Last year, Lior Sternfeld and Michelle Campos signed the so-called Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism which argued that calling for the destruction of Israel was not antisemitic.
The signatures of Sternfeld and Campos alongside numerous other anti-Israel academics was unsurprising. Sternfeld had previously signed a petition in support of BDS activists which concluded with the assertion that the signers might refuse to “enter the State of Israel”. He and Campos had also signed another petition accusing the Jewish State of “apartheid”.
More recently, Campos, Sternfeld, and Orit Bashkin had signed on to the Statement on Israel and Palestine in Jewish Studies accusing Israel of engaging in “state violence” against Hamas. In language echoing Soviet propaganda, it denounced Zionism as “ethnonationalist” and “settler colonial” systems of “Jewish supremacy” that led to the “segregation” of “Palestinians”.
Israel, all of it, it asserts, exists on occupied territory, not only from the 1967, but the 1948 War of Independence.
From an academic standpoint, the various professors and graduate students declare that they will support their colleagues who boycott Israel and as scholars to “amplify, and support our Palestinian and other colleagues” and emphasize the “place of Palestine in Jewish Studies”.
With the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The NEH is one of the more toxic components of the federal government. While the Trump administration tried to defund it, the Biden administration is using it to push critical race theory into classrooms. But not to leave anyone out, it’s also funding a 1619 Project for Israel.
Sternfeld, Campos, and Bashkin were showered with a nearly $250,000 grant to “reimagine” Jewish life in the Middle East before Zionism. The NEH grant, one of the two largest in Pennsylvania, funds a “large-scale collaborative project to rewrite the histories, narratives, and memories of and by Jews in the Middle East in the 19th-21st centuries.”
“Most history books just want to show that Zionism was the only alternative for Jews living in the Middle East. To say that Jews were subject to restrictions that would not allow them to prosper and live in the Middle East is just nonsense,” Sternfeld contended in a story about the project.
The only nonsense here is Sternfeld, who can’t even enter Iran, insisting that a million Jewish refugees and a thousand years of discrimination are a figment of the imagination.
The NEH would never fund revisionist history that denied that black people were discriminated against during segregation. Why is it funding the same sort of revisionism against Israel?
The three beneficiaries of the NEH’s reappropriation of taxpayer money on their behalf have made little secret of their hostility to the Jewish State.
Lior Sternfeld has described Hamas a “bogeyman”, suggested that Israeli attempts to cut off Hamas “merited digging tunnels” and argued, “Can someone really compare the risk of living anywhere in Israel, to the risk of living anywhere in Gaza?”
Sternfeld slandered Israel as an “apartheid regime” and insisted that through “manipulation” Israelis “came to believe that the entire Middle East genuinely wants to eradicate Israel and the Jews” and for some reason, Israelis “do not believe the Arab leaders when they talk about peace (be it the Arab League peace initiative, or the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leaders”.
Orit Bashkin writes in one review of “discriminatory practices” as being the “building blocks of the meaning of Israeli citizenship” and rants about Israeli efforts to defend against Hamas.
Campos has accused Israelis of racism and repeated antisemitic tropes that the White House and Congress were “easily manipulated” by Israel and sent diplomats who lacked the “will to stand up to Israel”. She falsely claimed that Israel had killed “hundreds of Palestinians–among them militants, yes, but mostly civilians and those just defending their homes and villages”.