Chair of the Jewish Heritage

“Intellectuals and Terror: the Fatal Attraction

(Present vis-à-vis the Past, Aspects of Theory and History)”

May 3-5 2010

The Raab Building
Ariel University Center

With the conference’s central theme of “Intellectuals and Terrorism”: we are seeking to create a forum in which to explore “the third side of terrorism”-not the perpetrators of terror or their victims but representatives of the intellectual milieu who contribute to a cultural environment conducive to terror. The goal of the conference is to produce a comparative-typological analysis of real-life case studies and narratives, in order to develop a broad conceptual model of intellectual attitudes toward terrorism. Interest in terror and death has been exhibited by intellectuals in a range of societies, cultures, and historical periods, past and present. Bearing in mind the mass murders that resulted from death ideologies under Nazi and Communist regimes, it is necessary to examine the current situation, and to try to learn from the mistakes of the past. What happens when marginal intellectual currents become normative? What happens when the dominant academic discourse not only systematically challenges the founding principles of academia and its cultural foundations, but even incites towards radicalism and terror? Interdisciplinary in its approach, this conference encompasses the spheres of history, politics, psychology, literary criticism, and theory of culture. Participants in the conference will include key specialists in these fields from Israel and abroad, representing a variety of political and ideological stances.

The languages of the conference: English, Hebrew (with translation to English)

Programe

Monday, May 3, 2010

Opening

17.00-17.30 Registration and refreshments

Opening Session (In Hebrew)

Chairperson: Prof. Ortzion Bartana, Israel Heritage Department, Ariel University Center

17.30-18.15 Greetings: Prof. Michael Zinigrad, Ariel University Center

Mr. Yuli Edelstein, Minister of Information and the Diaspora

Prof. Israel Nebenzahl, Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Ariel University Center

Dr. Uri Zur, Head of the Israel Heritage Department, Ariel University Center

Prof. Ortzion Bartana, Introduction

18.15-18.45 Joel Fishman, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, George Orwell on the Intellectuals of His Time, and the Key Concepts: Intellectuals, Terror and Political Correctness

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Terror and Values

9.00-9.30 Reception and refreshments

9.30-11.00 Session One: Terror and Values: Historical Precedents (in English)

Chairperson: Dr. Uri Zur, Israel Heritage Department, Ariel University Center

Richard Landes, Boston University, Intellectuals and Terrorism: from “Useful Idiots” to “Useful Infidels”?

Anna Geifman, Boston University, The Liberal-Left Opts for Terror

Irma Ratiani, Maka Elbakudze, Tbilisi State University, Anti-totalitarian Text – The Reaction of Literature against Intellectual Terror

Paul Hollander, University of Massachusetts, The Appeal of Righteous Political Violence for Intellectuals

11.30-12.30 Session Two: Intellectuals in the Shadow of Terror: The Present vis-à-vis the Past (in Hebrew)

Chairperson:

Golda Akhiezer, The Hebrew University, Jewish Identity and National Consciousness: A Case Study of Radical Participation in the Russian Empire, 1881-1917

Meir Seidler, The Beauty and the Beast:Sartre’s Relation to Baader-Meinhof

David Bukay, Haifa University, Islam and Terrorism: Religious and Cultural Foundations

Eliezer Shargorodsky, The Open University of Israel, The 21^st Century Version of the Blood Libel.

15.00-16.30 Session Three: Intellectuals and Terror in Israel and in the World (in Hebrew)

Chairperson: Prof. Noach Milgram, Ariel University Center

Ron Schleifer, Ariel University Center, Political Warfare in the Arab-Israeli Conflict: Organization, Messages, Methods

Ronen A. Cohen, Ariel University Center, The Other Voice – An Intellectual Debate inside the Islamic World between the Western Agenda Devotees and those Embracing a Mistaken Interpretation of Islam

Yossi Goldstein, Ariel University Center, The Organized Terror against Britain, November 1945-June 1946

Yuval Arnon-Ohanna, Ariel University, Center, War and Peace Negotiations: Approaches in Islam versus Approaches in the West

17.00-18.30 Session Four: Round Table: “The Fatal Attraction” and Its Causes (In Hebrew)

Chairperson:Prof. Yossi Goldstein, Israel Heritage Department, Ariel University Center

Alek D. Epstein, The Open University of Israel, Intellectuals’ Fascination with Totalitarian Utopias

Yitzhak Klein, Efrata College, Jerusalem, Darkness at Noon: Israeli Academics Justify Terror against Israel

Noach Milgram, Ariel University Center, The Road to Violence Is Paved with the Misguided Intentions of Left Wing Intellectuals

Uri Milstein, Ariel University Center, The Attitude of Intellectuals towards Terror, according to the General Theory of Security: The Survival Principle

Wednesday, 5.5.2010

Images of Terror

9.00-9.30 Reception and refreshments

9.30-11.00 Session Five: Literary Representations of Terror (in English and in Hebrew)

Chairperson: Dr. Nitza Davidovitch, Israel Heritage Department, Ariel University Center

Helena Tolstoy, The Hebrew University, “Azefovzhina” in the works of A.Krandiyevskaya

Ortzion Bartana, Ariel University Center, Self-Hate, the Wandering Jew Model and the Deceit of the Six-Day War in the Pseudo-Intellectual Hebrew Prose

Leonid Katsis, The Russian University of the Humanities, Moscow, Problems of Terrorism in Unknown Articles by Zeev Jabotinsky (1903-1905)

Helena Rimon, Ariel University Center, The Poetics of Lucrimax and the Historiography of the Hebrew Literature

11.30-13.00 Session Six: Terror and the Cinema (In Hebrew)

Chairperson: Dr. Ziva Feldman, Israel Heritage Department, Ariel University Center

Hananel Rosenberg,The Hebrew University, “The Interview with the Terrorist”: Israeli Youth’s Reception of the Television Meeting with the Enemy

Yuval Rivlin, Israeli Films: The Act of Terror in Israeli Cinema

Kinneret Guterman, College of Management Academic Studies, Rishon Lezion, Representation of Terror, Arabs and Muslims in American Popular Media

Sariel Birnbaum, The Hebrew University, Egyptian Cinema as a Way to Fight Islamic Terror

13.45-16.00 Lunch – Trip to Tel Shilo

16.00-18.30 Session Seven: Terror, Mass-Communication and Society (In Hebrew)

Chairperson: Dr. Amnon Shapira, Israel Heritage Department, Ariel University Center

Elina Bardach-Yalov, Bar Ilan University, The Russian Dilemma: Are the Media the Oxygen of Terrorists?

Amnon Lord, Makor Rishon, The Intellectuals’ Temptation: The Political Warfare Strategy of Willi Münzenberg

Eyal Pascovich, Ariel University Center, Social-Civilian Apparatuses of Terrorist Organizations and their Intellectual (Religious and Social) Justification

19.00-20.30 Closing Session: The Role of Mass Media in Shaping the Image of Terror

Chairperson: Dr. Ronen Cohen, Department of Israeli and Middle Eastern Studies, Ariel University Center

Minister of Science, Prof. Rabbi Daniel Hershkovitz, Ben Dror Yemini (Maariv), Dov Kontorer (Vesti) Sophy Ron-Moria (Makor Rishon)

20.45 Festive Dinner (by invitation)

ABSTRACTS

Monday, May 3, 2010

Opening

Joel Fishman

George Orwell on the Intellectuals of His Time and the Key Concepts: Intellectuals, Terror and Political Correctness

George Orwell, who was an exceptionally fine observer of society, was very much aware of the importance of intellectuals and their considerable influence. He published his observations in magazine articles and particularly in his classic dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, which first appeared in 1949. He described the intellectuals as part of the “new aristocracy,” or the “managerial class,” – i.e., members of the salaried middle class which included bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians. In his view, they were hungry for power and intent on crushing the opposition. Because they now had the technical means to do so, members of this class were capable of enforcing tyranny with an efficiency unknown in earlier times.

Orwell was critical of the intellectuals whom he regarded as opportunistic and not particularly moral. He objected to their uncritical support of Stalin’s regime and their willingness to overlook its totalitarian oppression. He wrote that the secret wish of the English Russophile intelligentsia was “to destroy the old, equalitarian version of Socialism and usher in a hierarchical society where the intellectual can at last get his hands on the whip.” This group in his view was dishonest and cowardly. On other occasions, Orwell wrote that the English intelligentsia was defeatist, pacifistic, and admired power and cruelty. He did not hold this group in high esteem, and it didn’t matter whether their ideologies were leftist or rightist.

He considered the intellectuals of his time unable to sense danger and wrote: “… So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot…” Orwell also opposed the “realistic” approach to public life, which rejected moral considerations (and indeed, this school still exists in our time). It would be safe to surmise that moral considerations would have carried much weight in forming his attitude with regard to terror and he probably would have regarded it in the same way that he looked upon totalitarianism and the unrestrained exercise of power and cruelty.

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Terror and Values

Session One: Terror and Values: Historical Precedents (in English)

Richard Landes

From Useful Idiot to Useful Infidel: Meditations on the Folly of 21^st Century Intellectuals

Lenin allegedly referred to Western intellectuals who so supported the Communist experiment that they disguised its horrors from the West, as “useful idiots,” a term now widely used to describe liberal intellectuals who enjoy freedom and prosperity, yet work passionately to destroy both by giving moral and material support to the enemies of freedom.

The grotesque contradiction between these intellectuals’ values and their attitude towards the totalitarians they defended continues to puzzle anyone who examines the record. Roger Nash Baldwin, pacifist, founder of the ACLU, wrote a book of fulsome praise entitled Liberty under the Soviets in 1928 where we find the characteristic tendency of useful idiots towards ferocious self-criticism of the culture that allows them their freedoms and a refusal to apply those standards elsewhere.

Today we are faced with an even more inexplicable form of useful idiocy. On the one hand, whereas previous victims of this intellectual affliction at least had the excuse that they were dazzled by the goals of communism, the current crop apologizes for regressive, gynophobic, and openly totalitarian Islamic ideologies. On the other hand, these “intellectuals” refuse to learn from the long unhappy past of useful idiocy. Like their predecessors, they too are appropriately held in contempt by the people whom they defend – hence the term “useful infidels.”

Today’s useful infidels span a wide range, from the revolutionary leftists who see Islamic radicalism as a natural ally against an irredeemably evil West, to radical (post-colonial) intellectuals for whom subalterns can do no wrong, to liberals who, terrified of being called racists or Islamophobes, insist that only a tiny minority of Muslims are dangerous, and that Islam is a “religion of peace.” In so doing they contribute to the massive victories that Jihadi Islam has scored in the cognitive war they wage on the West. Identifying the phenomenon, understanding the (often messianic) motivations, and developing appropriate counter-measures is a major desiderandum of the 21^st century.

Anna Geifman

The Liberal-Left Opts for Terror

Patterns of “terrorist discourse” relay an overall typology, indicative of the universality of the intellectual position of the Left with regard to terror, cultural discrepancies notwithstanding. This paper compares left-liberals’ attitudes towards terrorism in the early 20^th-century Russian Empire to present-day reactions of their counterparts in Europe, the U.S., and especially Israel-the hub of terrorist activity today, the way Russia was a century ago. The general attitude represents “the worst intellectual heresy of our age: the romanticism of violence.”

Irma Ratiani, Maka Elbakudze

Anti-totalitarian Text – Reaction of Literature against Intellectual Terror

Literary anti-utopia, being formed in the last century, became one of the reflections of the wide-scale Communist dictatorship. Anti-utopia, representing one of the most crucial parts of anti-totalitarian meta-text, has precisely reflected the deep crisis of the epoch, the common skepticism and nihilism that prevailed in the society, depressed by intellectual terror.

Literary anti-utopia is utopia in a negative context. If utopia presents a social fantasy about an ideal society, anti-utopia, as a counter-utopia, actively opposes any social structure formed for implementation of a social ideal. Utopia is a dream about the ideally governed society; while anti-utopia symbolizes a protest against the practical realization of happiness. Therefore, the world of realized utopia and rebellious anti-utopia is identical: utopia symbolizes an ideal type of equal society; anti-utopia – an ideal type of slavery.

Literary utopia is the flagman of that new, ideal order, which is controlled by a mind from above and is of a common nature. In contrast to this, literary anti-utopia cannot and does not compromise with the obligatory character of the new, ideal order, and struggles for the survival of individual dignity among the mass.

Correspondingly, the main conceptual characteristic of anti-utopia represents the opposition of organized society/personâ identification in relation to the opposition crowd/an individual, where the relevant concept for the society is a mass of people obeying the hyper-tropic authoritative mechanism, while a person is a nonconformist individual opposing it.

The crowd represented in the anti-utopian novel is a unity of “free slaves” who are violently ruled by a hierarchical state machine and who are opposed by a disobedient protagonist. To be distinguished is the characteristic feature of the protagonist of an anti-utopian novel, which primarily implies in it the sense of individual self and the struggle for preserving this ego. Correspondingly, two different psychological types are singled out in an anti-utopian novel: mass and individual, whose antagonist interrelation is vividly revealed in the motivational model peculiar to the anti-utopian genre.

A number of motifs form the basis of the motivational model of the anti-utopian genre: collective labor and quasi-nomination; the concept of a leader; scientific progress and technocratic leadership; the leveling of creative minds; fear; destruction of family traditions; suicide; pseudo-carnivals and pseudo-rituals; and parody.

The coordination of these motifs with conceptual characteristics gains an eschatological meaning in a number of anti-utopian texts and singles out the projection of literary struggle against the dictatorship.

This paper aims to analyze these problems within concrete literary texts, such as Vladimir Nabokov’s “Invitation to the Beheading” and “Bend Sinister” and Mikheil Javakhishvili’s “Jakho’s Dispossessed”. Mikheil Javakhishvili, the great Georgian writer of the beginning of the twentieth century, was arrested and murdered in 1937 by Stalin’s regime; one of the main reasons of this writer’s death sentence was his best text, “Jakho’s Dispossessed”.

Texts by Nabokov and Javakhishvili are generally overlooked in the frame of comparative studies.

Session Two: Intellectuals in the Shadow of Terror: The Present vis-à-vis the Past

Golda Akhiezer

Jewish Identity and National Consciousness: A Case Study in Radical Participation in the Russian Empire, 1881-1917

The lecture is devoted to the participation of Jews in radical movements in the Russian Empire in the period of 1881-1917. The main focus is on the problem of Jewish self-identification among the revolutionaries. The purpose of this lecture is to trace some of the main aspects of the process of abandonment of the Jewish tradition for the sake of adopting radical ideologies, common in this period in Russia. The psychological motivations that affected the radicals’ choice will be discussed. Equally essential are the modes of transformation of traditional Jewish concepts into specific elements of revolutionary ideologies.

Meir Seidler

TheBeauty and theBeast: Sartre’s relation toBaader-Meinhof

This lecture focuses on the relationship between French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980) and the infamous German terrorists of the Baader-Meinhof gang which operated in Germany in the 1970s. After a short description of the intellectual atmosphere in France (after WWII in general and after the student revolt in 1968 in particular) and of the history of the Baader-Meinhof gang, I will proceed to analyze some major elements in Sartre’s existential philosophy and focus on those of them which enabled him to develop strong sympathies for left-winged terrorism. I will argue that these elements (together, admittedly, with some of Sartre’s character traits) are far from being marginal in Sartre’s philosophy but, rather, constitute its core and basic framework. Sartre’s sympathy for left-winged terrorism was long- lasting and accompanied him already from his early years. The well known meeting between Sartre and the terrorist Baader in the German jail in 1974 was thus a logical consequence of Sartre’s lifelong political engagement and ideological stance. The failure of that meeting, which was acknowledged by Sartre, was a result not of ideological differences but rather of Baader’s personality, which Sartre found simply shocking.

David Bukay

Islam and Terrorism: Religious and Cultural Foundations

Terrorism is a most salient feature of our contemporary era, and Islam is its main operative source. In this paper, I argue that it is Islam, and all its partial relative forms of appearance (radical, fundamental, fanatic, etc.) that matters. Islamic terrorism uses a variety of means, with two arms, Jihad and Da’wah, to ceaselessly promote its objectives to conquer the world. This is a dynamic target of permanent expansionism, a prolonged ambition that uses all means possible under the slogan: Islam is a righteous religion and this is the reason why it wins; Islam wins and this is the reason why it is righteous.

Islam is a political religion par-excellence, based on the characteristics of Arab culture which gives them rationalization and legitimization, and sees the world in a black-and-white perspective, the main core being that of total hatred towards the other.

Eliezer Shargorodsky

The 21^st Century Version of the Blood Libel

Many events have recently occurred which we would have hoped would have disappeared forever from our consciousness. One doesn’t need to go far to see the similarity between the Mohammed a-Dura libel or the Aftonbladet publication accusing IDF soldiers of killings Palestinians with a view to selling their organs, and the medieval Trento or Norwich blood libels.

The purpose of this paper is to make a typological analysis of some of the events of the last decade in light of the medieval blood libel phenomenon. I am not going to consider this phenomenon as it manifests itself in the Middle East, but I will concentrate on its renaissance on the continent where one could have thought it had disappeared forever.

From the times of the Norwich case (1144) about 150 blood libel cases have been recorded in Europe. The pattern is nearly the same: Jews are accused of a Christian child’s suspicious death. The child is declared a saint. The Jews are charged with murder and burnt or exiled. Often blood libels were accompanied by pogroms. The child martyr who by his death and “miracles” attributed to him, exemplifies the Christian God, was subsequently glorified in ballads and poetry where all the Jews were given the role of God-killers of past and present. The Christian belief in Jews as God-killers and in Christ redeeming by his death the sins of the believers in him thus finds a new confirmation. The blood libel is another reenactment of the founding myth of the Christian religion. The belief in the libel became part of the Christian creed in the eyes of the masses.

The similarity between the medieval blood libels and the A-Dura affair is not only that it is a lie and that Israel stands in the box, accused, but also that the lie is spread by the “new class” – those who determine which dominant social values and myths one should embrace – the media and NGO‘s which today fulfill the role fulfilled in the past by monks and street poets. Articles full of hatred and caricatures draw Israel as the ultimate other. The juxtaposition of a defenseless child and a ruthless IDF soldier is a replica of the dichotomy of little William from Norwich and the Jew devoid of mercy.

It should be noted that blood libels did not appear before a fundamental change occurred in the Christian dogma during the Crusades: the Church began to view the Jews not as the unwilling and mistaken killers of the Christian God – as stated by Augustine – but as those who committed the deicide purposefully. One can observe lastly a similar change in the way Israel is perceived by many within the Western intellectual circles: Israel is portrayed as a country whose soldiers kill innocent children and civilians intentionally. Such are, for instance, the accusations contained in the Goldstone report.

Today’s reemergence of the blood libel phenomenon discloses a whole system of beliefs, which no fact can undermine. These beliefs have clear religious features and they bear grave consequences as to the perception of the State of Israel in the West. In Israel, though, the magnitude of the threat hasn’t been taken into account yet. Another purpose of this paper will be to try to explain this attitude and to suggest some possible Israeli responses.

Session Three: Intellectuals and Terror in Israel and in the World (in Hebrew)

Ron Schleifer

Political Warfare in the Arab-Israeli Conflict: Organization, Messages, Methods

The legacy of the revolutionary warfare was instilled in the PLO activists trained in the Eastern Bloc who put it to good use in their struggle against Israel. The article outlines the strategies, the organizational dimension such as the use of fronts, and the messages which were used to persuade the Western World to support the Palestinian organizations.

Ronen A. Cohen, ArielUniversityCenter

The Other Voice – An Intellectual Debate inside the Islamic World between the Western Agenda Devotees and those Embracing a Mistaken Interpretation of Islam

The intellectuals’ role in the design of revolts and revolutions as well as the perception of terror is crucial in the modern era. Their attitude to power on the one hand and to political processes on the other have led to creating an integrative pattern of action among local and international terror groups. Their perception of power and its use in the terrorist dimension necessarily derive from an intellectual justification that is based upon religion. But there is more. There are intellectual people who have proven that the religious component plays only a minor role in their terrorist influence and that the pure secular idea is as important and developed. That was the case with Mao Tse-Tung in China, Ernesto Che Guevara in Cuba and others. Mao Tse-Tung‘s revolutionary philosophy was also used by Islamic revolutionary movements that during the Communist era aspired to copy his phenomenal success during the mass revolution in China.

Unlike the clergy, who justify terror and their path towards a revolution using religious terminology (as well as terror), intellectuals make up terminology and new terror concepts that are mostly based upon components of freedom, equality and fraternity (i.e. the French revolution) and use financial terminology to reject a regime or a group that has become a target since its members do not follow the directives designed by these leading intellectuals.

These intellectuals’ function does not end with igniting terror and leading revolutions; their main role is leading towards a partial if not a full acceptance of the new order. They have often labored alongside other rulers and revolutionaries in order to ignite terror and revolution and have shared the “leadership pie” with them. These same intellectuals have hoped to apply the utopian vision that they believe to be a perfect remedy for a society that has been recently managed by “sick” rulers. It is the same society they wish to cure by applying terror and revolutionary components that has brought them to their present position. Sometimes, the same intellectuals fight intellectual groups that were part of the revolution and terror ignition and there are even intellectual groups that have discovered that a perfect application of their platform is impossible or inapplicable.

In recent years, the voice of intellectuals within the Islamic world who support a genuine and intellectual examination of the so-called intellectual arguments presented by Islamic clergy who justify terror (such as the Egyptian Sheikh Yusuf al–Qaradawi, Dr. Hassan al-Tourabi in Sudan and others) has become louder (especially in Egypt). They all have one unifying characteristic: they are experts of the religious laws, the Islamic religious rulings and the international as well as Middle-East ways of life. According to them, the clergy’s rulings and actions are manipulative and are not compatible with reality or with the correct pure religious ruling that Islam offers (a religious give-and-take). As far as they are concerned, those religious rulers use demagogy and invalid rulings that lead the Arab and Islamic worlds towards a militant and terrorist reality that presents Islam as a militant religion. Those so-called “secular” intellectuals’ premise is not necessarily meant to protect Islam’s good name but rather to protect an intellectual interrogation that can manifest itself by expressing existential questions or political ones that exist in the Middle-East space.

Indeed, the clergy and the intellectuals’ crowd is larger and more illiterate and unfortunately more attentive than those “secular” intellectuals. As intellectuals, they do acknowledge this situation but they do not give up believing that their intellectual truth’s voice must be heard.

This research proposal intends to examine the complexity of the intellectual discussion between the two schools – the religious one vs. the secular one – as well as the extent of its impact on the world and Middle East audiences regarding terror, its justification or its invalidation. Furthermore, this research will also examine the political echo of that discussion in the world and in the Middle East and its impact upon the international discussion regarding the perception of terror in the world in general and in the Middle East in particular.

Yossi Goldstein

The Organized Terror against Britain, November 1945-June 1946

In October 1945, after it became clear that the British were insisting on the implementation of the “White Paper” policy, the Haganah, Irgun and Lehi decided to adopt terrorist tactics. Ben-Gurion appointed members to a committee known as “the X Committee”, whose function was to approve the actions. Discussions within the X Committee were conducted in a businesslike manner, despite polar political differences among its members. Compared to discussions on these difficult topics that took place at meetings of the Jewish Agency Executive, the members of the X Committee knew to transcend the contradictions between them. Why did the Jewish Agency leadership under a person like Ben Gurion turn to terrorism? How did the committee operate, what decisions did it reach, and why did it disband? These questions have generated sharp disagreements among researchers for many years, and the paper will attempt to address these issues.

Session Four: Round Table: “The Fatal Attraction” and Its Causes (In Hebrew)

Alek D. Epstein

Intellectuals’ Fascination with Totalitarian Utopias

In the end of the 1980s Paul Johnson published a book entitled Intellectuals, which, despite its being concise, has become probably the most detailed bill of indictment against this group of “social critics” and “social innovators”. Describing the intellectuals’ public roles, Johnson was very far from accepting a popular thesis – citing Edward Said – that viewed “the figure of the intellectual as a being set apart, someone able to speak the truth, a courageous and angry individual for whom no worldly power is too big and imposing to be criticized”. Quite the contrary: Johnson argued that self-mobilized intellectuals, in general, and university professors, in particular, were among the most faithful adherents of some of the worst totalitarian powers; and that their attitudes towards the principles of humanism and liberalism were negative in most countries in most periods of the recent history.

Truly speaking, Paul Johnson was not the first one to draw attention to some intellectuals’ fascination for the darkest regimes of the twentieth century. For example, in 1946 Max Weinreich published pioneer research entitled Hitler’s Professors, in which he emphasized that “German scholars, who as a rule already in the Second Reich had done their best to foster German imperialism, from the end of World War I supplied Nazism with the ideological weapons which any movement, but particularly a German movement, needs for its success”.

As we all know, over the past century many influential Western intellectuals became addicted, to a greater or lesser degree, to Marxism and even to Marxism-Leninism. Why did the overwhelming majority of intellectuals all over the world become seduced by the Communist fantasy? How could so many defend even Stalin himself, deny his crimes or explain them away? Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China and Cuba by Paul Hollander and A Better World. Stalinism and the American Intellectuals by William L. O’Neil provide amazing accounts of how the Western intellectuals embraced Marxist tyrants at the very moment their colleagues were rotting in prison cells, and the common people everyone claimed to be concerned for were starving. These books report how cultural and religious leaders from the West (some of them famous public figures), visited the Soviet Union (as well as China, Cuba, and other Communist countries), and told the most appalling lies to flatter their hosts and express their contempt for Western society.

Unfortunately, no one has systematically analyzed the association of Israeli intellectuals with various totalitarian ideologies. Even Paul Johnson, the author of the highly acclaimed A History of the Jews, in his book Intellectuals does not discuss the situation within the academic field in the Jewish state; moreover, the word “ Israel ” itself did not appear in this volume. However, it seems that his (and the other aforementioned researchers’) general conclusions have been relevant in the case of some important Israeli university intellectuals to a no lesser extent than to their Western comrades. Since such research has not been conducted yet, I would like to share with the conference participants some thoughts regarding this issue.

Yitzhak Klein

Darkness at Noon: Israeli Academics Justify Terror against Israel

There exists within the Israeli academic establishment a community that opposes the existence of a Zionist, Jewish state on neo-Marxist grounds. This community’s ideology analyzes societies in terms of exploitative relations between classes that are also ethnic groups. Though it is impossible to believe classic Marxist economic analysis, a fact of which this community is well aware, nonetheless they continue to speak and write in terms of exploitation and revolution. According to their ideology no nation-state defined as such can be legitimate, including Israel. This community views Israel’s presence in Judaea and Samaria as a particularly grave extension of the exploitative relations that characterize Israeli society “within the Green Line.” In the context of this group’s ideology, Palestinian terror against innocent Israeli citizens can be viewed as a legitimate armed struggle against exploitation, and some who hold this ideology justify Palestinian terror against their own people, at home and in international forums. Some members of this community also engage in acts of violence against Israeli armed forces and police, such as the violent demonstrations against the Security Fence at Bil’in. Israeli authorities have yet to acknowledge that the ideology motivating members of this community justifies violence, that violent acts committed under its influence should count as “ideological crimes,” or that the publication of this ideology should be considered “praise, admiration or encouragement to violence” under Article 144.b.4 of Israel’s Criminal Code.

Noach Milgram

The Road to Violence Is Paved with the Misguided Intentions of Left-Wing Intellectuals

This paper makes two assertions, one evidence-based and the second philosophical. The evidence-based assertion is that Left-wing intellectuals in Israel and in Western society endorse a one-sided view of violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: condemnation of Israel’s response to Palestinian terror and endorsement of Palestinian terror. Following are several examples of their views:

(a) The Left blames the Israeli government more and Palestinian leadership far less for the current conflict and tragic loss of life and limb on both sides.

(b) The Left blames Jewish nationalism (Zionism) and the Jewish religion for espousing and practicing what it regards as fascist, racist, and imperialistic policies. These policies presumably created the refugee status of the Palestinians 50 years ago and as a consequence, brought about the continuing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

(c) The Left insists that only negotiations will resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict, and condemns any actions by the Israeli army that cause injury and death to Palestinians defined broadly as non-combatants.

(d) The Left believes that responding to violence with violence creates an ever-worsening cycle of violence.

(e) The Left insists that Israel make dangerous, far-reaching concessions and sacrifices to persuade the Palestinians to live with Israelis in peace. In the name of compromise and peace, the Left endorses war against Israeli inhabitants of Judea, Samaria and parts of Jerusalem, and wishes to expel them from their homes, destroy their communities, and cede these areas to the Palestinian Authority. To achieve peace, it is necessary to use violent means, specifically against ideological opponents of their views.

(f) The Left believes that when Israel makes these painful sacrifices, Palestinians and the other Arab nations will renounce violence.

(g) The Israeli Left (represented by a small organization aptly called ”Peace Now”) believes that the transformation of terrorist and enemy to peaceful neighbor will be achieved quickly and permanently.

(h) The Left believes that peace must be achieved with the Palestinians, whatever the price, because it is intolerable that Israel live by the sword and suffer world-wide opprobrium.

(i) The Left judges the behavior of Palestinians by a different standard than it applies to Israelis. Extreme manifestations of Arab nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism are understandable; manifestations of these phenomena among Israeli Jews are reprehensible and must be exorcised. The actions of Israelis living in Judea and Samaria to defend their lives and property from attack are challenged, if not condemned outright.

The second assertion is a series of theoretical conjectures about the nature of Left- Wing ideology in general:

(a) The physical sciences, (e.g., physics, chemistry and biology) theorize about how to manipulate matter and as a consequence, they alter, even commit violence against atoms, compounds, and cells, respectively, and in so doing create atomic energy, new chemical entities, and feats of genetic engineering.

(b) Scientists engage in these endeavors in order to understand, predict and control these external realities for human betterment. In a sense, they wish to create a utopia.

(c) Their theories and technological discoveries may, however, become dystopian when employed by others to threaten the very existence of humankind.

(d) Members of the plastic and performing arts follow the same pattern. Artists create new realities in paintings, plays, music and dance in the service of the angels, but art may also serve the plans of the devil within humankind.

(e) We now come to the philosophers who treat social, cultural and political institutions in the same way that the physical sciences treat matter. They create theories in which human beings are relegated to the level of manufactured products coming out of an assembly line. If atoms can be smashed for the greater good, a few eggs can be cracked in the service of a social revolution. Plato spoke of killing adults to facilitate the philosopher king’s grand design to fashion a new society from the young. Hitler, Stalin, and Mao Tse-Tung brought about the death of millions of their own people as well as people of other counties to create a new world, a master race, a new Soviet man, and a productive proletariat worker, respectively. Left-wing intellectuals of the 20th century and intellectuals today do not condemn these men and their policies because the latter were in tune with the intellectuals’ own views about the malleability of human nature and the role of the master intellectual in modern society.

(f) Left-wing intellectuals renounce and denounce religion, nationalism, and ethnic traditions, the institutions of the ancient regime, the old order. They wish to replace the fragile, imperfect society that grants them the privilege of advocating its destruction.

(g) In their view, so-called social sciences are to operate like the physical sciences, and to advocate policies that manipulate and modify the elements of the social sciences-nations, societies, ethnic groups, families, and individuals – to fit a grand design.

(h) This approach is inherently violent; it promotes violence, it endorses violence, and in so doing, it elevates violence from a means to an end to the status of the end itself.

Uri Milstein

The Attitude of the intellectuals towards terror, according to the General Theory of Security: The Survival Principle

1. Extreme theories that are not derived from fundamental components cannot expose the structure and dynamics of concrete cases, such as the link between terror and intellectuals.

2. The survival principle – the security theory – examines the foundations of behavior and helps expose and clarify complex behavioral systems such as the link between intellectuals and terror.

3. According to this theory, terror, meaning causing fear by the means of violence, is a primary mean of threat neutralization. It has been used since the beginning of time:

4. The first case of terror according to Judaism is described in the biblical story of Cain and Abel – Cain the man of agriculture and the first civilized man, the founder of the city of Chanoch, tried by his act to terrify the nomadic shepherds who were hurting his fields and the new structure he had established.

5. Moses, the greatest Jewish intellectual, was also a terrorist, as shown by his killing of the Egyptian slave-guard and by the ten plagues inflicted upon the Egyptians in context of the war for the national liberation of the Israelites.

6. Muhammad enforced his religion in Hejaz by way of terror acts.

7. The modern intellectuals (humanistic and secular) are divided into two groups: a. Conformists who serve the existing order, b. Critics who want to create a revolution.

8. The conformists justify terror by the state as a means for neutralization of inner and external threats, like Cain in his time. Thus was the attitude of conformist intellectuals in the Soviet Union.

9. Among the critical intellectuals, many think that terror can help the revolution. The important figure among this group was Karl Marx.

10. The current intellectual empathy towards terror – at any rate, towards the Palestinian terror – is caused by their fear of war which might be a nuclear war; therefore they prefer the Palestinians and criticize Israel for not handing over territorial possessions. The initiator of this tendency was the British philosopher Bertrand Russell who criticized the Western struggle against Communism because of the danger that it will lead to war. Today the Jewish-Palestinian conflict threatens the Western intellectuals as a potential cause of a nuclear war.

Thursday, 5.5.2010

The Images of Terror

Session Five: Representation of Terror in Literature

Helena Tolstoy

An Unknown Literary Source on the Azef Case: A. R. Krandievskaja’s Novel “ ”The Secret of Joy” (1916)

Anastasia Krandievskaja, the wife of Vassili Krandievsky, a minor Moscow publisher, was a minor prose writer of the early 1900s who produced sketches and stories relating mainly to the working class plight, and was affiliated with the literary and political Left. Gorky occasionally stayed at her home in the years preceding the 1905 revolution, and she herself went abroad coming back loaded with forbidden political brochures, etc. The couple lived together with a millionaire Maecenas of the Bolsheviks who financed their editions and lost almost everything when the authorities confiscated his publishing house. In the 1910s Krandievskaja became close to religious-philisophical circles in Moscow and in 1916 published in Russkaja mysl a novel, “Tajna radosti” (“The Secret of Joy”) featuring a young girl involved in the terrorist intrigue closely resembling that of Azef. The novel is well-written, if over-dependent on Dostoevsky. The terrorist circle and its methods are depicted by an insider, with recognizable background figures. ”The Secret of Joy” can be compared to such post-1905 books as Andrey Sobol’s “Dust”. The following 1917 events prevented any reactions to Krandievskaja novel. Krandievskaja, with her sensitivity and intensity in painting the life of the soul, and with a feminine slant in depicting the terrorist theme, was overlooked and forgotten.

Ortsion Bartana

Self-Hate, the Wandering Jew Model, and the Deceit of the Six Day War in the Pseudo-Intellectual Hebrew Prose

Modern Hebrew prose has always been more critical than Hebrew poetry; for example, Brenner’s prose versus Bialik’s poetry. This critical attitude reached its climax in the Hebrew prose of the second half of the 20^th century. In this prose, known today as Israeli prose, the 1967 war (also referred to as the Six Day War) is presented as the “divergence point of occupation”, from which the fundamental injustice at the core of the Zionist movement is perpetuated further.

In my lecture I will argue that the model above is misleading, and that well before the 1967 war, the mainstream of Hebrew prose – included in state educational programs, praised amongst scholars, and cultivated by the Israeli leadership – was filled with self hatred, self accusations, and encouragement of the wondering Jew model – by which the Jew never fits in, no matter where he goes, and is deprived of any stable position in the world.

The lecture is based upon the “A.B. Yehoshua model” as well as on the “Amos Oz model”. Each of them will be demonstrated by one work: S. Izhar, as a novelist from the pre-independence period, to show beginnings, and Ahuzat Daz’ani by Hilu, to show the situation in the first decade of the 21^st century, will be included as an illustration.

It will be shown that Artzot Hatan (Oz, 1963), Michael Sheli (Oz, 1967) and Mul Ha’yearot (Yehoshua, 1963) – central novels of the sixties (“Dor Ha’medina”) – carry the argument that Zionism occupies place it doesn’t possess, that the Jew is by nature a “wandering Jew” and he deserves this destiny; that occupation is immoral, and there is a place for terrorism as a punishment for the Jew, who supposedly has become a Hebrew or an Israeli.

As a background it will be shown that Hashavui by S. Izhar is claiming that the Palmah’s actions before the declaration of independence were immoral, and Ahuzat Daz’ani carries the argument that Zionism is but colonialism.

All of these have been presented in Israeli culture as “the best of the best” – a culture that is justifying intellectual terrorism against itself.

Leonid Katsis

Problems of Terrorism in Unknown Articles by Zeev Jabotinsky (1903-1905)

My paper will be dedicated to the problems of attribution and analysis of the anonymous and pseudonymous articles by Zeev Jabotinsky published in Russian émigré journal “Osvobozhdenie” (The Liberation) in the years 1903-1905. I will try to show that these articles are the first step in the formulation of Jabotinsky’s theory of terror, and at the same time of Zionism. One of those articles is dedicated to the murder of the Minister of Interior Affairs von Pleve and some others are connected with the Kishinev pogrom and the revolutionary events in Odessa during the 1905 Revolution. Attention will be paid to the problems of the contacts between the Russian “Okhranka” (Secret Policy) social democrats and the Jewish Self Defense in Odessa. Such approach allows us to analyze the coexistence between historical reality in Jabotinsky’s “The Book of my Life” and his real political activity in 1903-1905, when he was a head of one of four departments of the Russian Social-Democratic Party in Odessa. At the same time we’ll show some texts by Jabotinsky connected with his polemics with “The Enemies of Zion” that appeared earlier than this famous brochure.

Helena Rimon

The Poetics of Lucrimax and the Historiography of Hebrew Literature

The paper deals with the post-colonial concepts regarding Hebrew Literature. According to some of them, the Hebrew literature written in Israel has all the features of colonial literature – the literature of colonizers. According to the conceptions of the other type (which deal mostly with the texts written by Jews in the Russian Empire at the end of the 19^th century and the beginning of the 20^th) Hebrew literature also has some features of the colonial literature, but reflects the hybrid identity of the colonized native intellectuals. The paper argues that Hebrew literature bears the marks of lucrimax (the concept coined by Alexander Etkind as an analogy or anagram of the word simulacrum: “a zealous striving on the part of the cultural elite for all things real, genuine, and original, and their rejection of their own culture as phony and conjured”). The critical post-colonial discourse about modern Hebrew Literature is saturated with the same myth-like lucrimax and is not suitable for the investigation of the complicated phenomenon of Hebrew Literature.

Session Six: Terror and the Cinema

Hananel Rosenberg

“The Interview with the Terrorist”: Israeli Youth’s Reception of the Television Meeting with the Enemy

The continuing public debate in Israel about providing a media platform for terrorists to express themselves has again been raised in view of the multiplicity of broadcast interviews with terrorists. The “interview with a terrorist” is part of the development of the “personal genre” in media coverage of terrorism, including comprehensive profiles of the personalities and personal lives of terrorists, a journalistic pursuit of information, and exclusive meetings held in enemy territory, as well as broadcasting in-depth interviews with terrorists, turning them into celebrities. The developing genre represents the symbiotic relationship which has been created between the media establishment, hungry for immediate information, and terrorism, which adapts its activities to the nature of the media.

This study deals with the reception of the “interview with the enemy” according to the “parasocial contact hypothesis”. The objective of the research has been to investigate the ways in which a television interview with Shifa al-Qudsi, a terrorist who had been apprehended on her way to a suicide bombing, was received by a group of Jewish-Israeli youth who tended to be politically hawkish. The research examines the emotional reactions of the viewers towards the terrorist being interviewed, and whether the interview, which presented al-Qudsi from a personal angle, created ambivalent reactions including both hostility and sympathy. When this dissonance is created, as proven in the research, the study investigates the attempts of the viewers to interpret and soften this conflict. In view of the central role and high involvement of the interviewer in this interaction, the viewers’ attitudes towards him were also investigated, as well as their attitudes towards the legitimacy of broadcasting an interview of this type, namely, one presenting the personal side of Palestinian terrorists.

The study was conducted as reception research involving a research population of 71 high school boys and girls with hawkish political orientations. A variety of strategies were used to collect data: focus groups, attitude classification questionnaires, and open-text questionnaires, and quantitative and qualitative methods were used in order to understand the range of reception patterns to the communicative text.

The findings of the research present a complex picture of viewer reactions towards the interviewee. The predominant feeling among the viewers was a marked attitude of hostility. However, this reaction was significantly combined with a sense of sympathy, and especially with feelings of pity and compassion, which arose while watching the interview. This dissonance of hostility combined with compassion is characteristic of the polysemic nature of the specific interview and of the variety of meanings encoded within it: the aggressiveness of the interviewer integrated with the personal-intimate view of the personality of the terrorist.

In an attempt to resolve this emotional dissonance, an array of “softening” strategies can be identified among the viewers, including reference to each side of the communicative act of the interview (viewer-interviewer-terrorist). Regarding the terrorist, one strategy used is “severance”: extracting this specific interviewed terrorist from the general group of terrorists for whom hostility remains high. A second strategy is “effacement”: diminishing the perceived importance of the terrorist, reducing her status or lessening the importance of what she says (for example, by scorning the measure of honesty of her replies). Still another softening strategy operates by blaming the interviewer, with the claim that the nature of the interview is what creates the positive image of the terrorist by emphasizing her personal sides, At times, the viewers negate the basic legitimacy of conducting this type of interview. Alternatively, softening the dissonance may be carried out with regard to the role of the viewer as he/she acknowledges his/her personal weakness in the face of media manipulation, and by ascribing great power to the emotional effect aroused by the mass media.

This study adds a layer to the understanding of processes of reception of political texts among the youth, who are perceived as the audience for whom the media constitute a dominant political agent of socialization.The research demonstrates how personal journalistic texts in the media coverage of terrorism, which are characterized by a separation between the personality or image of the terrorist and the act of terror itself, actually create the same separation among the viewers during the viewing experience. This experience also relates to the Levinasian definition of the communicative act as the creation of an “interior” for the “other”. The emotional conflict created following the televised contact with the interviewed terrorist and the attitudes of the viewers to the communicative act illustrate an extreme case of the creation of an interior for the other, perceived as non-legitimate, and of the reaction of the viewer to the mediating contact with this interior.

Yuval Rivlin

The Act of Terror in the Israeli Cinema

The Israeli cinema has dealt with the question of the nature of terror from its very beginning. Israeli responses toward acts of Arab terror made their way into the movie theaters, offering the viewer a chance to check his ideology versus the events (and their morals) shown on the screen.

Survey of the Israeli cinema will show us three major phases regarding the subject of “film and Terror”:

a. 1960-1977: Films produced with the aid of a government support. The movies, from They Were Ten (1960) to Mivtza Yehonatan (1977) justified the Israeli reactions to the Arab terror aggression.

b. Mid-1980’s-1993: The films adapted a more critical view toward the military solutions to terror and preferred narratives dealing with the victims, both Arab and Jews, of the Israeli acts of terror.

C. From 2000 to the present: The films portray the terrorist as a personality to be identified with. Films such as Paradise Now (2005) and the documentary My Terrorist (2008) show the terrorist in a positive light and by doing so, they blur the difference between the nature of the terror act and the nature of any other legitimate activity.

Kinneret Guterman

Representation of Terror, Arabs and Muslims in American popular media

Hollywood fascination with terror began during WWII. Terrorists were presented as exciting villains, and terror became a vital source for movie narratives, fantasies and myths, along with the endless conflict between good and evil. Up until the 1960’s, terrorist identity was relatively diverse, and included a standard variety of Russians, Nazis, Serbs, Communists and other nationalities besides Arabs and Muslims.

Since the 1960’s, ethnic stereotypes became a sensitive topic in popular culture. Latin and Asian Americans made it clear that they will not tolerate it anymore. The Middle East took their place in Hollywood. Since the 1980’s, with the end of the Cold War, Communist terrorism was irrelevant and the Middle East became almost the sole representative of terror in the world. The image of an Arab terrorist was at its peak during those years. Unlike non-Arab and non-Muslim terrorist characters (like James Bond’s enemies), who were characterized as cold, and politically calculated, Arab terrorists were presented as barbarians and fanatics and many ethnic and religious stereotypes found their way into the movies, even when they had no relevance to the plot.

The lecture will review the representation of Arabs and Muslim culture/society in popular media, emphasizing the Hollywood representation, and furthermore the representation of Muslim terror and its attitude toward the West. We will examine its main characteristics and its transformation over the last decades as reviewed in different textual studies, and its possible political and social implications as shown in the latest audience studies. We will also examine the mini-T.V. series Sleeper Cell (2005), which focused on an active Jihad terror cell in the USA. This series tried to deal with this sensitive issue while reducing (and even repairing) the common negative media stereotypes. We will examine the way terror, Islam and Arabs are represented in Sleeper Cell and discuss the meanings implied by this type of representation.

Sariel Birnbaum

Egyptian Cinema as a Way to Fight Islamic Terror

Egyptian film-makers were voluntarily mobilized in the 1990s and the 2000s to fight Islamic terrorism and extremism. Actually, in almost all the films by the greatest cinema stars from this period (actors Adel Imam and Nour A-Sharif, directors Youssef Chahine and Sharif Arafa) one will find attacks against Islamists.

Film-makers showed the Islamists as bloodthirsty, ignorant people. In many cases, the debate with Islamists is directed toward past events. The film Destiny (1997) by Chahine, presents the philosopher Ibn-Rushd (Averroes), living in medieval Moslem Spain. Ibn-Rushd, beside his knowledge in Islam and medicine, and his vast wisdom and education, shows affection to the good life, dancing and singing. In the film, he is antagonized by the vicious and murderous Islamists.

Session Seven: Terror, Mass-Communication and Society

Elina Bardach-Yalov

The Russian Dilemma: Are the Media the Oxygen of Terrorists?

The second armed conflict between the Russian Federation and the Chechen Republic started in the autumn of 1999. The first Russo-Chechnya conflict, which started in December 1994, can be characterized by the numerous concessions the Russian government made in order to satisfy the Chechen terrorists’ demands. As a result of this policy the Russian government had no other option but to sign the Peace Agreement with the Chechen Republic in August 1996, a fact which caused much anger and bitterness among Russian politicians and military personnel. Within a short time, strong accusations against various peace agreement’s supporters started to be voiced, with the targets including the media, that according to many was supporting the terrorists and apparently helped them to win the conflict. As a result of the major dissatisfaction with the coverage style of the first conflict the Russian government made significant changes in its media policy, which were mostly related to the mass communications coverage of the Chechen terrorist actions. Hence, the major question that was raised by the media and the academy staff was whether the Russian media are the oxygen of terrorists or if there was absolutely no relation between the media coverage style of the terrorist actions and the decisions and activities of the Chechen terrorists.

Eyal Pascovich

Social-Civilian Apparatuses of Terrorist Organizations and their Intellectual (Religious and Social) Justification

Many activist Islamic organizations operate – side by side with their military activity – a social-civilian wing, which gets the lion’s share of their budget. Thus, both the Hamas Sunni movement in the Palestinian Territories and the Hizbullah Shiite organization in Lebanon operate their own vast civilian infrastructures with a budget of at least tens of millions of dollars annually. Included are numerous activities and institutions that assist the population in every aspect of life – health (hospitals, clinics), education (schools, kindergartens, community and sport centers and even universities), religion (mosques, Qur’an memorizing institutes) and welfare (distribution of financial and material aid).

By doing so, the Islamic organizations achieve two main goals: the first is an ideological-religious one – to fulfill the religious duty of Zakat (charity) and the duty/custom of Da’wa (literally – preaching) that attracts the believers to Islam and whose goal is the resurgence of the ancient Islamic ideal. The second goal is a practical one – to create a base of supporters for the organizations’ activities, both the political and the military, and maintain a logistic apparatus for their military activity.

The academic research in this field, and especially journalistic and propagandist writings, have concentrated so far primarily on the last goal and less on the religious-ideological sources of the organizations’ social activities. These sources begin with the ancient Islamic scriptures – the Qur’an and the Hadith (the Islamic oral tradition), which sanctify the duty of charity, the values of social solidarity and aid to the needy, and preach the establishment of social justice – and go all the way to the Muslim contemporary scholars, who provide the inspiration and justification for the organizations. Thus, Hamas and other Sunni movements base themselves on the ideology of Hassan al-Banna and the Egyptian Muslim Brothers, as well as on the religious, political and social ideology of the Qatar Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who dealt a lot with the issue of Zakat in Islam; and Hizballah follows the social guidelines of the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini, the instigator of the Islamic revolution.

The lecture will focus on three main aspects, and these will be accompanied by policy-oriented lessons:

1. The absolute and relative extent of Hamas’s and Hizbullah’s social-civilian activities and their influence on the organizations’ political strength (and as a case-study – Hamas’ victory in the parliamentary elections held in the Territories in 2006, and Hizbullah’s survivability during the 2006 war in Lebanon and afterwards).
2. The religious and social meaning of the welfare activity in the terrorist organization’s eyes, based on Islamic duties and contemporary Muslim intellectuals.
3. The real nature of the connection between the organizations’ social-civilian apparatuses and their military ones – is it really tight and almost-conspiratory as often argued?

Giving a vast historical and geographical perspective and challenging common mistaken perceptions, the lecture will emphasize the fact that every reference – academic-intellectual and even more so military and a political – to terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Hizbullah must take into account some wider aspects of their activities, which are not limited to “pure” terrorism.

The Participants:

Akhiezer Golda, Ph.D., Department of History, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, The Rothberg school. Publications :

“Is there a Future for Research on the Jewish Past?” New Jewish School 12 (2002), pp. 247-256 (in Russian); “The Karaite Isaac ben Abraham of Troki and His Polemics against the Rabbanites”, C. Goodblatt & H. Kreisel, (eds.), Tradition, Heterodoxy and Religious Culture: Judaism and Christianity in the Early Modern Period, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Press, 2007; “The History of the Crimean Karaites in the 16^th-18^th Centuries”, in: Meira Polliack (ed.) Karaite Judaism, a Guide to its History and Literary Sources, Brill Academic Publisher, Leiden – Boston, 2003, pp. 729-759;

“תקופת הכיבוש רוסי בקרים בספר אבני זכרון”, דן שפירא (עורך), מצבות בית העלמין של היהודים הקראים בצ’ופוט-קלעה, קרים: דו”ח משלחת אפיגרפית של מכון בן-צבי יד בן-צבי, ירושלים 2007;(עם ד’ שפירא) “קראים בליטא ובווהלין-גליציה עד המאה הי”ח”, פעמים, 89 (2002) ועוד.

Bardach-Yalov Elina, Ph.D., Leeds University, Lecturer in the Department of Political Studies at Bar-Ilan University

Bartana Ortsion, Israeli writer, Professor at the Israel Heritage Department of the Ariel University Center. Publication of poems, stories and researches on the theory and history of Hebrew literature. For full list of publications, see Hebrew brochure.

Birnbaum Sariel, Ph.D. candidate, The Truman Institute, the Hebrew University. Publications in Middle East political Issues. The recent: “Historical Discourse in the Media of the Palestinian National Authority”, M.Litvak (Ed.) Palestinian Collective Memory and National Identity, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Bukay David, Professor of the School of Political Sciences at the University of Haifa. Publications in Hebrew and in English, among them: From Muhammad to bin Laden: the ideological and religious foundations of the Homicide Bombers Phenomenon. New Brunswick: Transaction Press, 2007; Yasser Arafat and the Politics of Paranoia: A Painful Legacy. New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2005; (ed.) Muhammad’s Monsters: Islamic Fundamentalism and Radicalism. Green Forest, Ar., Balfour Press, 2004; The Arab-Islamic Political Culture: A Key Source to Understanding Arab Politics and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, Sha’arei-Tikva: Ariel Center for Policy Research Publications, 2003; Total Terrorism in the Name of Allah: The Emergence of the New Islamic Fundamentalists, Sha’arei-Tikva: Ariel Center for Policy Research Publications, 2002; Facts and Fables in the Mythology of Islamic and Palestinian Terrorism, Sha’arei-Tikva: Ariel Center for Policy Research, Policy Paper No. 162, January 2006; Israeli Arabs: From Alienation to Elimination: The Coming of Intifadat al Aqsa. Sha’arei-Tikva: Ariel Center for Policy Research, Policy Paper no. 176. July 2008. 94p (in Hebrew); “Is the Military Bulwark against Islamism collapsing,” Middle East Quarterly, vol. 16 no. 3, Summer 2009; Peace or Jihad: Abrogation in Islam,” Middle East Quarterly, Fall 2007; “Can there be an Islamic Democracy?” Middle East Quarterly, Spring 2007; “The Religious Foundations of the Suicide Bombings”, Middle East Quarterly, Fall 2006; “The New Anarchistic Islamic Terrorist Groups”, in: David Bukay (ed.), Muhammad’s Monsters: Islamic Fundamentalism and Radicalism, 2004; “Zionism, Post-Zionism, and Pseudo-Zionism: The Media Leftist Complex and the al-Aqsa Intifadah”, in Shlomo Sharan (ed.), Israel and the Post-Zionists: A Nation at Risk, Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2003; “A Palestinian State: Clear and immediate danger to inter-Arab Relations”, in: Rafi Israeli (ed.), Dangers of a Palestinian State. Jerusalem: Gefen Press, 2002; “Annotated bibliography to the Arab-Israeli Conflict”, in: Gabriel Ben-Dor (ed.) The Palestinians and the Middle East Conflict, Ramat-Gan: Turtledove, 1978; “Cultural Fallacies in Understanding Islamic Fundamentalism and Palestinian Radicalism”, in: The Jerusalem Alternative, Green Forest: Balfour Press, 2005; “The Role of Da’wah in the Islamic Onslaught against Dar al-Harb,” paper presented at ASMEA Conference, Washington, Oct. 2009; ”Arab-Islamic Political Culture: The Need for Understanding,” paper presented at Intel Nexus 2009 Conference, Boston, Oct. 2009.

Cohen Ronen A., Senior Lecturer at the Ariel University Center Department of Israeli and Middle Eastern Studies. Publications: The Rise and Fall of the Mojahedin Khalq, 1987-1997: Their Survival after the Islamic Revolution and Resistance to the Islamic Republic of Iran, Sussex Academic Press, 2009; Modern Persian (a textbook), Ariel: Ariel University Center, 2009; ‘The Mojahedin Khalq: A Terror Organization or Liberation Fighters?’, Digest of Middle Eastern Studies, Fall (17/2), 2008; “Iran, Israel, and Zionism since the Islamic Revolution – From Rational Relationship to Disaster and Threat”, Center for Strategic Dialogue, Netanya Academic College, Fall, 2008.

Epstein Alek D., Department of Sociology and Political Science, The Open University of Israel. Publications in Hebrew, English and Russian, among them: ”The Decline of Israeli Sociology”, Azure (winter) 2004.

Fishman Joel, Ph.D., Modern European History; Fellow, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs; Special Interest: Political Warfare. Publications:Diplomacy and Revolution; The London Conference of 1830 and the Belgian Revolt ; La Guerre d’Oslo (with Prof. Ephraim Karsh), Paris: Editions de Passy, 2005; “Perception Failure and Self-Deception; Israel’s Quest for Peace in the Context of Related Historical Cases,” Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs: Jerusalem Viewpoints No. 450, 15 March 2001. http://www.jcpa.org/jl/vp450.htm.

“The Broken Promise of the Democratic Peace: Israel and the Palestinian Authority,” Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Jerusalem Viewpoints No. 477, 1 May 2002.

http://www.jcpa.org/jl/vp477.htm ; “Israel’s Information Policy and the Challenge of Ideological Warfare,” Nativ Vol. 15, no. 6 (November 2002): 58-64. (Hebrew); “Information Policy and National Identity: Israel’s Ideological War,” Ariel Center for Policy Research, Paper No. 142 (January 2003); “The Timeliness of George Orwell’s Message,” Kivunim Hadashim No. 8 (April 2003): 143- 150. (Hebrew); “Ten Years Since Oslo: The PLO’s ‘People’s War’ Strategy and Israel’s Inadequate Response,” Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Jerusalem Viewpoints No. 503, 1 September 2003. www.jcpa.org/jl/vp503.htm ; “The Cold-War Origins of Contemporary Anti-Semitic Terminology,” Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Jerusalem Viewpoints No. 517, 2-16 May 2004. http://www.jcpa.org/jl/vp517.htm ; “A Case Study: Madison, Wisconsin, U.S.A.: A Battleground for Israel’s Legitimacy,” Jewish Journal of Political Science, 16:3-4 (Fall 2004), pp.199-203; “The Dimensions of Disengagement,” Journal of International Security Affairs, Number 8 (Spring 2005), 61-69; “Democratic Universality and Its Adversaries,” Jerusalem Viewpoints, No. 533, August 2005;

http://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp?DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=111&FID=376&PID=1850&IID=896 ; “Hidden in Plain Sight: Alexis de Tocqueville’s Recognition of the Jewish Origin of the Idea of Equality,” Jewish Political Studies Review, vol. 17, nos. 3 – 4 (Fall 2005), 155-162; “The Big Lie and the Media War against Israel; From Inversion of the Truth to Inversion of Morality,” Jewish Political Studies Review 19, nos. 1 & 2 (Spring 5767/2007): 59-81; http://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp?DRIT=3&DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=111&FID=253&PID=0&IID=1704&TTL=The_Big_Lie_and_the_Media_War_Against_Israel:_From_Inversion_of_the_Truth_to_Inversion_of_Reality ; “The 1930s: Déjà Vu All Over Again,” Review article of Jimmy Carter, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, Jewish Political Studies Review, 19:3-4 (Fall 2007); “‘Peace First’ – A Rebuttal” [Rebuttal of Uri Savir], The Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, 1:2 (2007/5767): 55-61; “Bunkum as History: The Revisionist Quest for Lost Innocence,” Review article of Patrick J. Buchanan, Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost its Empire and the West Lost the World, and Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, Jewish Political Studies Review, 21:1-2 (Spring 2009):153-161; “The Need for Imagination in International Affairs,” The Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, 3:3 (2009): 95-108, http://israelcfr.com/documents/issue9-J.Fishman.pdf ; “‘Peace First’ – A Rebuttal” [Rebuttal of Uri Savir], The Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, 1:2 (2007/5767): 55-61; “The Need for Imagination in International Affairs,” The Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, 3:3 (2009) pp.95-108, http://israelcfr.com/documents/issue9-J.Fishman.pdf.

GoldsteinYossi, Associate Professor at the Israel Heritage Department, Ariel University Center. Publications in Hebrew and English. Author of 22 books, including 8 books on various academic issues (Jewish History, History of Zionism in Russia, etc.), 4 biographies (on Achad HaAm, Menachem Ussishkin, Levi Eshkol, and Yitzchak Rabin), and 5 textbooks (including The History of the Jews and The History of the Peoples in the New Age). Published 54 scientific papers on issues related to the early history of Zionism, the history of the Jews in Russia, and the history of the Land of Israel and the State of Israel. Wrote the curricula for 7 courses for the Open University, which were published in 24 academic units and assembled into 14 volumes, and an additional 4 volumes of references on: The history of Zionism, the history of anti-Semitism and the history of the Jews in the United States. Also published the academic course “Between Zion and Zionism” in Russian (5 volumes, 10 academic units).

Geifman Anna, Professor at the Boston University History Department. Publications in English and in Russian. Among them: Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia, 1893-1917, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1993; Entangled in Terror: The Azef Affair and the Russian Revolution, Wilmington. Scholarly Resources, 2000.

Guterman Kinneret, College of Management, Rishon Lezion.

Hershkowitz Daniel, Israeli politician and mathematician, the leader of the Israel political party The Jewish Home, a Knesset member, Minister of Science and Technology, rabbi of the Ahuza neighborhood in Haifa. Publications in mathematics.

Katsis Leonid, Professor at the Department of Jewish Studies, The Russian University of the Humanities. Publication in Russian and in English, among them: Osip Mandel’shtam: A Musk of. Judaism, Jerusalem- Moscow, Gesharim, 2002 (In Russian); Vladimir Mayakovski: the Poet in the Intellectual Climate of the Epoch, 2004 (In Russian); The Blood Libel and the Russian Thought: Historical-Theological investigation of the Beilis Trial, 2006 (In Russian).

Klein Yitzak, Ph.D., Harvard University, Director of the Israel Policy Center, Lecturer at the Efrata College, Jerusalem. Publications in English and Hebrew.

Kontorer Dov, Political Observer of the Israeli “Vesti” Russian newspaper.

Lord Amnon, Columnist of the Makor Rishon newspaper. Among his publications is The Israeli Left: From Socialism to Nihilism, 2003, a political and historical analysis of the Israeli Left from a personal perspective

Landes Richard, Associate Professor at the Department of History, Boston University. More

than 200 publications in English, German and French, among them the books: The Paranoid Apocalypse: A Hundred Year Retrospective on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, ed. Stephen Katz and Richard Landes, NYU Press, NY (In press); The Apocalyptic Year 1000: Studies in the Mutation of European Culture, essays edited by R. Landes, Andrew Gow, and D. Van Meter, Oxford University Press, 2003; Encyclopedia of Millennialism and Millennial Movements, ed. Richard Landes Berkshire Reference Works; Routledge, NY, 2000; Ademari Cabannensis Chronicon, ed. Pascale Bourgain, Richard Landes and Georges Pon, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Medieualis, 129, Tournout, Brepols, 1999; Relics, Apocalypse, and the Deceits of History: Ademar of Chabannes (989-1034), Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1995; The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response in France around the Year 1000, ed. Thomas Head and Richard Landes, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992; Naissance d’Apotre: Les origines de la Vita prolixior de Saint Martial de Limoges au XIe siècle with K. Paupert, trans. of the Vita prolixior, Turnhout, Brepols, 1991 and articles: “Introduction,” to The Paranoid Apocalypse (forthcoming; “The Paranoid Imperative and the Political Logic of the Protocols” (ibid.) “Jewish Self-Criticism, Progressive Moral Schadenfreude and the Suicide of Reason: Reflections on the Protocols in the ‘Postmodern’ Era” (ibid.); “Jews as Contested Ground in Post-Modern Conspiracy Theory, Jewish Political Studies Review, Vol. 19, Nos. 3-4 (2007); “Edward Said and the Culture of Honor and Shame: Orientalism and Our Misperceptions of the Arab-Israeli Conflict,” in Donna Divine and Philip Salzman, eds., Postcolonial Theory and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, London, Routledge, 2007 [Special issue of Israel Affairs, 13:4 (2007); “Economic Development and Demotic Religiosity: Reflections on the Eleventh-Century Takeoff,” History in the Comic Mode: The New Medieval Cultural History, ed. Rachel Fulton and Bruce Holsinger, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007; “Roosters Crow, Owls Hoot: On the Dynamics of Apocalyptic Millennialism,” in War in Heaven, Heaven on Earth: Theories of the Apocalyptic, ed. Glen S. McGhee & Stephen O’Leary, Equinox Press, London, 2005; “Millennialism,” Encyclopedia of Protestantism, ed. Hans Hillerbrand, Routledge, 2004; “Millennialism,” The Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements, ed. James Lewis, Oxford U. Press, 2004; “A White Mantle of Churches: Millennial Dynamics and the Written and Architectural Record,” in The White Mantle of Churches: Architecture, Liturgy, and Art around the Millennium, ed. Nigel Hiscock and Nancy Wu, New York, 2002; “What Happens when Jesus Doesn’t Come? Jewish and Christian Relations in Apocalyptic Time,” in Millennial Violence: Past Present and Future, ed. Jeffrey Kaplan, Frank Cass, London, 2002.

Milgram Noach, Dean, School of Graduate Studies of the Ariel University Center.

Publications in English, French and Hebrew, among them: “Le syndrome de la gauche israelienne” (The syndrome of the Israeli Left). In S. Trigano (Ed.) Revue d’ Idees Controverses, No. 4, 2007; |Ideology and the behavior of perpetrators and victims of violence”. In N. Ronel, K. Jaishankar & M. Bensimon (eds.). Trends and issues in Victimology, Cambridge, UK, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008; “The influence on Israelis and Palestinians of ideology and the inconsistent policies of Israeli governments toward ‘the conquered territories’ (Judea and Samaria)”. In E. Lavie (Ed.), Effect on the State of Israel of 40 years control over the territories, Tel Aviv University, Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Studies, 2009; (with Geisis, M., Katz, N., & Haskaya, L.) “Correlates of readiness for interethnic relations of Israeli Jews and Arabs”, Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology,14, 2008.

Pascovich Eyal, lecturer at the Department of Israeli and Middle Eastern Studies of the Ariel University Center. Publications in Hebrew and in English.

Ratiani Irma, Professor at the Faculty of Humanities, Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University. Director of Shota Rustaveli Institute of Georgian Literature. Over 60 publications in Georgian.

Rimon Helena, Ph.D. in the Theory of Literature from Moscow University, Senior Lecturer at the Israel Heritage Department, Ariel University Center. Publications in Hebrew and Russian, among them: The Time and the Place of Mikhail Bakhtin, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Heksherim Institute, Kinneret – Zmora Bitan – Dvir Publishing House, Beer Sheva, 2007, (in Hebrew); (ed.) M. M. Bakhtin. Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel (the Hebrew translation). Ed. and Commentary: H. Rimon, The Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Heksherim Institute, Kinneret – Zmora Bitan – Dvir Publishing House, Beer Sheva, 2010 (in Hebrew) Mikhail Bakhtin. The Last Works. Tel-Aviv: Wrestling, 2007 (in Hebrew); (Ed.) S. Y. Agnon`s Short Stories in the Russian translation. Ed.: H. Rimon, Moscow-Jerusalem, Gesharim, 2004 (in Russian); Israeli Literature in Russian Translation, Anthology, Ed., compiled and notated by H. Rimon, Petersburg Jewish University, 1998 (in Russian).

Rivlin Yuval, Ph.D. from the Department of the History of the Jewish People at the Hebrew University; Lecturer on film, Judaism, Midrash and History at the Yaakov Herzog Center for Jewish Studies. Recently published a book: The Roar of the Mouse: Jewish Identity in American and Israeli Cinema, 2009 (in Hebrew).

RosenbergHananel, Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University; lecturer at the Yaakov Herzog Center for Jewish Studies.

Ron-Moria Sophy, columnist at the Makor Rishon newspaper. Author of the novel The Tenth Fiance, 2010 (in Hebrew).

SchleiferRon, Senior Lecturer at the School of Mass Communication, The Ariel University Center. Publications in English and in Hebrew, among them:

Psychological Warfare in the First Intifada: Israeli And Palestinian Media Politics And Military Strategies, Portland, Sussex Academic Press, 2006.

Seidler Meir, Senior Lecturer at the Israel Heritage Department, The Ariel University Center. Publications in Hebrew and in English, among them: ‘Maharal and Religious Coercion’, The Maharal 400 Years Volume, 2010 (forthcoming); ‘A 19th Century Jewish Attempt at Integrativeness – Rabbi Elia Benamozegh’s Multicultural Approach to Polytheism’, Y. Goldstein (ed.), Yosef Salmon Jubilee Volume, Beer Sheva, 2010.

Shargorodsky Eliezer, Shargorodsky Eliezer, Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Political Sciencesat Bar-Ilan University, Educational Director of the Midrasha Zionit (Kiev-Jerusalem); teaches Modern Jewish Historyand History of the formation of the Jewish state at the Midrasha Zionit, the Open Universityand Bar-Ilan University. Publications in French, Russian, Hebrew.

Tolstoy Helena, Professor of Russian literature at Hebrew University, author of monographs on Chekhov and Alexei Tolstoy.

Yemini Ben Dror, the opinion-editor of the daily newspaper Maariv.