I never thought about the following points until I read this essay. I’ve always taken it for granted that Israel advocates are the good guys and anti-Israel advocates are bad guys. Perhaps the matter is more complex?
Chaim Amalek: “It seems that the anti-Israel lobby, intent as it is on anathematizing Zionism and Israel and expelling Jews from academic conferences for supporting Israel in its war with Islam/Arabs/multiculturalism is a greater threat.”
Back in the 1950s, Jews were at the forefront of the struggle to push for maximum freedom of expression. Now they are often leading the charge for censorship.
John Mearsheimer writes:
Universities are the one place in the United State where Israel tends to be treated like a normal country. Although Israel has many defenders on college campuses, it gets criticized there for its past and present behavior in ways that rarely happen in the mainstream media or among politicians and policy makers in Washington…
The Israel lobby tries to influence the hiring and promotion process as a way of limiting the number of Israel’s critics at American colleges…
The campaign against Abu El-Haj was aided by the New York Sun, which has since gone out of business, but which at the time monitored Columbia closely and vehemently criticized it whenever someone at the school said or did something that was considered hostile to Israel…
The lobby also seeks to marginalize critics within academia by smearing them…
Smearing outspoken professors is not merely designed to silence or marginalize them. It also has a powerful deterrent effect. Specifically, it sends a clear message to other scholars who might be inclined to criticize Israel or American policy towards Israel that if they speak out, the lobby will make a concerted effort to damage their reputations and marginalize them within and without the academy…
Another strategy that pro-Israel forces employ is attempting to suppress the publication of scholarly works that make arguments they deem wrongheaded and dangerous…
The lobby also works to limit criticism of Israel by keeping outside voices from speaking on campus…
This outcome illustrates that when the lobby cannot prevent a speaker from appearing on campus, its fallback position is invariably to demand “balance,” which means also inviting someone to speak who has impeccably pro-Israel credentials.
…nine cases involving anti-Israel activity have been filed under Title VI…
Aside from the fact that there is something disturbing about an outside lobbying group waging a wide-ranging campaign to influence how students think about a foreign country, many of the tactics the lobby employs are antithetical to core academic values…
There are two related reasons why defenders of Israel think that criticism of Israel is so dangerous and thus relentlessly labor to police academia. First, the case for America’s special relationship with Israel is weak. Second…support for that relationship among the American people is neither wide nor deep.
