Dear Roger,
The Ken Roth scandal lasted two weeks before Harvard’s Kennedy School capitulated in the face of a public
relations disaster and on January 19 reversed a decision not to give
the former director of Human Rights Watch a fellowship because he was
critical of Israel. The reaction from the Israel lobby was swift.
“Harvard surrenders to the antisemites,” said the Jewish News Service.
The good news here is that the withdrawal of the fellowship became a scandal when The Nation‘s
Michael Massing broke the news of Roth’s rejection, six months after
the fact. The story was all over the press, including NPR and public
television, and Harvard looked terrible in every telling. We’ve never
seen such an outpouring of concern for a victim of the Israel lobby. Steven Salaita and Valentina Azarova
and Norman Finkelstein all lost bigger jobs at universities and had
their reputations smeared with barely a peep from the mainstream press.
It’s true that Ken Roth is a suitable victim for the mainstream press. A member in good standing of the establishment, the son of a Holocaust survivor, Roth is not in the Palestinian activist community.
All the same, Roth insisted on bearing witness to Palestinian human
rights abuses, and his rejection and reinstatement represent a watershed
moment in the politics of Israel in the United States. The fascistic
new Israeli government is waking up Americans, including many Jews, to what Israel has become. The atrocities of Jewish supremacy go on and on, with American support. The two-state solution is a cruel joke that even the State Department admits requires “triage.”
Still
there was a sense this week that Americans were watching the Israel
lobby overplay its hand by smearing Ken Roth, and were not falling for
it. The ADL now has to go to greater
lengths than ever to try to equate criticisms of Israel with
antisemitism, because it sees that those criticisms are widespread, and
not just on the ADL’s whipping boy, “social media.” In covering the Roth
case, the New York Times finally publicized the Human Rights
Watch report of 2021 calling Israel an apartheid state. That report has
been outside a red line in the establishment– a line the Harvard
decision is helping to erase.
And Ken Roth appears to be personally determined to expose the role of pro-Israel donors at major institutions.
There was a sense this week that the American establishment is at
last facing the death of the two-state solution and Israel’s violations
of international law. So this is a moment to celebrate that progress–
and express pride in our role in reporting the unpleasant reality.
Thanks for reading, |
