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'Yet she continually presents the image of tiny Israel as being the bully against 250 million Arabs, with the IDF playing no role of protecting the Israeli people. The Israeli army just murders Arab children for sport.

Not satisfied with such forums, Kronfeld also endorses Israeli accomplice with terrorism Tali Fahima, Israel's Taliban-Jane who did a long jail sentence, who helped smuggle weapons for her terrorist Arab boyfriend to kill her her fellow Israelis.

UC Berkeley - Professor Chana Kronfeld (Dept of Near Eastern Studies) battles Zionism, promotes Israel army deserters on campus

By Lee Kaplan, www.IsraCampus.org.il
26/2/10

Chana Kronfeld is a professor of Hebrew, Yiddish, and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, involved in the Jewish Studies division of the

the Near Eastern Studies Department there. The department is financed to a large degree by Saudi money.

The department and the UC Berkeley campus, with its noisy Students for Justice in Palestine and Muslim Students Association, were the starting grounds for the International Solidarity Movement’s divestment and boycott program against the Jewish state across the US and Canada. One wealthy Jewish donor, alarmed at the anti-Israel atmosphere of Berkeley’s Near Eastern Studies department, donated $5 million dollars to set up the Jewish studies division, hoping to lend balance to campus discourse. However, to his chagrin, the Arab department head, an architect, only hired Jewish academics who were fanatically anti-Zionist or anti-Israel to staff it. Some of the other members of the department have already been featured here on Isracampus, like Daniel Boyarin and Rutie Adler. Professor Chana Kronfeld now joins the dishonor list.

Kronfeld has used her position as a bully pulpit to promote her anti-Israel agenda. She was instrumental in helping the Students for Justice in Palestine infiltrate Berkeley’s Hillel, using an anti-Israel front group called Tzedek, now defunct. Tzedek’s purpose was to get on the Board of the Jewish Student Union and use Hillel money and influence to propagandize against Israel. In 2003, Chana Kronfeld used her position to host on campus members of the radical splinter group “Courage to Refuse,” a group of leftist Israeli draft dodgers who toured the US.

The “Courage to Refuse” panel was filmed and is permanently on the University of California’s informational website since 2003. For 90 minutes it features Kronfeld as host as three Israeli “soldiers” who claim that Israeli soldiers in the territories routinely mistreat and brutalize poor Palestinians for personal amusement. The presentation was full of lies, and the allegations of the group have long since been debunked.

Chana Kronfeld, in introducing some Israeli radical draft dodgers, as representative of Israelis as Taliban John is of Americans, praised their actions thus:

“I need only think about the 525 soldiers (less than 1/10^th of 1%--ed.) of the Israeli army and the three young men here today… It’s not an option to remain uninvolved…What can I add to this from the safety and comfort of Berkeley? You guys are my heroes.” She then spoke of the IDF and Israeli government’s goals as being “to dominate, expel, starve and humiliate an entire people” (no mention of terrorism attacks or suicide bombings or defending the people of Israel—LK)

Chana Kronfeld has created such forums on campus trying to deter support for the IDF and accusing Israeli soldiers of engaging in atrocities. In addition, at the nearby Richmond Jewish Community Center she blindsided an Israel Independence Day celebration. Kronfeld there accused Israeli soldiers of murdering Palestinian children before her “poetry recitation.” A near riot ensued, with many of the participants walking out.

Kronfeld complained afterward, "We cannot say, 'My mind is made up, do not confuse me with facts.'" She added, "That is not a healthy human response in any situation. If Jews cannot listen openly to each other and resolve their disputes, how will we ever come to terms with the Arabs?"

Yet she continually presents the image of tiny Israel as being the bully against 250 million Arabs, with the IDF playing no role of protecting the Israeli people. The Israeli army just murders Arab children for sport.

Not satisfied with such forums, Kronfeld also endorses Israeli accomplice with terrorism Tali Fahima, Israel’s Taliban-Jane who did a long jail sentence, who helped smuggle weapons for her terrorist Arab boyfriend to kill her her fellow Israelis. Kronfeld signed and endorsed a statement that said,

“Has the Israeli government no business left except to persecute a young caring woman whose sole crime is trying to meet, and to understand the situation of Palestinians, and to try on her own to help Palestinian children -- whose life under the cruel occupation are not worth living, pushing them in one way only? We believe the Israeli government is afraid of the crack that Tali Fahima has made in the walls of apartheid and occupation; on her own, and with great courage. The Israeli government continues to operate as a police state, thinking that forcefully silencing Tali Fahima would deter and prevent other women and men from following her groundbreaking path.”

Groundbreaking path? It consisted of helping plan terrorist attacks on Jewish civilians, including Israeli children.

Kronfeld has consistently been part of the most anti-Israel segment of “Middle East Studies.” She has been a key supporter of other groups in Israel organizing mutiny of army soldiers, including “New Profile.” Kronfeld has also served as an editor for pseudo-Jewish pro-LSD hippy magazine Tikkun, which is devotedly anti-Israel. She has co-written some of her anti-Israel work with department colleague Daniel Boyarin.

Kronfeld relies on her academic instructional program and quotes she constantly repeats from certain Israeli poets to voice her antipathy toward Israel and support for the Palestinians. Her articles, translations and books all center on Israeli poets who were for the most part anti-Israel when it came to Israel’s self-defense even back in 1967. For example, Kronfeld relies on this quote from Dahlia Ravikovitch, an Israeli radical leftist poet, in her book The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch:

“He who destroys thirty babies
It is as if he'd destroyed three hundred
babies, and toddlers too,
or even eight-and-a-half-year-olds,
in a year, God willing, they'd be soldiers
in the Palestine Liberation Army.”

Talk about scientific evidence of Israeli misconduct!

Kronfeld lectures and writes on Israeli poetry with an agenda to put out the same type of anti-Israel message she subtly tried doing at the Richmond Jewish Community Center. She specializes in obscure Israeli “poets” who routinely attacked the Jewish state as always being at fault.

If thirty minors were killed during Israel’s 1982 war in Lebanon, they can become “three hundred babies and toddlers too” on paper or during a lecture and a justification for Arab terrorists to become a “liberation army.” It is a clever manipulation of someone else’s words in the classroom to promote anti-Israel propaganda and irredentism.

Chana Kronfeld is also an acolyte of Jewish Voice for Peace, an Arab front group of mostly Marxist Jews who also want “peace” for Israel, meaning capitulation to Arab demands. She is but another Israeli “academic” using her position outside Israel to aid Israel’s enemies, while telling anyone foolish enough to listen that she only wants “peace.”

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