On Nov. 1 I attended a guest lecture by a Dr. Mitchell Bard that was put on by the Oregon Hillel in conjunction with the Jewish Student Union. The lecture was entitled “Eyewitness to the Disengagement – Israel after Gaza: The Next Step Towards Peace.” I attended this lecture expecting a thoughtful and, I hoped, balanced account of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict with a focus on the recent withdrawal of Israeli settlements and troops from the Gaza strip area of Israel/Palestine. Instead, I was greeted with speaker who quite preposterously blamed the conflict entirely upon Palestinian “Muslim Jihad extremists” (a phrase that he went on to equate to some 1.2 million Muslims) and gave very little mention of the Gaza pullout itself.
The Middle East peace process has been a topic that I have a great interest in, and I have gone to great lengths to read both sides of the argument, and have come to realize that the conflict is one that goes both ways. Dr. Bard was clearly not of this opinion. His lecture included great praise for the staunchest of Israel’s hawks, such as Ariel Sharon, and the harshest of criticisms for Palestinians and their late leader Yasser Arafat. Bard painted Arafat as nothing more than “a corrupt war criminal,” while refusing to answer a question posed to him immediately after the lecture as to current Israel prime minister Ariel Sharon’s responsibility for the Qibya massacre whilst serving as a commander in the Israel Defense Forces.
All the more troublesome was Dr. Bard’s claim that he, like Israel, “knew” and “understood” Arabs, and he went on to falsely equate Iranians to Arabs (most are in fact Persian in ethnicity) and demonstrated a very shallow knowledge of Arab history and psychology as a whole, especially in his dismissal of the Lebanese political organization Hezbollah. Hezbollah, while responsible for terrorist acts, plays a much greater role in the Middle East by building schools, hospitals and infrastructure for needy Arabs, and operates as a political party much like Sinn Fein effectively operates as the political wing of the IRA in Northern Ireland.
Bard’s inability to see things outside of black and white terms is truly troubling and hardly makes him a very sympathetic or informative speaker; indeed, he came across as little more than an out-and-out Israel advocate with a very one-sided understanding of the overall conflict.
After listening to Dr. Bard, it came as no surprise to me to discover that Dr. Bard is affiliated with the Jewish advocacy organization known as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which follows the policy of advocacy for unlimited financial and political support for Israel on the part of the United States regardless of the direction of policies taken by the Israeli state. AIPAC goes to great lengths to keep voting records for and to politically attack and destroy any member of the U.S. Congress that deviates in any way from AIPAC’s tightly held beliefs. AIPAC as an organization has been dismissive of any scholarship upon Israel that equates the conflict with being in any way multisided.
Dr. Bard expressed the official line of rhetoric put forward by AIPAC with absolutely no deviation. Interestingly, I have heard that in AIPAC’s charter is a constraint placed upon AIPAC members to not debate Israel’s policy, as doing so is “divisive.” Thus the underlying problem with AIPAC is that it is an organization that would seek to exclude a healthy debate upon the topic of Middle East peace, a topic that requires a multitude of perspectives to be expressed in order for a solution to ever be reached.
There was an utter lack of any attempt at evenhandedness at any time during the lecture and I feel this in the end misses the point of holding such a lecture, which is to seek a peaceful solution to the Middle East crisis. I believe that the fault with this resides with Hillel and the JSU. Both organizations should realize the necessity for a balanced viewpoint upon the conflict if the conflict is ever to be solved, and it is shocking that they would so actively put forward so narrow-minded a speaker. I would call upon both Hillel and the JSU to be more thoughtful in selecting future speakers on a topic that truly deserves a thoughtful and evenhanded presentation.
Alexander Deley majors in history and political science at the University.