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Tanya Reinhart was an anti-Zionist militant that embarrassed even some of the die-hard leftists in the Israeli academia. She denounced the Oslo agreement, she condemned the security fence, she advocated the Palestinian "right of return", and she was captivated by conspiracy theories and even supported the boycott against her own university. Yet, her colleagues in Tel-Aviv held an evening in which they paid tribute to her activities on the first anniversary of her death.

Presumably all those who gathered on 16 March in Tel-Aviv University campus, failed to notice how absurd the occasion was. Colleagues and comrades paid their respect to the former Professor of linguistics who tirelessly campaigned in favor of an international boycott against them. Shamelessly, on every available publication and platform she called on universities and governments around the world to bring down the academic institutes in Israel.

But this would not be the only irony lost on those who praised her for her "front line" activities during decades of bashing and smearing. Reinhart's radicalism exceeded even the zealotry of the Israeli mainstream Left. While the latter regarded the Oslo agreement as the only salvation for the future of the Israel, Reinhart opposed it. While even within her own crowd certain academics regarded the security fence as a necessity in the face of Palestinian suicide bombings, she was quick to dismiss it as yet another proof of Zionist racism. While many of her friends were in love with the knee jerk tendency to make an analogy between Israel and white South Africa, she held a "slightly" different opinion. "What Israel is doing under Ariel Sharon", she wrote in 2003, "far exceeds the crimes of the South Africa's white regime. It has been taking the form of systematic ethnic cleansing, which South Africa never attempted". Reinhart was repeating this analogy to justify the academic boycott against the universities.

She went even further that this. In her writing she was in the habit of accusing the European Union for giving Israel a carte blanch to oppress the Palestinians, perpetuate the occupation and expand the settlements in the territories. At the same time she roundly denounced the European embargo imposed on Hamas since the elections in January 2006. "Europe chose not to force Israel to respect its obligations under international law". Moreover, "European governments are immovable in their support of Israel, no matter what crimes it commits; and the Palestinians are dying slowly, with their suffering not even being reported".

Reinhart always claimed to be in the know. She knew about a master plan to starve the Palestinians to death, she know about a secret plan to kick them out of the territories and she was dead certain that Israel had no plan to evacuate Gaza. In November 2004 she wrote an article under the title "Sharon's Gaza Pullout: Not Gonna Happen!". She also delivered an emotional speech in Paris in which she described it as a PR ploy, with the intention to win hearts and minds in the West. "Deception and lies have been a corner stone in Israeli policy, brought to a new level of perfection since Oslo", she emphasized.

When, after all, the pullout took place, she refused to recognize her mistake by arguing that the occupation did not end at all."Israel will supervise and guard the external envelope on land, will maintain exclusive control in the air space of Gaza, and will continue to conduct military activities in the sea space of the Gaza Strip. In other words, the Palestinians will be imprisoned from all sides, with no connection to the world, except through Israel. Israel also reserves for itself the right to act militarily inside the Gaza strip. In return for this "concession", Israel would be permitted to complete the wall and to maintain the situation in the West Bank as is.... Besides, she wrote in another article, it was the Bush administration that applied pressure on Sharon to implement his disengagement plan.

Reinhart never heard about Palestinian violence. On the contrary, all she knew during her repeated visits to West Bank villages is warm hospitality. "Palestinians have opened their hearts and their homes to the Israelis and internationals that come to support their non-violent resistance to the wall and the occupation robbing them of their land…" She did not detect any acts of terrorism across the green line, certainly not among Bir Zeit students whom she supported since the 1970's. As for the Arab snipers who targeted Israeli civilians around Jerusalem, well they were on Israel's payroll…

Pack of lies

In 2004 she wrote an embarrassing booklet called "Israel/Palestine: how to end the 1948 war". It was a manifesto, littered with inaccuracies and half-truths, in which she accused Zionism of all possible evils. According to her, Ehud Barak was responsible for the outbreak of the "second Intifada" and teamed up with Sharon to wage a war of terror against the Palestinians at the end of which a mass expulsion would be carried out.

The late Edward Said called it "the most devastating critique now available of Israel's policy toward the Palestinian people". Few may forget that the same Said was spotted on the Israeli-Lebanese border throwing stones on members of the IDF a few days after the May 2000 pull-out. Another supporter of Hezbollah, Professor Noam Chomsky, was Reinhart's PhD supervisor who praised her after her death by describing her as a woman who helped to expose "Israel's atrocities". "She drew away the veil that conceded criminal and outrageous actions and shone a searing light on the reality that was obscured". No wonder, that he, Said, Norman Finkelstein, Ran Hacohen and Ilan Pappe were said to be "orphaned" by her sudden death. In fact, in many of her articles Reinhart was reiterating the views of her mentors, Said and Chomsky.

In her analysis Reinhart kept writing about a "slow and steady genocide in the territories": People are denied medical treatment, children suffer of malnutrition and the society as whole is dying. The fact on the ground suggest otherwise, but she never paid attention to facts if they did not serve her one-sided views. One can dismiss her as a marginal figure that did no harm to her community. But made a full use of her Jewish-Israeli origins and as such was embraced by anti-Zionist circles around the world, which provided her with many platforms.

Tel Aviv University, the institute she wanted to ban, was Reinhart's home for almost three decades. She also had a column on the most circulating daily in the country. Yet, before leaving Israel for good, she blamed her employers of applying unbearable pressure on her. She also felt suffocated and intimidated She was also worried that she may be gagged "one day in the future" and deprived of her freedom of expression. Hypocrisy? Audacity? Not in the eyes of those who shed tears in her memory a year after her untimely death in Long Island.

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