Speaking as part of a panel of Jewish public officials on Tuesday, Robinson answered a question in part by saying there is an “entire generation” of young adults who do not know about the Holocaust or understand that the region on which the state of Israel was created decades ago was previously “a crappy piece of land with nothing on it.”
“There were several hundred thousand people but, other than that, it didn’t produce an economy. It couldn’t grow things. It didn’t have anything on it,” she said during a public Zoom call hosted by B’nai Brith, an independent Jewish human rights organization.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Critics say remarks like Robinson’s dismiss people who lived in the area for tens of thousands of years before the creation of Israel in 1948, including Palestinians, Muslims and Christians.
“I was surprised and flabbergasted by the comments because they are both incredibly ahistoric and inaccurate by every measure of knowledge,” said Adel Iskandar, an associate professor of global communication at Simon Fraser University.
The nation’s establishment represented self-determination for Jewish people after the persecution of the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were systemically murdered from 1933 to the end of the Second World War in 1945.
But the creation of Israel is deemed the “catastrophe” — or Nakba — for Palestinians whose society, culture and identity were destroyed as they were driven from their homeland to make way for incoming Jewish immigrants.
At a Friday press conference on an unrelated matter, Eby did not directly answer questions about whether he had considered firing Robinson, or if she had offered her resignation.
“Political interference into the internal affairs of universities and colleges must never be countenanced as it undermines their independence and the academic freedom of faculty that is necessary to preserve, share and advance knowledge,” CAUT executive director David Robinson wrote in a letter to the premier.
The original article contains 1,261 words, the summary contains 192 words. Saved 85%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!