Addressing anti-Israel sentiment through educational reform - opinion

Columbia University advertised an event where the participants will be pondering “What does Gaza teach us about the relationship between media and the politics of annihilation?” It was part of an evening, themed “Encountering Atrocity,” and organized by the Center for Palestine Studies. Moreover, it was co-sponsored by The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities as part of a learning of “emergent media ecology.”

At the University of California at Berkeley, there’s a new endowed program in Palestinian and Arab Studies. It will teach the modern history of Palestine and the Palestinian people. The program will “allow students and faculty to connect Palestinian history more deeply with related fields such as Indigenous, Latinx, and Black studies.” A $3.25 million gift by anonymous donors led to the program’s establishment as well as the May Ziadeh Chair. Moreover, the university contributed $500,000 from its own funds to student-facing activities, scholarships, and conferences.

At Whittier College, students are being offered a new “Special Topics” course this fall semester, “Palestine in Context: Apartheid.” At New Mexico State, the Department of Borderlands and Ethnic Studies offers Palestine Studies courses that “explore Palestinians’ history of resistance and struggle towards their right of return and justice in a settler colonial context.” 

At the University of Michigan (U-M), Assistant Prof. Yarden Katz’s fields of study include imperialism, white supremacy, and racial capitalism. His website carries the slogans “Stop the Genocide!” and “Free Palestine, from the River to the Sea,” as well as a list of his articles, including several at the vicious anti-Zionist Mondoweiss site, such as “Are Israelis Jews? Returning to Jewish minority life.”

As many observers have noted, the problem with the eruption of the recent anti-Israel protests – which slides seamlessly into anti-Jewish menacing violence, as witnessed by the assault near the U-M Jewish Resource Center last week – has been the involvement of many faculty persons in reframing the notion of Palestine.

The writer Paul Berman posits that among today’s academia, especially in the humanities, the prevailing climate of opinion shuns complexities and nuances and supports the reduction of Jews to statelessness. Jews are depicted as “Nazis” and “colonists.” Hamas, on the other hand, is only involved in resistance and self-defense.

Not only have they been encouraging the protesters, canceling classes so they can participate in demonstrations, but more importantly, they have been providing them with a false and perverse education that carries them off to the marches, encampments, and sit-ins. They even defend some of the violence on behalf of their students.

CUNY Hillel executive director Ilya Bratam was quoted in Tablet as saying, “Academia has been lost... Today, the teachers believe their job is indoctrination... The faculty is the scariest entity in this struggle… faculty are the troublemakers.” There is a need to go to the heart of academia: the educational content and its framing.

What then is required, obviously, are alternative curriculum options with a more comprehensive outline of the Jewish history of the Land of Israel: one with more depth, one with more facts, one with more truth.

For example, at the University of Maryland, the basic course “Selected Topics in Israel Studies” is a study of Zionism and contemporary Israel “from the 1880s to the present.” At Berkeley, the course “History of Modern Israel: From the Emergence of Zionism to Our Time” explores “Zionism and Israel from its roots in the nineteenth century.” Over at Manchester University, the introductory course is “The History and Sociopolitics of Palestine/Israel (1882-1967).” The lecturers are almost all Jews in many scores of similar courses; many are Israelis who have abandoned their country.

This framework undermines the facts of Zionism, the chronicles of the Jewish people, and the history of the Land of Israel. Worse, it plays right into the anti-Zionist narrative, adopting the pro-Palestine voices that Zionism is but a modern phenomenon, a response to antisemitism, which was European and not Middle Eastern and, therefore, is foreign and inauthentic. Palestine 101 will win out every semester.

One response to this unfortunate reality is to create, at the first stage, a college-level course curriculum – the real thing. A description and introduction, motivating questions and topics, outline, assignments, readings, schedule and technical requirements.

The emphases should be, among others, the concept of the “Return to Zion” in Jewish sources and history; the centrality of the Land in Biblical, Talmudic and later Rabbinical writings, with references to religious, cultural and literary frames; the phenomenon of “false messiahs”; the continuum of the Jewish presence in the Land of Israel from 135-1880; as well as the charity emissaries who collected monies for the upkeep of the Jewish communities in Eretz Yisrael from Babylon to the Antilles to North America.

We cannot allow the continuation of what George Orwell described in the fifth chapter of his novel 1984: that our records be falsified, our books rewritten, dates altered: a literal “stopping of history” and the abolishing of the past. We cannot allow ourselves to be made victims of the purposeful eradication of our own footprint.

There are many Jewish foundations that could become involved. The Jewish Agency’s educational units should be a part. Yad Ben-Tzvi and the Zalman Shazar Center have readily available material. There will be a need for translations from Hebrew. There are new developments as well underway such as the George Blumenthal-sponsored website, Israel Archaeological Project documenting 3,500 years of Israelite presence in the Promised Land. As this is an intellectual effort, it really should not be that difficult.

What could be a problem is the lack of determination or elements of an inferiority complex as well as a lack of assertiveness. We need to proudly get out the truth about Jews, their national identity, and their relation with their homeland over the last 1800 years, and more.

The writer is a researcher, analyst, and opinion commentator on political, cultural, and media issues.