IsraCampus.Org

Professor Yinon Cohen is what some fellow academics have termed a “court Jew,” or at least a Jew that fits historian Bat Y’eor’s description of a dhimmi Jew under Arab and Muslim rule.

Cohen’s main field of study and teaching, where he began his academic career, was as a demographer at Tel Aviv U in the sociology department. Cohen has participated in a number of scholarly works in which he portrays negatively the treatment of Palestinian Arabs as victims of Zionism, the Jews emigrating to a Jewish homeland in Israel. Such works speak of “ethnocentrism” as somehow being at the root of Zionism.

Thus, how appropriate that Professor Cohen should have participated in one study comparing Israeli immigration trends with those of Germany. After all, the Arabs, who were ardent Nazi allies during the Second World War, today just love to make comparisons between Israelis as being like the Nazis, when Israel is, in fact, a giant refugee camp for the world’s Jews resulting from German Nazi persecution and the Nazi German regime that sought to wipe out the Jewish people.

Cohen seems to have minimal note, if any, that the Jewish emigrants prior to 1948 legally purchased their land through the Jewish Agency and any other additional land mandated to the new Jewish state by the British was public property at the time. True, the new state of Israel did capture some Arab territories mandated by the UN in 1948, but they also lost territories mandated to the Jews that were legally purchased, such as Gush Etzion, and particularly Kfar Etzion, an agrarian settlement where the Jews were all herded into a giant pit and massacred days after the Armistice was signed ending the 1948 War of Independence.

In the 1930s and 40s American Jews in particular had sewing tins where they regularly deposited pennies to be used by the Jewish Agency to purchase land for other Jews in Palestine to develop a homeland for fellow Jews to live, secure from a world that sought to wipe them out.

Yinon Cohen, the demographer, also seems to fail to recognize that the Jewish Diaspora was one created when Jews were literally dispersed as an entire people by the Romans as slaves throughout the Empire in what was known as a Carthaginian Peace. The Romans, on conquering the rival empire of Carthage, not only destroyed the entire city, but sowed the ground with salt so nothing could grow there ever again. By the same token, after the third Jewish revolt, the Romans deported as many Jews as possible as slaves (Jewish slaves built the Coliseum), renamed Jerusalem and renamed Israel as Palestine. Arab nationalism and Islam did not even exist as yet. However, over the next two millennia Jews continued to end the Passover and Chanukah prayers with the words, “Next year in Jerusalem,” about as Zionistic a phrase as one could think of for the religious-nationalist-ethnic people who survived their own Carthaginian Peace in order to return to the Holy Land.

Yinon Cohen would just reduce the Jewish return to Zion to the same as that of any other “ethnocentric” act by another nationalistic culture (the Jew-murdering Germans no less!). The Jews would do so to consolidate ethnic power in a given region. But the majority of today’s “Palestinians” were Arabs who were encouraged to migrate into the legally mandated Jewish land by the British at the same time the Jews were trying to find through the Zionist enterprise a refuge once and for all from the world’s pogroms, not as a goal to wipe out the “indigenous people” the Arab world and its allies try to imply.

Yinon Cohen even is inclined to accept the Palestinian narrative that there were 750,000 Arabs driven from their homes during Israel’s War of Independence in another ethnocentric move by Zionist Jews. Few people know that the actual number of Arab refugees per the United Nations was 420,000 at the end of hostilities. The Arab League left open the opportunity for Arabs to apply for refugee status until 1950, which was what swelled the number to somewhere between 720,000 and 750,000 because of the availability of free food and clothing. Many of those Arabs who applied for refugee status had jobs and homes and were not really refugees, but the card meant free amenities and could be transferred for life to one’s relatives. Many a “Palestinian Arab” who resided in the West Bank would envy his fellow Arab’s refugee status card and ability to pass it from father to son. Between 1952-1982 Israel quietly actually repatriated 140,000 “Palestinian Arabs” into Israel who could prove their property and family links from 1948, which means the actual 1948 refugee numbers were probably closer to 600,000 people, a number that Palestinian Arab advocates today claim is really close to as much as 11 million people. In 1948, Israel also let 110,000 Arab residents of Palestine remain as Israeli citizens with equal rights by law and these people total approximately 1.1 million Israeli citizens today, a 1000% increase.

So much said for Israeli ethnocentrism as compared to German repatriation as part of Yinon Cohen’s demographic “research” as a post-Zionist academic. But let’s talk further about how court Jews like Yinon Cohen serve the enemies of the Jewish people…

Of even more interest is Yinon Cohen’s appointment as the Director of the Institute for Jewish and Israel Studies at Columbia University. Middle East historian Martin Kramer has described Columbia and its anti-Israel faculty as “Bir-Zeit-on-the-Hudson.”

Bir-Zeit is a university that was largely expanded by Israel after 1967 in the West Bank in hope that an educated Arab populace would eschew violence against Jews. Instead, it is a breeding ground and recruitment center for Hamas and PFLP activists and terrorists against Israel. Anti-Israel faculty at Columbia U. and their behavior make Kramer’s comparison more than applicable.

Not long ago, a Chair was created in the name of Israel-hater Edward Said to the tune of $5 million dollars that the University refused to divulge to the public where the money came from (as required by federal law. A New York State Senator named LaValle invoked similar state law to force the University to reveal its source. Ultimately, it was linked back to a law firm that works for the PLO. This Chair then went to Rashid Khalidi, an Arab professor who has openly said killing Israeli soldiers is “legitimate resistance” during the “peace process” and an acolyte of Edward Said’s militancy and false scholarship against Israel.

In an attempt to ameliorate the anti-Israelism and anti-Semitism on campus, some of Columbia’s donors put up $3 million to create an Israel studies department. Columbia had already hosted Jew-hater Mahmoud Ahmadinajhad to speak on campus so something needed to be done. But, who did the University designate to head its search committee for the post of the new Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies?

Rashid Khalidi.

And who did Rachid Khalidi choose?

Yinon Cohen.

Martin Kramer wrote at the time that the inclusion of Khalidi and other anti-Israeli faculty on the search committee was nothing less than perverse and how “Edward Said used to complain that the Palestinians needed ‘permission to narrate’ their story” in US academia (perhaps because the narration was not based on facts or scholarly research?).” Kramer continued, “At Columbia, the situation is reversed: Israel can’t be narrated without the permission of the great Palestinian mandarins. They must be appeased, satisfied, propitiated.”

Columbia was already well known for its Arab professors who openly insulted Jewish students in the classroom such as Joseph Massad, so letting such a camarilla of anti-Israel professors pick the head of a new department to lend balance was a joke at best.

Yinon Cohen fits their needs. A sociologist and demographer on migration trends rather than a Professor of Jewish History and Studies, particularly as relates to world calumny against the Jews, Cohen has already earned his pro-PLO stripes by signing a petition with other post-Zionist faculty members announcing “their wish to express our appreciation and support for those of our students and lecturers who refuse to serve as soldiers in the occupied territories...” that “the present war is not being fought for our home but for the settlements beyond the green line and for the continued oppression of another people." This was done during Operation Defensive Shield when hundreds of Israelis were being murdered by suicide bombing attacks. The Oslo Peace Accords specified that Israel had the right to go after terrorists within the occupied territories if the Palestinian Authority refused to do so, so it was legal by international law and necessary to save Israeli lives. At the same time, Yinon Cohen also objected to protecting the lives of Jews who had the temerity to live on legally purchased land in the territories because their Arab neighbors insisted the area must be “Jew free” (talk about ‘ethnocentrism”!). Nobody has heard a retraction from Yinon Cohen either since the forced deportation of 8,000 Jews from Gaza that netted 4,000 missiles being fired on Israeli children in Sderot and as far north as Ashkelon.

Yinon Cohen thus was the perfect choice to placate the anti-Israel crowd at Columbia: a court Jew who can represent the Israeli side for “balance,” one who already has shown his attitude of rubber stamping the Palestinian narrative even at the expense of the murder of his own people if they try defending themselves.

Yinon Cohen has demonstrated where he stands in terms of the rights of the Jewish people to exist in an internationally legal and secure homeland, and their right to self-defense. He is benefiting his own career working as a dhimmi under Arab overlords who ultimately seek the destruction of a Jewish homeland through propaganda and indoctrination in America’s universities.

========================================

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