On David Newman - Academic

I recall David Newman as a member of Bnei Akiva in London in the mid-1970s and then later when his book on Gush Emunim came out as well as his father, a fervent member of Rabbis for Human Rights.

I cannot fathom the fanaticism of some on the Left who manage to illustrate the recklessness of maintaining political belief - and in Newman's case, with mobilizing and campaigning - with facts that negate his beliefs.

Efraim Karsh has destroyed him and here's an excerpt:

...[he] penned an op-ed in the Jerusalem Post in which he compared Israel's present political culture to that of Nazi Germany. "I will no doubt be strongly criticized for compared making such a comparison," he wrote...There is no moral equivalence whatever between the Nazi persecution, exclusion, segregation, and eventually industrial slaughter of European Jewry, and Israel's treatment of its Arab population...

...Even more mind-boggling is Newman's equating Israel's attempt to prevent foreign funding of Israeli nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) involved in the international Israel de-legitimization campaign -- along the lines of the US Foreign Agents Legislation Act -- with repressing political opponents by the Nazi regime.

What "human rights activists" have been unlawfully detained by the Israeli government, let alone rounded up and thrown into concentration camps? On what planet does the Ben-Gurion University faculty dean live?

But Newman is not someone to be bothered by the facts. His is the standard "colonialist paradigm" prevalent among Israeli and Western academics, which views Zionism, and by extension the state of Israel, not as a legitimate expression of national self-determination but as "a colonizing and expansionist ideology and movement" (in the words of another BGU professor) - an offshoot of European imperialism at its most rapacious...[he] views Israel as a present-day reincarnation of Nazi Germany in several key respects...

Further reading:

Here.

Here.

Here.

Here.

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