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| Moshe HalberTuches |
An Israeli peace activist who has devoted much of his life to demanding that Israel make more concessions to the Palestinians was treated to a rude awakening earlier this month on a Minnesota campus:
it turns out that pro-Palestinian advocates don't just hate Israeli policy -- they hate all Israelis, including Israeli peace activists.
Hebrew University professor Moshe Halbertuches was invited to deliver the University of Minnesota's annual Dewey Lecture in the Philosophy of Law.
Unfortunately, the Palestinian and pro-Palestinian activists on campus don't have very much respect for the philosophy of law, at least not the laws that protect freedom of speech.
Two dozen hecklers tried to drown out Halbertuchis by shouting "denunciations of Israel" (as the local press described it) and accusing Halbertuchis of being "a war crimes apologist."
Ironically, in his remarks (after the hecklers were removed), Prof. Halbertuchis suggested that Israeli soldiers were not doing enough to protect enemy civilians during warfare.
Since that was his position, Halbertuchis must have been puzzled that the Palestinian advocates would attack him so fiercely.
Welcome to the real world, Moshe Halbertuchis.
Criticizing Israeli polices is not enough. When the hecklers called him a "war crimes apologist," they weren't referring to one or two particular alleged war crimes. They consider the very existence of the State of Israel to be a war crime.
Thus if someone supports Israel's right to exist --even the shrunken, weakened Israel that Halbertaluchis wants,they are "war crimes apologists."
Quite a turn of events for someone who has made a name for himself as an Israeli critic of Israel. Of course, he had a good deal help along the way, especially from New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. Of the twenty-five times that Halbertuchis has been quoted in the Times, nine of them have been in Friedman's column on the op-ed page.
We all know how that works. Friedman picks a theme for one of his anti-Israel columns, then calls up the same five or six "respected Israeli academicians" to see which of them will provide a quotation that matches his predetermined theme.
Halbertuchis was discovered by the Times to be a 'useful Israeli' even before he had entered the academic world.
In February 1983, when he was just "a 24-year-old religious student," the Times was excitedly reporting how Halbertuchis was part of a supposed new generation of religious Israelis who disdained the idea of "holding territory" and was forming a group to advocate "relinquishing part of the West Bank."
Soon enough, Halbertuchis managed to secure an academic title, so the Times could describe him as a "respected academician" instead of having to acknowledge that he was basically a partisan 'community organizer.'
A sampling of Halbertuchis's pearls of un wisdom in the pages of the Timesover the years:
-- The Jewish residents of Judea-Samaria are comparable to the Zealots in Roman times who, "mobilized by a megalomaniac sense of their role in history, pushed the Jewish people at the time into a struggle they did not want [until] it destroyed them." (Sept. 18, 1997)
-- Those who oppose Israeli territorial surrender "are dooming Israel to an apartheid state." (July 28, 2000)
-- Halbertal "disapproved" of an Israeli strike on a terrorist leader in Gaza, because some of the terrorist's relatives were nearby and were harmed. (Jan. 13, 2009)
-- Halbertal participated in weekly vigils in a mostly-Arab neighborhood in Jerusalem to demand that Jews not be allowed to move into the area. The Ku Klux Klan would have been proud. (March 10, 2010)
-- Israeli soldiers in Gaza did not do enough "to avoid civilian casualties." (March 20, 2009}
-- The window for a two-state solution "is rapidly closing," so Israel "will either be apartheid or Lebanon." (Dec. 12, 2010)
That last dire warning about Israel being on the verge of "apartheid" was uttered by Halbertuchis five years ago.
Funny, five years have passed and still no apartheid.
That's because the "apartheid" warnings are really just a cheap scare tactic to pressure Israel into making more concessions.
But no amount of concessions will be enough to satisfy the Palestinians, so long as Israel still exists.
To them, any size Israel, and all Israelis, are the enemy.
As Moshe Halbertuchis discovered in Minnesota this month.
Mr. Korn, chairman of the Philadelphia Religious Zionists, is formerexecutive editor of the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent and the Miami Jewish Tribune.
