I must tell you that I am not generally a fan of Prof. Ze’ev Maoz. He is a leftist and his written some obnoxious anti-Israel articles and expressed some anti-Israel opinions (here is one: http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/morality-is-not-on-our-side-1.193739 I will cite some others below). He is currently on the faculty of the University of California at Davis and teaches at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center. He used to be a professor at Tel Aviv University and at the University of Haifa.
But the fact that he is left of center makes what he has published today even more important and newsworthy. Maoz has an Op-Ed in Haaretz today endorsing the calls for the shutting down of the Department of Politics at Ben Gurion University!
As you know, a recent international panel appointed by Israel’s Council on Higher Education denounced the Department of Politics at Ben Gurion University for being a radical anti-Israel indoctrination center and a Bash-Israel propaganda operation, with no serious academic credentials and standards, an “unbalanced” (meaning anti-Israel) group of pseudo-scholars. The panel proposed shutting the department down altogether. Israel’s radical anti-Israel tenured Left and their foreign Bash-Israel amen chorus raced to defend the department, while a rising chorus of pro-Israel voices have echoed the call of the international panel.
Well, Prof. Maoz has chimed in on the controversy and he has issued his own unambiguous call for closing the entire department of politics at Ben Gurion University.
You can see Maoz’ Op-Ed (in Hebrew) here: http://www.haaretz.co.il/opinions/1.1602889. Haaretz is not running the piece in English (we wonder why) but I will sum it up for you here.
His Op-Ed is entitled, “Yes, Shut it Down!”
He begins by proclaiming that he is a proud member of the Israeli Left. He then goes on to tell how the tenured Left has been lobbying him to oppose the recommendations of the panel, and asking him to recruit international support behind the Department of Politics at BGU in the name of “academic freedom.”
He then reveals that he himself had been recruited nine years ago by the Council on Higher Education to evaluate the very same department at BGU. At the time he proposed shutting down the entire department for essentially the same reasons as those in the new panel report. He claims his reasons were entirely academic, not political, just as the current panel’s recommendations are academic.
Back then, Maoz found that there are no serious academic standards in place in that department. Most of the faculty members have no serious
credentials in political science. He says that not only was the Council on Higher Education not conducting a witch-hunt against the Politics department at BGU, but it even refused to implement Maoz’ own recommendations, treated the department with permissive (his word) kid gloves, allowed it to go on functioning and even to develop new programs for students, and refused to apply the same rigorous standards to the department of Neve Gordon and David Newman that it was applying to all other departments across the board.
He concludes that the Department of Politics at BGU is an academic disgrace and the petitions of support for it are motivated by the most dubious of motives. Translation: those petitions consist of anti-Israel extremists seeking to defend other anti-Israel pseudo-academic extremists from criticism and accountability.
Here are some previous items I posted about Ze’ev Maoz, to convince you that he is no raving right-winger:
Ze’ev Maoz, Tel Aviv University
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/742257.html
“There’s practically a holy consensus right now that the war in the North is a just war and that morality is on our side. The bitter truth must be said: this holy consensus is based on short-range selective memory, an introverted worldview, and double standards. This war is not a just war. Israel is using excessive force without distinguishing between civilian population and enemy, whose sole purpose is extortion. That is not to say that morality and justice are on Hezbollah’s side. Most certainly not. But the fact that Hezbollah “started it” when it kidnapped soldiers from across an international border does not even begin to tilt the scales of justice toward our side.”
Some more pearls from the mouth of Ze’ev Maoz: In October, 1996 he said: “chance of army coup now possible.” And in August 1996: “If the political deadlock continues for a long time, and Syria reaches the conclusion that there is no solution in the political option, it may reconsider the military option as a viable one,” he [Ze’ev Maoz] wrote. In March 2002 he was interviewed saying: “Any initiative that comes from the Arab world makes me considerably more optimistic,” says Ze’ev Maoz, an Israeli political scientist, “because it has the potential ... to lower the psychological barriers that many Israelis have in terms of making concessions for peace.” At the same article it said: “Tel Aviv University
professor Maoz says Israeli supporters of a negotiated solution are “regrouping because they are starting to realize that a policy of applying
force just for the sake of applying force, without any sort of political vision, doesn’t lead anywhere.”
Further reading on Ze’ev Maoz:
http://www.jewishsf.com/content/2-0-/module/displaystory/story_id/4768/edition_id/87/format/html/displaystory.html
http://www.jewishsf.com/content/2-0-/module/displaystory/story_id/4316/edition_id/78/format/html/displaystory.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0308/p06s01-wome.html
http://www.freeman.org/m_online/sep96/basch.htm (half way down the page)
