A colloquium entitled “Palestinian history between past and present,” scheduled to take place on Friday, March 6, at the CUNY Graduate Center in Manhattan, should trigger all kinds of alarm bells.

A legitimate academic event is supposed to advance a search for truth. As contrived with the connivance of the CUNY Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity, however, this particular colloquium seems guaranteed to be little more than an echo chamber for one-sided anti-Israel tropes and the deliberate dissemination of disinformation. That this has become the state of academic discourse on a critically important, multi-faceted, and complex topic is nothing short of disastrous.

The March 6 event is organized by CUNY Ph.D. Students who arguably have the academic and constitutionally protected freedom to engage in rhetoric of their choice, even hateful rhetoric. The set-one’s-hair-on-fire problem is that this purportedly academic get-together is co-sponsored by the aforementioned Center for the Study of the Holocaust whose proclaimed mission “is to promote the exchange of ideas across disciplines and generations” and to serve “as a hub for a vibrant community of scholars from many fields with convergent interests.” By its endorsement, the Center, far from promoting any “exchange of ideas,” is championing the promotion and propounding of one-sided vitriol against a country and against individuals who identify with or are sympathetic to that country.

The most serious shortcoming of this colloquium is that it contributes absolutely nothing to a possible, however distant, resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. All it will do is exacerbate rather than decrease existing animosities on both sides.

First, it is certain to be yet another CUNY-sponsored exercise in vilifying Israel, Zionism, Zionists, and Jews who support the State of Israel’s right to exist. How do I know this beyond a shadow of any doubt whatsoever? Because the announced participants in the program constitute a veritable smorgasbord of Israel-haters and Zionist-bashers. No one who might express a different perspective has been invited.

The keynote speaker, Nasser Abourahme, is an Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at Bowdoin College who maintains not only that Israel has committed – and is committing – genocide in Gaza, but that Zionism, the desire and yearning of Jews for a homeland of their own, is genocidal by definition. “Zionism, like any settler colonial project,” he wrote as recently as January 30 of this year, “was premised on the elimination of the native population, one way or another, from the start.”

Never mind that Jews are indigenous to what was the biblical kingdom and became the Roman province of Judea, or that Jews lived there continuously even after it was renamed Syria Palaestina in the second century of the Common Era following an unsuccessful Jewish revolt against the Romans. There has not been a single moment in the intervening centuries that there has not been a serious Jewish presence in what became British Mandatory Palestine in 1922 and what the U.N. General Assembly partitioned into a Jewish and an Arab state in 1947. These are only some of the historical facts that Abourahme steadfastly ignores.

The other participants in the March 6 colloquium have similar track records. To give just one example among a whole host, Nadia Abu El-Haj, co-director of the Center for Palestine Studies and an anthropology professor at Barnard College and Columbia University, maintains that “The Halo for sanctification is words, that is, Auschwitz haunts any attempt in the Euro-American world to consider whether or not in its war on Gaza, Israel or the Jewish state is committing genocide.”

As far as Abu El-Haj is concerned, the Holocaust and Auschwitz are nothing more than a smokescreen used to deflect attention from the attempted vilification and repudiation of not just Zionism and the State of Israel but any assertion of Jewish national aspirations and rights.

Given Abu El-Haj’s bizarre conceptualization of the Holocaust, the co-sponsorship of the March 6 colloquium by CUNY’s Center for the Study of the Holocaust borders on the egregious. Effectively, this center, one of whose ostensible purposes is to study the Holocaust, has given its imprimatur – its hekhsher,  as it were – to the blatant exploitation and distortion of the Holocaust into an anti-Israel, anti-Zionist cudgel. Even worse, by co-sponsoring this event, the Center is endorsing the participants’ contention that a Holocaust has been perpetrated, or is being perpetrated, in Gaza.

For that matter, not a single participant on the March 6 program is likely to contest the depiction of Israel as evil incarnate. While opposing the Netanyahu government’s policies is an exercise of free and protected speech, denying Israel’s legitimacy as a state and its Jewish citizens the right to live there constitutes antisemitic hate speech per se. Here again, the Center’s co-sponsorship of the event more than implies that it and its leadership are ok with the latter view being voiced under their auspices.

There is a thin line between principled conviction and sanctimonious zealotry. It is one thing to be supportive of and sympathetic to the Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank. Indeed, I share and have shared these sentiments for more than 40 years. It is quite another, however, to advocate and inflame fanaticism. An inflexible insistence on all or nothing more often than not gets you nothing.

This is as true for the pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel and anti-Zionist extremists on the March 6 CUNY program as it is for their Jewish and Christian evangelical counterparts who would deny the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza their legitimate legal and civil rights or who refuse to condemn acts of violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank. As Abba Eban, the longtime dovish Israeli foreign minister, correctly pointed out, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a conflict between right and wrong but a conflict between two rights.

The Kotzker Rebbe, one of the most influential – and sharp-tongued – Hasidic masters of the 19th century, famously observed that the middle of the road is for horses. This proposition holds water as a counterweight to opportunistic or purely self-serving immoral or amoral pragmatism. It is far less sound, however, when it intensifies political or intellectual extremism. There are times when both sides of a seemingly irreconcilable conflict must begin to de-demonize each other. If there is to be any hope for Israeli-Palestinian coexistence in any form, it is critical for Israelis, Palestinians, and their respective supporters to acknowledge the valid grievances and even try to feel the pain of the other. Sadly, the March 6 CUNY colloquium seems likely to accomplish the precise opposite.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)