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How to respond on your way to class, when your best friend joins an anti-Israel protest.
This document “ON ONE FOOT™” was written by Dr. Mitchell G. Bard, Ph.D., Executive Director of the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise (AICE) and director of the Jewish Virtual Library
This fact-filled, clearly-organized guide provides the perspective and truths often lacking in the ongoing anti-Israel critiques that pervade academia, the media, and many other arenas.
Examples include:
- An independent Jewish state would be 3,000 years old today if not for foreign conquerors. Even after most Jews were exiled, small Jewish communities remained in the Land of Israel. Jews have lived there continuously for the last 2,000 years. Modern Israel developed the land from a largely uninhabited wasteland filled with malarial swamps into a thriving high-tech Western society.
- According to British statistics, more than 70% of the land in what would become Israel was not owned by Arab farmers, it belonged to the mandatory government. Those lands reverted to Israeli control after the departure of the British. Nearly 9% of the land was owned by Jews and about 3% by Arabs who became citizens of Israel. That means only about 18% belonged to Arabs who left the country before and after the Arab invasion of Israel in 1948.
- Legality is not the issue in evaluating the anti-Israel, sometimes anti-Semitic speeches and teachings of faculty and speakers on campus. No one questions that freedom of speech allows individuals to express their views. The issue is whether this type of speech should be given the cover of “academic freedom,” and granted legitimacy by the university through funding, publicity or use of facilities. A university is supposed to be different from a street corner; it is supposed to be a place where discussion has some academic or scholarly component. Few people would claim that anti-black, anti-gay, or anti-woman sentiments are protected by academic freedom, and yet that is the shield used to permit attacks on the Jewish people.