Editorial Article
Oren Yiftachel: Legacy of Fraud, Incompetence, and
Struggle against the Existence of Israel
So How Exactly do you say "Pseudo-Academic Fraud" in Bedouin?
Special Isracampus Report
22/4/2012
Oren Yiftachel is one of the worst anti-Israel "academic" extremists
in Israel. After being turned down for an academic position in urban
planning at the Technion due to his poor academic credentials, he
was made a professor of geography at Ben Gurion University, a
university where academic credentials are not always a necessary nor
a sufficient condition for a person to serve on its faculty.
There Yiftachel has built an entire career upon churning out
Bash-Israel propaganda. He specializes in trying to paint Israel as
a racist apartheid entity, or – to use his own favorite nonsense
word – an intolerant "ethnocracy." He justified the firing of Hamas
rockets into Israel, even when some landed near his own campus, on
grounds that Israel had "jailed" the entire Palestinian population
of Gaza. This "jailing" consisted of refusing to allow the Gazan
terrorists to import advanced weapons systems. (See this
anti-Semitic smear by him, still carried on the BGU official web
site:
http://www.geog.bgu.ac.il/members/yiftachel/shorts/the%20jailer%20state.pdf
and see also
http://www.martinsherman.net/557/comprehending-the-incomprehensible-%E2%80%93-part-i/)
Yiftachel churns out anti-Israel hate propaganda for some of the
most anti-Semitic groups and magazines on the planet. Along with
BGU's Neve Gordon and Lev Grinberg, he is part of the core BGU group
of tenured extremists who make no secret of their endorsement of
Arab mass murder of Jews.
Yiftachel is also basically the Ilan Pappe of the Negev, meaning
someone who never hesitates to lie and defraud when it comes to the
holy task of annihilating Israel. And he was recently nailed for
this by an Israeli judge.
For the past few years, Yiftachel has spent much of his time
attempting to demonize Israel for supposedly mistreating its Bedouin
citizens. This "mistreatment" consists of Israel's refusal to accept
at face value the fictional and imaginary "legal" claims of the
Negev Bedouins to huge portions of the entire Negev. The Bedouins
and their lobby have simply fabricated "claims" for this extremely
expensive and valuable land in land-poor Israel. Yiftachel, who has
no training in law or history or economics, has served as their
lobbyist in demanding that these fictional claims be accepted by the
state, in essence transferring much of the Negev to Bedouins having
no legal claim to the land there whatsoever.
Yiftachel also has a long track record of denouncing Israel for
allowing Jews to move to the Negev and the Galilee, or what he calls
"Judaizing" these territories. The term "judaization" has been used
by anti-Semites as a nonsense term to denounce Jews since the Middle
Ages.
In recent weeks, Yiftachel testified in a Beer Sheba Court about
those Bedouin claims in a suit against the state of Israel brought
by the Bedouin lobby. Yiftachel's fraudulent testimony has now
become the matter of public record and of a growing number of media
reports.
Yiftachel gave false testimony to the court. A second geography
professor from Jerusalem, Prof. Ruth Kark, gave non-fictional and
factually correct testimony on behalf of the state, challenging the
fraudulent claims of Yiftachel and the Bedouin lobby. Kark has
published a serious academic book about the Negev Bedouins, along
with her PhD student, Seth Frantzman, currently an editor at the
Jerusalem Post and someone who often writes for Isracampus.
The court ruled against Yiftachel and his lobby. The judge in
question, Sarah Dovrat, went out of her way to denounce Yiftachel
for fabrication and fraudulent misrepresentation of the contents of
a number of historic documents during his testimony, denouncing him
explicitly for testifying about the contents of documents he had
never even bothered to read!
The denunciation of Yiftachel and his fraud has now appeared in
several news venues. Citations from the judge's verdict in which
Yiftachel was denounced were posted on an Israeli chat list by
the distinguished Israeli professor of Geography from Tel Aviv
University, Gideon Biger.
On April 20, 2012, a particularly good expose of Yiftachel's fraud
was carried in Hebrew by the Makor Rishon daily newspaper. It filled
a full newspaper page and is too long to be translated in full here.
But we will paraphrase in English the more important segments of the
story:
It cites Judge Dovrat in describing Oren's testimony before her
court as a disgrace and embarrassment. It describes the court case
in question as one concerning an illegal encampment of Bedouins on
Negev land they do not own, where the illegal buildings (really
shanties) erected there have been repeatedly demolished by the
government of Israel. The lands on which these were erected are
state-owned public lands. The judge is cited as saying, "I felt
terribly ill at easy in listening to Yiftachel's testimony when it
became apparent that he was citing sources he had never even
bothered to read."
Yiftachel was called to testify by the Far-Leftist lawyer
representing the Bedouins, Michael Sfard, in order to grant academic
credibility to their false claims. The judge adds in her verdict: "Yiftachel
twisted and squirmed on the witness stand in a manner that caused me
to feel completely uneasy, in fact completely embarrassed." She adds
that Yiftachel clearly never bothered to read the documents he was
attempting to cite into evidence. Yiftachel was not the only fraud
brought by Sfard and his clients to the court. A surveyor who was
asked to testify about the lands in question had never surveyed
them, merely looking them up on an internet web site. The judge
tossed out the entire suit by Sfard and his Bedouin would-be land
thieves.
A particularly acrimonious letter was then published by the
University of Haifa's geography professor Arnon Soffer, blasting
Yiftachel. In that letter, Soffer writes that he has followed
Yiftachel's "work" for years and has always found it to be shallow
political propaganda and not academic scholarship. He expresses
satisfaction that Judge Dovrat essentially confirms officially
everything he already knew about Yiftachel. When interviewed for the
Makor Rishon piece, Prof. Soffer adds that Yiftachel is basically a
traitor to the state of Israel, someone attempting to turn the Negev
over to Bedouin squatters. Anyone proposing such an idea, says
Soffer, is a rotten villain as well as a traitor.
Soffer is also quoted there as calling Yiftachel a serial liar. For
example, Yiftachel likes to pretend that he "ONLY" endorses Bedouin
claims to a "mere" 5% of the Negev. It is 5% if one counts all the
Arava wastelands going all the way down to Eilat as included in the
Negev. But in the fertile Negev land north of Beer Sheba, Yiftachel
and his clients are demanding 100% of those lands for the Bedouins,
says Soffer. He also accuses Yiftachel of intentionally lying about
the number of "unrecognized" – meaning illegal – Bedouin squatter
villages in the Negev. Soffer claims that in reality 10% of the land
in Israel is being illegally held by the two and a half percent of
the population who are Negev Bedouins. Soffer's characterization of
Yiftachel was also backed by Prof. Gideon Biger from the geography
department at Tel Aviv University, also interviewed for the piece in
Makor Rishon. Biger says that Yiftachel's political agenda and
biases govern everything he does and writes, and Biger accuses him
of producing pseudo-scientific pseudo-research.
The newspaper editorializes that the entire court case in which
Yiftachel testified was in fact not at all about legal rights to
land but rather about the legitimacy of Israel as a state and its
right to enforce its own laws. Things Yiftachel opposes.
The Israeli anti-Zionist Left has been denouncing the judge in
shrill tones for her decision. The judge has been defended, however,
by many of Israel's serious legal academics, including the
left-leaning eminent Prof. Ruth Gavison. She insists that if dubious
Bedouin claims from the 1920s are to be taken at face value by the
courts, then so must all Jewish claims to lands across the Green
Line in the "Palestinian" territories. Yiftachel and his buddies of
course consider such statements to be fascist racism. The case is
expected to be appealed to the Supreme Court.
A second somewhat similar article
appears this week on the internet at
http://2nd-ops.com/adiby/?p=5658 (in Hebrew). It accuses
Yiftachel of forgery and perjury, when he submitted to the court a
corrected later affidavit carrying the false date of an earlier
affidavit he had submitted.
It should be noted that Yiftachel is not the only anti-Israel
"geographer" on the faculty of BGU. Geographer David Newman,
currently the Dean of Social Sciences and the Humanities at BGU,
shares most of Yiftachel's political biases and passions for
anti-Israel propagandizing. Dean Newman can be counted upon to stand
by his man and prevent any sanctions against Yiftachel for his
misbehavior! BGU president Rivka Carmi can also be counted upon to
forget all about Yiftachel whenever she insist there is only one
single anti-Israel lunatic in the entire faculty of BGU.
Neve Gordon and Lev Grinberg are probably better known as the global
symbols of the absence of serious academic standards at Ben Gurion
University. They are notorious realizations of the long track record
of BGU in hiring faculty with near empty "academic" records,
promoting them and granting them tenure. There are dozens of others
at BGU!
But the lesser known Yiftachel is just as much of a full-time
pro-terror anti-Israel hate propagandist, hired and promoted in
spite of his absence of serious academic credentials - all thanks
entirely to his hatred of Israel. Hating Israel is a far weightier
factor in getting hired and promoted at Ben Gurion University than
is scholarly performance!
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