Members of the RSO Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) picketed outside the lecture, which focused on Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian settlement conflict, but also dwelled on the issue of Israel’s standing around the world and its historical relations with the U.S.
Oren quoted former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in describing Iran’s nuclear program as “the greatest threat.”
And yet, Oren said, “Nobody wants to take military action against Iran.”
Oren also laid out the delicacy of Israel’s settlement disputes in Biblical terms.
“It is nearly impossible for the Jewish state to be able to tell a Jew that he or she cannot live in his or her ancestral homeland,” he said.
However, Oren indicated that Israel has made sacrifices in the interest of peace and argued that the Palestinian government shares most of the blame in stalling the peace process.
“Now, the impediment is the unwillingness of Palestinian leadership to sit down and discuss a two-state solution,” he said.
The roughly 15 picketers outside took umbrage with the ambassador’s point. As the talk went on, they chanted, “We reject Israel’s war crimes! We reject the murder of civilians! We reject Israel’s apartheid!”
Oren, Israeli ambassador since 2009 and historian of the Middle East, offered a long-view account of the relationship between Israel and America, beginning with the pilgrims, who, according to Oren, viewed themselves as the “new Israelites.” Oren claimed that a Biblical narrative is ingrained in American society, and that American democratic values are ingrained in Israeli society.
“If you go to some places in the United States, you’ll find a Ben-Gurion Street, a Golda Meir Street. If you go to my hometown, Jerusalem, you’ll find a Lincoln Street and a Washington Street,” he said.
Commercial ties have also emerged in the past 20 years, further connecting the two countries. According to Oren, Israel is now America’s twentieth largest export destination.
“When most American companies were outsourcing jobs to Asia, Israel was outsourcing jobs to the U.S.,” Oren said.
Fourth-year David Akinin was relieved to see civility during the lecture, considering the protests that interrupted former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s lecture at the University in 2009.
“I was looking to see a change in our campus, as [Olmert’s] reception was disappointing and embarrassing,” Akinin said. “It was wonderful to be able to hear [Oren] bring historical perspective, connecting American history and the achievements of the state of Israel.”
The talk’s moderator, professor of Near Eastern history Fred Donner, read questions submitted from the audience at the end, including one which expressed concern about challenges to the legitimacy of Israel as a nation.
“We have to take the de-legitimization issue seriously. We view it not as a PR problem, but as a strategic threat,” Oren said in response.
Third-year Sami Kishawi, a protester involved with SJP, stated that the group was not protesting Israel’s right to exist.
“Nothing here is anti-Semitic. I believe in a solution that’s equal to all sides,” he said. However, she said, “The principles of truth and justice should not be applied selectively.”
To the editor, writer, and photographer: Why is the picture for a Michael Oren event, with about 200 in attendance, of a few protesters outside? Why is so much time spent on protesters in this article and so little on what Oren actually said, or student responses to his speech? Next time you assign pictures to an article, maybe consider using pictures from the event itself. Maybe next time you can write more about what the speaker has to say and not about the general qualms of an RSO.
To the protesters pictured: Is it a lie that a nuclear Iran poses a threat to the entire middle-east? Does Israel not have a right to ammunition to protect against the almost 10,000 rockets (a few hundred already this year) fired into Southern Israel?
Two comments:
1. Having been standing next to A. Garfinkle as she interviewed Kishawi and another gentlemen, I’m disappointed to have to say that the reporter missed the point of the protest. Her second question, right off the bat, was whether or not the protestors denied Israel’s right to exist. Kishawi and the second individual standing with him (who I will remain unnamed but who Garfinkle can verify) both stated explicitly the point of the protest isn’t about “the right to exist” nor about geopolitical solutions (which the reporter also asked about for some reason) but was instead meant to call for equality and rights- two things Oren didn’t speak about. It is a shame to have to deal with reporters who already have a set agenda they want to work with.
2. Regarding the commenter above, the 10,000 low-grade rockets have been launched at Israel over the course of a decade, as reported by the Israeli military. According to Human Rights Watch, Israel has launched 14,600+ projectiles (which is more than 10,000) in an 18 month period (September 2005 to May 2007). Also, according to the Israeli military itself, Israel dropped over 100 tons of heavy explosives on Gaza on the first day of its invasion in December 2008. Based on calculations and estimations also provided by the Israeli military, this accounts for roughly 7 to 8 times as many rockets as have been launched at Israel over the last decade. In other words, there’s no point in playing the numbers game.
It’s not a numbers game, the difference is fundamental.
The Palestinians hope to kill as many Israeli civilians as possible.
The Israeli’s go to extremes to avoid killing civilians.
The Israelis sure did go to extremes. I mean, in twenty-two days, 330 children. Hundreds of other adult civilians murdered, thousands more injured. Documented evidence of white phosphorus weapons usage in residential areas. Again, Israel sure did go to extremes.
I seriously hope your aren’t a student or alumnus of the University of Chicago as your comment is a completely inaccurate representation of a very complex issue.
And if it’s such a “numbers game” as you claim, then look no further than Operation Cast Lead (aka the Gaza War) during which at least 1000 Palestinian civilians were killed in the span of 3 weeks (by the way this casualty figure is courtesy of B’Tselem, an Israeli NGO).
Before you go spewing nonsense I think it best to educate your self about the matter at hand. And this advice doesn’t just apply to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
I think it’s perfectly fair that the article gives time to the protesters and their message since the session with Ambassador Oren was so heavily scripted and censored. Do any other speakers require students write their questions on 3×5 cards for pre-screening by the moderator – or just ones that don’t want to answer for their actions?
Frankly, I thought it was spineless and weak of the University to grant Ambassador Oren that crutch to lean on. This institution is supposed to foster, not censor, debate.
Human Rights Watch is paid for and owned by the Palestinian Propaganda Machine. HRW is no more objective than Hamas is when it comes to the conflict.
Sammy,
Before you go spewing nonsense I think it best to educate your self {sic}.
Israel took more precautions to protect civilians in the Gaza conflict than the blood-thirsy Hamas did. Israelis dropped leaflets forewarning citizens of Israeli actions. Israelis allowed aid into Gaza even in the midst of the conflict. Israelis stopped operations even when confident they could take out Hamas operatives due to concerns about civilian injury or death.
It’s difficult fighting a war when enemey combatants take up positions in schools, mosques and hospitals and this is what Israel was forced to address in the conflict.
Maybe Israel should look to the Muslim armies of Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria, Syria and Pakistan for better examples of how to protect the innocents during intense conflicts. ROFLOL.
To Nathan — remember the whole Ehud Olmert thing in 2009? That’s why questions are prescreened now whenever things deal with Israel…so the guy gets a chance to actually give a talk!
HRW: Lying to make the Palestinians look good and sold to the West in an NGO wrapper.
http://spme.net/cgi-bin/articles.cgi?ID=8284
It is useless to hold a discussion with someone whose opinion is so tinged with hatred as to warp reality. I take solace in the fact that most people with an inkling of sanity and humanity aren’t as cynical/ignorant.
According to Sami Kishawi, “The principles of truth and justice should not be applied selectively.” And yet the SJP protesters ignore 60 years of war crimes by Palestinian leadership, including crimes against their own people, the most egregious being the use of their own children as human shields. If they truly reject the murder of civilians, they should be protesting Hamas. They target civilians; killers of Israeli woman and children are celebrated in Gaza.
Would Kishawi explain how Israel can be given the “apartheid” label, while ignoring the treatment of Palestinians in Lebanon and Syria, where they’re forced to live only in certain areas, denied citizenship, and forbidden from many occupations?
It is a capital crime under the Palestinian Authority for a Palestinian to sell land to a Jew. That’s not apartheid?
These protesters are very selective in their outrage, and the claim of searching for an “equal solution” rings hollow.
I completely agree with EF. I was sitting in one of the front rows and there was a Maroon photographer who took a ton of pictures of Ambassador Oren. Where are those pictures? Where are the pictures of the hundreds of attendants who were able to participate in a mature manner and listen to a viewpoint which they may take issue with. I would also add that the protesters were shouting that “we stand with the Irvine 11.” This refers to the eleven students who interrupted Oren’s speech at UC Irvine in 2010. Which part of the Irvine 11 do they stand with? The fact that the students were arrested and expelled from their respective schools? And please don’t claim that there was a first amendment violation- because none other then the leading Constitutional Scholar in the country, Erwin Chemerinsky, actually serves as the Dean of the UC Irvine law school, and he has repeatedly stated that the protesters had no right to shout out and interrupt Oren.
See http://articles.latimes.com/2010/feb/18/opinion/la-oe-chemerinsky18-2010feb18
Maybe it’s time for these U of C students to stand with a different group of eleven- and not a group of immature people acting illegally. Maybe next time they can join the 200 people inside.
These are the words of Simon Deng, a former Muslim slave from Sudan.
^^^^^
“I want to thank the organizers of this conference, The Perils of Global Intolerance. It is a great honor for me and it is a privilege really to be among today’s distinguished speakers.”
“I came here as a friend of the State of Israel and the Jewish people. – I came to protest this Durban conference which is based on a set of lies. It is organized by nations who are themselves guilty of the worst kinds of oppression.
It will not help the victims of racism. It will only isolate and target the Jewish state. It is a tool of the enemies of Israel. The UN has itself become a tool against Israel. For over 50 years, 82 percent of the UN General Assembly emergency meetings have been about condemning one state – Israel. Hitler couldn’t have been made happier.
The Durban Conference is an outrage. All decent people will know that.
But friends, I come here today with a radical idea. I come to tell you that there are peoples who suffer from theUN’s anti-Israelism even morethan the Israelis. I belong to one of those people.
Please hear me out.
By exaggerating Palestinian suffering, and by blaming the Jews for it, the UN has muffled the cries of those who suffer on a far larger scale.
For over fifty years the indigenous black population of Sudan — Christians and Muslims alike — has been the victim of the brutal, racist Arab Muslim regimes in Khartoum.
In South Sudan, my homeland, about 4 million innocent men, women and children were slaughtered from 1955 to 2005. Seven million were ethnically cleansed and they became the largest refugee group since World War II.
The UN is concerned about the so-called Palestinian refugees. They dedicated a separate agency for them. and they are treated with a special privilege.
Meanwhile, my people, ethnically cleansed, murdered and enslaved, are relatively ignored. The UN refuses to tell the world the truth about the real causes of Sudan’s conflicts. Who knows really what is happening in Darfur? It is not a “tribal conflict.” It is a conflict rooted in Arab colonialism well known in north Africa. In Darfur, a region in the Western Sudan, everybody is Muslim. Everybody is Muslim because the Arabs invaded the North of Africa and converted the indigenous people to Islam. In the eyes of the Islamists in Khartoum, the Darfuris are not Muslim enough. And the Darfuris do not want to be Arabized. They love their own African languages and dress and customs. The Arab response is genocide! But nobody at the UN tells the truth about Darfur.
In the NubaMountains, another region of Sudan, genocide is taking place as I speak. The Islamist regime in Khartoum is targeting the black Africans – Muslims and Christians. Nobody at the UN has told the truth about the Nuba Mountains.
Do you hear the UN condemn Arab racism against blacks?
What you find on the pages of the New York Times, or in the record of the UN condemnations is “Israeli crimes” and Palestinian suffering. My people have been driven off thefront pages because of the exaggerations about Palestinian suffering. What Israel does is portrayed as a Western sin. But the truth is that the real sin happens when the West abandons us: the victims of Arab/Islamic apartheid.
Chattel slavery was practiced for centuries in Sudan. It was revived as a tool of war in the early 90s. Khartoum declared jihad against my people and this legitimized taking slaves as war booty. Arab militias were sent to destroy Southern villages and were encouraged to take African women and children as slaves. We believe that up to 200,000 were kidnapped, brought to the North and sold into slavery.
I am a living proof of this crime against humanity.
I don’t like talking about my experience as a slave, but I do it because it is important for the world toknow that slavery exists even today.
I was only nine years old when an Arab neighbor named Abdullahi tricked me into following him to a boat. The boat wound up in Northern Sudan where he gave me as a gift to his family. For three and a half years I was their slave going through something that no child should ever go through: brutal beatings and humiliations; working around the clock; sleeping on the ground with animals;eating the family’s left-overs. During those three years I was unable to say the word “no.” All I could say was “yes,” “yes,” “yes.”
The United Nations knew about the enslavement of South Sudanese by the Arabs. Their own staff reported it. It took UNICEF – under pressure from the Jewish –led American Anti-Slavery Group — sixteen years to acknowledge what was happening. I want to publicly thank my friend Dr. Charles Jacobs for leading the anti-slaveryfight.
But the Sudanese government and the Arab League pressured UNICEF, and UNICEF backtracked, and started to criticize those who worked to liberate Sudanese slaves. In 1998, Dr. Gaspar Biro, the courageous UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Sudan who reported on slavery, resigned in protest of the UN’s actions.
My friends, today, tens of thousands of black South Sudanese still serve their masters in the North and the UN is silent about that. It would offend the OIC and the Arab League.
As a former slave and a victim of the worst sort of racism, allow me to explain why I think calling Israel a racist state is absolutely absurd and immoral.
I have been to Israel five times visiting the Sudanese refugees. Let me tell you how they ended up there. These are Sudanese who fled Arab racism, hoping to find shelter in Egypt. They were wrong. When Egyptian security forces slaughtered twenty six black refugees in Cairo who were protesting Egyptian racism, the Sudanese realized that the Arab racism is the same in Khartoum or Cairo. They needed shelter and they found it in Israel. Dodging the bullets of the Egyptian border patrols and walking for very long distances, the refugees’ only hope was to reach Israel’s side of the fence, where they knew they would be safe.
Black Muslims from Darfur chose Israel above all the other Arab-Muslim states of the area. Do you know what this means!!!?? And the Arabs say Israel is racist!!!?
In Israel, black Sudanese, Christian and Muslim were welcomed and treated like human beings. Just go and ask them, like I have done. They told me that compared to the situation in Egypt, Israel is “heaven.”
Is Israel a racist state? To my people, the people who know racism – the answer is absolutely not. Israel is a state of people who are the colors of the rainbow. Jews themselves come in all colors, even black. I met with Ethiopian Jews in Israel. Beautiful black Jews.
So, yes … I came here today to tell you that the people who suffer most from the UN anti-Israel policy are not the Israelis but all those people who the UN ignores in order to tell its big lie against Israel: we, the victims of Arab/Muslim abuse: women, ethnic minorities, religious minorities, homosexuals, in the Arab/Muslim world. These are the biggest victims of UN Israel hatred.
Look at the situation of the Copts in Egypt, the Christians in Iraq, and Nigeria, and Iran, the Hindus and Bahais who suffer from Islamic oppression. The Sikhs. We – a rainbow coalition of victims and targets of Jihadis — all suffer. We are ignored, we are abandoned. So that the big lie against the Jews can go forward.
In 2005, I visited one of the refugee camps in South Sudan. I met a twelve year old girl who told me about her dream. In a dream she wanted to go to school to become a doctor. And then, she wanted to visit Israel. I was shocked. How could this refugee girl who spent most of her life in the North know about Israel? When I asked why she wanted to visit Israel, she said: “This is our people.” I was never able to find an answer to my question.
On January 9 of 2011 South Sudan became an independent state. For South Sudanese, that means continuation of oppression, brutalization, demonization, Islamization, Arabization and enslavement.
In a similar manner, the Arabs continue denying Jews their right for sovereignty in their homeland and the Durban III conference continues denying Israel’s legitimacy.
As a friend of Israel, I bring you the news that my President, the President of the Republic of South Sudan, Salva Kiir — publicly stated that the South Sudan embassy in Israel will be built— not in Tel Aviv, but in Jerusalem, the eternal capital of the Jewish people.
I also want to assure you that my own new nation, and all of its peoples, will oppose racist forums like the Durban III. We will oppose it by simply telling the truth. Our truth.
My Jewish friends taught me something I now want to say with you.
AM YISROEL CHAI!
The people of Israel lives!