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Culture » January 4, 2005

Israel’s Ideologues

By Neve Gordon

“Are you a donor to Israeli universities?” the anonymous writer asks. If yes, you should “learn what is happening on Israeli campuses. Be informed about what is being done with your gifts and generosity.”

These are the opening lines of a new Web site called Israel Academia Monitor (israel-academia-monitor.com), a pathetic attempt to copy Campus Watch, which was launched in 2002 to police and discipline American university professors who criticize U.S. Middle East policy and Israel’s occupation. Campus Watch is closely connected to the academic journal Middle East Quarterly and to the Middle East Forum, a right-wing think tank whose members have access to the Bush administration. Numerous donors with deep pockets support this neocon apparatus.

The Israel Academia Monitor, which may also be an offshoot of the Middle East Forum, is both preposterous and dangerous. Its instigators would have failed introductory courses like Logic and Twentieth-Century History. The law of contradiction—i.e., that antithetical propositions P and not-P cannot be true simultaneously—ceases to exist in this cyberspace, thus allowing the site’s creators to intimate that donors should boycott all Israeli universities that employ professors who criticize state policies—while at the same time denouncing Israeli professors who favor a boycott of Israeli institutions.

Moreover, the Monitor presents itself as a human rights group of sorts, which aims to bring to light abuses of academic freedom. Its nameless perpetrators consider themselves not only the defenders of free speech, but an anti-McCarthyist movement.

The McCarthyists they inveigh against are academic rogues, professors who are critical of Israel’s rights-abusive policies yet at the same time inspired by a deep concern for Israel’s population and the occupied Palestinians. Apparently, their offense against free speech is that they do not enable zealous nationalists to voice their views—an absurd allegation considering that for some years now the balance of power within Israel has been tilted toward the far right.

At first sight, only twisted logic augmented by historical ignorance could draw a parallel between relatively powerless academics and those well-orchestrated, government-sanctioned redbaiters of ’50s America. However, this is a feint. In reality the Web inquisitors at Israel Monitor are accusing Israeli professors of McCarthyism in order to deflect criticism from themselves, while at the same time they set about exploiting fear in a McCarthy-like manner.

The Web site dedicates a page to each major Israeli university, listing “extremist professors” who, in the words of the Monitor’s anonymous press release, promote “insurrection and lawbreaking” as well as “seditious” behavior. These professors also collaborate with “anti-Semites and enemies of Israel” and support “lawlessness and terror.” An innocent reader could be forgiven for thinking that Hamas terrorist cells led by academics are currently operating within Israeli universities, preparing students for the Jihad.

Israel Academia Monitor might have been a tasteless joke if the times were not ripe for this kind of witch-hunt—if it were not symptomatic of a more general and ominous mood informed by a nationalistic and sectarian frenzy.

The site’s authors encourage students and scholars to pass on information about suspect professors, promising to publish incriminating material. The goal, it seems, is to purge Israeli universities of those who dare question the state—or, at least, silence them—and to influence hiring and tenure decisions.

This assault, however, is not only aimed at academic freedom but at democracy itself, for the danger confronting contemporary democracy is not some new wave of overt authoritarianism, as it was in the early and mid-twentieth century. It is not even terrorism. Rather, the danger comes from those for whom the freedoms that accompany democracy represent a threat, an obstacle to their uninhibited pursuit of dominance and wealth.

Like its forerunner Campus Watch, Israel Academia Monitor is indicative of the much broader attempt to silence all those who confront the powers that be.

Neve Gordon teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University, Israel, and is the editor of From the Margins of Globalization: Critical Perspectives on Human Rights.

More information about Neve Gordon

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  • Reader Comments

    Another equally disturbing site and organization is NGO Monitor (http://www.ngo-monitor.org/index.html).  NGO Monitor criticized civil society organizations like the Ford Foundation and NGOs like Human Rights Watch.  They attempt to chill funding of Israeli and Palestinian human rights and peace NGOs by labeling their funding and activity as anti-Israel.  Their efforts are similar to those Neve Gordon mentions.  Their world view is that any criticism of Israeli policy is anti-Israel and, the implication has been made by others from similar camps, anti-Semitic.

    Organizations like the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, The NIF, PHR-Israel Adalah, B’tselem, Machsom Watch, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, HaMoked, Rabbis for Human Rights and many other Israeli and Palestinian organizations work to end the conditions that allow for human rights violations.  Because much of such violations are connected to Israeli policy in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and inside Israel proper criticism and scrutiny is justifiably directed towards Israeli authorities.

    Posted by Louis Frankenthaler on Jan 6, 2005 at 5:30 AM

    Just want to invite Neve to grace our nazi Holocaust Denial web site with some more of his articles about th eneed to destroy Israel so that we can solve the Jewish Problem together along lines we mutually agree.

    Posted by Ernst Zundel on Feb 23, 2005 at 8:41 AM

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Appeared in the January 17, 2005 Issue
Also by Neve Gordon
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