Monday, September 11, 2017

Can I Lecture?

In previous posts, I highlighted what I saw as the futility as well as the repetitiveness of such contemporary groups as JVP and IfNotNow.  All they target, all their claims and, most importantly, all their failures, were experienced by the Bund, the Palestine Communist Party, Brit Shalom, Ihud, Progressive Party, American Council for Judaism, Breirah, and on and on.

Zionism and the state of Israel not only bested them but all these negative ideologies, most Diaspora-focused, all failed whether through religious and political assimilation or the Holocaust.

All their claims, in essence, have been made consistently and constantly over the past century and a quarter against Zionism, Jewish nationalism and Israel.  But they have been overtaken by time and their inability to deal with Arab animosity and rejectionism, usually via terror, a staple response since 1920 and before.

And here is another example proving my point - a study of political movements that challenged Zionism including the bi-nationalist movement of the British Mandate period; the Palestinian Communist Party of the same period and the anti-Zionist Matzpen group from the 1960s to the 1980s.

And now we have this campaign of "You Never Told Me":-

Our Open Letter to Fellow Alumni

To our friends and fellow alumni of Jewish camps, schools, and youth movements across the country:

...We, your friends in IfNotNow, are compelled to compassionately call in these institutions to reflect with us and to change their Israel education to include an honest understanding of the Occupation and Palestinian narratives.

We are alumni of different institutions... [and] Across denominations and organizations, we have had formative experiences at camps, day schools, and youth groups. And yet, universally, we were never told the honest truth about the Occupation.

We can no longer accept an educational approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that is at worst silence and at best nuanced. We can no longer accept a communal norm that will force another generation to only learn about the occupation only once they leave these institutions. We can no longer sit idly by while the institutions we care so deeply about lose moral legitimacy.

...After 50 years of Occupation, we say that enough is enough.  We invite you -- alumni and supporters from across the country -- to join us in asking our institutions to reimagine Israel education in a way that engages directly with the realities of the Occupation and reflects the ethics our institutions aim to teach.

I have but one question: can I teach and lecture in such a course on Israel's administration of Judea and Samaria and on its legal, ethical, moral and historical rights to these lands?

^

1 comment:

Batya said...

This blog post has been included in my roundup, Shiloh Musings: Interesting Posts from Blogs Near and Far aka "Havel Havelim" You're invited to visit and read the others.