What We Learned on Our Academic Visit to Israel
Category: News & Politics
Via: krishna • 8 months ago • 13 commentsBy: Edward H. Kaplan and Evan Morris Professors
(This is not my photo) Newsweek Photo : Jewish and Muslim students give a presentation together at Hebrew University.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
We represent a group of 25 Yale faculty who have just returned from a five-day visit to Israel. Our mission was to learn from and make meaningful academic connections with our Israeli counterparts. Much of what we learned and observed astounded us.
The environment is challenging, yet the Israeli academic enterprise has proven breathtakingly resilient. Imagine operating a university where a quarter to a third of students, staff, and faculty have been murdered, injured, taken hostage, or are on active military reserve service. Imagine teaching in classrooms with both Arab students (some with family in Gaza or the West Bank) and Jewish students (many just returned from military service or with casualties among family and friends).
Imagine trying to manage standard faculty promotion, review, and tenure processes in the face of boycotts and similar discrimination from hostile academics around the world.
Contrary to the apartheid charge leveled against Israel in general and Israeli academic institutions in particular, we saw precisely the opposite. At Hebrew University, we received a presentation from two young female students, one a hijab-wearing Muslim and the other Jewish, just returned from reserve duty. The presentation ended with their heartfelt embrace.
At Ben Gurion-Soroka Hospital, Technion-Rambam Hospital, and the Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical Center, we saw how integrated their medical schools and faculty are. The percentage of doctors, nurses, and pharmacists who are Arabs greatly exceeds their share in the total population.
We heard Arab university vice presidents, and their Jewish counterparts take full pride in jointly leading Israeli university life. Unlike the scene on American campuses, Muslim and Christian Arabs, Druze and Jewish students understand that their job is to learn, not to fight each other.
In presentations by an Israeli Arab journalist and a Druze professor, we learned that contrary to conceptions prevalent on American campuses, the majority of Israeli Arabs do not seek to separate from Israel.
Indeed, while Israeli Arabs do have demands, we learned they are in service of more integration into Israeli society—better schools, law enforcement, and physical infrastructure—not less. Similarly, we learned from a Druze professor the strong connection to the Jewish State felt by the Israeli Druze.
We could not come to Israel without visiting the sites of the Oct. 7 atrocities and seeing with our own eyes what Hamas did to innocent civilians. We saw the carnage and devastation at Kfar Azza where 64 kibbutz members were murdered, and many others taken hostage.
We visited the site of the Nova Festival where more than 360 young Israelis were murdered, raped, and kidnapped. We learned how at Soroka hospital in Beer Sheva, arriving Oct. 7 casualties peaked at the rate of one every 40 seconds, yet the hospital was able to stay open and maximize the number of lives they could save.
Every Israeli university, like all of Israel, remains traumatized from Oct. 7. Yet Israelis are resilient, and this is doubly true for Israeli academics. Indeed, virtually all the faculty and students we met asked how they could help us deal with the grotesque protests so commonplace on American university campuses. Seeing the strength of our Israeli academic colleagues, we return committed to telling their stories and fighting back against the hate.
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We represent a group of 25 Yale faculty who have just returned from a five-day visit to Israel. Our mission was to learn from and make meaningful academic connections with our Israeli counterparts. Much of what we learned and observed astounded us.
Imagine operating a university where a quarter to a third of students, staff, and faculty have been murdered, injured, taken hostage, or are on active military reserve service. Imagine teaching in classrooms with both Arab students (some with family in Gaza or the West Bank) and Jewish students (many just returned from military service or with casualties among family and friends).
Imagine trying to manage standard faculty promotion, review, and tenure processes in the face of boycotts and similar discrimination from hostile academics around the world.
Contrary to the apartheid charge leveled against Israel in general and Israeli academic institutions in particular, we saw precisely the opposite. At Hebrew University, we received a presentation from two young female students, one a hijab-wearing Muslim and the other Jewish, just returned from reserve duty. The presentation ended with their heartfelt embrace.
At Ben Gurion-Soroka Hospital, Technion-Rambam Hospital, and the Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical Center, we saw how integrated their medical schools and faculty are. The percentage of doctors, nurses, and pharmacists who are Arabs greatly exceeds their share in the total population.
We heard Arab university vice presidents, and their Jewish counterparts take full pride in jointly leading Israeli university life. Unlike the scene on American campuses, Muslim and Christian Arabs, Druze and Jewish students understand that their job is to learn, not to fight each other.
That friendly integration and cooperation is EXACTLY what I saw with my own eyes, and have reported about here on NT, at the modern Orthodox Jewish Laniado Hospital in Netanya, Israel. It is so astounding for me to see how UNBELIEVABLY IGNORANT AND GULLIBLE the people around the world are to take seriously the Palestinian/Hamas lying narrative about Israeli apartheid. If in fact the ultra-Orthodox Haradim (for whom I have no respect whatsoever) are pushing the Arabs/Muslims from the territories, I don't believe that even compares with what the Muslim countries did to the Jews living in them, especially when the State of Israel was created.
Actually I think that a good %age of those people don't even know what the real Apartheid* was like.
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*The one that had existed in South Africa
What they call Israeli apartheid is not only the friendly working together I spoke of in Laniado Hospital, but that friendly working together also exists in pretty well EVERY Israeli institution - Israel, where Arabs/Muslims are mayors and officials in many towns and villages, and they work together in many organizations and businesses, serve in the IDF, learn together in classrooms with teachers of both beliefs, have political parties, and sit as justices in the courts, even on the Supreme Court of Israel. Muslim/Arab residents in Israel have said that they would rather live in Israel than in ANY Arab/Muslim nation. I have seen it with my own eyes and I'd be willing to bet that those who cry "apartheid" have NEVER been to Israel.
“Unlike the scene on American campuses, Muslim and Christian Arabs, Druze and Jewish students understand that their job is to learn, not to fight each other.”
Perhaps the difference is between wanting an education or want life experiences.
IIRC, when we had the Draft in the U.S. those who went to college fulltime got draft deferments-- so they could finish their education. Then after they graduated they went into the military.
In Israel they set it up differently-- they have to go into the military first-- then they go to college. As a result they complete military and are more mature when they go to college so they take it very seriously. (Most American kids are more immature when then graduate High School and then go to college.
(Yes-- they have much less life experience).
I work with some vets that used their GI Bill after service and were surprised at the immaturity of their classmates.
That's the way it should be, I graduated HS in 1965, not one of my classmates that went to college ever went in the military. After getting their Bachelors degree they went on to obtain a masters, got married, had kids or did something else to get out of the draft. Those that dropped out of college got married and had kids to stay out of military service.
Military service during a war can be dangerous/. OTOH in peacetime its great.
You are serving your country. You learn self-discipline, also learn a lot about relating to people, working together. and of course there are many benefits for veterans afterwards..
I assume most of the visiting faculty were Jewish since their popularity on their campus can’t go any lower. Also assume that no university dollars were used to reimburse the cost of this trip. No way Yale was putting money in any Israeli pockets.
I don't know. That might be true.
OTOH there have been so many charges of anti-Semitism on college campuses that maybe the powers that be at Yale thought it might make them look good if they did this. IDK.