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Omar Barghouti (not to be confused with convicted murderers Ahmed Barghouti or Marwan Barghouti) is a graduate student in Philosophy at Tel Aviv University. He is also a founding member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), the leaders of the Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.

Some have suggested that Barghouti, a ‘Palestinian citizen of Israel’ is behaving hypocritically by continuing to study at a university that he urges others to boycott; but as we will see, he’s no stranger to double- or even triplethink. There is a petition (in Hebrew) here which has been signed by almost 143,000 people who want to see him kicked out of Tel Aviv University.

Barghouti is often referred to as ‘moderate’ and ‘nonviolent’, which he is compared to Ahmed and Marwan, for example. But although he doesn’t launch terror attacks or even give speeches calling for Arabs to rise up and slaughter Jews, his goal is the same, to end the state of Israel.

Omar Barghouti is a man at home in the academic world who spins the ugly core that underlies all of Palestinian Arab ‘culture’ — burning hatred and a drive for bloody revenge — into perfectly formed academic English, providing a theoretical basis for educated Westerners to tap into their own darker impulses in the guise of an enlightened pursuit of justice, and in terms of the most modern post-colonial thought.

Let’s look at an abstract of a paper by Barghouti into which he weaves all of the required themes, which I’ve boldfaced (h/t to Israel Academia Monitor):

This paper argues for a secular, democratic state in historic Palestine as the most morally coherent solution to the century-old colonial conflict because it offers the best hope for reconciling the inalienable right of the indigenous Palestinians to self-determination and the acquired rights of the colonial settlers to live in peace and security, individually and collectively. Accepting colonists as equal citizens and full partners in building and developing a new shared society is the most magnanimous offer any oppressed indigenous population can present to its oppressors, but for such to be attained, settlers must shed colonial privileges and character, accept justice, unmitigated equality, and conscious integration into the region. Building a just and lasting peace anchored in international law and universal human rights, conducive to ethical coexistence requires the ethical decolonization, or de-Zionization of historic Palestine. Such a process is premised on a revitalized, democratized Palestinian civil resistance movement with a clear vision for a shared, just society and effective worldwide support for reaffirming Palestinian rights and ending Israel’s violations of international law and universal rights. By emphasizing the equality of humanity as its most fundamental principle, this paper shows that the proposed secular democratic state promises to transcend national and ethnic dichotomies that now make it nearly impossible to envision reaching any just solution to the most intricate questions. [my emphasis]

In other words, if the ‘colonists’ (Jews) can be made to give up their ‘colonial privileges’ (security), the ‘indigenous’ population will magnanimously permit the creation of a truly ‘ethical’ and just society! Although this isn’t mentioned, I presume that if the ‘settlers’ do not freely choose to renounce their ‘privileges’, the ‘resistance’ won’t be so magnanimous.

Despite its appeal to some Western academics, whom Barghouti skilfully manipulates, the theory’s premises are false. They do violence to historical facts. And Barghouti’s constant references to ethics, justice, human rights, equality, etc. are so entirely inappropriate — especially in the context of historical Palestinian Arab behavior — as to be obscene.

I’m sure that I don’t need to repeat it yet again, but Israeli Jews are not colonists, most Palestinian Arabs are not indigenous, the post-colonialist framework doesn’t apply, and an Arab-majority one-state solution would become a bloodbath within hours of its birth.

But like Ahmed and Marwan, Omar wants a bloodbath. So he is doing his best to prepare the ground for it, by weakening Israel through BDS and by delegitimizing and isolating it from the Western democracies that might be expected to support it against its racist, undemocratic and brutal Arab and Iranian enemies.

And all the while he is nurtured by the institutions of the Israeli state that he wishes to destroy.

Technorati Tags: Omar Barghouti, Israel

Dr. Joseph Klafter has a problem. He’s president of Tel Aviv University (TAU), where Dr. Anat Matar and Prof. Rachel Giora are members of the faculty, and Omar Barghouti is a graduate student.

Matar, a professor of Philosophy has called the IDF a ‘criminal army’, agrees with the conclusions of the Goldstone report that accuses Israel of deliberately targeting the civilian Palestinian Arab population for violence, and supports the boycott-divestment-sanctions (BDS) movement — including the academic boycott of Israeli institutions. She was arrested at a violent demonstration against the security barrier in Bili’in in 2005.

Giora, about whom I wrote previously, also a stalwart of the BDS movement, is member of the Linguistics Department. Her name appears first (followed, of course, by Matar’s) on a petition calling for “civil society institutions as well as concerned citizens around the world” to

• Integrate BDS in every struggle for justice and human rights by adopting wide, context-sensitive and sustainable boycotts of Israeli products, companies, academic and cultural institutions, and sports groups, similar to the actions taken against apartheid South Africa;
• Ensure that national and multinational corporations are held accountable and sanctioned accordingly for profiteering from Israel’s occupation and other Israeli violations of human rights and international law;
• Work towards canceling and blocking free trade and other preferential agreements with Israel;
• Pressure governments to impose a direct and indirect arms embargo on Israel, which will guarantee end-user compliance with international law and human rights principles.

And Barghouti — well, he is a leader of the BDS movement, a founder of PACBI, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural boycott of Israel. PACBI claims to want to apply pressure to make Israel ‘change its ways’, but in reality its goal is to destroy the Jewish state. It is absurd that this person is benefiting from a university built from contributions given in good faith by Zionists in order to strengthen the Jewish state. And it is beyond absurd that he is studying ethics.

Dr. Klafter’s problem takes the form of a dilemma. On the one hand, he seems to believe that the words and actions of Matar, Giora and Barghouti are protected by the concept of academic freedom. On the other hand, some big donors to TAU have said that they will zip up their wallets if subversive academics like the above are not fired or expelled.

While Klafter finds the BDS campaign and particularly the academic boycott “odious”, he is opposed to taking action against the boycotters because to do so would

subvert the very same principle by which we oppose the boycott and will undermine our best efforts to thwart it. If we impose severe sanctions against dissident faculty and students, we will play into the hands of those who lead the boycott drive by compromising on our own core value of academic freedom.

According to Klafter, Academic freedom is an absolute value, because without it the university would not be able to perform its functions. So even if a teacher or student agitates for the destruction of the state, he or she can’t be stopped. One can oppose the academic boycott itself, because it  limits academic freedom. But doing anything about the perpetrators is forbidden. So the donors should fight the boycott by increasing their contributions, because this will strengthen the university and the state.

Here are a few facts Dr. Klafter seems to have missed:

• The state of Israel is more important than Tel Aviv University. BDS is not just an academic boycott — although the fact that it includes one makes student Barghouti a hypocrite — it is part of a campaign to delegitimize and weaken the state so that it can be physically destroyed.
• Academic freedom, like freedom of speech in other contexts, is not an absolute value. It can be limited without destroying it.
• If the university becomes a bastion of anti-Israel activity, then Zionist donors can better support the state by sending their money elsewhere.

It’s not just the BDS people. TAU is also home to Shlomo Zand, whose ‘scholarship’ attacks the very notion of a Jewish people, and a number of others. It’s time for Israeli academia to wake up, smell the coffee, and think about what their academic freedom would be like in the Arab state that Matar, Giora and Barghouti want to replace Israel with.

Technorati Tags: Tel Aviv University, Joseph Klafter, Rachel Giora, Anat Matar, Omar Barghouti, BDS movement 

Yesterday I talked about the remarkable death wish exhibited by some Jewish Israeli intellectuals. Today I want to amplify that with a discussion of their support for the enemy on one particular front of the continuing war against Israel.

The BDS — Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions — movement has become a major part of the 100-year war against a Jewish state in the Mideast. It has two purposes, one direct and one indirect:

1. To weaken Israel economically by getting consumers worldwide to avoid Israeli products, and
2. To contribute to the delegitimization of Israel in order to reduce international support for Israel when conflicts — violent or diplomatic — occur.

BDS is part of an overall strategy to end the Jewish state that also includes propaganda, diplomacy, terrorism and war. These work together to multiply their effect. For example, the false atrocity propaganda surrounding the Second Lebanon War and Operation Cast Lead makes it harder for Israel to seek international support for future wars of self-defense.

The indirect effects of  BDS — delegitimization — may be more important than the cost of any economic boycott, which is why the BDS movement expends great effort on boycotting Israeli academics, athletes, films, etc.

The primary argument is based on the false analogy with apartheid South Africa, whose regime was changed in part by a worldwide application of BDS. It is held that Israeli treatment of Palestinians is intended to prevent them from exercising their human rights, to ‘colonize’ and exploit them, and is based on racism. Much support for this argument is drawn from “post-colonial theory” which has become a staple of conventional wisdom in academia. It is this dogma which obscures the fundamental differences between Israel and South Africa, and makes the analogy seem plausible (although I think stupidity, ignorance and antisemtism also play a role).

Without going into detail, I’ll just mention some of the obvious ways in which Israel is not South Africa before 1990:

• There are no race-based laws. Israelis and Palestinians are both racially diverse populations who are actually genetically similar.
• Arab citizens of Israel have, de jure, all the rights of Jewish citizens. To the extent to which this is de facto not true, it is due to the external conflict, cultural differences, and the conflation of civil rights with national aspirations.
• Palestinians living in the territories are not citizens of Israel, and in Gaza they can be said to constitute a hostile population. Security measures to prevent terrorism by Palestinians (e.g., the separation barrier) are exactly that: security measures.
• South Africa was not continuously at war with its neighbors from its founding as Israel has been.

Although there has been an official Arab economic boycott of Israel — even the pre-state Jewish yishuv — since 1945, the organized popular boycotts seem to have begun around 2000, corresponding to Yasser Arafat’s decision to reject a state in the territories and to launch the al-Aqsa Intifada instead. The proposal for an academic boycott was made at the September 2001 Durban Conference on Racism, where discussion about actual racism took a back seat to attacks on Israel.

The BDS movement has received a large amount of support from extreme left-wing Israeli academics. I’ll let one of them, Prof. Rachel Giora of the Linguistics Department at Tel Aviv University,  tell you in her own words why such support is important:

The major role of the Israeli BDS movement has been to support international BDS calls against Israel and legitimize them both as clearly not anti-Semitic, as not working against Israelis but against Israeli governmental policies…

But is it in fact inconsistent that an Israeli Jew could support policies that are antisemitic or contrary to the well-being of Israeli Jews? Unfortunately not — all it takes is a leap to irrationality. For example, Prof. Giora and 34 other Israelis initiated a petition in 2001 which read, in part,

We call on the world community to organize and boycott Israeli industrial and agricultural exports and goods, as well as leisure tourism, in the hope that it will have the same positive result that the boycott of South Africa had on Apartheid. This boycott should remain in force as long as Israel controls any part of the territories it occupied in 1967. Those who squash the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinians must be made to feel the consequences of their own bitter medicine.

In March 2002, at the height of  a wave of murderous bombings, the month of the Passover Seder Massacre in which a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 30 Israeli civilians and injured 140, an Israeli “feminist author” named Reza Mezali called for an end to US military aid to Israel, saying,

Arms are the motor of militarization. Please reciprocate the young people inside Israel saying “NO” to the deployment of their bodies and souls, in the service of the occupation. Please join them by saying “NO” to arming it with your dollars.

What could illustrate more clearly the writer’s desire to hurt the state and help its enemies than an effort to disarm it in the face of ever-increasing military threats? But even this isn’t the worst — that honor belongs to journalist Michael Warschawski, whose positions are not that different from those of the deceased Yasser Arafat. He too supports the BDS strategy:

For us Zionism is not a national liberation movement but a colonial movement, and the State of Israel is and has always been a settler’s colonial state. Peace, or, better, justice, cannot be achieved without a total decolonization (one can say de-Zionisation) of the Israeli State; it is a precondition for the fulfillment of the legitimate rights of the Palestinians –- whether refugees, living under military occupation or [as] second-class citizens of Israel… any attempt for reconciliation before the fulfillment of rights strengthens the continuation of the colonial domination relationship. Without a price to be paid, why should the Israelis stop colonization, why should they risk a deep internal crisis?

This is where the BDS campaign is so relevant: it offers an international framework to act in order to help the Palestinian people achieving its legitimate rights, both on the institutional level (states and international institutions) and the civil society’s one… The BDS campaign was initiated by a broad coalition of Palestinian political and social movements. No Israeli who claims to support the national rights of the Palestinian people can, decently, turn his or her back to that campaign.

Of course the achievement of ‘justice’ for the Palestinians for those such as Warschawski would end the Jewish state. Probably  those Israeli Jews without relatives in Europe or the US would then experience life as a Jew in an Arab state. Precedents aren’t encouraging.

Technorati Tags: Israel, BDS movement, Rachel Giora, Reza Mezali, Michael Warschawski