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There is a particular cultural malady amongst many Israeli “sociologists” and “political scientists” that allows them to postulate in a vacuum free of the reality on the ground for the average Israeli. Being a PhD and college professor, particularly with tenure, spending time abroad in the safety of the US or Canada and being a discussant in a university setting with Arab intellectuals and professors who will patiently sit and sophistically discuss the need to end the Jewish state as a means to some egalitarian utopian society (that in reality will never exist in peace and calm in the midst of a Muslim-Arab umma) must be a great life. Meanwhile, the average Israeli has to worry about his children getting blown up as he works and earns about $18,000 a year and does his six weeks of reserve duty to protect the Jewish people from an Arab culture that has reintroduced child sacrifice, that perpetuates misogyny, honor killings, homophobia and promotes, above all, the murder of Jews as not only a noble pursuit, but even a Godly one. The late Professor Baruch Kimmerling referred to this Arab culture in euphemistic terms as simply “Palestinian nationalism” deserving of the world’s respect. Goebbels’ Big Lie showed how repetition gives validity to a lie; Israeli intellectuals like Kimmerling did more than the Big Lie ever could to demonize the Jewish right to self-determination by legitimizing the myth of a Palestinian nationalism that was fabricated from whole cloth by the Arab League. Kimmerling may now be dead, but his ideas and statements are still alive to be used by the Arabs.

Kimmerling’s own Academic Profile was so wordy and verbose, it could only appeal to a fellow egghead trying to impress rather than to make clear any usefulness of his work while he lived or explain how he allegedly benefited Israeli society instead of the Arabs who still seek to fabricate a history that is little more than 45 years old as a “Palestinian nationality. “ Without Jews like Kimmerling to do it for them during his lifetime, the Arabs would probably not be anywhere nearly as successful as they have been.

Kimmerling also claimed to have written about “Israeli militarism” in society, as if Jews protecting themselves is a bad thing in the Jewish state.

As a young man, I visited Israel for the first time where I expected to find a warrior type society of Jews, very militaristic, and inclined to belligerency. To my surprise, every Israeli I spoke with, and not just the ivory tower intellectuals, but even the soldiers were very anti-war. Young men who did their reserve duty all complained about their compulsory military service not because they felt Israel was wrong to defend its citizens, but because it was no fun. Yet they did their duty. Today, it is a particular tactic of certain NGO’s funded by the EU to try and persuade young Israelis to refuse military service (they even stole the term refusenik, referring to Jews trying to leave the Soviet Union for Israel, into a term for Israeli draft dodgers) in order to undermine the country’s ability to defend itself from the Arabs. And it’s the intellectual gobbledygook of types of professors like Kimmerling who in fact help that effort. It’s all because of those nasty “Zionists,” you see, and if we stop keeping Israel as a Jewish country, why then Arab nationalism will be free to blossom and bring wonderful benefits to the world.

Baruch Kimmerling was a PhD in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is one such professor who promoted this thinking, a formula to end Israel as a Jewish state that lives on after him. His curriculum vitae stated he was living in Toronto, Canada as a visiting professor before his death, but he retained his Israeli address as a faculty member at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

As I began writing this editorial on Kimmerling’s effect on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, I felt a particular personal anger about Kimmerling’s work, work that helps to legitimize the nonsense that springs forth from the Arab Camp with its fabricated “Palestinian narrative.” For without Jewish PhD’s like Kimmerling to legitimize Arab tribalism and primitive behavior by suggesting Zionism is the cause for such primitive behavior, the world for once might respect the Jews for standing up for their own self-determination and well being.

Kimmerling is one of the intellectuals who spoke of postzionism: “Postzionism, like zionism, is in constant motion. The boundaries of postzionist discourse, like those of zionism, are in a constant state of flux. Comprised of nomadic concepts that assume different meanings in different contexts, postzionism lacks a distinct structure or organization, and its boundaries are often blurred.

It sure is.

Kimmerling even quoted Ilan Pappe’, a “historian” as an authority on the debate over postzionism as “an identity crisis of a society that stands on the threshold of a period of peace, in which the national consensus, previously build upon threats to survival and security problems, clears a space for a debate across the society and its culture (Pappe’, 1995b, 45).”

Peace? What peace after fifteen years of terrorism from Arabs who in Arabic have never stopped their advocacy for Jew-killing for its own sake?

Pappe’ was involved in fabricating a phony massacre by “Zionists” at Tanturra and is in the pay of the EU to be a spokesperson for the Arabs across American university campuses. If Kimmerling considered Pappe’ a valid intellectual to quote, what does it say for Kimmerling’s thought processes, no matter how verbose his own self-description of his work exploring Arab nationalism vis-à-vis Jewish nationalism?

Zionism could easily be said, like Kimmerling claimed, in constant motion because Jews are too busy ducking Kassem and Grad rockets to be allowed to live in self-determination as Jews and Jewish intellectuals like Kimmerling were too busy giving legitimacy to Arab irredentist goals masquerading as simple human rights efforts by the Arabs rather than what they are: an attempt to erase a Jewish presence in the Arab and Muslim dominated Middle East.

But, alas, there are many Kimmerlings still alive today who abound now in academia, even inside Israel’s universities.

So why is this particular editorial about yet another Israeli academic who was a constant flack for the Arabs so personal for me? Let me explain:

As a journalist I have written many times about the International Solidarity Movement, a consortium of international communists and anarchists who were created with the assistance of the PFLP but now work mainly in support of Hamas. One particularly loathsome leader of the ISM is a man named Paul LaRudee from the San Francisco Bay Area where I reside. I got LaRudee deported from Israel in 2006 as he tried entering the country under a false identity to aid Hamas. LaRudee has written proudly of sleeping in the bed of a suicide bomber and helping to prevent the demolition of a bomb making factory in Judea and Samaria. Once deported by order of Israel’s Supreme Court, LaRudee went to Lebanon and was a human shield for the Hizballah during the Summer war two years ago. I’ve attended a training session that LaRudee gives for activists in the ISM who want to help destroy Israel are given here in Northern California where we were taught to lie about the Palestinian narrative to further the destruction of Israel. LaRudee recently got non-profit status from the IRS no doubt lying about what his organization really does, and while I was researching his organization, Norcal ISM, on the Internet I came across a lengthy article on his website, written by—guess-who— Baruch Kimmerling. Norcal ISM and LaRudee have hidden the article but I found it in the Internet archive on the Web. Kimmerling’s article, used as proof of the need to end the Jewish state’s existence on the ISM website discussed an objection to the Security Fence and Israel’s refusal to remove it as ordered to do so by a United Nation’s court in the Hague.

Kimmerling stated in the year 2004 article, “The pretext for building the fence was security and the desire to keep suicide bombers out of Israel. However, a careful analysis of the fence route shows that it is only one fragment of a larger plan to draw the future borders of Israel and to incorporate the majority of the settlements and settlers, while dividing the Palestinian population into four separate enclaves.”

Kimmerling continued, “The issue of borders is currently a cause of some confusion within Israel because of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's commitment to evacuate the Gaza settlements, as well as a few small isolated West Bank settlements. The right wing went into a panic because, for the first time since 1967, a leader who identified with their cause had committed himself to dismantling settlements in historic Palestine.”

Historic Palestine? What is that? Whatever narrative the Arabs can fabricate of a Palestinian national identity that never existed before the creation of the PLO by Egypt in 1964 when Nasser assigned an Egyptian-born murderer named Yasser Arafat to create the PLO? This was the same Arafat who even invented a fictional Palestinian King Salem in the days of Abraham. After all, why not say the Palestinians were a superior and older culture and nationalism brought to the Middle East by flying saucers before the Jews since even Jewish intellectuals like Kimmerling will afford their myths the dignity of being part of a valid nationalism. Such Jewish intellectuals as Kimmerling was rush to support a fascist Arab-Muslim movement for some equally mythological “peace” for the Jews in the future, no matter how absurd. The very fact that the Arabs refuse to let Jews live in a Palestinian state should be proof enough that Jews are subject to deportation and killing and need a fence and secure borders to protect themselves.

The Fascists in the PA have claimed Arabs in the PLO were descended from the Philistines, no, wait, the Canaanites, to make sure they predated the Jews. Arabs, who by real UN standards are no longer refugees, but claim refugee status as an excuse to take by force land legally purchased by Jews,. and who live in camps run by the Jew-killers of Hamas at US taxpayer expense, are only encouraged and given legitimacy by the Kemmerlings in Israeli academia who are still alive today to carry on his ideas so devoid of reality.

In 2004, Kimmerling spoke about the coming Disengagement like the detached intellectual he is, an event where not since the Holocaust were so many Jews (8,000) forcibly deported from their homes given to Arabs in the name of peace, who then began shooting 4,000 missiles at Israeli daycare centers killing women and children.

As for The Hague’s claim the Security Fence is illegal, the Oslo Accords permitted hot pursuit by Israel into the PA to get terrorists the PA refused to arrest or even detain. Sharon had to go into Judea and Samaria fourteen times to stop terrorist attacks that killed hundreds of Israeli. The Fence only went up when it was clear there was no real partner in the PA to stop the deliberate murder of Jews. The Hague Court also had dictatorships like Red China represented on it, hardly a country that Israel should respect as an arbiter of human rights and one that is an ally of the Arab League. If Kimmerling by his own verbose academic record was such smarty pants, why did he consider a trumped deck in The Hague represents real international law while the same court refuses to declare suicide bombings illegal and demands the Arabs release captive soldiers Shalit, Regev and Appel that the Arabs won’t even permit the Red Cross to see?

Why were academics like Kimmerling so dumb? Or is it that they are just plain evil? As far as we know, Kimmerling’s ideas are still standard propaganda against Israel.

One thing is for certain: the Arabs and their communist allies like in the ISM couldn’t care less, and, in particular, anti-Semites like Paul LaRudee just love to reprint the dead academic’s comments, as ridiculous and lacking in common sense as they are because they suggest that even living Israeli academics agree with such notions to dismantle a Jewish state.

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