Professor Elena Kagan

Dean, Harvard Law School

 

Dear Dean Kagan,

 

I am a Research Scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health. Recently, I was joined by two professors at the School in proposing to the School's Center for Health and Human Rights that it hold a symposium on "The ethnic state and human rights in Israel/Palestine." The Center's director (Stephen Marks) rejected the proposal on the grounds that the topic "seems to be more a topic for an exchange among historians and specialists in Jewish studies or Middle East studies." (The proposal and relevant email exchanges between the director and myself are posted at http://newdemocracyworld.org/Marks.htm .)

 

The School's Dean for Academic Affairs (James Ware) also rejected the idea of holding a symposium on this topic, on the grounds that, "Though the issue may well be worthy of a public discussion, it is a political rather than a public health issue and the subject is not one in which our faculty can offer the best scholarship or expertise." (See   http://newdemocracyworld.org/Ware.htm for the relevant exchange of emails between the School's Dean for Academic Affairs and myself.)

 

Likewise, Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies (see email exchanges at http://newdemocracyworld.org/Center%20Middle%20Eastern%20Studies.htm ) and the Kennedy School of Government's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy (see email exchanges at http://newdemocracyworld.org/Carr%20Center%20Human%20Rights%20Policy.htm ) declined to hold a symposium on this question.

 

Hence my email to you, as Dean of the Harvard Law School:  international law and our concept of human rights, which is embedded in it, are central issues regarding the question of whether there ought to be a Jewish state in Palestine.

 

My concern that there be a symposium on this question stems from the fact that, as Israel argues very rationally and logically, the human rights of Palestinians to return to their country, to not have property arbitrarily taken from them, and to have good health care (Articles 13, 17 and 25, respectively, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) must be denied to them (by the Israeli policies of refusing to grant Palestinians the Right of Return, refusing to compensate Palestinian refugees and "present absentees" inside Israel proper for property taken under cover of the Absentee Property Law of 1950 and other measures, and instituting closures, checkpoints and the Wall, etc. which notoriously conflict with good health for Palestinians in the occupied territories) if the Jewish state of Israel is to have security.

 

Therefore, the question of whether there ought to be a Jewish state in Palestine (meaning one that prevents non-Jews from becoming a majority of the population, and one whose government is responsible to "the Jews" rather than to all of its citizens) is central to any serious discussion of the Israel/Palestine conflict and the terrible situation of Palestinians under Israeli control. (A leaflet about this topic was distributed to everybody at the School of Public Health recently, and the online version is at http://newdemocracyworld.org/israel.htm .)

 

Dismissing opponents of a Jewish state in Palestine (who included Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and Judah Magnes in the past) as "anti-Semites" (as Larry Summers has done, as well as the ADL) is intellectually dishonest; the fact that powerful people do this is an important reason for holding an intellectually honest symposium on the question.