Israel a ‘Nazi apartheid regime’? Bible ‘full of myths’?
Watchdog monitors ‘anti-Jewish trends’ of Jerusalem universities
By Aaron Klein
JERUSALEM – Israeli college professors who label their country a Nazi apartheid regime, teach that the Bible is full of myths, urge the downfall of the Jewish state, and speak at conventions calling for the boycott of Israel?
Universities in Jerusalem that give awards to academic papers complaining Jewish soldiers don’t rape enough Arab women and encourage students to protest the antiterror policies of the Israeli military?
These trends are rampant across college campuses here, according to one website – Israel Academia Monitor – which has been documenting what it calls the anti-Israel, at times anti-Semitic behavior of the senior staff at major Israeli universities.
Some 20 to 25 percent of the humanities and social sciences staff in Israel’s universities and colleges have “expressed extreme anti-Zionist positions,” according to Israel Academia Monitor.
“In addition [the university staff] have engaged in public demonstrations, prepared and signed petitions addressed to Israeli soldiers to disobey their commanders’ orders and not serve in Judea and Samaria, and have been active in encouraging academic organizations abroad to boycott Israel Universities and academics,” states a new Monitor position paper made available online.
In one of hundreds of recent documented examples, Israel Academia Monitor’s website lists Dan Bar-On, a psychology professor at Israel’s Ben Gurion University, who penned an article in a Palestinian journal this past April arguing alleged Israeli “aggression” against Palestinians is morally equivalent to the Holocaust.
“Some of the aggression that the Jews did not exercise against the Germans, they are expressing against Palestinians,” stated Bar-On.
According to Israel Academia Monitor, Bar-On has promoted textbooks in which terrorists are described as freedom fighters, and he signed a statement – later proved false – claiming Israel was about to perpetrate genocidal atrocities against Arabs just as Allied Forces invaded Iraq in 2003.
Also at Ben Gurion University, the Monitor documents geographer Oren Yiftachel who wrote a book last year, “Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine,” in which he argued that there is no place in the Middle East for a Jewish nation.
According to Israel Academia Monitor, other professors at Ben Gurion University denounced Israel as an “apartheid” regime and claimed anarchists arrested during protests here are victims of “Israeli state terror.”