Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton has become a focus for debate over Israel.
Last April, you may recall, several students at the school interrupted a speech by an Israeli colonel, then walked out on the speech and called the officer a war criminal. The students were disciplined for allegedly violating the speaker’s rights; and three of them said that in order to stay in school they had to take a “Campus of Difference” training program created by the Anti-Defamation League, a pro-Israel organization.
Now the issue is busting out again, and the school’s interim president, Dennis Crudele, has issued a surprisingly-lengthy statement cheerleading Israel and distancing the school from students who are critical of the Jewish state (though Crudele also states that the students are not anti-Semitic). Excerpts:
Over the next few days, a small student group will stage a series of events on FAU’s Free Speech Lawn. The student group intends to raise political awareness of certain policies of the State of Israel with which they disagree….
Let there be no mistake about it: FAU deeply values its relationships with the State of Israel and with our many Jewish students, faculty, staff, neighbors, and friends around the world. Our Hillel Center and Chabad Student Center are large and thriving. We have student exchange programs with universities in Israel, and FAU students, scholars, and officials regularly travel to Israel for academic or other purposes. We have proudly hosted many Israeli officials and visitors on our campuses over the years. Our Center for Holocaust and Human Rights Education trains educators from around Florida to teach Holocaust and genocide studies, and our library houses three major resources dedicated to the study of Jewish culture and history: (i) the Judaica Sound Archives, a center that collects, preserves, and digitizes Judaica audio recordings and musical scores dating back centuries; (ii) a Yiskor Memorial Books special collection of books written by Holocaust survivors that document the shtetls destroyed by the Nazis; and (iii) a Visual History Archive, which offers online access to more than 1,000 English-language testimony videos by Holocaust survivors and witnesses, and cataloguing and indexing data of nearly 52,000 videotaped interviews conducted with survivors and witnesses in 56 countries and 32 languages…
The group’s criticisms of Israel often fail to appreciate that Israel is a robust democracy – unique in its part of the world – that nourishes an astonishingly broad array of public opinion and expression, even to the extent that this group’s own protest activities would be permitted to take place in Israel…
The last word belongs to one of the students disciplined in the earlier protest. Nadine Aly has responded to Crudele on twitter:
@FAUpresident Israel is as much a democracy as we were under the confederacy. U have ur full rights if youre a white male that owns property
— Nadine Aly (@NadineAly1) October 3, 2013
FAU deeply values its relationships with the State of Israel and with our many Jewish students
Yet another person who believes that “Israel = Jews”.
Letter to the Editor: “Build Bridges Not Apartheid Walls”
by Nadine Aly
http://upressonline.com/2013/10/letter-to-the-editor-build-bridges-not-apartheid-walls/
I understand Nadine’s point but it’s important to be precise. If what she said was true, a clear majority of Israeli Jews wouldn’t have full rights themselves since 65% of them are non-Ashkenazi and of the Ashkenazi Israeli Jews, half are women. In addition the 35% or so of the Ashkenazi Jews are just the share of the Jewish population. If you count all citizens, their share plummets even further.
Is she suggesting that 15% or so of the population in Israel have full rights and, inversed, that 85% of them don’t?
There’s a lot of discrimination against black Jews, for instance, you have wage discrimination against women. But this is true in America also.
I’m chuckling as I’m writing this because I understand I sound like hophmi’s clone. Believe me, I’m not trying to negate her point. Israel, even within the green line, is not a typical Western democracy. But my point is that just taking the usual identity politics found in the West, where the white male is the bete noir, and lazily transplanting it to Israel, where religion matters more than blood(even if blood matters a lot too), makes you lose the potency of the argument.
This is also why I roll my eyes when some on the left, like Chomsky, keeps trying to put a “capitalism did it” perspective on the conflict because that’s in vogue in the Western left today, while in fact while capitalism does have a lot of flaws, you’d have to be pretty naive to believe that capitalism and not fanatic nationalism is the culprit.
Israel is a special case and the analysis must take into consideration; it’s not what we face normally in the Western world.
(Nitpicking over).
” Our Center for Holocaust and Human Rights Education trains educators from around Florida to teach Holocaust and genocide studies, and our library houses three major resources dedicated to the study of Jewish culture and history”……
When will they invest in a Center for Nakba and Human Rights Education? Or a center dedicated to Human Rights Education for all??
(When?)
“Israel is as much a democracy as we were under the confederacy”.
“Well darkness has a hunger that’s insatiable
And lightness has a call that’s hard to hear”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUgwM1Ky228
Zionism is darkness. Justice for
Palestine is the light.