From Argentina To Turkey - Via Israel

I guess it takes all types but this fellow is definitely one of the more weird ones out there exploiting academic terminology to pervert truth:-

An U.S.-based academic who grew up in Israel criticized Israeli settlements in Gaza and the West Bank, referring to the conflict as the "colonization of Palestine" during a lecture in Istanbul on Saturday.

...Gabriel Piterberg, a professor of Near East history at the University of California in Los Angeles...[said] “First, this is a conflict between settlers and indigenous people. Second, this is an unresolved settler situation where the settlers are incomparably more powerful, and the natives have not disappeared and will not disappear."

Born in Argentina and raised in Israel, Piterberg...lecture[d] Saturday at Sabancı University, titled "The Zionist Colonization of Palestine in the Comparative Context of Settler Colonialism,"...Piterberg...analyzed the works of two prominent early Zionists, Haim Arlozorov and Arthur Ruppin.

And here comes the kicker:

...Anti-Semitism and “outright racism” were inherent in Ruppin's work, which was intended to “renew the purity of the Jewish race,” Piterberg said. He also made a connection between Ruppin’s work and the social scientists directly involved in the Holocaust.

Like Iran and Neturei Karta, the Holocaust was somehow the fault of the Zionists.

But is Piterburg really an academic or an ideologue disguised as one? Consider this:-

While it’s technically impossible to crown one UCLA professor as the most active on campus, it’s a safe bet to say that history professor Gabriel Piterberg will always rank in the top three. While Piterberg’s dour radicalism would prevent him from earning the title of Miss Congeniality, he has never shown any shyness about promoting his political views, no matter how toxic. Whether it’s condemning the U.S. in print, or damning Israel in speeches, Piterberg is always locked and loaded.

Seems he was in April in Berlin before Turkey:

Gabriel Piterberg examines the ideology and literature behind the colonization of Palestine, from the late nineteenth century [and what about Jews in Erezt-Yisrael coming after the Expulsion from Spain in the first half of the 16th century? Hasisidm in 1777? Jews in Gaza in the 16th century? Jews from Ashkenaz in 1700?] to the present. Exploring Zionism’s origins in Central-Eastern European nationalism and settler movements, he shows how its texts can be placed within a wider discourse of western colonization. Piterberg revisits the work of Theodor Herzl, Gershom Scholem, Anita Shapira and David Ben-Gurion,among other thinkers influential in the formation of the Zionist myth, to break open prevailing views of Zionism. He demonstrates that it was in fact unexceptional, expressing a consciousness and imagination typical of colonial settler movement. Shaped by European ideological currents and the realities of colonial life, Zionism constructed its own story as a unique and impregnable one, in the process excluding the voices of an indigenous people — the Palestinian Arabs.

Such claptrap.


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