To the Editor:
Ghazi-Walid Falah was the subject of an article by John Gravois in The Chronicle (“Why Was This Geographer Thrown in Jail?,” November 23) and a companion piece on your Web site, in which I was falsely accused of spearheading a conspiracy against him.
Both pieces were written almost exclusively from his perspective. Why is The Chronicle airing a personal vendetta against me and against the state of Israel?
The author casts Falah as an exemplar of “the risks involved in studying the region” and details the geographer’s spurious charges that his arrest and difficulties advancing in Israeli academia are due to his race and his controversial opinions. The reality is that despite being a country at war, Israel is above all a democracy, and its academy is open and inclusive.
Gravois also amplifies Falah’s absurd charge that I played a role in his arrest, writing: “Mr. Falah muses darkly that Arnon Soffer, with all his influence in high places, may have played a role in his detention.” This is sheer nonsense!
A few observations about Falah’s claims and actions: Notwithstanding his claims of being punished for his views or thwarted in his efforts, Falah has long freely researched and photographed abandoned Arab villages in Israel.
According to Gravois, Falah had come in 2006 to visit his hospitalized mother and “took a breather” by renting a car to take snapshots of the “beautiful” landscape. What is clear is that during a time of heightened alert, Falah traveled to the tense Lebanese border.
The landscape he was photographing included antennae and military installations. This may have been just unfortunate timing or poor judgment on Falah’s part, but the overall circumstances created understandable suspicions of espionage: travel alone in a sensitive area, photography at a border, a record of prior visits to and contacts in both Lebanon and Iran, extreme vilification of Israel.
Nor is it unusual for a suspect to be remanded during wartime until more evidence can be collected. It is patently absurd to assume this is a racist vendetta against an Arab academic by an Israeli academic who disagrees with his views.
Similarly, the article suggests Falah’s academic career floundered in Israel primarily because of an “academic conspiracy” that I allegedly launched in 1989. Gravois writes that after a yearlong appointment at Tel Aviv University, Falah “never found another one on an Israeli campus,” with the implication that Israeli academics blackballed him because of his unpopular views.
Falah was dismissed from Tel Aviv University because of his strange behavior. He was also dismissed from two Palestinian universities for the same reason.
Gravois writes that “Falah’s academic career only picked up speed once he left Israel and headed for America.” Here, too, the facts need clarifying. Falah passed rapidly through three more universities, plus having an unexplained gap of two years on his curriculum vitae. Is this also to be blamed on an Israeli conspiracy?
There is no doubt that I object to Falah’s shoddy scholarship; there is not one article of his about Israel or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that does not contain errors, dishonest quotations, and deceptions (I am prepared to detail scores of such examples). And there is no doubt that Falah’s writings are obsessively anti-Israel. His work is embraced by those who share his sentiments and by those to whom rigorous scholarship is secondary to a political agenda.
But to claim he was blackballed because of his radical views is ridiculous. Falah’s difficulties progressing in the academic world were likely a matter of his irrational and paranoid behavior and his shoddy scholarship.
The Chronicle has become a party to Falah’s conspiracy theories and anti-Israel calumnies. What is your real motive?
Arnon Soffer
Professor Emeritus of Geography
University of Haifa
Haifa, Israel
