Munitions found in Jenin (IDF)
Princeton University, one of America’s eight Ivy League universities – the elite of the elite there – is now offering an anti-Israel course that, it seems, wants to teach students that Israel has no right to even exist. “The Healing Humanities: Decolonizing Trauma Studies from the Global South” is ostensibly about how nations around the world dealt with the aftermath of having been part of European colonial empires. But including Israel means that the course pre-supposes that Israel’s existence is nothing more than an extension of imperialism, a trope traditionally promoted by Israel haters.
The course will be taught by Satyel Larson, Assistant Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University.
The course uses an anti-Israel work of propaganda called “The Right to Maim,” written by Jasbir K. Puar Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. The book’s title alone reveals its author’s bias against Israel.
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Dictionary.com defines debilitation as, “an act or instance of making a person or thing weak or feeble, often in a specific way; the resulting state of weakness: Death or debilitation is statistically far more likely to occur by disease or accident than by malicious action.”
“Debilitation is extremely profitable economically and ideologically for Israel’s settler colonial regime,” Jasbir K. Puar wrote. “The understanding of maiming as a specific aim of biopolitics tests the framing of settler colonialism as a project of elimination of the indigenous through either genocide or assimilation. Accounting for Israeli settler colonialism and occupation is an encounter with the unspoken thresholds of biopolitical thought.”
So, Israel is engaged in “colonialism” and is “maiming” the Palestinians.
She also claimed that Israel is not concerned with avoiding harming innocent civilians when it conducts raids against suspected terrorists like the one recently carried out in Jenin. He wrote that any such efforts to avoid civilian casualties are just a “shrewdly contrived scheme to strengthen its stranglehold over the West Bank.”
And Puar’s book also makes claims that as Israel advances, the country relies less on Palestinian labor to their detriment.
“There is less need for Palestinian labor, for Palestinian production. Rather, profit is derived from the dismemberment of reproduction, a function of capitalism without labor.” In other words, Israel used the Palestinians for the past 75 years for cheap labor, but now will let them suffer, depriving them of work and sources of income.
Even the left-leaning Jewish publication “Tablet Magazine” derided the book saying “on its own merit, Puar’s book is an intellectual and moral hoax, a bit of sizzling sophistry designed to stir the faithful into a frenzy of outrage divorced of any and all observable reality.”
Jasbir K. Puar has also made false claims that Israel kills Palestinians and then “harvests” their organs for transplant.
For the record, the IDF takes precautions to ensure that no innocents are harmed during engagements with terrorists, even at the risk of harm to its own forces. Films have been released showing drone strikes called off at the last second when innocent people are observed in the area of the intended strike.
This, while terrorist groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad use schools, hospitals, mosques, and even UN compounds as bases for their operations and places to store munitions. This was something shown in Israel’s recent engagement with Islamic Jihad terrorists in Jenin.
The questions of whether or not Israel should withdraw entirely from all areas of the West Bank and whether there should be a two-state solution to the conflict are certainly legitimate topics for debate. But when one makes unfounded allegations of human rights violations, compares Israel to a colonial power, or questions whether the country should even exist, he or she loses all credibility.
This is nothing more than a “now they show their true colors” moment and if Princeton is the serious center of education and academia that it purports to be, then it should not allow such courses any more than it would allow a history professor to teach that George Washington was not the first president of the United States or a mathematics professor to teach that one and one make five.
