What’s the harm in a postponed lecture?
The British Museum in London has postponed, at short notice, a lecture on ancient Jewish history which was to have been given by Paul Collins, the museum’s keeper of the Department of the Middle East, after it became known that ‘a significant proportion’ of those registered to attend were intending to disrupt the lecture. The lecture would have adduced archaeological evidence to show that a Jewish kingdom existed in Palestine well before the Islamic presence, giving the lie to the assertion that Jews were late-coming interlopers in the land who displaced the indigenous Arab people.
The point here is not to become embroiled in a scholarly disputation but to show how unprepared modern Israel has been for the intellectual war now being waged against Diaspora Jews. This is a war on several fronts. As things stand, the threat to disrupt the lecture has succeeded, and the voice of truth has effectively been silenced. The violence of the disrupters is no longer confined to attacks on Jewish institutions but has spilled over into a respected British establishment, an augury, perhaps, of things to come.
The latest assault on academia is an attempt to sever the historic link between ancient and modern Israel by silencing the voice of scholarship which demonstrates that link, and it has succeeded in doing this by intimidatory means. To some extent, the leaders of modern Israel are partly responsible for defeats like this on the scholarly front. For decades, they have seen the Diaspora only as a source of ‘Aliyah’, not as a community of Jews with a unique history of its own and an important moral and ethical standard-bearer. Diaspora Jews have always been urged to see Israel as the only safe haven for Jews and to forego the false paradise of Diaspora life.
Understandably, Israel’s focus has been on its own internal struggles and on the unceasing military threat to its survival emanating from its long-standing enemies in the Middle East. Unfortunately, the iniquitous acts of Israel’s extremist leaders being visited on Arab communities, many of which are under Israeli jurisdiction, have alienated many Jews, who easily fall in line with ‘either-or’ propagandists who vilify Israel and call for a Palestinian state in which Jewish Israel will play no part. A small army of Jews now dissociates itself from Israel and identifies with Palestine. These Jews fail to understand what the destruction of Israel would mean for their own destiny.
Ignorance of history is a wonderful seed-bed for propaganda. Often repeated slogans readily take root and spread to ineradicable proportions, especially in the absence of historical facts that tell the truth. Antisemites have gleefully discovered this and have worked assiduously to propagate myths that portray the Jews as a foreign body lodged in the soul of the Arab people. Only those who have been steeped in Jewish history are equipped to challenge such assumptions, and they are alarmingly few in number.
So the postponement of a scholarly lecture at the British Museum, whether out of care to preserve a secure forum for debate or out of cowardice, signals the collapse of a platform from which the truth can be enunciated and provides yet another victory for forces hostile to Israel who know how to mine public sympathy. The way forward is to face down such intellectual thuggery and, beyond that, to educate the wider populace in the facts. There is an indissoluble link between Israel and Judaism, as only a study of Jewish history through the ages can reveal.
