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Juan Cole: Ignites a controversy with attack on Israel's foreign minister

On Monday, Juan Cole went after Israel's foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, for "grandstanding at the UN." His beef is not only with Ms. Livni but also with her father, Eitan Livni, who in pre-state Palestine was a leader of the Irgun. The organization was infamous for orchestrating the attack on the King David Hotel, in Jerusalem, in 1946 in an effort to drive the British out of Palestine.

"One wonders if Livni regrets her own father's having been elected to parliament as a member of the Likud Party," Cole asks. He then proceeds to question whether the apple has fallen very far from the tree: "Her government fired 1.2 million cluster bomblets into Lebanon last summer, mainly in the last days of the war.... That is an act of naked terror fulfilling no war aim, and Lebanese children are still being killed by the bomblets."

After mixing it up in the comments section on Cole's blog, Yaakov Lozowick, director of the archives at Yad Vashem, has posted a lengthy open letter to Cole on Lozowick's blog.

Read entire article at Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)