IsraCampus.Org.il

San Diego, California, is an idyllic community on the Pacific Ocean, a resort type tourist city where sailboats ply the sea, the young romp in bathing suits and the sun is out all year long. There one can visit the world’s biggest zoo or Sea World. There, some 10,000 miles away from the Middle East and not subject to missile fire from Gaza or sniper fire upon Gilo, Sociology Professor Gershon Shafir of San Diego State University enjoys himself. There, he is not being exposed to any threat from Arab terrorism. It must be easy for this Israeli expatriate intellectual and UC Berkeley graduate to dream up his revisionist sociological "explanations" for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Shafir teaches his ideas about the problems of the conflict as being all Israel’s fault, this due to what he calls “inequality in Israeli citizenship” and “colonialism.”

Those are the two central "themes" behind Shafir’s work and commentaries. He concentrates on the concept of unequal “citizenship” and the outgrowths of “colonialism” as the result of there existing a Jewish state. No such problems of course from the existence of any Arab states. Shafir takes his page from the late Edward Said, the pseudo-intellectual English literature professor who was born in Egypt but who built his career in America before discovering he was a “Palestinian”. Shafir writes continuously of the Israeli Jews being “colonialists.”

Gershon Shafir received three B.A.s in Economics, Political Science, and Sociology, all from Tel Aviv University. He then left Israel to earn his M.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles, and finally his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1980. Perhaps it was his emigration from Israel to these American campuses that helped form his mindset. Be that as it may, he quickly reached the conclusion that Israel is a colonial project of the West. He wants to hear nothing of the argument that Israel as a haven for Jews also allows for the rights of all its non-Jewish citizens, who enjoy the same civil rights.

Shafir is the author of Land, Labor, and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914 (1989, and updated edition 1995) and Immigrants and Nationalists (1995). His books about Israeli society tend toward the idea of a “colonization model” that “depicts Israel as a settler-colonial society driven by the needs of territorial acquisition and pressures of the labor market, and it regards the Israeli-Arab conflict as the most crucial determinant in the shaping of Israeli society,” this according to one Arab intellectual and admirer of his work.

Heavily influenced by the late arch anti-Zionist and PLO apologist Baruch Kimmerling, Gershon Shafir co-wrote the research for one book that one reviewer has described thus: “It has been deeply preoccupied with both charting the specific features of Jewish colonization of Palestine and comparing it to other settler-colonies like America and South Africa.” Jewish emigration to Israel is said be “a late instance of European overseas expansion," a “Jewish conquest” of land and labor. (Such people ignore the fact that the Jews bought their land legally through the Jewish agency and the Zionists worked to make in many cases even swamp land usable). The Zionist movement, according to Shafir, was one of pioneering and settlement that used biblical rights as justification for grabbing the land. That this could be suggested as academic criticism is ridiculous; does Shafir mean the legal purchases of land or acquisition in wars that tiny Israel did not start?)

Shafir further contends that out of such behavior grew a "permanent war society" (not one based on Jewish self-defense against unremitting Arab attacks or a desperate need for secure boundaries.) Jews who no longer submit to pogroms become "warmongers" to the likes of Shafir and Kimmerling. How dare they shoot back? Shafir’s has asserted that the changes that occurred in Israeli society after the stunning Israeli victory of 1967 “are to be understood not only as a transition from a Zionist-socialist society to a right-wing, colonial one, but as the continuation of the colonial project by means of a transition from one method of colonization to another.” Israel cannot win.

Shafir, of course, throws in a considerable pinch of Marxism in his "research" when he claims the failure of capitalist settlement in Palestine later spurred on Labor Zionism. He insists that "national colonization" was led by what he terms "Jewish labor supported by rich Jewish capital provided by the Jewish bureaucratic elites."

His current research projects in process include: "De-colonization and Peacemaking in South Africa and Israel/Palestine." Somehow we doubt it is a project that will praise Israel and condemn Arab aggression and bigotry. His major areas of interest these days are “comparative-historical sociology, with emphases on nationalism, ethnicity, and citizenship rights” as per his own biography.

The constant side-by-side comparison with South Africa, such as in one of his book titles above, is a notable, odious and untrue obsession of his. This is the anti-Jewish analogy so popular in anti-Israel intellectual circles, including parts of the University of California. A list of his other publications contains titles that suggest the recurring theme that Israel, and not Arab states, engages in violations of human and citizen rights.

Shafir currently has even more new tomes in progress, including one about his late sociologist guru Baruch Kimmerling’s discussions on “Israeli exceptionalism,” and one titled "Capitalist Bi-nationalism in Palestine and the 1936-1939 Arab Revolt." That second book no doubt will include more than a little Marxist condemnation of capitalism. Of course, what he calls the “Arab Revolt,” is just another Arab pogrom against Jews all over the Middle East for the Jews of the region. That Shafir uses the same rhetoric of Arab apologists for Jewish murder this way is disturbing.

UC Berkeley, his PHD alma mater, was the first campus to promote the international boycott and divestment from Israel campaign on US campuses nationwide. Anti-Israel ideas and activity go way back there as a side project that is well funded by the PLO and Saudi Arabia. That campus was more than just a source for Gershon Shafir’s Ph.D; it was a place to develop a marketable group of Bash-Israel ideas. In the 1980’s when Shafir earned his degree at Cal, the Bay Area campus was a place where the PLO solicited funds directly right in the middle of Sproul Plaza and the administration looked the other way. Even in academia one learns what sells, and selling Israel as a colonial project that practices apartheid like South Africa is the product that Gershon Shafir found he could peddle. He even won a book award from his colleagues in the Middle East Studies Association, a pro-Islamofascism pro-terror advocacy body pretending to be a scholastic forum.

A previous winner of the same prize as Shafir is the PLO official Rashid Khalidi, in the news recently for having babysat for Obama.

Gershon Shafir requires students in his courses books to read piles of Bash-Israel propaganda, some written by Palestinians like Beshara Doumani of his alma mater at UC Berkeley. Doumani blames Israel for the rise of the Hamas and has acted as faculty advisor for the Students for Justice in Palestine, the group that has led the boycott and divestment movement against Israel. Doumani is known for inventing the lie that there were 3 million Palestinian refugees in 1948, a ridiculously high figure even the PLO never claimed, yet his writings are mandatory reading for Shafir’s students.

During the 19th century, the greatest era of actual colonialism, the word described when a foreign power would invade another country to remove its wealth and resources for the invader and to use the indigenous population both as quasi-slave labor for manufacturing and export and as a captured market to buy finished goods exported from the controlling country. Colonialism was what made Britain the pre-eminent power as the British Island came to colonize from South Africa to India and even the Pacific Ocean. Part of such colonization consisted of sending troops to sort out the local natives when restless and to protect new immigrants.

But today’s Arab propagandists, funded by Saudi and other Arab oil money (and Israeli intellectuals willing to play the game, including and especially Shafir), try to use the word “colonialism” to apply to the Jewish state of Israel in order to suggest an illegal invasion by Jews. Arabs as victims is propaganda that plays well when it is promulgated by ex-Israeli sociologists abroad.

Shafir has no use for George Santayana and his comments about the dooming of those who fail to learn from history. "We are trying to tell people to unlearn the past," Gershon Shafir has been quoted as saying, in promoting the anti-Zionist themes that flow through his work. Israeli courage and valor are nothing but Israeli propaganda.

But Shafir conveniently glosses over history. Like other post or anti-Zionist Israeli scholars, he tries to show that the Zionist leadership is itself guilty of discrimination, such as between Ashkenazi (European) and Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) Jews within the emerging Israeli society.

One can be sure that Israeli Jews are far busier marrying fellow Israeli Jews from other sub-ethnic groups than persecuting them. But Shafir ignores this and says, “Israel changed from a Zionist-socialist society to a right-wing, colonial one, but as the continuation of the colonial project by means of a transition from one method of colonization to another.”

Shafir prefers his students and readers to think that Arabs lived in a peaceful vacuum posing no intermittent threat to the Jews before 1948. In fact, he insists that from 1888-1948 the Arabs were the victims of Jewish-Zionist “colonialism,” as Jews moved to the Holy Land to repopulate it as a Jewish homeland. Shafir thinks that doing so denied the Arabs the inalienable rights of equal "citizenship." Perhaps he did not notice the fact that Israeli Arabs have 22 Arab states in which they can get citizenship if they are unhappy living as a minority.

For Gershon Shafir, Israel created its "colonialist" dilemma when it had the audacity to become a Jewish state. He adds that “citizenship” in Israel has been the result of three "discourses" for at least the last century: “republicanism”, “ethno-nationalism” and “liberalism.” In one of his books, Shafir writes, “Zionism developed as an image of the colonial-settler state that integrated elements of the Labor Settlement Movement that nurtured a republican image of Israeli citizenship; ethno-nationalism has increasingly defined Israel as a Jewish state and liberalism as envisaged a democratic state enabling both Arab and Jewish citizens to live together with minimal state intervention.” Shafir would prefer to see a "secular state" in place of a Jewish one and feels this is the means of ending the political impasse between Arabs and Jews.

It is a common habit of intellectuals like Shafir to use tunnel vision when applying theories to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Israel does in fact have equal rights for all its citizens by law. Like Armenia, Greece and some other states, it reserves an automatic right to citizenship for members of its dominant ethnic group who wish to apply for it, with other laws allowing non-Jews also to apply. Israel also has widespread "affirmative action" programs to benefit its Arab citizen population in its universities and civil service. Such things do not interest Shafir. Instead he discusses at length how Mizrahi (or Oriental Jews) and Ashkenazim are "unequal in citizenship” due to cultural differences.

Maybe he has been in California too long, but Oriental Jews today own banks, are professors, are cabinet ministers, and are prominent in all realms of Israeli society.

Shafir also would have us believe the control by Israel of Judea and Samaria (The West Bank) was another colonialist exploit, rather than the result of Israel finally being able to have some reasonably secure borders after defending itself. Shafir describes the Six Day War as if it were all a plot by the Jews to colonize more Arab land, rather than a defensive move to drive back an Arab assault on the Jewish state.

Incidentally, there were 25 Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria and Gaza prior to war in 1948 that were wiped out by the Arabs. The result of the Six Day War was that many Jews were now able to return to live in their lost homes, such as the Jews in Kfar Etzion.

Shafir thinks the Arab “Right of Return” should also be implemented, with masses of Arabs who claim their long-dead ancestors once lived in what is now Israel flooding inside the Green Line. What about all that Arab oil money for them? Evidently that’s to buy guns with.

Shafir is just one more “It’s-all-Israel’s-fault-because-it’s-a-Jewish-state” academic. His only claim to notoriety is that he is an ex-Israeli saying such things. But Israelis and ex-Israelis who hate their own native country are not uncommon in academia these days. Professor Gershon Shafir’s biased suggestions for ending the Middle East impasse only will make the conflict harder to end.

========================================

Op-Ed articles appearing on IsraCampus.Org.il are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the opinion of IsraCampus.Org.il