Academic boycott of Israel

There have been several proposed academic boycotts of Israel. Proposals to boycott Israeli universities and academics have been put forward by various academics and organisations. The goal of proposed academic boycotts is to use international pressure to force a change in Israel's policies towards the Palestinian territories and its inhabitants.

Issues

The proposals have been the subject of contentious debate. The primary issues discussed are:

• Are they ethically justified?
• Would they be an effective and positive agent of change?
• Are there overriding issues of academic freedom?
• Are the proposals a cover for anti-Semitism?
• Is Israel being unjustly singled out?

Guardian open letter, 2002

The idea of an academic boycott against Israelis first emerged on April 06, 2002 in an open letter to The Guardian initiated by Steven and Hilary Rose, lecturers in biology at the Open University and social policy at the University of Bradford respectively, who called for a moratorium on all cultural and research links with Israel. It read:

"Despite widespread international condemnation for its policy of violent repression against the Palestinian people in the Occupied Territories, the Israeli government appears impervious to moral appeals from world leaders. The major potential source of effective criticism, the United States, seems reluctant to act. However there are ways of exerting pressure from within Europe. Odd though it may appear, many national and European cultural and research institutions, including especially those funded from the EU and the European Science Foundation, regard Israel as a European state for the purposes of awarding grants and contracts. (No other Middle Eastern state is so regarded). Would it not therefore be timely if at both national and European level a moratorium was called upon any further such support unless and until Israel abide by UN resolutions and open serious peace negotiations with the Palestinians, along the lines proposed in many peace plans including most recently that sponsored by the Saudis and the Arab League."

By July 2002, the open letter had gained over 700 signatories, including those of ten Israeli academics.

In response to the open letter, Leonid Ryzhik, a lecturer in mathematics at Chicago University, led a rival web-based petition that condemned the original's "unjustly righteous tone" and warned that the boycott has a "broader risk of very disruptive repercussions for a wide range of international scientific and cultural contacts". By July 2002, the counter petition has gathered almost 1000 signatories.

Fink, in a letter published in Nature, criticizes the open letter for its weak argument for singling out Israel: "As it stands, the petitioners have not made a cogent argument for why they selected Israel alone — from the many imperfect nations of the world — for their proposed academic boycott."

Mona Baker, Miriam Shlesinger and Gideon Toury

Mona Baker, an Egyptian professor of translation studies at the University of Manchester in England and a signatory of the 2002 open letter, decided in early June 2002 to remove two Israeli academics — Dr. Miriam Shlesinger of Bar-Ilan University, a former chair of Amnesty International, Israel; and Professor Gideon Toury of Tel Aviv University — from the editorial boards of the journals "Translator" and "Translation Studies Abstracts" that Baker and her husband publish. Manfred Gerstenfeld writes that Baker offered to allow the academics to remain on the board only on condition that they leave and sever all ties with Israel. He argues that this is a well-known anti-Semitic motif, whereby a Jew could remain a university professor only if he converted, or in this case, severed ties with his own state.

Mona Baker's email to Prof Toury read:

Dear Gideon, I have been agonising for weeks over an important decision: to ask you and Miriam, respectively, to resign from the boards of the Translator and Translation Studies Abstracts. I have already asked Miriam and she refused. I have 'unappointed' her as she puts it, and if you decide to do the same I will have to officially unappoint you too.

I do not expect you to feel happy about this, and I very much regret hurting your feelings and Miriam's. My decision is political, not personal.

As far as I am concerned, I will always regard and treat you both as friends, on a personal level, but I do not wish to continue an official association with any Israeli under the present circumstances.

Prof Toury replied:

I would appreciate it if the announcement made it clear that 'he' (that is, I) was appointed as a scholar and unappointed as an Israeli.

Mona Baker replied that:

I'm damned if I'm going to be intimidated. This is my interpretation of the boycott statement that I've signed and I've tried to make that clear but it doesn't seem to be getting through. I am not actually boycotting Israelis, I am boycotting Israeli institutions. I am convinced that long after this is all over, as it was with the Jews in the Holocaust, people will start admitting that they should have done something, that it was deplorable and that academia was cowardly if it hadn't moved on this.

Association of University Teachers

On April 22 2005, the Council of Association of University Teachers (AUT) voted to boycott two Israeli universities: Haifa University and Bar-Ilan University. The motions to AUT Council were prompted by the call for a boycott from nearly 60 Palestinian academics and others. The AUT Council voted to boycott Bar-Ilan because it runs courses at colleges in the occupied West Bank (referring to Ariel College) and "is thus directly involved with the occupation of Palestinian territories contrary to United Nations resolutions". It boycotted Haifa because it was alleged that the university had wrongly disciplined a lecturer. The action against the lecturer was supposedly for supporting a student who wrote about attacks on Palestinians during the founding of the state of Israel (despite the fact that the student's research had been proved false in court and the University denied having disciplined the lecturer). The boycott, which was not compulsory, was set to last until Haifa "ceases its victimisation of academic staff and students who seek to research and discuss the history of the founding of the state of Israel ..."

Condemnation and backlash

The AUT's decision was immediately condemned by Jewish groups and many members of the AUT. Critics of the boycott within and outside the AUT noted that at the meeting at which the boycott motion was passed the leadership cut short the debate citing a lack of time. Specifically, The Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Union of Jewish Students accused the AUT of purposely holding the vote during Passover, when many Jewish members could not be present

The presidents of Jerusalem-based al-Quds University and Hebrew University issued a joint statement condemning the boycott effort as unproductive towards ending the "shared tragedy" but rather could prolong it:

"Bridging political gulfs - rather than widening them further apart - between nations and individuals thus becomes an educational duty as well as a functional necessity, requiring exchange and dialogue rather than confrontation and antagonism. Our disaffection with, and condemnation of acts of academic boycotts and discrimination against scholars and institutions, is predicated on the principles of academic freedom, human rights, and equality between nations and among individuals."

One of the university presidents, Sari Nusseibeh of al-Quds University, continued: "If we are to look at Israeli society, it is within the academic community that we've had the most progressive pro-peace views and views that have come out in favor of seeing us as equals [...] If you want to punish any sector, this is the last one to approach." He acknowledges, however, that his view is a minority one amongst Palestinian academics.

Israel's embassy in London issued a statement criticizing the AUT's vote as a "distorted decision that ignores the British public's opinion", and condemning the resolutions for being "as perverse in their content as in the way they were debated and adopted." The embassy also noted that "[t]he last time that Jews were boycotted in universities was in 1930s Germany." Zvi Ravner, Israel’s deputy ambassador in London, also noted that "[t]he last time that Jews were boycotted in universities was in 1930s Germany."

Abraham Foxman, speaking for the Anti-Defamation League, issued a statement condemning the "misguided and ill-timed decision to boycott academics from the only country in the Middle East where universities enjoy political independence."

Cancellation of boycott

After the backlash and condemnation - both internal and external - members of the AUT, headed by Open University lecturer and Engage founder Jon Pike - gathered enough signatures to call a special meeting on the subject. The meeting was held on May 26, 2005, at Friends Meeting House in London. A protest in support of academic freedom and for Peace in the Middle East took place on the lawn outside the meeting At the meeting the AUT membership decided to cancel the boycott of both Israeli universities. Reasons cited for the decision were: the damage to academic freedom, the hampering of dialogue and peace effort between Israelis and Palestinians, and that boycotting Israel alone could not be justified.

National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education

In May 2006, on the last day of its final conference, National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE) passed motion 198C, a call to boycott Israeli academics who did not vocally speak out against their government.

The following portions of the resolution are quoted by Brian Klug

• "The conference invites members to consider their own responsibility for ensuring equity and non-discrimination in contacts with Israeli educational institutions or individuals, and to consider the appropriateness of a boycott of those that do not publicly dissociate themselves from such policies."
• "The conference notes continuing Israeli apartheid policies, including construction of the exclusion wall, and discriminatory educational practices. It recalls its motion of solidarity last year for the AUT resolution to exercise moral and professional responsibility."

The resolution was dismissed by the AUT, the union into which the NATFHE was merging into.

Criticism

A group of 8 Nobel laureates preemptively denounced the policy before it was passed from the perspective of limiting academic freedom. Frank Wilczek of MIT expressed his concerns as such: "The primary value of the scientific community is pursuit of understanding through free and open discourse. The clarity of that beacon to humanity should not be compromised for transient political concerns."

Brian Klug makes this criticism of the NATFHE motion:

"In short, the intention of the Natfhe motion - what it seeks and why - is obscure. But even if the policy and rationale were clear and unambiguous, there is a deeper problem with motions of this sort that prevents them from attracting a broad base of support: they rely on the false (or limited) analogy implied by the word 'apartheid'. This is not to say that there are no points of comparison, for there are - just as there are in a host of other countries where minority ethnic and national groups are oppressed. Nor is it even to say that the suffering experienced by Palestinians is less than that endured by 'non-whites' in South Africa: it may or may not be (although I am not sure how to do the sums). But as I have argued elsewhere: 'The validity of the analogy does not depend on a catalogue of atrocities, however appalling'."

The Association of Jewish Sixthformers (AJ6) issued a press release expressing dismay and concern "about the affects of any boycott on Jewish and Israeli Sixthformers." Specifically, AJ6 pointed to "partnerships and exchange visits with Israeli schools and colleges may be under threat", that "Jewish students who study in Israel during their Gap Years are worried that teachers may refuse to provide them with references for these programmes."

The Anti-Defamation League issued a statement which condemned the motion explaining:

"It is profoundly unjust for academics in the only democratic country in the Middle East -- the only country where scholarship and debate are permitted to freely flourish -- to be held to an ideological test and the threat of being blacklisted because of their views. No one would expect a British or American professor to have to withstand such scrutiny of their political views. Yet, when it comes to Israel a different standard applies".

The British government, through Foreign and Commonwealth Office Minister Lord Triesman, issued a statement that the motion was "counterproductive and retrograde" although the British Government recognized "the independence of the NATFHE."

Paul Mackney, the general secretary of NATFHE, was sent over 15,000 messages from boycott opponents.

Response to criticism

Mackney, the general secretary of NATFHE and who opposed the motion as passed, is quoted after the fact by the Guardian:

"The ironic thing, is if we had put this to delegates a couple of weeks ago, before the international pro-Israeli lobby started this massive campaign emailing delegates and trying to deny us our democratic right to discuss whatever we like, it probably wouldn't have passed. People feel bullied, and what we have seen is a hardening of attitudes. All they achieved was making the delegates determined to debate and pass the motion."

Tamara Traubmann and Benjamin Joffe-Walt, reporting for the Guardian, conducted an analysis of "whether the campaigns against such boycotts are actually motivated by concerns for academic freedom, or whether they are using the universalist ideal to stifle critical discussion of Israel." They describe their findings this way:

"Through discussions with anti-boycott campaigners and a trace of the most common emails (not necessarily abusive) sent to the union and handed over by Natfhe, we found the vast majority of the tens of thousands of emails originated not with groups fighting for academic freedom, but with lobby groups and thinktanks that regularly work to delegitimise criticisms of Israel."

University and College Union

On May 30, 2007, the University and College Union voted to boycott Israel, calling on college lecturers to "consider the moral implications of existing and proposed links with Israeli academic institutions." [1]

Comparisons to academic boycotts of South Africa

Main article: Academic boycotts of South Africa

The academic boycott of South Africa is frequently invoked as a model for more recent efforts to organize academic boycotts of Israel.

Some invoke the comparison to claim that an academic boycott of Israel should not be controversial based a misconception that the academic boycott of South Africa was uncontroversial and straightforward. The reality, at the time, was very different. The effort was the subject of significant criticism and contentious debate from diverse segments. Andrew Beckett writes, in the Guardian, on this frequent mistaken comparison:

"In truth, boycotts are blunt weapons. Even the most apparently straightforward and justified ones, on closer inspection, have their controversies and injustices."

Other, such as Hillary and Stephen Rose in Nature, make the comparison and argue for an academic boycott of Israel based on a belief that the academic boycott of South Africa was effective in ending apartheid. George Fink responds to this claim in a letter to Nature:

"The assertion [...] that the boycott of South Africa by the world's academic communities 'was instrumental in ending apartheid in South Africa' is a deception.

Apartheid was actually terminated by two pivotal and interrelated political events. First, the United States Congress, on 29 September 1986, overrode President Reagan's veto and imposed strict economic sanctions on South Africa. Second, F. W. de Klerk was elected president of South Africa on 14 September 1989. Two months later (16 November 1989), de Klerk announced the scrapping of the Separate Amenities Act, then, on 11 February 1990, freed Nelson Mandela from prison. The rest is historical detail."

See also

• Economic and political boycotts of Israel
• New antisemitism
• Sanctions against Iranian scientists
• Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions

External links

• Palestinian campaign for the academic and cultural boycott of Israel
• The anti-Israel Academic Boycott by Andre Oboler (Zionism on the Web)
• Engage: The left wing campaign against those who argue for a boycott of Israel