To the Editor

Saree Makdisi
Professor of English and Comparative Literature

In responding to my article on Israeli apartheid ("Is this not apartheid?," Feb. 21), Leila Beckwith and her colleagues fail to refute my arguments and unwittingly reveal the extent to which the willful blindness of Israel's American supporters is essential to its ongoing and amply documented abuse of the Palestinian people.

They chide me for saying that Palestinians are the indigenous population of the West Bank; they consider Israel's illegal colonists "native" as well.

This claim ignores international law and elides the fact that only seven of every 100 Palestinians were Jewish when European Zionists arrived to turn Palestine into a Jewish state. "We must expel the Arabs and take their places," said Israel's founding father, David Ben-Gurion, in 1937.

That is exactly what happened in 1948, says leading Israeli historian Benny Morris. "There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing," he argues. "A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them."

Perhaps Beckwith and company cling to worn-out myths because they can't bring themselves to acknowledge Israel's ugly history. That is not how scholars are supposed to behave.

Unfortunately, Beckwith seems to lack faith in the academic ideal. She is the UCLA liaison for Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME), an Orwellian organization that seeks to shield Israel from criticism by stifling our academic freedom. After lobbying the UC regents, an SPME delegation, including Beckwith, met the head of the UC Academic Senate to press the university to effectively censor "anti-Israel bias," which, with characteristic mendacity, they conflate with anti-Semitism.

Such anti-intellectual behavior is the last resort of those discomfited by the diversity of opinion characteristic of an academic community.

Nevertheless, I invite Beckwith to a public dialogue. A rational discussion tempered by facts and evidence might remind her of the actual purpose of a great university.