Neve Gordon Is Not the Problem
Daniel Gordis , THE JERUSALEM POST
Intentionally or not, Neve Gordon, senior lecturer and head of the Political Science Department at Ben-Gurion University, has unleashed a firestorm in Israeli academe. His recent op-ed in The Los Angeles Times declared that Israel is an apartheid state, and that it ought to be boycotted to “save Israel from itself.”
Sensing a public relations debacle among their American supporters, the president and leadership of BGU distanced themselves from his comments and hinted that he ought to resign. Predictably, other Israeli academics leaped to Gordon’s defense. Most interesting, however, was the outrage Gordon’s column has evoked among many American Jews. Some are so beside themselves that they are now threatening to withhold their financial support from the university.
To be sure, Gordon’s argument is deeply flawed. He writes as if Israel sought or enjoys controlling the Palestinians, making no mention of the fact that it captured the West Bank in a defensive war that it did not seek, or that more than once (most recently with Ehud Olmert’s election in 2006) Israelis have chosen leaders whose campaigns called for relinquishing those territories. Add to that his failure to admit that the Palestinians still refuse to recognize Israel’s right to exist and continue to call for its destruction, and one can appreciate the fury of Ben-Gurion University’s American supporters.
The fury these American Jews are suddenly expressing illustrates how little these very supporters know about the system of higher education in Israel to which they are so deeply committed. Is this really their first glimpse into the widespread and long-standing hostility of Israeli academe to Jewish statehood? Gordon has been espousing this viewpoint for years. He regularly writes for anti-Israel publications, holed up with Yasser Arafat during the siege of Ramallah, and has on more than one occasion likened Israel to Nazi Germany. But he’s always enjoyed the steadfast support of the university, to its very highest echelons. His views are widely held among his colleagues.
Nor is BGU unique here. Coming to Gordon’s defense, Tel Aviv University professor Shlomo Sand stated outright that Israeli universities are not Zionist institutions and should not be. They are about scholarship, he insisted, not about the Jews or their state.
There are non-Jews and non-Zionists at these universities, he claimed, and the universities must serve them no less than anyone else. And at Hebrew University, the crown jewel of Israeli academe, the long-term influence of the binationalists involved in the university’s founding has also been well documented.
Indeed, the only thing that is surprising about this latest turn of events is that American donors are surprised. For, to those who know even a bit about Israeli academe, the anti-Israel posture of many departments is really yesterday’s news.
The important question in all this is what American philanthropists who are committed to Zionism and to Israel’s higher education ought to do. Surely they can’t really believe that universities will suddenly silence their professors or terminate tenure. What, then, are the options?
These philanthropists ought to look close to home for their answers. For many of America’s great universities developed from an entirely different tradition. Woodrow Wilson, as president of Princeton, spoke unabashedly of “Princeton in the nation’s service.” Columbia College instituted its now-classic core curriculum as an explicit defense of Western civilization. Neither Princeton nor Columbia, like many other great American liberal arts colleges, saw any conflict between superb scholarship and inclusiveness on the one hand, and devotion to country and one’s own civilization on the other.
Is it at all surprising that these colleges have produced an abundance of America’s great leaders?
Israeli education needs more support from American Jews, not less. Rather than withholding their funds, a much more useful response would be to channel their support and their knowledge to create an Israeli version of the “college in the service of the nation.”
How?
Those American philanthropists currently wringing their hands probably have no idea that Israel has not a single liberal arts college to its name. Typical Israeli undergraduates get none of the curricular breadth that an American education usually requires, and as a result, they know almost nothing about Western civilization, the majesty of Jewish intellectual history or even the competing philosophic currents inside Zionism.
In today’s Israel, the People of the Book do not even read their own books. When they read or hear someone like Neve Gordon, nothing in their education has given them the tools to evaluate what he says, or to take him on. They are helpless.
TODAY’S NARROW model of education, in which students essentially study only one discipline, produces excellence, but excellence as technocrats. It does not produce the broadly read, intellectually nuanced people that the Jewish state so desperately needs.
Without dramatic change, Israeli universities will produce only more Neve Gordon’s – scholars of varying quality, who feel no love for the very country that has saved their people. If it learned from American education, Israel might actually begin to cultivate a new wave of leadership, and with it, a generation of Israelis who actually love their nation.
Dr. Gordon is correct – Israel needs to be saved from itself. What Israel needs now is a reconceived notion of the educated Israeli.
It needs a liberal arts college, and the young people prepared to speak constructively about Jewish sovereignty, its challenges, its failures and its future that only that kind of college can produce.
A century ago, who could have imagined that the Jewish state would one day have a world-class army but a failing, collapsing educational system? Whether or not American Jews have the foresight to use their philanthropy to promote genuine change in Israeli academe still remains to be seen. But if they do, Neve Gordon’s op-ed may ironically have goaded both Israel and the American Jewish community into taking the first steps needed to begin to save the Jewish state.
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Tags: America, Israel, Judaism
Dr. Daniel Gordis is Senior Vice President of the Shalem Center, where he is also a senior fellow. The author of numerous books on Jewish thought and currents in Israel...
The Jewish State must end, say its enemies, from intellectuals like Tony Judt to hate-filled demagogues like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Even average Israelis are wondering if they wouldn't be better off somewhere else. 
It should be noted that Bar Ilan University does have a core curriculum in basic Jewish studies that every undergraduate is required to take. Admittedly, this is not anywhere near the basic liberal arts courses that even science and engineering students are required to take in the US, but it could form the nucleus of a minimum liberal arts curriculum that every Israeli university student should be required to complete.
Bravo! The one point I’d like to make, though, is that American universities are also no longer bastions of the nation’s values or even of sound scholarship and critical thought- particularly in the case of the ivy leagues like Columbia: when an Arab female professor there claimed that all of Israel’s so-called antiquities were planted in our soil by the Israeli government in order to validate Zionism, Columbia did not give her the boot. Instead they gave her tenure! So American higher education just may no longer be the best role model…
Excellent article.
Yes it is high time that something ought to be done to change the anti-Israeli air in some Israeli universities. Specially the one in T-A
Maybe cut their governmental budgets and subsidies or as Daniel Gordis suggested, open new universities based on new values.
Then we shall see how many “new historians” will have a place to distribute their fabrications.
I think some review of the thinking that is going on inside Israel academia would be quite enlightening and even, perhaps, disappointing for Daniel. I collected some from discussions going on behind the scenes at HebU, TAU, Bar-Ilan, Haifa U and BGU:http://myrightword.blogspot.com/2009/09/extracts-from-academics-arguing-over.html or here
Unfortunately, Daniel also misses the point when he turns to American donors to build a new Israeli college. Daniel addresses the issue of sovereignty and our independence yet expects Americans to give us these tools. But, such a university must be created by Israelis. Only they are capable of addressing these issues because they are the only ones who are committed to the ideas of a Judaic or Hebraic civilization as a separate and unique worldview. American Jews remain a hyphenated and conflicted personality. The Zionist vision was to heal that tear in the Jewish psyche. From now on we must recognize that Jewish life is identical with the vicissitudes of the Jewish state.
American Jews see Israel as some cultural artifact; an outdoor museum. But, they return to their lives in the States where Judaism is no longer a polity. It has become a religion that might inspire morals, but remains separated by American convention from describing the character of the state.
Excellent article and time for Brandeis University to open a satellite in Israel with Daniel Gordis in charge. It would provide so many students with a liberal arts and cross cultural education. It could be done with faculty from both Israel and America. It would attract more Americans to attend college in Israel.It could easily focus on public service and liberal arts.
Ellen Fox
Palo Alto, California eptember3rd, 2009
While bemoaning the educational system in Israel and in the U.S. may be useful for venting, the fact remains that “educators” such as Neve Gordan are doing incalculable damage to Israel, and by extension, the Jewish people. Israel is a country at war. While this does not affect American and other foreign educators, it should certainly be a factor in Israel’s approach to those who provide solace and comfort to the enemy. Educational freedom, as well as other “freedoms” should not be a cover behind which those committing treason (and I choose the word appropriately and with forethought)should be able to hide. It is a crime; it is on the books; and the proper consequences should be applied.
I agree with most of what Dr. Gordis writes here but I’m puzzled by this blanket statement: “Add to that his failure to admit that the Palestinians still refuse to recognize Israel’s right to exist and continue to call for its destruction….” While this is true of some Palestinians and some factions, this is not majority Palestinian thinking that has consistently endorsed two states, as reflected in opinion polls and the stated policy of the leadership of the Palestinian Authority.
While using the American model of a liberal education at a liberal arts college is highly persuasive, unfortunately today, those same liberal arts colleges have become hotbeds of anti-American lecturing and scholarship. Israel is not alone in battling the derisiveness of its educators who seem to contain an inordinate amount of self-loathing for their own history and country. Strengthing the curriculum with a more fair and balanced staff would immediately offset the harm that these pedagogues inflict on young minds. That given, I believe that the American donors to Israeli Universities should definitely target broadening the education that students receive.
The source of the problem is not a lack of liberal education but a lack of Jewish education.
It is exactly the mistaken thinking by those such as Mr. Seliger, who ignore or obfuscate the clear and open declarations by the Palestinian leadership that has consistently refused to accept the right of a Jewish state to exist in the Middle East. While they may accept a two-state solution, being one Palestinian Arab state, and one Arab-Jewish state, their unaltered demand for the so-called “refugees’right of return” makes it clear that this “solution” is but one stage of their “policy of stages”. And the public opinion polls that have been taken and published from the Palestinian territories show that the general population does not accept Jewish historic, political, or legal rights in the area in general, (and in Jerusalem in particular.)
IGNORANCE OF THE AMERICAN COLLEGE SCENE IS
INCREDIBLE.LIKE ISRAEL,STUDENTS ARE TAUGHT
AMERICA IS THE PROBLEM.A RACIST EXPLOITER.
KILLER OF THE INDIANS.ALL TOO MANY BELIEVE IT.
THIS IS A PROBLEM FOR ALL THE WEST.
I agree with Saul Goldman that Daniel Gordis himself misses the problem, but from another angle: it will take too much time to introduce the type of institutions he advocates (rightly) in Israel. In the meantime, people like Gordon will keep doing serious damage for years, vilifying the very State that allows them to live a comfortable and safe life. A better solution is needed, at least in the short term. Tema Merback’s comment points in the right direction. Look at what happens in the very US institutions of higher learning that Gordis points to as models: Palestinian propaganda reigns supreme, with the help of too many left-wing professors, on hundreds of campuses. Clearly, if there is any solution, it must be in the direction of demanding and restoring balance and fairness. In short, rigorously apply academic standards and reclaim the place from the radicals who have ruled it unopposed for too long under the guise of academic freedom. Restoring academic integrity is really what is needed, more so than building new institutions from the ground up (although both propositions are feasible). It could be done faster, and at a considerably lower cost.
While I live in far off Canada, I gather from reading articles in the Israeli press and elsewhere that the problem starts in elementary school where Zionism and love of country is not taught or respected. So, if you pile money into ‘new’ liberal arts colleges, who will populate the resulting professorial positions? More left-wingers and vilifiers of Israel! So, how can that be the solution? It would just perpetuate the problem.
An eye-opener is “The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel’s Soul” by Yoram Hazony, but it was so disheartening and shocking that I’ve never been able to finish it!
It will take a completely new generation armed with the knowledge of Zionism, Judaism and the history of both the State and the Jewish People starting at the earliest ages before you will see a change at the higher levels of education. Quite a pity!
But, then again, I’m just a stupid Jewish Canuck viewing from afar. So, what do I know, eh?
We are not educating a generation of literate Israelis. How is it that we are allowing this to happen? Is the secular/left of our policy-makers so unabashedly self-destructive? It’s hard to imagine, but just as hard to imagine is that this state of affairs simply “happened.” I suppose it was the pressure of the times, the perceived need to be entirely “function and efficiency” oriented in order to quickly produce the technocrats we needed to build a country from scratch. And once entrenched, so enshrined. Certainly the secular/left has its share of responsibility for maintaining this system, but so does the Mamlachti Dati for yielding the intellectual field of battle in order to produce religious technocrats. I mean by that, those who reduce Judaism to halachic observance, but have no understanding of the difference of worldview between the West and us. Or the similarities, for that matter. And the Mamlachti Dati doesn’t have the excuse of the secular/left, for religious technocrats are not needed to build the country.
This is an excuse for colleges to allow sedition and anarchy as a substitute for education. Gordon is Israel’s Ward Churchill, an angry radical leftist that uses his academic position to attack his country. He hides his treachery under his academic robe. We have similar problems in the west with such misguided academics who support evil people as false victims,poisoning the minds of our youth. It’s better that Israel specializes in technical subjects than expand it’s liberal political science programs. Israel doesn’t need Ward Churchills or Neve Gordon’s which threaten it’s democracy.
Freedom of speech does not mean yelling fire in a crowded theatre.
I am surprised at both Danny Gordis’s original article and some of the subsequent comments. As an American who recevied both an undergraduate and graduate degree from an Israeli University and subsequently served on the faculty of a US university, I have experienced both sides of this “academic” issue. From my perspective, the underlying issue is the lack of political will irrespective of where – US or Israeli insitutions. I have no problem with Palestinian supporters at academic institutions. My problem is that when they articulate as fact information that is not, nobody has the poltical will to stand up and say so; to publically challenge the credibility of the speaker. They are free to speak; they are not free to lie and not be challenged. Yet few are prepared to stand up at a university and call a colleague a liar. The answer is not more liberal arts colleges in Israel or the suggestion that US philanthropists pay for them. The problem facing education in Israel is much more complex and its solution is not simply more liberal arts colleges. The answer is for people to have the politcal will to stand up and say something whether it is about falsehoods perpetrated by Palestinian supporters or failures in the Israeli education system. Current members of existing academic institutions, be they the focused examples of Israeli institutions or the bastions of US liberal arts education, must have the courage to stand up and demand academic credibility from their colleagues. Being an academic does not mean you are never wrong. It also does not mean you can never challenge a colleague for being wrong. Doing so is not outside the boundries of academic credibility. Doing so is demanded of academic credibility.
This article is both very honest and very correct. Israel lacks real liberal arts education, its professors are often farther left than those in the US, and they are often even more detached from reality. The trick is turning these deficiencies into reform. Speaking with Israeli professors, they often bemoan the lack of real liberal arts education in Israel (whatever their political inclinations) but no one steps up to reform the system.
Part of this is institutional stasis. The Israeli university system was built on the German model, meant to turn out professionals with intense but narrow training. This is a pattern that has stuck. But it is also a lack of will. In this case, Gordis may be right that what the Israeli university system needs is more American or at least support, maybe in the form of wealthy benefactors with ambitions of building a real liberal arts educational framework. Israelis sadly are not going to do it on their own.
I think the concept of a “good liberal arts university education” is ambiguous. There is the idea that the university culture should have a universalist attitude, but this is always built upon a subtext assumption that the citizens of a nation, including its professors, have primal patriotic feelings of dedication to their national well-being and to some consensus on what is vital to national identity– such as history, language, literature, national purpose, and the moral assumptions upon which the national community is built. If the intellectual leadership of a nation does not have this primal feeling, it is only a matter of time before the nation itself disintegrates.
In addition, I do not believe that one should look to the U.S. as a model for this idea of national identity. The serious internal cleavages within the U.S. on critical matters of policy such as the nation’s role in protecting global stability, or its mode of providing medical care to its population, or policies on immigration, taxation, economic regulation, scientific research, global resource protection and conservation, etc. indicate to me that the United States may not currently be presenting a viable model for the formation of public policy. Indeed, there may not be a nation in the world whose situation is similar to that of Israel. Many previously-existing models, such as Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, no longer exist.
I must agree with Shlomo Vile: the problem in Israel is less the lack of a liberal education (though the absence of a single liberal arts college in the country is a shock), but the lack of Jewish education. The difficulty is not surprising; in many ways the existence of the state seems to obviate the need for the religion. Nor is it unique; it is a central theme of Jewish history, a typical response of the B’nai Yisrael whenever they possess the land. One would have hoped that the traumas of the half-century leading up to the creation of the new state would have been enough to change this pattern at last; but evidently this is not the case.