Princeton in the Service of Ethnic Cleansing

Here is the first installment of the supplementary posts to my April 5 post, “Princeton’s Genocide.” This one consists of screenshots from the Daily Princetonian (April 27, 1984) of Meir Kahane’s first visit to Princeton in April 1984, at the invitation of Yoram Hazony. As you’ll see from the last screenshot, Kahane explicitly advocates the apartheid and ethnic cleansing likewise defended in his book, They Must Go. “If necessary to maintain a Jewish majority in Israel, Arabs might need to be deported.” Since Kahane regarded Israel as encompassing everything it held in 1984, that meant that “Arabs” would have to be deported from the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, Golan, and Israel proper.

In this, Kahane anticipated Trump by decades:

The reality of the situation is, therefore, clear. The Jews and Arabs of the Land of Israel cannot co-exist in a Jewish-Zionist state. A time bomb in the Holy Land ticks away relentlessly.

A Jewish state means Jewish orientation and ties. It means Jewish culture and a Jewish spirit in the Jewish body politic. But above all, a Jewish state means Jewish sovereignty and control of its destiny. That can be accomplished only by a permanent Jewish majority and a small, insignificant, and placid Arab minority. … The result will be bloody conflict.

If we hope to avoid terrible result, there is only one path for us to take: the immediate transfer of Arabs from Eretz Israel, the Land of Israel, to their own lands. For Arab and Jews of Eretz Israel there is only one answer: separation. Jews in their land, Arabs in theirs. Separation. Only separation (Meir Kahane, They Must Go (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1981), p. 7).

The echo of George Wallace’s 1963 Inaugural Address is painfully obvious, but was no deterrent to those who invited Kahane. As the invitations to Kahane and now Naftali Bennett make clear, Princeton’s Zionists have never outgrown Jim Crow. Israel is the playground in which they enact it. So is McCosh Hall. 

It’s worth noting that They Must Go is no longer available on Amazon. Like the Palestinians themselves, the truth about Zionism has to be washed away. I got my copy in 2003 from my late colleague Allan Gotthelf, when we were both teaching in the Philosophy Department at The College of New Jersey. He was cleaning out his office and needed to get rid of some unwanted books. “Here’s one I like but can’t keep,” he said, handing me Kahane’s book. “I still basically agree with it, though not all the details. Kahane has a good sense of what needs to be done to preserve the integrity of the State.” I murmured a thanks and accepted the gift. You learn a lot when you do.