Letter from Jerusalem

In our very first lessons on the British constitution we were impressed with the most salient of facts to the effect that the British Parliament can turn a man into a woman (or vice versa). This, it turns out, was excellent intellectual and psychological preparation for understanding what is happening in the Israeli settlement of Ariel, before our very eyes.

Today’s issue of the Israeli daily, Ma’ariv, informs us that the next meeting on the Israeli cabinet is going to turn the College of Judea and Samaria into a university. It appears that the initiative is coming from the Minister for Education, Limor Livnat. Ms. Livnat, it transpires, has granted her acquiescence to Sharon’s Gaza Disengagement Plan conditionally.

The condition – you guessed it – is to intensify settlement in the West Bank. Livnat figures that the ‘new university’ will attract additional population to the Ariel area. She is also certain, according to the same source, that there will not be any difficulty concerning her initiative which has reportedly received the backing of Ariel Sharon, with the United States, which has given its blessing to the settlement blocs, Ariel included. Thus if all goes well, the Israeli government will turn a college previously established by fiat of a military officer in the occupation, into a full fledged university. Livan claims that there is no financial problem involved since the College is already funded by the Israeli Council of Higher Education.

Those who follow the vagaries of Israeli internal politics must appreciate that Livnat’s gambit is also a brilliant counter-maneuver against Shimon Peres’ initiative to establish a new, ninth Israeli university in the Galilee. Peres’s initiative has received the enthusiastic backing of the Labor Party’ especially as he is going around brandishing a $100,000,000. check from former Israeli mogul, Arnon Milchen. The Council for Higher Education is against the Galilee plan because it has learned the hard lesson that philanthropists like to fork out sums for buildings named after them or their dear ones. But this doesn’t mean a hill of beans when it comes to paying salaries and keeping the floors clean.

Even so, the CJS might well become a university by virtue of a cabinet decision. There will be no difficulty in finding a name for the new university: the George W. Bush University (OT).

Stay posted for further developments. You may have discerned that your correspondent is a bit obsessed by this story.

Bar Ilan University in the Defense of Academic Freedom

Bar Ilan University and the College of Judea and Samaria (CJS) are in the news. So here is some additional information for those interested in the subject. The CJS has recently submitted a request to have its research Master of Arts degree recognized by the Council of Higher Education (CHE) in Israel. Such a step is necessary if a student who completes his MA at the CJS plans to go on to doctoral studies in an Israeli university.

The relationship between the CJS and the Council of Higher Education in Israel is a bit complicated. If you check out the accreditation situation, it becomes clear that the CJS is not accredited by the CHE. However, the CHE does note on its website that the CJS is accredited by a separate body which is called the Council for Higher Education in Judea and Samaria CHE-JS). This Council is situated at Bar Ilan University. The CHE-JS does not have a website and does not reveal to the public its composition. So we do not know the identity of the people who work out of an Israeli institution and consider themselves qualified to confer accreditation for BA studies and MA studies (non-research trend up to this point).

On the other hand, the CHE-JS is quite candid about the source of its jurisdiction and states that it operates on the basis of a decree issued by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). In my translation, the decree is for the ‘Administration of Local Authorities (Judea and Samaria) [tsav b’dvar nihul moatsot mikomiut] Number 892 from the year 1981, article 3 (h), addendum 4 – Orders regarding Education.’

Thus, the relevant IDF commander created a council for higher education in the West Bank. Some hard questions:
Can an army officer create either directly or indirectly a council for higher education?
Who defined the function and the goals of this CHE-JS? The IDF? The Council itself?
Who are the members of the CHE-JS and who appointed them?
Who in Israel decided and when was it decided to recognize the degrees granted by the CHE-JS?
What is the past, present and future relationship between Bar Ilan and CJS?

It would be stretching the concept of academic freedom a bit to include the right to set up and sponsor an ‘institution of higher learning’ in occupied territory.

Letter from Jerusalem

Though George Bush has been forced by a host of factors to abandon his ‘hands off ’policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this does not mean that the United States is even considering using its power and prestige to advance a solution to this ongoing crisis. Instead of serious engagement and the mobilization of its influence, the Bush administration has opted for a policy of ‘low intensity diplomacy’. The U.S. was obliged, in the face of wide international feeling that there is a chance for making progress towards a settlement, to show increased interest. However, the United States continues to avoid really necessary steps that would effect a real change. Low intensity diplomacy can be recognized by a flurry of important people traveling back and forth discussing everything and anything and deciding absolutely nothing about the real problems.

Sharon’s Gaza Disengagement Plan (GDP) was conceived in order to block genuine negotiations. It’s a classic ‘filler’ and designed to help the United States cover its ‘do nothing policy.’ We witnessed a new demonstration of this situation this week with the publication of the Sasson report. The report, ordered quite a while back by Sharon at the insistence of the U.S. government, could not come at a worse time for those who initiated it. In simple words, the report confirms that Israeli government and the IDF occupying army, employing almost every illegal subterfuge in the book, have been intensively engaged in massive and illegal settlement action. This involves the further wholesale theft of broad stretches of the remaining tiny and truncated sections of Palestinian territory – in addition to the considerable tracts of territory grabbed by the infamous security wall. The Israeli government, with the tacit connivance of the United States, has been liquidating and pulverizing the territorial foundations of the future Palestinian state, despite Bush’s ‘vision’ and new promises from Washington that the Palestinian state would be contiguous…

The devastating content of this official report ordered by the Israeli government would seem to require some sort of reaction from Washington, if only to prevent the low flame on the back burner from dying for lack of sufficient oxygen. However, Condi Rice and others speaking for Bush, declared that it is advisable to concentrate right now on the more ‘dramatic’ events linked to the Gaza Disengagement Plan. In this, our newfound ‘drama critic’ joins the ranks of those who hide between the ‘one thing at a time’, plea - when that one thing is helping them buy time. The Sasson report is worth a special meeting of the UN Security Council to discuss the ongoing blatant acts of aggression against peace and the future of the Palestinian people. This is what is needed to impress all concerned with the urgency of the situation.

Those ‘in the know’ don’t really need a Security Council session to know that Abu Mazen and the renewed peace process are living on borrowed time. However, Bush and Sharon are not willing to proceed with the peace process until they are convinced that Abu Mazen has sold out and will sign on for the ‘temporary Palestinian state’ project.’ Most indicators, at this stage, are that though Abu Mazen is playing the U.S. game, he has not joined the U.S. team. As a matter of fact, there is every reason to continue to hold that neither Abu Mazen nor any other conceivable Palestinian leader could agree to a settlement less satisfactory to the Palestinians than the one agreed to – in broad lines – by Yasser Arafat.

Sharon and Bush are playing for time. But time gives the radical Islamisists political and strategic breathing space. Politically, this will enable them to convince their public that Bush and Sharon are leading the Palestinians up a blind alley. Strategically, this will enable them to renew resources and recruitment and also convince sections of the Fatah grass roots armies to join them. When violence returns to the scene, Sharon will ask how anyone can expect him to negotiate in such conditions and Bush will explain why Sharon is taking the only reasonable and consistent stand possible against terror. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of plain people in Gaza used the lull in the fighting to demonstrate for food and jobs.