Israeli professor turns harassment into a lesson in wit and resilience
London-based Michael Ben-Gad tells free speech conference: 'They put me in what they think is an IDF uniform, but it was an Air Force major’s uniform'
A London-based Israeli academic harassed by a group of pro-Palestinian students has delivered a masterclass in using humour as a weapon.
Prof Michael Ben-Gad described a new campaign against him in recent days, in which the protesters had doctored a photo of him and “put me in what they think is an IDF uniform, but it was an Air Force major’s uniform”.
He told his audience: “That’s kind of fine by me because if you believe their argument, a klutz like me can fly a plane.”
Referring to his national service in the 1980s, he said: “I worked very hard to get the doctors over there to agree to let me serve in the ground forces. They’re not going to give me a $40 million F-16 to fly.”
Ben-Gad, an economist at City St George’s, University of London, was speaking at the conference of Academics For Academic Freedom, a free-speech campaign group. The latest student demonstration against him, on 21 November, in front of the campus building, followed a disturbance of one of his lectures a few weeks earlier by keffiyeh-wearing students who accused him of having blood on his hands for having served in the IDF.
At the third annual AFAF conference the professor also responded to the placing of $100,000 bounties on the heads of Israeli academics around the world. Home addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and social media accounts were listed for at least 40 academics, the Jerusalem Post had reported the previous day. “I’ve looked through the list and they left me off the honour roll. I’m not sure who to complain to about that.”
He had a further grievance: “As an economist, it’s kind of odd to have just one price. There’s no premium on professors of mathematics and physics. It shows you how badly they’re doing at the moment.”
Although Ben-Gad is not the only Israeli on campus, the student protests had focused personally on him, as well as against Sir Anthony Finkelstein, president of City St George’s – “I’ll leave it to your imagination what it is they don’t like about him.”
On why he is being personally targeted, he says he has some suspicions. When the university had tried to impose certain rules on academics, such as “that 20 percent of the reading list has to be from the global majority”, he was very public about his objection. “I said, ‘I’m not interrogating the ancestry of anyone before I put them on our reading list.’”
City St George’s has been invited to comment.