This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Israeli consul for public diplomacy in New York, Yuval Donio-Gideon, took the highly unusual step of contacting Bard College earlier this year to object to the course, Apartheid in Israel-Palestine, on the grounds that it breached the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism.
Bard, which runs a joint-degree program with a Palestinian university, Al-Quds in the West Bank, awarded Thrall a writing fellowship which he used to complete his recently published book, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy.
In September, a former head of the Mossad intelligence agency, Tamir Pardo, joined a rising number of prominent Israelis in comparing the occupation of the West Bank to South Africa’s defunct system of racial oppression.
The consulate’s intervention came at a time when the Israeli government was threatening to “publish a ranking of the most antisemitic campuses in the US; to shame institutions that promote anti-Israel positions, where Jewish students feel unsafe”.
The Israeli consulate in New York said in a statement that it had a “moral imperative to alert academic institutions about content that defames Israel and could incite antisemitism and jeopardize the safety of Jewish students on campus”.
The UCJF’s executive director, David Drimer, told a local newspaper, the Daily Freeman, that Bard was influenced in its decision to hold the course by a $500m endowment to the college from George Soros who has been at the centre of antisemitic conspiracy theories on the right.
The original article contains 1,240 words, the summary contains 246 words. Saved 80%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
What’s there to debate about? 💀
