The current rector of the University of Haifa, a Zionist leftist, led an unsuccessful campaign to have anti-Zionist extremist Ilan Pappe’s tenure revoked. The current president of Tel Aviv University, himself a man of the Left, denounced campus radical professors for trying to prevent the opening of an Iranian Studies Center there because they feared it might “serve American interests” and fight Islamist radicalism and terrorism.
But at Ben-Gurion University, the campus heads have a track record of openly celebrating and identifying with their anti-Israel faculty extremists. BGU officials have repeatedly justified the words and actions of anti-Israel radicals teaching at BGU. Carmi herself has proclaimed one of the worst extremists at BGU, whose academic career consists of little more than producing anti-Israel screeds and propaganda, a “distinguished scholar.”
BGU has paid a price for its coddling of its faculty extremists. Expressions of outrage against BGU’s anti-Israel extremists are becoming more frequent among American Jews. Some BGU officers and representatives are increasingly complaining that the university has gained a reputation for being a center of anti-Israel radicalism.
Evidently, university officials are feeling the heat from overseas Jewish donors. In the Academia interview noted above, Carmi attacks the donors to her own university for supposedly trying to interfere with “academic freedom” at BGU (pages 37-8) when they express opinions about what goes on there.
It seems that while leftist faculty members openly calling for Israel to be annihilated are perfectly entitled to freedom of expression at BGU, overseas donors are not. Carmi declares such “pressures” from donors on the university to be unethical (her word). Donors expressing criticism of how their own funds are being spent are out of line, believes Carmi. They are people “trying to dictate the agenda of the university.”
American and Canadian Jews have the moral responsibility to use their influence and make donations wisely and selectively. We should make it crystal clear to Israeli university officials that North American Jews are interested in helping build the Jewish state, not in financing academic radicals and traitors seeking to tear it down.