A potentially ugly row is brewing in the United Kingdom over an April academic conference at the University of Southampton, titled, “International Law and the State of Israel: Legitimacy, Responsibility and Exceptionalism.”
Let’s just cut to the chase here. The real title of this conference is, “Does the State of Israel Have a Legal Right to Exist? No, Of Course It Doesn’t.”
Hence, the growing volley of criticism heading in the direction of Southampton, one of Britain’s better universities. Even politicians are weighing in. Lord Howard Leigh, a prominent member of the Conservative Party, had this to say: “It is very disappointing that a distinguished university like Southampton has organized this conference. They have never held a conference questioning the right of existence of any other country.”
Leigh is absolutely correct, but that won’t bother the organizers one jot. The clue: Why is the word “exceptionalism” in the conference title? Israel, in their eyes, is a state built upon violence and ethnic cleansing, and the task of academics, therefore, is to unravel the legal implication that inevitably follows: As a sovereign entity, the Jewish state should be dismantled.
I have to admit that I’m undecided as to how serious a problem this conference is, although it’s important to note that British Jews are incensed by it, and are even circulating a petition appealing to Southampton University not to sully its good name by lending it to a motley crew of fanatical anti-Zionists.
Given that, let me offer one reason as to why we shouldn’t be overly worried. Many of the speakers have been around for what seems like an eternity — so long, in fact, that if Israel, heaven forbid, were to disappear, the immediate result for these folks would be unemployment.
I’m talking here about names like Ilan Pappe, Haim Bresheeth and Uri Davis, Israelis who have made a career out of denouncing their former country as a racist state beyond reform. I’m talking, too, about Arab propagandists such as Victor Kattan, Nur Masalha and conference co-organizer George Bisharat of U.C. Hastings College of the Law. All of them have been pushing the “one-state” option for decades, code for the elimination of Israeli sovereignty, a goal that could only be achieved by exterminating and expelling the vast majority of Israel’s Jewish population.
Gathering these people under one roof is certainly a distasteful proposition. Yet it remains to be seen whether these voices will echo outside of the chamber that Southampton University has so kindly provided them.
Indeed, leafing through the conference program, you get the distinct sense that the proceedings could easily descend into farce. Keynoting is the veteran Princeton professor Richard Falk, until last year the U.N. special rapporteur on Palestinian human rights. Over the years, he has established himself as a 9/11 conspiracy theorist, an apologist for the brutal former Gadhafi regime in Libya and a specialist in such outrageous statements as his conclusion that the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing was a form of “resistance” to America’s “global domination.” For those and other reasons, Falk is regarded as a lunatic whose loathing of his Jewish origins has been a public spectacle throughout his career.
Then there are the unknown names, such as Ofra Yeshua-Lyth, another Israeli and a former journalist with the Ma’ariv daily newspaper. The subject of a flattering profile on the anti-Semitic website Mondoweiss, Yeshua-Lyth introduced herself by saying: “I remember myself as a journalist explaining that a secular democratic state is actually a call for the annihilation of Israel. Today I say the same thing. It’s true, but now I support it.” She also described herself as an “opponent of the regime.”
That’s an easy sentiment to express when you haven’t got secret police, such as exist in Muslim countries, breathing down your neck. It’s also a sickeningly immoral one. Barely four hours away from Tel Aviv is the world’s worst humanitarian crisis since World War II. In Syria, the number of refugees and displaced (more than half the country) makes you wonder in despair why the Palestinian Arab refugee population created by the exterminationist war that the Arab states launched against Israel in 1948 is still the favored obsession of academics ostensibly specializing in the Middle East as a whole.
So on one level, this conference is more of the same: the same speakers, the same themes, the same visceral hatred not just of the Jewish state, but of any expression of Jewish identity. You need only look at the output of the main conference organizer, Southampton professor Oren Ben-Dor (another anti-Zionist “ex-Israeli”) for confirmation.
But I’m reluctant to summarily dismiss the conference as irrelevant, because Ben-Dor’s initiative aims to turn anti-Zionism from a variation of traditional anti-Semitic ideology into an academic methodology. In other words, the point of departure for this conference, as well as the writings of its participants, is that Israel’s illegitimacy must be recognized as a “fact” that is not open to debate.
Given how Middle East studies have degenerated in America in recent decades, we shouldn’t be surprised if the Southampton conference repeats itself on this side of the Atlantic. The danger lies not in the impact these ideas will have on the policy of the current and successive administrations, but in the establishment of a norm among students of the Middle East that Israel shouldn’t be in the region in the first place.
Ben Cohen writes a weekly column for JNS.org. His writings on Jewish affairs and Middle Eastern politics have been published in Commentary, the New York Post and Haaretz.