The Planned Palestinian Invasion of the University

David Collier

The university campus is becoming increasingly hostile to both Jews and Israel. From what I have witnessed and experienced, it is no side effect, but rather part of a deliberate and well-planned strategy. We are witnessing an entry operation.

In March, in the period around “Israeli Apartheid week,” I attended an impressive one-day conference at the London School of Economics. It was jointly organized by “Olive,” “FOSIS,” and “Friends of Al-Aqsa.” The event was titled “From Johannesburg to Jerusalem.” One of the speakers was Max Blumenthal, who got on stage to present various conspiracy theories, compare Israel to ISIS and to praise Hamas.

The university pull factor

During the event, there were two workshops held. One that was of particular interest went about explaining how to create and promote Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns on campus. The strategy was broken down into seven parts. The most important was persuading your university to create a scholarship for Palestinians. This is what was said:

The best people to lead a group or society on campus are Palestinians. There is no one who can articulate better to you the realities of occupation and who can make that argument better. To get Palestinians on campus, from the Gaza Strip, from the West Bank and from Israel, what you need is to convince your university to set up scholarships. That requires lobbying, and that requires organizing and that can also come in the form of fundraising every year.

At Sheffield, we get a fee waiver ever year for a Palestinian student. Then we have to fundraise for accommodation and living. Although actually now the university pays for that as well, originally we had to do so. But what that actually meant was that you could build up long relationships with academics who pay standing orders and you build up a network of individuals to contribute towards your scholarship.

So that is the “pull” factor. I am sure that when they lobby the university for the scholarship, they plead humanitarian concern. They stress the necessity of saving the student from the “oppressive and brutal occupation.” In reality, they are lobbying to persuade the university to finance their political cause. Whichever way you consider this, people on this side are actively seeking new recruits from “Palestine” to promote BDS. Then they ask the university to pay for it.

The university push factor

But I wondered at the time about the “push.” Who are these students? Are they Palestinians from Gaza lucky to be given a life-changing opportunity? Or is there a deliberate “push” factor, where Palestinian movements have created a network carefully selecting potential candidates, assisting them in their application and training them prior to their departure?

It would be an astonishing miss if this is not the reality. The Palestinian cause on this side is desperate to lobby for the scholarship. They have a specific goal in mind. Are they going to do all this work, go to all this trouble, only to find they end up with a Palestinian who isn’t capable of presenting their case? Consider Gaza, given that Hamas has control over the propaganda there. Is Hamas selecting or filtering the applicants? Are our university funds being used to further the Hamas cause?

Meet Hazem Al-zatma. Hazem wants to study at Swansea University. Hazem is from Rafah in Gaza and has apparently applied for a scholarship at Swansea. On his Twitter feed is a Tweet saying, “I am still waiting for an official reply and I think it is ‘Yes’ according to my friend who phoned them. I hope I can join you all [at] the nice family of Swansea University.”

If you hyphenate his surname and replace the “A” with an “E,” you find out Hazem is also a freelance translator. You also find he is an online activist. Sometimes he just drops the “Al” and the hyphen altogether. This is Hazem Zatma”s Google page. Hazem raised £170 using online crowdfunding towards his Swansea University education under the captivating title: “Send Refugee to University For Masters.” According to a site called “translator scammers,” Hazem tends to change his name quite frequently.

The problem, however, is far larger than one name-changing translator from Rafah.

Rawan Yaghi was a student at Gaza’s Islamic University, and she won a scholarship to Oxford University to study linguistics and Italian. The BBC ran a story about how “students at Oxford’s Jesus College will pay some of the cost of Rawan’s studies.” The anti-Israel site Mondoweiss published a story about how Rawan was a Mondoweiss contributor. Rawan also ran a blog called weresist. You can also see her in a video promoting #BDS. No surprise, then, that in a recent interview, Rawan suggested “she is planning to be involved in the BDS campaign.” The person who organized the campaign to assist in Rawan’s scholarship-funding was activist Emily Dreyfus. Both Daphne Anson and BBC Watch picked up this story at the time.

We clearly have an example here of an activist in the UK, bringing over an activist Palestinian, who then furthers the “Palestinian cause” once her position here was secured. This was described as a deliberate strategy in the workshop at LSE.

Now, is it systemic?

Full circle

Meet Malaka Mohammed. In 2013, Malaka was given a scholarship by Sheffield University. Malaka raised almost £5,000 towards additional expenses. While still at university in Gaza, Malaka successfully implemented the first BDS campaign. Clearly an activist, she is now on her way to Sheffield — the same university that was specifically mentioned in the workshop I participated in; the one that was persuaded to provide a scholarship to Palestinians to promote BDS.

Now meet Malaka in 2014, just one year later. There was a workshop called “Confronting Israeli Apartheid: Building the Student Movement for Palestine” taking place at Sheffield. Like the one I attended, this was about spreading BDS on campus. Malaka, who was now “Education Officer at Sheffield University Students’ Union,” was one of the speakers. Her topic included “Palestine scholarship campaigns.”

Malaka has come full circle.

Standing next to Malaka on the platform was Goldsmiths University’s then-education officer Sarah El-alfy, best remembered for leading the campaign to reject a Holocaust memorial day. Another on the platform was Juman Asmail, a Palestinian student activist from the university of Southampton. Juman co-founded Southampton Students for Palestine. She was also instrumental in breeding discomfort across the UK Jewish community as one of the driving forces behind the failed anti-Israel conference at Southampton.

Not just Sheffield

The University of Durham has a page dedicated to the “Durham Palestine Educational Trust.” It lists those students granted scholarships in recent years. Diana Alzeer was there until 2013. Prior to her arrival, Diana was already an activist and co-produced a video diary called Sleepless in Gaza and Jerusalem. In 2013 she appeared at a Palestine Solidarity Campaign event at SOAS. Nada Nabris is from the same year group, and along with Alzeer promoted Palestinian activism on campus and raised money to pay for further scholarships. Others, such as Tahani Abu Shaban, also raised money for the same cause. Tahani’s Twitter page leaves no doubt about her sentiments, with a Tweet stating that “Israel surpassed Hitler in barbarism.”

Tahani worked with Hamas-infested UNRWA in Gaza, but what is suspicious is that her Twitter feed became active on the subject of the conflict, in English, just a few months before she arrived in the UK. This provides some indication that some of the students may be being primed in Gaza before they leave. And just so Durham’s class of 2014 isn’t left out, the entire group — Basma Al Hadad, Saba Fadda and Reem Jodeh — can be seen here protesting the conflict and pushing BDS on their local high street.

All over the country

I spent much of February going to events that demonized Israel and pushed BDS. In all of these events there were Palestinian students, many of them here on scholarships. Many of these students are now doing the job that they were expected to do: furthering the cause, creating a case so that even more Palestinian scholarships can be created. This isn’t about one or two universities anymore. At St Andrews, a scholarship program was created for Palestinians, called STEPS. They welcomed their first student in about 2012, and by 2013 they were cancelling pro-Israel events because of protests. There are scores of universities that receive indirect funding through outlets such as the “Said Foundation” – Birmingham, Cambridge, East Anglia, Essex, Exeter, Glasgow, Goldsmiths, Kings, UCL, Leeds, Leicester, LSE, Loughborough, Nottingham, Oxford, Oxford Brookes, Holloway, SOAS, Southampton, Sussex and Warwick. There are also the HESPAL Scholarships, 22 each year, spread across the UK. The list is almost endless.

Kings, the university now remembered for the violent protest against a meeting about Jewish peace initiatives, has KCL Action Palestine, who, like good BDS activists, “succesfully achieved a scholarship system for a Palestinian student in 2008.“ Or take Amal Nazzal at Exeter. She arrived on a HESPAL scholarship. Now she teaches at Exeter and includes BDS examples in a lecture during a marketing module. This particularly unethical method of subliminal conditioning is widespread. While I was at Birkbeck, the Lecturer in Law, a BDS activist, used Gaza protests as one of the examples we needed to study in the section on police powers. Nazzal also writes on the conflict at outlets such as Middle East Monitor. She writes of “Israeli colonization and apartheid” and is now free to lecture a whole generation of British students.

A clear victory for the BDS strategy

This isn’t an exercise in careful selection. I could have expanded this research from days into weeks, uncovering more and more evidence under almost every single stone. This is a blatant BDS strategy that they openly advertise and propagate. Consider this: almost every NGO contacted in the exercise I reported about safety conditions in “Palestine” instructed the volunteers how to behave when they returned home. There are information booklets given to ex-volunteers about how to become an activist. Does anyone really believe that those Palestinians awarded scholarships do not undergo similar instruction? Or taking it to a level higher, that those best suited for international activism are not actively pushed towards scholarships? These students are highly politicized and many come as soldiers on a mission. They walk into a university campus that is simply not prepared or capable of dealing with them. There is no comparable “opposing army.”

This is a strategic infiltration of our academic space. Why is there so much money being invested in one specific nationality, when clearly there are far more deserving cases worldwide? Worse still, these scholarships, if utilized by activists, contribute to a worsening and deepening of the conflict. Is it a coincidence that so many of these scholarships are being awarded to students who were already activists before they came? These students most certainly contribute to a deteriorating situation within the UK. How many, just how many, of the Palestinian students standing up on campus, pushing propaganda, alienating the British Jewish students and demonizing the only free state in the entire Middle East, are here on scholarships? How many? And this isn’t just in the UK. If this is a BDS strategy, then it is likely happening everywhere.

The government has a duty to act

I have nothing against the students or scholarships set up to further student education and opportunity. However, the government has clearly stated it believes there is a connection between BDS activity and antisemitism on campus and that BDS “undermines good community relations.” We can now see there is a deliberate and intricate network that intends to bring foreign students over to the UK with the intent to create such an atmosphere on campus and strengthen BDS. We also know that they chase university funding under the flag of humanitarian concern. These scholarships are funding antisemitism.

These students are not British, and they are being imported with the specific aim of increasing the strain on community relations. Their actions fuel the rise in antisemitism against UK Jewry. The government has a clear duty to act quickly to protect its own citizens. Therefore, this practice has to be stopped. The government has to intervene to ensure that it does. If humanitarian concern is the primary purpose behind these scholarships, then simply suggest that while they are here they should refrain from political activity that unsettles UK citizens, such as BDS. Make it a condition of their sponsorship.

After all, if education is really the primary goal, why would anyone object to such a proposal?

David Collier has been writing about Israel for 18 years and blogs from ‘Beyond the Great Divide’. He spends much of his time inside the BDS camp, and is researching antizionist forces inside the university campus.

Deir Yassin: another picture worth a thousand lies

Petra Marquardt-Bigman

English: Aftermath of the British bombing raid of 3 and 4 April 1945 that destroyed the Boelcke-Kaserne (Boelcke Barracks) located in the south-east of the town of Nordhausen and killed around 1300 inmates. The barracks was a subcamp of the en:Mittelbau-Dora Nazi concentration camp. Used as an overflow camp for sick and dying inmates from January 1945, numbers rose from a few hundred to over 6000, and the conditions saw up to 100 inmates die every day.

עברית: שורות של גופות מאות אסירים בחצר מחצה הריכוז נורדהאוזן. בתמונה נראות פחות ממחצית הגופות של האסירים שמתו ברעב או ביריות אנשי הגסטפו.

Italiano: File di cadaveri di prigionieri riempiono il cortile del lager di Nordhausen, un campo di concentramento dalla Gestapo.

Last week, some people on Twitter were marking the anniversary of the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre in which about 100 Palestinian villagers were killed by Irgun and Lehi forces. Among the widely shared pictures that were supposedly showing the aftermath of the massacre, I noticed one that seemed suspicious: despite the photo’s low resolution, one could make out rather large buildings that would have been unusual in a small Arab village at the time; moreover, the buildings looked heavily damaged – again something that didn’t quite fit with the weapons available to the Irgun and Lehi fighters – and it also seemed that some of the bodies were clad in the kind of striped prisoner clothing known from pictures of Nazi concentration camps.

It was hardly surprising to see individuals like former Hamas health minister Basem Naim – who is not averse to circulating misappropriated images to demonize Israel – promoting such a questionable photo. But I soon discovered that the Egyptian English-language Ahram Online also featured this image as the first in a photo gallery on “Deir Yassin – An Israeli massacre in Palestine 68 years ago.”

Ahram identified the source of the image as the Palestinian information center (PIC) website; and sure enough, a search on the site turned up a 2015 article on “Deir Yassin: Unforgettable Massacre” that includes this photo and, incidentally, exaggerates the death toll: “Hundreds of Palestinian women, children, and elderly were killed.” So apparently, PIC wants its audience to believe that Irgun and Lehi were careful not to kill any men in their prime, let alone any Palestinian fighters.

PIC is a site set up first in 1997; it is available in multiple languages and “aims to promote awareness about Palestine, the Palestinians and the Palestinian issue and to balance the often distorted picture presented in the mainstream media;” PIC also claims to be “the voice of the Palestinian people and their long struggle for justice.”

Pity that this “voice of the Palestinian people” is resorting to cheap “Pallywood”-style propaganda.

To be sure, Pallywood propaganda works: when I used a screenshot of the photo for an image search, Google promptly suggested that the most likely match was the Deir Yassin massacre. Only when I searched for the image adding “Nazi camps” I got as the top result a Ha’aretz book review from December 2014 that was illustrated with the same image captioned: “Rows of bodies fill the yard of the Boelcke Barracks, a subcamp of the Mittelbau-Dora Nazi concentration camp. Credit: Wikicommons / T4c. James E Myers.”

The Wikicommons image can be found here; its description reads: “Aftermath of the British bombing raid of 3 and 4 April 1945 that destroyed the Boelcke-Kaserne (Boelcke Barracks) located in the south-east of the town of Nordhausen and killed around 1300 inmates. The barracks was a subcamp of the en:Mittelbau-Dora Nazi concentration camp. Used as an overflow camp for sick and dying inmates from January 1945, numbers rose from a few hundred to over 6000, and the conditions saw up to 100 inmates die every day.”

Continuing my search, I confirmed another suspicion: the tireless blogger Elder of Ziyon had already dealt with the misappropriation of this image, which he discovered three years ago when Omid Safi, a professor of Islamic Studies at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, used the photo to illustrate a blog post on the Deir Yassin massacre. As Elder of Ziyon noted in an update, Safi eventually removed the photo and replaced it with another one – which again has apparently nothing to do with Deir Yassin, but is most likely taken from the Sabra and Shatila massacres committed by Lebanese Christian Phalangists in September 1982. Needless to say, also this image remains popular as supposedly showing the aftermath of the Deir Yassin massacre; indeed, an apparently related image is also included (#10) in the Ahram Online gallery.

It is perhaps no wonder that Arabs and Palestinians keep claiming that Israelis and Jews fake their own history – whether it’s evidence of ancient Jewish roots in the historic Land of Israel or evidence of the genocide committed against Europe’s Jews. After all, as amply documented, Palestinians and their supporters do it all the time, and they quite obviously don’t feel that it is somehow undignified to use either fabricated or misappropriated images to promote their narrative of almost unfathomable Israeli and Zionist evil. Personally, I find it particularly pathetic when this is done even in instances like the Deir Yassin massacre, where lying would seem to add little, since it really is a stain on Israel’s record in the fighting that was part of the war of independence.

But there is no denying that this utter lack of honesty and integrity has gained widespread acceptance and indeed even academic approval. Courtesy of the notorious anti-Israel group “Jewish Voice for Peace,” we learnt recently that “dozens of respected Palestinian, Israeli, and American academics” are vigorously protesting a “shocking and outrageous act of censorship of the Palestinian narrative from US schoolbooks.” The “Palestinian narrative” that is being so ruthlessly ‘censored’ is reflected in a series of maps that supposedly document Israel’s take-over of “Palestinian” land, but the maps have been shown to be completely misleading, and as one critic put it, the academics who want them taught arguably “shouldn’t be in academia.”

Perhaps the academics who demand that US college students should be taught from textbooks that feature misleading maps demonizing Israel would also see no problem with using an image from a Nazi concentration camp to illustrate the “Palestinian narrative” of the massacre at Deir Yassin. What’s wrong with exaggerating the death toll and destruction at Deir Yassin – or anywhere else, as long as Palestinians feel it promotes their “narrative” of victimization at the hands of Israel?

Needless to say, the notion that subjective “narratives” should not be scrutinized, but instead be accepted as somehow equivalent to factual reality is fashionable beyond the Arab-Israeli conflict and reflects broader intellectual trends (or some might say, broader intellectual decline). But even at a time when it is fashionable to assert that there are no objective facts, it remains a fact that the photo that is so popular as an image of the Deir Yassin massacre is actually – in fact – a photo of a bombed Nazi concentration camp. There is also the telling fact that the Palestinian information center decided to promote this image as documenting the Deir Yassin massacre. It was most definitely a successful deception: Google believed it; Ahram Online believed it; and countless social media users are continuing to promote the image year after year.

Before long, there may be dozens of “respected” academics who will demand that this image should be featured in US textbooks to teach students about the Deir Yassin massacre. After all, if the Palestinians feel that this image adequately conveys what happened at Deir Yassin, it’s part of their legitimate “narrative,” right? And maybe the activists who marked the Deir Yassin massacre at a demonstration in Jerusalem by reading the names of the victims could in the future add the names of the victims of the bombing of the Boelcke Barracks? It would be more than ten times as many – so it would be more dramatic, and since facts don’t matter, anything goes, right?

Petra Marquardt-Bigman is a politically homeless lapsed leftist who can’t get used to living in a time when the Nazi slogan “The Jews are our misfortune” is considered quite acceptable in its 21st century version “The Jewish state is our misfortune.” She therefore writes mostly about antisemitism, anti-Israel activism and BDS, i.e. Bigoted Double Standards. She grew up in Germany and has a Ph.D. in contemporary history.

In first, US army uses Iron Dome to down drone

A Tamir missile fired from the Iron Dome missile defense battery during a trial in the United States in April, 2016. (Rafael Advanced Defense Systems)

Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system successfully intercepted an unmanned drone in the United States earlier this week, in the battery’s first-ever trial on foreign soil.

The US military fired Tamir missiles, the projectiles used in Iron Dome batteries, to successfully down the unmanned aerial vehicle.

According to Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, the state-owned company that developed the advanced missile defense systems, the Tamir missile successfully struck and destroyed the target drone.

The trial was conducted by Rafael together with Raytheon, a major American defense contractor and the world’s largest producer of guided missiles.

Rafael quoted the head of the US army’s interceptor program, Lt.-Col. Michael Fitzgerald, as saying the test was part of a larger process of selecting potential air defense systems to be used by the US. So far, the Iron Dome technology has not been sold to foreign militaries.

In 2014, Raytheon won an Israeli contract to supply $149.3 million in Tamir missiles.

Raytheon and Rafael are also jointly developing the Stunner missile that will be used in Israel’s medium-range David’s Sling missile defense system.

The Iron Dome system was jointly developed and funded by the US. It is credited by the IDF with shooting down over 700 rockets from Gaza that were headed for Israeli population centers, a “kill ratio” of about 85-90 percent of the total rockets fired at population centers. (Most of the 4,500 rockets fired from Gaza fell in uninhabited areas in Israel or, in some cases, inside Gaza.)

The threat of attack drones launched towards Israel has in recent years become palpable, with Hezbollah making several attempts to fly unmanned aerial vehicles into Israel. Hamas in the Gaza Strip also tried to fly UAVs into Israeli territory, but the aircraft either were intercepted before managing to fly deep into Israeli airspace or crashed inside the Gaza Strip.

Last year, Rafael released footage of the Iron Dome successfully intercepting a drone for the first time.