On July 25, 2000, when the second Camp David talks between then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat broke off, I was sitting in the office of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Elyakim Rubinstein, then the attorney general of the State of Israel, came to address the group.
I will never forget his words as he said, “What we offered was so generous in fact, others looking back on this might call it irresponsible. There are people now, from the Labor Party, on their way to the airport, crying in their limousines.”
What was offered to the Palestinians was 91% of Judea and Samaria (more commonly known as the West Bank); custodianship over the Temple Mount; “administration” of the Muslim and Christian quarters in eastern Jerusalem; a return of up to 100,000 Palestinian refugees for family reunification purposes; and international control of the Jordan Valley, with Palestinian security forces controlling the border crossing with Jordan.
Arafat did not say “No”. He did not say “Yes.” He simply walked away from the table.
This will go down in history as one of the greatest failures of a leader; as he preferred to subjugate his people to more hatred, more one-sided propaganda, more intifadas, more wars and more violence than to accept an exceedingly reasonable offer.
When President Bill Clinton was about to leave the White House, he got a phone call from Arafat. “You, Mr. President, are a great leader,” Arafat said. To which Clinton responded, “No. I am a failure, and you made me one.”
I am retelling this story, because the truth of that deal has constantly been distorted.
Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor emeritus of modern Arab studies at Columbia University, wrote a book, Resurrecting Empire, in which he describes what Israel offered at that Camp David summit as “so miniscule, it isn’t even worth referring to.”
That book, with its grand deception about the summit, is used as a textbook in college classes throughout the United States. Total lies and distortions of the truth are footnoted, indexed and passed along as well-accepted dogma.
Columbia University has had a huge antisemitism problem for decades. And it is not limited to simply one professor.
On Oct. 8, 2023, Joseph Massad, Columbia professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history, wrote in the “Electronic Intifada” of his “jubilation and awe,” that the “sight of resistance fighters storming Israeli checkpoints separating Gaza from Israel was astounding, not only to Israelis but especially to the Palestinian and Arab peoples who came out across the region to march is support of the Palestinians against their cruel colonizers . . .. No less awesome were the scenes witnessed by millions of jubilant Arabs who spent the days watching the news of Palestinian fighters from Gaza breaking through Israel’s prison fence or gliding over it.”
This one-sided agitprop has gravitated away from the Middle Eastern study programs and infiltrated the humanities, social sciences and even schools of education.
This is not limited to Columbia. Cornell University’s Russell Rickford, an associate professor of history, called the Oct. 7 attacks “exhilarating” and “energizing.” Reminder: Oct. 7 was when thousands of Hamas terrorists invaded Israel and tortured, murdered and raped more than 1,200 people, taking 251 others hostage and parading them through the streets of Gaza for people to jeer at.
Osman Umarji, an adjunct professor at the University of California, Irvine’s school of education, stated on Nov. 10, 2023, “The Zionists have been exposed for the criminals and blood-thirsty animals that they are. This is a gift from Allah to the world.”
Zareena Grewal, associate professor of American studies, ethnicity, race and migration, and religious studies at Yale University, wrote on Oct. 7, “Settlers are not civilians. This is not hard.” In another tweet that day, she wrote, “Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle, solidarity.”
Assistant professor of law at Albany Law in New York, Nina Farnia, wrote on the morning of Oct. 7, “Palestinians are tearing down the walls of colonialism and apartheid” and “Palestinians are a beacon for us all.”
What sort of hatred motivates these comments? Is there no empathy for the other side?
We know that the minds of students are like sponges, and that is why, in 2008, I, together with scholars and writers Martin Kramer and Stanley Kurtz, worked successfully with Congress to amend Title VI of the Higher Education Act to have regional and area studies demonstrate “a diversity of viewpoints” and “wide range of perspectives.”
The amendments to this law have been overlooked and ignored by the universities. The trickle-down effect has exploded, and our nation’s youth are being brainwashed by professors who sympathize more with brutal, barbaric terrorists than with the courageous survival of the people of Israel.
It is our younger generation of Americans that are losing out. If these are the educators they respect, what does that tell us about their academic inquiry, their integrity, their sense of justice, of truth, and of their basic values?