“There is an academic battleground on campus,” warned Dr. Edward Beck, a psychology professor and Israel activist.

But he adds that the fight between pro-Palestinian/anti-Israel groups and their pro-Israel opponents is one-sided.

At universities like Columbia in New York City and DePaul in Chicago, professors have been let go or denied tenure for espousing pro-Israel or Zionist viewpoints. Theories put forth by Noam Chomksy and others calling Israel a colonial power have captivated academicians.

“We have to take the offensive. We have to initiate,” said Beck, who spoke Nov. 9 at the Jewish Community Center at a talk sponsored by the Alvin, Lottie and Rachel Gray Center for Jewish Life and Learning.

Beck, an Alvernia College (Pa.) psychology professor, is president of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME), a 510(c)(3) organization made up of 700 professors representing more than 200 universities worldwide.

The group’s mission, according to its website, is to encourage faculty “to develop effective responses to the ideological distortions, including anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist slanders that poison debate and work against peace.”

SPME convened its first academic conference in Cleveland the weekend of Oct. 28-30. The conference, held on the campus of Case Western Reserve University, was a great success, said Beck.

A book will be published containing all the papers presented at the conference, which refuted the so-called “propaganda serving as scholarship” coming from many academicians, said Beck. The book was funded with a grant from the Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland.

For a long time, Israel advocacy on college campuses focused solely on educating the students directly. The students, in turn, would become knowledgeable advocates.

But what the Jewish community neglected to do was “teach the teachers,” said Beck. As a result, many professors continue to dispense false or ill-advised information, not just in Middle East studies departments but in English, anthropology and history as well.

He hopes that the publication from this latest conference does its part to inform professors about the reality of the political and social history of Israel. “They (pro-Palestinians) talk about the new ‘mantras,'” noted Beck. “Right of return, occupation. What does it really mean?”

No-wing

Beck said his group is has no political agenda. The membership is a broad-based constituency from the left, center and right sides of the spectrum. But he sometimes has trouble recruiting new members for political reasons.

“Advocacy is seen as a right-wing activity,” he said. “Many professors are afraid to come out of the foxholes.”

Beck admits he was a “raving, lunatic liberal” in the ’70s who protested the Vietnam War. He wants to bring that same fiery passion to Israel advocacy. “This is about survival, the right of self-determination and self-defense. It’s not right-wing or left-wing.”

Academic crusade

Promoting the group remains a very hard sell, concedes Beck. He often sits by his computer late at night and sifts through college websites, looking for Jewish names. He then sends out e-mails asking them to consider membership.

Still, he’s happy with the 700-strong base SPME has now. For the academic community, that’s an impressive figure. “Professors are notorious non-joiners and independent thinkers,” explained Beck.

Funding also remains a problem. A large, well-known philanthropy recently withdrew its support for the group because it thought SPME’s position on disengagement was too liberal.

The work the group does is not that exciting, either. “I wish I could tell you it’s vibrant, sexy work,” said Beck. “It’s slow and painstaking.”

An academic position paper can take three to five years to pass through peer review, and the papers have titles like “Yomut Turkmen Ethnnography and Postcolonial Theory” or “The Palestinianization of the Feminist Academy: Stalinism, Postmodernism, and Islamic Apocalypse Now” n not exactly bedside reading. (Both of these papers were presented at SPME’s Case conference).

SPME’s speakers are also very careful about their speaking engagements. They will only come to a college campus if specifically invited by faculty, not by a student group.

The stakes are simply too high, especially when a DePaul University professor and SPME member was recently fired for allegedly “flipping-off” a Palestinian group on campus. (The professor claimed he simply threw up his arms in disgust.)

In the future, Beck hopes to make his group more visible on campus and a more effective counter to the morass of Israel-bashing scholarship. Right now, his small army is girding for academic battle.

“We have a critical mass,” he claims. “People are paying attention.”

http://www.clevelandjewishnews.com/articles/2005
/11/10/news/israel/xantisemitism1111.txt