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Author: Miriam Elman

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Miriam Elman

Miriam F. Elman is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, where she is a research director in the Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflict and Collaboration.

Posted by Miriam Elman on July 01, 2018 15 Comments
In several posts we have described how biased teaching materials about the Arab-Israeli conflict and the history and practice of Islam were used for years in the curriculum of two public high schools in the Boston suburb of Newton, Massachusetts:

Posted by Miriam Elman on June 24, 2018 13 Comments
The 223rd General Assembly (GA) of the mainline Presbyterian Church (USA) wrapped up yesterday on June 23rd with voting commissioners approving a number of overtures (resolutions) which “featured one-sided condemnations of Israel” while “almost no effort” was made to hold Palestinian governments accountable for stymying peace or “harming Israelis and Palestinians alike.”

Posted by Miriam Elman on June 22, 2018 10 Comments
Wednesday June 20th was World Refugee Day, a day when the international community expresses solidarity for people forced to flee their homes as a result of war, persecution, or violence. Palestinians and their supporters globally typically also use the opportunity of World Refugee Day to raise awareness about the current situation facing Palestinian refugees and also to remind people about what befell the Palestinians in the 1947-1948 war for Israel’s independence.

Posted by Miriam Elman on June 17, 2018 11 Comments
Last week the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism’s official summer camping arm, the National Ramah Commission (NRC), pledged not to partner with an activist group of Ramah camp alumni affiliated with the far-left “IfNotNow” (INN) group. In a letter distributed on June 11th to its institutional partners, whose programs this summer include more than 11,000 children and staff members in the U.S., Canada and Israel, the leaders of Camp Ramah explicitly noted that they will “not engage in any way” with INN as an organization.

Posted by Miriam Elman on June 09, 2018 13 Comments
On April 16h, Durham, North Carolina became the first American city to align a municipal public policy with the agenda of the virulently anti-Jewish and anti-peace extremist organization Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), which falsely blames Israel and American Jewish organizations for U.S. domestic police militarization and instances of police violence against blacks and other minorities in America, Demonization: Durham NC City Council bans police exchanges with Israel. As we discussed, in a statement which passed unanimously, the City Council of Durham imposed a total ban on police exchanges with “only one country in the world: the Jewish nation of Israel.”

Posted by Miriam Elman on June 03, 2018 20 Comments
From June 16-23 the General Assembly (GA) of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) will meet in St. Louis where delegates will consider for passage at least eight Israel-related resolutions. By contrast, in terms of its Middle East coverage, the GA is slated to consider only one overture “responding to the current Syrian crisis” and one responding to the devastating humanitarian crisis in Yemen.

Posted by Miriam Elman on May 28, 2018 26 Comments
The demonization and delegitimization of Israel and bigotry directed toward Jewish faculty, staff, and students is increasing at dramatic rates on university and college campuses. In these supposedly intellectual spaces, virulently anti-Israel “scholars” and student-activists connected to, and supportive of, the global BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) movement regularly:

Posted by Miriam Elman on May 22, 2018 13 Comments
Last week on May 15th was Nakba Day, when Palestinians and their supporters mourn what they call the ‘catastrophe’ of the modern Jewish state’s establishment, mark the displacement of some 750,000 Arabs in 1948, and call for the ‘right’ of return of the Palestinian refugees to their lost homes in present-day Israel. There are many reasons that hundreds of thousands of Arabs were displaced in 1948—but as we highlighted in a recent post, chief among them was the fear of being harmed by the approaching Zionist forces.

Posted by Miriam Elman on May 14, 2018 31 Comments
Today (May 14) the U.S. embassy will officially move from Tel Aviv to Israel’s capital city. The move, widely regarded as historic and “momentous” for Israel and the Jewish people, will coincide with the anniversary of Israel’s declaration of independence 70 years ago on the Gregorian calendar. It also comes one day after Jerusalem Day (Yom Yerushalayim), which marks the reunification of the city during the 1967 Six Day War, and the return of Jewish heritage and holy sites to Jewish sovereignty.

Posted by Miriam Elman on May 08, 2018 12 Comments
Starting in June, the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR), an anti-Israel organization based in Washington, DC, is planning to launch a “three-year plan” to support “municipal-level campaigns across the country” which aim at ending U.S. support for Israel. In rolling out this new plan to advance “exciting work” at the “street-level,” USCPR is hoping to capitalize on the recent success of its member groups in the city of Durham, NC.

Posted by Miriam Elman on April 22, 2018 13 Comments
Last week Durham, North Carolina became the first American city to align a municipal public policy with the agenda of the anti-Israel fringe organization Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), which falsely blames Israel and American Jewish groups for instances of police violence against blacks in the U.S. and domestic police militarization. In a statement endorsed unanimously, the City Council prohibited international police exchanges "in which Durham police officers receive military-style training." The statement, after an intense lobbying campaign by anti-Israel activists and over the objection of police groups, mentioned only Israel by name in the opening paragraph of the document.

Posted by Miriam Elman on April 08, 2018 47 Comments
In the saturated arena of anti-Israel political activism in the U.S., the once little-known Washington D.C.-based organization IfNotNow (INN) is catapulting its way to the forefront of the pack. In one of its boldest moves, IfNotNow is planning to train camp counselors to "teach" campers at Jewish summer camps about the Israeli "occupation." Given IfNotNow's politics, described below, the teaching without a doubt will be anti-Israel. Parents who are sending their children to Jewish summer camps, motivated in part by establishing their children's connection to Israel, will be undermined without knowing it and probably without the camp administration's knowledge.

Posted by Miriam Elman on March 18, 2018 14 Comments
Why have American academic presses rejected a book manuscript by Dr. Eliezer Tauber, a former dean and highly-regarded Israeli history professor at Bar-Ilan University’s Department of Middle Eastern Studies? Tauber is an award-winning and prolific expert on the early phases of the Arab-Israeli conflict. By all accounts, his latest book about the April 9, 1948 battle in the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin has “many strengths” and provides the most comprehensive investigation to date of what was both a seminal event in Israel’s War of Independence and in the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem.

Posted by Miriam Elman on February 25, 2018 21 Comments
United States lawmakers Scott R. Tipton (R-Colo) and David B. McKinley (R-W.Va) were stopped and questioned by Israeli police on the morning of February 22nd while they were visiting the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. According to media reports of the incident (see, for example, here and here), Tipton and McKinley were detained by Israeli officers guarding the site after the Waqf—the Jordanian-funded Islamic Trust that administers day-to-day activities there—brought to their attention that one of the congressmen had apparently taken an olive branch that he had found lying on the ground while touring the place.

Posted by Miriam Elman on February 17, 2018 4 Comments
On Tuesday February 13 the Israeli army repatriated a mentally unstable Lebanese man after he infiltrated Israel by crossing the border fence over the weekend. According to multiple Israeli media reports, the Lebanese national was detained after allegedly being coerced by members of the Hezbollah terror group, who threatened to have him committed if he didn’t do what they demanded.

Posted by Miriam Elman on February 11, 2018 7 Comments
The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) is an international media-monitoring organization that was founded back in 1982 to promote more accurate, balanced, and complete coverage of Israel and the Middle East. In addition to its many blogs and longform articles which expose an astonishing amount of errors and omissions, CAMERA also produces original research that evaluates how this skewed information on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is filtered into educational programming in various settings, such as in U.S. college campuses, the K-12 educational system, and in churches.

Posted by Miriam Elman on January 30, 2018 19 Comments
According to recent Israeli security assessments, more than a third (420 out of 1,027) of the terrorists released in a November 2011 swap for captive soldier Gilad Schalit have gone back to planning terror attacks. As noted by senior Israeli security officials, some of these freed murderers have taken up leadership roles in Hamas in Gaza, from where they are “working with Iran to execute terrorists attacks and kidnappings.”
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