The Massacre That Almost Was

Last year the news services reported a horrifying scholarly discovery. Though everyone knew that if Rommel reached Palestine, the Yishuv would share the same fate, we did not know that an eizentzgruppe had already been formed and plans made for the annihilation of the Jewish community in Palestine, in advance of Rommel's expected victory.

Now this study has been published in a detailed, point-by-point discussion in Yad Vashem's journal. We learn there of the planned Final Solution for the Yishuv, in which Palestinian Arabs were meant to take a large part, similiar to that of the Eastern European collaborators such as those in Latvia and the Ukraine. The Grand Mufti, Haj Amin Al-Husseini apparently worked feverishly to ensure a "clean sweep" of the Jews in the Holy Land, providing statistics and maps for the SS.

Next time you hear about how the Palestinians would never dream of annihilating the Jews, mention this article.

Nice Try (On the Van Leer Institute)

The Van Leer Institute is known throughout Israeli academia as the most influential bastion of the hard-core anti-Zionist left. Boasting a large budget and an impressive array of academics from various fields, this institute is the one-stop shop for all your anti-Zionist needs. For years, left-wing as well as right-wing Zionists have lambasted the institute for its one-sided, radical agenda, embodied in its flagship journal Theory and Criticism. Assaf Sagiv did a wonderful deconstruction of their alternative history of the 50 years of Israel, the conclusion of which I have re-posted from an earlier comment at the bottom of this critique.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I saw the following extensive puff-piece on Van Leer. Even more surprising was the fact that the article appeared not in Haaretz, but in the Jerusalem Post, which I had thought was at least Zionist in orientation. The article is symptomatic of the intellectual attitudes of the hard-left as a whole - only members of the institute are quoted extensively to praise Van Leer to the sky, critics and detractors are anonymous and lumped under "many [critics]". Needless to say, the fawning reporter does not ask any hard questions about the radical agendas of the academic team such as in the aforementioned journal or in the many books it supports which bash Israel incessantly. We do not learn of the blatant abuse of the Holocaust by Messrs Ophir and friends as documented by Prof. Elhanan Yakira. We learn nothing of the "Palestinians are innocent victims and Jews are evil aggresors" school constantly pumped the people in question.

I don't think it would be an exagerration to say that Van Leer bears a substantial part of the responsibility for the present demonic image that Zionism and the State of Israel "enjoy" abroad in critical academic, cultural and political elites. As mentioned below, their negative attitude pervades many humanities and social sciences departments here in Israel, to the point where finding pro-Zionist comment in academic articles is equivalent to finding buried treasure. All the "we love everyone" rhetoric is, in my opinion, a mask that covers a very poisonous hatred of everything the State of Israel stands for. To say that they represent the Israeli left is no less pretentious and false as the Bolsheviks' claim to represent the whole of the "people". The Jerusalem Post would do well to encourage moderate alternatives to Van Leer rather than serving as their unofficial spokespeople.

Post-modern academics cannot come to terms with the “existing order,” but they do not know how to change it without turning today’s “oppressed” into tomorrow’s “oppressors.” They do not know how to wage an effective fight against the evil, which, in their view, is inevitably rooted in political reality. Lacking the possibility of engaging in practical action, all they have left is negation for its own sake. Despite the impression conveyed by some of its articles, Theory and Criticism is not the ephemeral publication of a fringe group. Unfortunately, it presents us with a reliable picture of a mode of thinking now accepted as the norm in important circles in Israel’s academia, especially in the humanities and social sciences. In light of this fact, it is impossible to avoid certain depressing conclusions about the role played by the academic elite in Israeli society.

Most Israelis expect that their institutes of higher learning will contribute to the advancement of the public discourse in Israel; that the tens of thousands of young people who enter the universities each year will benefit from their education by becoming better citizens, and learning to make intelligent political decisions within a democratic framework. Yet Israel’s campuses are gradually becoming hothouses for political anarchism, as the Israeli intelligentsia busily educates towards resentment of the Jewish state and the values that permit it to exist. Academic “post-Zionism” does not even play the important positive role that intellectual opposition sometimes does in a pluralistic society; it does not bother to advance realistic alternatives or formulate a creative, inspiring vision which offers a kernel of hope. In its cultivation of chronic and sterile resentment, bereft of both responsibility and imagination, the trend represented so powerfully by Theory and Criticism in the end offers nothing more than “theory” and “criticism.”