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The following is based on a speech at the Jewish Center of Jackson Heights, New York on January 8, 2005. The first part of the speech is available here: http://www.arutzsheva.org/article.php3?id=4700.

Israel won’t fall from Hamas, Hezbollah, or some other foreign band of barbarians. Its defeat, may it never come, is within.

Presently there’s a controversy at Columbia University over classroom depiction of Israel by Arab professors from the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures. [1] Consider this pair of remarks:

“I want people to boycott Israeli institutes.”
“I think the de-Zionisation of Israel is a pre-condition for peace; I have no doubt about that.”

One of the Columbia professors? A Palestinian professor at Birzeit University or Al-Quds University?

Make that Israeli Ilan Pappe, a politics professor at Haifa University. [2]

Pappe’s anti-Zionism is widespread in the Israeli professoriate. Consider this abstract of an article by law professor Andrei Marmor, from the University of Southern California and previously Tel Aviv University:

…the article examines the distinction between Israel's alleged entitlement to the territories it occupied and resettled during the war of independence and those it occupied and resettled in 1967, arguing that from a moral perspective both episodes of conquest are tainted with illegitimacy, and that the former does not fare any better than the latter. [3]

Or Tel Aviv University political science professor Yoav Peled, who wrote of his niece’s murder in a suicide bombing in 1997:

On September 4, my 14-year-old niece, Smadar, was killed with four others in a suicide bombing in Jerusalem. Smadar's grieving parents, Nurit Peled-Elhanan and Rami Elhanan, have courageously put the blame for their daughter's tragic death right where it belongs: in the lap of the intransigent government headed by Benjamin Netanyahu. To give concrete expression to their feelings, they invited a representative of the Palestinian Authority and former Prime Minister Shimon Peres, architect of the peace process, to speak at Smadar's funeral. [4]

Surpassing Peled, Ben-Gurion University politics lecturer Neve Gordon went to Ramallah in February 2002 and clasped hands with Yasser Arafat. [5]

Israeli anti-Zionism isn’t only in academia. Israeli director Keren Yedaya said during her acceptance of the Camera D’Or at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival: “…I come from Israel, and we are responsible for the slavery of three million Palestinians.” [6]

Similar is documentary filmmaker and sixth-generation Israeli Yulie Gerstel’s My Terrorist. In August 1978, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist Fahad Mihyi and an accomplice machine-gunned an El Al flight crew in London. The attack murdered a flight attendant and wounded four others including Gerstel, who was a flight attendant. Sentenced to four life sentences, Gerstel located Mihyi in 2000 and recounts in her director’s statement:

…I found Fahad Mihyi in English prison, lonely and deserted. Both his family and the PFLP had disowned him. After corresponding with Fahad I visited him in prison. He expressed deep remorse, said that he had turned away from political violence and was now pro-peace. I decided I wanted to help get him released. [7]

A recent case of outright Israeli collaboration with the enemy is Tali Fahima, who went to Jenin to be a human shield for Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade commander Zakariya Zubeidi. [8] In this solidarity for her negation, Fahima follows Israeli “peace activists” like Uri Avnery, who volunteered to shield Arafat. [9]

Other Israelis prescribe remedies that would be merely ridiculous if their consequences weren’t so hideous. Left-wing activist Yehudith Harel writes of allowing large numbers of Palestinians to enter Israel:

I don't think that if any refugees returned—even in big numbers—that it would be at the expense of the present Israeli citizens. On the contrary, I can easily fantasize that in case Israel agreed to absorb a big number of Palestinian refugees, together with them would come not only an immense human potential, but also a huge international aid. This beautiful and rich human resource, together with the big financial aid, could not only boost the local economy but also contribute to our cultural richness and diversity. [10]

They advocate annihilation and call it peace.

Some Jews can’t handle victory; they seek to abolish the embodiment by Israel of so much Jewish blood and hope. That miracle creates burdens, and some would rather surrender than defend.

May they destroy only themselves.

Notes

[1] See Jennifer Senior, “Columbia’s Own Middle East War,” New York Magazine, January 17, 2005, http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/urban/education/features/10868/ and Uriel Heilman, “Non-academic debate,” The Jerusalem Post Magazine, December 23, 2004, http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1103776317627&apage=1.

[2] See http://www.labournet.net/world/0209/pappe1.html. Likewise, Oxford professor Avi Shlaim, who grew up in Israel, has stated, “I'm for a boycott of Israeli goods and against a boycott of Israeli academics. Israel does 40 percent of its trade with the EU and very little of its trade with the US, so EU economic sanctions against Israel would be effective and I'm in favor of them, as well as an arms embargo.” “Israel's Occupation Turns 35: Avi Shlaim on History and the Current Impasse,” Middle East Report 223 (Summer 2002), http://www.merip.org/mer/mer223/223_shlaim_interview.html. In a January 25 debate in London on the motion “Zionism today is the real enemy of the Jews,” Shlaim argued for the motion with Ha’aretz correspondent Amira Hass and British professor Jacqueline Rose. See http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/12898/.

[3] Andrei Marmor, “Entitlement to Land and the Right of Return: An Embarrassing Challenge for Liberal Zionism,” USC Law and Public Policy Research Paper No. 03-17 (2003), http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=424622. Tel Aviv University linguistics professor Tanya Reinhart similarly claims, "Israel's birth was in sin." Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002), p. 52.

[4] Yoav Peled, “Blame the Government for Israeli Deaths,” Los Angeles Times, September 12, 1997.

[5] For a photograph, see http://www.nevegordon.blogspot.com/.

[6] See http://www.festival-cannes.com/news_archive.php?langue=6002&actu=2825&retour=index.php.

[7] See http://www.wmm.com/catalog/press/myterr_presskit.pdf.

[8] Orit Shohat, “Throwing the book at Tali Fahima,” Ha’aretz, December 30, 2004, http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/objects/pages/PrintArticleEn.jhtml?itemNo=521424.

[9] “Uri Avnery To Act As Human Shield for Arafat,” Gush Shalom (Peace Bloc) Press Release, September 14, 2003, http://www.countercurrents.org/pa-avnery150903.htm. One of Avnery’s books is titled Israel Without Zionists.

[10] Yehudith Harel, “One or Two States—Return or Not?” Academic Left Mailing List of Haifa University, July 17, 2003, http://www.one-state.org/articles/2003/harel2.htm.

Myles Kantor is a columnist for FrontPageMagazine.com and editor-at-large for Pureplay Press, which publishes books about Cuban history and culture. His e-mail address is myles.kantor@gmail.com.