UNM’s current vision statement does not contain the left-wing buzzwords cited in the article below, but “social justice” teaching is a strong undertow in several UNM departments. Each year there are several courses across the campus that give credit for “community organizing” and “social justice” of various flavors.

Is any credit given for right wing organizing? Has anybody ever gotten course credits for campaigning for Republicans, spending the weekend volunteering with the Minute Men, attending an AIPAC conference or lobbying for offshore drilling? Why not? Chances are the very thought made you laugh. But seriously, objectively, analytically: In what way is it better to go to Central America and teach local people how to be political activists than it is to show local young women practical alternatives to abortion for unwanted pregancies, for example? Is campaigning for the Democratic candidate more academically desirable than campaigning for the Republican candidate? What if a UNM climatologist wrote a professional paper showing that global warming, as described by the UN and Al Gore, were not true? What would be the results for his career at UNM? Good, bad, no effect?

Social Justice at face value is a good thing, of course, and true social justice is an aim for every decent human. But in academic and political parlance it is one of the main codewords for furthering a far left wing social and political agenda. This agenda involves communist ideology, liberation theology and so on, and has a very slanted sense of justice, which is to say practically none.

However, while this left wing current is very strong in many parts of UNM, we can be glad that those of us who disagree with the left wing viewpoint and aims do in fact have the ability to speak up, present our views and work toward our goals in a matter fitting for a public university, the same as our left wing colleagues do.

Whatever “minority” political/social viewpoint you might hold, even political or religious conservatism or Zionism, or some uncommon mix of right and left, you will not be mobbed or harassed for speaking. It only takes the courage to speak up and go against the flow, and you may be surprised at the positive results you see.

More importantly, if those who hold these minority political/social viewpoints do not speak up and give their views and celebrate their causes, it will become increasingly difficult to do so. People who agree, but are less bold will be afraid to speak up alone. Those in the opposing camp, having no opposition, will become bolder in presenting their political/social agenda as truth, and students who do not have strong views will begin to assume the most commonly stated view is the truth, since they hear no other side.

Do your fellow students, staff and faculty a favor, and speak your views out loud with courage and good reasoning, whenever you find something you feel is wrong, unjust or otherwise objectionable.
Don’t be afraid of the bad grade, the bad graduate recommendation or the passed over promotion for holding unpopular views. Nobody ever improved a society, a government or a campus by keeping silent.

When “peace”, “social justice”, “international justice”, “family values”, “choice”, “life”, “grassroots”, “democracy”, etc, become buzzwords at the service of any particular agenda, they have become meaningless sounds, and the ideals that may once have been behind them are not advancing.

The following article concerns Brandeis University in particular and large American universities in general.

Posted by Students for Academic Freedom

Brandeis University is now officially committed to social justice. The university’s “Diversity Statement” says that the university considers social justice central to its mission. Is this controversial? Absolutely, says George Mason law professor David Bernstein, blogging at the Volokh Conspiracy. Universities shouldn’t be in the social justice business, according to Bernstein, a Brandeis alum who thinks the formal commitment is an attempt to attract donations from left-liberal alumni and other like-minded sources.

Citing a brochure used in a class to stress the important of social justice, Bernstein says, “At best this is just p.r. talk and has no effect on academic freedom in the university, and is merely embarrassing. At worst, Brandeis in fact institutionally favors certain ideological views over others, has no claim to be a university devoted to the pursuit of truth regardless of ideological implications.”

But isn’t justice an obvious goal for people of good will across the political spectrum? In theory, yes. In practice, “social justice,” sometimes used synonymously with “social action,” is a campus buzzword that refers rather clearly to the agenda of the left. Bernstein quotes a Brandeis administrator hoping that the university will turn out operators of “socially responsible” businesses and politicians who “head progressive national governments.”

“Social justice” bureaucrats make an effort to keep the language neutral, but commitment to the left shines through. The term often refers to plans for government-sponsored redistribution of income. Other social goals include more anti-discrimination laws, environmentalism, resistance to “oppression” and support for gay marriage and adoption. Columbia Teachers College, perhaps the most vehemently ideological of the “social justice” schools, says education is a “political act” and educators “must recognize ways in which taken-for-granted notions regarding the legitimacy of the social order are flawed.”

The policy makes clear that any would-be teachers who believe in merit and individual responsibility would be better off not showing up at Teachers College: “social inequalities are often produced and perpetuated through systematic discrimination and justified by societal ideology of merit, social mobility and individual responsibility.”

So Bernstein is probably wrong to see the Brandeis commitment to social justice as an attempt to attract financing from the left. More likely it is simply another example of the spread of a partisan codeword and the ideological pressure behind it.

EI’s chief evidence against CAMERA was a series of private e-mails exchanged by CAMERA staff and their volunteers. An EI staff member infiltrated the group and turned the e-mails over to Wikipedia, claiming they revealed a plot by CAMERA to manipulate Wikipedia and to pass off “crude propaganda as fact.” An investigation followed, resulting in two indefinite bans and several shorter-term bans for CAMERA members.
A closer look at Wikipedia’s inner workings, however, reveals there is more to the story. Research carried out by Social Media expert Dr. Andre Oboler, a Legacy Heritage Fellow at NGO Monitor, reveals that it was EI, not CAMERA, that manipulated Wikipedia to achieve its ideological goals.

Dr. Oboler and HonestReporting also found that despite Wikipedia’s clear policy against political advocacy, initiatives such as “Wiki Project Palestine” and the Yahoo group “Wikipedians for Palestine” used the Wikipedia platform to promote their ideological views, largely unopposed by the Wikipedia community. CAMERA, however, was singled out by the administrators in order to “send a strong message to lobbying groups, campaigns and other advocacy groups.”

WIKIPEDIA AND THE NEUTRAL POINT OF VIEW
With nearly 60 million visitors a month and 10 million entries in 253 languages, Wikipedia has become a primary resource for students across the world. A Google search for almost any topic will return a Wikipedia entry at or near the top of the list of results.

But despite its popularity, Wikipedia does not always provide the most accurate information. What sets the encyclopedia apart from other sources is its reliance on the “wisdom of crowds” - allowing any user who spots an error in any entry to simply change it himself, anonymously if he chooses.

Not surprisingly, this feature turns controversial topics such as “Jerusalem” or “Terrorism” into battlegrounds between people with sharply different agendas. To counter the problem, Wikipedia established the neutral point of view (NPOV) as one of its guiding principles. The NPOV policy is meant to ensure all sides are presented equally on a topic until a consensus eventually emerges, a process that can take many months of intense debate.

Unfortunately, NPOV is another noble goal not always applied equally by Wikipedia users. Dr. Oboler tracked the activity of Wikipedia user Bangpound, an individual revealed to be EI staff member Benjamin Doherty, who appears to be looking to spin EI’s view of CAMERA’s campaign. Here is how Dr. Oboler describes his activity:

At 14:08 on April 21 EI boasted publicly to someone thought to be a member of CAMERA’s staff that CAMERA and its editor have been exposed. He links to the EI article about CAMERA [accusing CAMERA of a Wikipedia conspiracy]. At 14:26 the same person edits the CAMERA page making it say “CAMERA also attempts to use Wikipedia to covertly disseminate discredited pro-Israeli propaganda.” They add that EI have e-mails that “outlined an attempt to subvert Wikipedia editorial controls and leadership structures” - an accusation designed to make Wikipedia editors see red. At 14:44 they edited the Wikipedia page on reliable sources adding “CAMERA cannot possibly be considered a reliable source” and again they outline their accusations. These edits appear aimed both to discredit CAMERA and to promote EI. It was clever marketing as well as clever advocacy, and it took under half an hour. [For the full transcripts of these edits see Dr. Oboler's research on Zionism on the Web].

But according to Dr. Oboler, EI’s manipulations on Wikipedia pale in comparison to other pro-Palestinian groups such as “Wiki Project Palestine” - an effort supposedly aimed at improving articles related to Palestinian culture and society but misused to promote a political agenda, and the Yahoo group “Wikipedians for Palestine.”

The real organized effort [to recruit outsiders to promote pro-Palestinian views on Wikipedia] appears to be from “Wikipedians for Palestine,” a group that was advertised to individuals both on Wikipedia and through at least one Palestinian campaigning organization. That group was active for over two years. It was detected, questions were raised on and off Wikipedia, and then …nothing seemed to happen, then or now.

People commenting on the CAMERA case who were shown to be involved in this Palestinian group first proclaimed the group’s innocence. Then they made a number of misleading claims off Wikipedia, stating, for example, that they “never recruited neophytes to edit Wikiepdia,” and that their group is “independent and never bankrolled and backed by any organization, let alone one as well staffed and funded as CAMERA.” They were challenged by an administrator to give access to their group so the archives could be checked, as was done to CAMERA. They promptly deleted the group - destroying all archives.

Wikipedia apparently dropped the issue because no one had infiltrated the group or had evidence revealing the content of the deleted archives. According to Dr. Oboler, it is impossible to know exactly what it accomplished over the past two years.

What is clear is that its claims on the group’s home page were designed not only to defend themselves but also to attack CAMERA. The group may or may not have actually recruited people who were not editors, but they certainly tried to. The penalties to CAMERA are for trying to recruit people, not for any problematic editing on Wikipedia (itself a very unusual thing in a Wikiepdia investigation - normally only actions on Wikipedia are considered).

COMMON FORMS OF ANTI-ISRAEL BIAS ON WIKIPEDIA
Anti-Israel bias in Wikipedia takes three primary forms: vandalism, blatantly false allegations, and attempts to marginalize the Israeli perspective.

Vandalism, such as efforts to change Jerusalem to ‘Capital of Palestine,’ tends to be relatively harmless. Editors discover these kinds of changes quickly and “revert” them to the ‘community consensus’. Wikipedia allows editors to be notified by email if someone has changed a favorite entry. It also keeps a history of all changes, making it easy to restore the original content.

A more insidious form of bias is the use of false information. An example can be seen on the ‘Egypt’ ‘Camp David Accords’ entry, where clear anti-Semitic incitement in the Egyptian press was dismissed as simple ‘Anti-Zionist criticism’. This entry alone attracts 150,000 viewers a year, and the related ‘Egypt’ entry, which doesn’t mention the issue at all, is viewed 3.5 million times annually.

More common are attempts to marginalize Israeli and Zionist content and lend more weight to the Palestinian or Arab narrative. The entry “Massacres committed during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war,” for example, lists only those allegedly committed by Jews. Another example is the original ‘Hebrews’ entry, which fails to mention the undisputed fact that Jews always prayed in Hebrew, and that it became their primary everyday language in Israel since the early 20th century.

This category also includes entries that serve to diminish the perception of threats against Israel. For example, several Iran articles are apologetic about Iranian president Mahmoud Admadinejad’ s calls for erasing Israel from the map, reassuringly explaining the threat as mistranslation of Farsi, which supposedly only meant ‘erase off the pages of time.’ However they fail to mention that the same slogan was also painted on ballistic missiles in Iranian army parades.

PRO-PALESTINIAN ADVOCACY: WIKIPROJECT PALESTINE
A WikiProject is a Wikipedia’s community feature allowing people with common interests to collaborate on particular encyclopedia topics. A project’s homepage is essentially a central billboard allowing users to share articles of interest with the Wikipedia community.

The ‘Palestine Project’ goals, stated on its page, fall within the accepted Wikipedia guidelines: To “Maintain information on Palestine including history, culture, geography and contemporary political, socio-economic and ideological context; Improve Palestine-related articles by expansion, verification and copyediting. ” And finally: “Be thorough and watch for POV in particularly controversial articles.”

Despite the warning, however, the actual content promoted by the project appears geared towards online advocacy. There are 210 articles marked as “high importance”. About half are related to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Many appear because of their influence on public opinion on the Palestinian cause.

In its hall of fame for best articles, the Palestine Project page lists four best biographies. One is by Norman Finkelstein, a staunch supporter of the Palestinian cause, whose controversial bestseller “The Holocaust Industry” accused Jews of exploiting the Holocaust for financial and political gain.

There is also a large number of small articles that appear to have been posted to add weight to the Project’s page, giving it the appearance of significant substance. Many of these articles are posted by anonymous users so that they will be difficult to track. This is particularly suspicious behavior considering the community-building nature of WikiProjects.

According to Dr. Oboler, the entire project appears to be an organized effort to promote the Palestinian point of view on Wikipedia.

In trying to kill off an attempt by CAMERA to get pro-Israel people involved in Wikipedia, Electronic Intifada may just have thrown a spotlight on the real and far more successful campaign to control Wikipedia… the campaign that caused CAMERA so much concern in the first place.

THE PROBLEMS ON WIKIPEDIA
A study of user involvement on Social Media sites such as Wikipedia suggests that only 1% of site visitors become heavy contributors. But according to Dr. Oboler, the involvement of more people and greater diversity ultimately benefits sites like Wikipedia:

CAMERA was right about the problems on Wikipedia. People should consider getting involved in Wikipedia and making use of the resources they have (such as books) to improve the accuracy of articles they take an interest in (on any topic imaginable). The first goal must be to improve Wikipedia. That this helps reverse manipulation of the truth is one side effect. Good well-sourced arguments will not only expose mistakes, they will also make Wikipedia better.

Editing Wikipedia is not hard and, in time, people will learn how it works and become part of the community. If you do want to get involved, pay attention to the policies, the five pillars and other information you will be shown when you join. If you run into problems there are plenty of people on Wikipedia more than happy to help or provide clarity about Wikipedia itself.

The truth will win out, but someone needs to make sure it is heard, footnoted and properly sourced.

Dr. Oboler is also a post-doctoral fellow in Political Science at Bar-Ilan University where he is researching online public diplomacy. This research covers Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Google Earth and Wikipedia among others online platforms. More on his research can be seen at http://www.zionismontheweb.org/ internet_ warfare/ . Details on Wikipedia (the background data of which was shared with HonestReporting) are being added during this week.

Recording of Ben Gurion’s announcement of the founding of the State of Israel with scenes from the time (Hebrew). English Text

StandWithUs is looking for student leaders for our prestigious Emerson Fellowship. Fellows will be responsible for running Israel programs, and educating others on campus.

Fellows will receive a stipend for their work. You will also be sent to a training seminar, and be eligible to be sent on leadership missions to Israel, or to intern in our Israel office next summer!

Applications are due by June 1st.

Apply now at Emerson Fellowship

Dani Klein
Campus Director, North America

Do you want peace? First, define peace. There are many kinds of peace…the peace of the grave, the peace of complete victory, the peace of having nothing left to lose, the peace of living together in unity. Unless both sides in a conflict want the same kind of peace, peace will only come with victory. For that to change, the Palestinians will have to change their goal. Listen and consider.

For the first time, an American rabbi will be traveling to Iran Tuesday on a mission of interfaith dialogue and understanding.

Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, one of the early forces behind the Jewish Renewal movement in America, will co-lead a delegation of 21 peace activists to the Islamic Republic on a mission “to humanize the face of Iran, lest we end up with a disaster of global proportions we cannot imagine,” she told The Jerusalem Post by phone on Monday.

Gottlieb, a longtime peace activist and recent cofounder of the Shomer Shalom Institute for Jewish Non-Violence, said her participation in the mission came out of Tuesday’s threat by Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton that an Iranian assault on Israel would be met with an American response that would “obliterate” Iran.

“It is important to negotiate and not threaten obliteration,” Gottlieb believes, “in particular because there are between 30,000 and 40,000 Jewish people living in Iran, the oldest extant Jewish community in the Middle East, which has been there since the first exile in 586 BCE.”

The mission, the fifth “friendship and solidarity delegation” to Iran of the New York-based Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), is coordinated on the Iranian side with the Iranian Center for Interfaith Dialogue, described by FOR as “an official entity committed to supporting interaction between different religious communities.”

The itinerary of the trip, which returns to New York on May 13, includes Teheran, where the group will meet at least one representative of the Iranian government, according to Gottlieb, as well as the sacred Shi’ite city of Qom, and historic Esfehan and Shiraz.

For Gottlieb, the Iranian Jewish community is an important factor in opening an interfaith dialogue with Iran.

“Most world Jewry does not realize that the community is still there, and we have not asked ourselves how we can best protect and nourish that community. These are people who have chosen not to leave, because they have a deep connection to that place,” she said.

While the group will meet an government official, “our purpose is to meet civilian groups in the religious community, in arts and culture, students, women’s groups.” It’s all part of an effort at “civilian diplomacy,” which Gottlieb describes as “people-to-people [connections] to create a more positive environment on the ground for people to exchange productive dialogue and to create more understanding, to humanize the face of the enemy on both sides.”

Gottlieb rejects the idea that her participation on the mission may help legitimize a regime that publicly supports Holocaust denial.

“Of course not. That [position] doesn’t characterize me. FOR is very committed to the Jewish people and its well-being all around the world.” Rather, “in every society there are people who represent hateful and unpopular positions that do not cultivate peace.”

What about the threat to Israel? “I don’t think Iran is going to attack Israel; I think it’s a chimera. Iran has never initiated a war. And the fact that Israel has never signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and that it has nuclear weapons, is one of the reasons Iran wants nuclear weapons. Israel has already bombed Iraq and Syria. It is not [unreasonable] for Iran to think it will also be a target. Maybe we should be pressuring everybody to sign the NPT. We should be [backing] the forces of peace, not the forces advocating war.”

Gottlieb also disagrees with those who argue that a persuasive threat of force is necessary for diplomacy to be successful.

“I think the American public accepts certain conventional ideas which are not borne out in history,” she believes. “For instance, in the last 50 years there have been 72 nonviolent revolutions all around the world. If you ask the Iranian people, they are pleading with us not to go to war, saying to us, ‘Let us solve our own problems, and let us work in our societies to make the changes we desire.’”

One of the problems, she believes, is ignorance.

“The history of Iran is not understood by the people of the US,” she says. “If the American public cared to inform itself about the [American-supported] overthrow of [Iranian prime minister Mohammed] Mossadegh in 1953 and the politics we’ve engaged in towards Iran,” they would see the situation differently.

For Gottlieb, “unless we know the history, we’ll be very vulnerable to the sound-bytes of our politicians. I’m traveling to better inform myself of what Iranians on the ground have to say, how they feel, what kind of support they want from us.”

Just three days after her return, Gottlieb will attend the Founders Conference in Chicago of Shomer Shalom. “I’m hoping to create a movement of Jewish people to study nonviolence both as a strategy and a way of life, to create seeds of peace, to build and nourish peace and understanding. That’s what we’re called to do in our tradition. I’m fulfilling a mitzva, and that’s what a rabbi is supposed to do.”

She insists she is not naïve - “I’ve been at this for a long time, and I’m a student of history” - but simply has “great faith in the goodness of people, and I want to encourage that. I don’t want to sit back passively while violence increases.”

She expects to face criticism for the trip, but criticism “can’t stop us from thinking generations ahead. I’m doing this for my children and my grandchildren.”

Sixty years ago the Exodus, then called the USS President Warfield had its name changed for the last time as it embarked on what would be its last and most famous mission

As the world ramped up to WWII the British caved into Arab pressure (that would never happen now–would it ?) and refused to allow any Jews to enter what was then called Palestine. Many of those trying to get in were trying to escape the Holocaust, after the war, when the Exodus made its final journey, the British were stopping Holocaust Survivors from entering the holy land.

The Exodus voyage was an attempt to smuggle some of these Jews into the country, but they were noticed by the British as they approached Haifa. Upon the ship’s arrival in Haifa on July 18 the passengers were transferred to three more seaworthy ships. These ships, and the President Warfield, left Haifa harbour on July 19th for Port-de-Bouc. Foreign Secretary Bevin insisted that the French get their ship back as well as its passengers. When the deportation ships arrived at Port-de-Bouc near Marseilles on August 2, the emigrants refused to disembark, and the French refused to cooperate with British attempts at forced disembarkation. Realizing that they were not bound for Cyprus, the emigrants conducted a 24-hour hunger strike, refusing to cooperate with the British authorities.

The ship’s ordeals were widely covered by international media, and caused the British government much public embarrassment, especially after the refugees were forced to disembark in Germany. It is said that the events convinced the US government that the British mandate of Palestine was incapable of handling the Jewish refugees problem, and that a United Nations-brokered solution needs to be found. The US government then intensified its pressures on the British government to return its mandate to the UN, and the British in turn were more than willing to accept this.

Below is a first-hand account of the Exodus, Israel’s First Ship of State

If any on board the British ship failed to understand the reference, they would have understood the unfolding drama when the Columbian flag was lowered and the Israeli one raised

Launched in 1928, the President Warfield initially plied the Chesapeake Bay between Baltimore and Norfolk. Nearly two decades later, the ship - worn out, battered and appearing to one observer as “a matchbox splintered by a nutcracker” - was renamed the Exodus. In 1947 the ship embarked on its final voyage, and helped to launch a nation.

On the 60th anniversary of the Exodus’s sailing, Metro spoke to a father and son who were among its 4,515 passengers. Eli Agulnik, who today resides with his South African-born wife, Zinky, in Kfar Saba, was three years old at the time.

“My father, Boris, had been a colonel in the Russian army and my mother, after marrying my father, had moved east and so avoided the Nazi invasion,” he explains.

The rest of his family had been less fortunate.

“My grandfather Motel crawled to his grave,” relates Agulnik. “When the Germans arrived and began rounding up the Jews, they had little patience for the elderly. They threw saba out the window from his second floor apartment.” Motel survived the fall, but the Germans made him crawl to a pit, where they shot him together with the rest of the residents of his shtetel, Agulnik recalls. Other family stories were equally horrifying. His aunt was one of a group of Jews hiding in a sewer. As the Gestapo searched above, another woman suffocated her baby to keep his cries from giving them away.

Agulnik says that in 1947, after months of travel by train, foot and cart, his family made its way from the Russia-China border to Poking Pine City, the second largest German DP camp after Belsen. Their plan was to reach Palestine. “There, my sister Yudit was born and… I finally had my brit mila, at age three. There was no anesthetic and they said I screamed in Russian, ‘Mommy, mommy it’s painful.’ Afterwards, I’m told, I used to proudly go around and boast, ‘Now I am a Jew and I am going to Israel.’”

Few immigrants to Israel can claim that the story of how they arrived entailed a lengthy sea journey that was chronicled in daily newspapers around the world. How many have kept the El Al tickets from their aliya flight? But Agulnik proudly shows Metro his Exodus boarding pass.

While still in the camp, Agulnik senior was approached by the Hagana. Having been a battle-hardened colonel in the Soviet army, he was needed in Palestine. The family boarded a truck that was part of a convoy bound for Sete, a port near Marseilles. From there, they would be joined by other Holocaust survivors and displaced persons and would board the President Warfield, bound for Palestine.

“At the German-French border we were told to get out of the trucks and cross by foot. Scared that they would not allow us through with a three-month-old baby, my mother hid little Yudit in a box and left her on the truck. At the other side, after [the] nerve-wracking process at passport control, my anguished mother rummaged through the boxes until she found my sister, who was crying from hunger and fear,” Agulnik recalls. “One of the French soldiers noticed the commotion, but when he saw [my mother] breastfeeding Yudit, he tactfully looked away.”

“Looking away,” however, was something the British refused to do. After setting sail on July 11, the President Warfield soon had company. The British Royal Navy began tailing the vessel, despite its Columbian flag. Soon, there was little point in pretense. The destination was Palestine, and the ship - under the command of young American Ike Aharonowitz and his mainly American crew of Jewish ex-servicemen - was ready to convey a message to the world.

One can imagine the outcry after the ship’s real name was revealed in bold lettering: EXODUS. If any on board the British ship failed to understand the reference, they would have understood the unfolding drama when the Columbian flag was lowered and the Israeli one raised. The course of not only a ship, but a whole nation, was at stake.

“What was different about the Exodus,” explains Agulnik, “was the massive number of passengers on board. Generally, the ships that had been bringing in illegal immigrants before were relatively small, carrying at the most a few hundred passengers. With over 4,500 on our vessel, the Hagana had upped the ante. The stakes were high!”

The British government, which wanted this evolving drama to reach a finale of its own choosing, ordered its Navy to hijack the ship.

“One of the destroyers came alongside and called over the loudspeaker to our captain, ordering him to sail for Haifa,” relates Agulnik’s father, Boris, a resident of Haifa. “As time passed, they could see that the Exodus was not changing course. The instructions from the Hagana were to sail directly to Tel Aviv, as far [as possible] from the British naval base at Haifa. Then the British made their move.”

Some 40 kilometers offshore and outside the jurisdiction of Palestine, the British destroyers surrounded the Exodus - one even ramming into it. They forced their way on board the Jewish vessel, caring little for the 655 children on board, many of whom were war orphans. Challenged by the Exodus’s passengers and crew, a fight broke out in which three shipmates, including first mate William Bernstein - a US sailor from San Francisco - were killed.

“The British had truncheons and were bludgeoning left, right and center. What did we have to fight with?” sighs Boris, “Our bare fists - and some hopelessly fought with tin cans. Ike, our captain, lost his finger.”

In the end, the British took control of the ship and towed their battered- and-bruised prize into Haifa port. Little did the Mandate Authority realize that they were creating the images that would swing the world’s sympathy toward the Jewish people.

Ruth Gruber, an American journalist, was waiting on the wharf as the Exodus limped into harbor. In a dispatch, she described her first impressions: “In the torn, square hole, as big as an open, blitzed barn, we could see a muddle of bedding, possessions, plumbing, broken pipes, overflowing toilets, half-naked men, women looking for children. Cabins were bashed in; railings were ripped off and lifesaving rafts were dangling at crazy angles.”

The rafts must have been hanging very precariously, because one of them dislodged and drifted over to another ship, the Drom Afrika, which had left Cape Town three months earlier carrying seven young Jewish men trying to reach Palestine. Metro spoke to Issy (Greenberg) Granot, a retired architect, who was on board that day and helped lift the Exodus’s errant life raft onto the deck of the Drom Afrika - a former mine-sweeping vessel that had been converted into a fishing trawler in an attempt to fool the British.

“As we sailed into Haifa, we saw the Exodus being towed into port. We watched as the Holocaust survivors on board were transferred onto three British ships. That night, Haifa Port was alive with activity,” Granot recalls. He describes how police patrolled the harbor, dropping depth charges to scare off the Jewish frogmen who were working to sabotage the British ships.

But the British had no intention of sending the Exodus passengers to Cyprus. “They wanted to make an example and humiliate us. What better way than by sending us back to Europe?” Agulnik asks. Exhausted from the sea journey as well as the battle on board, all 4,515 passengers were transferred to three freighters converted into prison ships - The Empire Rival, The Ocean Vigor and The Runnymede Park.

Not only reporters, but also some members of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) witnessed the events in Haifa Port. They later said that what they saw influenced them to press for an immediate solution to Jewish immigration and the question of Palestine.

The next day, the three ships left. The Agulnik family was crammed into the belly of The Empire Rival. Boris describes the conditions on board. “We lay crammed together in the bare hold of the freighter and the food was inedible. Nevertheless, under the command of the Hagana, we began to build an organization. It was decided that all passengers were to remain on board and not disembark when we arrived in France. We were repeatedly encouraged to resist [the British]. Even little Eli went all out to make a nuisance of himself. He used to climb all over the place, particularly on top of the makeshift toilets on the deck, and scream, ‘Englander, I’m here. Now come pull me down.’”

But the Hagana members who had slipped on board disguised as refugees were plotting other acts of resistance - some more serious than others. “No sooner were we out at sea, when one of them climbed the mast and removed the Union Jack, replacing it with the Star of David. If they could, they would have lynched the fellow. In the end, they released him, never suspecting that he was a Hagana plant.”

“What we later found out was that the three Hagana chaps had brought a bomb on board. Unfortunately, they had no timer, so they drew lots as to who would sacrifice himself should they decide to use [it],” Boris adds.

When the ships arrived at Port-de-Bouc near Marseilles on August 2, the emigrants refused to disembark. The French refused to cooperate with the British attempts to force them off the ship. “So the British Consul came on board and tried ‘friendly’ persuasion. If we voluntarily left, they’d arrange French papers for us, find work and so on. People were booing and screaming. Someone shouted, ‘We know all about British promises,’” Boris relates. He says the scene reached a head when a passenger showed the consul a plate of that day’s food. “You call this food. Look at it. Can you tell the worms apart from the spaghetti?” he asked the official, who left in a huff.

Following a hunger strike by the passengers, the ships were ordered to proceed to the British-controlled sector of Germany. Boris reveals that he had been told that the Hagana managed to smuggle a clock on board to use as a timer for their bomb. The plan dictated that if the Jews were ever forced to leave the ship, the Hagana would detonate it once all were safely off. The plan was executed when the ship reached Hamburg and all the refugees were finally forced off the ship into DP camps.

“The British suspected something and conducted a search of The Empire Rival. We heard afterwards that they found the bomb in the engine room, removed it, and placed it on a small dingy with the aim of dropping it somewhere safe in the sea. Reports filtered back that the bomb exploded, killing all the British personnel,” Boris relates.

One day, David Ben-Gurion visited the camp. “After he addressed the people, I introduced myself and we spoke in Russian,” says Boris, who at that time knew no Hebrew. “BG spoke with such vigor. He assured me, ‘Don’t worry. There will very soon be a Jewish State, and you, the passengers of the Exodus will become its honorary citizens.’”

Eventually, in 1948, the Agulnik family returned - but not to Palestine, rather to Israel. The captain of their ship was Ike Aharonowitz, of the Exodus.

Ten years later, Leon Uris wrote Exodus. The best-seller was partly based on the story of the ship. One of the millions around the world who read and thrilled to the novel was a young girl in Cape Town, Ziona “Zinky” Wolffe. She was so inspired by the story that she went to her father and told him, “One day, Dad, I will marry an Israeli who sailed on that ship.”