Abe Foxman at the Anti-Defamation League is upset that Gilad Atzmon was invited to perform at the Friends Seminary in New York. But Foxman’s principal concern in the complaint is a school trip to Israel and Palestine, focused on “the West Bank region” — Foxman can’t say Palestine. He is disturbed that these students will be hearing oral histories of Palestinians without the counterbalance of the Israeli narrative, the students going to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial. Foxman is aware that the Israeli story is losing out among the young and enlightened now to a Palestinian story.
As I write this, a Friends Seminary group of six faculty and 19 high school students is visiting the Israel/West Bank region. It is what is taking place on this trip and, indeed, what goes on at the school regarding Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that make the decision to invite someone like Atzmon to speak to students so disturbing.
As we have come to learn, the participants will be spending most of their time in the West Bank meeting with Palestinians. The trip is billed as a cultural one and the youngsters will have overnight stays with Palestinian families over a five-day period. In addition, they will be developing oral histories of those families. There is, of course, nothing intrinsically wrong in doing these things. But because of the intensely personal nature of the home visits in the West Bank, which will expose the group only to a Palestinian perspective, these visits should be balanced by similar experiences with Israelis within Israel.
While we understand the students are also spending three days in Israel, they will not be meeting with Israeli families and they will not be visiting important venues like the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem.
The imbalanced structure of the trip would be troubling enough on its own. When combined, however, with the fact that one of the faculty members leading the trip is a history teacher with well-known anti-Israel views, which he promotes at the school, the concerns grow exponentially. He is the main teacher of history at Friends for 10th grade students. By all accounts, he presents the students a completely biased and one-sided version of events in the Middle East.
A prime example of his approach has been related by some of his students: in his World History class, when he devotes one day to Israel, his two primary sources have been reported to be a speech by former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and a paper by the American Friends Service Committee. AFSC, as it is known, has a long history of one-sided advocacy against the State of Israel. For another example, he has said that the word “terrorist” is too subjective a word to describe a suicide bomber. We have been told similar examples abound.
It is clear, in talking to a number of parents, that the teacher’s approach is one that does not have a counter for impressionable high school students within the school curriculum. On the contrary, it is strongly reinforced by the kind of trip going on now, and by certain other teachers.
One would think that school administrators would ask some questions about taking high school kids to the Middle East and devising such a pro-Palestinian schedule. After all, Israel is America’s main ally in the region, a number of the students are Jewish, and balance is one of the school’s valued and oft-stated educational goals.
What seems to be happening therefore at Friends is a familiar and disturbing phenomenon. An institution gets so comfortable presenting a distorted, anti-Israel version of historical and current events in the Middle East that it does not or will not recognize how easily what seems like criticisms of Israel can veer into anti-Semitism.
