The president of Tel Aviv University was recently upset following Channel 14’s report on politicization in Israeli academia and at his own academic institution. In that video, Prof. Ariel Porat claims Israeli academia allows open discourse and free speech for everyone. But as our reporter Oranit Poran Swissa showed, some would dispute that. Yet the reality in Israeli academia goes far beyond biased politicization favoring the Israeli left—it’s an erasure of the right side of the political map. Consider several conferences held at multiple academic institutions recently.
Prof. Assaf Sharon heads Tel Aviv University’s PPE program. He was hosted as part of a meeting with students at the Open University. Sharon, a left-wing activist and former advisor to the Democrats party, explained to students in an Open University course that the right is the most extreme and problematic element in Israeli society and that the National Security Minister is a “fascist.” Even students were stunned by the Open University’s blatant politicization and voiced their criticism.
In principle, it’s clear that political positions can be voiced in academic spaces. The issue is that there are no events at the Open University where right-wing lecturers are invited to speak about their political positions. In fact, you can find again and again academic conferences, supposedly, that are entirely devoted to left-wing political positions. For example, just recently the Open University held a conference dealing with the “phenomenon” of ‘settler violence’, as the conference termed it, to which only left-wing organization activists were invited.
So at the Open University, they bring a radical left-wing activist from a radical organization who explains that violence in Judea and Samaria is the result of a ground army composed of religious Zionists and people from development towns. And again, there’s no position presenting a different view or contradicting the radical speakers.
It’s no secret that senior academics are positioned on the left side of the political map and they constantly work to define the discourse and its boundaries. Or as Dr. Ronit Lentin-Shenor from Tel Aviv University explained, academia and the protest movement belong to the left-wing elite, and their role is to convince the people to replace those chosen by the people. So the academic elite works to convince the people, including many students, to fight against the leader—meaning whoever was chosen in democratic elections by the broader public. Israel’s cultural institutions have become places where right-wing and conservative positions are essentially erased from the public space in academia.
The Open University declined to comment.