Israeli dissident faces firing from Haifa University

[Mark Pavlick]

>
>Dear colleagues, if you are interested in details on the Katz dissertation
>affair at the University of Haifa, there was an article published, written
>by Pappe, in the quarterly _Journal of Palestine Studies_ (I don't have the
>issue at my fingertips, but it was published in 2000 or 2001).  Pappe is a
>wonderful scholar in the genre of the revisionist Israeli historians.  I
>hope we can support him.  If I remember correctly, following his
>persecution, Katz the M.A. student "rescinded" his research findings, based
>on Hebrew language Israeli military documents, of a previously undiscovered
>massacre of Palestinians at Tantura in 1948.  PLEASE PASS ON TO ACADEMIC
>LISTSERVES. fh
>
>>  Date: Sun, 12 May 2002 10:13:06 +0100
>>
>>  From: Ilan Pappe
>>
>>  Subject: The expulsion of Pappe
>> 
>>  Dear Friends,
>>
>>  I have received today an invitation to stand for a trial in my
>>  university, the university of Haifa. The prosecution, represented by
>>  Haifa Deans of humanities demands my expulsion from the university due to
>>  the positions I have taken on the Katz affair. It calls upon the court to
>>  judge Dr. Pappe on the offences he has committed and to use to the full
>>  the courts legal authority to expel him from the university. These
>>  offences are in a nutshell my past critique of the universitys conduct in
>>  the Katz affair, the MA student who discovered the Tantura massacre in
>>  1948 and was disqualified for that. The reason the university waited so
>>  long is that now the time is ripe in Israel for any act of silencing
>>  academic freedom. My intent to teach a course on the Nakbah next year and
>>  my support for boycott on Israel has led the university to the conclusion
>>  that I can only be stopped by expulsion.
>>
>>  Judging by past procedures this is not a request, but already a verdict,
>>  given the position of the person in question in the university and the
>>  way things had been done in the past. The ostensible procedure of a fair
>>  trial does not exist and hence I do not even intend to participate in a
>>  McCarthyist charade.
>>
>>  I do not appeal to you for my own sake. I ask you at this stage before a
>>  final decision has been taken to voice your opinion in whatever form you
>>  can and to whatever stage you have access to, not in order to prevent my
>>  expulsion (in many ways in the present atmosphere in Israel it will come
>>  now, and if not now later on, as the Israeli academia has decided almost
>>  unanimously to support the government and to help silence any criticism).
>>  I ask those who are willing to do so, to take this case as part of your
>>  overall appreciation of, and attitude to, the preset situation in Israel.
>>  This should shed light also on the debate whether or not to boycott
>>  Israeli academia.
>>
>>  This is not, I stress, and an appeal for personal help my situation is
>>  far better than that of my colleagues in the occupied territories living
>>  under the daily harassment and brutal abuses of the Israeli army. It is
>>  an opening gambit and many of colleagues, especially my Palestinian
>>  Israeli colleagues, can be next. A testimony to the tragic circumstances
>>  of my own university is that I know there is no use in distributing this
>>  letter on its internal web-site, as all of my colleagues in the past when
>>  it came to the crucial moment - for understandable reasons - felt they
>>  could do very little to help me, without risking their own position in
>>  the university.
>>
>>  I know many of you have access to world media and can help to expose the
>>  already dismal picture and false pretense of Israel of being the only
>>  democracy in the Middle East.
>> 
>>  Yours
>>
>>  Ilan Pappe
>
>********************
>Frances S. Hasso
>Assistant Professor of Women's Studies
>   and Sociology
>Oberlin College
>10 North Professor St.
>Oberlin, OH 44074
>(440) 775-6783 (office)
>frances.hasso at oberlin.edu

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