Moti Neuman responds to last week’s column by Ronit Lentin, in which she called for a boycott of Israeli adademics
It is regrettable that Ronit Lentin, an Israeli citizen, is so consumed with negative attitudes to her own country as to be blind both to historical facts and to current realities. Only this can explain her call for a boycott of Israeli academics, which will apparently bring about something called ‘freedom’.
Her references to Hamas reveal an astonishing naivety. From 1994 to 1996 Hamas was responsible for a wave of suicide bombings in Israel that derailed the Oslo peace process and gravely damaged the positive political mood in Israel towards that process in the late1990s. During the second intifada (2000–2005), it was responsible for more than 70 per cent of the 150 suicide bombings that killed over 1,100 Israeli citizens, most of them civilians.
When its suicide bombers could no longer penetrate Israel due to the security barrier, Hamas escalated its rocket and mortar attacks against civilians in southern Israel (more than 12,000 in nine years, 3,000 of them in 2008 alone). Hamas’ anti-Semitic and extremist Islamist ideology, expressed in its 1988 Charter, calls not only for the destruction of Israel but for the murder of Jews anywhere in the world – thus including Lentin.
Moreover, during the military coup of June 2007, Hamas assassinated some 150 to 200 Fatah members, throwing some of them from the roofs of buildings. It is responsible for the torture and persecution of Palestinian women, homosexuals and the once vibrant Christian minority in Gaza.
Can this be the organisation Lentin sees as ruling Gaza by ‘democratic’ right? Can she be so deep in denial as to ignore all this and present Hamas as a bunch of misunderstood people merely ‘seen as terrorists’?
‘Misrepresenting facts’
Lentin misrepresents the shortage of building materials in Gaza as a ‘boycott’ of its schools. But Israel must try to prevent Hamas from rebuilding its terrorist infrastructure for further attacks on Israeli citizens. Israel has consistently enabled the entry of humanitarian assistance, even when Hamas attacked the very providers of this assistance.
Then Lentin twists the fact that ‘students’ are in jail in the West Bank (is it just for being students, Ronit?), and turns the difficulties of movement due to the ‘interminable checkpoint regime’ – that is, the security measures unfortunately needed to prevent a recurrence of past terrorist violence – into a ‘boycott’ of the Palestinian universities,
I ask Ronit Lentin, which is worse – not knowing whether you will get to your lecture or conference on time because of a checkpoint, or not knowing whether your child will get to school alive because Hamas chooses that time to rocket your town?
In reality, there would be no Palestinian universities at all without the so-called ‘occupation’ by Israel. In the 19 years from 1948 to 1967, when the West Bank was under Jordanian rule and Gaza under Egyptian rule, not a single university was founded in either territory.
All but one of the seven universities in the West Bank, and all four of those in Gaza, were founded under the nefarious Israeli ‘occupation’.
People ‘turn backs’ on Hamas
Lentin also may not be aware that, because of improved security and growing investment in the West Bank, all checkpoints around major West Bank towns have been removed and others greatly reduced. Economic growth, according to the World Bank, stands at eight per cent. West Bank Palestinians are turning their backs on Hamas, associating Hamas-ruled Gaza with oppression and poverty.
Israeli citizens of every race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and sexual orientation exercise the right to vote and enjoy identical civil and political liberties. If by ‘freedom’ Lentin means a self-governing Palestinian state living side-by-side in peace with Israel, such a desirable outcome is already Israeli government policy.
It will be achieved, not by boycotts, but by negotiation carried on in good faith between partners who have agreed to leave violence behind. And no true liberal could call for a boycott on the exchange of knowledge between academics for the advancement of mankind.
Moti Neuman is co-chair of the Umbrella Organisation of Israelis in Ireland
