations concerning the hiring of a faculty member?

The University’s response to David’s onslaught against Dr. Oron was to claim that it “does not compromise the privacy of candidates.”  Which of course ignores the fact that a duly appointed member of a University committee did just that.  At no time during any of this madness did the University or department make any attempt to reach out to Oron, explain to him what was happening, or seek to mollify his concerns about the attack on his reputation.  It never defended him personally or encouraged him in any way.

In addition, David accused the University of Washington lecturer of “disseminating hate against Israel” and comparing the IDF and its officers with Nazis.  In truth, it was IDF officers themselves who made the comparison in a 2002 Haaretz article in anticipation of Operation Defensive Shield.  They admonished the army to learn from all previous military sieges in history including, specifically the Nazi assault on the Warsaw ghetto.  Oron merely called attention to this fact in his essay.  Here is the salient passage from the Haaretz article:

…One of the Israeli officers in the territories said… it’s justified and in fact essential to learn from every possible source. If the mission will be to seize a densely populated refugee camp, or take over the casbah in Nablus, and if the commander’s obligation is to try to execute the mission without casualties on either side, then he must first analyze and internalize the lessons of earlier battles – even, however shocking it may sound, even how the German army fought in the Warsaw ghetto.The officer indeed succeeded in shocking others, not least because he is not alone in taking this approach. Many of his comrades agree that in order to save Israelis now, it is right to make use of knowledge that originated in that terrible war, whose victims were their kin.

Frankly, I’ve been writing on this subject for a very long time and this article was new to me until I read the essay in which Oron quoted the article.  The idea that the army of the State of Israel should learn lessons from one of the most desperate and vicious assaults against Polish Jewry during the Holocaust era is not simply tin-earned or offensive, it is really a hillul ha-Shem, a desecration of God’s name.  Does the IDF really want to be compared to Hitler’s killing machine at the height of its vicious assault against the brave Jews of the Warsaw ghetto?

Returning to David’s accusations in his column, much like abortion and other socially conservative ideas have been exploited as wedge issues against Democrats, Israeli rightists manipulate the Holocaust as a wedge issue in an Israeli political context.  Like abortion for American conservatives, the Holocaust elicits a visceral response from Israelis.  Whenever you can tar your opponent with terms like those David exploits, you’re almost guaranteed to put him on the defensive.

Finally in his article, David excoriates Oron for supporting the military refuser movement and notes longingly that there are countries in the world (North Korea and Iran undoubtedly) where refusal to serve is punishable by death.

Then Prof. David upped the ante, suing Rabinowitz for libel for 100,000 shekels and claiming that in removing him from the appointment committee the chair had slandered his good name.  The rightist professor retained as counsel a leading far-right attorney who is also representing Im Tirzu in its libel lawsuit against an Israeli activist who created a Facebook group calling the group “fascist.”  David’s brief, all the while claiming his own reputation was damaged, slanders Oron savagely.

As part of his legal campaign, yesterday Haaretz published an op-ed by David which called BGU “Bir Gurion University,” as if the campus’ left-wing faculty wished to turn it into an Arab university.  The article was briefly available on the website’s main page, but now it’s been relegated to an inaccessible back page.  A slightly different version has also been published by Yediot Achronot.  Among the other smears David offers in Haaretz is to call a campus protest against the Gaza flotilla attack a “Nazi march.”  Finally, he accused, again without proof, the campus peace activists of calling a faculty member’s son who died a “hero’s death” in Operation Cast Lead, a “Nazi criminal.”  Even more shockingly, he calls the entire affair of Oron’s job candidacy and his own elimination from the appointment committee a “Nazi circus.”

In the year since he heard that he was the department’s top candidate, no one from the University had any contact with Oron, and certainly no one breathed a word of apology to him.  In April, no doubt goaded by Prof. David, the student body president quoted the school’s president as saying that his candidacy was dead.  Last week, on an Israeli Social Sciences listeserv, David waved this as evidence of the president’s support for his campaign.

After a year of absorbing these body blows to his reputation and not responding, Oron finally confronted his BGU nemesis on the listserv last week.  He simultaneously wrote Pres. Rivka Carmi expressing concern with the smearing of his reputation and her supposed connivance with David to undermine him.  Prof Rivka Carmi replied that she couldn’t possibly interfere with any candidate’s consideration by a department even if she wanted to do so.  She also added the rather mysterious statement that Oron’s candidacy was “no longer relevant.”

Curiously Dr. Rabinowitz, the department chair, wrote to Oron yesterday claiming that when Pres. Carmi inquired about the status of Oron’s candidacy Rabinowitz told her that he was still very much an active candidate.  The chair blames Oron’s supposed lack of communication with the department for his not getting the job, without realizing that after a candidate has been smeared it might be the responsibility of the department to contact him rather than the other way around.  I’d say the truth is that after David went on the warpath neither the University nor the department wanted to hire him and they can find many reasons in retrospect to blame the victim for not getting the job.

What is also troubling is that after all of this madness, the chair expresses disappointment that Dr. Oron addressed David’s charges against him in the Social Sciences listserv where the latter had attacked him.  It appears he would’ve preferred Oron to have remained silent and waited patiently for the school’s rejection letter.

A few days ago, Prof. David wrote triumphantly to Oron that the department had hired someone else for the job.  Which means that David has won, that academic bullying has won; that anyone at Ben Gurion who has a political vendetta against a young aspiring academic can vent their rage and frustration in the most public of settings.  They can sling mud at them, potentially harm their careers and no price will be paid.

In fact, after the University of Washington statistician defended himself on the Israeli listserv, an Israeli graduate student wrote to him that he had been denied a graduate fellowship by a Diaspora academic fund because his name appeared on the Israel Academia Monitor site.  Though I do not know for certain which group participated in the witch hunt, one of the best funded such academic programs is the American-Israeli Cooperative Exchange, whose director is former Aipac flack, Mitchell Bard.  Given Bard’s pro-Israel advocacy and ideological partisanship it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if he used Isracampus, Israel Academia Monitor or NGO Monitor as arbiters of who should be denied funding for academic research.

Returning to Dr. Oron, luckily he has a good position at the University of Washington.  Despite Prof. Israel David’s best efforts, one hopes he will fail in harming Oron’s career.  But imagine the next young scholar applying for a job at BGU who has ‘questionable’ affiliations in his or her background.  If such a person has several job interviews with Israeli academic institutions, why would they want to include BGU given the treatment afforded Oron?

Ben Gurion’s president honors academic freedom in the breach when it doesn’t cost her anything.  When the chips are down, she folds like a house of cards.  For example, when BGU Prof. David Newman was attacked by a British trustee of the University, who suggested he’d be happy if Newman died because the faculty member had aired views critical of Israeli policy in a TV documentary, Carmi remained mum.  140 of Newman’s colleagues demanded that she make a statement in support of Newman.  In the face of alienating a wealthy donor, she shut up.  Perhaps as a direct result of her pusillanimousness, Newman was recently named dean of the faculty of humanities and social sciences in a vote by his peers.

Instead of leadership and conviction, Pres. Carmi tests the political winds to see which way they are blowing and follows suit.  Currently in Israel there is a savage campaign against human rights and peace NGOs.  The legal political activism of activists is under assault as never before.  Astute individuals like David and Carmi understand this.  The first exploits it and the second acquiesces to it.  Neither response does either Israeli academia or Ben Gurion proud.

On a related note, yesterday the founder of Im Tirzu published a Haaretz column, The Fight for Academic Freedom, in which he contended, much like David Horowitz and Daniel Pipes in the U.S. context, that anti-Zionists have taken over Israeli campuses and that soon political correctness will prevent anyone not sharing such views from speaking their minds.  Assaf Oron’s case proves the absolute falseness of this claim.  If anything, it is the Im Tirzus and Israel Davids who are in the ascendancy on Israeli campuses, not the other way around.

Finally, what is one of the most obvious and elementary violations of both the candidate’s privacy rights  and academic due process is that the job he was applying for had absolutely no political component.  He was applying to be a statistician, not a political science or sociology professor.  As such, his personal political involvement had nothing to do with the job and should’ve been ruled treif as grounds for review or consideration.

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• Threatened prof wins out (thejc.com)

Neve Gordon death threat: 'Gordon: You are a traitor. I will reach Ben Gurion to kill you. Signed--Im Tirtzu'

In a moment of supreme irony, Ben Gurion University President Rivka Carmi, who only a few months ago was facing a revolt among donors and Israelis aghast at Prof. Neve Gordon‘s support of the global BDS movement, has now released a strong statement of support for him in the face of a death threat.  She did the right thing compared to the cowardly response she had to Gordon’s articles on BDS.  Then she advanced the specious argument that Gordon himself had somehow crossed a red line of permissible speech in advocating a political position that harmed the state.

Here are major excerpts from her statement:

…The death threat Professor Gordon received is a crossing of a red line for one and all [here at Ben Gurion] without regard to any difference [we may have] of religion, political affiliation, ethnic origin.

The political debate in Israel is hard, polarizing, and even extreme.  We walk a very thin line between our democratic obligations and values such as freedom of speech, and our obligations to the security, strength and future of our nation.

The dispute is piercing and painful and each person is convinced that truth is on his side.  We have already seen that we are not suited for balanced discussion–not even in academia.

But no matter how much we oppose and disdain the view of another–the shedding of blood is a crime plain and simple.  Something terrible has befallen us and it is imperative that we be on guard.

Ben Gurion University will not tolerate the fomenting of hatred of any kind, whether physical or verbal violence, and will act vigorously to eradicate it.

Another irony is that Prof. David Newman, a colleague of Gordon’s  and a newly named Ben Gurion dean, found that a British trustee of the University wished for Newman’s demise because of a disagreement with the latter’s liberal politics.  I wonder if Pres. Carmi let this trustee know in no uncertain terms that his speech crossed a line?  Perhaps a trustee can get away with breaking the rules more readily than an unknown person who mails a death threat.

One hopes of course that this incident would sensitize the president to the necessity of protecting her faculty’s right to free expression.  Though she does not say it explicitly, the passage in italics seems to imply that if only Gordon hadn’t violated his end of the bargain he wouldn’t find himself under threat.  Personally, I don’t buy the distinction she attempts to make.  I do not believe it is the obligation of an academic to pull punches during a policy debate because one’s views might endanger the state.  This is total narischkeit.  And certainly in the case of Gordon.  Advocating BDS in no way endangers Israel.  What it does threaten is a conception of Israel as a state with superior rights for Jews and inferior rights for non-Jewish citizens.  And it threatens a state based on Occupation, which is a state many citizens–Jewish and Palestinian–don’t want either.

Ben Gurion trustee wished David Newman dead

The pro-Israel ideological wars continue at Ben Gurion University (BGU), where knives were sharpened after faculty member, Neve Gordon published a groundbreaking op-ed in the L.A. Times advocating the BDS (Boycott Divestment Sanctions) movement as a means of opposing Israel’s Occupation.  Now, there is news that a right-wing BGU trustee, Michael Gross, after seeing Prof. David Newman interviewed on the BBC documentary (starting about 19:25 in the video above), Dispatches, wrote him an e mail wishing him dead:

Mr Gross [the trustee] sent two emails to Prof Newman after the political geography professor, also British-born, appeared on last month’s Channel 4 Dispatches strand, which examined Britain’s pro-Israel lobby.

Prof Newman, who has been at BGU for 21 years, did not directly criticise Israeli policy in the programme…

Mr Gross, who…sits on BGU’s international board of governors, emailed Prof Newman after the programme’s transmission…“I saw your disgusting contribution to the Dispatches programme. I will use whatever influence I have at BGU to have you thrown out…I hope you perish.”

He later sent another message: “The sooner you are removed from BGU and the face of the earth, the better.”

I have spent many years in academia as an undergraduate and graduate student and university fundraiser.  Frankly, I’ve never heard of a university trustee doing such a thing.  It’s beyond astonishing.  I can certainly understand that a right-wing pro-Israel trustee like Gross would be angry with Newman for appearing on a TV show that he viewed as harming Israel’s interests.  But wishing him dead?  And not once, but twice?  This is simply beyond the pale and should not be countenanced by a legitimate institution of higher education.

Of course, there is the issue of academic freedom, which Gross’ grossly threatening language violated.  But beyond that, Gross wished a distinguished member of the BGU faculty DEAD.  Can this be acceptable in civil discourse in a university community?  Especially when the individual levelling the threat is a university trustee?

128 BGU faculty signed a letter of protest (gathered over a mere 48 hours) addressed to the chairman of the school’s board of governors, former Goldman Sachs vice chairman, Roy Zuckerberg.  They wrote in part:

We find it quite incredible that a person [Gross] capable of writing such letters should have a place on any Board of Governors, in particular that of a University.  The letters signal an attitude of  total disdain for the principles of  academic discourse based on open debate, and for free inquiry of any  kind, and we believe that there is no place in the BGU community for  people who are capable of writing such letters. The fact that Mr.  Gross wishes  to use his financial assets as leverage, and seeks to control who  should, and should not, be employed by the university, renders his  behaviour even more egregious. We accordingly ask that you use your position as Chairman of the Board of Governors to ensure that Mr. Gross issue a formal and public apology to Prof. Newman, or alternatively ask for his resignation from his position as a member of  the Board of Governors.

Zuckerberg, rather astonishingly replied to the letter by addressing both Gross and Newman as two naughty schoolboys who’d just had a fist fight in the schoolyard:

…Both of you by your own admission have made errors of judgment.  I am not going to assign grades or degrees of blame, nor do I plan to take any of the actions suggested by you and some of your colleagues.

I must insist, however, that both of you drop the issue, enough damage has already been incurred to the good name of the University, and any further prolongation of the dispute will only exacerbate the situation.

…I call on both of you to return to applying your talents and resources in constructive channels.

I anticipate we can now end this matter.

A fellow trustee of his university has wished a faculty member dead and the chairman of the board wishes to wash his hands of the matter with a statement best summarized as “boys will be boys.”  Zuckerberg is the chairman of an institution of higher learning, not Goldman Sachs.  This incident has huge repurcussions in terms of violation of academic freedom and just plain abusive conduct.  Yet Zuckerberg writes as if he’s admonishing two rogue traders who had a fist fight on the trading floor.  This will not do.

Another unintentionally comic aspect of this donnybrook is this statement by British pro-Israel academic and columnist, Geoffrey Alderman:

The now very public slanging match involving Michael Gross and David Newman, reported in the JC last month, represents, for me, a multiple sadness.

…The language used by Mr Gross [in his attack on Newman] is not the language I would have used. At the same time, Professor Newman’s decision to appear on Peter Oborne’s pseudo-documentary — apparently without any editorial control — is not the decision I would have made.

Academic freedom is a precious commodity. But it doesn’t give an academic the licence to say what he or she pleases. There is, for example, such a thing as bringing one’s university into disrepute, and during an academic career now in its 48th year it has been my sad duty to have had to deal with a number of such cases, involving academics (some very senior) who felt they could, with impunity, bite the hand that fed them.

I’m sorry to use the word “astonishing” so often in this piece, but here we have another piece written by an academic, of all things, which completely misconstrues the meaning of the term academic freedom.  In fact, this concept DOES give a member of the academy to ‘say what he or she pleases’ as long as it is truthful and accurate.  And nothing Newman said in this documentary was untruthful or inaccurate or even incendiary.  Academic freedom does, in fact, allow a faculty member to ‘bite the hand that fed them’ if doing so is in the interest of the pursuit of knowledge, the essential mission of academia.  Not that Newman was doing anything of the sort through his participation.

Further, I find it again, well, astonishing that a fellow academic, when faced with something close to a death threat (or at least “death wish”) would refuse to rally in the latter’s defense.  Alderman, who seems eminently lacking in empathic spirit, should himself face such a threat and then we’d see how he would react and what he would have a right to expect from his own colleagues in support.

But here’s the real clincher:

At this point, I must declare an interest. It is a matter of public knowledge that I am privileged to hold, at the University of Buckingham, a professorial appointment endowed by Mr Gross. It is from this endowment that part of my salary is paid. But I must add at once that Mr Gross has never sought to influence either my academic work or my extra-mural media activities. On a great number of issues affecting world Jewry, he and I happen to agree. On some others we do not. But we respect each other’s views, and independence.

Of course, Alderman “respects” Gross’ “views” on Newman and has little or no problem with them.  As for independence…did that man say ‘independence?’  How independent is he when Gross virtually signs his paycheck.  In fact, it is a journalistic travesty that the Jewish Chronicle, Britain’s main Jewish periodical, published this column.  Alderman has a huge conflict of interest and anything he says on this subject is colored by his professional association with Gross.  And having Alderman declare himself independent and therefore able to be objective in this matter is deplorable.  It’s like a white 1960s southerner telling you he’s no racist.  Of course, Alderman thinks he’s fair and balanced.  But it’s not up to an interested party to make such a judgment.  That should be in the hands of a sober editor, something the Chronicle apparently doesn’t possess.

Gross must go.  To have him continue as a director of Ben Gurion risks making the institution look like the donors run the show and are able to call for the demise of any faculty member they dislike.  Besides, Israel lately has been the victim of numerous incidents of violence and terror by Jews against fellow Jews (not to mention Palestinians as well).  In fact, settler terrorist, Jack Teitel has admitted to Israeli police that he planted a bomb intended to kill Hebrew University professor Zeev Sternhell.  In light of this how can BGU countenance retaining Gross on its board?  I would like to ask Roy Zuckerberg what it would take for him to actually force Gross off the board?  Newman’s death?  Or merely a bomb placed outside his front door as happened to Prof. Sternhell?

I’m not claiming that Gross would do such a thing.  But he came perilously close to suggesting as much in his atrocious e-mail remarks.  Or at least suggesting that someone else who killed Newman would receive Gross’ approbation.  This is garbage pure and simple and should not be winked at or treated with a slap on the wrist as Zuckerberg has done.

Neve Gordon and family: Why does Rivka Carmi call this man a "traitor?" (National Catholic Reporter)

Ben Gurion University has intensified the witch hunt against Prof. Neve Gordon, who published an op-ed column in The Guardian and L.A. Times endorsing the Global BDS movement’s program against the Israeli Occupation.  The column provoked a firestorm of controversy here in the U.S. and in Israel.  The worst vitriol has come from the University’s president herself, Rivka Carmi.  She has approvingly noted that many are calling Gordon a “traitor.”  She has called for him to resign and leave Israel (Gordon is a decorated paratroop officer who was severely wounded during the first Lebanon war).  She has alleged that Gordon seeks to destroy Israel.  She has also called her University a “Zionist institution” that cannot have any truck with nation-threatening notions such as BDS.

But now, things have gotten worse.  The school cannot fire Gordon because he has tenure.  But they can exert enormous pressure on the department to can him as chairman.  That’s what’s happening now. The University rector met with faculty supporting Gordon and told them:

…Gordon is not able to properly promote his department’s international programs while addressing the same people regarding a boycott, and the contradiction on this point poses a conflict of interests.

Since when is it a conflict of interest for a political scientist to publish an article on a major issue within his discipline?  When the distaste of donors conflicts with the pursuit of knowledge, must the latter lose at BGU?  If so, what kind of University is this?

In addition, the American support group for Ben Gurion has introduced particularly hateful rhetoric into the controversy.  In Jewish Week, the American affiliate’s PR flack weighed in:

Gordon has been a “thorn in our side for many years” and that there has been a campaign by a number of people in the U.S. to have him fired from the university.  Strongin said Gordon’s op-ed has reactivated the group…

She further calls Gordon’s column the “reprehensible remarks of one rogue faculty member.”  When a faculty member called Strongin’s comments against Gordon “irresponsible” she had the temerity to reply:

How dare you call me irresponsible…My comments only reflect that of BGU’s administration, so don’t you dare stand on your high horse and accuse me of wrong doing.

In further communication, Doron Krakow, executive vice president of American Associates of Ben Gurion University (Strongin’s boss) lays down the law and fires up the big rhetorical guns against Gordon:

Gordon’s editorial is merely the latest example of his exploiting his position with the University to call attention to himself through the use of extreme, anti-Zionist and anti-Israel rhetoric not inconsistent with that which we hear from Israel’s worst enemies.  Though this is hardly news, you and your colleagues nonetheless saw fit to elect him as department chair.

Personally, I find it extraordinarily offensive that the non-academic American affiliate of an Israeli university would lecture a faculty member about the mistake of appointing another faculty member as department chair.  Since when did anyone arrogate to Doron Krakow the right to lobby for or against candidates for academic positions?  Is Ben Gurion to appoint its leaders solely on the basis of which donors they will or won’t offend?  Will it vet candidates for academic positions based on the controversial nature of their writings or publications?  Where does this end?

Furthermore, since when does someone who is essentially a fundraiser get to make politically freighted judgments on faculty members comparing their views to those of “Israel’s worst enemies?”

The truth is that the academic discourse at Ben Gurion is among the most diverse among all Israeli universities.  Debate about the Occupation among various disciplines on campus is vigorous and challenging.  That is why a smart president would tell the world that this is a mark of what universities do best and would praise such diversity.  Donors may not like certain points of view, but they can be made to understand that to be a great institution all ideas from the popular to the unpopular must be debated and studied.

If someone doesn’t calm Rivka Carmi and her associates down, her University will end up the laughingstock of Israeli institutions.  Their thinking represent the tyranny of small minds.  If they win, BGU will proudly bear the banner of a “Zionist” educational institution which wears its ideology on its sleeve; and where inquiry, academic freedom, and the pursuit of knowledge take a back seat to Zionist political correctness.  The only faculty who will want to teach there and the only students who will want to study there are settlers and supporters of the Likud and Israel’s nationalist parties.  What kind of University will that be?

If there are academics reading this I would like to start a campaign on Gordon’s behalf that might involve a letter published in the N.Y. Review of Books and any other activity that might enlist support here in the U.S. and in Israel.  Carmi and the American branch of Ben Gurion are clearly bullies who care nothing about concepts like academic freedom.  But if they know there are other distinguished academic figures who are watching what they are doing they will back down.  But Gordon needs our help now.

And for anyone who doubts Neve Gordon’s commitment to his country (which he proved by the severe injury he suffered at Rosh Ha-Nikra in the first Lebanon war), please read Why I Live in Israel.