Speaker at Centre for Jewish History violently denounces Israel
Just when you thought things couldn’t get any messier over at the Centre for Jewish History, a New York Times columnist who was invited to speak at an event there has unleashed a barrage of verbal attacks on Israel…writes Stephen M. Flatow/JNS.0rg
Michaela Kalowski talks with Roger Cohen in Sydney Photo: David Sokol
The columnist, Roger Cohen, was invited to deliver this year’s Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture. The Leo Baeck Institute is one of six Jewish organisations that operate from the Centre for Jewish History building. I did not attend Mr. Cohen’s lecture Oct. 15. But in a pre-lecture interview with the Baeck Institute’s newsletter, LBI News, Cohen violently lashed out at Israel.
“Somehow,” he declared, “the Jews, who were for millennia humiliated and excluded in the diaspora, now find themselves in a semi-colonial situation in which they subject the Palestinian people to much of what we once suffered.”
“Much of what we suffered?” Gas chambers? Pogroms? Ghettoes? Inquisitions? Which of these, exactly, does Cohen think Israel has used against the Palestinians?
He didn’t stop there. Cohen proceeded to declare, “Lawlessness prevails in the settlements.” Another blatant lie. Anybody who is familiar with the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria knows “lawlessness” is an absurd and outrageously false description. Those communities are legal, and the overwhelming majority of their residents are peaceful, law-abiding citizens.
Cohen continued, “The settlers vote as citizens of Israel while the millions around them cannot vote.” Utterly false. Of course the Palestinian Arabs can vote, and they do vote—when Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas lets them.
Just five months ago, on May 13, 2017, hundreds of thousands of supposedly “disenfranchised” Palestinians went to 461 polling stations, and chose the members of the 391 municipal and village councils in the PA-controlled portions of Judea and Samaria. A total of 3,489 council members were elected. But I guess Roger Cohen wasn’t paying attention. He was too busy accusing Israel of denying Palestinians the right to vote.
Of course, it’s not as if the Leo Baeck Institute didn’t know what it was getting into when it chose Cohen as its speaker. He has been an outspoken critic of Israel for a very long time. In his column from Feb. 10, 2014, he accused the Israelis of “keep[ing] their boots on the heads of the Palestinians.” In his column from Jan. 28, 2016, Cohen urged businesses around the world to take action to force Israel to “cease settlement-related activities”—in other words, to boycott Israel. And who can forget his series of articles in 2009 whitewashing antisemitism in Iran?
Stephen M. Flatow
I find it hard to believe that the leaders of the Leo Baeck Institute were not aware of Cohen’s record before they selected him as their speaker. But whether or not they knew of his attacks on Israel in the past, why did they consider it necessary to circulate his latest attacks on Israel, in their newsletter? Why publicise and legitimise his anti-Israel tirades?
A similar question was raised recently when it was revealed that another institution at the Centre for Jewish History, the American Jewish Historical Society, was planning a Balfour Declaration event featuring speakers from the anti-Zionist “Jewish Voice for Peace” group.
I am not assuming that the controversial new president of the Center for Jewish History, David N. Myers, is to blame for the activities of either the American Jewish Historical Society or the Leo Baeck Institute. They are autonomous organisations that make their own programming and publishing decisions.
Nor am I suggesting that people who attack Israel should be deprived of their right to free speech. There are, of course, plenty of platforms for people who want to denounce Israel. The question I am raising is whether mainstream Jewish community institutions should provide platforms for such attacks on the Jewish state.
The leaders of the American Jewish Historical Society decided, to their credit, that the anti-Zionist Balfour program should be cancelled, since it was not consistent with their society’s mission. Perhaps the folks at the Leo Baeck Institute can learn from that. The Baeck Institute’s mission is to “promote the study and understanding of German-Jewish history.” Roger Cohen’s comparison of Israel’s behavior to that of past persecutors of the Jews—including German Jews, obviously—was a gross distortion of German-Jewish history. The publication of Cohen’s anti-Israel vitriol in the Baeck Institute newsletter was clearly inconsistent with the institute’s mission. The institute should acknowledge its grievous error in judgment.
Stephen M. Flatow, a vice president of the Religious Zionists of America, is an attorney in New Jersey. He is the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995.
