http://www.washingtonjewishweek.com/main.asp?SectionID=4&SubSectionID=4&ArticleID=8016

For years, some pro-Israel activists have been troubled by university professors who demonstrated bias against Israel in the classroom. But last week was apparently a first: A George Washington University instructor resigned after being accused of teaching a class that was biased in favor of Israel.

Hanna Diskin told the students in her “Arab-Israeli Conflict” class on Tuesday of last week that she would not be teaching the class for the remainder of the semester – and would be leaving the D.C. university – because she was upset that students in the class had complained about her teaching to the head of the political science department.

Diskin, visiting from Hebrew University in Jerusalem, told the class that the course she had been scheduled to teach next semester had been canceled due to the complaints. But a student in the class, senior Greg Berlin, said that political science department head Christopher Deering said that next semester’s course merely had been deemed “inactive,” or on hold, pending a review of class evaluations from this term.

Calls to Deering and to Bernard Reich, who filled in for Diskin last Thursday, were not returned.

Diskin declined to comment via e-mail. A GWU spokesperson also had no comment.

Berlin and a classmate, senior Elizabeth Kamens, both said that the problem with Diskin’s teaching was that she focused only on Israel in a course that was supposed to deal with the entire Arab-Israeli conflict.

“We would never cover the other side,” said Kamens, who is Jewish.

“It became more of an Israeli politics class,” said Berlin, noting that while understanding Zionism is important to studying the Arab-Israeli conflict, he wondered why they were they spending half of the semester learning about it.

Berlin said that he and a number of other students had expressed their “dissent” to Diskin in class about the way she was handling the course, but became frustrated when they would ask for an Arab perspective on an issue and Diskin would change the subject or talk over them. For example, after Diskin cited the number of Israelis who died in a particular military conflict, Berlin said, students asked for the number of fatalities on the Palestinian side. Diskin, according to Berlin, replied that only the Israeli figures were reliable, because only Israel was a democracy.

“I’m Jewish myself, but I feel there’s a line between objectivity and teaching with a bias,” said Berlin, who said he was one of a number of students who expressed their concerns to leaders of the political science department.

The students said they were assigned readings from only two books: the scholarly A History of Israel by GWU professor emeritus Howard Sachar and the book Myths & Facts.

Kamens said she was “a little surprised” that the latter book was selected for an upper-level political science course because of the book’s structure. It outlines common “myths” about the Arab-Israeli conflict and then provides evidence responding to those myths.

Myths & Facts originated as a American Israel Public Affairs Committee publication decades ago and was updated by Mitchell Bard, executive director of the Chevy Chase-based American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, in recent years.

M.J. Rosenberg, who edited Myths & Facts when he worked at AIPAC in the 1980s, was surprised to hear it was being used in a college class.

“It’s not a textbook,” said Rosenberg, now the policy director at the Israel Policy Forum. “It’s counter-propaganda” that is “not designed to show both sides,” but to provide all the facts that support the pro-Israel side.

Rosenberg said it was “hard to believe” the book would be used in any college class other than one studying propaganda.

Bard said his book is “all based on facts” and is the “most concise collection” of information on the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Coincidentally, Bard’s organization, AICE, provided the funding to hire Diskin as a postdoc fellow at GWU. Bard said AICE – which will fund 26 professors and six postdoc fellows at universities around the country this school year – has no input on whom the university hires or course content, other than that the visiting instructors teach Israel studies.

He said professors who teach under AICE auspices are expected to be professional.

“If we’re perceived as advocates, that would be counter to the idea we’re promoting,” he said.

Bard said he was still attempting to get further information about Diskin’s departure, but said he had never heard a complaint that a university instructor was too pro-Israel and that it would be “ironic” considering the number of complaints that have been made about anti-Israel professors.

Daniel Pipes, whose Middle East Forum set up a Web site titled Campus Watch to monitor the statements of Middle East Studies professors for bias, also said that an accusation of pro-Israel bias in the classroom was “something I can’t think of having happened before.”

Pipes argued Diskin’s departure signaled “another step” in enforcing attitudes throughout academia that are “anti-American and anti-America’s allies.”

He also defended the use of Myths & Facts as a textbook. “So far as I know, it is a reliable source, perfectly reputable,” he said.

Berlin said Diskin’s decision to resign appeared to be her own, since the political science department did not know anything about it until she announced it to her students.