Concern about Israel

DAVE GORDON

Three weeks before 55 cities around the world would see the sixth annual Israeli Apartheid Week on campuses, various academics addressed Israel supporters in a daylong Toronto symposium called When Middle East Politics Invade Campus.

“I hate this conference,” said Prof. Gil Troy of McGill University when he addressed the 400 attendees at the Hyatt Regency Hotel Feb. 16. “I hate the fact that we have to devote a day – an hour, a minute – explaining that this [Israel’s demonization] is a problem. We need more administrators, more students, more professors here. Even if there’s so much as one student who goes into a defensive crouch in the university classroom because they’re afraid of expressing their own thoughts, we’re all diminished.”

Troy, the author of Why I am a Zionist, suggested that anti-Israel forces on campus are obsessed with bumper-sticker sloganeering and that it was imperative that discussions include nuance, “by bringing academia back to academic values.” In his talk, he explained what he called a paradox on campus.

“This is a golden age for Jews on campus,” he said. “Let’s acknowledge we’ve never had so many Jews on campus, so many Hillels, so many Jewish professors, on campus today. It’s also a golden age for Israel-bashers on campus. How we solve that is our challenge.”

One solution is to bridge commonality with the left, so often on the side of Israel-baiters, he said: “Criticize Israel, yes, as long as you don’t engage in disproportionate attacks and delegitimize.”

The conference was an initiative of Advocates for Civil Liberties (ACL), a new interfaith group of attorneys and other professionals whose website cites concern about the “toxic” atmosphere on campuses, noting that “the environment is the direct antithesis of the academic ideals of civil discourse and reasonable debate.”

The conference was coordinated by Meryle Kates and Jonathan Kay, National Post managing editor and columnist, was moderator. Speakers included Catherine Chatterley, a research fellow at the University of Manitoba and an historian in the fields of antisemitism and the Holocaust; Richard Cravatts of Boston University, the author of a forthcoming book, Genocidal Liberalism: The University’s Jihad Against Israel; Salim Mansur, an associate professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario, a Toronto Sun columnist and the author of Islam’s Predicament; British historian Andrew Roberts of the Friends of Israel Initiative, author of the recent history of the Second World War The Storm of War; as well as local students, who offered their perspectives on the hostile environment for pro-Israel students on campus, and Judge Hadassa Ben Itto, author of The Lie that Wouldn’t Die: “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” from Jerusalem via video.

Dr. Phyllis Chesler, author and professor emerita of psychology and women’s studies at City University in New York, expressed her frustration with certain professors’ one-track mind regarding the rights and plights of women.

“Most of my colleagues have been Palestinianized and Stalinized. More are concerned with the fate of a country that never existed – Palestine – than the fate of the real women who live in Gaza,” she said.

She described how she once spoke to a group of African American feminists – who were honoring her work – who asked what she thought of the “situation of women in Palestine.” She said her response was, “I think you’re asking me where I stand on the issue of apartheid. Islam is the largest practitioner of religious, gender apartheid on earth.” She was “heckled and jeered,” she said, as attendees demanded answers to the “humiliation of the checkpoints,” to which she rejoined, “What about [Muslim] cutting out of women’s clitorises? What about their honor murdering you? What about [when] they force you to marry your illiterate first cousin who batters you and your family approves of it?”

In her Toronto talk, Chesler lamented the left’s rallying cries that overlook worse Muslim-on-Muslim crimes, preferring to focus on the ills of the West. “But Islam – a major colonizer, with rampant racist countries, slave-owning countries – nothing. Eight hundred years of persecution of Hindus in India! That means the so-called ‘truth tellers’ don’t know from this,” she said. “We live in a time when objective truths don’t matter anymore. Only brainwashing matters. Everything is relative. Propaganda is the order of the day.... [It seems] Islamophobia is the only type of racism that exists and antisemitism doesn’t count.”

She noted, “... Israel and Jews [are] cursed 24/7 in every language of the world in every media. Doctored photos, faked photos, fictionalized multipart series on Egyptian television, mosques beamed by satellite into the West with horridly hateful sermons, and massacres that never were.”

From the war of ideas to the military front, Elliot Chodoff, a Middle East analyst and the co-author of MidEast on Target, spoke about the various threats facing Israel.

“It’s something you all know is true but important to say outright,” said Chodoff of the Arab world and anti-Zionists. “The objective isn’t to condemn Israel or defame Israel – it’s to destroy Israel.... It started May 1948 and it’s still going on.”

Among Israel’s concerns, he said, is the fear of more shelling from the Lebanese border. “It’s a myth that Hezbollah has been smuggling weapons to Lebanon. It’s simply not true,” said Chodoff. “Smuggling implies clandestine. They are shipping weapons into Lebanon, land, sea and air.” On a recently intercepted sea vessel, Israel captured some 5,000 rockets, he said. “To put it in perspective, during the entire war in 2006, they [Hezbollah] fired some 4,000 rockets.”

Despite its best efforts, however, “no country in history has ever stopped smuggling.... No country can make itself hermetically sealed that nothing gets through.” Moreover, the United Nations charter guarantees the right of any state to self-defence, he said, but, for Israel, it’s trickier: “If Jews defend their lives, they’re [considered] criminals.”

On Israel’s western border, he continued, the situation in Egypt could be problematic. “If Egypt becomes a Western democracy, that would be amazing. But don’t count on it,” he said. Outlining a worrisome scenario, he described what could happen if Egypt tears up the peace treaty with Israel. The critical part of the treaty, he said, was the demilitarization of the Sinai in 1979, leaving 150 miles of space between the two countries. He said, “What happens if the Egyptian government decides to roll armored tanks into the Sinai?... What would the world do, or what would the United States do? We have no answers.”

About other existential threats to Israel, the Jewish Independent asked Chodoff why Iran is pursuing a nuclear strategy, rather than focusing on pathogens or chemical weapons, such as Iraq did under Saddam Hussein. Chodoff explained, “Nobody yet has come up with a way to deliver chemical weapons by missile. That’s unchartered technology. Nuclear weapons are chartered technology. They just have to figure out how to do it and they are powerfully pretty close to it.” He continued, “Nuclear capability [also] puts you in a different club. If you’re thinking imperial, you’ve got to have nuclear power.” He added that a major setback for a chemical bomb against Israel is that they’re prepared for such an attack. “Gas masks, sealed rooms, evacuation procedures – the Israeli population is a protected population. Not perfect, but as close as you can get. You cannot protect against a nuclear weapon ... a chemical weapon has very little effect. Then you get into a procedural paradox of having used a weapon of mass destruction without there being mass destruction. It puts you on the wrong side of the balance sheet. Israel, or the West, can say, ‘You used this, and now we’re going to rip into you.’ Heavy retaliation for little gain.” It would not be worth the price of war, he posited, for Iran to settle for “a mere thousand [Israeli] casualties” when or “if they could obliterate millions.”

Dave Gordon is a freelance writer in Toronto. His website is davegordonwrites.com.

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