Dan David was a remarkable man, who survived both the Nazis and the Communists in his native land of Romania. After many travails, he finally made aliyah to Israel, where he borrowed money to buy the Photo-Me (those booths where you can have your photo taken) franchise for several countries. He eventually sold his stake in Photo-Me for 210 million pounds. He then turned to philanthropy, providing 100 million pounds to create the Dan David Foundation that awards each year a half-dozen Dan David prizes, now worth $300,000 apiece, to people in academic life and in the arts. He died in 2011, but his eponymous foundation continues to award the Dan David Prize.
This year, one of those Dan David prizes was awarded to a medieval historian, Professor Matthew Champion, who teaches and does research at Melbourne University in Australia. Immediately more than a hundred Australian academics, including thirty of his colleagues at Melbourne, signed a letter demanding that Champion rescind his acceptance of the prize, an acceptance which they claimed would legitimize the “genocidal” Jewish state. Champion ignored their demand.
More on this madness can be found here: “Australian academics sign open letter calling on Dan David winner to return ‘Israel-linked’ prize,” by Esther Davis, Jerusalem Post, July 10, 2026:
Professor Matthew Champion, the Australian academic who won the Dan David Prize earlier this month, rejected calls from dozens of academics to boycott the prize due to its links to Israel.
More than 100 academics, including activist Randa Abdel-Fattah and National Museum chair Clare Wright, signed an open letter calling on University of Melbourne associate Professor Matthew Champion to rescind his acceptance of the largest history prize in the world, The Australian reported.
The open letter reportedly said that keeping the award would contribute to “the ongoing normalization of the genocide and scholasticide in Palestine.” Scholasticide is a term coined by Palestinian scholar Karma Nabulsi in 2009, meaning the systematic destruction of a society’s education system….
These hate-filed academics need once again to be wearily informed that the Jewish state has not committed “genocide” in Gaza. Genocide requires intent, and the IDF has never shown such intent. Quite the contrary. The IDF makes tremendous efforts to minimize civilian casualties, through an elaborate system that includes millions of dropped leaflets, millions of text messages sent, millions of robocalls made, all to warn civilians in Gaza away from areas soon to be targeted. This warning system, that no other army has used, led West Point Professor John Spencer, an expert in urban warfare, to conclude that “Israel has done more and implemented more measures to prevent civilian harm than any military in the history of urban warfare.”
As for the charge these academics hurled at Israel, accusing it of “scholasticide,” by which they mean the systematic destruction of a society’s education system, what can they possibly mean? The IDF has hit some school buildings in Gaza, but only because they were not being used as schools. Instead, Hamas was using most of them to hide its combatants and weapons, and its launching pads for missiles. Not Israel, but Hamas destroyed the eduction system in Gaza, that was determined to take over school buildings and use them for its own war-making purposes.
In the letter, the academics claimed that the Dan David Foundation had made “minimal” statements about that war in Gaza, and had failed to describe the conflict as a “genocide” when calling for an immediate end to the war.the war.
But the Dan David Foundation didn’t describe the war in Gaza as a “genocide” because it wasn’t, and isn’t. No matter how many times that idiotic charge is made, it will still be false. The Foundation made “minimal” statements about the war because it is not a political body. Would these same Australian academics demand that Bob Dylan, who won the Nobel Prize For Literature in 2016, now return the award because the Swedish Academy, that choses the recipient, hasn’t said anything about the war in Gaza?
In the foundation’s statement, they expressed “growing concern and alarm” about the war, and said civilian lives must be protected.
That statement from the Dan David Foundation apparently wasn’t enough for the Australian academics. Nothing short of a full-throated denunciation of the “colonial-settler apartheid genocidal state” of Israel will assuage their fury.
The open letter claimed that “the foundation’s focus on history and archaeology serves a key part of the Israeli and Zionist project of attempting to rewrite, and write over, the story of Palestinian land.”…
Israel has no “project” to rewrite the story of “Palestinian land.” The true story is this: Jews have been settled on what those academics choose tendentiously to call “Palestinian land” for the past 3500 years. The Muslim Arabs only appeared in the area some 2000 years later. The “Palestinian people” were not invented, for obvious propaganda purposes, and at the suggestion of the KGB, until the mid-1960s. It is not the Jews who have been destroying archeological evidence in the area — Jewish archeologists preserve and study, with the same care, both Jewish and Arab sites, while the Palestinian Arabs have been systematically destroying evidence of the Jewish presence in the land; they have even tried to destroy Jewish holy sites, including the Tombs of Joseph and of Rachel.
According to The Australian, Champion is thought to have received scores of messages since the academics published their call for him to rescind his acceptance of the prize.
Were these messages urging him to rescind, or instead celebrating his award, and telling him to ignore the troglodytes demanding that he give it back? The article in The Australian does not say, but I suspect there were many more urging him to keep the prize than the number demanding he rescind his acceptance.
Professor Champion, with the backing of University of Melbourne administrators, has no intention of rescinding his acceptance of the award. And these academics’ obvious inability to impose their will should madden them. Meanwhile, their wild charges flung at the Jewish state, accused of committing “genocide” and “scholasticide,” should be carefully rebutted. But let someone other than Professor Matthew Champion perform that task. He’s already been through a lot.
Photo Credit: Queen’s College, University of Melbourne, Gracchus250, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0.