When freedom of speech is a lesser principle than protecting Israel
This posting has these items arranged in chronological order, the most recent first:
1) The Guardian Opinion divided on Southampton university’s cancelled Israel conference, published letters, given a judicious headline;
2) Al Jazeera: Freedom of speech and the state of Israel attack oon the decision to cancel by Ghada Karmi, April 5th;
3) MEMO Academics pursue judicial review over cancelled Israel conference,April 2nd;
4) MEMO Israel lobby pressure on Southampton shows signs of desperation, Ben White on March 25th;
5) Jewish Chronicle: Israel activists plan protest at university, the establishment view, March 19th;
6) Electronic Intifada: Israel lobby, UK officials attempt to shut down Univ. of Southampton conference, Ali Abuminah, March 16th;
7) Tony Greenstein’s blog: Oren Ben-Dor – Southampton University Lecturer Who Supports Bigots In the Name of Free Speech , March 2008;
Dr. Ghada Karmi, one of the ‘toxic speakers’ who was slated to speak at the Southampton conference.
Opinion divided on Southampton university’s cancelled Israel conference
Letters to the Guardian
April 06, 2015
In late March we had culture secretary Sajid Javid’s astonishing statement in a speech to the Board of Deputies of British Jews (reported in Jewish News) that any arts organisations refusing Israeli sponsorship will risk losing funding, breaching the long-established principle of an arms-length relationship between government and the arts. The Arts Council is supposed to be a buffer between them precisely to avoid political censorship and bullying. Now we have news (1 April) of the cancellation of the University of Southampton’s conference on international law and the state of Israel after protests from the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Zionist Federation UK. All Charlie Hebdo? Except when freedom of expression means freedom to criticise Israel.
Caryl Churchill
London
• We note with regret that the University of Southampton has shamefully capitulated to pressure from the pro-Israel lobby and cancelled an international academic conference. The university claims to have acted on police advice that they cannot guarantee security against threatened demonstrations. Where was the threat to public order? How could a conference, predominantly of lawyers discussing complex legal issues concerning the legal status of Israel and its boundaries, be a threat? Or are we to conclude that pro-Israeli demonstrators are such violent opponents of academic freedom that the police cannot contain them?
Prof Hilary Rose, Prof Steven Rose
London
• The University of Southampton’s conference presented itself as an original attempt at opening up a debate on the legitimacy of the creation of the state of Israel. But having read the conference programme, I am struck by the fact that not one of the 52 speakers listed was billed to defend Israel’s right to exist. Clearly, the university is at liberty to host any conference that addresses serious questions seriously. However, this conference would appear not to fit that category, its programme being entirely one-sided. A conference that allows only one side of an argument is not scholarly and cannot promote debate.
Henry Ettinghausen
Emeritus professor of Spanish, University of Southampton
PM David Cameron entertains the Jewish Leadership Council. Photo by AP.
Freedom of speech and the state of Israel
The best way to end this pro-Israel bullying is to stand up to it – firmly and every time.
By Ghada Karmi, Al Jazeera
April 05, 2015
It has become the norm in Europe and the US for any adverse comment about Israel, however mild, to evoke a ferocious counterattack from pro-Israel groups. The fear of provoking these intimidatory reactions has prompted a widespread pre-emptive self-censorship with regard to anything Israeli or Jewish among individuals and organisations seeking to avoid them.
Scarcely any western public organisation, official or newspaper today dares to flout these strictures and pay the price. There are two main reasons for this situation: first, the deliberate conflation of hostility to Israel with that to Jews under the common and pejorative heading of antisemitism and second, the striking success of pro-Israel lobbyists in using their influence to stifle criticism of the “Jewish State”.
It was a combination of these two factors that prompted Britain’s Southampton University’s decision to cancel its forthcoming conference, “International law and the State of Israel: legitimacy, responsibility, and exceptionalism”.
‘Toxic speakers’
I write as one of 52 so-called “toxic” speakers, as the Board of Jewish deputies describes us, who had been slated to participate in the conference, which the press has emotively and inaccurately reported to be about “Israel’s right to exist”.
In fact, it would have been a ground-breaking event, drawing together a large number of noted domestic and overseas scholars to examine fundamental questions about Israel’s establishment and what constitutes its legitimacy.
In a democratic society that respects freedom of speech, these are legitimate subjects of debate, and the conference deserved better than to have been summarily cancelled by the university authorities. On March 30, and at a very late stage in what had been marathon preparations for the conference, the university suddenly withdrew its permission for it to go ahead.
It justified its decision on the dubious grounds of “health and safety”, citing the threat of hostile public demonstrations that might have put staff, students and conference participants at risk, even though the Southampton police had stated they were adequately prepared to deal with any such problems.
There is little doubt that the university’s action was the result of the pressure placed upon it by intensive pro-Israel lobbying. The Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Jewish Leadership Council and the UK Zionist Federation, which collected 6,400 signatures protesting against the conference, all made representations to the university authorities, asking them to cancel it.
Likewise, the Union of Jewish Students protested. Several MPs, including the conservative MP for Romsey and Southampton, did the same, and the Minister for Communities, Eric Pickles, called the conference a “one-sided diatribe”. The conservative peer, Lord Leigh, also expressed his dismay at the conference.
Delegitimising Israel?
Tim Shacking, a mathematics professor at Southampton University, said the conference aimed to “delegitimise Israel” and that he felt “uncomfortable” as a Jew; and a respected former graduate, Dr Andrew Sanezenko, returned his Southampton university degree in protest.
One of the university’s major patrons was said to be thinking of withdrawing funding from it, and a solicitor, Mark Lewis, announced he would “look unfavourably” on Southampton graduates applying to his firm.
A delegation of Jewish leaders, including Britain’s ambassador to Israel, Mathew Gould, whose inappropriate inclusion should have raised questions about his diplomat’s role, met with four university vice-chancellors to discuss the limits of free speech, in clear reference to the Southampton conference.
There are many other examples of this kind of intimidation in the service of Israel. Last year the editor of one of the most respected medical journals in the world, the Lancet, Richard Horton, was made the object of a sustained smear campaign by pro-Israel groups aiming to oust him from his position. He had helped to establish a Lancet-Palestinian health alliance with Ramallah’s Bir Zeit University in 2013 to enable Palestinian health workers living under Israeli occupation to publish their research in the journal.
Horton’s support for these medical professionals was branded anti-Israel bias, made worse when the Lancet published a letter last July during Israel’s war on Gaza signed by 24 leading physicians and scientists supporting Gaza’s people and denouncing Israel’s attacks on them. The Daily Telegraph headline for September 22, 2014 read: “Lancet hijacked by anti-Israel campaign.”
There were demands from the Israeli government for the Lancet letter to be removed, and several Jewish physicians declared they would not submit or review articles for the journal. The Lancet’s publisher, Elsevier, was targeted with threats of an intensive boycott campaign against the journal and the large-scale cancellation of subscriptions to it unless Horton was sacked. That has not happened as yet, but it remains a threat.
Cause for alarm
That this formidable array of domestic forces can be assembled so effectively to protect a foreign state, Israel, to the detriment of free speech in a democratic country, should be cause for alarm. The smear of antisemitism is the perennial weapon of these pro-Israel lobbyists, and it seems to work every time. That and the real threats to the status and livelihoods of Israel’s critics have succeeded in silencing many of them.
The same applies to organisations and institutions. It is past time for this kind of terrorism to be challenged, and in that respect the Southampton conference was an important event. For it would have exposed the shaky foundations on which the Israeli edifice is built and which drives its supporters to ensure that no one finds out.
Israel’s “right to exist” is not a taboo subject, and should not be so especially in the context of the cost of its existence to the Palestinian people. No state established on the stolen land and property of another people and their continued oppression has any right to exist.
The best way to end this pro-Israel bullying is to stand up to it, firmly and every time. Southampton University should set a precedent that those in a similar predicament can follow, and reinstate its conference as soon as possible.
Dr. Ghada Karmi is a research fellow at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, Exeter University .
Academics pursue judicial review over cancelled Israel conference
By MEMO
April 02, 2015
Academic organisers of a conference on Israel and international law will today launch legal efforts at the High Court, after the University of Southampton confirmed it was cancelling the event.
In what is being seen as an important test for free speech on British campuses, barristers acting on behalf of the organisers will this morning file grounds for an urgent judicial review of the decision.
The withdrawal of permission for the conference on the grounds of “risks to safety and public order” was first reported by the event’s organisers earlier this week, and subsequently confirmed in a statement on the university website.
The university administration has been under considerable pressure from pro-Israel groups, who objected to the conference’s subject matter.
But the withdrawal of permission for the event has produced an outpouring of support for free speech on campus, and dismay at the prospect of Southampton pulling the plug.
More than 6,300 people have signed a petition to the university, asking it to “uphold free speech and allow the conference on Israel and international law to proceed.”
By way of contrast, this is roughly the same amount of signatures in 48 hours as a Zionist Federation-organised petition against the conference gained over an entire month.
In parallel to the public outcry, dozens of academics in the UK and beyond, including staff at Southampton, have written to the Vice-Chancellor to express their dismay.
These included David Gurnham, Director of Research at Southampton’s own School of Law, who said that the “decision to withdraw support for a conference in this manner makes me, and I’m sure very many others like me, seriously question the University’s commitment to open and free debate.”
Another letter, by James McDougall, fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, described Southampton’s decision as “an attack on freedom of speech in our country”, and said the university’s leaders had “failed in their duty to their society, to their students, to their faculty, and to themselves.”
Meanwhile, a statement of support for the conference from academics has reached 900 names, including dozens from Oxbridge, Russell Group universities, and Ivy League schools.
Hidden Agenda at Southampton University?
By Mark Gardner, CST blog
April 02, 2015
The cancellation on “health and safety” grounds of a planned anti-Israel conference at Southampton University is causing much controversy. This hides a deeper problem with the conference: its organiser’s insistence that Zionism can only be understood by deep reference and understanding of Jews, Judaism, “Jewish being” and “Jewish pathology”.
The organiser is Professor Oren Ben Dor, whose thinking sits alongside that of the better known Gilad Aztmon. Both men are ex-Israelis living and working in Britain. They both hold up Jewish anti-Zionists as some kind of ultimate supposed proof that Zionism can only be fundamentally understood (and more importantly opposed) as an extension of Jewishness.
Atzmon’s anti-Zionism has caused turmoil in anti-Israel circles. Most left wing anti-israel activists anxiously manufacture distance between Zionists and Jews (i.e. between anti-Zionism and antisemitism). Ben Dor derides such thinking as “politically correct” and opposes it every bit as bitterly as does Atzmon.
Atzmon’s insistence on linking “the Jewish Question” and Zionism means leftist Jewish anti-Zionists have led a fractious but largely successful campaign to have Atzmon declared antisemitic and beyond the pale within anti-Israel circles. Now, with Ben Dor at its core, the Southampton anti-Israel conference threatens to derail this.
As Jewish anti-Zionist Tony Greenstein has stated of Ben Dor’s association with Atzmon:
he has aligned himself with a small, antisemitic current on the fringes of the Palestinian movement.
Ben Dor is a staggeringly turgid writer and speaker, whilst Atzmon is a showman: but nobody is compelled to visit his website, read his book or attend his meetings. In the case of Professor Ben Dor, university students (Jewish and non-Jewish) are being taught by this man.
Ben Dor’s defence of Atzmon in Counterpunch gives some indications of his ideology and impenetrable style. It begins “…No thinking person could fail to be stimulated by the deep connections Gilad [Atzmon] makes”.
It emphasises the link between Zionism and “Jewish being and thinking” and asks if the original aggressive Jewish “victim mentality” and “choseness” persist into Zionism:
…Zionism can be conceived as a symptom the non-empathetic manifestations of which are historically and existentially continuing certain facets of Jewish being and thinking. It is very important to ask whether the originary aggression of victim mentality as well as the choseness-begotten separateness existentially links the Zionist and the Jewish question.
It opposes attempts to “sever the deeper ontological connection” of the “Jewish Question with the Zionist Question”. (Ontological means “the nature of being”.) Ben Dor says this is so deep, that Jews perhaps cannot even oppose Zionism:
…The anti-Zionist struggle must not encage itself in too simplistic a link between the Jewish Question with the Zionist Question–a simplistic link that in fact craves to sever the deeper ontological connection that might persist between the two questions…this very denial of the existential link between the Jewish Question and the Zionist Question – a link that is suppressed by formulations such as “Jews Against Zionism” or, more broadly, by many attempts of “Jews” to become anti-Zionist – that needs to be questioned and destabilised.
He then implies that the meaning of the Jewish link with Zionism means that it is not sufficient to only challenge “the symptom – Zionism”:
To be an anti-Zionist without due regard to that being and thinking that Zionism may so tragically continue, may well be to confuse symptom and cause, thus perpetuating that history that leaves the symptom – Zionism – intact…
On and on Ben Dor waffles, until he hits upon the Holocaust, stripping its meaning for Jews. This is where his ivory tower is perhaps at its ugliest.
Despite his family having lost many relatives in the Holocaust, Ben Dor shows a startling failure on the most basic human level to accept that Jewish backing for Israel (ie Zionism) is an overwhelmingly natural and human reaction to the Holocaust. He goes further, suggesting that Nazi perpetrators were somehow captives of a deeper historical force that may repeat in the future. Ben Dor does not explicitly rule out the possibility that this “corruption” “between humans and Being long ago” is somehow due to Jewish longevity and influence:
The horrors and murderous violence against Jews may have been a response to events that had corrupted the relationship between humans and Being long ago. Grasped thus, the Holocaust may have been severely distorted by National Socialism; by those who are said to “deny” the Holocaust by some arguments about facts; by self-righteous Jews-against-Zionism; by Zionists. All these forms of forgetfulness of the Holocaust may well be on a common matrix of denial. Indeed this denial may constitute a chronicle of another Holocaust foretold.
My point is that the Holocaust’s significance lies beyond the actions by the Nazis who actually perpetrated the violence and who justified these actions by turning this significance into a militarist object of an idea. The same claim can be made in relation Zionists and their Jewish opponents.
None of this mumbo jumbo features in the actual Southampton conference programme. Instead, it reads as just another faux academic anti-Israel hate fest. Which of its many attendees and defenders even know of Ben Dor’s deeper animosities is open to question: but these animosities are fundamental to his ideological position and place him firmly in the same ball park as Atzmon. An environment in which antisemitic discourse is permitted, even if not fully endorsed and encouraged…thus far.
If Ben Dor is now to be defended within current mainstream leftist anti-Israel and anti-Zionist discourse, this represents a significant lurch towards an anti-Zionism that holds Jews and “Jewish being” as fundamentally responsible for every crime that is laid at Zionism’s door. The antisemitic danger of such a shift is blatant.
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For a more comprehensive view of Ben Dor’s animosity, the below video should be viewed. It is too long to summarise, but these give a taster of it:
10.50 [self hatred mentality] “stems…from sublimated hatred of, and supremacy towards, all others”
15.55 “It is the denial that there is something so Jewish in that which has provoked the Holocaust; and the dealing with which has been so successfully postponed by the Holocaust”
18.19 [on Jewish anti-Zionists] “Nothing would prevent them for going and celebrate many feasts of hatred of all others”
18.50 “the connective tissue to the Jewish pathology that actually moves Zionism and the deeper historicity that Zionism is just a fleeting phase of”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7Mn3lwGHgg
Israel lobby pressure on Southampton shows signs of desperation
Ben White, MEMO
Wednesday, 25 March 2015
As Israel lobby groups in Britain continue to pressure the University of Southampton to cancel an upcoming conference, the desperation is starting to show.
Earlier this week, The Academic Friends of Israel claimed that conference coordinator Professor Oren Ben-Dor had “been removed from the Board” of The Parkes Institute, based at Southampton.
The Academic Friends of Israel is run by Ronnie Fraser, who in 2013 saw his high-profile case against University College Union dismissed entirely by an employment tribunal. In the aftermath, more circumspect Israel supporters described Fraser’s action as a “legal and public relations disaster.”
Ben-Dor’s ‘removal’ was repeated as fact in The Jewish Chronicle under the headline: ‘Professor dropped from university institute over controversial Israel conference’, and also triumphed by groups urging the cancellation of the event.
Today, however, The Parkes Institute confirmed to me that the Israel lobbyists had got it wrong.
Responding by email, Professor Joachim Schlör, Director of The Parkes Institute, clarified that Ben-Dor had indeed once been a member of the institute’s Advisory Committee “several years ago”, a position he occupied as “a representative of our Law School.”
While The Academic Friends of Israel claimed that “as a result of the conference going ahead [The Parkes Institute] removed [Ben-Dor] from their Board”, Schlör told me that there was simply a different “current delegate for the Faculty of Social Sciences” on their committee.
While The Parkes Institute is critical of the conference, it has also made clear that it “fully support[s] freedom of speech within the law.” Indeed, two honorary fellows of the institute are among more than 800 academics who have backed the University of Southampton and academic freedom.
Signatories for the statement of support include chairs, professors, researchers and lecturers from leading universities, including 27 Oxbridge academics, 16 from Ivy League schools in the USA, and more than 160 scholars from Russell Group universities in the UK.
Those seeking to cancel the scholarly gathering have been getting increasingly desperate. Seddons law practice was forced to distance themselves from partner Mark Lewis, after the latter told the Telegraph that he would look less favourably at CVs of Southampton law graduates.
The Board of Deputies’ Jonathan Arkush, meanwhile, has openly called the conference “antisemitic”, an accusation ridiculed by Israeli journalist Seth Frantzman, who wrote about how “many of [the speakers] are Israelis, or former Israelis and more than half the academics at the conference are Jewish, some of them long-time activists.”
Israel activists plan protest at university
By Naomi Firsht, Jewish Chronicle
March 19, 2015
The University of Southampton is said to be reviewing its position over the conference it is due to host on the legitimacy of Israel.
Board of Deputies president Vivian Wineman met the university’s vice-chancellor, Professor Don Nutbeam, on Wednesday to discuss concerns that the three-day event would be a vehicle for anti-Zionists to challenge Israel’s existence.
Following the meeting, Mr Wineman said: “The university is reviewing its position and is considering all the options open to it.”
Board vice-president Jonathan Arkush, who also attended, described the conference, titled “International Law and the State of Israel: Legitimacy, Responsibility and Exceptionalism”, as “crossing a line”.
“We think that an event that calls into question the right of the world’s only Jewish state to exist is antisemitic,” he said.
Earlier attempts by the Jewish Leadership Council had failed to persuade Prof Nutbeam to address the community’s concerns.
JLC chief executive Simon Johnson had written to the head of the university’s law department, Professor Oren Ben-Dor, who is organising the conference.
Mr Johnson said: “It became absolutely clear that the vice-chancellor will not move on this as he considers academic freedom must be defended.”
Grassroots group Sussex Friends of Israel said it planned to hold a demonstration on the final day of the conference.
A spokesperson said: “We’ve been working closely with the JLC. We were aware of what was going on behind the scenes and kept a low profile. The JLC tried quiet diplomacy so now it is down to grassroots to do something more public,” she said.
Mr Johnson said he supported the protest. “Having done everything we could, we then decided it was time for the community to express a peaceful protest.”
Below, photo of Vice-Chancellor Don Nutbeam with then Higher Education Minister David Willetts, 2012, from students’ publication Soton Tab.
Israel lobby, UK officials attempt to shut down Univ. of Southampton conference
By Ali Abunimah, Electronic Intifada
March 16, 2015
Academics are pushing back against an effort by Israel lobby groups and UK government officials to cancel or alter a law school conference related to Palestine.
Almost 300 professors at universities in the UK and other countries have signed a statement expressing “principled and full support for the University of Southampton’s commitment to freedom of speech and scholarly debate.”
The University of Southampton has come under intense pressure over the conference “International Law and the State of Israel: Legitimacy, Responsibility and Exceptionalism,” scheduled for 17-19 April.
The conference will “engage controversial questions concerning the manner of Israel’s foundation and its nature, including ongoing forced displacements of Palestinians and associated injustices,” the organizers wrote in a statement to The Electronic Intifada.
The organizers are University of Southampton law professor Oren Ben-Dor; George Bisharat, professor at the University of California Hastings College of Law; Juman Asmail, a law graduate from Southampton and Southampton engineering professor Suleiman Sharkh.
The conference “will examine how international law could be deployed, expanded, even re-imagined, in order to achieve regional peace and reconciliation based on justice,” the organizers add.
The provisional program includes presentations from a range of well-known academics and experts including University of California at Los Angeles historian Gabi Piterberg; Nur Musalha, a historian who has written extensively about Zionist plans to expel Palestinians; University of Exeter historian Ilan Pappe and Princeton University emeritus professor and former UN Special Rapporteur Richard Falk, among others.
Smear campaign
Pro-Israel media and lobby groups have been mounting an ever more shrill campaign using Islamophobic themes and casting aspersions of antisemitism to smear organizers and speakers.
Some have called for the conference to be banned outright, while others are urging the university to require pro-Israel speakers, on the grounds that the conference is “one sided.”
The Jerusalem Post reports that late last year, “leaders of the Jewish community, including representatives of the Jewish Leadership Council, Board of Deputies and the Union of Jewish Students” sent a letter to the university to cancel the conference.
The Post says it has “exclusively” seen “extracts” of the letter.
A Southampton spokesperson emailed The Electronic Intifada that the university “received a number of representations concerning this conference, both those expressing concerns and those in support,” but would not provide details of the organizations that had approached it.
The Electronic Intifada has filed a Freedom of Information request with the university in an effort to bring more light on the Israel lobby’s campaign against academic freedom.
Zionist Federation petition
The UK’s Zionist Federation launched a petition calling on the university to ban the conference, a demand to which several members of parliament have added their voices.
The mass circulation tabloid The Daily Express published an op-ed associating the conference with support for the notorious Islamic State militant “Jihadi John” and demanding that the government cut funding to Southampton.
The Jewish Chronicle trumpeted criticism by a former Conservative government minister and quoted Southampton mathematics professor Tim Sluckin claiming that the purpose of the conference is to “delegitimize Israel.”
Sluckin, who is also secretary of the Southampton Hebrew Congregation, said the conference “makes me feel uncomfortable as a Jew.”
Government collusion
Perhaps the most worrying aspect for supporters of free speech is the apparent collusion of UK government officials in the attempt to smear and suppress the conference.
Communities minister Eric Pickles who has ‘consistently conflated “antisemitism” with solidarity for Palestinians’.
Last week, Conservative cabinet minister Eric Pickles warned the University of Southampton against “allowing a one-sided diatribe.” According to Jewish News, this made Pickles, who is Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, “the most senior politician yet to intervene” over the conference.
Last December, Pickles’ department issued a report promising “government action on addressing antisemitism.” But as The Electronic Intifada reported, the government document “conflates antisemitism with criticism of the State of Israel” and misrepresents the Palestinian call for the academic boycott of Israeli institutions.
Pickles has consistently conflated “antisemitism” with solidarity for Palestinians. He has for instance condemned the London Borough of Tower Hamlets for “flying a Palestinian flag.” London municipalities have a long tradition of international solidarity, especially during the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.
The Jerusalem Post also revealed that in February, UK ambassador to Israel Matthew Gould met with UK university heads to discuss the limits of “freedom of speech” relating to Israel.
According to the Post, the University of Southampton’s refusal to cave in over the conference was a topic of discussion in the meeting.
Ben White writes for Middle East Monitor that the university’s “stubborn commitment to freedom of speech has clearly angered Britain’s Israel lobby, but the bigger question here is why a UK ambassador was involved in the first place.”
The UK Foreign Office confirmed to White that the meeting had taken place but as White notes, the government spokesperson “did not elaborate on whether lobbying British universities” on behalf of Israel “was part of the ambassador’s remit.”
“Legal obligations”
The organizers have rejected accusations that the conference is “one sided.”
“Diligent efforts, including face-to-face meetings with leading intellectuals in Israel, were made to ensure the widest range of opinions possible,” the organizers wrote in their statement.
“Those who chose to abstain, however, cannot derail the legitimate, if challenging, academic discussion the conference will inspire.”
The organizers also say that are “deeply grateful for the University of Southampton’s commitment to freedom of speech and expression, which should set an example for universities worldwide.”
But the university has been more circumspect. Its spokesperson assured The Electronic Intifada that it “is legally obliged under the Education (No. 2) Act 1986, to ensure that freedom of speech within the law is secured for members, students and employees of the university, as well as for visiting speakers.”
“We must ensure that academic staff have the freedom within the law to question and test received wisdom, and to put forward new ideas and controversial or unpopular opinions.”
University appeasing critics?
But in what looks like an attempt to appease critics, the spokesperson adds that “For the avoidance of doubt, the University of Southampton is not expressing an opinion or taking any particular standpoint in relation to the conference, ‘International Law and the State of Israel,’ but is fulfilling its legal obligations.”
Universities often endorse conferences and take strong stances in favor of various kinds of research on human rights, economic, medical or environmental issues.
For instance, University of Southampton Vice-Chancellor Don Nutbeam enthuses about a new research collaboration between his institution and the insurance company Lloyds Register.
But Southampton’s statement about the Israel conference follows an emerging pattern among universities that have come under attack for research or advocacy in relation to Palestinian rights: administrators assert their minimum obligations on free speech grounds while distancing themselves from the content, as if believing that Israel should be held accountable under international law were something odious and offensive.
Oren Ben-Dor – Southampton University Lecturer Who Supports Bigots In the Name of Free Speech
Tony Greenstein, blog
First posted March 2008
Oren Ben-Dor is an ex-Israeli and a law lecturer at the University of Southampton. He is also someone who has aligned himself with a small, antisemitic current on the fringes of the Palestinian movement.
In an article for Counterpunch, Freedom of Speech, Free Speech and Their Enemies – The Silencing of Gilad Atzmon Ben-Dor explains that he recently signed a petition that ‘condemns the constant attempts to silence Gilad Atzmon’. Gilad Atzmon is also an ex-Israeli, as well as being a well-known jazz player and an almost equally well-known antisemite. who has adopted the politics of holocaust denial.
What Ben-Dor condemns as the attempted silencing and censorship of Atzmon is in fact criticism of him. For some strange reason, racists believe that not only should they be given a free license to abuse others, but they are also entitled to immunity against criticism. The petition Ben-Dor signed was initiated by antisemites and signed by a number of well known holocaust deniers, including Paul Eisen and The Radical Press, (later removed after the Petition’s author Mary Rizzo had tried to defend it). The latter site specialises in articles such as AMERICA IS RUN BY JEWS . It is a site to which Ben-Dor’s friend Atzmon regularly posts articles.
Who is Gilad Atzmon?
Atzmon is best judged by what he writes and says. Describing himself as an ‘ex-Jew’ he believes that to be Jewish is to be a Zionist. His writings are a throwback to the conspiracy theories that were prevalent in the early part of the last century. In his essay ‘On antisemitism’ he writes that:
“we must begin to take the accusation that the Jewish people are trying to control the world very seriously…. …. American Jewry makes any debate on whether the ‘Protocols of the elder of Zion’ are an authentic document or rather a forgery irrelevant. American Jews do try to control the world….”
Atzmon has replaced ‘Jewish people’ by Zionists but the meaning remains the same as he himself has admitted.
In response to accusations that he was a holocaust denier Atzmon responded (Post 19) ‘With Levy and Abrahams making the headline, the Protocols are MAINSTREEM NEWS.. rather than a remote Tsarist forgery…’ Hitler in Mein Kamp said that the Protocols must be genuine because what they describe is true. Atzmon’s take is that whether they are a forgery is irrelevant, since regardless they are true! A distinction without a difference.
Atzmon, demonstrates just why why it is that Oren-Dor was so moved to exclaim that ‘No thinking person could fail to be stimulated by the deep connections Gilad makes.’ Indeed. Reaching back into the Middle Ages for the myth of Jews as Christ killers is certainly stimulating, if not breathtaking:
‘I would suggest that perhaps we should face it once and for all: the Jews were responsible for the killing of Jesus who, by the way, was himself a Palestinian Jew.’
And though Oren Ben-Dor may not have meant to be ironic, there is no doubt that Atzmon makes some very deep connections. None more so than when he comes to describing the relationship between Israel and the United States. Those who cling to the quaint notion that the US subsidises the Israeli State because it serves the US’s politico-strategic interests in the Middle East should think again.
‘it looks as if Zionist lobbies control American foreign politics. After so many years of independence, the United States of America is becoming a remote colony of an apparently far greater state, the Jewish state.’
In the Observer of 17th April 2005, in a talk given to students at the School & African of Oriental Studies, Atzmon is quoted as saying that attacking a synagogue is a ‘rational act.’ Does anyone doubt why Ben-Dor complains that Atzmon’s critics ‘do not really do justice to the intellectual game’ of Atzmon.’ That, Ben-Dor argues, is ‘the essence of this petition.’ I couldn’t put it better myself.
Ben-Dor calls ‘Peacepalestine’, where Atzmon posts most of his articles ‘one of the more enlightening internet platforms on Palestine.’ That is certainly one way of describing it. It is also the place where holocaust deniers and cranks such as Paul Eisen, a close friend of Atzmon, declare their disbelief about the Holocaust: ‘Regarding gas, again I am not sure but the evidence for the use of homicidal gas-chambers is not good at all. The evidence against it is much, much stronger.’ Atzmon however cannot be accused of lacking a sense of humour. His description of the Socialist Unity site as ‘socialist Jewnity’ was certainly a gem. As Ben-Dor notes, ‘it is the task of an intellectual to touch the untouchable and liberate thinking from its blackmailed, somewhere idle, comfort zones.’ Well that is certainly one was to describe Atzmon’s gutter antisemitism.
Unfortunately the same cannot be said of Oren Ben-Dor’s deliberately impenetrable thicket of prose. Apparently:
‘Zionism can be conceived as a symptom the non-empathetic manifestations of which are historically and existentially continuing certain facets of Jewish being and thinking.’
Or his other blinding insight:
‘Zionism can be conceived as a symptom the non-empathetic manifestations of which are historically and existentially continuing certain facets of Jewish being and thinking. It is very important to ask whether the originary aggression of victim mentality as well as the choseness-begotten separateness existentially links the Zionist and the Jewish question.’
Stripped of its pretentiousness, there is a clear message. Zionism, a political movement, is not the product of antisemitism nor is it a settler-colonial movement. Rather it is something intrinsic and inseparable from being Jewish. So despite all the intellectual sophistication of Atzmon and his defenders, what we have is the rather mundane Zionist argument that to be opposed to Zionism is to be antisemitic. It is no wonder that Atzmon’s only message to Jews is to stop being Jewish!
Ben-Dor confirms this with his remark that ‘There is need to fathom the extent to which the slogan “Jews against Zionism” may be an oxymoron.’ It can only be an oxymoron if the idea of Jews opposing Zionism is itself contradictory.
Just as Zionism was a reaction to antisemitism, so the antisemitism of Atzmon and his supporters echoes with the themes of Zionism. Stripped of its pseudo-academic and flowery language, Oren Ben-Dor’s article is but a reflection of that which he purports to oppose.
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