Christopher Dennis- Bryn Mawr, Re: Israel Narrative on the Campus..

Sir: Diversity is a term currently used, with great popularity
but not always with deep scholarship, to denote the civil rights,
civil liberties or “equality” incumbent upon government to give all
its citizens in law. The culture concept term of “doiversity” is
American. Students, as you know, are easily confused as to the
difference between national law, international law, moral law, etc.
One might say that “diversity” analygous to Israel might be, how does
Israeli law treat its minority citizens- do they all have the same
access to the university, for example? Can an Ethiopean Jew or an
East Jerusalem Arab go to the Hebrew University? In South Africa –
Apartheid day, blacks were barred from higher education- this was the
immediate action leading to the boycott by academicians of S.African
universities. The word “oppression” as we use it in US, as for
example, when in the 1926 hurricane the dead blacks of West Palm
Beach Florida were buried in a common pit,
> while white people got a regular burial, is what we associate with
the oppression of cast as it has been legitimized in literature, law,
and in educational policy as defined by a ministry of education.
>
> I challenge you sir to come to Israel and to take a look at the
Ministry of Education’s efforts to provide “diverse” educational
education to all of its citizens. I’ll eat my hat if Bryn Mawr is
attempting to do more than our educators of education in the
universities of Israel.
> We have discussed Israel, the nation-state, now a few words about
Israel and its policy of international relations, foreign relations
in regard to the 1967 War. “Diversity” is a misnomer here. I assume
your students are questioning what happens to a conquered people when
there is no peace treaty, no annexation either. When the
citizenship is not clear and when a people has no authority of its
own that can maintain law and give protection. So far in the history
of the world it has meant military rule. The law-law on the books,
of the land acquired in 1967, has a hodge-podge of Ottoman, British-
Mandate, Muslim, Jordanian, Israeli-military law. WE are the first
ones to tell you there is no way to make war smell like a rose.
>
> To those of us Israelis who are bent on parting ways with this
territory, and there is no doubt this means a majority of our
citizens, two states means two states. The issue is no longer how to
deal with a population and a policy we regret, (the original reason
was to swap peace for land) but how to get out of it. The better
solution would have been a negotiated treaty but most sadly we will
have to settle for this.