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Below are two letters sent to Haifa University officials, one sent by Jacob Katriel and another by Stanley Heller. Please send us your letter and we'll publish it.
Professor Yehuda Hayuth, President of the University of Haifa
Professor Aaron Ben Ze'ev, Rector of the University of Haifa
Dear Professors Hayuth and Ben Ze'ev,
I have carefully read the ten page complaint against Dr. Ilan Pappe, and I am writing to you in order to strongly advise you to drop this case and
to refrain from pressing official charges against him.
While I claim no expertize in the relevant scholarly discipline, I
followed the unfolding of the Tantura Affair closely enough to be
convinced that, at the very least, you should exercise extreme caution
while passing judgement on the expressions of anybody who has publicly supported your graduate student, Mr. Teddy Katz (as I have done, too).
Again, without any relevant scholarly credentials, but with enough
personal experience, both as a user and as a "victim" of the abuse of the
internet by others, I believe that the true social nature of this medium
is being established as a semi-private forum, where norms of expression
are different from those of formal academic discourse. I have not asked
you to investigate the possibility that the University of Haifa is the
origin of items posted in ACADEMIA by a person signing as kaiser_zupe (or variations thereof), who brutally attacked me (and my family) as well as Professor Kimmerling and several other academics who had supported Teddy Katz' cause on that list in a manner that even Professor Danny Censor, the editor of ACADEMIA and a leader in the anti-Katz crusade, felt compelled to publicly distance himself from. I have not done so because the only purpose that such an investigation could serve is to humiliate that person. As things stand (in the absence of such investigation) several people on your faculty can legitimately feel that they are being suspected to be behind that anonymous internet-abuse. Such an investigation might have been in their interest, but as far as I am concerned the internet is a medium in which even such conduct should be tolerated.
I have served on promotion committees long enough to strongly advise you against opening any proceedings that will necessitate the public exposure of the promotion and tenure files of all the faculty members that Prof. Ben-Artzi's letter of complaint claims have been harmed by Dr. Pappe. Obviously, without full exposure of these files Dr. Pappe's case will not receive due process. I believe that the damage that will be caused, for example, by revealing the identities of all the several dozen scholars who wrote the letters of evaluation of these faculty members, and the content of their letters, may make it impossible for your university to conduct its academic tenure and promotion procedures in the future.
I am sure that pressing the charges against Dr. Pappe will have a
devastating effect on the status of your University within Israeli
academia. The international consequences of such a move will affect
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