Despite the history of recurrent blood libels that Jews have had to endure over the centuries, it is still a surprise that a new one would premier in an academic lecture hall. The event occurred on the evening of October 22, 2010, at the University at Buffalo, the campus of the State University of New York where I teach. I write now because it is only in recent weeks that I have received sufficient documentation on what took place and have had enough time to look into the ugly allegations then made.
The distinctive accusation that evening was that Israeli soldiers dressed up as Lebanese Phalangist militiamen to massacre Palestinians in Beirut in 1982. The lecture concluded with veiled justification for violence against Israelis, repeated audience expressions of fury, frenzied calls for boycotts and other punishments of Israel, and recruitment for anti-Israel activist groups.
What is as interesting as the fact of a blood libel’s occurrence on a campus is why it is happening at all. It is the question to which I return after describing what happened.
According to the account widely accepted by Israeli and Palestinian sources, the massacres took place in Sabra and Shatila, two camps where Palestinian refugees and their descendants were forced to live by Lebanese law. On September 16 and 17, 1982, the military arm of the Lebanese Front, consisting predominantly of members of a Maronite Christian Party called the Lebanese Phalanges, entered the camps, killed nearly 1000 people, and wounded many others. Historians believe that the Phalangists were taking revenge for the assassination of their leader Bashir al-Jumayyil and for the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s massacre of an estimated 500 people in the Christian village of Damour in January 1976. (The Lebanese forces also perpetrated a massacre of Palestinians at the refugee camp Tal al-Za’tar in August 1976.)
At the time of the atrocity in Sabra and Shatila, Israeli troops controlled the outskirts of the camps and allowed the Maronite troops to enter. An official Israeli investigation found Israeli military command culpable for not having anticipated the massacre and for not having acted rapidly, upon receiving information that civilians were being murdered, to stop or evict the Maronite forces. A few days later, several hundred thousand Israelis demonstrated in Tel Aviv’s central square to express their outrage that their country could be even indirectly connected to the massacre. Lebanon never released results of an official investigation into the event.
Inflaming Hatred in Buffalo
The posters on campus that announced the lecture, “Sabra and Shatila Massacre 28 Years On: Memory Lives, Resistance Persists,” invited students to “Join the discussion and the ongoing work to organize for a local ADC [American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee] chapter.” The posters also depicted the Palestinian cartoon character Handala scribbling an Arabic phrase that has been translated as “Revolution until Victory.”
The first part of the lecture consisted of a graphic personal remembrance of the killings by Nabil Mohammad, who was introduced as a survivor of the massacre and a current organizer of the ADC. He was followed by Don Wagner, a Presbyterian Minister, described in the poster as an “eyewitness,” and otherwise widely known for extreme antipathy to Israel. He is the one who claimed at the lecture, after a harrowing description of the killings, that “most likely many Israelis were in the Phalangists’ military uniforms and they denied responsibility.”
Students in the audience would naturally get the point: that the murdered family members, dead bodies, stench of death, and dead babies under rubble, on which the speakers dwelled, were the work of the Israelis. The ones most likely to have been affected were the university’s Arab or Muslim students from abroad, who made up a large part of the audience and would have come to the event usually with little knowledge of Jewish history.
According to the account I have, Wagner also called for Palestinians to quit negotiating with Israelis and to “resist.” While he claimed “I am committed to nonviolent resistance,” he also said “that’s my comfortable feeling as an American,” and Palestinians would feel differently, especially, he claimed, because they had been nonviolent and it hadn’t worked. “There is an enormous nonviolent movement in Palestine and many are paying a heavy price, so resist in all kinds of ways! Don’t concede!”
By the conclusion of the event, the speakers had worked the audience into a fervor. Speakers and audience members called for economic sanctions, boycotts, and divestment. Voices called to “Boycott anything that you think is Israeli Zionist,” boycott Starbucks, support Persbyterian boycotts, help form the ADC chapter in Buffalo, and work with Students for Justice in Palestine (a group that advocates academic boycotts of Israel). Audience members were urged to fill out cards so they could be contacted for the organizing effort.
Did Israelis Dress Up as Phalangists?
The event’s claim that is both novel and inflammatory is that “most likely” Israelis had put on Phalangist uniforms to hide that they were committing mass murder at Sabra and Shatilla. What is the credibility?
Both the New York Times and Washington Post covered the massacre extensively in late September 1982, and vociferously condemned Israel for its role, but none of the articles states that Israelis themselves had carried out the murders. The Encyclopedia of Genocide and the Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity contain detailed articles on the massacre, but neither mentions Israelis disguising themselves as Phalangists. The Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East and North Africa has an entry that is highly antagonistic to Israel, and gives far more attention to it than to the Phalangist perpetrators, yet makes no mention of direct Israeli involvement in the killings.
Rashid Khalidi, author of Under Siege: PLO Decisionmaking During the 1982 War (Columbia University Press, 1986) and no friend of Israel, had extensive access to people on the ground during the 1982 war and to Palestine Liberation Organization leaders and documents, and represented PLO’s position at the time. He, too, makes no mention of Israelis dressing up as Phalangists.
Despite the enormous volume of slander against Israel easily found on the internet, a moderate amount of searching on my part turned up no other instance of this claim. In further searching, it may well pop up, floating on internet sewers. In the meantime, the “Israelis disguised as Phalangists” libel appears to have been invented at the University at Buffalo.
Organizers of the Event
On the university’s online Events calendar, the first of two organizations listed as co-sponsor was the ADC, which had just received notoriety for presenting an award for courage to the journalist Helen Thomas after she called for Jews to “get the hell out” of Palestine and go home to Germany and Poland. Thomas went on to say, as as numerous news outlets reported, that “Congress, the White House and Hollywood, Wall Street are owned by Zionists. No question, in my opinion.” In its reports on the Middle East, the ADC has used “resistance” interchangeably with “terrorism.”
The speaker, Presbyterian Minister Don Wagner, is a frequent polemical lecturer against Israel. In his Dying in the Land of Promise, published in 2003, he reflects on a killer vine that surrounded his rose bush in his garden. He writes, “I began to realize that I had just experienced something analogous to the past one hundred-year process of Zionist occupation in Palestine.” In addition to equating Israeli Jews with vines and weeds, the book is filled with the kind of bias and one-dimensional distortion of history that have now become standard in the anti-Israel literature.
The other listed co-sponsor was the university’s English Department. After I wrote a letter of complaint to the department chair, on behalf of the Buffalo Chapter of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, she assured me that the Department had had no role in the event whatsoever. On behalf of the chapter, I also asked her to declare publicly on the department’s website that the department had been falsely associated with this slanderous event and in no way endorsed it. I am sure most chairs of academic departments wrongly associated with racist incitement against other groups would rush to publicly deny the accusation, but she declined to do so.
On the English Department’s internal listserv, faculty member James Holstun admitted to being the source of the false listing. “Because of the way in which university bookkeeping is done,” he wrote, “it is impossible to reserve rooms for open events without some university club or departmental affiliation. Any member of the English Department, as a member of the English Department, can reserve a room for a public event for no charge. I reserved the room in my name, listing the English Department as the affiliate [actually as co-sponsor]. I paid the exorbitant fee for microphones out of my pocket; the Department paid nothing.” On the face of it, this would imply that the room was listed under the name of the English Department in order to avoid the university’s requirement that rooms be booked by bona-fide campus groups, but the university would need to investigate to find out for sure.
One of the external groups for which recruits were sought during the event was Students for Justice in Palestine. This group, too, has a history of anti-Israel incitement on the Buffalo campus. There is good evidence that it was involved in fraudulent leafleting to confuse those walking to attend the Israel Ballet performance at the university in February 2010, and in harassment and intimidation of attendees at a Hillel event, featuring an Israeli speaker, in fall 2009. Continuing a long record of supporting anti-Israel events, the Western New York Peace Center, which claims the mantle of “peace and justice,” also took part by promoting the event to its membership.
James Holstun, the professor of English who reserved the room, likewise has a long record as an anti-Israel agitator. He has served on the board of directors of the Western New York Peace Center and has been affiliated with the area’s residual Marxist-Leninist groups. His polemical writing features variations on the Jew-is-Nazi slur and has spurred others into outpourings of virulent antisemitism on web sites around the world.
Aside from the novelty of the blood libel, the fact that an evening of Israel hatred took place in Buffalo is in itself not especially consequential. Hate speech targeting Israel and Jews is now common on many campuses in California and Canada. But why? The event I have described here gives a clue.
False Atrocity Allegations as Blood Libel
What was the purpose of the lecture on Sabra and Shatila? It was not meant to draw lessons from the sufferings inflicted on the innocent or to advance knowledge about massacres committed in the Middle East. Had that been the purpose, the speaker might also have mentioned another massacre that occurred in the same year, 1982, in the City of Hama, in Syria. Syrian troops surrounded and bombarded the city, where a rebellion was brewing. They killed at least 10,000 and perhaps more than 50,000 civilians. Because the latter atrocity could not be tied to Israel, it was forgotten. The campus activists who claimed to have only justice in mind had no interest in memory or resistance for the victims of Hama.
The lecture in Buffalo served neither to memorialize the victims of Sabra and Shatila, nor to respect their memory by pointing the way out of murderous conflicts. Rather its purpose was to demonize Israel, build students’ animosity toward it, and perpetuate war. The method was blood libel: the murder accusation fabricated to incite violent hatred of Jews.
Six years ago, another evening of Israel hatred took place at the University at Buffalo. It, too, began with stories of suffering Palestinian victim-youth, told this time by visiting speaker Norman Finkelstein. He claimed that American Jewish leadership had directed thousands of authors and scholars to write about the Holocaust after 1967 so as to justify the oppression of Palestinians. Elie Wiesel and Simon Wiesenthal were in on it, eager to profit off Holocaust victims. Revealing their Nazi leanings, Israelis were even importing blond and blue eyed Russians, Finkelstein said, so Zionists could turn themselves into an Aryan race.
This lecture, too, brought together a Buffalo area church, Muslim and Arab groups, a Marxist-Leninist outfit, the Western New York Peace Center, and radical academicians. In both events, the drama of the Palestinian victim-child molested by that hideous victimizer, the Nazi-Jew, was used to work the audience into a frenzy.
The clues are right there. The advocacy groups claiming to represent Muslims or Arabs, the wayward Christian group or minister with an agenda, the flailing post-communists, and the anti-globalization peace-and-justice utopians need each other, but have too little in common. At universities around the world, they have rediscovered the old formula: in mass meetings that target the Israeli or the Jew, they can build solidarity through collective, ritualized loathing. All they need is a good blood libel.
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Ernest Sternberg is a professor at the University at Buffalo and Member of the Board of Directors of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.
