Special Column (No Title; Attack on Pappe for Supporting the Boycott)

From the www.monabaker.com archive (legacy material)

Ariel Segal Ma’ariv (translated from the Hebrew original) | Maariv | 29 April 2005

Every year, on the eve of Passover, a cloud would hang over the festivities of the house of Israel in all its dispersions. Lunacy, cruelty comprised of the basest human drives found vent in the blood libels woven against our people. Dark abysses, rivers of blood, humiliation and torture, murder, martyrdom and expulsion. The lie was repeated, crossed frontiers, religions and time – the Jews murder gentiles and use their blood sacrificially on the eve of Passover.
First the libels in the Hellenistic world (see entry “Yosef Ben-Matitiahu”) from thence they migrated to Europe and reached a head during the Crusades. They did not circumvent the Muslim East (the Damascus Libel) nor evil Russia (the Beilis Trial, 1911). The libels were renewed under the Nazi regime and were reaffirmed and reinforced in the Muslim world.
The ghosts of the bloody past walk among us and the image of the Jew in the collective memory remains that of the blood thirsty demon aspiring to suck the blood of an innocent Christian child (see Jeffery Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales).
Miraculously the blood libel has survived and come into its own in the leftist circles of the West. It is camouflaged as critic of Israel and its advocates are not a blood thirsty mob but intellectuals – radical soft spoken leftists in tweeds that collaborate with the vilest haters of Israel.
Among the slanderers and agitators the Jews are of course prominent, and again this is a case of an ancient heritage. Converted Jews [“meshumadim in the original = lost souls] took major part in reviving the blood libels. Ehad ha’Am says in his famous article “Hazi Nechama” [partial consolation] that the blood libel is the only allegation aimed at the Jews that we cannot suspect as valid despite the force of its universal acceptance. If we wonder sometimes whether it is possible that all the world is wrong and the Jews right, the blood libel exemplifies that it is possible (see the stupid article by A. B. Yehoshua in Alpaim “An Attempt to Identify and Comprehend the Infrastructure of Antisemitism”).
The first blood libel to erupt in Europe took place in Norwich, England, in 1144. A convert by the name of Theobold of Cambridge incited the mob claiming that the town Jews murdered a Christian child and made sacrificial use of his blood. Since history revolves in a cyclic route and returns to events already recorded I was not surprised when this Passover Eve brought with it another blood libel, all crisp and fresh. In the same England of the Norwich of old the AUT decided to boycott the University of Haifa and Bar-Ilan University. The latter for its involvement in the “campus it operates in Ariel” and the former because three years ago it had meant to end the employment of Dr. Ilan Pappe for having authorized a thesis by Teddy Katz on the Tantura Massacre (in 2000 the ”Tantura Massacre” affair erupted – a blood libel). Teddy Katz, a Ratz activist, submitted a thesis, as partial fulfillment of the requirements towards an MA degree, in which he maintained that the Alexandroni Regiment committed a massacre in the village of Tantura. Alexandroni veterans brought him to trial where it was found that Katz falsified and twisted evidence. The court decreed that Katz must issue a public letter of apology and dismiss his allegations against the regiment. Following the trial the university disqualified his thesis. Later it was exposed that the defense of Katz was partially shouldered by the Palestinian Authority (based upon Weekophaeadia, the free internet Encyclopaeadia).
In the page before you you see Dr. Ilan Pappe’s face because Pappe has an important mandate in the boycott decision. For years Pappe is touring the world and beseeching all his listeners to boycott Israel, to which he refers by the nickname “Apartheid State”.
On the eve of the AUT resolution Pappe published a heart-rending article in The Guardian calling upon the AUT to boycott Israeli academia. In moving and touching words Pappe described his quest for peace and how he, the great hero, is being hounded by the academia for his beliefs. One could almost think it was Galileo persecuted by the Inquisition. By the way, contrary to the wail and moan of Che Guevara de la Schmate [Yiddish for rag] of Haifa, he lives quite well off his hate-ideology: world tours, lectures, publications and of course, deserving of applause for Israeli stupidity, tenure in the University of Haifa.
The irony is that of all places Haifa is first to suffer from the academic boycott. The same university where students carry on their T-shirts the portrait of Nasser, founder of Pan-Arabic Nationalism, is the one to suffer from the Palestinian lie. The University of Haifa, a part and parcel of Post Zionist left, is paying for its laxity in face of Pappe and co., the supporters of Arabic terrorism endeavouring to bring destruction upon Israel as the state of the Jewish nation.
Also interesting and masochistically satisfying is to examine the English Intellectual discretion over time. Their predecessors were the ones who in the 1930s decried the intention to wage war on Nazism. They called Churchill a “war monger”. Later they claimed that America was entering the war with the aspiration to quash the English Socialist Revolution. It has been said before that nobody is as stupid as a silly erudite.
Needless to say that the same equality and peace seeking benevolent AUT, well tried in the tradition of universal humanism, obviously does not seek to boycott China – the beacon of human rights, Korea – defender of humanism, Iran – the liberal wonder, Saudi Arabia – the vision of tolerance or the model of enlightenment – Sudan. Because the boycott emanates from the cancerous intellectualism that has taken root in the social sciences and in humanities which distorts Western thought – post-modernism.
The Western Left, with all its “posts” and its “isms”, lives in an agnostic world of good and evil. The root of all evil is the great Satan – the USA and its ally the little Satan – Israel. The good is the third world struggling under the yoke of capitalism.
Those who once swore in the name of Stalin and did not take the Paul Pot lesson, are now holding on high the new culture hero of the academia – Ossama Bin-Laden. But why should we complain of the English, who find confirmation and affirmation from their court Jews, from he who smears and slanders his state at every opportunity: they have Mr. Pappe.
“Is there another nation whose offspring have come to such a distortion, mental and sensible, that everything that its people do, all its creation and all its sufferings, are hated and despised, and everything that the enemy of its people does, every robbery, every murder and every rape, fills their heart with a sense of admiration and stupefaction?… and here germs of self hatred will infest it… so much so that they will see in the Palestinian Nazis their salvation, that have succeeded in bringing together here in this land the zoological antisemitism of Europe with the love of the dagger of the East” (Berl Katzenelson, a senior leader and ideologue of the Labour Movement, May 1st 1936).
Ilan Pappe is a very small intellectual beacon and should not be compared, for example, to a great mind like Martin Buber, in whom many post Zionists find inspiration (Buber opposed the establishment of a Jewish State and Jewish Immigration, and voiced his opposition the day after he himself immigrated here from Germany). The claims of persecution are also quasi paranoia and quasi wishful thinking emanating from mental deprivation. People like Pappe are too miserable for some minor official of the General Security Service to bother with and with their grand hallucinations.
Nevertheless, negligible Pappe is a certain yardstick, a historical point of reference, as regards the attitude of Israeli society and democracy to those who seek its destruction from within. As a conscientious post modernist and a penny-worth provocateur Pappe has espoused the Palestinian narrative literally. He regards the Zionist enterprise as a colonial sin from the outset. The war of independence was a Zionist ploy for ethnic cleansing and the only solution of the conflict is founding of a bi-national state in all of Palestine which will be called Palestine. Pappe does not recognize the Jewish right for self determination. Palestinians – yes, Jews – no.
I have collated for you a summary of his gospel from an essay he published in the extreme leftist website ha’Gada ha’Smalit [“The Left Bank”].
“The window of opportunity for Palestinians and Jews is closing. Should the last European post colonialist enclave fall by force of arms and if it will not dismantle voluntarily in order to become an egalitarian civil state, it will be replaced by an extremist religious and nationalistic regime seeking vengeance. In the Palestinian Bank, when this inevitable scenario will come to pass, the list of injuries will be so long and weighty as to make a plea for moderation, discretion and constructiveness inhuman. These may come later, but to judge by the Arab world that has de-colonized through struggle and not conciliation, the chances are poor. Therefore, whoever fully supports today the right of return believes the window of opportunity is still open. He who takes the trouble may make contact with political communication networks and realize that indeed there is still an opening. Whoever is in continual touch with refugees here, in the occupied territories and in exile knows that it is possible and that a basis for a different reality still exists. Whoever understands this recognizes the gap between the enormity of the crime committed in 1948 and the moderation of the Palestinian vengefulness”.
You understand? If we voluntarily fall apart “the moderation of the Palestinian vengefulness” will take pity on us. How? Like the morality of the 1948 events in Hebron? Or the massacre of the daughters of Hatuel perhaps, or maybe the fountain of humanism of the Dolphinarium?
There is only one thing each one of you can do. God forbid that you should harm him physically. Simply ignore him. Give him a taste of what he wishes to impose on all of us. If you pass him on the street cross over. Do not sit next to him on public transport. Say not a word to him on any matter big or small. Deal with him as Jews dealt all through the ages with dissidents from the community.
You wanted a boycott, Pappe? Enjoy.