Like professors in the U.S., the overwhelming majority of academics in Israel (at least in the social sciences and humanities) are left-wing. It is not a matter of indifference that American professors are so tendentious. But in Israel, adopting leftist intellectual fashions means swallowing ideas that spell the destruction of the state. A study of political science syllabi in Israel's five universities, for example, found that about 80 percent of the course material took a "post-Zionist" or anti-nationalist position.
Neve Gordon, a professor at Ben Gurion University of Beer-Sheva, has led international efforts to boycott the Jewish state. Rachel Giora, a professor at Tel Aviv University, actively encourages international divestment campaigns. Shlomo Sand, the son of Holocaust survivors and a professor at Tel Aviv University (and Berkeley), proclaims that "There is no Jewish people and no justification for a Jewish state." The leading announcer on the Army radio channel, Merav Michaeli, has urged Israelis to resist the draft. Israeli professors have cheered the idea of issuing international arrest warrants for leading Israeli politicians and army officers -- though none has so far volunteered to renounce his own salary as a contribution to international sanctions.
Israeli organizations like the New Israel Fund have financed groups that participated in the libelous "Goldstone Report" about the 2009 Gaza operation and helped distribute disturbing films in Israel like "Paradise Now" (2005), which offered a highly sympathetic fictional portrayal of two Palestinian suicide bombers. To be clear: Israelis helped to promote a film, the message of which was that Israel was so profoundly evil that even mass murder could be justified against it.
The corrosive effect of this sustained assault on Israel's soul is obvious. Today, around the nation, a popular bit of graffiti sourly satirizes Theodor Herzl's famous phrase inspiring Jews to believe in their state. Regarding Israel, the wall art proclaims, "We don't need it. We don't want it." The percentage of young Israelis resisting the draft was 18 percent in 1991 and is estimated to be 25 percent today. The number of emigrants continues to rise.
There is push back. Im Tirtzu, a group begun by four army officers after the inconclusive, and many believed, incompetent war with Hezbollah in 2006, is attempting to reinvigorate Israeli self-respect and confidence on a number of fronts -- though facing a stiff headwind from Israeli media, academia, and civil society. The disillusioned are far from a majority, but they are a worrying minority, and in this, as in everything else, Israel has little room for error.