IsraCampus.Org.il

Isracampus.org gets letters in response to our articles and exposes about Israeli academics sometimes functioning as a fifth column inside Israel's universities and against the Jewish state. Most praise the work done here.

But one morning my breakfast coffee was just ruined as I read an email received from one such Israeli academic:

Date: Aug 20, 2008 6:14 AM
Subject: Contact from IsraCampus.org
To: isracampus@gmail.com

You have the most profound misunderstanding of democracy I have encountered in quite a while.

Bat-Ami Bar On

-------------------------------------
Bat-Ami Bar On
Professor of Philosophy and Women Studies
Chair
Department of Philosophy
Binghamton University (SUNY)
Binghamton, NY 13902-6000
USA
607-777-6198
ami@binghamton.edu
http://philosophy.binghamton.edu/~ami

The message was short and to the point. As usual, from the damn-Israel-for-everything crowd, it cited no specific information (such correspondence usually uses catch words or phrases without specifics or logic like "racist", "apartheid", "colonial", "legitimate resistance" ((if death occurred)) or the overused and elusive "occupation").

Of course, being genetically induced with Jewish guilt I had to respond. Ms. Bar On had somehow seen our concept of democracy as lacking here at Isracampus with her missive to us. The woman is a philosopher, so clearly must be more attuned to the vagaries of the world than the lowly Watchers Over Jerusalem (and, man, does it ever need watching!), who are busy working here at Isracampus. I just had to respond personally.

Anyway, here goes, although I don't have the luxury of one sentence responses with no facts to back them up as are so in vogue with the anti-Zionist and anti-Israel movements on campus these days, but I do think I can respond in fewer than 5,000 words:

To: ami@binghamton.edu
From: leekaplan@dafka.org

Subject: Understanding of democracy at Isracampus

Dear Professor Ben Ami;

As one of the contributors at Isracampus, I asked that I be able to personally address your email criticizing the website's understanding of democracy.

Your email sent me scurrying first to the dictionary to look up what the word "democracy" means. Two definitions particularly stuck out at me:

Democracy

Government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is
vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected
agents under a free electoral system.

and, to a lesser extent:

the common people of a community as distinguished from any privileged class; the common people with respect to their political power.

(I'm sure the second definition would thrill you, Prof, Bar On, given your field of expertise in Women's Studies and empowerment of women in an oppressive male society, not to mention Karl Marx, but more on all that later).

I read excerpts from your own book, Meditations of National Identity. I noted that you distinguish between Jewishness and being Israeli, nevertheless classifying yourself as Jewish-Israeli. You then go on to repeat the litany of accusations of the political Left in Israel of mistreatment of the Palestinian Arab population promoting a false leftist narrative of a system of Jewish Israelis desiring to control the minority Arab population without explaining the necessity for security procedures (you do not live in a vacuum, even there in upstate New York, and understand the constant threats against Israel). You write about "curfews, detention, expulsions, daily harassment" of Palestinians that "confused" you about your Israeliness. One would assume you consider yourself part of the "privileged" class as a Jewish-Israeli when in fact there are many Israelis below the poverty line and who do no better financially than minority Arabs. In fact, these Jews sometimes fare worse because of the Arab League boycott that leaves them dependent on aid, particularly the Jewish elderly and children. The Arabs, in turn, have affirmative action programs in Israel provided by Israel, and those who are not Israelis in the Territories have UNWRA and the Gulf Sheiks who provide for them, even if they prefer buying them guns rather than food.

Forgive me, but as a philosopher maybe you have your head in the clouds? Your treatise neglects to show both sides of the dispute between Jews and Arabs as related to Israel and somehow is based solely on your ability to befriend one Palestinian woman, Amal, a sort of "everywoman" of Palestinians who you really do not flesh out, but merely consider a victim of Israel, thus your friend and equal. (It's also an amazing capacity of Palestinian Arabs to befriend Jews who will accept, like you without hesitation, their whine of mistreatment by the Jews, the need to replace Israel with a Palestinian state, and to oppose "Zionism"; they even get them to write documents condemning Israel the same way as the worst Arab irredentist would do. Of course, if the Israeli decides Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state with a similar narrative of suffering and dispossession at the same time a Palestinian does for an Arab, Muslim state, the friendship usually cools).

Professor Bar On, you are a descendent of Ashkenazim from Romania, pro-communist Marxists, so have always had the luxury of considering yourself a "privileged" Jewish-Israeli whereas other Jewish-Israelis you consider "privileged" were no better off as Israel tried to survive during these last 60 years than the Arabs who are Israeli citizens or those Arabs later on in the Territories after 1967.

But, you, dear professor, are what could be called a Demopath. You pathologically invoke the civil cause of democratic rights by supporting those who seek others (in this case, the Jews of Israel) from enjoying those rights. Because we expose those of your ilk who slander and libel Israel through the halls of academia, you suggest our using our own democratic rights to inform the Israeli public is based on "misunderstanding" the principles of democratic society.

Let's get something straight: The Arabs of whom you write one-sided reports are in no way democratic or guided by the leftist socialist and pro-communist positions you personally advocate. The Jews were practicing democracy even before the Greeks until some Jews like yourself got together and decided there was a better way, so made a manic-depressive named Saul their first King and gave up true democratic principles. Things went downhill after that, except maybe for King Solomon, but it would seem there are still plenty of your type around; that is, willing to give up real democracy in order to enable the end of democracy by giving the totalitarians what they aspire to have. Fortunately, by 1948, Israel returned to a democratic form of government and is considered on a par with the US and UK in terms of democratic rights.

There is not one democratic Arab or Muslim country in the entire umma, or the entire world; even a future Palestinian state will be run by Sharia law as its constitution, already ratified, is modeled after those of Saudi Arabia and Iran. The Palestinian Arabs may not have equal military power in the West Bank and Gaza (where they are arming thanks to Iran), but they have the entire Muslim and totalitarian world behind them with oil money, guns, more money, boycotts, more oil money, intimidation, extra oil money, publicity, add on oil money, divestment, Gulf oil money and classical anti-Semitism, and, coming soon to threaten the only Jewish state near you, nuclear weapons.

Did I mention oil money?

Fatah or Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or PFLP, Force 17 or Tanzim, Al Aksa or the PPP, none are democratic with even their own people and definitely would not be so with Jews in the land. You, like so many Israeli academics in the Left, portray the problem as one of two sides that just need to get along like you and your friend, Amal. But the geopolitical situation is so much bigger and complicated beyond the ken of your philosophical feminist buddy-buddy philosophy, dear professor. You mention how you and Amal like the same Middle Eastern foods; Palestinian Authority travel brochures read that hummus and falafel that was brought to Israel by Yemeni Jews was in fact a "Palestinian dish" that was stolen by the Jews to wipe the Palestinian nationality off the map. Of course, Palestinian and other Arab scholars with PhD's also write that the Temple Mount never was part of Jewish culture and that the Jews never lived in the Holy Land in ancient times. It was always "Palestinians."

Those nasty Zionists, conspiring with the cuisine to dispossess the innocent fedayeen who are only fighting for the recognition of their falafel. How, uh, er, um, undemocratic!!!

The Arab mantra of replacing Israel is not just about land. Nor is it about Jews trying to reshape opinion to justify taking the land or subjugating the Arabs solely to the benefit of the Jews. For the Palestinians, some of them, it is about land lost generations ago (although this is usually hyperbole), but for others it is about expanding Islamic domination over all the Middle East and the Jews are in the way. Still others want a communist totalitarian state of the "proletariat" called Palestine, but, above all, with Arab cultural and nationalistic domination of the Arab Nation. Democracy is the last thing on their minds.

Your "meditations" also failed to point out that Israel's Knesset has Arabs as full members (including Azmi Bishara who was spying for Hizballah but is entitled nevertheless to his pension). Communist parties in Israel that really advocate for a dictatorship of the proletariat (led by Arabs) flourish in Israeli democracy. By law, Arab Israelis have equal rights to Jews and even enjoy affirmative action programs in Israeli universities over IDF veterans.

Has inequality existed between Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews and the Arab, Bedouin and Druze minorities in Israel? Yes, as in any human society different people need to meld, but you fail to note, the Sephardic Jews who are today's Sabras are past that and it is the Sephardic Jews who lived among the Arabs in past generations who are in fact more conservative than their Marxist-inspired Ashkenzim in the Left whose forced socialism appeals to you. The Arab Nation doesn't have the same problems with Jews that democratic Israel faces because when it comes to Jews, they just kill them or deport them, then accusing Israel of "apartheid."

Now, I would assume you say I "misunderstand" democracy here at Isracampus because I write about academics like yourself, many who live on the Israeli taxpayer's dime, who prefer, instead of solid scholarship and hard research, to get by repeating the made-up propaganda spewed by the Arab totalitarians. In Orwellian-like totalitarian societies, truth is only what the state wants it to be, so a misinformed public is stable and made malleable by the dictatorship's leaders, hardly a democratic principle. Professors like yourself who prefer to pitch a one-sided, inaccurate picture of Israel as oppressor and abuser, who present an image of a peaceful Arab population collectively punished (even suicide bombers and "collaborators with the Jews" who die on the Palestinian side are listed in PA statistics as innocent civilians murdered by Israelis). The Arab side and its international communist human shields of the ISM which you are part of as a member of Women in Black use rhetoric to deceive (such as calling murder "legitimate resistance") and they fill universities abroad with academics like you, who use the same deceptive techniques to encourage divestment and boycotts that make Jewish children and the elderly go to bed hungry at night in Israel.

What is it exactly that gets done at Isracampus? Well, they show people how one Israeli academic fabricated a massacre at Tantura of Arabs that never occurred. They show how another Israeli professor met and lectured in Washington against Israel to a neo-Nazi front group that is funded by Saudi Arabia and supports Hamas. They revealed how another Israeli professor was saying that Jews in the Middle Ages did in fact use the blood of gentile children to make matzo. They reveal how one Israeli professor who sought to prove that Israeli soldiers rape Arab women at checkpoints and elsewhere, when he could not find even one example, changed research to say the reason IDF soldiers don�t rape Arab women is because they consider them subhuman (he also was accused by a female student later of raping her). They reveal to the Israeli public and the democratic world when such professors lie to aid the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state in order to aid totalitarian Arabs to do so.

It is me as a writer here at Isracampus who believes it is you who "misunderstands" the concept of democracy. You think it means the power to say, undisputed, anything one wants no matter how untrue, or how damaging to concept of empirical proof, should be given equal weight to the facts. Arabs who do not maintain bomb factories in their homes or build illegally on someone else's property without a deed do not incur home demolitions. Peaceful Arabs in the territories are not "harassed" and do have recourse to complain to the authorities (meanwhile the Arabs complain of babies stillborn at checkpoints (that never occurred) in the same ambulances that have in the past transported suicide bombers and weapons). Checkpoints don't just prevent the deaths of Jews by terrorists, they protect innocent Arabs on both sides of the Green Line.

I feel here at Isracampus that they understand democracy very well. They utilize it every day to reveal the actions of Israelis like you who enable the antithesis of democracy and aid totalitarian movements, then claim they are merely exercising democracy to do so. That is the essence of a democratic society. You can still say whatever you like, but I will call you on it when it's untrue or deceptive, so you'd better be accurate. I note also you are a member of Women in Black, an organization not well-known for its honesty in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and one that is part of the International Solidarity Movement's national conferences calling for the end of Israel. Women in Black had a presence on the Gaza Flotilla boats seeking to open sea lanes to enable the transfer of more weapons to Hamas from Iran and was just recently in the news.

Which brings us to the last issue in my response letter. Ms. Bar On, you are a feminist.

Despite this, you question Isracampus's understanding of the word democracy while rubberstamping the whining and accusations against Israel by the very Arabs Israel has sought to help to create their own state. There is an incongruity of thought here, as the Palestinian Arabs are among the worst misogynists in the world, practicing honor killings and abusing women's rights daily. The majority of the Arab world mandates that women live under the veil and have few rights. In the Palestinian Authority, motherhood has also become, through Arab media promotion, a means of raising suicide bombers and martyrs-a newly developed form of child sacrifice. Your friend Amal is apparently an Israeli Arab, yet we also know that, among the Israeli Arabs, honor killings of women for losing their virginity, even by rape, are still common. The only difference is in "democratic" Israel, the murderers are prosecuted, tried and jailed whereas in the Arab countries they go free. Despite this fact, you, as a "feminist," can only find fault in Israel and have nary a comment about the Arabs you claim are such vulnerable victims of the Jewish state.

All of the above information leads me to believe that it is indeed your understanding of the word "democracy" that is askew, not the work at Isracampus.org.il.

That is why I feel Isracampus is needed, and why I will continue with such work, secure in the knowledge that I am promoting true democracy.

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Op-Ed articles appearing on IsraCampus.Org.il are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the opinion of IsraCampus.Org.il