Battling Anti-Zionism On Israeli Campuses
An Interview With
Dr. Steven Plaut
BY SAMUEL SOKOL
Israeli academic anti-Zionism, and in
some extreme cases overt anti-Semitism,
has become a major story in the Jewish
news media as of late, in large part due to
an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times in
which Professor Neve Gordon of Ben
Gurion University called for an interna-
tional boycott of the Jewish state.
In order to clarify this issue for our
readers, the Five Towns Jewish Times
turned to Professor Steven Plaut, Ph.D.,
considered by many to be Neve Gordon’s
chief academic opponent and one of the
staunchest defenders of Zionism on
Israeli campuses.
Plaut runs a website called Isracampus,
which works to expose and monitor the
anti-Israel political activities of radical
leftist Israeli academics. It is modeled
roughly after Campus Watch in the U.S., a
website run by noted Arabist Daniel
Pipes, which does similar work in moni-
toring American academics in Middle
Eastern studies departments.
The Five Towns Jewish Times spoke
with Plaut about “economic peace,” aca-
demic anti-Zionism, and his long-stand-
ing legal feud with Neve Gordon.
Q. How did you get involved in Zionist
activism?
A. When I first came to Israel, I stayed
out of political debate and discourse. At
the time I saw my role as becoming a
26 January 8, 2010 5 TOWNS JEWISH TIMES
spokesman for and promoter of free-mar-
ket economic ideas. I sought to attack the
residual socialist policies and suppres-
sion of competition, which were the fun-
damental ideologies of all political par-
ties in Israel, including the Likud. I joined
Daniel Doron and some others in ham-
mering away at these anti-productive
monstrosities and against centralized
command and control of the economy,
fighting through the media.
I did so until the Oslo fiasco began.
Once Rabin and Peres abandoned tradi-
tional Israeli policy regarding the
Palestinians and pursued Peace Through
Appeasement and Capitulation, I became
convinced that economic policy was sec-
ondary and that all of Israel had become
a single-issue country. I believed that the
Oslo debacle had to be opposed and
reversed, and that every ounce of energy
must be devoted to that lest the country
be annihilated by the stupidity of the
Israeli political elite. I still believe this.
Today I am very active with a small
group of similar-minded people in operat-
ing Isracampus. It is a website and group
that exposes and monitors the anti-Israel
political activities of radical leftist Israeli
academics and faculty members. I believe
that the suicidal policies pursued by Israel
over the past two decades all stem from
the artificial power of the Israeli Far Left,
especially via its hegemony over Israeli
universities, courts, and the media. We
think the world needs to know just who
and what the Israeli academic Left is, and
how it is harming the country.
Q. Who are the worst academic offend-
ers against Israel?
A. Several hundred people, most of
Dr. Steven Plaut
them documented and exposed on
www.Isracampus.org.il, are spread among
Israeli universities and colleges. The very
worst centers of academic radicalism are
Ben Gurion University and Tel Aviv
University, while the University of Haifa
and the Hebrew University are only slight-
ly behind. The worst faculty offenders are
usually employed in the humanities or the
soft social sciences, as well as in law and
education. Many of them openly call on
the world to boycott Israel. Some openly
support terrorist attacks against Jews.
Almost all the offenders are Israeli Jews;
very few are Arabs. Some are Israelis living
outside Israel. Rather recently, a professor
at Sapir College kicked a student out of
class for wearing an IDF uniform.
Q. What do you think of the decision by
Defense Minister Barak to cut ties with the
Yeshivat Hesder in Har Bracha, in light of
anti-IDF stances taken by professors at
Israeli universities?
A. It is clearly absurd. Some teachers at
Har Bracha expressed opposition to the
government’s policy of expelling settlers
from their homes, but demanded that
yeshiva students obey the law and serve
in the army. By contrast, hundreds of rad-
ical faculty members at Israeli universi-
ties demand that Israelis refuse to serve
in the army altogether, break the law, and
these same radicals often call for Israel to
be annihilated altogether. The army has
not cut off ties with Israeli universities,
even though some army officers have
been assigned to take courses with ultra-
haters of Israel on the campuses, includ-
ing the nefarious Ilan Pappe. Lecturers
who penalize students who wear uni-
forms or serve in the reserves should be
summarily fired, even if they hold tenure.
Q. Can you tell us a little bit about your
long-standing legal battle with Neve
Gordon?
Continued on Page 28

Battling Anti-Zionism
Continued from Page 26
A. Well, it is all about to go to the
Supreme Court, so I may have a better
comment for you in a few months. In any
case, it is Israel’s most notorious SLAPP
suit, that is, a harassment lawsuit
attempting to silence one’s critics via friv-
olous libel litigation. The suit in question
has been described in the media as the
Israeli version of the David Irving suit
against Deborah Lipstadt, with me play-
ing Deborah Lipstadt.
Briefly, Neve Gordon is a fanatically
anti-Israel and anti-Jewish Marxist lectur-
er in political science at Ben Gurion
University. He routinely denounces Israel
as a Nazi-like, racist, apartheid, fascist
entity, and he has called for Israel’s exis-
tence to be terminated altogether. His
articles are so venomous that they are car-
ried by Holocaust denial and neo-Nazi
websites. He issued the call last summer
in the Los Angeles Times for a worldwide
boycott against Israel.
Gordon filed a SLAPP suit against me
because I dared to criticize him for pub-
28 January 8, 2010 5 TOWNS JEWISH TIMES
lishing fawning sycophantic praise of
neo-Nazi Norman Finkelstein. I also
described Gordon and the group of
“human shields,” which illegally entered
Ramallah to defend terrorists from the
Israeli army and prevent their capture, as
“Judenrat Wannabes.”
Gordon, who lives in Beer Sheba, ran
to Nazareth to file the harassment suit,
hoping it would be assigned to a radical
Arab judge there. The judge [Reem
Naddaf, ed.] for the first round in court
was indeed a radical anti-Israel Arab
woman, whose husband was the right-
hand party associate of Azmi Bishara
(the Knesset Member in hiding now
because he is wanted by Israel for spying
and treason).
She explicitly endorsed Holocaust revi-
sionism in her verdict and also declared
there that all of Israel stands on lands
stolen from another people.
That judge simply ignored all Israeli
case law and defenses of freedom of
speech, and effectively ruled that sedition
is protected speech while criticism of
sedition is libel. She found against me.
Later a Nazareth appeals court over-
turned almost everything in the original
verdict, but left some residual issues
unresolved. That is why I appealed to
Israel’s Supreme Court. The whole legal
battle has been going on for about eight
years. We will see if the Supreme Court
has the courage to rule unambiguously in
favor of freedom of speech and against
neo-fascist SLAPP suit harassment.
Professor Amal Jamal of Tel Aviv
University is threatening to sue Israeli
newscaster Dan Margalit for responding
harshly and kicking MK Jamal Zahalka off
his program after the legislator insulted
him personally and stated that Ehud
Barak likes to listen to classical music
while children are murdered. Zahalka
also called Tel Aviv occupied territory.
Q. What is your take on academics get-
ting involved in such issues? Does this
remind you at all of Neve Gordon’s attempts
to discredit your criticism of his views and
to silence you through legal means?
A. Most Arab faculty members in Israeli
universities keep a low profile and keep
their opinions to themselves. An open
secret is that many are beneficiaries of
affirmative action preferences. In any case,
Amal Jamal at TAU, Asad Ghanem at Haifa
University, and a few other Arab faculty
members have become very open and
extremist in recent years. Some express
their hatred of Israel and their opposition
to Israel’s continued existence as a Zionist
state. By and large, though, the Israel-hat-
ing Arab faculty are far less extremist than
are the Israel-hating Jewish faculty mem-
bers at Israeli universities.
Q. What can be done regarding Israel’s
poor state of academic performance and
falling quality of universities?
A. Privatize, privatize, privatize! Turn
the public aid to the universities over to
students, like veterans’ vouchers in the
U.S., and let those students shop for the
best education. Force the universities to
compete. Do away with tenure so that
pseudo-academic extremists with little or
no scholastic achievement can get the
boot. Strip the universities of their entitle-
ment to taxpayer funding and force them
to compete for students armed with
vouchers. Convince donors to universities
to demand accountability. Fire professors
involved in law breaking and in treason.
Q. As an economist and nationalist
political thinker, what is your take on
Bibi’s economic peace initiative?
A. It is an empty slogan. Economic
prosperity and growth will make Israel
stronger but will not make the Arabs any
less belligerent. Islamo-fascist hatred of
Israel and Jews, together with Arab terror-
ism, do not diminish when standards of
living rise. Much to the contrary, econom-
ic comfort in the Islamic world (and high-
er education) produces terrorism and
fanaticism, not moderation.
Q. Have you had any success?
A. It is an uphill battle. There are small
achievements and minor successes, but
most of the battle still lies ahead. Rescuing
Israel from the Left is a long trench war
that has been going on for decades and
will go on much longer. No matter how
many times the ideas and policies of the
Far Left are discredited and fail, they just
crop up all over again. This is as true under
governments headed by the Likud as it is
of those led by the Labor Party.
Q. What can the public do about the
deplorable state of academic anti-Zionism?
A. Well, there are some encouraging
signs. First, Zionist students on Israeli
campuses are well organized and vocal
and getting more effective and aggressive
in confronting the tenured Fifth Column.
These students are now getting organized
to “spy” on radical faculty members and
leak to the media what they say and how
they indoctrinate inside their classrooms.
Second, many of the academic radicals
have been intimated by Isracampus and
groups like NGO Monitor, who follow
what they do and say, and publicize their
behavior. They are frightened by the idea
that someone is keeping tabs on them.
Third, major university donors and
patrons from around the world are speak-
ing up much more openly and making it
clear that they do not want their dona-
tions to Israeli higher education misused
for anti-Israel political indoctrination and
anti-Zionist sedition.
There is still a long way to go. The uni-
versity heads still turn a blind eye to mis-
use of the classroom for political indoctri-
nation. Hiring and promotion decisions
are still subject to a corrupt process that
rewards pseudo-academic political radi-
calism and sometimes punishes serious
research and academic work. ❖