{"id":83316,"date":"2020-09-30T17:35:37","date_gmt":"2020-09-30T14:35:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jcpa.org\/?p=83316"},"modified":"2020-09-30T19:29:02","modified_gmt":"2020-09-30T16:29:02","slug":"anti-israel-claims-of-ethnic-cleansing-have-no-place-in-a-student-paper-or-anywhere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jcpa.org\/anti-israel-claims-of-ethnic-cleansing-have-no-place-in-a-student-paper-or-anywhere\/","title":{"rendered":"Anti-Israel Claims of Ethnic Cleansing Have No Place in a Student Paper \u2013 or Anywhere"},"content":{"rendered":"
\u201cA Jewish Argument for Divestment<\/a>,\u201d the recent opinion piece in the Columbia Spectator<\/em> (Sept. 23, 2020), is distressing on two counts. First, that it was penned by two Jewish Columbia University students, who take pride in their \u201cdramatic unlearning\u201d of \u201cdogma\u201d they received to support the State of Israel as youngsters. Along with glaring historical distortions, the two undergraduates unleash vile accusations against the Jewish state, including that of ethnic cleansing \u2013 an accusation as obscene as it is absurd to any educated ear.<\/p>\n The second disturbing point is that their views appear, not on the website of a group whose documented<\/a> ties<\/a> to terror<\/a> and radical Islamist bodies leave no doubt as to their questionable accuracy (organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine or Jewish Voices for Peace come to mind), but in the Columbia Spectator<\/em>. The paper is the official student mouthpiece of an Ivy League university \u2013 the same Columbia University whose student body voted overwhelmingly yesterday<\/a> (61% to 27%, 11% abstaining) \u201cto recommend that the University should divest from companies profiting from or otherwise supporting Israeli policy toward the Palestinian people.\u201d That a claim so outrageous, leading to such a vote, could be vetted and published in a respectable venue is indication of the traction and influence it has gained through rote repetition, which has not been effectively combatted.<\/p>\n At this time of year, Jews the world over engage in soul-searching. Just as each of us examines where we have fallen short in our relationships with God and with one another, this article in the Spectator<\/em> and too many others like it call us to\u00a0improve our tactics and long-range strategy to combat a false charge as abhorrent as ethnic cleansing.<\/p>\n This is not the first instance when Jewish and Israeli institutions have fallen short in attempts to defend Israel and the Jewish people from distorted and libelous charges, their failures leaving both Israel and Jews dangerously exposed. To mention only a few examples:<\/p>\n The above examples may well trigger the impulse to beat our chests in contrition. But do they really point to gross dereliction of duty on the part of the Jewish world and the individuals devoting their energies to Israel\u2019s welfare? To the contrary.<\/p>\n In most cases, given the historical context and without the benefit of hindsight, the worst one can fault Jewish and Israeli bodies is for \u201ca failure of imagination.\u201d<\/p>\n These organizations\u2019 Achilles heel often stemmed from their very goodness and humanity. Too busy building a country, absorbing immigrants, confronting existential threats and momentous challenges, who among us could even dream up the accusations concocted by our enemies? Many of them, in fact, were projections of their own acts and intentions for the Jewish state.\u00a0<\/p>\n Take ethnic cleansing, for example. We recall the photographs documenting the Jews driven from the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem\u2019s Old City by the Arab Legion, their home for centuries, with Jews forbidden to even set foot or visit Jewish holy sites until the city\u2019s reunification in 1967. This act of textbook ethnic cleansing does not square with equivalent claims directed at the State of Israel, where Arabs today comprise over 20% of the population, or with the disputed territories of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza\u2019s dramatic drop in infant mortality and increased life expectancy since Israel\u2019s presence in 1967. \u00a0<\/p>\n Like other adversaries of Israel\u2019s over the years, the article\u2019s authors disregard actual incidents of ethnic cleansing and focus allegations on Israel. The term itself was used in the Balkans as recently as the 1990s during the Serbian campaign<\/a> to remove ethnic minorities from their territory. Nor did the authors mention the forced ethnic cleansing of Arab Sunnis from Syria<\/a> by Iranian-backed Shia militias \u2013 still ongoing.<\/p>\n Consider the irony: The Columbia Spectator<\/em> article appeared just as the UAE and more and more voices in the Sunni Arab world formally and publicly recognize the Jews as a people with a historical connection and indigenous presence in the land of Israel. With our neighbors now accepting a truth they had long denied, this welcome paradigm shift must be matched with concerted efforts to extend this grasp of truth \u2013 even to North American university campus publications.<\/p>\n Several approaches employed here at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs have met with encouraging degrees of success in changing the argument. For example, the Palestinian Authority now pays a heavy price for its policy of encouraging terror through paying imprisoned terrorists or their families. While they have not changed their policy to date, aggressively-targeted publicity of our study Incentivizing Terrorism: Palestinian Authority Allocations to Terrorists and their Families<\/a><\/em> has changed the playing field.<\/p>\n\n
A Failure of Imagination<\/h3>\n