To the right, the President of Tel Aviv University's notion of academic research and scholarship
On March 25, 2009, Tel Aviv University ran a full-day indoctrination session in communism, misrepresented as an "academic conference" to discuss the history of the Israeli communist party. We had been posted numerous warnings about this before it was held.
Every single speaker at the conference was either a member of Israel's Stalinist party MAKI or a pro-communist fellow traveler. The most "moderate" speaker was Yair Tsaban, a leader in Israel's Marxist MAPAM party, and he was booed by the communists in the audience.
When challenged by a worldwide wave of public denunciation and criticism for allowing the campus to be used for such purposes, the president of Tel Aviv University, Prof. Zvi Galil, issued a defense of this communist indoctrination congress, defending it as a legitimate academic activity. (His letter was reprinted here). In part he justified it because the Zionist scholar Anita Shapira would be participating in it. But Shapira merely greeted the participants at the beginning of the "conference" and dd not lecture about the subject at hand.
News details about the conference had appeared in the media before it took place, including here and here. The complete program for the event, with the list of speakers, can be seen here. The defense by the Tel Aviv University president of the misuse of campus facilities for Stalinist indoctrination was all the more alarming when coming from the very same campus officials who had censored a student protest exhibit exactly a year ago about human rights abuses in communist China and had ordered the student exhibit shut down. Academic freedom at Tel Aviv University is curiously selective!
The content of the talks at the "conference" was exactly as expected. Several of the speakers were party henchmen from the Stalinist MAKI party and not academics at all. Representatives of the communist party were on the scene distributing party "literature" and propaganda books. Every single speaker celebrated and praised communism, and most spent time attacking Zionism, Israel and Israel's very existence, praising Arab terrorism as "resistance" to Zionist colonialism.
Among the speakers was Elana Kaufman, who teaches a pro-Arab "narrative" course at Israel's Open University. She had been a collaborator with the late pro-terror Marxist sociologist Baruch Kimmerling, best known for his long pseudo-academic fabrication of the history of the "Palestinian nation." She spoke at the conference about the communist party's wonderful role in organizing Arab resistance to Zionism. She denounced Zionism for coercing the Arabs to become dependent upon the marketplace and for stealing their lands. She hailed the communist party for organizing the early violent "Land Day" protests among Arabs to "protest" Israel's supposed policy of "inflicting injury" on its Arab population. This led to the party's greatest electoral victory, she said, in which it won 80,000 votes in 1976.
She was followed by Dr. Amal Jamal, currently head of the department of political science at Tel Aviv University. He bewailed the fate of the poor Arab communists in Israel. He objected that the communist party is first and foremost the communist party of Jews, a rather curious observation given its voter support and membership makeup, and objected that Arabs who wish to be communists also have to be Israeli.
He was followed by Samiach Al-Qassam, presented as a "Druse poet," whose lecture was supposed to be on "literature and politics." Instead, his talk was devoted to the thesis that Jews and Arabs could not be equal in Israel and so Israel should be dismantled and enveloped within a larger bi-national Palestinian state with an Arab majority. In other words, a sort of Middle Eastern version of Rwanda.
Al-Qassam denounced President Obama and ex-President Bush of the United States for trying to create a Palestinian state alongside Israel instead of a state that replaces Israel. He then launched a lengthy sycophantic celebration of how wonderful communists are, how they not only defended the downtrodden workers but even the middle class. He declared that the Israeli communist is the true patriot, whereas American capitalists are phony patriots. He then bragged about how he had been hosted by the Romanian dictator Ceauşescu and by Russian's Gobachev, although claimed that as a poet he feels somewhat constricted in formal communist discipline. Thus when he was in Romania he preferred to dine with his Romanian security service guide and not with Comrade Ceauşescu himself.
Later in the "open discussion" section of the "conference," Al-Qassam also bragged about how he had been arrested and later was on Israel's wanted list for his seditious and illegal activities. Al-Qassam insisted that Israel stop looking upon the Hamas and the Fat'h as its enemies and instead should look upon the Jewish political right, which he described as "racists," as the true enemy. To loud applause he added that while he understands the suffering of the family of Gilad Shalit, the Jews have to understand that there are 11,000 Palestinian "Gilad Shalits" imprisoned by Israel. In other words, Gilad Shalit is the moral equivalent of imprisoned mass murderers, terrorists, bombers and ordinary criminals in prison.
He was followed by Marxist Gadi Algazi, a radical anti-Zionist from Tel Aviv University's department of history. Algazi has long denounced Zionism as a form of colonialism and vilifies every attempt by Israel to defend its civilians from terrorists, including Israel's security fence. For a sampling of his anti-Israel propaganda writings, see this. His talk was devoted to celebrating the Arab "resistance" to Israel and to Zionism, a resistance that just happens to take the form more often than not of atrocities and terrorism.
Yair Tsaban, who had long served in the Knesset as a representative of the Marxist MAPAM party and later of MERETZ (into which MAPAM was merged) enraged the hostile audience, most of whose members made little secret of their violent anti-Israel political sympathies. He was the closest thing to a Zionist participating in the conference. Tsaban aroused the enmity of much of the audience when he suggested that commemorations for any suffering of Palestinians be separated from Israel's own celebrations of its Independence Day. For this he was booed and denounced as "anti-humane."
Dov Chanin, a Stalinist Knesset member from Israel's Maki-Hadash communist party, gave a dry boilerplate denunciation of Western capitalism as the true danger to human civilization, because capitalism is based on the pursuit of profit for its own sake. Communism, he insists, represents the future hope of humanity.
