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The British Boycott of Haifa University is Based on a Libel

(Wall Street Journal) Fania Oz-Salzberger - The University of Haifa - a model Jewish-Arab institution - was declared untouchable by the British Association of University Teachers over the case of Dr. Ilan Pappe, an anti-Zionist scholar of great political energies who has been calling for a boycott of his own university, for several years. Pappe is the unofficial mentor of graduate student Teddy Katz, whose Master's thesis claimed to document a massacre of 200 unarmed civilians by the Haganah (the pre-state army of Israel) at a village called Tantura, near Haifa. When veterans of the Israeli army force that attacked Tantura sued Katz for libel, an Israeli district court ruled that the empirical evidence was grossly manipulated in the course of transliterating the tapes. Katz had put words in the mouths of his interviewees that were never uttered, and he agreed to apologize to the veterans. All this seems to have escaped the fact-finding capabilities of our British colleagues. The writer is senior lecturer in the School of History and the Faculty of Law at the University of Haifa.
2005-05-09 00:00:00
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