Slamming The Haute Ecole Pedagogique Vaud in Lausanne, Switzerland, the Wiesenthal Centre called it to stop an up-and-coming 'Hatefest' directed at spreading anti-Israeli ideology among high-school students and their teachers.
The Center's Director for International Relations Dr. Shimon Samuels called upon Haute Ecole Rector Guillaume Vanhulst to stop the event, in which speakers such as Shlomo Sand and Elias Khoury are meant to speak.
Samuels called the speakers "well known anti-Zionists who deny the right to self-determination of the Jewish people and are intent upon the destruction of the Jewish State."
He also noted that the event was meant to take place in October 2018 but was cancelled as the original title, 1948: knowing and teaching the Palestinian Nakba [Disaster] , was seen as too one-sided.
Sand, an Israeli academic, became known for his 2008 book The Invention of the Jewish people which he followed with his 2012 book The Invention of the Land of Israel and his 2013 book How I ceased to be a Jew.Sand was slammed by his views by various scholars that pointed out that his subject is French intellectual history and film theory - not Jewish history or culture.Shaul Stampfer pointed out that Sand's claim that European Jews are partly descended from the Khazars has no grounding in facts.
Elias Khoury is a Lebanese writer who joined Fatah in 1967 and is active in Palestinian issues ever since.In an interview with Yediot Ahronot, he said that it's impossible to understand the Palestinian experience without also understanding the Israeli side, "who also has a human experience we should learn of." His books had been translated into Hebrew.