With antisemitism and pro-Hamas extremism erupting across Great Britain, the University of London is preparing to convene a major seminar on “Anti-Jewish Racism and Violence after 7th October and Before.” Yet one of the featured speakers is an extremist who constantly accuses Israel of racism and defends anti-Israel boycotts.
The seminar, sponsored by the university’s Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, will be held on December 12. One of the two featured speakers is faculty member Yair Wallach, whose record of anti-Israel hostility is so appalling that he should be the subject of study by the center, not one of the “experts” to whom it is giving a platform.
Wallach’s summary of what he will be discussing at the seminar refers to what he calls “Israel’s mass killing of civilians in Gaza.” That gross distortion of the situation in Gaza is consistent with the lies Wallach has been spreading about Israel for many years.
Wallach portrays Israel as a racist, violent state to its core. “Zionist colonization followed familiar routes of native dispossession as in many other settler-colonial locales,” he wrote for the online +972 Magazine website on January 10, 2023. He emphasized that it would be a “misunderstanding” for anybody “to insist that Zionism is no different from white settler enterprises in Australia or North America.”
Wallach also promotes the apartheid slur against Israel. He claims that the Israeli government is secretly planning to become an apartheid regime. On July 24, for example, Wallach tweeted that the proposals for judicial reform are actually a secret plan “to formalise [sic] a theocratically minded Apartheid regime for now, and to pave the way for a mass expulsion of Palestinians later.” And in Newsweek (December 10, 2020), he accused Israel of perpetuating a racist, “exclusive Jewish-Israeli hegemony.”
Wallach: boycotts of Israel are 'a legitimate and non-violent tool'
With regard to the anti-Israel BDS movement, Wallach signed a June 2019 petition by 240 extremists asserting that boycotts of Israel “are a legitimate and non-violent tool of resistance.” Not surprisingly, that petition is featured prominently on the official BDS website.
It should be noted that according to the Anti-Defamation League, “the global BDS movement doesn’t seek to create a Palestinian state but rather aims to dismantle the Jewish state…many of the founding goals of the BDS movement…are antisemitic.” But Wallach has no problem with BDS.
Writing in the summer 2021 issue of the Tel Aviv Review of Books, Wallach absurdly claimed that “Palestinians make up about 50 percent of the population under Israeli rule today.” Apparently, he is unaware that 98% of Palestinian Arabs live under the rule of the Palestinian Authority or Hamas – or perhaps he does not want to admit that fact because it undermines his narrative of cruel Israeli occupiers.
In the aforementioned +972 article, Wallach accuses Israel of “squeezing Palestinians into ever-shrinking enclaves – a policy that has been applied in severe fashion to the blockaded Gaza Strip.” More lies. The enclaves ruled by the Palestinian Authority have not shrunk by even one centimeter. Neither has the Gaza Strip. And Gaza was never “blockaded.” Thousands of Gazan laborers have entered Israel and returned to Gaza daily for years. Israel only prevented the entry of weapons.
Last year, Wallach signed a petition denouncing a Jewish philanthropist who withdrew his donation to the University of Washington because of an Israel-bashing professor there, as if donors have an obligation to finance institutions with which they disagree.
Wallach also actively revises basic Israeli history. Regarding the Arab invasion of the tiny new state of Israel in 1948, he told the online magazine The New Arab (May 15, 2023): “It is clear that the Arab military effort [in 1948] was primarily directed at a failed attempt to save Palestinians. To be sure, there was also a rejection of partition and [an] attempt to prevent it, but the talk of ‘genocide’ has no basis whatsoever.”
So no matter how many times the Arabs spoke openly about “throwing the Jews into the sea,” Wallach pretends that they were just trying to “save Palestinians.” Save them from what? From having their own state, as the UN proposed and the Jews agreed? Save them from living in peace with despised infidels?
Wallach is not a marginal figure
UNFORTUNATELY, WALLACH is not an obscure figure. He has access to major platforms from which to spread his anti-Israel libels. His latest book was published by a major university press (Stanford). He is frequently published or quoted by leading British and Israeli newspapers. And he influences students every day as chair of the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of London.
Obviously, he has every right to speak wherever he wants, write whatever he wants, and teach whatever he wants. But parents who are thinking of sending their children to the University of London should know exactly who will be teaching their kids.
Perhaps the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, which is sponsoring the upcoming webinar, should think twice about lending the prestige of its platform to somebody who spreads hatred of the Jewish state. Is that what Birkbeck’s donors really want?
The writer is a commentator on Jewish affairs. He was previously a US delegate to the World Zionist Congress.