http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/israel-and-the-moral-midgets-of-american-academe/print/
province of the academic Lilliput called the American Studies Association has voted to boycott Israeli academics because of “the Israeli occupation of Palestine” and “the systematic discrimination against Palestinians.” The well-earned criticism of this vote is probably the most attention this organization has ever received outside the parochial precincts of the American university, where “conferences” of like-mindedness pedants regularly gather together to read papers to each other and ritualistically affirm their fossilized political and intellectual orthodoxy. Indeed, what this vote tells us about the corruption of American higher education is more worthy of comment than its impact on Israel’s intellectual life, considering that “American Studies” is a political rather than a scholarly enterprise unlikely to concern genuine Israeli scholars. Martin Kramer’s response gets it just about right: “Boycott me, please.”
The first thing revealed by this vote is the massive ignorance of history, including current events, that permeates American universities. Most obvious is the rote repetition of the phrase “Israeli occupation of Palestine.” This phrase is historically meaningless. There is no occupation in legal terms, because there has never existed a country to be occupied. The territory under question last existed formally as a province of the Ottoman Empire, which has long settled into the dustbin of history because it miscalculated badly and allied with the Central Powers in World War I. The legal disposition, through a U.N. resolution, of this territory by the mandatory powers that replaced the Ottomans after World War I was rejected and violently contested by the Arab nations that attacked Israel in 1948.
Until 1967, this territory was controlled by Jordan, whose annexation of it was never recognized internationally. It came under control of Israel as a result of the defensive Six Day War. Without that event, it is likely that despite international disapproval, the territory would have in time become part of Jordan according to the ancient wisdom that possession is nine-tenths of the law. After all, who boycotts China over its absorption of Tibet? If after their victory in 1967 Israel had behaved as most states do in such circumstances, she would have annexed the territory that by the legitimacy of history is part of Israel, and that was fairly won on the battlefield. And again following the usual practice of most states, Israel then would have expelled all the Arabs. This historically has been the common practice that no one other than the losers complained about after other wars. One and a half million Greeks, for example, were booted out of Muslim Turkey in 1923, from lands their ancestors had inhabited for nearly 3 thousand years, while half a million Muslims, descendants of invaders or Christians converted under the shadow of the sword, were sent to Turkey. Or consider the 12 million Germans kicked out of Eastern Europe after World War II. That’s what happens when a people start a war and lose.
