Israeli Lobby scuttles SJSU Panel on War and Occupation

Israeli Lobby sabotages SJSU Panel on War and Occuptaion

The Israeli lobby is up to its usual tricks again. Last evening
it managed to sabotage a teach-in on war, occupation and peace
in the middle east held at San Jose State University. The panel
was supposed to be comprised of Emad Yahya, Salem Ajluni,
Hossein Al-Hamalawy, Gil Villagran and Sharat Lin. However
due to the last minute shenanigans of the lobby and the intense
pressure it applied, Professor Villagran had to bow out of the panel
in the "interest of a more balanced perspective". The upshot of the
whole sordid affair was that Prof Villagran was replaced by a Zionist
ideologue David Meir Levi.

Imagine, for the moment, that you are living in apartheid South Africa.
Imagine further that University of Johannesburg decides to hold
a panel commemorating the Soweto Uprising, whose raison d'etre
is to expose the horrible injustices of the apartheid regime. Now imagine
that powers that be at the University apply pressure on the
organizers of the panel to "balance the one-sided perspective of the panel"
by including an apartheid ideologue on the panel. Would such pressure
tactics be considered reasonable or would they be seen for what
they are - efforts of the powerful to squelch any dissenting views?

Although Israel and its apologists balk at the apartheid analogy,
the analogy is now commonplace. It is not just Jimmy Carter who
compares the conditions in occupied Palestinian territories to apartheid,
but even respectable human rights organizations such as Amnesty
International and Human Rights Watch which routinely use this
analogy while documenting human rights abuses in occupied
territories. Even Ha'aretz, a mainstream Israeli newspaper calls
a spade a spade. A recent article 'Yes, it is apartheid',
( http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/977947.html),
by Yossi Sarid which is a pungent satire on Israeli culture which
transforms Carter into the very epitome of evil for daring
to meet with Hamas leaders, observes

"Let's let old Carter be, so he may let sleeping warriors lie;
he will not be back. The contents of his words, however, should not be ignored. "Apartheid," he said, "apartheid" - a dark, scary word
coined by Afrikaners and meaning segregation, racial segregation.

What does he want from us, that evil man: What do we have to do with apartheid?
Does a separation fence constitute separation? Do separate roads for Jewish
settlers and Palestinians really separate? Are Palestinian enclaves between
Jewish settlements Bantustans?"

That the Israeli lobby routinely squelches dissent is not news. That
it has the power to make and break politicians is not news. That
it has the power to destroy academic careers of highly original scholars such
as Norman Finkelstein whose trailblazing work has been an inspiration
for all of us looking towards a just solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict
is not news. The real question is - Are we simply going to capitulate
to its shenanigans or are we going to stand up to it? The choice is ours.