by Dr. Avi Bareli, historian, and senior lecturer at Ben Gurion University , translated by Hillel Fendel.
Anti-Semitic college students threatening
Jews on campus and calling for Israel's liquidation is not a new phenomenon and
is not exclusively related to October 7th. At least since the
1970's, a post-colonial school of thought has spread and gained steam in
academia, seeking to explain Zionism based on two seemingly academic
assumptions: that there is no Jewish nation, and that the return of this
non-nation to "its land" is nothing more than cruel conquest and dispossession.
According to the cultivators of this
approach in Western academia, the group of people known as "Jews" has
no right to self-determination. They would be best advised to disperse throughout
the world and assimilate, or else continue to absorb the special type of hatred
known as anti-Semitism [or both]. The source of anti-Jewish hatred, according
to this view, lies in religious separatism, or in the Jews' attempt to be a
distinct "people" among the nations - in the lands of the Diaspora,
or in Palestine, which, it is claimed, is Muslim or Arab in its essence.
This school of thought has a history starting
back in 19th century Europe. It is rooted in the liberal ideology of the
European multinational states and empires, and then in the
"anti-colonialist" propaganda of early Soviet communism (which itself
then practiced oppressive colonialism in its territories). European Communism
was instilled with a view that the Zionist enterprise was a dispossessing colonialist
enterprise – a far cry from a national enterprise of a native, dispossessed,
and oppressed people returning to their ancient homeland.
Today's Brand
The contemporary academic school of
thought continues to absurdly "explain" the Zionist enterprise and
Israel as an enterprise of pure colonialism, based on the Communist legacy. In
its historical explanation of the reasons for the establishment of Israel, it
is a distinct academic failure. But this has not prevented it from gradually
gaining dominance in the humanities and social sciences in Western academia.
This dominance is concretized, for example, in the way the elite Harvard
University behaved precisely when it was trying to cleanse itself of charges of
anti-Semitism. These charges, it will be recalled, were based on the school's
negation of the Jews' right to self-determination, and on the absurdity of its
president telling the US Congress that calls for Jewish genocide must be
evaluated "in context."
And whom did Harvard appoint for the
cleansing operation? Jewish History Professor Derek J. Penslar, who teaches
courses, inter alia, in the history of Zionism and Israel. He recently told an
Israeli media outlet, for example, that "the Zionist enterprise definitely
has colonialist attributes." That is, he feels that the post-colonialist,
non-nationalist approach provides at least part of the causal explanation for
Israel's establishment.
However, he did qualify this by
saying that describing Zionism as a colonial, conquering dispossession of another
people explains only part of the historic phenomenon of Zionism.
This halfway approach is very evasive.
For if we remove the nationalist motivations that brought Jews from around the
world to move to, and invest their capital in, Israel, and remain with only the
colonialist motives, we are left with no way to explain the success of Zionism.
Zionism is primarily and essentially a movement to liberate the Jewish Nation.
A historian who runs away from this conclusion for the sake of some
"middle ground" – maintaining that Zionism is both colonial and
nationalist – will not be able to counter the arguments of a wave of anti-Semitism
that denies that Zionism is a movement for national self-determination.
Harvard can rectify its recent
anti-Semitism only by totally denying any colonialist nature to Zionism, and
not by taking a pareve, in-between approach.
We see the dominance of this
post-colonialist approach to explaining Israel in American academia by the very
fact that Harvard chose someone like Prof. Penslar to cleanse itself of charges
of anti-Semitism. It is not surprising that a historian like him sought, in the
above interview, to take a middle-ground approach even between Jews and those
who wish to murder them – even to the point in which he makes a form of
equivalence between the bloodthirsty sadism of Hamas and the self-defense of
Israel.
[Translator's note: The writer seems to be ahead of his time, even if just by a few days, given the decision by the ICC prosecutor to request war-crime warrants for the arrests of both Netanyahu and Sinwar, warmly welcomed by various countries.]