[Marxism] Israeli academic backs boycott

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Counterpunch Weekend Edition
May 21 / 22, 2005
To Create It, an Academic Boycott is Needed
Academic Freedom in Israel is Central to Resolving the Conflict

By OREN BEN-DOR

I write as an ex-Israeli, who happens to be a British academic. I write
because experience has taught my conscience the harm that results from
silencing free historical debate, the danger inherent in not letting the
Other's voice challenge national heroic myths.

All my education in Israel was one sided, treating the Other as the enemy,
the murderers, the rioters, the terrorists -- without alluding, in any way,
to their pains and longings. For my teachers and, as a result, for me also,
for many years, Zionism was beyond reproach; it was a return to the
promised land as a result of persecution, it was draining the swamps, it
was building a state based on Jewish genius.

The Holocaust, in which half of my own family was murdered, provided a
continuous supply of blinding collective memory -- a memory of victim-hood,
and as a result, a source of self-righteousness, much, much
self-righteousness. The Holocaust (in Hebrew, "ha-Shoah" - the catastrophe)
has always had the monopoly on memory in Israel, leaving no room for
al-Naqba (Arabic, "the catastrophe"), the price that the Palestinians paid
for the creation of the state. For my teachers, and for me, the 750,000
Palestinian refugees of 1948 were bitter enemies defeated in a war, not
human beings with feelings, memories, lost lands and shattered self-respect.

I write this article because, shockingly, the denial and marginalisation of
the Other's story is continuing to this day in Israeli academic
institutions. I write as an attempt to make a first step to denounce my
association with this denial, to denounce my previous self. But I do not
write just as a means to quickly remedy my bad conscience -- knowing the
powers of collective memory and collective denial, I acknowledge that there
is no quick fix for that.

full: http://www.counterpunch.com/bendor05212005.html


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