Profs Hammer Israel, Fail to Predict Palestinian War

by Winfield Myers  •  March 12, 2008

http://www.campus-watch.org/blog/2008/03/profs-hammer-israel-fail-to

In "Profs Hammer Israel, Fail to Predict Palestinian War," Campus Watch adjunct scholar Jonathan Schanzer asks why professors of Middle East studies failed to address internecine Palestinian war, even as many attacked Israel's defense policies. Writing in The American Thinker, Schanzer notes:

From the Egyptian border breach to indiscriminate rocket fire at Israel, the Gaza Strip currently poses serious threats to regional security. The Hamas terrorist organization controls this territory because it defeated the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in a six-day Palestinian civil war in June 2007. But a cursory review of history shows that the Hamas-PLO rivalry has been brewing since 1988, when Hamas first emerged on the scene. Despite clear signs of impending conflict, nearly every professor of Middle Eastern studies in America failed to see it coming.

Why did so few experts write about the internecine Palestinian war? Hundreds of Arabic-speaking professors and researchers have trekked through the West Bank and Gaza over the years, funded by U.S. research dollars.

Most were too busy lambasting Israel's defense policies to identify the gathering storm, but a few U.S. professors saw the writing on the wall.

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