It was somewhat reassuring to read in today’s newspapers that, at an emergency meeting of the AUT held yesterday, the union of university teachers finally saw enough reason to call off its boycott of Israeli universities which had previously been voted for at its annual conference last month, after a debate held on a Friday afternoon immediately before the Jewish festival of Passover, thereby conveniently guaranteeing no observant Jewish memebrs of the AUT could attend.
Whatever reassurance yesterday's decision might provide concerning the moral sanity of Britain's academics must be tempered, for the moment at least, by the knowledge that, with no less a perfect sense of timing, last Saturday, of all the days of the week that could have been chosen to conduct their meeting, the London branch of NATFHE, Britain's other trade union of r academics, succeeded in placing on the agenda of its forthcoming annual conference this weekend an emergency motion that calls on its members to join the boycott.
One of Israel's universities that the AUT had sought to boycott was its oldest-- the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, opened by Lord Balfour in 1925.
With all the characteristic wisdom and understanding for which British academics are so renown, those who called for it to be boycott seemed wholly unaware of how, ever since that university first opened, its whole orientation and thrust has always borne the stamp of its first chancellor and subsequent president, the American reform rabbi Judah Leon Magnes. He was champion of an entirely non-political form of cultural Zionism that aim simply for a Jewish cultural renaissance in Palestine, not the creation of a Jewish state to which Magnes was always vehemently opposed, preferring instead a bi-national state.
The crass stupidity and ignorance of the British academics who called for the Hebrew University to be boycotted is revealed by what said about Magnes and the university of which he was chancellor in 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, Hazony's book liekwise reveals the equal stupidity of the British academics in seeking to boycott any other Israeli university. For what it reveals is how deeply influenced by the Hebrew University have been the staff and policies of all other of Israel's universities.
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 informed entirely by universal humanistic ethical conceptions and not at all 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….’
One further quotation is worth considering. It comes from a letter Magnus wrote in 1929 to Felix Warburg, a major benefactor of the Hebrew University. In his letter, Magnes made known his personal vision of what purposes he wanted the Hebrew University to serve. By so doing, he reveals still moe clearly how stupid and ignorant are those British academics who have called for the boycott. Magnes wrote:
‘The [Hebrew] 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 worth noting that no serious Arab disturbances occurred when Balfour visited Jerusalem to open the Hebrew University, just one year on from an unprecedented large wave of Jewish immigration into Palestine following the seizure by the Polish government of many Jewish businesses and the simultaneous closing of the US borders to mass immigration. 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 unfamiliar with the name of Haj Amin al-Husseini, he was the person the British installed as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and who, in that capacity, entered into a formal alliance with Adolf Hitler before leaving Palestine for the Balkans there to form an SS division of Arab and Bosnian Muslims so as better to play his part in his Fuhrer’s particular solution to the Jewish question.
Haj Amin al-Husseini was closely related to Rahman Abdul Rauf el-Qudawa el-Husseini, an Egyptian-born graduate of the University of Cairo, better known to the world by his other name ‘Yasser Arafat’. It is a pity this relative of Haj Amin's chose not to study at the university situated in the city of which his elder relative was the Grand Mufti. Had he done so, then just possibly that part of the world might have been spared a lot of needless bloodshed later, and much elsewhere besides.