The Haifa and Bar Ilan Boycott (another Ilan Pappe tale)

Wall Street Journal ^ | May 2, 2005 | FANIA OZ-SALZBERGER

[kenavi]

On the eve of Passover, the British Association of University Teachers (AUT) took a decision to boycott two of Israel's eight universities -- Haifa and Bar Ilan -- for their alleged collusion with the Israeli government in its mistreatment of the Palestinians. Haifa was also accused of curbing academic freedom. This decision is breathtaking, and will surely feature in the annals of the European radical left and its perverse contribution to peace in the Middle East.

The story embedded here is well worth telling, but not in the way the AUT tells it. "On May 15, 2002," the AUT boycott document declares, "Dr. Ilan Pappe, senior lecturer in Political Science at Haifa University, was sent a letter notifying him that he faced trial and possible dismissal from his position . . . . [T]hese accusations related to Dr. Pappe's efforts to defend a 55-year-old graduate student, Teddy Katz, whose Master's thesis was under attack by an Israeli veteran's organization because it documented a massacre of 200 unarmed civilians by the Haganah (the pre-state army of Israel) at a village called Tantura, near Haifa."

This, to put it plainly, is false. Mr. Katz's thesis was based almost solely on transcriptions of oral interviews he conducted with elderly Palestinian former residents of Tantura, who allegedly witnessed a massacre of their kin by Jewish soldiers. When veterans of the Israeli army force that attacked Tantura sued Mr. Katz for libel, a district court ruled that the empirical evidence was grossly manipulated in the course of transliterating the tapes. Mr. Katz had put words in the mouths of his interviewees that were never uttered. He agreed to apologize to the veterans, telling the media that radical activists -- including Dr. Pappe -- had led him astray.

[kenavi]

FR had a recent thread about Dr. Ilan Pappe, who seems to be Israel's Ward Churchill in intellectual integrity.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/search?s=Ilan+Pappe&ok=Search&q=quick&m=any&o=score&SX=4276acb48cd20a8dab0bf78f71e6ac66af6ca42d

[SJackson]

If you'd like to be on this middle east/political ping list, please FR mail me.

I, therefore, have two humble requests from the British Association of University Teachers.

First, do check your facts again -- assuming that all this sound and fury is about facts at all. Second, just in case my résumé happens to please your political palate, don't extend any kindness to me by saying that peaceniks like myself are off the hook. I am proud of being boycotted along with the University of Haifa as long as your deplorable decision stands. Don't chaperone me back into international scholarship under the patronage of the politically correct. This, I gather, is not what John Stuart Mill had in mind.

Ms. Oz-Salzberger is senior lecturer in the School of History and the Faculty of Law at the University of Haifa.