Professor Falk continued to spin his fairy tales when he implicitly praised the generosity of Hamas in their willingness to “extend the ceasefire for up to 10 years, which Israel refused to even acknowledge.” Let us review the facts: when the six-month “lull” or “calm” (not the same as a ceasefire) agreed to by Hamas in June 19 expired on December 19, 2008, it was Hamas, not Israel that refused to renew the “lull.” In any case, Hamas fired hundreds of rockets and mortars at Israel while it was supposedly observing the “lull,” thus proving that any proposals it may make for a cessation of, or even a reduction in, hostilities, are meaningless.
As for the 10 year “ceasefire” (better known as hudna), Hamas proposed it in 2004, more than four years before the current fighting-- but only on condition that Israel totally withdraw to its 1967 borders and relinquish the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem before the hudna would even begin! This same proposal was reintroduced in 2006 when a Hamas delegation visited Britain. But the British Foreign Office, like Israel, was wise enough to refuse even to meet the Hamas delegation, knowing full well their obligations under the UNSC Resolutions listed above. Moreover, anyone with a cursory knowledge of Arabic and Islamic history would know that the true meaning of that hudna, as Hamas interprets it, is a temporary reprieve to regroup, rearm and fight another day, at a time of their choosing. Needless to say, before and after this proposal, Hamas kept firing its rockets into southern Israel. How naïve could Prof. Falk be? How gullible does he think his audience is?
But Prof. Falk doesn’t stop there. In his unfettered “jihad” against Israel, he invents a new cause for the hostilities: the “November 4 incursion” into the Gaza Strip as a provocation by Israel. Again, let us review the facts. On November 4, Israeli intelligence provided information on an imminent attempt by Hamas to abduct IDF soldiers through a tunnel dug through the security fence. The IDF responded by infiltrating the Gaza Strip and within 250 meters they found the other end of the tunnel. They engaged the Hamas terrorists, killed a number of them and suffered six casualties, two of them seriously wounded. This pre-emptive attack in the face of a clear and imminent danger is anything but an aggression. Prof. Falk’s naked inversion of aggression and self-defence would be disingenuous if it were not as malicious as it was intended.
Prof. Falk concludes his diatribe by complaining that “a civilian population has been locked into a war zone and denied the option of becoming refugees.” He like Professor Makdisi conveniently forgets that the Gaza Strip also has a border with Egypt which was kept intentionally closed by the Egyptian authorities during the three-week military operation. The total absence of any blame pointing to Egypt tells us much more about Prof. Falk’s preconceived agenda than about his purported sympathy toward the Gaza population. He also omitted the well documented efforts by the Hamas thugs to forcibly prevent the civilian population from leaving their homes, to better use them as human shields. We should also remember that whenever Israel has allowed Palestinians to leave a combat zone, it has been accused of expelling innocent civilians from their homes, turning them into refugees and promoting “ethnic cleansing!” Undoubtedly Professor Falk and the other panelists would have made such a claim if Israel had facilitated a refugee “exodus” from Gaza.
The final round of applause from the duped audience followed Prof. Falk’s repetition of the mandatory mantra about “the unlawful West bank settlements.” Why not? After disfiguring international law in such a shameless way for over an hour, no one expected him to show any intellectual integrity and remind the audience of the provisions of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine (1922), which are valid to this day, and which not only authorize Jewish settlements in the whole of Palestine, but specifically encourage them.
If you thought the performance of Prof. Falk was a textbook study of Orwellian propaganda hard to outperform, consider Prof. Gaby Piterberg, who threw in an analogy with “the excessive violence by France in Algeria during the Algerian War of Independence.” There you have it: Israel is no more than a colonial power with no rights whatsoever in the foreign land it occupies. Another professor, another nonsense, another class of students to be indoctrinated by the vilest propaganda in one of the most prestigious centers of higher learning in America.
When supposedly knowledgeable people, claiming expert status, indulge in such a disfiguration of reality, there can only be one reason: to divert guilt and responsibility from Hamas, where it belongs, to Israel, the eternal culprit in their eyes; and to denigrate the State of Israel selectively, for the sole reason that it is a Jewish State. There is a name for that malicious hatred, and the participants must surely know it, no matter how much they indulge in obfuscation. When falsehoods, malice and cowardice about facing the truth all join together, it can only be called hateful propaganda. Et tu, UCLA?
*Salomon Benzimra and John Landau contributed to this article.
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