An extremist historian claimed in a recent webinar that Israel practices mass rape of Palestinian Arabs. But when the radical leftwing magazine that sponsored the event later issued a transcript of his remarks, it swept that embarrassment under the rug by quietly omitting his insane allegation.
In other words, Jewish Currents magazine literally rewrote history.
This disturbing episode began when Raz Segal, a professor at Stockton University in New Jersey, appeared on a webinar sponsored by Jewish Currents last month.
In the course of the discussion, Segal made this outrageous claim:
“I do think absolutely that this Israeli government has a plan, and in a way it’s a plan that all Israeli governments have always had, of creating a larger Jewish state, a ‘Greater Israel’ with as few Palestinians as possible, right? In any kind of possible way, there is, you know, short-term intense violence, like the 1948 Nakba, right?–the expulsions of 750,000 Palestinians and the destruction of hundreds of villages in the 1948 war; and longer-term processes of violence, various, you know—mass incarceration, humiliation, sexual assault, all kinds of, you know, very well documented, Israeli mass violence; and what we’re seeing now is part and parcel of this, it is—I don’t think it has anything to do with revenge, it has something to do with a structural plan of how Israel should be as a Jewish State, right?”
(You can hear it for yourself at https://www.youtube.com/
Immediately after the webinar, I wrote an op-ed criticizing Segal’s disgusting accusation. The op-ed appeared in numerous newspapers.I imagine the team at Jewish Currents were embarrassed to be called out over Segal’s vile slur. Because on November 29, when Jewish Currents circulated a transcript of Segal’s remarks, its staff carefully sanitized what he had said. Here’s the cleaned-up version:
“I think this government has a plan that’s the same as all the previous governments:creating a larger Jewish state with as few Palestinians as possible, however possible.This could be through short bursts of intense violence, like the expulsions of 750,000 Palestinians and the destruction of hundreds of villages in the 1948 War and the Nakba, or through longer-term processes of violence.”
Segal’s ugly libel that all Israeli governments carry out “longer-term processes of violence” including “sexual assault” of Palestinian Arabs had simply vanished.
You can understand why Jewish Currents would want to hide what Raz Segal said. He was saying, in effect, that David Ben-Gurion was a mass rapist. And so were Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, and Yair Lapid, among others. There’s no way any rational person or magazine would want to be associated with his disgusting statement.
But just because Jewish Currents is embarrassed by what its speaker said, doesn’t give it the right to rewrite history. That’s against the rules that govern public discourse. Altering the historical record is a major violation of journalistic ethics.
How do the members of the Jewish Currents board of directors feel about such an unethical action taking place in their names?
Are the members of its advisory board—including several well known academics—comfortable with Jewish Currents unilaterally changing the historical record?
The mission statement of the American Jewish Press Association says that it “fosters the highest ethics” in Jewish journalism. So will it be investigating this glaring ethical breach by Jewish Currents?
[Moshe Phillips is a commentator on Jewish affairs whose columns appear regularly in the American and Israeli press.]