Student hooligans from Brandeis scream at Israeli Knesset members in Newton, Mass.

Disgusting hooliganism by Brandeis University students on Monday night (3/26/12), when so-called "pro-Palestinian" activists disrupted a meeting with several Israeli Knesset members in Newton, Mass. They went off campus to yell and scream at MKs from Likud (Ofir Akunis), Yisrael Beitenu (Lia Shemtov and Faina Kirshenbaum), Labor (Raleb Majadele), and Meretz (Ilan Gilon) who were participating in a "town-hall" style meeting at a synagogue in Newton, Temple Emanuel.

According to a statement by Brandeis Students for Justice in Palestine, members of the group, as well as activists from affiliate groups, wearing t-shirts displaying the word "apartheid" in Hebrew letters, "mic-checked the panel, protesting the undemocratic nature of the Israeli apartheid state and notified the offending officials that until their government ceased its discriminatory policies they were not welcome by students at Brandeis University community events."

"The activists were pushed outside the hall by police officers and private security guards. One Brandeis student was arrested and another was injured while being thrown to the floor by a police officer," the statement added. A video of the incident was uploaded to YouTube.

Activists chanted at the panel: "Israel is an apartheid state and the Knesset is an apartheid parliament," as well as: "We will not welcome Israeli officials to any Brandeis University event until apartheid ends."

Raleb Majadele was the first Arab minister in an Israeli government, appointed by Prime Minister Amir Peretz in 2007 to the post of Minister of Science, Culture and Sport.

This is not the first time this year that Majadele has been subjected to hooliganism. In early January, "Anastassia Michaeli, a hawkish Israeli lawmaker, got so angry during a routine parliamentary debate Monday that she took a glass of water, tossed it at Labor Party backbencher Raleb Majadele and said 'shame on you' before storming out." Majadele must be doing something right, if both the extreme left and the extreme right react so violently to him.

I find it particularly shameful that the group that behaved so disgracefully was from Brandeis University, which was founded as a secular Jewish university and has a majority Jewish student body. It's disgusting that a group of students from Brandeis, an educational institution that prizes the use of reason and upholds the right of free speech for all, should be so intolerant of the exercise of free speech by others that they travel off campus to disrupt a conversation at a synagogue, of all places.

Is this apartheid?

Separation Wall at Abu Dis, Jerusalem

Israel gearing for effective separation of East Jerusalem Palestinians (Haaretz).

Last week, a new border crossing was opened in East Jerusalem's Shoafat neighborhood, to little fanfare. Two days later, Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat asserted that Israel should relinquish Palestinian neighborhoods of the capital that are beyond the separation barrier, despite the fact that their residents carry Israeli identity cards.

Some people view these events as two pieces of the same puzzle. A third piece is the resumption of work on separate roads for Israelis and Palestinians between Jerusalem and the West Bank settlement of Ma'aleh Adumim.

Separation Wall at Abu Dis

(Also published on my new Israel blog - The land and the people, which I'm setting up to write for when I'm going to be in Israel for my sabbatical - January-July 2012).

Photos of the Separation Wall at Abu Dis were taken when I went on a tour of East Jerusalem sponsored by Ir Amim, in the summer of 2010.

Jimmy Carter's "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid"

A BOOK REVIEW: Jeffrey Goldberg has just reviewed Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid in the Washington Post. He quotes from several statements made by Carter that seem to indicate Carter's adherence to classical Christian judgements on Jews and Judaism:

Jimmy Carter tells a strange and revealing story near the beginning of his latest book, the sensationally titled Palestine Peace Not Apartheid. It is a story that suggests that the former president's hostility to Israel is, to borrow a term, faith-based.

On his first visit to the Jewish state in the early 1970s, Carter, who was then still the governor of Georgia, met with Prime Minister Golda Meir, who asked Carter to share his observations about his visit. Such a mistake she never made. "With some hesitation," Carter writes, "I said that I had long taught lessons from the Hebrew Scriptures and that a common historical pattern was that Israel was punished whenever the leaders turned away from devout worship of God. I asked if she was concerned about the secular nature of her Labor government."

Jews, in my experience, tend to become peevish when Christians, their traditional persecutors, lecture them on morality, and Carter reports that Meir was taken aback by his "temerity." He is, of course, paying himself a compliment. Temerity is mandatory when you are doing God's work, and Carter makes it clear in this polemical book that, in excoriating Israel for its sins - and he blames Israel almost entirely for perpetuating the hundred-year war between Arab and Jew - he is on a mission from God.

I think it is very telling that Carter a) had this conversation with Golda Meir, and b) tells the story in his book. If he is trying to convince American Jews or Jewish Israelis that he is an "honest broker," then he has failed by continuing a long-time Christian trope. In the Hebrew Bible, the prophets excoriate the people of Israel and their leaders for their sins, in the most blood-curdling terms. But the prophets never place themselves outside of the people of Israel. They are part of Israel and are criticizing it out of love. When Christianity began to become a separate religion, one of the rhetorical moves that Christians made was to take the prophetic rebukes of Israel and refer them to the Jews of their time, without acknowledging that the prophets were criticizing their own people, whom they were part of and whom they loved. They were engaging in a "Christianization" of the prophets.

Carter also dissolves the distinction between the Jews of the first century and Israelis of the 20th century:

Why is Carter so hard on Israeli settlements and so easy on Arab aggression and Palestinian terror? Because a specific agenda appears to be at work here. Carter seems to mean for this book to convince American evangelicals to reconsider their support for Israel. Evangelical Christians have become bedrock supporters of Israel lately, and Carter marshals many arguments, most of them specious, to scare them out of their position. Hence the Golda Meir story, seemingly meant to show that Israel is not the God-fearing nation that religious Christians believe it to be. And then there are the accusations, unsupported by actual evidence, that Israel persecutes its Christian citizens. On his fateful first visit to Israel, Carter takes a tour of the Galilee and writes, "It was especially interesting to visit with some of the few surviving Samaritans, who complained to us that their holy sites and culture were not being respected by Israeli authorities - the same complaint heard by Jesus and his disciples almost two thousand years earlier."

So now the Israeli authorities=the Jewish religious leaders of the first century, whom the New Testament holds guilty of the death of Jesus? As Goldberg says, "a man who sees Israel as a lineal descendant of the Pharisees could write such a sentence." And only a man who considers the Pharisees the hypocritical villains would connect the contemporary state of Israel with the ancient Pharisees. One wonders if Carter realizes that he's not just insulting the leaders of Israel, but also all Jews everywhere, since contemporary Judaism, in all of its forms, is based on rabbinic Judaism, which grew out of the Pharisaic movement of the Second Temple period.

Jimmy Carter

Today, in the mail, I received the most recent of many pleas for money that have come from the Carter Center. I have never given any money to the Carter Center, and after Jimmy Carter's performance on the Lehrer report on November 28, there is not a chance in the world that I will ever give money to anything associated with Jimmy Carter. To see the transcript of the interview, see here: Jimmy Carter interview. Carter castigates the Israelis for not negotiating with the Hamas government after Gilad Shalit was kidnapped this summer (and two other Israeli soldiers were killed). Judy Woodruff, who was interviewing him, asked him about the Israeli refusal to negotiate with Hamas on the basis that Hamas did not recognize Israel's right to exist. He answered her question with this obfuscating reply:

The day after the election, I went and met with Mahmoud Abbas, who is the leader of the Palestinians. He's their president. He's the head of the PLO, which is the only organization, by the way, that the United States or Israel recognizes, the PLO, in which there's not a single Hamas member. Hamas has nothing to do with the PLO.

And after I met with Abbas to talk about a unity government, which he rejected, then I met with a Hamas leader. He's a medical doctor who was elected. He's now in prison, by the way. But he said -- when I insisted that they recognize Israel, he said, "Mr. President, which Israel are you talking about? Are you talking about the Israel that's occupying our land? Are you talking about the Israel that has built a wall around our people? Are you talking about an Israel that deprives us of basic human rights to move from one place to another in our own land?" He said, "We can't recognize that Israel."

But later, the prime minister of the Hamas government, Haniyeh, said, "We are strongly in favor of direct talks between Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the PLO and the head of the government, and the prime minister of Israel, Olmert." And he said, "If they reach an agreement in their discussions that's acceptable to the Palestinian people, we will accept it, also. Hamas will."

Carter ignores uncomfortable facts that he doesn't want to acknowledge, including the very recent Hamas refusal to recognize Israel's right to existence (it's been one of the stumbling blocks in the current Palestinian talks over a unity government). He has a very annoying mixture of naivete and sanctimony. I'm reminded again of why I decided not to vote for him in 1980 - when his UN ambassador Andrew Young met with Arafat, when it was official U.S. policy not to talk to the PLO, a policy that I certainly agreed with at the time, since the PLO was at that time as intransigent as Hamas is today. And with the title of his new book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," he certainly indicates where his sympathies lie.