While the bulk of pro-Israel campus activism in North America has focused on educating and empowering students, a group of professors wants to combat anti-Israel bias among academics.
To that end, they are organizing a fall conference that seeks “to challenge the theoretical foundation that leads people to misconceptions about Israel,” according to conference chair Philip Carl Salzman.
Organizers said the conference would be the first to ever take apart the ideology of postcolonialism – championed by such renowned Israel critics Edward Said and Noam Chomsky
– which they described as leading to the demonization of Israel.
“In general the environment on campus among the faculty is very, very tilted against Israel,” said Aryeh Green, an adviser to former Diaspora affairs minister Natan Sharansky, who helped push the idea of the conference. “The general faculty tends to accept arguments that have been put forward by pro-Palestinian activists.”
He continued, “The question is how to battle that hostility. This is not where you can bring out the heavy guns of public advocacy… to tell them Israel’s in the right.”
Instead, he said, “The academic community reacts best to other academics.”
So on the last weekend in October, some two dozen professor from nearly as many universities will congregate at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland to give lectures deconstructing post-colonialism.
The “Post-colonial Theory and the Middle East” conference is sponsored by the 600-member Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, a group devoted to discrediting anti-Israel propaganda in academia.
“It’s used to completely delegitimize Israel,” said Dr. Edward Beck, director of Susquehanna Institute and a co-founder of SPME, of post-colonial ideology. “It has been absolutely embraced by the academy. Edward Said and Noam Chomsky are seen as leading thinkers in the modern era. The [doctrine] has penetrated every single discipline and it’s championed by many people who don’t understand it and don’t critique it.”
Salzman, an anthropology professor at McGill University, defined post-colonialism as, in part, the concept that, “Everything was always wonderful in the Third World and the Middle East until the West came and made things bad.”
He added, “Israel is characterized as a Western colonial intrusion without legitimacy.”
Beck suggested that the hope of peace during the Oslo process led pro-Israeli professors to overlook the danger inherent in the ideology.
“I think there was such a euphoria before the intifada that peace might be in the offing, that people were hoping that this theory wouldn’t have as big an impact as it turned out to have,” he said. “We were caught with our pants down. We didn’t do the scholarship we needed to be critical and [say] that this is unacceptable.”
He added, “The faculty are just now coming out of the foxholes, because it’s very unpopular on college campuses to defend Israel.”
