Van-Leer Watch

Van Leer Watch will monitor the activities of the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem. This institute was founded in 1959 by the Van Leer family from the Netherlands. It calls itself "a leading intellectual center for the interdisciplinary study and discussion of issues related to philosophy, society, culture and education."

In recent years, though, Van Leer has been taken over by post-Zionists, anti-Zionists, and Marxist radicals. Its fellows include fringe-Left academics like Yehouda Shenhav, who considers Zionism a form of colonialism, and Adi Ophir, who in 2003 signed a petition stating “We condemn the brutal policy of the Israeli government aimed at destroying the Palestinian society”... Van Leer also publishes the journal Theory and Criticism, considered the organ of the post-Zionists.

Van Leer’s events have highlighted figures like Oren Yiftachel and Lev Grinberg, both of Ben-Gurion University. Yiftachel has written that the "existence of an Israeli state can be viewed as an illusion", and called for canceling Israel’s Law of Return. Grinberg has written that "Suicide bombings killing innocent civilians must be condemned unequivocally; they are immoral acts, and their perpetrators should be sent to jail, but they cannot be compared to state terrorism carried out by the Israeli government."

Van Leer Watch will keep readers up-to-date on the Van Leer Institute’s events and publications.

                                                                                                                                                                                                       

Yossi Dahan trashes Israel at the "Socioeconomic Seminar on Theories of Social Justice" - Summary - March 4, 2008

On Tuesday, March 4, the Van Leer Institute held a "Socioeconomic Seminar on Theories of Social Justice." The featured speaker was Yossi Dahan, who discussed his new book (in Hebrew) Theories of Social Justice. Dahan, who teaches at the Ramat Gan (Tel Aviv) Academic College of Law and at Israel's Open University, is a radical activist who is on the Board of Directors of the left-wing Adva Center in Tel Aviv. Dahan is also a member of Hakeshet Hademokratit Hamizrahit (Eastern Democratic Rainbow), a splinter group of Sephardic Israelis that views Israel as an oppressor both of Arabs and of Sephardim.

Dahan flaunts his blame-Israel-for-everything mentality on his website Haoketz.org. "The Hizballah organization," he grouses, "didn't exist before Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and began its attacks only after that." Technically true, but Dahan neglects to say that Israel had then entered Lebanon because of constant shelling of its northern communities by another terror organization, the PLO, and that the explanation for Hizballah's rise is not complete without mentioning the advent three years earlier of a fanatically anti-Israeli, anti-Jewish, and anti-Western theocracy in Tehran.

Regarding the Second Lebanon War (2006), too, Dahan sounded more like a foreign propagandist than an Israeli sympathetic to his country's dangers and dilemmas: "In the distant past, an Israeli minister would have been apologetic about 'harm to innocent victims,' a statement that is part of etiquette for those who claim to represent a collective that's subject to any moral rules and restrictions whatsoever; he would have mumbled something about not intending to harm civilians and expressed regret. These days the Israeli ministers run after the television cameras and declare to the reporters that the current death and destruction are just the beginning."

This is a leering, deeply disloyal commentary on a war that was imposed on Israel by the kidnapping and murder of its soldiers, and shelling of its civilians, in sovereign Israeli territory and that evoked a widespread patriotic response from almost all of the Israeli population. Almost all Israelis understood the pressures imposed on Israel by Hizballah's positioning of its fighters, weapons, and even rocket launchers in civilian neighborhoods. Dahan's take on the situation was no different from that of Israel's worst defamers abroad.

Also in the summer of 2006, when Israeli forces were battling terrorists in Gaza in the wake of Hamas's abduction of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit and murder of two other Israeli soldiers in a raid on sovereign Israeli territory, a group called 4Gaza circulated a petition that described the Israeli actions in Gaza as monstrous aggression and concluded:

 

We protest and demand

From the Israeli government and the IDF:

Stop the carnage!

Stop the destruction!

Stop the siege on the Gaza strip.

 

The signers, who numbered over a thousand and included Noam Chomsky, world-famous Israel-basher and supporter of Holocaust deniers, also included...Yossi Dahan. In 2005 Dahan also signed a petition on behalf of Tali Fahima, an Israeli woman who was convicted for acting as a human shield for the Palestinian terrorist Zakaria Zubeidi. The petition described Fatima as an "Israeli peace activist."

The Van Leer Institute claims that it "gives expression to the wide range of opinions in Israel." So wide that the Institute feels called upon to provide a stage to an Israeli academic and activist who views Israel as a savage aggressor against innocent people, and who lauds a proterrorist Israeli traitor as a peace activist.  There is no objection to discussing theories of social justice. There is a lot of objection to granting legitimacy and publicity to a fringe figure who views the state of Israel as a criminal enterprise.