What would it be like to stroll down Locust Walk and notice kiosks plastered with inflammatory posters that, say, offered a reward for killing President Clinton?
Now substitute Prime Minister Rabin for Clinton and you'll have an idea what Bar-Ilan University in Israel is like, according to Political Science Professor Ian Lustick.
Bar-Ilan is a religious university near Tel Aviv where Rabin's confessed assassin Yigal Amir studied law and computer science. Other suspects in the murder also attended Bar-Ilan.
Dr. Lustick has excellent contacts in Israel. Recently his analysis of events in the Middle East have appeared in national media such as The New York Times and "The News Hour with Jim Lehrer."
He has written one book on Jewish fundamentalism in Israel. Another book, "Unsettled States, Disputed Lands" (Cornell University Press, 1993), examines the assassination, terrorism and civil-war threats that British and French governments confronted over the fate of Ireland in 1914 and Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s. In the book, Dr. Lustick compares these threats with similar threats he predicted the Israeli government would face when it sought to disengage from the West Bank.
When asked a few days ago about Bar-Ilan University and its connection to Eyal, a far-right movement that Israeli police suspect may be connected to the assassination, Dr. Lustick said, "While I think there is insufficient information to say that Bar-Ilan was the headquarters of Eyal, I will say that the atmosphere there is representative of the kind of hothouse climate that breeds the sentiments and beliefs that lie behind the assassination."
Bar-Ilan opened in 1955 with fewer than 100 students. Now a thriving university, Bar-Ilan has become a "hotbed for the religious national movement," said Yael Zerubavel, associate professor of Hebrew, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, "although secular Israelis study there as well.
"Its development, in fact, reflects the profound changes that Israel society has gone through since 1967," she continued. "First, the rising appeal of the national religious movement. Second, the claim of the national religious to be the true followers of the Zionist pioneers with the ideology of settlement and the emphasis on the readiness for patriotic sacrifice."
The Israeli government supports and funds Bar-Ilan, said Dr. Lustick, who added that the university is as established in Israel as Notre Dame or Yeshiva universities are in the United States. "Bar-Ilan was founded as part of the idea that orthodox Judaism and the modern world were not incompatible. The belief was that Jewish law could be made consistent with modern science and liberal democracy. The same principle lies behind Yeshiva.
"But in both the United States and Israel this idea has come under tremendous stress as a result of the influence of the Jewish Messianic fundamentalism that provided graduates of these institutions with a vision of themselves as the vanguard of the Jewish people, and the struggle over settlement in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as the concrete expression of the partnership of God and the people of Israel to complete the redemption of the world.
"As Arab, international and even Israeli resistance to these ideas became fiercer, the movement reacted by latching onto strains within orthodox Judaism that place categorical divisions between Jews and non-Jews and between Jews faithful to the Land of Israel and those 'neo-Hellenizers' who are betraying the Land and the God of Israel. Some rabbis and professors at Bar-Ilan took this wave of emotion and political ascendancy and strengthened it with homilies and interpretations of Jewish legal formulas that put Palestinians in the place of Amalek and Jewish doves in the place of the assimilationist Jews against whom the Maccabees fought. Amalek was the tribe that attacked the Jews in the desert. God's commandment to the Jews was not only to slaughter all of them, wherever they could be found, but to obliterate their memory as well."
As for the political climate on Bar-Ilan's campus, Dr. Lustick says that it would be virtually impossible for any group not on the conservative side of the politcal spectrum to organize or publicize its activities. He says the same condition also applies to Yeshiva. "When I lived at Tel Aviv University for a while in 1990, the peace groups regularly received bomb threats," said Dr. Lustick. "The atmosphere is much worse at Bar-Ilan. At the same time, there are very reasonable, even dovishly oriented professors there, but they just keep a low profile on campus."
When asked which Israeli families would want their sons and daughters to attend Bar-Ilan, Dr. Lustick's profile depicted religious, but not ultraorthodox, Jews who want to minimize the exposure of their children to what they consider dangerous secular ideas and trends prevailing at other universities. "However, the university has an excellent faculty in many areas," he said. "There are a significant number of Arab students enrolled, partly because of the school's location and partly just because of the programs it offers."
As for the mood on Bar-Ilan's campus today, according to Dr. Lustick, there is soul-searching among some of those who teach Jewish studies. "I understand there have been large and solemn meetings of students to consider the importance of toning down rhetoric and introducing more respect and civility into Israeli political life," he said. "And, Bar-Ilan leaders have also complained of being unfairly blamed."
Critics--some from within--have come forward to point an accusing finger at Bar-Ilan. "One of the Bar-Ilan professors, Menachem Friedman, who was a fellow at Penn's Center for Judaic Studies a couple of years ago, gave an interview on NPR [National Public Radio] after Rabin's assassination and said that he feels the Bar-Ilan faculty is guilty by not standing up to these groups and letting them voice their opinions without interruption," Dr. Zerubavel explained. "I read in the Israeli paper, Ha'aretz, that the university newspaper published a very aggressive article by a Rabbi who was a pro-settlement activist, yet the university administration did not bother creating a distance between it and publish anything in response. So clearly, these forces were operating there quite strongly."