It was reassuring, just a little, to read in today’s newspapers that, at an emergency meeting held yesterday, the AUT finally saw enough reason to call off its boycott of Israeli universities for which it had voted at its annual conference last month, after a debate held on a Friday afternoon immediately before the Jewish festival of Passover, thereby guaranteeing no observant Jewish representatives could attend.
However, whatever reassurance the AUT's decision might provide of the moral sanity of Britain’s university teachers must, at least for the moment, be tempered by the knowledge that, with no less a perfect sense of timing, last Saturday of all days the London branch of the other trade union for academics, NATFHE, succeeded in placing on the agenda of that union's forthcoming annual conference this coming weekend an emergency motion calling on members to join the boycott.
One of the Israeli universities the AUT originally in its sights to boycott was Israel’s oldest-- the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, opened by Lord Balfour in 1925.
With all the characteristic wisdom and understanding for which their like is so world renown, the British academics calling for its boycott seem wholly unaware of how, ever since it opened, its whole orientation and thrust has borne the stamp of its first chancellor and subsequent president, the American Reform rabbi, Judah Leon Magnes.
Magnes championed an entirely non-political form of cultural Zionism that simply wanted to see a Jewish cultural renaissance in Palestine and not the creation of a Jewish state to which he was always bitterly opposed, having preferred, instead, a bi-national one.
An extract from a book, published in 2001, by Yoram Hazony, president of a Jerusalem-based institute for Jewish social thought and public policy, entitled The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel’s Soul, reveals the crass stupidity and ignorance of the British academics who have called for its boycott and, indeed, their stupidity in calling for the boycott of any other, since the faculty and policies of all Israeli uniersities have all been so deeply influenced by it.
Hazony writes:
'Magnes … had little interest in the settlement of millions of Jews [in Palestine]… For him, the mission of the Hebrew university was to be twofold: First, it should take the lead in inculcating a Jewish universalism in the entire Jewish population [--that is, an outlook orientated towards universal humanistic ethical conceptions and entirely un-ethnocentric. DC].… Second, it would within its walls seek to “bring about the spiritual reconciliation of the two most gifted races of Semitic stock”.
‘Magnes remained at the helm of the Hebrew University for twenty-four years – the first ten of them in a position of near-total authority - during which time the core of its staff and the main strokes of its ideology were irrevocably cast.
‘Inevitably, Magnes’ insistence on keeping the university aloof from the dream of the Jewish state opened up a chasm between the professors, who saw themselves as the intellectual leadership of Jewish Palestine, and the great majority of the Jewish people….’
At the risk of straining the patience of the reader still more, one further quotation, from a letter Magnus wrote in 1929 to Felix Warburg, a major benefactor of the Hebrew University, in which he made known his personal vision of what purpose the University would serve, reveals the depths of the stupidity and ignorance of the dastardly group of British academics who have called for the boycott.
Magnes wrote: ‘The University is the place where Arab-Jewish relations can and must be worked out. That is … I aim to bring the University into politics in my sense and on behalf of my views.’[emphasis as in the original]
In the context of the present-day Middle East conflict, it is interesting to note that, when Balfour visited Jerusalem to open the Hebrew University, just one year on from an unprecedented large wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine following the seizure by the Polish government of Jewish businesses and the simultaneous closure of US borders to mass immigration, no serious Arab disturbances were occasioned by his visit.
As Conor Cruise O’Brien remarked in his book on the Arab-Israel conflict The Siege, ‘the absence of any such reaction in 1925 may suggest that there was some truth in the Zionist impression that the earlier violence [in 1921] was not so much spontaneous from below as fomented from the top: by British officers and Arab notables, especially Haj Amin.’
For those for whom his name might be unfamiliar, Haj Amin al-Hussaini was the then self-appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who later entered into a formal alliance with Adolf Hitler before leaving Palestine to form an SS division of Arab and Bosnian Muslims in the Balkans to play his part in his Fuhrer’s particular solution to the Jewish question.
Haj Amin was closely relatd to one, Rahman Abdul Rauf el-Qudawa el-Husseini, an Egyptian-born graduate of the University of Cairo, better known to the world as ‘Yasser Arafat’.
It is a pity the Mufti's younger relative chose not to attend the University of the city over which his elder relative had been Mufti.
A lot of needless bloodshed might then, possibly, have been spared that part of the world -- and elsewhere.