Friday, August 20, 2010

Gabriel and I Debate on JSF (Six Months Ago)

This may be old, but it's news to me. I just found out that a debate I had in the comment section of one post on "Jews sans frontieres" in January was reproduced in another post a month later. I don't know whether to see this as a compliment or an insult. Did Gabriel see this as an interesting debate with someone who has interesting arguments that make for fertile discussion despite his disagreement with me, or is he using me as an example for Zionist ignorance and racism? I'd like to think it's the former.

I find one this curious (emphasis mine):

"When [the video] was published on JSF, I was challenged by Emmanuel Shiff, apparently a student from the Hebrew (colonial) University, about my criticism of the Israeli peace movement."
Why would he assume (wrongly, by the way) that I'm from Hebrew University? There are, after all, seven universities in Israel, five of them with political science departments.

Though it isn't my university, I'll defend it anyway. Yes, the Mount Scopus Campus of Hebrew U is in East Jerusalem, but the campus was founded in 1925, before the 1948 War, and remained Israeli territory even between 1949 and 1967, when it was an Israeli enclave sorrounded by Jordanian-controlled territory.

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