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Hatred: Coming Soon to a Campus Near You

(Jerusalem Post) Dore Gold - Anti-Israel hatred on campus crests each year during an event called Israel Apartheid Week. With this ominous name and programs that thrive on ignorance and blind disregard for the facts, tens of thousands of college students are urged to rise up against Israel - painfully evoking the types of racist characterizations of the Jewish people which defined attitudes once heard in Europe in the middle of the last century. This year's display will come to a campus near you before the end of February. Typically, those hurling these charges against Israel hope their audiences are ignorant of the facts. In apartheid South Africa, blacks were not allowed to use white hospitals, they could not attend white universities and they could not participate in the South African parliament. Visit Hadassah Medical Center today, or any other health facility in Israel, and see Jewish and Arab doctors caring for Jewish and Arab patients. Witness for yourself at Hebrew University or any institution of higher learning as Jewish and Arab professors teach students of different backgrounds. Go to the Knesset, and observe the debates involving both Jewish and Arab parliamentarians. Given this reality, Justice Richard Goldstone, a former judge on the South African Supreme Court, wrote in The New York Times on October 31, 2011: "The charge that Israel is an apartheid state is a false and malicious one that precludes, rather than promotes, peace and harmony." Goldstone, it should be remembered, did not have a problem criticizing Israeli policies in the aftermath of its 2008-2009 military operation in Gaza. But when it came to calling Israel an apartheid state like the old South Africa, with which he was intimately familiar, he firmly rejected the charge, which was completely divorced from the reality of modern Israel. No nation has fought racism more consistently than the Jewish people. The Jewish state was founded on the very same moral outlook, reflecting the Jewish value of "Tikkun Olam," or repairing the world, which is deeply held across the Jewish religious spectrum. When Israeli medical teams rushed to international disaster zones in Turkey (1999), Kosovo (1999), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (2008), and Haiti (2010), helping the afflicted regardless of their race or creed, they were driven by the very same core Jewish value. The writer is president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, a former ambassador to the UN and a former senior adviser to the prime minister.
2012-02-23 00:00:00
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