The general who commanded all Israeli ground forces during the five years of the Second Intifada agrees with Arab hardliners that only one nation can exist between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
“There can be no two-state solution. It is impossible to agree to an independent country for the Palestinians and then tell them they can’t have an army,” declared retired Maj. Gen. Yiftah Ron-Tal, countering a proposal by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The trim, 53-year-old career soldier, now a business executive, visited Los Angeles in the middle of June to raise the visibility abroad of the Ariel University Center (AUC), located in the West Bank or in Samaria, depending on the speaker’s semantic and ideological preference.
Before discussing the university’s mission, Ron-Tal was asked to comment on the not uncommon perception of Israeli settlers as religious fanatics who kick peaceful Arab farmers off the land and uproot their olive trees.
Ron-Tal labeled such a picture as sheer caricature and then gave three primary reasons for the crucial importance of settlements, a term he endorsed proudly, saying the settlements are in the middle of the land of Israel, are part of the state and are crucial to Israel’s security.
“Our country is one continuous frontline with no strategic depth,” he added. “The citizens of the settlements are our first line of defense, and we cannot afford to give an inch.”
What would happen if the Israeli government agreed to remove the West Bank settlements in the framework of an overall peace agreement, Ron-Tal was asked.
“There would be a war inside Israel; it would be worse than Gaza,” he responded instantly. “In any case, it’s not a matter of settlements or territory. The Arabs can’t accept a Jewish state.”
Ron-Tal was not perturbed by the vision of a future of continuous or intermittent military confrontations. “Our main aim is not peace; the first imperative is that we must be strong,” he said.
Turning to the “caricature” of the bloodthirsty, fanatical settler, Ron-Tal allowed “there are fanatics everywhere,” but blamed the unfavorable image on left-wing media control in Israel.
“There are 250,000 to 300,000 settlers, not counting those in East Jerusalem, of whom perhaps a few hundred could be described as fanatics,” he said.
If Ron-Tal had President Obama’s ear, he would try to convince the chief executive that Israel is of critical importance to the U.S. position in the Middle East, especially in the face of Iranian threats.
“President Obama needs a strong Israel,” Ron-Tal said. “A nuclear Iran is a threat not just to my country, but to all of Europe.”
A basic component of Israel’s strength is its continuing development of high-tech skills, underpinned by well-educated engineers and scientists.
That’s where AUC comes in, said Eldad Halachmi, the college’s vice president for resource development, who accompanied Ron-Tal, together with recent graduate Liron Yovel.
AUC traces its beginning to the College of Samaria and Judea founded in the early 1980s in Ariel, some 30 miles east of Tel Aviv. The small college still had only about 300 students in 1994, but with the growth of the West Bank population and increases in Russian and Ethiopian immigrant students, the enrollment figure now stands at 11,000.
At the same time, the government relaxed the rules that had restricted the number of full-fledged universities to the seven existing ones, and the Ariel upstart jumped in with a feisty attitude, akin to a working-class American state university challenging the “elitist” Ivy League.
Four years ago, the college decided to upgrade itself to university status, a decision immediately contested on both political and academic grounds. The name Ariel University Center appears to be an interim arrangement, but at this point it is not yet a full doctorate degree-granting research institution.
However, Halachmi said that full recognition is only a matter of time. Currently, AUC is already conferring master’s degrees in some fields of engineering and the social sciences, runs eight research centers involving 220 faculty scientists and has established a Technology Incubator to spur inventions.
A special program, called ATZil (for Academics, Technology and Zionism Israel) exposes overseas students to the country’s high-tech industry and university life.
AUC is emphatically pro-Zionist, and its promotional brochure bears the slogan “For a Better World, For a Stronger Israel.”
Everyone studying for a degree has to take at least one course related to Jewish and Israeli heritage per semester and, the brochure notes, “AUC is the only institution of higher learning in Israel that requires an Israeli flag to be displayed in every classroom.”
Religious students are attracted to AUC, which has developed a joint program with yeshivot under which some 600 Orthodox men and women can earn a secular degree while also pursuing Torah studies.
Religious students make up about one-third of the total enrollment, Halachmi estimated, but diversity is the watchword. The student body includes some 1,300 Russians, about 500 Arabs, 300 Ethiopians and many students from the largely secular Tel Aviv area.
Liron Yovel, a recent AUC graduate with a bachelor’s degree in structural engineering who is now going for an advanced degree at the University of Colorado, said that what he liked most about AUC was “the can-do mentality, flexibility and spirit of challenge.”
The biggest problem, he said, was the scarcity of on-campus housing, which forced him to make a daily 60-mile roundtrip commute from his home in Petach Tikvah.
So private contributions to build dorms are the top priority for AUC fundraisers, but space is tight everywhere on campus and getting tighter, as AUC looks toward an enrollment of 20,000 students by 2020.
Halachmi’s wish list includes money to expand classrooms, libraries and laboratories, and to erect buildings for a Jewish heritage and synagogue center, auditorium, student center and amphitheater.
Like all Israeli institutes of higher learning, AUC is feeling the effects of tighter government budgeting, and it also has to cope with an additional handicap.
The established seven universities in “old” Israel draw much of their advanced research funding from U.S. government agencies, such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. But under U.S. regulations on the occupied territories, AUC is not eligible for such grants because it is located in the West Bank.
Compared to the established Israeli universities, AUC doesn’t have much of a profile or fundraising presence in the Diaspora, but it is now getting into the game.
One of AUC’s largest financial supporters is Los Angeles philanthropist Lowell Milken, and the university’s upper campus is named in honor of the Milken family.
AUC is now taking steps to expand its regional presence and has named Lily Steiner as West Coast executive director of American Friends of the Ariel University Center.
