We need democratic spirit and political will - The Jewish Chronicle

A sickening anti-Israel student “activism” is spreading across our universities – it is virulent, demonising and increasingly violent, as we saw at King’s College London.

Bicom is challenging the demonisers wherever we can and I debate them whenever I get the opportunity.

But the activism is only the expression of a deeper problem. Some academics are educating their students to think of Zionism as a kind of Nazism. They are teaching them a perverted upside down version of the 19th century liberation movement of European Jews who decided, in the face of pogroms and a radicalising antisemitism that culminated in the Holocaust, to establish a Jewish homeland, a refuge state, in Palestine.

They tell the students that Zionism is a form of racism, ‘a quite evil philosophy’ in the words of Exeter University’s Ilan Pappé. He depicts these evil Zionists as “ethnically cleansing” the natives from the land in 1948. The “criminal” Israeli state and the “ethnic cleansing society” have been engaged in an “incremental genocide” against the remaining Palestinians ever since.

With this kind of academic teaching in mind, Professor Derek Penslar of Oxford University has observed that while some early scholarship about Israel was nation-building myth more than it was critical scholarship, much of what is taught to students today is a counter-myth, albeit “this time adversarial rather than apologetic”.

Prof Penslar has identified the distinguishing qualities of this demonising counter-myth: “Israel [is portrayed] as relentlessly aggressive, the Arabs as piteously weak and divided, the Palestinians as passive victims of foreign intrigue, bereft of all responsibility for the tragedy that befell them.”
Students are offered a “simplistic linear view of Israeli history” and an “ideology-driven approach”, in which “one set of stereotypes is replaced by another”. The categories of aggressor and victim “are not deconstructed but merely reversed” and there is an “unintended symmetry”, Prof Penslar insists, between the “[old]champions and the [new] revilers of Israel”. Both, he argues, “have constructed mythological narratives that free their constituencies of accountability for their actions”.

This week was the second of two debates with Ilan Pappé. In Exeter last year, we debated the validity and explanatory power of the concept of “settler colonialism”, now increasingly influential in academia, and in my view central to the academic delegitimisation of Zionism and Israel.

At this week’s second event we had another sharp but civil exchange of views, this time about the treatment of Israel in academic debate at UK universities.

David Hirsh (professor of socialogy at Goldsmiths University) and I took the counter-myth apart piece by piece over two hours. We made the case that the academy was being weaponised, pointing out that Ilan has declared “I want to devote my energies to delegitimising the state of Israel”.

We pointed to his systematic use of demonising language; a lexicon designed to achieve the political task of framing Israel as a unique evil in the world; and to his tendency to decontextualise-to-demonise, for example when writing about Israel’s actions in Gaza.

We also raised the extremely disturbing response of one of our opponents, Malaka Muhammed Shwaikh, to the actions of Muhannad Halabi on October 3 2015 when he killed two and stabbed others in Jerusalem, including a toddler.

“God Bless you oh Mohannad” a tweet in her name was posted on the day. Academic frames, we pointed out, can make violence thinkable outside the seminar room, whether in Jerusalem or London.

Although the debate was a success, and the role of the Jewish Leadership Council was outstanding in ensuring the two events included a strong challenge to the demonisers, our strategy cannot be defensive, demanding access to events designed by the demonisers.

Bicom and its academic journal Fathom believe the strategy should be to hold different events. We need to commit to the long term work of cultivating of a powerful alternative academic paradigm about Israel within UK academia.

We need conferences and seminars marked by a democratic spirit, a search for a truly critical historiography, and a political commitment to the mutual recognition of two peoples. Understood not as symbols of good and evil but profoundly, as both Europe’s victims, still caught up in what Amos Oz once called “a tragedy in the ancient and most precise sense of the word”.