An Expert on Zionism
Who gets nominated for prestigious prizes in Jewish Studies?
You may recall my series of critiques on the obsessive anti-Israel work of Irus Braverman, a professor at the University of Buffalo. She takes wildlife conservation practices which are the norm in every part of the world—even among Palestinian and Arab conservationists—and claims that when practiced by Zionists, they are actually part of a secret Jewish conspiracy to commit “violence” against Palestinians. I’m including my critique of her work in my forthcoming book The Lions of Zion, but I was wondering what the response to her book was in the academic world. I found several glowing reviews, but I also found one review that, along with praise, had rebuke.
This critical review was by Dr. Hanine Shehadeh (who also goes by Hanine Hassan) of Beirut University—but her criticism is that she feels that Braverman did not go far enough in her criticism of Israel! While praising the book for exposing Western audiences to a new aspect of Zionist crimes, she expresses regret that Braverman did not go into further detail about how “the Zionist ideology, which regards Jews as possessing unique racial and genetic characteristics, consequently elevating Jewish life as superior and more valuable than non-Jewish life, is a pertinent factor in justifying the elimination of all non-Jews on all of historical Palestine in order to gain more land.”
Unique racial and genetic characteristics?! While there are certainly some Jews with racist attitudes, often based on a mystical worldview, this is generally found among ultra-Orthodox Jews, who are specifically non-Zionist, and they certainly aren’t involved in gaining land or eliminating anyone. The vast majority of adherents of Zionist ideology do not believe that there are any racial or genetic differences between Jews and non-Jews. There were and are many Zionists who aren’t even Jewish! It is true that Jews generally value the lives of their own people above others, but so do most peoples around the world, and what drove Zionism was the simple necessity of ensuring that Jews would be able to survive. And Zionists obviously don’t believe in eliminating all non-Jews in historic Palestine - there’s millions of Arabs and others living in Israel with equal rights, and Israel never planned to eliminate them.
Fine, so Shehadeh is an ignoramus about Zionism. There’s no news there, right?
Except that Dr. Hanine Shehadeh, who is speaking tomorrow at a conference in midtown Manhattan (or, as the organizers refer to it, Lenape), received her PhD in Intellectual History at the Department of Middle Eastern Studies in Columbia University, specializing in Zionism.
And it gets much, much worse. Her doctoral thesis, titled “The Zionist Quest for Honor,” argues that Zionists didn’t simply use violence in order to survive against hostile enemies, but rather that violence is inherent to Zionism. She claims that “there was always an established Zionist need to use violence as to prove to the British, and through them to all European gentiles, that Jews can become colonizing Aryans in a different geography.” The term “Aryan” here refers to the German racial usage of the word. Hanine Shehadeh is thus also claiming that Zionism sought to turn Jews into Nazis.
And it gets even worse. At the end of the dissertation, Shehadeh rejects the Two State Solution on the grounds that one group (the Palestinians) are an “Indigenous people,” for whom the land is only necessary so as to provide survival, identity, and connection to nature, whereas the other group is a “Zionist settler-colonial state which has a structure of domination predicated on dispossession, where violence against the natives still constitutes the regulative norm governing this process of colonial dispossession… the narrative of honor is part of the engineering modus of settler-colonialism and as such, it does not allow for any form of cultural, political and social co-existence with the native population.” This argument, which ignores all kinds of relevant facts, such as the existence of two million Arabs in Israel who have full rights—better than Arabs in any Arab state—presumably means that Israel must be destroyed.
Hanine Shehadeh’s thesis has been nominated for Columbia University’s 2025 Salo and Jeanette Baron Prize in Jewish Studies.
"presumably means that Israel must be destroyed." Indeed.
I wouldn't expect anyone holding a "PhD in Intellectual History at the Department of Middle Eastern Studies in Columbia University, specializing in Zionism" to think otherwise.
If you came from another planet to Columbia U. you would think "Intellectual History" means warning your students about the evils of Zionism, which is the worst of all possible -isms, a sort of Nazism, Communism, nationalism, colonialism, imperialism, racism, Satanism and sadism all rolled into one.
And I thought "Whiteness Studies" (the pseudoscholarship that records all the ways white people are evil) was hateful!
Academic Leftism in our time has devolved into rich white liberals lauding and paying demented black or brown people to perform their hatred and desire to murder those OTHER white people, who are the embodiment of evil. And thus scholarship is replaced by ritual performances of deceitful jargon whose entire purpose is to give Western Leftists a frisson of radical violence, while they sit at a safe distance collecting checks and citing each other.
Columbia delenda est.
Or, as I was going to say, Salo and Jeanette Baron are rolling in their graves. Hopefully, being "nominated" for their Jewish Studies prize means no more than some of the cockamamie nominations that have been made for the Nobel Peace Prize.