Neve Us Alone

I must have missed the teacup tempest that erupted back while I was on vacation when the Los Angeles Times (are they still publishing a print edition?) decided to give editorial space to Neve Gordon, a professor of politics at Ben-Gurion University in Israel which urged the world to boycott his country.

I will admit to never having heard of Mr. Gordon, although that has more to do with my lack of “readidness” regarding books with titles like Torture: Human Rights, Medical Ethics and the Case of Israel (an interesting topic for someone who lives in a region where Israel’s neighbors maintain budget line-items for medieval torture chambers for political dissidents, and a leading cause of hospital fatalities in nearby Gaza is being dragged from your bed by Hamas and beaten to death).

Anyway, it was not abundantly clear why this Israeli politics professor, as opposed to all of the other Israeli politics professors, got space in the LA Times until I read his piece and realized that the paper still considers an Israeli condemning his own country a “man-bites-dog” story. Honestly, where have they been for the last hundred years?

After all, the parade of Jews ready to condemn their fellow lansmen for the “crimes” of Zionism goes back to the beginning of the Zionist movement itself. Many of my fellow activists get apoplectic over the phenomenon, tracing it back to this Jewish religious tradition or that historic psychological aberration. But there’s always been a simpler explanation as to why “Jewish critics of Israel” are guaranteed attention, one provided by Adam Smith over 200 years ago: market demand.

Every organization pushing for BDS, for example, has its Jewish face (often people whose only connection to Jewish tradition is their readiness to blast other Jews for doing things that embarrass them). And by joining such organizations, these “courageous” souls get showered with praise for their fearlessness in standing up to a solid wall of pro-Israel sentiment that they know full-well does not exist.

In academia, the benefits of striking such a pose are even more alluring. Take Norman Finkelstein (please!). (Sorry – I couldn’t resist.) For two decades, Dr. Finkelstein has built a career based on being the “exposer” of other academics such as Harvard German scholar Daniel Goldhagen and Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, substituting vitriol for scholarship (given that he knows nothing of the German language, US or international law). Despite the fact that each book was more farcically footnoted than the last, Finkelstein earned a huge raft of followers, not because of the quality of his work, but because of whom his choice of targets. In any other field, such crackpot pseudo-scholarship would earn a one-way ticket to a career in comic book store, but when the field is condemnation of Israel, fame, fortune and even a documentary film are the rewards.

Consider Mr. Gordon’s strange situation whereby he is calling for the world to boycott the very institution where he teaches, yet when people criticize this urging of academic censorship those critics are accused of “muzzling” and attempting to get Gordon shunned. The notion that a professor calling for his institution and colleagues to be boycotted crying foul when some suggest such a boycott begins with him demonstrates BDS as fashion statement (i.e., - “do what I say to them, but don’t touch my salary!”) than politics.

Other Israeli academics have protested Neve Gordon’s editorial and – needless to say – these Israeli voices are not being hailed by “Fans of Gordon” (i.e., people who also never heard of him until he became politically useful as the latest “courageous Jew poster child” for a boycott of the Jewish state).