In a number of countries, campuses have become one of the prime battlefields against Israel.1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 This is partly related to many other problematic characteristics of contemporary academia. Academic freedom in many places is abused so extensively that new standards are required.

The prevailing concept in the past was that academic freedom fosters knowledge and through it, science advances. Nowadays one can investigate a number of universities where the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is taught, for instance. One can then check the literature list given to the students and re- cord what is said by the teachers in the classes. In the United States, one could start with some of the campuses of the University of California, which have particularly bad reputations because of numerous incidents of anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism there.

One is likely to discover from time to time that the so-called knowledge taught about the Middle East includes propaganda, sometimes even mixed with hatred. This reflects a larger reality. One then understands that academia cannot be fully self-governing, though it will fight tooth-and-nail to retain its privileges. There are many indications that in several countries attitudes toward Israel have become a sensor of what is wrong with academia at large.

Going Back Decades

 There had already been anti-Israeli manifestations at universities almost fifty years ago. For instance, in 1969 left-wing students verbally attacked Asher ben Nathan, Israel’s first ambassador to Germany. When he was shouted down at Frankfurt University by the left-wing alliance, it was a portent of what would happen many years later. The aggressors at that time were a mixture of Ger- mans, Palestinians, and Israelis. When Ben Nathan spoke in Munich in 1969, a poster in the auditorium proclaimed, “Only when bombs explode in 50 supermarkets in Israel will there be peace.”10

Years later, the vice-chancellor of Hebrew University addressed a meeting at Kiel University in Germany. Before his arrival, a left-wing group distributed a leaflet with the slogan “Beat Zionists dead, make the Near East red.”11

Major anti-Zionist activities also took place at British universities decades ago. Wistrich says:

In the 1970s . . . I wrote my doctorate at University College, London. The campus war had heated up and was at full blast in 1975 after the UN “Zionism is racism” resolution. There were efforts to ban all Jewish societies on British campuses. This was stopped by a militant and determined campaign. The time was not yet ripe for the brazen anti-Semitism of the kind we find today in Britain and much of Europe, but it was certainly there beneath the surface.12

The Current Century

A major campaign against Israeli universities began in the current century and developed in many places. It was initiated in Britain by two British professors, Steven Rose (who is Jewish) and his wife Hillary. In April 2002, an open letter appeared in The Guardian that gained signatures from scholars in various countries. It called for a moratorium on all cultural links with Israel at European or national levels, until the Israeli government abided by UN resolutions and opened “serious” peace negotiations with the Palestinians.13

Since then many attempts to discriminate against Israel, its academic institutions, and its scholars have been made in several Western countries. Initiatives have multiplied in recent years. Campaigns frequently employ anti- Semitic motifs and sometimes also involve violent anti-Semitic acts. Although the phenomena on campus are heterogeneous, assailants mainly come from two specific segments of the academic world: the extreme left and Muslims.

It is often difficult to get a clear view of widely dispersed, multifaceted phenomena. Academic measures against Israel involve many countries, each with its own peculiarities as far as academia’s functioning and organization are concerned. The process of defaming and demonizing Israel has many aspects, as do reactions to it by administrators, faculty, students, and nonacademic bodies and individuals.14

The Portfolio of Anti-Israeli Activities

Anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic activities in academia take the form of biased teaching, initiatives for divesting Israeli securities by university funds, discrimination against Jews identifying with Israel and sometimes classic anti-Semitic acts, proposals to cut ties with and boycott Israeli universities, ostracizing Israeli academics, refusing to publish or review Israeli academic papers, hampering the careers of pro-Israeli scholars, and so forth. Several of these campaigns have strong anti-Semitic motifs. Many actions are initiated by university lecturers.

Such initiatives recur on a number of campuses in certain countries. Among the main ones are Britain, Canada, and the United States. Anti-Israeli educators often cluster within certain disciplines worldwide, some of which are Middle Eastern studies and linguistics.15

There are also academic whitewashers of hatred. In Sweden, for example, Ahmed Rami, the man behind Radio Islam, was convicted of hate crimes be- cause of the anti-Semitic content of his broadcasts in 1989 and again in a court of appeals. Nevertheless, influential journalists and politicians supported him and even denied or exculpated his anti-Semitism.16 Jan Bergman, professor of theology at Uppsala University, testified in Rami’s defense and claimed among other things that for Jews it was indeed a religious duty to kill Gentiles.17

Extreme  Examples

There are many extreme examples of Israel-hate promoted by academics in several countries. In Italy, National Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27 is often abused by left-wing academics for anti-Israeli hate-mongering.

Italian journalist Angelo Pezzana says:

Marking the 27th of January as a day of remembrance has turned it into a national event where everyone can express his opinion, however miserable. The latter happens mostly in schools. Meetings are held with hundreds of students present where extreme leftist professors are invited to speak. They present the Shoah in a distorted way. This leads thereafter to a public debate usually linking the crimes of the Nazis to Israeli policies.

These hate preachers are so verbally violent that moderates can not state their opinions. I have participated in a number of these meetings. The horrific past was quickly forgotten in order to express hatred of Israel. The most recurrent sentence was, “Israel is doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to the Jews.”18

In a 2007 essay, Alan Goldschläger noted that Canadian “universities do not object when the very legitimacy of the existence of the Jewish state is rejected, as has been the case during Israel Apartheid Week events held in 2006 on campuses in Toronto, Kitchener, Waterloo and Montreal.”19

Goldschläger also quoted an email from Michael Neumann, a Jewish professor of philosophy at Trent University in Ontario, who wrote that his sole concern was to “help the Palestinians.” Neumann continued:

I am not interested in the truth, or justice, or understanding, or anything else, except so far as it serves that purpose . . . If an effective strategy means that some truths about the Jews don’t come to light, I don’t care. If an effective strategy means encouraging reasonable anti-Semitism, or reasonable hostility to Jews, I also don’t care. If it means encouraging vicious racist anti-Semitism, or the destruction of the State of Israel, I still don’t care.20

It was a blatant example of how deceitful the concept of academic freedom has become.

The medical journal The Lancet gave a platform to a number of anti-Israeli inciters during Protective Edge. It published a letter by doctors, including Mads Gilbert, who claimed that Israel had created a false state of emergency to “masquerade a massacre” of the Gazan people, particularly civilians. Additionally, they accused Israeli academics of complicity in the massacre because only 5 percent of Israeli academics signed an appeal to the Israeli government to cease military operations in Gaza.21 The letter made no mention of Hamas’s atrocities.

Violence

As far as threats of violence are concerned, in February 2009 Jewish students at York University in Toronto—which has gotten an increasingly bad name as a center of campus anti-Semitism—were forced to fl e to the Hillel office after they had participated in a press conference. Anti-Israeli protesters banged on the doors chanting “Die bitch go back to Israel” and “Die Jew get the hell off campus.”22

A few months later, an anti-Israeli propaganda conference called “Models of Statehood in Israel/Palestine” took place at the same university. Speakers demonized Israel. Dr. Na’ama Carmi from Israel, who gave a talk, said that “anyone who challenged the Palestinian perspective was intimidated or even labeled a racist . . . At times, those presenting a different view were subject to abuse and ridicule.” She added: “Never before in my whole academic career have I encountered the rudeness that I experienced at this conference.”23 This is just one example of academia as a tilted playing field in the battle of ideas, or, less politically correct: academia as a provider for hate promotion.

Support for terrorism was on display at the University of Toronto in 2005. A former student, Avi Weinryb, recounted: “A mock refugee camp constructed in the school’s Sydney Smith Hall foyer was adorned with Arabic language posters calling on camp residents to support or join the terror group Islamic Jihad. This group had been banned by the government of Canada in November of 2002.”24 Outright incitement to murder occurred at the same university in 2002. As mentioned earlier, Ted Honderich, a Canadian-born philosophy professor at University College in London, gave a lecture at the University of Toronto. In it he said the Palestinians had a moral right to blow up Jews, and even encouraged them to do so.25

At one point Concordia University in Montreal also became known abroad for physical violence against Jews on campus. In an incident that reached the international media, in September 2002 then former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was scheduled to speak there, but the event had to be canceled.26

Recommendations of the CPCCA Inquiry Panel

The Inquiry Panel of the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Anti-Semitism (CPCCA) devoted much attention to anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism on campus as it saw this as a major problem. It concluded:

Universities have a responsibility to uphold the rights to free and critical academic inquiry and to free political expression that have so long been a feature of the university experience. The Inquiry Panel recognizes that by doing so, universities serve the broader polity through the introduction of new ideas and theories concerning the world around us. However, the Inquiry Panel also concludes that these rights must be balanced with the responsibility of ensuring academic rigour in both research and teaching and with the provision of a learning environment in which all students feel safe and accepted and able to focus on their studies.27

The panel also presented recommendations for universities:

• First and foremost protect the safety of students by implementing and en- forcing strict student codes of conduct, which among other things, prohibit and enforce academic (or legal) penalties for harassment of other st They must also ensure that proper security and police are allowed to moni- tor events that have potential to turn violent;
• Designate certain “student spaces” on campus which should be reserved as a sanctuary from advocacy for various causes;
• Protect the equal right to freedom of speech for all students, by applying the same standards to both pro- and anti-Israel events and promoting academic discourse on campus;
• Exercise their own rights of free speech, and their responsibilities as academ ics by condemning discourse, events and speakers which are untrue, harmful, or not in the interest of academic discourse, including Israeli Apartheid Week;

• We recommend that student unions operate in the interest of the broad campus community;
• We recommend that the Federal Government and/or the Inquiry consider offering assistance sponsoring conferences and other similar initiatives, or the issuance of statements of principle to help combat hate on campus;
• We recommend that the Federal Government and/or the Inquiry work with the provinces to help administrators develop suitable tools and structures to deal with this burgeoning problem in an effective and principled manner;
• We recommend that students be permitted to opt-out of non-union organizations that take positions on partisan issues;
• We further recommend that when student fees are automatically directed to campus organizations, that students be able to opt-out of such fees on- line and prior to paying them, rather than in person and by way of refund;
• We recommend that university administrations support programs aimed at elevating the academic discourse surrounding contentious issues and fostering programs aimed at achieving real dialogue; and
• We recommend that professors be held accountable for academic rigour of their 28

Norway

In spring 2009, a group of lecturers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim called for an academic boycott of Israel.29 At the same university in April 2005, the student organization SIT, of which membership is obligatory, had declared a boycott of Israel that lasted close to a year.30 After the 2009 boycott call, NTNU launched a seminar on the Middle East.

It consisted of a series of six lectures over a few months. Three were presented by prominent anti-Israelis: the Israeli extremists Ilan Pappe and Moshe Zuckerman and the American scholar Stephen Walt. The other three lectures were by Norwegian anti-Israeli academics. The main organizers of the series had all signed the call for an academic boycott of Israel.

From an international perspective, the new element of anti-Israeli hate was that the seminar series received financial support from the university rector, Torbjørn Digernes. Never before had the top management of a university in the Western world supported a series of anti-Israeli propaganda lectures. This is yet another example of the pioneering of hatred that occurs in Norway.

Leslie Wagner, who has headed universities in the United Kingdom, wrote on Digernes’s blog:

Dear Rector, I write to you as a former vice chancellor (rector) of 2 British universities. That universities have meetings, lectures and debates which are one sided is unfortunate but not new. But that these activities take place under the patronage of the Rector is in my experience unprecedented. We must assume from this that you support the clear one-sided nature of the debate. In doing so you besmirch the name of your university, and its reputation for scientific objectivity. The international academic community is aware of your activities and is watching carefully. I understand that further anti-Israel actions are being considered, and I urge to think very carefully before you completely obliterate whatever international reputation Trondheim currently enjoys.31

During the lecture series, the NTNU board decided to discuss a proposal brought to it for the boycott of Israeli academia. This request was condemned by leading academic and other bodies abroad. Later, articles opposing the boycott appeared in leading Norwegian newspapers. Under this pressure the Norwegian government came out against the boycott, after which the board unanimously voted against the proposal.32

Biased Teaching

In several academic fields there is major anti-Israeli bias in teaching. One example is Middle Eastern studies in the United States. The field of Palestinian studies has expanded disproportionately to its academic relevance. Thanks to scholars’ bias, there are taboo subjects that are never studied in the framework of Middle Eastern studies, including both Palestinian and Al-Qaeda terrorism. Martin Kramer, then at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University, played a major role in exposing distor- tions in Middle Eastern studies in the United States. The tragedy of academia, he asserted, is that it has become home to countless people whose mission is to prove the lie that “Zionism is colonialism.” Research is undertaken, books are written, and lectures are presented to establish this falsehood.33

In his 2001 book Ivory Towers on Sand, Kramer concluded that since the 1980s, American academic centers in Middle Eastern studies had been factories of error.34 Scholars in this field were so biased that they failed to analyze or forecast all major developments in the Middle East. He pointed out that had one relied only on the analyses of academics, one would not have anticipated the emergence of Al-Qaeda or the possibility of an event such as 9/11. Kramer described the situation as even graver in light of the discipline’s heavy funding by the U.S. government.35

American Boycotts

In 2013, three associations of American academic teachers decided to cut ties with Israeli academic institutions. One of them was the American Studies Association (ASA). Although it voted in December 2013 to boycott Israel, the motion was supported by less than a quarter of its members. The organiza- tion said that 1,252 of its approximately 5,000 members had cast electronic ballots over the last several days, a rate of participation it termed an all-time high. Sixty-six percent of the voters favored the boycott.36 Among the many reactions was a letter to the ASA by the Israeli NGO Shurat Hadin threaten- ing legal action.37

The ASA boycott was preceded by that of the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) from May 2013. Only 10 percent of the AAAS membership was present for the vote, but protest was minimal compared to the ASA boycott vote. Using false moral equivalence between Israel and apartheid-era South Africa, the AAAS said American civil-society organizations had to boycott Israel because of the United States’ ongoing ignorance of “illegal actions of Israel with respect to the Palestinians’ right to education,” while offering no specific examples.38

In an open letter on December 15, 2013, the Native American and Indig- enous Studies Association (NAISA) also announced a boycott of Israel. Like the ASA and the AAAS, the NAISA declared that it would boycott Israeli academic institutions. Their open letter drew false parallels between the discrimination of Palestinians by Israel and the historical plight of Native Americans.39

The AMCHA Initiative

One of the most active fighters against the academic boycott of Israel has been Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, a lecturer in Hebrew at the University of California Santa Cruz. She is a founder of the AMCHA Initiative.

AMCHA has understood that a first step toward fighting the anti-Israelis on campus is to compile their names. In September 2014, AMCHA published a list of 218 professors who identify themselves as Middle East scholars and call for the academic boycott of Israel.

In the same vein, University of California Los Angeles emeritus professor Leila Beckwith explained how detrimental professors who engage in boycotting are to academic freedom:

It’s bad enough that these professors have revealed themselves to be wildly biased against one, and only one, Middle Eastern country. Even more troubling, however, is the fact that many of these patently biased boycotters of Israel are affiliated with government-designated, taxpayer-funded National Resource Centers (NRC) on their campuses. Clearly NRC-affiliated faculty who have publicly vilified Israel and committed themselves to refusing “to collaborate on projects and events involving Israeli institutions” have violated both the letter and spirit of the federal law which funds their teaching and research.40

Israel and the Jews as Sensors of Academic Decay

Israel as well as the Jews can often serve as sensors of both the moral and professional decay in many ways. One place where that is particularly clear is in the academic world. Examples are numerous. Within the framework of academic freedom, any absurdity including conspiracy theories can be proclaimed by seemingly respectable scholars.

Some remarks by the Norwegian scholar Johan Galtung provide an illustration. Galtung is considered one of the founders of a discipline called “Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution.” He also established the International Peace Institute in Oslo.

After the Breivik murders in 2011, Galtung claimed there was a possible connection between this killer and the Israeli Mossad. He said, “I consider the Mossad highly unlikely, but it is illegitimate to eliminate it as a hypothesis with no evidence.” In line with such an absurd approach, one can claim a possible connection between Galtung’s own institute and the murderer, or the Norwe- gian government and Breivik, as there is no evidence to the contrary.

Galtung, a part-time anti-Semite, claimed that the murderer had ties to the Freemasons organization, which had Jewish origins. On other occasions, he said one of the factors behind the anti-Semitic sentiment that led to Auschwitz was that Jews had influence in German society. One might as well say that the far larger influence of the trade union in Norway could lead to the extermina- tion of trade union members.

Galtung also held a discussion on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, probably the best-known anti-Semitic forgery. According to Galtung, “It is hard to believe that the Russian secret police were able to be so specific.” In a corre- spondence with Haaretz, he later toned down his remarks and wrote, “I don’t know exactly who wrote The Protocols.”41

This author has provided a far more detailed analysis of anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism on campus in the book Academics against Israel and the Jews.42

Notes

1. Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, “Anti-Zionism and the Abuse of Academic Freedom: A Case Study at the University of California, Santa Cruz,” Post-Holocaust and Anti-Semitism, 77, February 1, 2009.
2. Manfred Gerstenfeld, “2007-2008: Another Year of Global Academic Anti-Semitism and Anti-Israelism,” Post-Holocaust and Anti-Semitism, 73, October 1, 2008.
3. Manfred Gerstenfeld, “Recent Developments on the Academic Boycott: A Case Study,” Post-Holocaust and Anti-Semitism, 61, October 1, 2007.
4. Manfred Gerstenfeld, “How to Fight Anti-Israeli Campaigns on Campus,” Post– Holocaust and Anti-Semitism, 51, December 1, 2006.
5. Ronnie Fraser, “The Academic Boycott of Israel: Why Britain?,” Post-Holocaust and Anti-Semitism, 36, September 1, 2005.
6. Yves Pallade, “New Anti-Semitism in Contemporary German Academia,” Jewish Political Studies Review 21, 1-2 (Spring 2009): 33-62.
7. Avi Weinryb, “The University of Toronto: The Institution where Israel Apartheid Week was Born,” Jewish Political Studies Review 20, 3-4 (Fall 2008): 107-117.
8. Alain Goldschläger, “The Canadian Campus Scene,” in Manfred Gerstenfeld, ed., Academics against Israel and the Jews (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 2007).
9. Corinne Berzon, “Anti-Israeli Activity at Concordia University 2000-2003,” in Manfred Gerstenfeld, , Academics against Israel and the Jews (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 2007).
10. Wolfgang Kraushaar, Die Bombe im Judischen Gemeindehaus (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition HIS), 2005, 86-104. (German)
11. Gerd Langguth, “Anti-Israel Extremism in West Germany,” in Robert Wistrich, ed., The Left against Zion: Communism, Israel and the Middle East (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1979), 257.
12. Manfred Gerstenfeld, interview with Robert Wistrich, “Anti-Semitism Embedded in British Culture,” Post-Holocaust and Anti-Semitism, 70, July 1, 2008.
13. “Protest against Call for European Boycott of Academic and Cultural Ties with Israel,” original press release, The Guardian, April 6, 2002.
14. Manfred Gerstenfeld, Academics against Israel and the Jews (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 2007).
15. Ibid. The second edition can be read for free at: http://jcpa.org/book/academics- against-israel-and-the-jews.
16. See, e.g., Dennis Zachrisson, FiB-Kulturfront, 16, 1988 (Swedish); Claes-Adam Wachtmeister, Expressen, September 26, 1990 (Swedish); Sven Öste, Dagens Nyheter, September 23, 1990 (Swedish).
17. Per Ahlmark, Vänstern och tyranniet: Det galna kvartseeklet (Stockholm: Timbro, 1994), 24 (Swedish)
18. Manfred Gerstenfeld, interview with Angelo Pezzana, “Anti-Israeli Italians Abuse Holocaust Memory,” in Demonizing Israel and the Jews (New York: RVP Press, 2013), 107-109.
19. Goldschläger, “Canadian Campus Scene,” 154.
20. Ibid., 156-157 (source: as documented in the archives of the League for Human Rights of B’nai Brith Canada).
21. Paola Manduca et , “An open letter for the people in Gaza,” The Lancet, August 2, 2014.
22. Tori Cheifetz, “Jewish Students ‘Held Hostage’ in Toronto Hillel,” The Jerusalem Post, February 15, 2009.
23. Na’ama Carmi, “Middle East Conference Anything but Academic,” Toronto Star, June 30, 2009.
24. Weinryb, “University of Toronto,” 113.
25. Jonathan Kay, “Hating Israel Is Part of Campus Culture,” National Post, September 25, 2002.
26. See Corinne Berzon, “Anti-Israeli Activity at Concordia University 2000-2003,” in Manfred Gerstenfeld, , Academics against Israel and the Jews (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 2007), 163-173.
27. Report of the Inquiry Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Anti-Semitism, July 7, 2011, 60.
28.  Ibid., 61-62.
29. akademiskboikott.no/opprop-mainmenu-34/14-oppropet/54.
30. Yael Beck, personal communication.
31. Quoted in Manfred Gerstenfeld, Antisemittismen I Norge (Bergen: Norge IDAG, 2010), 14 (Norwegian)
32. Cnaan Lipshiz, “Norway University Rebuffs Motion for Israel Boycott,” Haaretz, November 13, 2009.
33. Martin Kramer, “Is Zionism Colonialism? The Root Lie,” Post-Holocaust and Anti-Semitism, 35, August 1, 2005.
34. Martin Kramer, Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America (Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2001).
35. martinkramer.org.
36. Yarden Skop, “U.S. academic group votes to boycott Israel,” Haaretz, December 16, 2013.
37. Yonah Jeremy Bob, “NGO threatens to sue US academic boycott group which boycotts Israel,” The Jerusalem Post, January 9, 2014.
38. Mary Yu Danico, “Official Statement Regarding the Resolution,” Association for Asian American Studies, May 3, 2013.
39. Council of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, “Declaration of Support for the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions,” NAISA, December 15, 2013.
40. “AMCHA Posts List of Anti-Israel Professors,” AMCHA Initiative, September 3, 2014.
41. Ofer Aderet, “Pioneer of global peace studies hints at link between Norway massacre and Mossad,” Haaretz, April 30, 2012.
42. Manfred Gerstenfeld,, Academics against Israel and the Jews (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 2007).