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32INTELLECTUALS’ FREEDOM AND THE LACK OF INTELLECTUALS’ ACCOUNTABILITY: ISRAELI CASE IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE
Alek Epstein1
Some ideas are so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.
George Orwell
At the end of the 1980s Paul Johnson published a book entitled Intellectuals, which, despite its being concise, has become probably the most detailed bill of indictment against this group of “social critics” and “social innovators”. Describing the intellectuals’ public roles, Johnson was very far from accepting a popular thesis that - quoting Edward Said – “the figure of the intellectual as a being set apart, someone able to speak the truth, a courageous and angry individual for whom no worldly power is too big and imposing to be criticized” [1]. Quite the contrary: Johnson argued that self-mobilized intellectuals, in general, and university professors, in particular, were among the most faithful adherents of some of the worst totalitarian powers; and that their attitudes towards the principles of humanism and liberalism were negative in most countries in most periods of the recent history. According to Johnson,
“The association of intellectuals with violence occurs too often to be dismissed as an aberration. Often it takes the form of admiring those ‘men of action’ who practice violence. Mussolini had an astonishing number of intellectual followers, by no means all of them Italian. In his ascent to power, Hitler consistently was most successful on the campus, his electoral appeal to students regularly outstripping his performance among the population as a whole. He always performed well among teachers and university professors. Many intellectuals were drawn into the higher echelons of the Nazi Party and participated in the more gruesome excesses of the SS. ... Stalin, too, had legions of intellectual admirers in his time, as did such post-war men of violence as Castro, Nasser and Mao Tse-tung” [2].
1 Department of Sociology, Political Science and Communication, The Open University of Israel
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Truly speaking, Paul Johnson was not the first one to draw an attention to some intellectuals’ fascination for the darkest regimes of the twentieth century. For example, in 1946 Max Weinreich published pioneer research entitled Hitler’s Professors, in which he emphasized that “German scholars, who as a rule already in the Second Reich had done their best to foster German imperialism, from the end of World War I supplied Nazism with the ideological weapons which any movement, but particularly a German movement, needs for its success” [3]. Later Joachim Fest included in his book The Face of The Third Reich, published in 1970, a chapter entitled “‘Professor NSDAP’: The Intellectuals and National Socialism”, reminding that as early as 3rd March 1933 three hundred university teachers of all political persuasions declared themselves for Hitler in an election appeal, while the mass of students had gone over to the National Socialist camp considerably earlier. Moreover, already in 1931 the Nazi party, with 50 to 60 per cent of the votes, enjoyed almost twice as much support in the universities as in the country as a whole. The dominant influence of rightist tendencies was as evident among the teaching staff as in the selfgoverning student body, which was largely controlled by the Union of National Socialist German Students (NSDStB). In April 1933 German university students, long prone to anti-Semitism and needing little prompting from above, pushed ahead with various actions against both Jewish students and professors [4]. In May 1933 a collective declaration of support for the new regime was made by the professors. Professor Ernst Storm, later Rector of the Berlin Technical University, held up Hitler in his role as Supreme Commander of the Nazi party Sturmabteilung [“Storm Division”, SA] and Chief of Staff Ernst Rohm as models “for every German university lecturer” [5, p. 257]. While the idea of scientific objectivity - in Hitler’s view a “slogan coined by the professors simply in order to escape from the necessary supervision by the power of the state” - was damned in a flood of directives and pamphlets as a symptom of a bourgeois-liberal epoch, the historians, for example, found themselves called upon “to see German history only with German eyes, with the eyes of the blood”; on the 550-year jubilee of Heidelberg University, the Nobel Prize winner Philipp Lenard issued his unspeakable views on “Aryan physics”; Professor Walter Poppelreuther glorified Hitler as a “scientific psychologist”; and Professor Reinhard Hohn elevated the concept of the national community “to the fundamental principle of science” [5, p. 257]. Sometimes prominent German intellectuals were unable to make distinctions between democracy and dictatorship. For example, in 1942 Martin Heidegger had written: “Bolshevism is only a variety of Americanism” [6].
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Heidegger’s hostility towards Bolshevism was relatively unique phenomenon; as we all know, over the past century many influential Western intellectuals became addicted, to a greater or lesser degree, to Marxism and even to Marxism-Leninism. Why did the overwhelming majority of intellectuals all over the world become seduced by the communist fantasy? How could so many defend even Stalin himself, deny his crimes or explain them away? The sentence “I have seen the future and it works” is attributed to Walter Duranty, a New York Timess Moscow correspondent from 1921 to 1934, who won the Pulitzer for a 1931 series of reports about Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s five-year plans to reform the economy. His stories appeared in the New York Times before the Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933, which left 5 million to 10 million dead. Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China and Cuba by Paul Hollander and A Better World. Stalinism and the American Intellectuals by William L. O’Neil provide amazing accounts of how the Western intellectuals embraced Marxist tyrants at the very moment their colleagues were rotting in prison cells, and the common people everyone claimed to be concerned for, were starving. These books report how cultural and religious leaders from the West (some of them being famous public figures), visited the Soviet Union (as well as China, Cuba, and other communist countries), and told the most appalling lies to flatter their hosts and express their contempt for Western society [7]. In course of these trips, the Western leftist intellectuals invariably found a future of prosperity, freedom, and justice for all, and developed incredible blindness to terror, starvation, and despotism of all sorts, dismissing it as necessary to block the work of evil dead-enders.
Many academics became firm believers in a large array of falsehoods about the Marxist states, in particular the Soviet Union. As mentioned by Robert Conquest,
“academics were not the only ones who were grossly and fundamentally deceived about both the facts and the motivations of the Stalin and post-Stalin regimes in the USSR, but still, the academics may in the long run have been the most influential in peddling falsehood, if only from their particular claim to special knowledge and to the disinterested pursuit of truth – and also from the fact that politicians, media, and public took this claim seriously, and each ill-informed politico or editor maintained a supposed expert to support his own preconceived opinions: a phenomenon not yet extinct. It was in the 1930s, just when the Soviet system was in its very worst phase, that major validation of the enormous set of falsifications with which this was concealed came for the first time from Western academics of the highest standing” [8].
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This attitude can be understood only against a background of complex motivations connected with the position and function of intellectuals in the modern society, which explain their susceptibility to totalitarian solutions. Among these motivations are the ambivalent attitude of intellectuals towards power and their tendency to embrace utopian systems or ideological concepts per se.
National Socialism, as well as Stalinism and Maoism, laid bare phenomena of which the movement itself was in turn only a symptom: the most consistent expression in the field of political power groupings of a multiplicity of pseudo-religious longings, a need for fundamental certainty, intellectual discontent, and impulses to escape from practical intellectual activity into the more hospitable semi-darkness of substitute metaphysical realms. These motivations in turn were permeated by the longing of the intellectual, isolated in his world of letters, for solidarity with the masses, for a share in their unthinking vitality and closeness to nature, but also in their force and historical effectiveness as expressed in the myth of the national community [5, p.250].
Unfortunately, no one has systematically analyzed the association of Israeli intellectuals with various totalitarian ideologies. Even Paul Johnson, the author of the highly acclaimed A History of the Jews, in the book on Intellectuals did not discuss the situation within the academic field in the Jewish state; moreover, the word “Israel” itself did not appear in this volume. However, it seems that his (and the other aforementioned researchers’) general conclusions have been relevant in case of some Israeli prominent university intellectuals to a no lesser extent than of their Western comrades. Since such research has not been conducted yet1, I would like to share some thoughts regarding this issue with the conference participants.
For the recent decades hundreds of Israeli academics have published articles and signed petitions in support of the Palestinian Arabs’ right to self-determination2. Dozens of Israeli intellectuals have also been defending the Palestinian Arabs’ “right of return”. Unfortunately, some of the most famous Israeli intellectuals did not grant the same rights to the Jews of Palestine/Eretz-Israel.
1 Probably there exists only a single pioneer attempt of such study, which is, unfortunately, neither systematic, nor scrupulous for the detail; see Edward Alexander, “Israeli Intellectuals and Israeli Politics”, Nativ. A Journal of Politics and the Arts, no. 87—88 (September 2002) and http://www.freeman.org/m_online/jan97/alxandr.htm.
2 Probably the first of them was Professor Jacob Talmon, who published in 1969 an open letter to the Minister of Information Y. Galili entitled “Self-Determination for Palestinian Arabs”; see Jewish Liberation Journal (November— December 1969).
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Some Israeli scholars go even further, blaming Israel for Palestinian Arabs’ terror attacks. Baruch Kimmerling, an eminent professor of sociology from the Hebrew University, remarked, for example, that
“The Israeli conditions [to the Road map peace plan] are based on an incorrect perception of the causality and logic of the conflict - the presumption that the root of the violence lies in ‘Palestinian terrorism’, rather than in Israel’s generation-long occupation and illegal colonization of Palestinian lands and its exploitation and harassment of the entire people” [9].
Professor Tanya Reinhart from Tel-Aviv University draws the same line of argument:
“Israel’s persecution of the Palestinian people is not war against terror. The Palestinian suicidal terror has a simple solution - get out of the territories and give the Palestinians reasons to live. The war against the Palestinians is over the ‘Promised Land’ of Sharon, the army and the settlers. In this kind of war, one needs to lie constantly...” [10].
Answering his own question “Where is the Palestinian Gandhi?”, Dr. Ran HaCohen from Tel-Aviv University’s Poetics and Comparative Literature Department, expressed a very similar opinion. His words are unequivocal:
“The problem is the perpetrators, not the victims: it’s Israel, not the Palestinians. The Palestinians don’t have to watch the Gandhi film. They fought the First Intifada with stones (1987-1993) and were answered with Israeli bullets. They fought the Second Intifada (2000-2004) with weapons and were answered with Israeli tanks, Caterpillar bulldozers, and airplanes” [11].
The late Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903-1994) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem reached an analogous conclusion already in the beginning of the first Intifada:
“We use the term ‘terrorism’ to describe the acts of the Palestinian people, and call their fighters ‘terrorists’. But our rule over a resistant people could not persist were it not for the use of means which are considered to constitute war crimes throughout the world - and even plain criminal acts. We do not view these acts as terrorism; they are considered to be policy because they are implemented by a legal government and a state arm. ‘Aberrant acts’ by necessity become the norm because, far from being a side effect of an occupation regime, they are its essence” [12].
These (and other) authors’ point of view is unambiguous: there is no Arab terrorism; the whole phenomenon should be re-framed. They argue that there exists only relatively moderate and understandable protest to Israeli occupation, exploita-
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tion and harassment of the Palestinian people.
Let us consider historical evidence, related to the period long before the establishment of the independent State of Israel, long before Israel acquired or produced its own tanks or airplanes – let us remember the days of the British Mandate. On August 23, 1929, the local Arabs devastated the Jewish community by perpetrating a vicious, large-scale, organized pogrom. According to the Encyclopedia Judaica, “The assault was well planned and its aim was well defined: the elimination of the Jewish settlement of Hebron. The rioters did not spare women, children, or the aged; the British gave passive assent. Sixty-seven were killed, 60 wounded, the community was destroyed, synagogues razed, and Torah scrolls burned”.
In light of the stances taken by some Israeli professors at present, one might wonder what the leading Hebrew University professors had to say on this matter in those days. One can suppose that at least in that case they would have blamed the Palestinian Arabs for the terrorist massacre and demanded from the (British) authorities to defend the Jewish community’s rights. Yet the response of some of them was completely different from the reaction one could have expected. Just a few months later, on March 1930, Akiva Ernst Simon, Martin Buber’s most faithful student and biographer, who later became Professor of Education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, demanded from the Jewish Agency a declaration that Jews would be willing to remain a permanent minority in a bi-national state in order to pave the way to an agreement with the Palestinian Arabs. In his memorandum, dated March 12, 1930, Simon proposed some radical concessions to be made:
“The Administrative Committee of the Jewish Agency should therefore turn to the Arab people with this solemn declaration that the Jewish Agency is striving for nothing but the creation in Palestine of a cultural Jewish minority, governing itself... For us it would safeguard immigration within the limits of our minority goal” [13, pp. 53-54].
Simon argued that “the Jews [should] renounce the plan of developing a majority” [13, p. 54]. As a reply to the Hebron massacre and the Arab riots in some other locations (during the week of riots, 133 Jews were killed and 339 wounded) Akiva Ernst Simon demanded from the Jewish leaders to abandon both the Jewish right of return to Palestine/Eretz-Israel, granted by the Balfour Declaration, and their right to political self-determination [14].
Furthermore, it is widely known that Judah L. Magnes, who was the founding president of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, opposed the creation of a Jewish state, being the most consistent advocate of a bi-national solution. After the
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1929 riots Magnes repeatedly demanded immediate Zionist concessions to the Arabs. He called upon the Yishuv to suppress the anger generated by the murderous pogroms and to overcome the disappointment from the fact that non even a single Arab leader was prepared to condemn them. Despite the continuing violence perpetrated under the direction of the Arab leadership, Magnes did not desist from demanding the adoption of a pacifist policy, even at the expense of securing Zionist objectives [15].
It was on August 11, 1942, at the first meeting of the Executive Committee of “Ichud” [“Union”] organization, that Magnes stated that “Jews and Judaism can and will exist in the Diaspora, with or without the Jewish state in Palestine/Eretz-Israel” [13, p, 259; 16]. Magnes made this statement seven months after the Wannsee Conference, at which the Nazis had discussed what they called “the Final Solution of the Jewish question”. Indeed, one could argue that Magnes and the other members of the ‘Ichud’ association, most of them professors of the Jewish-German origin, such as Martin Buber and Ernst Simon, still did not know a lot about the annihilation of the European Jewry. The information that the European Jews had become a subject to systematic murder was officially published in Palestine/Eretz-Israel for the first time on November 23, 1942. This information was based on a telegram, sent on August 8, 1942, using the US State Department facilities, by Dr. Gerhardt Riegner, the Jewish World Congress representative in Geneva, to his patron, the WJC President Rabbi Stephen Wise in New-York. Riegner notified Wise that in Hitler’s headquarters a plan had been discussed according to which “three and a half to four millions should after deportation and concentration in the East be at one blow exterminated in order to resolve once and for all the Jewish question in Europe”. Dr. Richard Lichtheim, the Jewish Agency’s representative in Geneva, delivered a copy of this telegram to Jerusalem [17, p. 15]. On November 4, 1942, the Polish government in exile minister, Professor Stanislaw Kot, arrived in Palestine. The talks Kot held in Palestine/ Eretz-Israel centered on the systematic annihilation of Poland’s Jews and the means to save them [17, pp. 36-46]. On November, 18, a group of sixty-nine Palestinian Jews, who had gotten stuck in Europe, arrived in Palestine/Eretz-Israel. They provided the first eyewitness reports of life in the ghettos and the mass murders; they informed about a locomotive engineer who told how the Jews “are being forced to enter special buildings and being destroyed by gas” [18]. All these reports had not influence Ichud’s program, which remained antagonistic to the Zionist Jewish immigration project.
These events took place only three years after the famous Jewish philosopher
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Martin Buber and his supporters established in April 1939 The League for Jewish-Arab Rapprochement and Cooperation, the first pamphlet of which, carrying articles by Buber and a number of his followers, argued against the Jewish state and called for the limitation of the Jewish immigration to 45 percent of the population of Pales-tine/Eretz-Israel. Taking into account the Arab population of the country in those days (about one million people, including both Moslems and Christians), if the British had approved the League’s proposal, no more than 20 per cent of those, who became the Holocaust victims in the near future, could have survived in Palestine/ Eretz-Israel. The second pamphlet, which appeared in August 1939, again attacked the Zionist Organization for trying to settle Jews in Palestine without the consent of the Arabs, asserting that “it will not be the theory of Hitler and the worshipers of force which will win” [19]. On November 16, 1939, Buber excoriated unnamed Zionists who were working “to establish our own national egoism”, declaring that even in a time of crisis, those who did so “are performing the acts of Hitler in the land of Israel, for they want us to serve Hitler’s God after he has been given a Hebrew name” [20]. Thus one cannot argue that a great intellectual like Buber did his best in order to warn Jews about the impending danger of Hitlerism; quite the contrary, until March 1938 he remained in Germany, and immediately upon his arrival in Palestine/Eretz-Israel began his struggle neither for the rescue of the German Jews, nor for the unlimited Jewish immigration to Palestine/Eretz-Israel from Germany and other countries, ruled by the Nazis, but against the mythical Zionists who “are performing the acts of Hitler in the land of Israel”. Today’s radical leftist academics who argue that “the root of the violence lies not in ‘Palestinian terrorism’, [but] in Israel’s generation-long occupation and illegal colonization of Palestinian lands and its exploitation and harassment of the entire people”, had prominent predecessors, whose concept of reality was inadequate to a no lesser extent than that of their spiritual children.
I am far from advocating any parallelism between the years of Holocaust and those of the second Intifada: the situations and the circumstances differ drastically. Despite the security fence, Israel in the beginning of the 21st century cannot be compared to any Jewish ghetto. However, there is no doubt that there have been influential Palestinian leaders and organizations whose aims are quite similar to those of the Nazis, namely to kill as much Jews as possible regardless of their personal characteristics: being a Jew is the only crime of the vast majority of the Arab terror victims, exactly as it was during the years of Nazism. Hamas, whose stated goal is to establish an Islamic theocracy not only in the West Bank and Gaza, but also on the Israeli ter-
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ritory (which would imply the end of Israel in its entirety), is probably the most hostile organization towards Jews and their statehood. Naturally enough, Hamas is listed as a terrorist group by the European Union, Canada and the United States. Hamas militants, especially those affiliated with the Ezzedeen Al-Qassam Brigades (named after Sheikh Ezz ad-Din al-Qassam, 1882–1935, who criticized the pro-Nazi Mufti of Jerusalem Hajj Amin al-Husayni for his “moderate approach towards the British”), have conducted numerous attacks, including large-scale suicide bombings, against Israeli civilians1. Hundreds of Israelis were killed in Hamas suicide attacks between 2000 and 2004. Hamas has engaged also female suicide bombers, including a mother of six and a mother of two children under the age of 10.
On March 22, 2004, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, characterized by The Guardian (which can hardly be labeled as a pro-Israeli newspaper) as “spiritual leader of the terror group Hamas” [21] was killed in an Israeli helicopter missile strike on his car as he was leaving a mosque in the northern Gaza Strip. BBC, another communication network which is unknown for its support of Zionism, described him as “the founder and spiritual leader of Hamas, ... one of the largest and most militant of all the Palestinian groups, ... [that] has killed hundreds of Israelis in suicide bombings” [22]. Yassin was the leader and mentor of Hamas; he authorized and initiated all Hamas terrorist attacks emanating from the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Following Israeli assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Lev Grinberg, political sociologist and the former director of the Humphrey Institute for Social Research at Ben Gurion University, published an article in La Libre Belgique accusing the Israeli government of committing symbolic genocide against the Palestinians. In his words, “The murder of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin by the government of Israel is part of a major move carried out by the government of Israel, which can be described as symbolic genocide” [23]. Lev Grinberg draws a comparison between the Holocaust and the Israeli struggle against the leaders of the radical Islamic terrorist organizations, detecting only minor differences between the two. He argues: “Unable to recover from the Holocaust trauma and the insecurity it caused, the Jewish people, the ultimate victim of genocide, is currently inflicting a symbolic genocide upon the Palestinian people”. Grinberg states that “because the world will not permit total annihilation, a symbolic annihilation [of the Palestinians] is taking place instead”.
The Israeli intellectuals’ anti-Israeli rhetoric reaches its culmination in Grin-
1 These include the massacre in Netanya in March 2002, in which 30 people were killed in a terrorist attack while celebrating the Jewish festival of Passover; the Patt junction massacre in Jerusalem (19 dead); the Jerusalem bus 20 massacre in November 2002 (11 dead); Haifa bus 37 massacre in March 2003 (17 dead); the Jerusalem bus 2 massacre in August 2003 (23 dead); the Beersheba massacre in August 2004 (16 dead) and many more.
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berg’s claim that “All this talk about ‘peace process’ and ‘right to defend’ is nothing but a deception designed to cover up the symbolic genocide carried out by the government of Israel. First it destroyed the authority, institutions and infrastructures of the Palestinian Authority, and now it is destroying what’s left of its hopes: it is killing leaders and ordinary citizens, men and women, children and old people”. Regarding the aforementioned statement, the only fact that cannot be disputed is that Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was an old man, though nobody knows how old he was: Ahmed Yassin’s Palestinian passport listed his date of birth as January 1, 1929, but other Palestinian sources documented his birth year as 1937, whereas some Western media reported it as 1938. However, no one, except an Israeli scholar, whose field of specialization is political sociology, claimed that the assassination of Ahmed Yassin should be perceived as an indicator of the Israeli government’s intention to kill ordinary Palestinian citizens, men and women, children and old people. Let us repeat it once again: “some ideas are so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them”. Israel provides some remarkable examples to strengthen this thesis. While prominent European and American intellectuals were fascinated with either Stalin or Hitler, the Israeli ones, taking into account specific local circumstances, decided to express their voices in favour of Palestinian terrorism, in general, and Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and his legacy, in particular.
Despite the clear-cut evidence1, Lev Grinberg firmly believes that the Palestinian leadership has nothing in common with the terrorism - in his view, “[Palestinian] terrorist acts are done by individuals in despair, usually against Arafat’s will”. As a matter of fact, he is not original in his views, stating (as, for example, Baruch Kimmerling and Ran HaCohen, cited above,) that the roots of the problem are in Israel, not in the Palestinians. He goes even further: in the article entitled Israel’s State Terrorism he condemns the Israeli leadership as a terrorist one2. Adi Ophir, Tel-Aviv university’s professor of philosophy, makes a similar claim, describing his country’s authorities: in his view, “the Israeli regime is shifting before our very eyes from de facto apartheid to de jure apartheid” [24]. Grin-berg’s colleague from the Ben-Gurion University, Dr. Neve Gordon, found his own synonym; in his words, “Israel’s gravest danger today is not the Palestinian Administration or even Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, but the one it faces from within: fascism” [25]. Alas, more than sixty years have passed, but nothing has changed
1 See, for example, a scrupulous analysis presented by Efraim Karsh, Arafat’s War: The Man and His Battle for Israeli Conquest (New York: Grove Press, 2003).
2 Lev Grinberg, “Israel’s State Terrorism”, Tikkun. A Bimonthly Jewish and Interfaith Critique of Politics, Culture and Society (April, 2002); http://www.democracymeansyou.com/mideast/state-terrorism.htm.
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since Martin Buber blamed anonymous Zionists who “[were] performing the acts of Hitler in the land of Israel”.
One can argue that Lev Grinberg’s essay reflects a demarche of a single person, and, as such, cannot be perceived as a prime example. Unfortunately, the opposite is true. The quotations provided above demonstrate that his views have been shared by other Israeli academics as well. The question is, however, whether their public advocacy of such views perpetuates the academic freedom or, rather, abuses it. Replying to a public criticism of Grinberg’s statements, Ha’aretz - the most ‘intellectual’ Israeli newspaper - published an editorial entitled “Academic Freedom”, stating: “The world of academe is full of people with radical, foolish and destructive views of all political persuasions. One can criticize them, demonstrate against them, and keep away from their lectures. And yet, the principal of academic freedom makes it obligatory to enable them to act and express themselves without interference” [26].
The (ab)use of the principle of academic freedom by politicized intellectuals and their self-appointed defenders, who fight for the right to express “foolish and destructive opinions” is a phenomenon of its own kind. The principle of academic freedom has been introduced in order to defend the role of the universities as “guardians of truth”, despite any political or governmental pressure. However, one can wonder whether this principle should be adopted for the sake of “foolish and destructive opinions”.
The principle of academic freedom, and the principle of freedom of speech in general, are not the sacred ones, and in most countries they cannot be used, for example, by those, who, though consider themselves intellectuals, are the Holocaust deniers. In their meaningful book entitled Denying History. Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do they Say It? Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman addressed the free speech issue. Their position regarding the freedom of speech of anyone on any subject is that “while the government should not be in the business of limiting speech, an institution should have the freedom to restrict the speech of anyone at any time who utilizes resources within the jurisdiction of its own institution (such as a school newspaper, classroom, or lecture hall)”. The authors’ point is that “we must not confuse freedom of expression with the obligation to make easy that expression” [27]. If the universities are willing to preserve a status of independent “temples of science”, they should find appropriate ways of confronting “radical, foolish and destructive opinions of all political persuasions”, instead of supporting and defending them. I will take an issue with Neve Gordon and David Newman: there is no threat to academic freedom in Israel today. Yet there was - and there is - a luck
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of intellectuals’ responsibility and accountability for the use of this freedom [28].
More than three years ago Dr. Martin Sherman from the Department of Political Science at the Tel-Aviv University published a brilliant essay entitled “The Professors of Oslo”. This article appeared only in a daily newspaper, so that it did not gain a wide academic readership it deserves. I would like to bring here in a concise form his most essential statements, which are relevant today just as they were in 2003.
“It is difficult to forget how, in the period of giddy optimism and lofty hopes in which Oslo was conducted (or rather concocted), the overwhelming majority of Israeli academics rallied enthusiastically behind it. This phenomenon was particularly pronounced in the spheres of the humanities and the social sciences. These disciplines allegedly comprise the professional skills needed for erudite analysis of processes such as Oslo, and for sober estimate of the elements which are likely to impinge on their chances of success - or failure. Across the country, in faculties and institutes of political science, international relations, history, strategy, and Middle Eastern studies, senior staff praised and lauded, almost without exception, the farsighted prudence and daring of the architects of the Oslo edifice. Prestigious lecturers, renowned researchers, and authoritative experts all repeatedly recited the long list of impressive benefits that would supposedly result from this bold vision. Time after time they explained, in detailed arguments, how a glowing future of peace and prosperity was about to be ushered in by this inspired initiative.
However, a decade later, during which the opposing assessments underwent the test of time, the realities that prevail in Israel are far closer to the dire warnings of the spurned skeptics than to the rosy prognoses of the prominent (and popular) pundits. ... But miraculously, despite the miserable failure of their professional evaluations, despite their proven inability to understand the events and processes which occurred within the field of their alleged expertise, the professional, public and economic standing of the nation’s senior academic echelons seems virtually unscathed. These false prophets continue to occupy the most prestigious - and best-paid - posts in the country’s leading institutes of higher learning; they are frequent participants in the media, appearing as authoritative experts to interpret current events and to explain to the public the significance of emerging realities, realities which only a short time ago they dismissed - as authoritative experts - as totally unimaginable.” [29]
I would like to summarize my essay by citing the conclusion Martin Sherman made to his argument.
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“Academic accountability is a difficult topic to broach, and even more difficult to implement. It is, however, one that must be tackled in the light of the experience of the last decade. For those who reject some form of accountability in the name of academic freedom, and claim for their immunity from the consequences of their failures, are confusing liberty with licentiousness. This interpretation of freedom is unacceptable and unsustainable; it will lead to certain ruin” [29].
December, 2008.
Reference Sources and Literature
1. Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectuals, 1993, cited in: Jeremy Jennings and AnthonyKemp-Welch, The Century of the Intellectual. From the Dreyfus Affair to Salman Rushdie, in J.Jennings and A.Kemp-Welch (eds.), Intellectuals in Politics, London: Routledge, 1997, p. 1.
2. Paul Johnson, Intellectuals, New-York: Harper and Row, 1988, p. 319.
3. Max Weinreich, Hitler’s Professors. The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes Against the Jewish People, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999 [1946], p. 239.
4. Geoffrey J, Giles, Students and National Socialism in Germany, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985, pp. 14-72.
5. Joachim C Fest, The Face of The Third Reich. Portraits of the Nazi Leadership, translated from the German by Michael Bullock, New-York: Pantheon Books, 1970 [originally published in German in 1963].
6. Jeffrey Herf,Reactionary Modernism Reconsidered: Modernity, the West and the Nazis, in Zeev Sternhell (ed.), The Intellectual Revolt Against Liberal Democracy, 1870-1945 (Jerusalem: The Israeli Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1996), p. 147.
7. Paul Hollander,Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China and Cuba, New-York: Oxford University Press, 1981; William L. O’Neil, A Better World. Stalinism and the American Intellectuals, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982.
8. Robert Conquest, Academe and the Soviet Myth, The National Interest, 31, Spring 1993, republished in John H. Moore (ed.), Legacies of the Collapse of Marxism, Fairfax, Virginia: George Mason University Press, 1994, pp. 229-237.
9. Baruch Kimmerling,From Barak to the Road Map, New Left Review, 23, September 2003, pp. 134-144; quotation from pp. 143-144.
10. Tanya Reinhart, The Palestinians don’t even have weather, Yediot Aharonot, March 9,
2003 [in Hebrew]; see the English translation at: http://www.tau.ac.il/~reinhart/
political/politicalE.html
11. Ran HaCohen, The Palestinian Gandhi, May 2, 2005, http://www.antiwar.com/ hacohen/?articleid=5796
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12. Edward C Corrigan, Jewish Criticism of Zionism, Middle East Policy, 35, 1990, pp. 94–116.
13. Sysan Lee Hattis, The Bi-National Idea in Palestine During Mandatory Times, Haifa: Shikoma Publishing Company, 1970.
14. Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, New-York: Alfred Knopf, 1999, p. 116.
15. Menahem Kaufman, Magnes’ Efforts for a Jewish-Arab Settlement after the 1929 Riots, in The Magnes-Philby Negotiations, 1929, Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, The Hebrew University, 1998, p. 10.
16. Meir Margalit, The Establishment of ‘Ha’Ichud’ and the Response of the Yishuv to the Reorganization of ‘Brit Shalom’, Zionism, 20, 1996, pp. 151-173 (in Hebrew).
17. Shabtai Teveth, Ben-Gurion and the Holocaust, New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1996.
18. Records of the Jewish Agency, November 22, 1942 // Central Zionist Archive, cited in Shabtai Teveth, Ben-Gurion and the Holocaust, p. 38.
19. Yoram Hazony, The Jewish State. The Struggle for Israel’s Soul, New York: Basic Books, 2000, p. 244.
20. Martin Buber, They and We, Ha’Aretz, November 16, 1939 (in Hebrew); cited in Yoram Hazony, The Jewish State, p. 244.
21. David Hirst, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, The Guardian, March 23, 2004.
22. “Sheikh Yassin: Spiritual Figurehead”, BBC News, March 22, 2004; http:// news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/1695470.stm
23. Lev Grinberg, Symbolic Genocide, La Libre (Belgium), March 29, 2004 [in French]; see
an English translation: http://www.ginsburgh.net/textes/Symbolic_Genocide
_Grinberg.html See also Lev Grinberg’s interview: Aviv Lavie, Not for the faint-hearted, Ha’aretz Journal, May 5, 2004
24. Adi Ophir, A Time of Occupation, in Roane Carey and Jonathan Shainin (eds.), The Other Israel. Voices of Refusal and Dissent, New York: The New Press, 2002, p. 65.
25. Neve Gordon,The Fascisization of Israel, Information Brief, No. 86, 4, February 2002; http://www.palestinecenter.org/cpap/pubs/20020204ib.html
26. Editorial, “Academic Freedom”, Ha’aretz, April 25, 2004.
27. Michael Shermer and Aiex Grobman, Denying History. Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do they Say It? Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000, p. 13.
28. David Newman,The Threat to Academic Freedom in Israel-Palestine, Tikkun. A Bimonthly Jewish and Interfaith Critique of Politics, Culture and Society, July/August 2004; Neve Gordon,Academic Witch-Hunt in Israel, Dissent Voice, December 31, 2004; http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Dec2004/Gordon1231.htm.
29. Martin Sherman, The Professors of Oslo, Jerusalem Post, November 3, 2003.
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