Since the start of the war in Gaza and its extension to Lebanon, several voices have been calling for a boycott of Israeli universities, always specifying that this should target only the universities as institutions and not the people working there. These initiatives claim to be aimed at increasing pressure on Israel to change its policies, end the war and recommit to a peace process with the Palestinians, and are justified by the argument that any Israeli university, by the mere fact of its existence, supports the policies of the Hebrew state. Yet there are serious grounds for doubting both the political effectiveness of these boycott practices and the representations that motivate them. To clarify the relationship between Israeli universities and the Netanyahu government, and to lift the veil on their role and functioning in the current conflict and within Israeli society, K. interviewed Professors Itai Ater and Alon Korngreen, members of the “Academics for Israeli Democracy” group, and Professor Eyal Benvenisti.
For contemporary critics of religious Zionism, its messianic fever is above all a consequence of its religiosity. Thus posed, the problem admits of only one solution: for life in Israel to be a negation neither of exile nor of Palestinian rights, Zionism can only be secular. In this personal reading of Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin’s latest essay, Mishnaic Consciousness, Biblical Consciousness: Safed and Zionist Culture (Kibbutz Ha-Meuhad and Van Leer Institute Publishing, 2022), Noémie Issan-Benchimol offers another normative support for our critique: the proto-Zionist model of Safed, for whose consciousness exile is lived par excellence in Israel. By pointing to the ideal of an articulation between law and mysticism, another possibility is opened up. Or does it already have the status of a realization?
By what kind of ideological caper is it possible for a nationalist, reactionary discourse to be adopted by the anti-imperialist left? This is the question, unfortunately of current interest, that the first part of Daniel Szeftel’s article left us with two weeks ago. How, indeed, did the ideologues of Arab nationalism manage, after the war, to make people forget their sympathies for European fascism, and make their discourse audible to the Western world? In the continuation of his investigation, Szeftel meticulously studies the process of reformulation that enabled this ideology to become attractive, and the political, academic and international networks that contributed to its dissemination. Accusing Israel of “genocide” against the indigenous Palestinian people appears to have been a decisive factor in this transformation, making it possible to maintain an essentialist conception of national identity, while attributing to the Jews the racist tendencies that flow from it.
