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Speakers who have been featured in recent months—and one who is slated to talk in January—have promoted anti-Israel libels.
By: Moshe Phillips
One of Great Britain’s most prominent institutes for the study of anti-Semitism is quickly turning into a home for extreme Israel-bashers.
When the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism was created at the University of London in 2010, there was great hope that it would live up to its declared mission of promoting research and teaching to combat “anti-Semitism, racialization and religious intolerance.” The public had no reason to doubt the institute, which was originally named after its founder, the Pears Foundation, would live up to its mission “to promote genuine advances in the understanding of complex issues.”
Instead, sadly, speakers who have been featured at Birkbeck in recent months—and one who is slated to talk in January—have fostered misunderstanding and worse by promoting anti-Israel libels.
On Jan. 14, Birkbeck will host professor Omer Bartov of Brown University. Bartov has become infamous in recent months for claiming that Israel is committing “genocide” against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. His announcement for the Bartov lecture says he will speak about how Zionism has become “an ideology of ethno-nationalism, exclusion and domination of Palestinians.”
Let’s be clear: Bartov’s problem is not what is happening in Gaza. His problem is Israel’s very existence. He has been bashing Israel long before the Hamas terror attacks on Oct. 7. Back in August 2023—more than two months before Israeli troops even entered Gaza—he was one of the organizers of a protest letter accusing Israel of conspiring to “ethnically cleanse all territories under Israeli rule of their Palestinian population.” The letter was featured by anti-Israel publications throughout the world. And he has a long record of similar pronouncements.
Another recent speaker at the Birkbeck Institute was Harvard professor Derek Penslar. In an interview with the London Jewish Chronicle on March 14, 2013, Penslar asserted: “What happened to the Palestinians [in 1948] wasn’t genocide. It was ethnic cleansing.” Writing in Fathom in April 2021, Penslar accused Israel of “perpetuat[ing] oppression, resistance, and hatred.”
On Aug. 4, 2023, Penslar signed a petition which slandered Israel as a country of “apartheid” and “Jewish supremacism.” He and his fellow-signatories also libeled Israel’s government as “a regime of apartheid,” and called on the Biden administration to “restrict American military aid from being used in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.”
Penslar’s opposition to U.S. aid goes much further than the Biden administration’s withholding of some bombs from Israel over its actions in the Gaza city of Rafah. He wants to restrict all American military aid to Israel from being used anywhere in the territories that the Palestinian Arabs claim—not just Gaza. If Penslar had his way, Israeli soldiers would not be able to use U.S.-made rifles to guard the Western Wall, or synagogues and kindergartens in Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter in the Old City, as well as many other parts of the city.
The Birkbeck Institute also recently hosted a talk by Doug Rossinow, a professor in Minnesota who has been harshly attacking Israel for more than twenty years.
In July 2002, Rossinow signed a large advertisement in The New York Times demanding that Israel return to the indefensible, nine-miles-wide pre-1967 lines and calling for the mass “evacuation” (expulsion) of all Jews from the areas beyond those lines—meaning Judea, Samaria, the Old City of Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.
Rossinow’s group also urged Washington to use “our massive economic and military support” as “leverage” to force Israel to agree to those demands. They even declared that “foreign troops may well be required to enforce [the terms], and they must be prepared to accept casualties.”
In 2014, when Israel struck back at Hamas terrorists in Gaza, Rossinow joined an open letter denouncing Israel for “the ongoing carnage in Gaza” and “killing and wounding so many Palestinian children.” Rossinow and company also called for halting U.S. military aid to Israel.
Rossinow also has a record of wild attacks against AIPAC. In two articles in 2018, he denounced the “swaggering” AIPAC, declaring it was “born of violence and conflict” and “born in awful knowledge.” Rossinow wrote that AIPAC was “formed to spin positive PR after Israeli atrocities” and “to deny, obscure, or downplay the piercing impact” of Israeli actions. And he added this ugly comment: “Violence by the Israeli state against Palestinians … lies like a hard stone gnarled in the roots of the Israel lobby.”
The Birkbeck Institute boasts on its website that it “partners” with a number of respected institutions, including the Wiener Holocaust Library (in London) and the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Being able to list the Wiener and Sassoon centers gives the Birkbeck Institute a stamp of credibility that it longer deserves.
It’s time for the Wiener Library and the Vidal Sassoon Center to reconsider their relationship with Birkbeck. Retaining their partnership with Birkbeck, after it has provided a platform to three viciously anti-Israel speakers, makes a mockery of the important educational values that Wiener and Sassoon promote.
(JNS.org)
Moshe Phillips is national chairman of Americans For A Safe Israel, a leading pro-Israel advocacy and education group
