Yale, Ben-Gvir and Banning Palestinian Groups

Universities are in a bind.  As institutions of learning and teaching, knowledge learnt and taught should, or at the very least could, be put into practice.  How unfortunate for rich ideas to linger in cold storage or exist as the mummified status of esoterica.  But universities in the United States have taken fright at pro-Palestinian protests since October 7, 2023, becoming battlegrounds for the propaganda emissaries of Israeli public relations and the pro-evangelical, Armageddon lobby that sees the end times taking place in the Holy Land.  Higher learning institutions are spooked by notions of Israeli brutality, and they are taking measures.

These measures have tended to be heavy handed, taking issue with students and academic staff.  The policy has reached another level in efforts by amphibian university managers to ban various protest groups who are seen as creating an environment of intimidation for other members of the university tribe.  That these protesters merely wish to draw attention to the massacre of Palestinian civilians, including women, children, and the elderly, and the fact that the death toll, notably in the Gaza Strip, now towers at over 50,000, is a matter of inconvenient paperwork.

Even worse, the same institutions are willing to tolerate individuals who have celebrated their own unalloyed bigotry, lauded their own racial and religious ideology, and deemed various races worthy of extinguishment or expulsion.  Such a man is Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who found himself permitted to visit Yale University at the behest of the Jewish society Shabtai, a body founded by Democratic senator and Yale alumnus Cory Booker, along with Rabbi Shmully Hecht.

Shabtai is acknowledged as having no official affiliation with Yale, though it is stacked with Yale students and faculty members who participate at its weekly dinners. Its beating heart was Hecht, who arrived in New Haven after finishing rabbinical school in Australia in 1996.

The members of Shabtai were hardly unanimous in approving Ben-Gvir’s invitation.  David Vincent Kimel, former coach of the Yale debate team, was one of two to send an email to a Shabtai listserv to express brooding disgruntlement.  “Shabtai was founded as a space for fearless, pluralistic Jewish discourse,” the email remarks.  “But this event jeopardizes Shabtai’s reputation and every future.”  In views expressed to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Kimel elaborated: “I’m deeply concerned that we’re increasingly treating extreme rhetoric as just another viewpoint, rather than recognizing it as a distortion of constructive discourse.”  The headstone for constructive discourse was chiselled sometime ago, though Kimel’s hopes are charming.

As a convinced, pro-settler fanatic, Ben-Gvir is a fabled-Torah basher who sees Palestinians as needless encumbrances on Israel’s righteous quest to acquire Gaza and the West Bank.  Far from being alone, Ben-Gvir is also the member of a government that has endorsed starvation and the deprivation of necessities as laudable tools of conflict, to add to an adventurous interpretation of the laws of war that tolerates the destruction of health and civilian infrastructure in the Gaza Strip.

After a dinner at President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort (the bad will be fed), Ben-Gvir was flushed with confidence.  He wrote on social media of how various lawmakers had “expressed support for my very clear position on how to act in Gaza and that the food and aid depots should be bombed in order to create military and political pressure to bring our hostages home safely.”  By any other standard, this was an admission to encouraging the commission of a war crime.

In July last year, Israel’s State Prosecutor Amit Aisman reportedly sought permission from Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara to open a criminal investigation into Ben-Gvir for alleged incitement of violence against residents of Gaza.  The move was said to be a gesture to placate the International Court of Justice as it considers the genocide case filed by South Africa against Israel over the war in Gaza.  In a string of increasingly agitated interim orders, the ICJ has asked that Israel comply, as signatory member, with the obligations imposed by the United Nations Genocide Convention.  These include prohibitions against incitement to genocide.

Incitement has become something of a nervous tic for the minister.  In November 2023, for instance, Ben-Gvir remarked that “When we say Hamas should be destroyed, it also means those who celebrate, those who support, and those who hand out candy – they’re all terrorists, and they should also be destroyed.”  Seeing himself as essentially immune to any form of prosecution, Ben-Gvir gave the State Prosecutor a sound verbal thrashing, claiming that it was “trying to make an Israeli minister stand trial for ‘incitement’ against citizens of an enemy state that danced on the blood our soldiers on the streets of Gaza on October 7.”

In a statement responding to protests against Ben-Gvir’s visit, Yale stated that the student encampments set up on April 22 on Beinecke Plaza were in violation of the university’s policies on the use of outdoor spaces.  Students already on notice for previous protests along similar lines would face “immediate disciplinary action”.  With dulling predictability, the university revealed that it was looking into “concerns … about disturbing anti-Semitic conduct at the gathering”.

University officialdom had also focused on the activities of Yalies4Palestine, a student organisation whose club status was revoked for “sending calls over social media for others to join the event”.  The statement makes the claim that the group “flagrantly violated the rules to which the Yale College Dean’s Office holds all registered student organizations”. Consequently, the body cannot receive funding from Yale sources, use the university name, participate in relevant student activities, or book spaces on the campus.

This profaning of protest in a university setting is a convenient trick, using the popular weasel words of “offensive” and “unsafe” while deploying, more generically, the pitiful policy inventory that makes freedom of expression an impossibility.  Mobilised accordingly, they can eliminate any debate, any discussion and any idea from the campus for merely being stingingly contrarian or causing twinges of intellectual discomfort.  The moment the brain aches in debate, the offended howl and the administrators suppress.  Play nice, dear university staff and students, or don’t play at all.  Besides, Ben-Gvir, by Yale standards, is a half-decent fellow.

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