ANTI-SEMITISM AT UC SANTA CRUZ – Making the Vile Lens, by Becky Johnson, Dafka News, October 29, 2006

UCSC Hosts Yet Another Anti-Israel Speaker
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http://www.dafka.org/NewsGen.asp?S=4&PageId=1319

Santa Cruz, Ca. — His appearance on campus did not happen without controversy. Michal Michlan-Friedlander, the director of academic affairs for the Israeli Consulate in San Francisco wrote a letter challenging his talk called “Breaking the Silence.” Merav Ceren of StandWithUs distributed a flyer suggesting it be dispensed or displayed at the event. Ernie Weiner, Executive Director of the American Jewish Committee for the Northern California Region wrote to Acting Chancellor George Blumenthal of the University of California, Santa Cruz that “this event will inevitably serve as a inflammatory exercise in blatant political propaganda.” UCSC Professor Ilan Benjamin [Co-Coordinator of SPME- UCSC Chapter] did likewise saying “…Although presented as an educational event, this event is not educational at all, but is rather unmitigated political propaganda which presents a single anti-Israel perspective in the absence of any context or counterpoint.”

Israeli Historian, David Meir-Levi wrote “…some academics and liberal leaders have adopted this newly revised edition of Jew-hatred as a cornerstone in their fight for ‘truth, justice and the American way’.

Breaking the Silence is a movement of former Israeli Defense Force members who have joined together to give testimonies of the harsh acts they had committed and seen committed against Palestinians. The invited speaker, Yehuda Shaul, was an orthodox Jew who grew up in Hebron in what is commonly called a “settler” community.

Wrote UCSC Hebrew Lecturer, Tammi Benjamin [Co-Coordinator SPME- UCSC Chapter], “This anti-Israel event is being sponsored by two research groups and a department at UCSC. All three of these academic units have declined co-sponsorship of our (pro-Israel) speakers in the past.”

The classroom at UCSC where he spoke was crowded with students, and some were standing in back. Shaul showed a short series of images which he says he himself took.

“I remember the first time I had a Palestinian child in the scope of my gun,” he says, letting the horror of that thought settle into the minds of the students. “I heard a noise and turned around and someone had thrown a hand grenade at me. It didn’t explode and that’s why you see me standing here today.” He told how he had run around the narrow streets, looking for the perpetrator, with his gun out. “Two streets away I came across a Palestinian boy playing with a ball in the street. He came within a hair of losing his life to me.”

The students, impressed with the gravity of the situation, didn’t get it that it COULD have been a 13 year old who threw the grenade in the first place, and that to do anything at all about the deadly violence perpetrated by Palestinian teenage boys raises queasy dilemmas that neither Shaul nor the UCSC faculty that hosted the talk were likely to want to answer.

The next slide showed half a dozen Palestinian men, handcuffed and blindfolded, sitting about 20 feet apart on a street in Hebron in 2003. He told of games that IDF soldiers played at the checkpoints. One soldier told him “that if they smile too much, while they are handing the IDF soldier their papers” they are detained in similar fashion.

He showed another teenage boy sitting, handcuffed and blindfolded. “Here is a 14-year old detained for throwing stones.” While the images are disturbing, I thought, “What if my 14 year-old had been caught throwing stones at police?” I knew that if he didn’t get shot on the spot by the officer, that he would wind up in Juvenile hall for a very long time.

The students didn’t get it. All they saw was something horrible that shouldn’t be happening. They were only half right.

Yehuda Shaul was part of Operation Defensive Shield, a military operation that was launched after 120 Israelis had been killed in a two-month period. He described being ordered, in the urban setting, to set up military outposts in strategic Palestinian homes.

“At first we were very respectful. We even cleaned the house before we left.” But then after he had done it multiple times, that respectful attitude wore off. He describes taking over an apartment specifically because it had a satellite dish so the IDF soldiers could watch a sports game.

“I don’t have any photos of piles of skulls to show you.”

He was in Jenin in 2002. He showed a slide of a Palestinian grocery store shorn off by an IDF tank. “The street was not big enough for the tank,” he explains. Then he described a situation in which his unit had run out of water. His commander radioed him that he should go to the damaged Palestinian store “and take only water, nothing more.”

I was struck by the ethical choice the commander had made. Stealing is bad. But putting his soldiers in even more danger than need be, in order to get needed water, could be worse. He had balanced out the dilemma in a way that the New Orleans Police force couldn’t seem to do in the aftermath of Katrina.

Shaul said “but when we get there, the soldiers say “don’t I deserve cigarettes? “Don’t I deserve chocolate?” Shaul doesn’t share that 32 IDF soldiers died in Jenin. It seemed an odd fact to leave out. Stealing chocolate seemed hardly worthy of mention. And wasn’t it in violation of a direct order?

His next photo was of a crowded, urban hillside in Hebron. Shaul’s unit was stationed at a high point where his commander told him “They shoot, we shoot back.” What he didn’t tell him, is that they almost never knew where the shot was coming from. “Returning” fire was oxymoronic.

But the military leaders in the Israeli army had figured out a system.

“They had picked out 10 or 12 targets—mostly empty buildings—and we were told to fire at them,” he told his audience. The impression that most military exercises in 99% of the armies all around the world operate on sometimes idiotic rationales for what they are doing, was reinforced by this story. The IDF were not immune from pointless policies.

But there was nothing pointless about the situation in 2002 in Jenin. Jenin was home to more suicide bombers than any other Palestinian city. 3,333 terror attacks were initiated from the West Bank in 2002, and 453 civilians and security personnel were killed. This was a deadly serious effort to reign in killer violence. And it worked too.

By 2005, attacks originating from the West Bank had been reduced to 592. And the combined Israeli death toll was down to 54. Palestinian deaths were down 77% by 2005 due to Israel’s security measures. As much disgust as Shaul raised for the “occupation” and the checkpoints, he failed to acknowledge that those efforts had payed off with increased safety for Palestinians AND the people he had been entrusted to protect.

Despite this he kept insisting that Israel could not expect the attacks to stop until Israel had ended its occupation of Palestinian lands. “How did that work out in Gaza?” one audience member wondered.

Shaul described his fear of firing a machine-gun into a crowded urban environment. “Inside you pray you don’t hit innocent people.” Of course suicide bombers AIM at innocent people, the more, the better. Shaul doesn’t see that he is documenting how much more carefully the IDF considers each action than their enemies do.

“Do you know why there are checkpoints?” he suddenly asks. “Checkpoints are there to prevent their reality from coming here.” But why should “their reality” of snipers, suicide bombers, grenade throwers, or even stone throwers be ALLOWED to come into Israel. Why was Israel obligated to let them in? Shaul had no answer.

In the question and answer period we found out how few answers he had.

“Will you refuse to serve your reserve duty?” one woman asked.

“Breaking the Silence is only about telling our stories. We don’t have a position on that,” he said.

“What will you do now?” asked one woman student. “Will you petition the Israeli military to correct these problems? Will you counsel young people about these problems? Will you proceed to litigate? Or what?”

“I didn’t come here with answers,” he replied. No, he came selling books.

“Israel has REAL security issues, ” said Ilan Benjamin who heard the entire talk. “How should Israel address these in light of the fact that they do seem to be working?”

“I don’t get into politics,” he said.

I asked him ” You expressed concern on that Hebron hilltop that you might hit an innocent person. But realistically, how big a problem is this? If it was widespread, you would expect the Palestinian death toll to be somewhat evenly divided between men and women. Since the death toll is only 2.5% female, doesn’t that prove that killing an innocent civilian is quite rare? I mean it’s not like you can magically only hit males.”

“I don’t know about the statistics you mentioned. If only one is killed, is that okay?”

No. But it’s not much to sell a book about either.

At the end of the talk, Sarah Kirchner who is co-ordinating Yehud Shaul‘s speaking tour, encouraged the audience to “think what they could do to continue the resistance to The Occupation” and to “bring the Israeli army to the International Court of Justice.”

Breaking the Silence is not into politics? Well, apparently only when it suits them.

Yehud Shaul’s presentation for Breaking the Silence was sponsored by

The Center for Global International and Regional Studies, Cultural Studies, the Politics Department at UCSC

Those concerned about the pervasive anti-Israel atmosphere fostered on the UCSC campus should address their concerns to the following individuals:

Acting Chancellor George Blumenthal
Executive Vice Chancellor David Kliger
Dean of Humanities, Prof. Georges Van Den Abbeele
Dean of Social Sciences, Prof. Sheldon Kamieniecki
Prof. Ronnie Lipschutz, co-director, Center for Global International and Regional Studies (CGIRS)
Prof. Daniel J. Wirls, Chair Politics
Prof. Gail Hershatter, co-director Cultural Studies
Prof. Chris Connery, co-director Cultural Studies
Prof. Paul Lubeck, co-director CGIRS

ANTI-SEMITISM AT UC SANTA CRUZ – Making the Vile Lens, by Becky Johnson, Dafka News, October 29, 2006

UCSC Hosts Yet Another Anti-Israel Speaker
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Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) is not-for-profit [501 (C) (3)], grass-roots community of scholars who have united to promote honest, fact-based, and civil discourse, especially in regard to Middle East issues. We believe that ethnic, national, and religious hatreds, including anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism, have no place in our institutions, disciplines, and communities. We employ academic means to address these issues.

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