Author: Martin Kramer

Columbia’s Israelis

On By Martin Kramer

On Friday, Amnon Rubinstein, the distinguished Israeli jurist and professor, published a column in the Israeli daily Maariv (in Hebrew), summarizing his stint as a visiting professor at Columbia University. A grim story it is: Ahmadinejad’s visit to campus stirred all the muck back up again.

Rubinstein discovered that the only truly active friends of Israel on campus were orthodox Jewish students. For him, a self-avowed secular humanist, it came as crushing disappointment that like-minded Israelis weren’t standing up. At the demonstration against Ahmadinejad, he could “count the Israelis on a hand that’s missing fingers.” At the faculty level, it was worse. He tells of being present in a meeting attended by two Israeli professors. One proposed the screening of the film Jenin, Jenin, a cinematic slander of Israel, and the other proposed inviting Israel-demonizing Norman Finkelstein to campus. Rubinstein doesn’t name the two, but the sad thing about Columbia is that their identities aren’t obvious. More than two Israeli professors there could have made these sorts of proposals.

That aside, it reminded me of some unfinished Columbia business. Avid readers of this blog will recall that Columbia president Lee Bollinger, back in 2005, tried to calm the raging waters by announcing the establishment of a chair of Israel studies. Four trustees quickly anted up $3 million. The university then appointed a search committee that included Palestinian agitprofs Rashid Khalidi and Lila Abu-Lughod. At the time, I wrote this:

The inclusion of Khalidi and Abu-Lughod on the search committee is perverse. Edward Said used to complain that the Palestinians needed “permission to narrate” their story. At Columbia, the situation is reversed: Israel can’t be narrated without the permission of the great Palestinian mandarins. They must be appeased, satisfied, propitiated.

So were they? The chair has been filled by Yinon Cohen, a former Tel Aviv University sociologist who works mostly on labor markets and migration. Cohen isn’t a hard-left post-Zionist, but he’s far enough left to have signed a May 2002 open letter by some Israeli faculty. At the time, Israel was wrapping up Operation Defensive Shield, its response to the wave of suicide bombings inside Israel that had killed Israelis in the hundreds. The letter’s signatories announced their “wish to express our appreciation and support for those of our students and lecturers who refuse to serve as soldiers in the occupied territories… [T]he present war is not being fought for our home but for the settlements beyond the green line and for the continued oppression of another people.”

I don’t think Khalidi and Abu-Lughod have much to worry about.

Update, February 28: The New York Sun has followed up this post, and collected some responses at Columbia. And Amnon Rubinstein has published an English version of his Maariv article, which discretely omits the most interesting bits about Columbia’s Israeli faculty. (He simply says they “added more fuel to the fire of hatred against Israel.”)

Update, February 29: Here is another letter (in Spanish) by Israeli academics and signed by Yinon Cohen, directed toward Palestinian students. There’s no indication of the date, but all the surrounding items are from late 2001. It begins thus: “We, faculty and students of Israeli universities, extend our arms in solidarity with your just cause, against repression of the popular uprising by the Israeli military forces…. Academic faculty in the occupied territories! We wish to cooperate with you in opposing the brutal policy of siege, closure and curfew of the IDF.”

And it’s Yinon Cohen who earlier this month brought fellow petition-signer Neve Gordon to Columbia. (Alan Dershowitz has called Gordon “one of the world’s most extreme anti-Israel academics.”) Gordon’s subject: “From Colonization to Separation: Exploring the Structure of Israel’s Occupation.” The lecture was co-sponsored by Khalidi’s Middle East Institute, and constituted a class in Cohen’s course on “Special Topics in Israeli Society.”

Imad who?

On By Martin Kramer

As Hezbollah’s official funeral of Imad Mughniyah unfolded yesterday—Hezbollah’s leader eulogizied him over a coffin decked in Hezbollah’s flag—it was useful to recall the party’s denial of his very existence over all these many years. Mention of his name to Hezbollah officials would draw a blank stare or blanket denial. “Hezbollah professes no knowledge of the man,” the New York Times reported in 2002. A journalist who interviewed a top Hezbollah official and parliamentary deputy, Abdullah Kassir, once asked him if he knew Mughniyah. “Kassir flashed a blistering look and responded curtly, ‘I have no answer.’”

Hezbollah’s leader, Hasan Nasrallah, followed a double tack: he would defend “freedom fighter” Mughniyah, but not acknowledge him. “The American accusations against Mughnieh are mere accusations,” he was quoted as saying. “Can they provide evidence to condemn Imad Mughnieh? They launch accusations as if they are given facts.” But when pressed, Nasrallah “refused to reveal whether Mughnieh has a role in Hizbullah.” Of course.

Another American academic wrote this precious paragraph in her book on Hezbollah:

For its part, Hezbollah has consistently denied the existence of any relationship with Mughniyeh, direct or indirect. As a matter of record, from the time of the party’s inception, all Hezbollah officials have emphatically denied ever knowing a person by the name of Imad Mughniyeh. The apparent avoidance of this issue is clear in an answer to a recent question about the party’s relationship with Mughniyeh. The response of a Hezbollah senior official was that Mughniyeh had never held a position in their organization, and was, in Deputy Secretary General Naim al-Qassim’s words, ‘only a name’.

The same author then spends a few embarrassing pages agonizing over this question: “Was Mughniyeh a member of Hezbollah?”

Now that Nasrallah’s eulogy has placed Mughniyah officially in the pantheon of Hezbollah’s greatest martyrs (with Abbas al-Musawi and Raghib Harb), this question looks absurd. That it ever arose is a testament to the discipline of Hezbollah in sticking to lies that serve its interests. One of its paramount interests is concealing from scrutiny that apparatus of terror that Mughniyah spent his life building. Hiding the clandestine branch protects it from Hezbollah’s enemies, and makes it easier to sell the movement to useful idiots in the West, who insist that the movement hasn’t done any terror in years, and maybe never did any at all. They produce statements of such mind-boggling gullibility that one can easily imagine Mughniyah chuckling to himself on reading them. The “literature” is rife with claims that Mughniyah didn’t really belong to Hezbollah, or he answered to Iran, or he had his own agenda—anything to dissociate his terrorist acts from the party.

The truth is (and always has been) a simple one. Hezbollah is many things, but it has always included within it a clandestine terrorist branch, and it probably always will. Indeed, Nasrallah’s threat in his eulogy—to commence an “open war” with Israel outside the Israel-Lebanon theater—alludes to the “global reach” that Mughniyah helped to build.

If Hezbollah were absolutely determined to distance itself from the terror tag, it wouldn’t have accorded an official send-off to a most-wanted terrorist. Nor would its leader have stood over his coffin and threatened “open war.” Assassinations of terrorists can boomerang, and so might this one. But it’s already had the one merit of exposing the core of Hezbollah that lies deep beneath the schools, the hospitals, and all the other gimmicks the party uses to get support and pass in polite company. On page one of the International Herald Tribune yesterday, there were photographs of the aftermath of the Beirut bombing of the U.S. Marines barracks (1983), the hijacked TWA Flight 847 (1985), and the ruins of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia (1996). That’s Hezbollah too, and that was Imad Mughniyah—and they were one.

Update: For more reading on “expert” gullibility regarding Mughniyah and Hezbollah, see this chapter-and-verse dissection by Tony Badran, and this analysis by Michael Young.

Gaza buried in flour

On By Martin Kramer

The Boston Globe has just run an op-ed under the headline “Ending the Stranglehold on Gaza.” The authors are Eyad al-Sarraj, identified as founder of the Gaza Community Mental Health Program, and Sara Roy, identified as senior research scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. The bias of the op-ed speaks for itself, and I won’t even dwell on it. But I do want to call attention to this sentence:

Although Gaza daily requires 680,000 tons of flour to feed its population, Israel had cut this to 90 tons per day by November 2007, a reduction of 99 percent.

You don’t need to be a math genius to figure out that if Gaza has a population of 1.5 million, as the authors also note, then 680,000 tons of flour a day come out to almost half a ton of flour per Gazan, per day.

A typographical error at the Boston Globe? Hardly. The two authors used the same “statistic” in an earlier piece. They copied it from an article published in the Ahram Weekly last November, which reported that “the price of a bag of flour has risen 80 per cent, because of the 680,000 tonnes the Gaza Strip needs daily, only 90 tonnes are permitted to enter.” Sarraj and Roy added the bit about this being “a reduction of 99 percent.”

Note how an absurd and impossible “statistic” has made its way up the media food chain. It begins in an Egyptian newspaper, is cycled through a Palestinian activist, is submitted under the shared byline of a Harvard “research scholar,” and finally appears in the Boston Globe, whose editors apparently can’t do basic math. Now, in a viral contagion, this spreads across the Internet, where that “reduction of 99 percent” becomes a well-attested fact.

What’s the truth? I see from a 2007 UN document that Gaza consumes 450 tons of flour daily. The Palestinian Ministry of Economy, according to another source, puts daily consumption at 350 tons. So the figure for total consumption retailed by Sarraj and Roy is off by more than three orders of magnitude, i.e. a factor of 1,000. No doubt, there’s less flour shipped from Israel into Gaza—maybe it’s those rocket barrages from Gaza into Israel?—but even if it’s only the 90 tons claimed by Sarraj and Roy, it isn’t anything near a “reduction of 99 percent.” Unfortunately, if readers are going to remember one dramatic “statistic” from this op-ed, this one is it—and it’s a lie.

Sarraj is a psychiatrist, but his co-author, Sara Roy, bills herself in her bio as a “political economist.” Her research, the bio reports, is “primarily on the economic, social and political development of the Gaza Strip.” You would think someone with this claim to expertise would know better than to copy some impossible pseudo-statistic on the consumption of the most basic foodstuff in Gaza. Indeed, in a piece she wrote a decade ago, she herself put Gaza’s daily consumption of flour at 275 tons. Did she even read her own op-ed before she sent it off to Boston’s leading paper? If she did, what we have here is a textbook example of the difference between a “political economist” and an economist.

Update: The Boston Globe, presumably after consulting Sarraj and Roy, has added this correction:

A column on Saturday by Eyad al-Sarraj and Sara Roy incorrectly said that Gaza requires 680,000 tons of flour daily to feed its population. It is 680,000 pounds, which means a reduction of 73 percent, not 99 percent, of flour allowed into Gaza.

What originated as a half-malicious, half-unthinking repetition of a fantastic charge against Israel, is now presented by Sarraj and Roy as somebody’s typo, compounded by a little bad math.

In fact, the “correction” is nearly as pathetic as the “error” it is meant to fix. Measuring the flour needs of Gaza in pounds is like measuring the distance from Boston to New York in yards. The UN, Palestinian ministries, and aid agencies all use tons. The pounds-for-tons “correction” is an attempt to cover up the authors’ original sin: they just copied the figure straight from the Ahram Weekly (which anyway doesn’t use pounds—it uses metric measurements). The Boston Globe should go back to the authors and ask for the precise source of their figures. It’s called fact-checking.