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Please allow me to introduce Moshe Machover, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of London. Machover, an Israeli ex-pat (he doesn’t like to say he is Israeli, but that he comes from “Palestine”), has used the British university system since 1968 to support him and help promote his communist crusade for the last forty years. As with most anti-Israel Israeli academic “communists,” Machover prefers living in a democracy such as the UK or Israel rather than in a communist dictatorship of the proletariat like he has advocated for the rest of us unfortunate victims of “capitalism, ” “imperialism” and “colonialism.” Machover earned a degree in advanced mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, but somehow became a Professor of Philosophy at the University of London after being a mathematics researcher there for many years. Before moving to the UK and as a lifelong communist, Machover has always been active in Israel’s communist party movements that are allied with Arab communist groups who seek the dismantling of the Jewish state. This has always been in cooperation with Arab terrorist groups such at the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (also communist inspired) and its offshoot, the Democratic Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (with its Syrian connections).

Machover helped start, with fellow members of Maki, the Israeli communist party, the new communist political party Matzpen, in 1962 after co-authoring a book the year before titled The Other Israel, the Radical Case Against Zionism which dealt with the notion that Zionism was a form of colonialism and imperialism (the standard Soviet Stalinist lines). However, the old guard leadership of Maki felt that Israel had a right to exist, something the Arab members Israel’s communist party objected to along with its Soviet leadership in Moscow. As a consequence, Maki broke up, but some Jews like Machover used the schism to go their own separate ways with the Arabs. Matzpen, Machover’s new communist party in Israel was involved by 1972 in both espionage and treason on behalf of Syria, as communist members of the group trained in Syria for terrorist attacks inside Israel thus explaining the communist links with the PFLP and DPFLP.

Machover, who belonged to the Tel Aviv faction of Maki, a party decidedly against Israel’s right to exist and contrary to the Jerusalem faction of Maki’s advocacy for a Jewish state, later went abroad where he continued his anti-Israel activities as an academic in different British universities. He began a communist group in the UK and a socialist-communist news magazine titled Israca, an acronym for Israeli Revolutionary Action Committee Abroad, still opposing the Jewish democratic state.

Moshé Machover and other communist Israelis were all part of the editorial board. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, supporters of the organisation and other radical left academics and activists formed yet another journal in the UK, Khamsin, in which they published their “analyses” of current events. Today, nearly 60 years later, he is still going strong in his recitations of Stalinist communist party doctrine against the Jewish state, yet is less known than more contemporary anti-Israel Israeli academics due to his age. But research shows that Machover is still equally involved, his activities even extending to the Alternative Information Center, a precursor for the International Solidarity Movement. In the year 2000, a selection of material from Khamsin was published under the title Forbidden Agenda: Intolerance and Defiance in the Middle East that continues to vilify Israel.

Machover’s Tel Aviv group later changed its name to the Socialist Organization in Israel and dropped the term 'Israeli' in order to avoid possible association with Zionism while still keeping the emphasis on “class struggle.”

If you want to understand the motivations of Israeli academics that support the dissolution of Israel for the Arabs, it’s important to comprehend Israel’s communist party in which Machover played his part. The groupthink that communist organizations demand of the membership instills in such academics tunnel vision when it comes to social issues. Not all anti-Israel Israeli academics are communists; some are just opportunists. Both make money through speaking engagements in the truest sense of capitalistic exploitation though, even contrary to communist ideals. Still, so many of them engage in the Stalinist groupthink that should have died out long ago with the Soviet Union by allying themselves with Arabs to kill their fellow Israelis. Such perversity of mind is something that even the best psychoanalyst probably cannot unravel, perhaps the reason why the University of London took a mathematician and made him a Professor of Philosophy where he could teach only political abstractions that are only understandable to him and cannot work in the real world.

Thus, knowing his background, we can understand why an academic like Machover gives lectures on campuses and elsewhere in the UK, like the lecture he gave for the Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust Annual Lecture titled Israelis and Palestinians: Conflict and Resolution.

The Trust is a Marxist think tank and propaganda outlet in the UK where British communists can pretend they are revolutionaries saving the world from capitalism as they live comfortably in a capitalistic democracy and cheer on totalitarian regimes and terrorist groups overseas.

From the very title of this speech onward, Machover engages in a tactic of Marxists and their Arab allies of “lying by omission” when pretending to give an academic lecture on the history of Israel in the conflict and its “resolution.” By leaving out some pertinent facts and then discussing history only where it suits him, Machover presents a history of the conflict by giving us just enough true information to convey a false impression, but omitting certain details without directly lying to gain his audience’s support. Machover’s treatise, contrary to resolving any conflict, only intensifies the conflict by leaving no room for Israel to remain as it is, a Jewish state, even as a good neighbor to a Palestinian one, because he paints a picture of Israel as a “colonialist” and “settler” state that usurps the rights of the “indigenous” population (Arabs). Supposedly, Jews are not indigenous to Israel at all. The fact that there has been a Jewish presence in Palestine prior to 1948 for 5,000 years, and as many of the Arabs moved to Palestine in the 1920’s and 30’s to benefit from the financial expansion of the Zionist project nary deserves a mention.

Machover also advocates for an unconditional right of return of Arabs, but Jews, you see, never had a right of return and are just “settlers” (as usual he refers to the Territories when convenient, but means all of Israel). Meanwhile, three generations of Sabras do no not even have a right to call themselves Israelis according to Machover. To him, they are merely “Hebrews” who have illegally settled on Arab land as an example of “colonialism” in the worst sense, supported by the Western “imperialist” powers. The Muslim umma and pan-Arab nationalists he mentions are not imperialists or colonialists, you see, only Jews who seek national determination are such.

Machover also quotes out of context the words of Zionist leaders who sought on Jewish humanitarian grounds to not be unjust to the Arabs, whereas the Arab leadership back then called for the murder of Jews, Jews who legally purchased their land. He then, in best Marxist fashion, compares the Arabs to exploited workers (the proletariat) as an extension of British and ultimately US imperialism. However, forced to acknowledge that the Arab workforce in Israel was not exploited (in fact, many Arabs do well in the construction trade and own businesses and have affirmative action programs in Israeli universities), it is allegedly only because Israel seeks to “ethnically cleanse” them from the region by denying them work. Machover always needs a colonialist nationalist struggle to fit his Stalinist and Manichean version of Israel’s existence.

What he purposely leaves out is that whereas the British were the colonial power in Palestine prior to 1948, the Jews were not a colonial power also, even if such a description fits well with his communist ideology. The British repaid the Jewish Legion who fought the Turks on the Allied side the same as they repaid today’s economic and terrorist curse to the world, the Saudis, for doing the same. Both groups were promised their own country if they fought and died against the Axis. Ultimately, the Brits screwed the Jews and gave half of what was to be Israel to another tribe from the Arabian Peninsula, the Hashemites, that became Jordan and Iraq. Contrary to being colonists of Arab land, the Jews were under the yoke of British colonialism and fought the British as well as the Arabs until the UN decision to create Israel in 1948. Prior to 1948, Jews in Israel fought both the Arabs and the British to have their own independence despite British duplicity with the Arabs against the Jews.

For laypeople listening to a lecture by Machover, especially in the UK where anti-Semitism among a growing Islamic population is rife, the impression would be that the early Zionists planned on exterminating and removing the Arabs from a county called Palestine, this as part of a grand imperialist scheme of the West. Sadly, this is the scenario being repeated as the Big Lie on campuses in Britain and America and this is what makes Machover so dangerous; he acts as if he explains with great knowledge the problem and then offers a best solution: Israel should become Palestine, dominated by Arabs. Machover then descends into the notion of “solidarity” (ever notice the use of the same term by the communist and PFLP-inspired International Solidarity Movement?) with the Arab nationalist movements fighting “imperialism.” Jewish nationalism, and the original kibbutz system based on genuine socialism is not discussed by Machover, an omission that must be intentional to win over his British and American socialist-oriented listeners. This, of course, makes Machover the darling of communist websites in the UK that love to claim they are fighting racism, but promote Arab racism against the Jews.

Machover’s language descends into 60’s communist rhetoric and sloganeering, as well. He refers to the “ravenous imperialist powers” when speaking of America or Britain. Israel, of course, commits “atrocities” of a magnitude much greater than Arab terrorism (communists always maintain democracies murder civilians in massive numbers whenever they finally react militarily in self-defense). Facts, of course, give way to fantasy also as Machover tells his audience that Jordan’s seizure of the West Bank from 1948 to 1967 was actually done with the collusion of Ben Gurion and the Hashemite leader Abdullah. Machover should tell that to the 6,000 Jews who died in the 1948 War of Independence.

Clearly, in Machover’s writing and speeches we see how his goal is facilitating the Palestinian national liberation struggle as a necessay step towards socialism as he sees fit for the rest of the world, a combination of support for national and social struggles against the “imperialist” democratic powers of the West (where he chooses to live).

So, what’s the harm? He’s just another dried up old commie, eh? But Machover has a particualrly odious Stalinist frame of mind when it comes to speaking about Israel, a mindset that even his Trotskyite fellow communists in the UK find absurdly unrealistic and untruthful. Readers should listen to the debate between Machover and a fellow communist who advocates for the existence of Israel. Machover, no doubt is used to younger college-aged audiences who know no better, for he descends into conspiracy theories, selectively misquotes Jabotinsky, cites false statistics of Palestinian refugees and Israeli responses to them since 1948 and even lies about world military history. Indeed, Machover over parses the words of Ahmadinejhad to “wipe Israel off the map” to mean merely a change in regimes.

Machover quotes Jabotinsky out of context claiming he called for the ehtnic cleansing of Arabs from Palestine. But here Machover engages in a bare-faced lie. Jabotinsky's statements were ambiguous on the topic of “transfer” (expulsion of the Arabs). He supported only acts of self-defense and mostly argued that Arabs should be included in the liberal democratic society that he was advocating, later completely disregarding the potency of Arab resistance to Jewish settlement, and stated that settlement should continue, and the Arabs should be simply ignored. That is, if Jews were buying their land legally, the clerical fascism of the Arabs should not have deterred their action.

Only the slimiest of communist revolutionaries would feel the need to lie in such a manner, but Machover then continues with his other whoppers:

On the issue of Arab refugees, Machover uses the Palestinian classical number of 700,000. Yet UN figures for 1948 placed this number closer to 420,000. From 1948-1950 the Arab League allowed any Arab who claimed to be a “Palestinian refugee” to get a refugee card even if he was not a refugee. Arabs who had businesses and money could get on the gravy train for free clothes and food thanks to generosity of the “imperialists” who Machover so detests who funded the UN welfare agency. And they did not need to live in the camps, just collect food and supplies. At the same time, Israel kept 110,000 Arabs at the end of the conflict they did not start, gave them full citizenship, and today they total 1.2 million. From 1952-1982 approximately 170,000 Arab were repatriated inside Israel who could show their losses and for family reunifications.

You’ll never hear the above facts from Moshe Machover. He’ll lecture college students and wannabe socialists that Jews just came on in and grabbed every Arab’s house they could find for themselves. Nor would he ever discuss the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) and in Gaza that were legally purchased and developed, that the Arab forces took for themselves (including Kfar Etzion where 35 Jews were herded into a pit and executed after the Armistice had been signed).

Even Israel’s wars of self-defense are lied about in Machover’s conspiracy theories. In discussing the Suez War of 1956, he states that Israel had control over the Straits of Tiran when in fact it was only Egypt’s denial of Israel’s rights to navigate them that became an act of war when the Egyptians forbid Israeli shipping—something considered an act of war by international standards. He conveniently leaves out the fact that the Egyptians financed and trained Arab fedayeen who crossed the frontier from Gaza continually to murder Israeli civilians, almost the same as is happening today in the Negev. It was also in 1956 that the precursor to the PLO was taking shape as part of an Egyptian subterfuge that later became Arafat’s PLO in 1964 (Arafat was born in Egypt). Machover even ignores the concept of the United Arab Republic that Nasser started and expected to include Syria, a fascist Arab nationalist movement that felt having a Jewish country in the middle of their hegemony in the Middle East was out of the question. No, to Machover Israel went to war for the imperialist goals of NATO and no other reason, a conspiracy theory at best.

But being the good Stalinist that he is, Machover won’t bend an inch even for his fellow communists in the UK who feel destroying Israel has no real logic in the framework of helping the “working classes.” Machover even defends Ahmadinejhad, citing the latest trope that he never said he wants to “wipe Israel off the map” but merely suggested “regime change.”

Sure. That’s why the Iranian Hitler wants nuclear weapons and considers himself the 12^th imam, and why he leads symposiums to show the Holocaust never happened. I recommend that readers of Isracampus listen to the recordings of a debate, audible at the hyperlinks above, between Machover, the deliberate liar and deceiver in the interest of world radical social revolution and his fellow communists who also do not find him credible. Machover bemoans Jewish “racism” toward Arabs, but has no condemnation for Arab racism against Jews who he refuses to call Israelis (even the Sabras), but whom he defines rather as “Hebrews,” never Israelis.

The danger is that this man, a communist marginalized fruitcake, is still going strong and speaking to college-aged audiences overseas. He’s the Israeli who some people think stands as the logical reason to destroy the Jewish state, only that his flawed logic, his “philosophy” as presented, is based on lies and conspiracy theories that are meant to deceive our youth who do not get all the facts at symposiums where Machover speaks. And just to show that the fruitcake does not fall from the tree, Moshe Machover’s son, Daniel, a radical leftist lawyer who also represents the PFLP, was recently involved in leveling war crimes charges in the UK against Israeli General Doron Almog so that he was unable to deplane from a flight from Israel and had to turn back and go home.

Moshe (Moses) was the Jew who led his people out of Egypt and to the Promised Land. What a shame that a namesake of his 4,000 years later, Moshe Machover, would, if he could, be the man to lead the Jews out of Israel and under the golden calf of false information toward another Holocaust. That academia did not dispose of this man long ago shows where the Academy is headed and how even an old dried-up commie crank, can still command attention when it comes to denigrating the Jewish national homeland.

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