41845358-Antisemitism

xiv
ANTISEMITISM
Jenin in ominous tones: “Rarely in more than a decade of war reporting from
Bosnia, Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, have I seen such deliberate destruction,
such disrespect for human life.” 17 From Jenin the Jerusalem correspondent
for the London Independent sent this dispatch: “A monstrous war crime
that Israel has tried to cover up for a fortnight has finally been exposed.” 18 He
then spoke of “killing fields [a naked allusion to the genocidal killings in Cambodia
by the Pol Pot regime]” and the “ghastly reek of rotting human bodies
everywhere.” Some editorial writers and columnists in the British press compared
the Israeli government to al-Qaeda and the Taliban. After separate investigations
by the Palestine Authority, the Israeli government, and the
United Nations, the tale of mass murder was dismissed; it turns out that the
number of Palestinian dead was between 46 and 56, most of them combatants
in the vicious house-to-house fighting that also took the lives of 23 Israelis. 19
(Fewer Palestinian noncombatants perished than did the 28 Jews attending a
Passover seder in Netanya who were murdered by a suicide bomber.) Had the
Israelis relied on artillery and air bombardments, the number of Palestinians
killed would have been significantly higher and Israeli casualties fewer. But
seeking to avoid civilian casualties, Israel opted to flush out the terrorists by
sending its soldiers into Jenin’s sniper-infested streets and alleys and boobytrapped
houses. Surely some powerful negative images of Israel and Jews—
grounded in ancient stereotypes—prompted British reporters to thrash the
Jewish state.
That same desire to defame Israel and Jews infected academics, who mutilate
language in their rush to vilify. Tom Paulin, a prominent poet and Oxford
academic, called the Israeli army the “Zionist SS”; the Portuguese Nobel laureate
José Saramago compared Israeli actions in the West Bank with
Auschwitz; and British professor Mona Baker spoke of the events “as some
kind of Holocaust.” 20 Violating its own procedures and constitution, in April
2005 the British Association of University Teachers boycotted two Israeli universities,
Haifa and Bar-Ilan, supposedly for “repressing” academic freedom;
its executive designated Israel a “colonial apartheid state, more insidious than
South Africa” and called for “removal of this regime.” 21 Critics noted that the
AUT’s bizarre action—one more step to de-legitimize Israel—occurred at a
time when the peace process appeared more hopeful, that Israeli-Arabs attend
these universities without incident, and that alone in the Middle East Israeli
universities enjoy full academic freedom. Prompted by the international uproar
and by the president of Al Quds University in East Jerusalem and his
counterpart at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who invoked “cooperation
based on mutual respect rather than boycotts and discrimination” and