George Smith, a retired University of Missouri-Columbia professor, said he was reluctant to do an interview. 

He had just won the Nobel Prize in chemistry and, as a result, had brought positive attention to a school still recovering from recent allegations that it is an intolerant place. 

And now, this article would explore his controversial views on Israel. 

“The university has been great; it’s committed to academic freedom,” Smith said. “And your article probably is going to mean attention to the university as fostering, as honoring an anti-Zionist faculty member. I hope this article will not do that.

“I think it’s vastly unfair that a university would suffer from having a faculty member with a view that a particular community disagrees with.”

But there had already been stories after the award announcement in the Jerusalem Post and the Times of Israel describing Smith as “anti-Israel.”

And Smith, who is not Jewish but is married to a Jewish woman and raised his children Jewish, disagrees with that characterization. 

“To say that I hate Israel is just not true. I love Israel,” Smith said. (Neither of the articles used the word “hate.”)

But I told him this article would be an opportunity to clarify his views (he was not interviewed for either of those other stories) and, perhaps, provide a more complete picture of who he is, as it relates to Israel and Jews.

And so, he agreed to an interview.

Smith won the Nobel on Oct. 3 for harnessing “the power of evolution,” according to the organization. Or more precisely, for developing a method known as phage display, which has been used to produce treatments for conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis and autoimmune diseases.

“I was very pleased of course,” Smith said. “Pleased for myself. Pleased for all the people who (contributed) to the work that I happened to be the one honored for.”

But because he retired in 2015, he has missed some of the benefits that he might have received had the award come earlier, such as receiving funding for a grant proposal into malaria research.  

So now his attention is focused on other causes, such as resolving the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. 

Smith’s views on Israel generated significant attention in 2015 when he tried to create and teach a course called “Perspectives on Zionism.”

He had, for example, written an op-ed in the Columbia Daily Tribune in which he said that the “Zionist government of Israel … practices and condones apartheid-like discrimination against its Palestinian subjects — not only the Palestinians of Gaza, who are subject to a ruinous economic blockade and bloody military assaults; or of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, who have no say in the oppressive military authority that rules over their lives; but also the Palestinians in Israel proper, who are subject to dozens of Jim Crow laws and social practices that severely curtail their life chances.”

A number of pro-Israel local, national and international organizations objected to the course and urged the university administration to cancel it. The campus president of Christians United for Israel told the Jewish News Syndicate that Smith was “not qualified to teach the class. His background is in biology. … His only interest in Zionism is that he has been a virulent anti-Zionist activist.”

The class was ultimately cancelled due to low enrollment, the school said. Smith, a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, which groups such as the Anti-Defamation League say has veered into anti-Semitism, said that the reason there weren’t enough students was because during the month when he would have been recruiting students, he was in Cleveland assisting his mother-in-law, who had broken her hip. 

Nevertheless, the hurdle did not keep Smith from promoting his agenda on the conflict. He continued to write columns on the subject and lobbied against anti-BDS legislation in Jefferson City. 

Now he’s working on a project in which he is researching and writing about the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe after World War II. 

“I want to draw a parallel between the expulsion of ethnic Germans after the Second World War with the potential disaster if Palestinian Arabs are ever granted equal rights in their homeland, if they adopted a kind of nationalism that ended up expelling Jews from Palestine,” Smith said.

He would like to see a “one Democratic state like the United States. It wouldn’t be a Jewish State or a Palestinian state. Palestine would be a good name for it because before 1948 that was the name.”

On the concern that groups like Hamas, which controls Gaza and has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States since 1997, are intent on expelling Jews from Israel, Smith said, “That’s not what [Palestinians] have in mind.”

(After a Palestinian man shot and killed two Israeli coworkers in the West Bank Oct. 7, Hamas described it as a “heroic operation” and a “natural response to the crimes of the Israeli occupation against the rights of our people, in all the Palestinian lands.”)

Smith and his family belong to Congregation Beth Shalom, a Reform synagogue in Columbia. Its rabbi, Yossi Feintuch, and board members sent him notes congratulating him on the Nobel Prize.

Feintuch, who is Israeli, likened Smith to Balaam, “a great prophet” who the rabbis said “was equal to Moses” and, yet, “he was obsessed with cursing the Jewish people.”

“The rabbis resolved it merely by saying Balaam was blind in one eye, and that is the extent I would go in my coming to grips with the complexity of George Smith,” Feintuch said. “On the one hand, George performed a unique task of tikkun olam (repairing the world)” through his scientific work. 

“On the other hand, he has a very, very troubled record vis a vis the Jewish people,” Feintuch said.

Daniel Swindell, a Columbia resident who for years has led efforts opposing Smith, describes him as an anti-Semite. The ADL, an organization aimed at combating anti-Semitism, states that denying Israel the right to exist as a Jewish state qualifies as anti-Semitism.

“There is no end to how clear [Smith] has made it that the Jewish State does not have a right to exist as a Jewish State,” said Swindell, whose mother is Jewish and who lived in Israel.

But Smith said if it were possible to convert to a “secular Judaism” he would have done so.

“I am really engaged in Jewish culture, and that includes Israeli culture,” he said.