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Carlo Strenger, professor of psychology at Tel Aviv University, has published an op-ed in Haaretz criticizing an earlier op-ed in the Jerusalem Post by Isi Leibler, columnist and former vice-president of the World Jewish Congress. If Strenger disagrees with Leibler and wants to present counterarguments, that’s fine. Instead, Strenger has written a crude, defamatory ad hominem attack that misrepresents or ignores Leibler’s actual statements. Is this how one gets to be an accredited professor at Tel Aviv University?

Much of Strenger’s screed focuses on the word "excommunication," which Leibler uses exactly once in his article. Strenger, conversely, uses the word seven times in his. Here is Leibler’s sole use of the term:

“The exploitation of Judge Goldstone’s Jewish background by our enemies intensifies our obligation to confront the enemy within—renegade Jews—including Israelis who stand at the vanguard of global efforts to demonize and delegitimize the Jewish state. Such odious Jews can be traced back to apostates during the Middle Ages who fabricated blood libels and vile distortions of Jewish religious practice for Christian anti-Semites to incite hatred which culminated in massacres. It was in response to these renegades that the herem (excommunication) was introduced.”

Strenger even acknowledges that, in a subsequent piece in The Guardian, Leibler “denied…that he ever called for the excommunication of [the left-wing American Jewish lobbying group] J Street or of critics of Israel.”

But this doesn’t stop Strenger from going on to say: “Leibler explicitly evokes the Middle Ages in advocating excommunication.” And: “Does he really think that excommunication is the way to deal with Jewish Liberals who believe that Israel is often making tragic mistakes?” And: “In calling for excommunication of those who disagree with him, Leibler seems to endow himself with papal infallibility in knowing what is good for Israel—but in Jewish tradition nobody can claim infallibility.”

First, what does Leibler actually “call for” in his Jerusalem Post op-ed? I quote:

“The Israeli government must now take steps to neutralize the impact of renegade Jews who present themselves as legitimate alternative Jewish viewpoints. Such an initiative by a country which provides genuine democratic rights to all its citizens, including Arabs, could hardly be categorized as eradicating freedom of expression. It would rather represent a highly overdue effort to exorcise such odious groups from the mainstream and expose them as unrepresentative fringe groups with no standing.

“Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu…should summon a global Jewish solidarity conference encompassing Jewish leaders, opinion makers, philanthropists and activists…in order to demonstrate the unity of the Jewish people.”

At most, Strenger could have reasonably objected that Leibler does not make sufficiently clear what he means by phrases like “neutralize the impact of renegade Jews” or “exorcise such odious groups from the mainstream” (Leibler subsequently explained what he meant here). Instead, Strenger keeps accusing Leibler, over and over, of favoring “excommunication,” all with no basis in Leibler’s actual text, which—as noted—uses the word only once in reference to Jews in the Middle Ages.

Second, who are these “renegade Jews” to whom Leibler refers? Are they, as Strenger characterizes them, “Jewish Liberals who believe that Israel is often making tragic mistakes” or just “those who disagree with [Leibler]”?

Again, to quote Leibler:

“Ha'aretz…launched an English internet edition which emboldened Diaspora Jewish extremists and provided a green light to global media outlets to run demonizing articles about Israel on the grounds that they had already appeared in a ‘reputable’ Israeli daily. The most recent example was the Ha'aretz campaign defaming the IDF, which proved to be entirely baseless but created an enormous global upsurge of anti-Israeli hysteria and eased the way for the Goldstone Report.

“…Regrettably, successive Israeli governments failed to respond even when professors at universities funded by Israeli taxpayers and Diaspora Zionists began exploiting their positions to delegitimize their country. They identified with Israel’s enemies, calling on the world to boycott Israeli institutions, including their own universities.

“…In fact, when senior academics like Ben-Gurion University’s Neve Gordon, call Israel an ‘apartheid state’ and encourage the world to boycott Israeli institutions, they are the ones abusing academic freedom.

“…Highly vocal Jewish groups like the recently created J Street describe themselves as ‘Zionist’ but their prime objective is to pressure the US government to use ‘tough love’ against Israel—a euphemism for demanding that the Jewish state make further unilateral concessions to neighbors pledged to its annihilation.

“In the past two weeks alone…in Toronto, Jews were at the forefront of a campaign to boycott Israeli films at a film festival because the anniversary of Tel Aviv—‘built on the destroyed villages of Palestinians’—was being celebrated; two Israeli women who evaded national service are conducting a North American campus tour under the auspices of ‘Jewish Voice for Peace’ to persuade students to intensify their role in the ‘resistance movement’; in San Francisco the local Jewish Federation is providing funds for a film festival which promotes the vilest anti-Israel films; radical Rabbi Michael Lerner invited a woman who justifies suicide bombings to address his synagogue on Yom Kippur; and so on.”

These statements are not in the realm of opinion. Every one of them is demonstrably true. Haaretz indeed regularly runs demonizing articles about Israel and the IDF that are constantly cited by Israel-haters and anti-Semites abroad; professors at Israeli universities indeed delegitimize their country, identify with Israel’s enemies, call for boycotts of Israel and their own universities, and so on—as abundantly documented on this web site; Israeli lecturer Neve Gordon has indeed—most recently, and famously, in the Los Angeles Times—called for a boycott of Israel; J Street indeed seeks to pressure the U.S. government to force Israel into concessions; and as for Jews spearheading the effort to boycott Israeli films in Toronto, the speaking-tour campaign to subvert the Israeli army by two Israeli draft-dodgers, the Jewish anti-Israel film fest in San Francisco, and "Rabbi" Michael Lerner’s pro-suicide-bombing synagogue lecturer, this is all a matter of the public record.

And yet, reading Strenger’s op-ed attacking Leibler, you will not see one single mention of any of these phenomena, let alone a consideration of the issue Leibler raises of how the loyal Jewish world, in Israel and the Diaspora, should deal with them. From Strenger you will only hear of “Jewish Liberals who believe that Israel is often making tragic mistakes” or “who disagree with [Leibler].” In other words, you will see a blatant use of distortion and omission that—presumably, but who knows—would merit a failing grade in a paper by one of Prof. Strenger’s students.

Yet somehow—even in the space of his own short op-ed—Strenger manages to go well beyond distortion and omission to outright defamation of Leibler of the vilest kind:

Now, fourteen years after Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, Yaakov Teitel…has been detained…. [Leibler] should not forget that there might always be somebody like Yaakov Teitel who takes him more seriously than I assume he wants to be taken. I hope that Mr. Leibler condemns such acts unequivocally as every civilized human being, Jewish or not, should…. J Street’s [recent] convention coincided with the commemoration of the 14th anniversary of the Hebrew date of Rabin’s assassination…. What we need to learn from Rabin’s murder is that hate speech creates an atmosphere that legitimizes violence.

Teitel is the American Jewish immigrant recently arrested and charged with the murder of two Arab civilians, the attempted shooting of two Israeli policemen, and the injury and attempted murder of a left-wing Israeli professor and a "Messianic Jew." Strenger, thus, manages to associate Leibler with an alleged murderer (Teitel) and an actual one (Yigal Amir, Rabin’s assassin) while insinuating that Leibler himself incites such acts, and that there is doubt as to whether Leibler adheres to civilized norms and opposes such crimes. This is usually the tactics of McCarthyists. Strenger engages in such calumny while categorically excluding and failing to address the actual issue that Leibler’s article raises—how to deal with blatantly disloyal acts by Israelis and Diaspora Jews including calling for boycotts of Israel itself, its universities, its artistic products, and so on; encouraging mutiny in the Israeli army; providing a forum for a supporter of anti-Israeli terrorism, and the like.

Anyone familiar with Strenger’s political track record will not be surprised by any of this. It includes repeating as fact the vicious canard that “Israel actively drove 750,000 Palestinians from their homes in 1947/8”; calling Zionism an “anachronistic” term “having no more current use than the term Risorgimento”; primitively dichotomizing Israeli society into an enlightened Left and a retrograde, “tribal” Right; calling for the abrogation of the Passover Haggadah, and so on.

No, Prof. Strenger's "ideas" do not surprise anymore, but he can still shock: with the crudity of his argumentation; with his virulent contempt—beneath a thin veneer of faux tolerance—for all who “disagree with him”; with his inability to engage in informed, constructive discourse about his country instead of parroting every slander of its enemies.

Joel Amitai is an independent researcher and filmmaker. Reach him at jamitai40@gmail.com.

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