Let's Have a Course on Startup Nation Instead

Zionists simply cannot tolerate dissent from the party line, whether in politics, the media... or on campus.

Academics have been smeared, and some have even lost their jobs as a result of Zionist pressure tactics. Pro-Palestine students too have been smeared and suspended merely for exercising the rights of assembly, protest and free speech. But I'm not sure if anything quite like this has happened before: 

A proposed University of California Berkeley course Palestine: A Settler Colonial Analysis has been dropped because of Zionist pressure, on the grounds that it is an example of "the misuse of the classroom for political indoctrination."

Here is a description of the course:

"This 1-unit lecture and discussion-based course will examine key historical developments that have taken place in in Palestine, from the 1880s to the present, through the lens of settler colonialism. First, by utilizing a comparative approach and engaging with existing scholarship, we will gain a broad understanding of settler colonialism. Second, we will explore the connection between Zionism and settler colonialism, and the ways in which it has manifested, and continues to manifest, in Palestine. Lastly, drawing upon the literature on decolonization, we will explore the possibilities of a decolonized Palestine, one in which justice is realized for all its peoples and equality is not only espoused, but practiced."

In fact, it is those raised on the false historical narrative of Zionism, with its myths of a golden age of Jewish political sovereignty in Palestine, a forced expulsion, a dark, centuries-long exile, and an eventual, triumphant return to the 'Land of Israel', who have been politically indoctrinated. And it is they who resist tooth and nail any subjection of their narrative to critical scrutiny by historians.

Mind you, the early Zionists had no problems with the 'c' or 's' words. A few examples suffice:

There was Baron de Hirsch's Jewish Colonization Association and its successor, Baron de Rothschild's Palestine Jewish Colonization Association.

There was the call in the first Zionist Congress's Basel Program (1897) for "the settlement of Jewish farmers, artisans and manufacturers" in "Eretz Israel."

The were early descriptions such as this of Zionist settlers in Ottoman Palestine: "We found the graves of the great Talmudist Rabbi Meir and two of his pupils in a school of the Ashkenazim, which, for the nonce, was serving a very useful purpose as hospice for a number of German Jews travelling to a new colony farther south." (In a Syrian Saddle, A. Goodrich-Freer, 1905, p 305)

There was the July 1917 first draft of the Balfour Declaration, which called on the British government to establish "a Jewish National Colonizing Corporation."

And there was Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann with his "plans for immigration, irrigation [and] colonization." (Trial & Error, p 316)