Hebrew University Professor’s Troubling NGO Connections
On January 22, 2019, Hebrew University Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian will speak at an event in Amsterdam about “Technologies of Violence at Damascus Gate: Jerusalemite Children Write against ‘Combat Proven’ Dispossession.” Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s research includes antisemitic themes popularized by NGO activists. In this narrative, Jews are not only “blood thirsty” but “greedy,” killing children to make money by selling weapons.
The three non-governmental organizations (NGOs) sponsoring the event promote discriminatory anti-Israel campaigns. For example:
- Gate48 supports BDS, and in July 2018 signed a Jewish Voice for Peace letter condemning the IHRA definition of antisemitism and anti-boycott efforts.
- FFIPP promotes BDS campaigns, bringing Omar Barghouti to teach its interns about this form of discrimination. FFIPP also meets with PFLP-tied NGOs and other prominent BDS groups. Its board members include Richard Falk, Judith Butler, and Hanan Ashrawi.
- Palestine Link supports the Kairos Palestine document, which characterizes terrorist acts as “armed resistance” and “Palestinian legal resistance,” denies the Jewish historical connection to Israel in theological terms, seeks to mobilize churches worldwide in the call for BDS, compares Israel with the South African apartheid regime. Palestine Link also supports BDS.
Additionally, the speaker herself has numerous NGO connections. In 2014, she signed the highly inflammatory “open letter to the people in Gaza,” published in The Lancet medical journal and authored by NGO activists who promoted David Duke videos. The letter accused Israel of carrying out a propaganda campaign that “justifies the creation of an emergency to masquerade a massacre” and ignored Hamas’s crimes of rocket fire and terror tunnels from Gaza into Israeli territory.
Shalhoub-Kevorkian also serves as “Academic Board Member” and Director of the Gender Studies Program of Mada al-Carmel. In 2007, Mada al-Carmel co-authored the “Haifa Declaration” (2007), which calls for a “change in the definition of the State of Israel from a Jewish state” and accuses Israel of “exploiting” the Holocaust “at the expense of the Palestinian people.”
Finally, the event’s focus on children in Jerusalem raises red flags. NGO Monitor research shows that the primary organization working on the issue of Palestinian children is Defense for Children International – Palestine (DCI-P), which has close connections to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist organization. Another organization, Wadi Hilweh, claims to work on the subject in eastern Jerusalem, but is simply an anti-Israel political advocacy group. NGO Monitor found that the Hebrew University professor in question regularly uses information from these organizations in her publications. It would not be surprising if these NGOs are similarly cited in the Amsterdam presentation.
