Anti-Israel forums slammed
A SYMPOSIUM titled “Law, Rights and Resistance in Occupied Palestine” at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) on Friday has been labelled “one of the worst examples of polemics masquerading as genuine academic scholarship that we have seen in Australia”.
That is how Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) executive director Peter Wertheim described the event, organised by postgraduate students with support from a group of academic staff members at UNSW, which will address, among other things, “whether there is a legal right, as opposed to a mere moral right to resist occupied rule under international law and, if so, under what conditions it can be exercised”.
“The title and the advertising of the symposium betray the fact that its conclusions have been predetermined by the organisers,” Wertheim said. “The conflict between Jews and Palestinian Arabs is not, and has never been, fundamentally about ‘resistance to occupation’. The conflict pre-dates Israel’s capture of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. It pre-dates the establishment of Israel in 1948, the Balfour Declaration in 1917, and even the advent of the modern Zionist movement in the 1890s.
“The conflict exists because most Palestinian Arabs and their leaders have never accepted the right of the Jewish people to sovereignty in any part of Israel, and have done all in their power to keep Jews out or drive them out.”
Wertheim said the symposium has “framed the conflict in a way that is intellectually superficial, morally simplistic, and utterly biased and lacking in credibility”.
Dr Hilton Immerman, honorary fellow of UNSW, told The AJN: “This is one-sided anti-Israel propaganda dressed up as an academic symposium. It only serves to discredit this great university.”
Meanwhile, at the University of Sydney last week, a forum was held titled “Why Boycotting Israel isn’t Anti-Semitic” organised by the Sydney Staff for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions group.
“There is a word that applies to the singling out of one ethnic group for less favourable treatment than other such groups. That word is ‘racism’,” ECAJ public affairs director Alex Ryvchin said. “The very fact that they feel the need to tell the world that BDS is not inherently racist is a reliable indication that that is precisely what it is.”
EVAN ZLATKIS
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