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Yossi Amitay is a lecturer on modern Arab history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and a member of the secretariat of the Israeli Council for Israel-Palestine Peace (ICIPP) and a kibbutz member.

Ben Gurion University of course already has a reputation for trying to be a sort of Bir Zeit University in terms of anti-Israel academics there who oppose the existence of the Jewish state. But how many people know about the “peace” group that makes up the ICIPP, a group Yossi Amitay likes people to know he is attached to.

The ICIPP is in fact a group that endorses everything anti-Israel in the media war currently going on. Arab propaganda campaign, continues to try and convince well-meaning people in the US and EU that being pro-'Palestinian' means that you are for “peace.” The Arab leadership in Arabic always says the Right of Return in non-negotiable and that any land ceded by Israel for a Palestinian state is only a phase to taking it al back for the Islamic Umma and pan-Arab nation.

But professors and people like Amitay choose to ignore the evidence and say that the Arabs don’t really mean it. As Jewish bodies get piled higher, some academics try even harder to push the square peg into a round hole.

So what actually has Amitay done to deserve a write up here at Isracampus besides reinforcing the concept of what makes a good dhimmi in the surrounding Arab world? For one, he contributes nonsense to the “Palestine-Israel Journal,” which is a de facto PLO journal funded by the United Nations and by those other great financiers of NGO’s that work to dismantle Israel like the European Union (their website for Amitay even has the EU flag at the bottom). The EU has up until just recently financed a multitude of anti-Israel NGO’s like ICHAD, which are run by Israelis who can find no fault with Arab irredentist goals toward Israel and only wail against “humiliation” of those poor Arabs.

Amitay has been active in the "SERUV" group that promotes mutiny and insurrection among Israeli soldiers. He was one of the cheerleaders for Tali Fahima, a Jewish woman jailed for assisting Palestinian terrorists plan attacks on Jews. After his own sister was murdered by Palestinian terrorists in an attack in Ramat Gan, Amitay gave an interview to the Tel Aviv weekly Ha-Ir, in which he said: "Nehama became part of the cycle of bloodshed, a cycle of Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian-Arab victims. We are all among the victims and the killers; if we ever tried to do something for peace, we must now ask ourselves: did we do enough? That is what I said on Nehama's graveside. It was difficult to say these things, but I did say them."

Another example of how much Yossi Amitay worries about the Arabs is his signing a nonsensical petition put out before the Iraq war accusing the Israeli government of planning to conduct genocidal atrocities against its Israeli-Arab population once the US went to war against Saddam Hussein. The title was: “Urgent warning: The Israeli government may be contemplating crimes against humanity.” The petition was prominently featured on websites that called for divestment from Israel abroad such as at Columbia University. After the invasion and when no genocide was perpetrated by Israel, Amitay never issued a retraction.

Amitay has called openly for divestment and boycotts against Israel, the country that pays his salary at Ben Gurion University. He has called for international involvement to force militarily or otherwise Israelis and Jews in Judea and Samaria from their homes and objected to the IDF fighting terrorism as not leading to a solution.

Ignoring the abundance of contrary evidence is nothing new; the President of the United States, the US State Department and the Olmert regime have certainly done so. But Amitay claims to be an expert of Arab history and should know better. He should use that expertise to make Israelis understand that the Arab goals are not in any way ever going to be in the best interest of Jews. Instead, he encourages his fellow Israelis to "cooperate" to such an extent as to surrender.

According to Amitay, “The Arab-Israeli conflict is basically and essentially a confrontation between two national-political entities. However powerful, the religious experience is, at the present stage, an attached element to the core of the subject, but is far from being the subject itself.” Amitay acknowledges a lot of the dispute grew out of Arab nationalism, which emerged in the 20^th century. He recognizes there is a religious motivation behind the anti-Israel movement but implies this is not the core problem because Jews lived under Islamic “protection” and “tolerance” prior to the dispute.

This use of the words “protection” and “tolerance” are Muslim interpretations and inventions of how they treated the Jews before Israel came along. Bat Ye’or, another historian of the Middle East, tells us of tales of Arab “protection” and “tolerance” that were only slightly better than the pogroms taking place in Europe. She also discusses those Jews who always found favor in Arab society, be it for money, fame or just personal security, whom she classified as “dhimmis.” It is interesting to note how Amitay cut his teeth on Arab history by living three years in Egypt.

In Amitay we find an Israeli returned to his homeland who seems to seek to practice dhimmitude there. In suggesting a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Amitay admits that Islam and Judaism are unlikely to bridge a gap in religious cooperation and has stated, “This goal can be attained if both parties recognize and respect the necessary minimum that each is capable of undertaking without being defeated or humiliated.”

At this writing, just as the war in Gaza roils forth, it is interesting how Amitay speaks of “humiliation,” a term frequently used by the Arabs to describe Israeli self-defense. Checkpoints “humiliate” the Arabs. Israel’s existence in the middle of the Umma and winning its wars against the Arabs “humiliated” the Arabs as well who must seek revenge. Even the Palestinian national anthem of a new state speaks of revenge for this humiliation.

Of course “humiliation” was part of the Arab subjugation of the Jews as dhimmis in Arab society. A Jew could not ride a horse but had to ride a donkey so as to never be higher than a Muslim. In turn, a Jew’s house could not be taller than that of a Muslim. Jews were forced to wear funny costumes distinguishing them in public from the Muslim population (the Nazis copied the idea of the Star of David as an article of clothing and the need for Jews to walk in the gutter when faced by a non-Jew, both from the Arabs). The effrontery of today’s Israeli Jew who has his own country, with a demographic majority and military prowess, is a total humiliation for many Arabs who were used to Jews living in ghettos and subject to pogroms when convenient.

Something else though that Amitay does not consider in his analysis of Arab suffering and humiliation is that the anti-Israel, anti-Zionist carryings-on by the Arabs are also a business, and a big business it is. Every “Palestinian” Arab created by the Arab League after 1948 was forced to tithe to Yasser Arafat and the PLO. This included even so-called “refugees” who were no longer refugees. The Arabs, whose ancestors were from “Palestine” in Kuwait, for example, were given Palestinian passports and had their incomes deducted to pay Arafat regularly, who parlayed those funds into being the fifth richest man in the world at the time of his death. The Palestinians are the biggest moneymaking scam in the history of the world.

Somewhere along the line, Amitay forgot or decided to ignore this fundamental part of Arab history in his “understanding” of the Arabs and desire to make “peace” with them. Amitay ignores that whatever can be taken from the Jews only adds to the coffers, the main reason Jews were tolerated in the Islamic world before the creation of a Jewish state: they had financial value. Thus they also paid the jizya tax as a religious minority. An Arab will tell you it was for “protection” since Jews were not allowed to serve in the military.

One thing is certain: Yossi Amitay’s willingness to earn a living at the expense of the Israeli taxpayer, while advocating that a certain portion of Israel’s Jews should submit to dhimmitude by capitulating to Arab demands, shows how the man has found his own niche in an Israel's leftist-dominated academia.

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