Complicity of Israeli Academia
From the www.monabaker.com archive (legacy material) Adi Ophir | Gush Shalom | Not published (see Gush Shalom Comment) Comment in Circular from Gush Shalom (15 January 2004): "Genocide Hides Behind Expulsion" - a response by Philosophy Professor Adi Ophir (Hebrew & English). Ophir offered it to Ha'aretz. It includes a remark against Ha'aretz allowing Morris' cynicism on its pages. It was refused. Response to an interview with Benny Morris in the Ha’aretz supplement, Jan.
From the www.monabaker.com archive (legacy material) Various (Responses to Benny Morris) | Ha'aretz Daily | 16 January 2003 Last week's interview with historian Benny Morris ("Survival of the fittest" by Ari Shavit, Haaretz Magazine, January 9, 2004) has generated a deluge of readers' responses. Here are some selected comments: Squaring the Circle Benny Morris should be congratulated for his candor with Ari Shavit in squaring the circle between his research findings on 1948 atrocities by the Israel Defense Forces, and the political and moral conclusions he now draws from them.
From the www.monabaker.com archive (legacy material) Jonathan Spyer | The Guardian | 14 January 2004 Israeli right-of-centre politics is today turned in on itself. The reason for this derives from the prominence in recent weeks given to proposals for unilateral disengagement by Israel from the Gaza Strip and the greater part of the West Bank, in the event of the continuation of the current deadlock between the sides. The Likud party's raison d'être, since its formation in 1973, has been the rejection of any territorial compromise in the West Bank, an area it considered crucial strategically, and which is saturated with sites and symbols of Jewish historical, cultural and religious importance.
From the www.monabaker.com archive (legacy material) Benny Morris | The Guardian | 14 January 2004 In 1948, thousands of Palestinians fled their homes in what is now Israel, and became refugees. Both sides have blamed each other ever since. But new documents show neither is entirely innocent, argues Benny Morris First, there were the faces, the old Palestinian women huddled around a smoking, outdoor stone oven among the ruins of the Rashidiye refugee camp near Tyre in June 1982, days after the Israeli army had scythed through southern Lebanon.
From the www.monabaker.com archive (legacy material) Adi Ophir | Voices of Civil Rights | January 2004 Response to an interview with Benny Morris in the Ha’aretz supplement, Jan. 9, 2004 At some point in the interview, when the reader might think that Benny Morris has already said the most terrible things, he brings up, in passing, the extermination of the Native Americans. Morris contends that their annihilation was unavoidable. “The great American democracy could not have been achieved without the extermination of the Indians.
From the www.monabaker.com archive (legacy material) Smadar Lavie | Anthropology News | OCTOBER 2003 On December 26, 2001, Ariyeh Caspi exhorted in Israel’s highbrow Ha’aretz Weekly that only 8.8% of those holding full professor’s rank in Israeli universities were women. In his article “Search for the Woman,” the journalist nonetheless neglected to mention that all these women pro- fessors are members of Israel’s Ashkenazi (US-European) wealthy elite. Most had embarked on their graduate studies and academic careers only after strategically marrying older, wealthier Ashkenazi husbands.
From the www.monabaker.com archive (legacy material) Ari Shavit | Ha'aretz Daily | 9 January 2004 Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist. People were mistaken when they labeled him a post-Zionist, when they thought that his historical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem was intended to undercut the Zionist enterprise. Nonsense, Morris says, that's completely unfounded. Some readers simply misread the book. They didn't read it with the same detachment, the same moral neutrality, with which it was written.
From the www.monabaker.com archive (legacy material) Relly Sa'ar | Ha'aretz | 27 November 2003 There's no politically correct spin to put on it, and the facts speak for themselves: As soon as Israel's top university administrators noticed that the big winners from admissions policy changes were not Jewish youngsters from low-income towns, but rather Arabs, they reverted back to the old admissions system. This year, the universities instituted a policy change - the abandonment of psychometric aptitude tests as a requirement for admissions.