May 13, 2005

"Who are the Real Victims?"

A British union of academics will now bar members of the faculty at Haifa and Bar Ilan Universities from its conferences and joint research. The British academics say they are moved by the eviction of Palestinians from their homes and the general plight of the Palestinian people. They compare Israel to apartheid South Africa where educational institutions separated blacks from whites.

When antisemitism became unacceptable after the Holocaust, academia and other circles of intellectuals declared Jew hatred to be racist. In the sophisticated world of the literate, Jews became widely accepted, but the ban by the British union of academics shows that a different and more virulent antisemitism has returned to the literate world.

Jewish students at European and American universities complain that because of their support for Israel, they are targeted for attacks and discomfited by professors. The Bush Administration also threatens Israel. The Jewish state has been attempting to sell sophisticated military hardware and technology to the Chinese, and our government maintains that China could use the hardware and technology against Taiwan, a sort of stepchild of America.

But in truth, the government's stand represents a hostility against Israel’s economic growth and its extraordinary technological advancement. Fareed Zakaria reported in Newsweek:
"Last year Wal-Mart imported eighteen billion dollars worth of goods from China. Of Wal-Mart’s six thousand suppliers, eighty percent are in just one country and it isn’t the United States."
If it is permissible for America's largest company to give eighty percent of its business to China, thus depriving thousands of Americans of jobs and thousands of small communities of businesses, why does our behemoth government threaten the small Jewish state and the Middle East’s only democracy for doing business with China?

Washington argues that merchandise is different from military technology. But it is cheap Chinese merchandise that has made ghost towns of parts of rural America, and the impact of this merchandise on our declining economy and the value of the dollar is far more calamitous to the United States and its allies than the hardware that Israel sells to the Chinese. Would anyone in the world think of boycotting China or Wal-Mart? Why then would anyone boycott Israel, whose people are already victimized and exploited?

The British academics should ask who the real victims are in the Middle East. Are they the Arabs whose lands possess oil—the world’s richest resource—and whose twenty-two countries don't care about their own people and certainly not about the Palestinians? Kuwait, after the Persian Gulf War, expelled 400,000 Palestinians. Did the British academics ever call for a boycott of Kuwait? And will the American government ever close its doors to Saudi students when fifteen of the nineteen perpetrators of the 9/11 attack against the United States came from that Arab country?

Israel’s universities solicit and welcome Arab students. At Haifa University, more than twenty percent of the students are Arab, and at Bar Ilan, a significant number of Arab students are also enrolled. But how many Jews attend or teach at the Arab universities in the West Bank or Gaza? The answer is none. The Arabs want a completely Judenrein state of their own, while Israel offers a home to one and one half million Arabs, and extends Knesset membership to nine Arabs. Israel, including its universities, is a better friend to Palestinians than the academics in the British and American universities. And sadly, it is to those universities that virulent antisemitism has returned.

Edited by Anna Olswanger

Shabbat Shalom