The Self-Absorbed Anti-Zionist "Scholar"

The University of Toronto is the most recent university in the centre of a hailstorm of controversy after accepting a master’s thesis, written by one Jenny Peto, that denounces Holocaust education as perpetuating what she deems Jewish racism.

Entitled “The Victimhood of the Powerful: White Jews, Zionism and the Racism of Hegemonic Holocaust Education”, the thesis targets the March of Remembrance and Hope (which unites young adults with Holocaust survivors for trips to Nazi death camps built in occupied Poland) and March of the Living Canada (in which young Jews travel with Holocaust survivors to Israel and Poland).

Peto insists that Holocaust education sells a Jewish identity of innocent victimhood. She maintains that the goals of such programs is to construct “a victimized Jewish identity” that justifies Israel as an apartheid state. (Peto is also heavily involved in the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid.)

But as it turns out, Peto’s thesis is really largely about herself.

Throughout the introduction and conclusion, Peto mostly writes about herself and her own experiences, both growing up as an outcast in an Orthodox Jewish community, and as an anti-Zionist crusader.

In particular, she identifies a run-in with one of her teachers as a formative moment of her anti-Zionism.

“My first memory of questioning my loyalty to the Israeli state is from the 9^th grade,” she writes. “It was 1995 and I was almost 15 years old, attending a private Jewish high school in Toronto. One day, during a Jewish History class, our teacher was giving a lesson on the city of Hebron. During the class, he mentioned Baruch Goldstein – the Jewish settler who, in February 1994, had massacred over 50 Palestinians while they were praying at the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron.

“When my teacher said Goldstein’s name, he followed it with ‘zichrona livracha’ which is Hebrew for ‘may his memory be blessed’,” she continues. “This is a common practice among Orthodox Jewish people when mentioning the name of someone who is deceased. I remember being completely shocked that he would bless the name of a man who had committed such a horrible act of violence. I raised my hand and asked him why he had blessed Goldstein and not said ‘yemach shmo’ which, in Hebrew, means ‘may his name be erased from history’ and is commonly said after mentioning the name of an evil-doer that has died.”

“My teacher, who himself was an Israeli settler, became enraged, refused to engage in this debate with me and sent me to the principal’s office where I was reprimanded for being disruptive in class,” she recounts.

Peto is, of course, entirely justified in her outrage at the seemingly explicit approval for Jewish terrorism exhibited by this particular unnamed teacher.

But Peto’s account seems to demand both correction and context. First off, Goldstein seems to have killed 29 Muslims in the Cave of the Patriarchs Mosque, not 50. Goldstein did, however, wound an additional 125. It’s still an abominable act.

An additional 25 Muslims were killed during the rioting that followed Goldstein’s terrorist act (by this time Goldstein was already dead, having been beaten to death). It’s hard to tell whether or not Peto counted them as part of Goldstein’s body count, but one thing is evident: if she did, she didn’t include the five Israelis killed during the same riots. Otherwise, she would have credited Goldstein with a body count of nearly 60.

Then, of course, there is the context. Extremist Israelis very much approved of Goldstein’s actions. They built a grandiose shrine to him in Meir Kahane Memorial Park. It became a pilgrimage site for Israeli extremists. However, in 1999 the shrine was bulldozed after passage of a law outlawing monuments to terrorists.

Peto’s unnamed teacher may have approved of Goldstein’s actions. Israelis as a whole did not.

It’s entirely fair to use the Baruch Goldstein episode to condemn the more militant and extremist forms of Zionism. It’s not nearly as fair to use the episode to condemn Zionism as a whole, or even the state of Israel.

Then again, it’s clear that the last thing Peto intended in developing her thesis was to even attempt to be objective or fair.

Rather, she clearly intends to push her own agenda in a master’s thesis that is remarkable only in the extent of its self-edification. She’s far from the only Canadian grad student doing precisely this.

This is, sadly, what academic research comes to when the academics in question put the research second to lionizing themselves.

Patrick Ross is a Contributing Writer for The Propagandist