Coming
in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Leavitt
for EPA Head? He's Much Worse Than You Thought
Recent
Stories
September 17, 2003
Timothy J. Freeman
The
Terrible Truth About Iraq
St. Clair / Cockburn
A
Vain, Pompous Brown-noser:
Meet the Real Wesley Clark
Terry Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Moore on Gen. Wesley Clark
Mitchel Cohen
Don't Be Fooled Again: Gen. Wesley Clark, War Criminal
Norman Madarasz
Targeting Arafat
Richard Forno
High Tech Heroin
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Website of the Day
The Ultimate Palestine Resource Site!
September 16, 2003
Rosemary and Walt Brasch
An
Ill Wind: Hurricane Isabel and the Lack of Homeland Security
Robert Fisk
Powell
in Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
Imperial Sociopaths
M. Shahid Alam
The Dialectics
of Terror
Ron Jacobs
Exile at Gunpoint
Christopher Brauchli
Bush's War on Wages
Al Krebs
Stop Calling Them "Farm Subsidies"; It's Corporate
Welfare
Patrick Cockburn
The
Iraq Wreck
Website of the Day
From Occupied Palestine
September 15, 2003
Stan Goff
It Was
the Oil; It Is Like Vietnam
Robert Fisk
A Hail of Bullets, a Trail of Dead
Writers Bloc
We
Are Winning: a Report from Cancun
James T. Phillips
Does George Bush Cry?
Elaine Cassel
The Troublesome Bill of Rights
Cynthia McKinney
A Message to the People of New York City
Matthew Behrens
Sunday Morning Coming Down: Reflections on Johnny Cash
Uri Avnery
Assassinating
Arafat
Hammond Guthrie
Celling Out the Alarm
Website of the Day
Arnold and the Egg
September 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 12, 2003
Writers Block
Todos
Somos Lee: Protest and Death in Cancun
Laura Carlsen
A Knife to the Heart: WTO Kills Farmers
Dave Lindorff
The Meaning of Sept. 11
Elaine Cassel
Bush at Quantico
Linda S. Heard
British
Entrance Exams
John Chuckman
The First Two Years of Insanity
Doug Giebel
Ending America as We Know It
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Blank Check Military
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Website of the Day
A Woman in Baghdad
September 11, 2003
Robert Fisk
A Grandiose
Folly
Roger Burbach
State Terrorism and 9/11: 1973 and 2001
Jonathan Franklin
The Pinochet Files
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Postcards to the President
Norman Solomon
The Political Capital of 9/11
Saul Landau
The Chilean Coup: the Other, Almost Forgotten 9/11
Stew Albert
What Goes Around
Website of the Day
The Sights and Sounds of a Coup
September 10, 2003
John Ross
Cancun
Reality Show: Will It Turn Into a Tropical Seattle?
Zoltan Grossman
The General Who Would be President: Was Wesley Clark Also Unprepared
for the Postwar Bloodbath?
Tim Llewellyn
At the Gates of Hell
Christopher Brauchli
Turn the Paige: the Bush Education Deception
Lee Sustar
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
Elaine Cassel
McCain-Feingold in Trouble: Scalia Hogs the Debate
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Hammond Guthrie
When All Was Said and Done
Website of the Day
Fact Checking Colin Powell
Hot Stories
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
September
18, 2003
Israeli Academic Institutions
In
Defense of the Boycott
By MONA BAKER and LAWRENCE
DAVIDSON
Introductory Comments
and a General Defense
Boycotts are age old undertakings. Unlike
sanctions, which are enforced by governments and sometimes destroy
the lives of millions of ordinary people (as in the case of the
12-year sanctions against Iraq) boycotts are most often grassroots
means of protest against the policies of governments. They can
be undertaken by ordinary people to defend fellow human beings
who are oppressed by governments and armies, and they can be
deliberately restricted in scope to cause as little damage as
possible to the lives of innocent people. Boycotts have historically
been undertaken at many levels: they can be carried out against
companies or industries (for instance, the American California
grape boycott of the 1970s, or the ongoing worldwide boycott
of Nestle products1); and against states (for instance the Jewish
initiated boycott of goods from Nazi Germany, or today's evolving
boycott of Israeli products and institutions in the face of that
country's colonialist occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and the
Golan Heights). Thus, from an historical point of view, there
is plenty of precedents for the tactic of boycott. And, as in
the case of South Africa, public pressure through boycotts can
eventually help force governments and organizations such as the
United Nations to apply sanctions against a particular regime.
Nonetheless, the boycott against Israel,
and in particular that aspect of it directed against academic
institutions, has drawn wide spread criticism. Much of this has
come from people who are, to one extent or another, partisans
of Israel. But some of it has its origins among those who have
genuine concerns that innocent Israelis are being unnecessarily
hurt, or that the boycott is undermining valued principles such
as academic freedom and the free flow of ideas. It is to this
latter group that we would like to address the following arguments
in the hope of taking up their concerns and, if not putting them
to rest, at least putting them in a context that makes understandable
the historical trade-offs inevitably involved in this struggle
for justice.
First of all, the academic boycott of
Israel is one part of a broader boycott and divestment effort
which involves economic, cultural and sports agendas. The academic
boycott specifically is based on several premises. One is that,
to date, all but a small number of Israeli academics remain quiescent
in the face of the violent colonial war their government wages
in the Occupied Territories. As a group they have had nothing
to say about Israeli violations of scores of United Nations resolutions
and the transgression of international law in the form of the
Fourth Geneva Convention. This includes not only human rights
violations of a general nature, but also, specifically, the
systematic destruction of Palestinian education and academia.
Nor, as a group have they come to the defense of their very few
fellow academics who have been persecuted for publically criticizing
Israeli policies against the Palestinians. A second, and related
premise, is that we recognize the important, though often unnoted,
fact that educational institutions and their teachers are principal
agents in the shaping of perceptions of whole generations as
to their country's relations with their neighbors and the world.
If, in the midst of extreme practices of oppression such as we
have been witnessing in the Occupied Territories, these institutions
do not function to analyze and explain the world in a way that
promotes justice and reasonable compromise, but rather acquiesce
in aggressive colonialist practices, then others may legitimately
boycott them.
Second, we would point out that the
boycott against Israel has been put forward by its organizers
as a non-violent way by which non-Israelis the world over
can express their concern for what is now the world's longest
post-Second World War occupation and one of its bloodiest
and most ethnic oriented. There has been a great hew and
cry against the violent tactics of resistence to Israeli occupation
evolved by the Palestinians. Though the first Intifada started
with little more than rock throwing it was condemned in the West
as a "dangerous escalation"of the Middle East crisis.
It also brought the Palestinians no relief. The Second Intifada
is certainly much more violent in its nature and now includes
the infamous tactic of suicide bombing. The organizers of the
boycott condemn this tactic even while understanding that it
is a product of despair and desperation that the occupation itself
has created.
We have asked ourselves what we, outside
of Israel and the Occupied Territories, can do to put pressure
on Israel to end the occupation and thus, at least help, bring
about the beginning of the end of this crisis. The boycott is
one of our main answer.2
Consideration of General
Objections
Objections to the Academic Boycott of
Israel have not been consistent. They have tended to shift over
time. For instance, at the beginning of the boycott
there was the call to keep academia, and particularly scientific
fields, out of politics. While as an ideal this may be
an admirable goal, in reality the bulk of higher education and
its academicians never escape politics. As we found in
the United States during the Vietnam War, various government
agencies quickly recruited an array of academic departments and
individuals, ranging from chemists to sociologists, to support
their war effort. The intimidation and bribery directed at the
rest of academia to remain quiet and loyal was effective until
the war itself became vastly unpopular. Israeli educational institutions
have followed this pattern. As Shahid Alam, Professor of Economics
at Northeastern University in Boston, has pointed out, "through
their links with the military, the political parties, the media,
and the economy, they (Israel's universities) have helped to
construct, sustain, and justify the Apartheid (policies of the
occupation).3 In general terms, states do not support academic
freedom or the free flow of ideas in cases that impact government
policies. Through various means of pressure they attempt to enforce
only two alternatives, quiescence or active support. In times
of stress, opposition comes to equal disloyalty and threatens
academic funding and careers. The academy, then, is not a neutral
arena on matters important to government. As Lisa Taraki, Lecturer
at Birzeit University on the West Bank, has argued, it can easily
become "a haven for many scholars either in the outright
service of repressive states, or for those who have rewritten
history in defense of colonial projects."4
In the current context, there are numerous
examples of the direct involvement of Israeli academia and academic
related professions in promoting and sustaining the oppressive
measures of the Israeli government and in violations of human
rights and of UN Resolutions. In general terms, almost all Israeli
academics find themselves actively or passively supporting the
occupation by virtue of Israel's policy of universal Jewish conscription.5
(This is a policy that does not democratize the Israeli army,
so much as it militarizes Israeli civilian society). Thus, almost
all Israeli academics are military veterans and many will do
reserve duty in the Territories. If they wish to resist serving
as part of the occupation forces they can do so by joining the
Refusnik organizations. Very few choose to do so. More concretely,
one can point to the active role taken by Bar-Ilan University
in validating courses given by colleges now being established
in the settlements. And finally, there is the particularly sinister,
documented involvement of Israeli doctors in torture.6
The argument for isolating academia from
politics was later augmented with the assertion that "in
the end the best way to resolve issues is to pursue dialogue,
not boycotts." But it is precisely because "dialogue"
on the Palestinian issue has been historically stifled that the
boycott against Israel has become necessary. For decades
the Zionists have had a near monopoly on the information flow
in the West concerning the Palestinian situation. One can still
see this in the fact that the vast majority of coverage in the
press, magazines, and TV news, particularly in the United States,
gives, most of the time, only the Israeli side of the story.
To the small extent that this is breaking down, those offering
the Palestinian point of view are now consistently labeled anti-Semites
and supporters of terrorists. The Zionists themselves thus
seek to maintain an environment that discourages dialogue and
makes necessary other, more direct and effective tactics.7
Moreover, 'intellectual exchanges' have been going on between
Israelis and the rest of the world since 1948 and with Zionists
for longer than that. It has made not a bit of difference to
the oppressive and colonialist policies of successive Israeli
governments. Under these conditions, "dialogue" is
unlikely to achieve anything in the future unless, simultaneously,
real pressure is applied from outside.
One of the earliest tactics to silence
and discredit advocates of the boycott has been the often used
red herring of anti-Semitism. The boycott of Israel, including
the academic boycott, is inherently anti-Semitic, we are
told, 'in effect if not in intent.'8 It encourages anti-Semitism,
even if it does not mean to. This argument is based on a dishonest
equating of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism and conveniently
ignores the mounting crescendo of Jewish voices against Zionist
and Israeli colonialist practices.9 It also ignores the fact
that not only was the boycott call started by a Jewish scholar
(Professor Steven Rose, Open University, UK), but also that many
of the supporters of the boycott are Jewish, some even Israeli.
Indeed, as many Jews have argued, it is current Israeli practices
and the Zionist colonial project that encourage and feed anti-Semitic
discourse, rather than legitimate means of protest against violations
of human rights in Israel. Thankfully, the use of anti-Semitism
to silence academics who support the boycott has become so discredited
that even the Association of University Teachers in Britain has
now officially declared its recognition of the distinction between
anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.10
Finally, there was the short lived argument that the issues
involved in the conflict between Israel and Palestine
are very complex, and a boycott reduces them to overly simplistic
dueling camps of good and evil. This assertion could not
be sustained in the light of UN resolutions and widely documented
Israeli violations of international law, and is now rarely heard.
We now turn to more serious issues concerning
the objectives, scope and potential effectiveness of the boycott.
Consideration of
Specific Objections
Argument 1: Futility.
The academic boycott is ineffective, it cannot influence the
policies of the Israeli government, and will only harden positions
due to resentment over outside pressure.
If the first part of this argument were
really true the Zionist response to the boycott effort would
not be so strenuous. In the U.S. the prominent, though misnamed,
Anti-Defamation League would not be extending time, energy and
money, to label the academic boycott effort as the "hijacking
of academic freedom"and the Zionists in general would not
be rushing to launch a number of anti-boycott petitions. The
near hysterical outcry coming from Zionists indicates a high
level of insecurity and fear. This fear may come, in part, from
the awareness that the academic boycott is not just directed
at the humanities and social sciences. It incorporates the hard
sciences which feed into Israel's high tech economy. As Martin
Haspelmath of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
in Leipzig has pointed out, "it can hardly be argued that
science is of little interest to governments or societies."11
Some Israelis have already acknowledged the potential of the
boycott. Senior Israeli economist Yoram Gabai is quoted in the
San Francisco Chronicle, 8 August 2002, as saying: "Faster
than expected, we will find ourselves in the time warp of (white-dominated)
Rhodesia in the 1970s and South Africa in the 1980s: enforced
isolation from without and an isolationism from within....The
enormous price of isolation will drag us into withdrawing from
the (occupied) territories, either in the context of a peace
treaty or without one as a unilateral act."12
This is not mere speculation on his part.
The power of national isolation, including that of academic
isolation, was recently attested to by Frederik de Klerk, the
former President of South Africa who initiated the move away
from apartheid and toward democracy. "Suddenly the doors
of the universities and libraries [of the world] were closed
to our bright students, which stimulated and motivated advocates
of change."13
As Gabai's prediction suggests, the academic
boycott does not work in a vacuum. It is but one component in
a broader boycott program that seeks to put pressure on all aspects
of Israeli society. Historically, such a broad approach can
be most effective when directed toward democracies, a category
to which Israel claims membership. Here individuals can pressure
their governments through elections. Unfortunately, and much
like white South Africa under apartheid, internally generated
Israeli perceptions are so censored and inbred that their ability
to understand the consequences of their national policies on
the Palestinians is limited. For instance, a majority of Israelis
have long believed in the myth of Barak's generous offer.14
As the self-defeating results of the last two Israeli elections
point out, a good number of Israelis are literally stuck in a
world of their own where positions cannot get any "harder."
As in the case of South Africa, external pressure is perhaps
the only way to move the Israelis to a realization that something
is terribly wrong with their outlook and behavior and that there
is a need to change both leadership and direction.
Even if one is skeptical of Israeli claims
to democracy, or their ability to break out of their perceptual
straitjacket, an international boycott targeting all aspects
of Israeli society has strong and beneficial symbolic value.
Such a boycott raises international consciousness over inhumane
and unjust behavior, lets ordinary citizens the world over know
that there is a way they can get involved and do something to
promote human rights and justice, and serves as a warning for
other would be oppressors that it is not only reaction by governments
that they need to worry about. In the end, economic and cultural
isolation has its own dynamic and, as Gabai fears, can wear away
at the resolve of those Israeli elites that fancy themselves
players on an international level.
One of the most important achievements
of the academic boycott is that it has generated such heated
discussion in so many venues (mainstream newspapers, television,
student publications, internet discussion lists, etc.) that the
negative details of the Zionist enterprise have inevitably forced
themselves onto the consciousness of many people, within and
outside academia. Thus, even the Zionist efforts to discredit
those who support the boycott, and de-legitimize the boycott
as a strategy of protest, have unintentionally helped provide
a superb forum for debating the facts about Palestine and the
occupation. If the boycott achieves nothing more than this it
will have achieved a great deal.
Argument 2: Misguided
--The academic boycott targets the wrong people and hurts Palestinians
as well as Israelis. It harms collaborative efforts between
Israeli and Palestinian universities.
The assertions that the academic boycott
hurts Palestinians and harms collaborative efforts are factually
untrue. While in the past there have been minor collaborations
between Israeli and Palestinian academic institutions in the
Occupied Territories, these have now ceased. This is due to inevitable
estrangement and suspicion that has come along with the continuing
colonization and occupation of the Occupied Territories. Also,
Israeli policies forbid the travel of Israeli citizens into the
Occupied Territories (except if they are going to and from colonies
illegal under international law) and make it extremely onerous
for Palestinians in those regions to enter Israel. If the Israelis
claim that these policies have been made necessary by the Palestinian
uprising, we answer that the uprising has been made necessary
and inevitable by the Israeli occupation and its brutal nature.
Part of that brutal nature has been the employment of tactics
designed to prevent Palestinian colleges and universities from
functioning in any normal manner. These tactics include
prolonged shut downs, military raids and travel restrictions
that impede students and faculty from reaching campuses.
No organized protest or resistence
to this consistent and prolonged attack on Palestinian academia
has come from Israeli academic groups, colleges, or universities. As Tanya Reinhart, a Professor of Linguistics
at Tel Aviv University and one of the few Israeli academics to
publically stand against Israeli occupation policies, has observed,
"Never in its history did the senate of any Israeli university
pass a resolution protesting the frequent closure of Palestinian
universities, let alone voice protest over the devastation sowed
there during the last uprising. It is not that a motion in that
direction failed to gather a majority, there was no such motion
anywhere in Israeli academia."15 And even with the shocking
escalation in the level of atrocities committed by the Israeli
army since the beginning of the second intifada, Israeli academia
continues to do practically nothing to bring the facts to public
attention.16 There is something obscenely hypocritical in
the fact that many of those individuals and organizations (Israeli
or otherwise) which have so vocally attacked the boycott, have
not raised their voices against the destruction of Palestinian
academia and society in general.17
The claim that the boycott "targets
the wrong people" is a more complicated one and deserves
close consideration. Almost all of the complaints registered
against the boycott of Israel, academic or otherwise, put forth
examples of humanitarian, well intentioned, Israeli individuals
(whose existence we certainly acknowledge) who are allegedly
being punished unfairly by the boycott (See also discussion of
the category of Academic Freedom below). In the case of the academic
boycott there are scholars who cannot place publishable material,
particularly in European journals, there are Israeli doctors
who cannot receive research assistance from abroad, there are
individual Israelis who have been asked to leave the boards of
scholarly journals, etc. Taken as individual cases, there is
no doubt that such situations result in frustration, inconvenience,
the disruption of research and perhaps even careers. Unfortunately
this is unavoidable given the broad based nature of the boycott
made necessary by the stubborn history of Israeli occupation.
Shahid Alam has put forth this point accurately and succinctly:
"I believe it is reasonable and moral to impose temporary
and partial limits on the academic freedom of a few Israelis
if this can help to restore the fundamental rights of millions
of Palestinians."18
We would like to point out that, to our
minds, the most notable cases of the "wrong people"
being hurt are those of the relatively few heroic Israeli academics
who have put their careers on the line to stand up against the
injustice of their country's colonial policies. For example,
there are, among others, Ilan Pappe, a professor of Political
Science at Haifa University, and Tanya Reinhart, who we quoted
above. Both are strong and vocal supporters of justice for the
Palestinians and advocates for political reform in Israel. Here
is what Professor Pappe says about the need for a boycott of
Israel: "It is a call from the inside to the outside
to exert economic and cultural pressure on the Jewish state
so as to bring home the message that there is a price tag attached
to the continuation of the occupation." The academic boycott
makes sense to Pappe as "part of the overall campaign for
external pressure." He continues, "Within such a call,
it makes no sense for an activist like myself to call on sanctions
or pressure on business, factories, cultural festivals, etc.
while demanding immunity for my own peers and sphere of activity--academia."19
Professor Pappe understands that he may also be hurt by such
a boycott, but he recognizes that the sacrifice is necessary
given the horrible situation we now find ourselves in.
In the end, the anti-boycott focus on
individuals just creates a red-herring that deflects attention
away from the larger, and more important, issue. As Pappe indicates,
individual Israelis simply cannot abstract themselves from that
larger issue. Israel is their country, Sharon is their Prime
Minister, the Occupation is their collective sin. Those, on the
outside, who support the boycott, understand present day Israel
for what it really is--a society that has institutionalized discriminatory
policies, created de facto first, second, and third class citizenship
categories, and has, for over thirty years now, maintained policies
of occupation and colonization that have systematically destroyed
Palestinian society. As a consequence, Israeli institutions (and
in some cases Israeli individuals) will now themselves become
relatively more isolated. If they find this uncomfortable, there
is always an escape route: pay heed to Professors Pappe, Rinehart
and others who point to the horror Israel is causing and act
to change the situation.
Argument 3: Academic
Freedom--The boycott violates the principle of academic freedom
and as such is unacceptable.
The boycott's impingement on the academic
freedom of Israeli scholars has been repeatedly condemned. It
has been called "contemptible," " hypocritical,"
and "an unacceptable breakdown in the norms of intellectual
freedom". For simplicity sake, let us work from the recent
statement of Dena S. Davis, a law professor at Cleveland State
University, published in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Davis writes that "Academic boycotts undermine the basic
premise of intellectual life that ideas make a difference, and
the corollary that intellectual exchanges across cultures can
open minds."20 Unfortunately, there is nothing necessary
about the assumption that the "difference" ideas make
results in a more humane world or more humane outlooks. Thus,
it is not only positive ideas that can make a difference.
Israeli Zionists (be they politicians, academics, cultural
leaders, businessmen, etc., that is, the country's dominant
elites), have been interacting with the world outside of Israel
since 1948. This sharing of ideas with the outside has made no
positive difference in the evolution of Zionist oppression against
both Palestinians inside and outside of Israel proper. Indeed,
it may very well have prolonged and deepened Israeli injustice
in this regard. Free communication on the part of Zionists has
allowed them to build solid support among American Jews based
on racist stereotyping of Arabs generally and Palestinians in
particular, as well as the correspondingly gross over-idealization
of the Zionist movement and its results. Thus, historically,
unimpaired 'intellectual life' and 'exchanges across cultures'
have not only failed to lead to the humanization of Zionism or
its policies but have led to the corruption of a powerful segment
to American Jewry. In addition, it is to be noted that those
very brave Israelis, both academic and non-academic, who have
taken a stand against such policies have, for the most part,
not done so because they had access to foreign academics or foreigners
per se.
This makes problematic the claim that
academic freedom somehow operates in a vacuum and, in and of
itself, always leads to the good, or the betterment of the world.
Nonetheless, we do agree that its opposite, the obstruction
of the "free flow of ideas" ought to be undertaken
only in severe and extreme circumstances. Unfortunately, that
is exactly the situation successive Israeli government have brought
about. Keeping to the realm of academia, proof of the severity
of the situation (and the hypocrisy of anti-boycott critics in
their failure to face up to it) can be found in the situation
of academic life in the Occupied Territories. Here, Israel's
illegal occupation has destroyed 'intellectual life' for
the Palestinians. The practice of "exchanging visits"
and "talking to each other," such as it has been over
the last 35 years, on the part of Israeli academics have not
produced the courage or insight to stand up and protest this
destruction. Israeli academics should be claiming for the Palestinians
the same rights of academic freedom they claim for themselves.
Their pointed failure to do so makes them subject to the general
boycott of Israel that is now evolving as a consequence of Israeli
policies.
Finally, it should be noted that the
academic boycott of Israel as presently pursued is not one of
uniform practice. It is a decentralized movement that allows
for individual interpretations on the part of its adherents.
In most cases the boycott is directed against Israeli institutions,
including academic institutions. But it may also be that as a
consequence of the boycott Israeli academics are now having a
harder time publishing outside the country, participating in
formal exchanges, sitting on boards and international committees,
and the like. However, this does not translate into a situation
where no one will talk to them. Boycott organizers are in
constant touch with the few dissenting Israeli academics such
as the two quoted above. And we are in fact anxious to talk to
other Israeli academics about what they can do to help end the
situation that has brought on the boycott in the first place.
In effect, far from discouraging Israeli dissent we are allied
to it and encourage Israeli academics to act in solidarity and
sympathy with their Palestinian colleagues who suffer much worse
isolation due to Israeli occupation. When the occupation is dismantled,
the academic boycott will be as well.
Argument 4: Inconsistency--The
boycott adherents unfairly single out Israel while ignoring all
other military occupations in places such as Tibet, Chechnya,
etc.
How do those who claim that we are 'picking'
on Israel know that we also ignore the behavior of the Chinese
in Tibet, Russians in Chechnya, etc.? We are generally not one
issue people and many of us do support well intentioned efforts
to isolate other oppressive regimes beyond that of Israel. However,
for a good number of those who support this boycott the struggle
against Israeli occupation is a high priority. There are a number
of reasons for this.
First, many of us, Jews, Muslims, Christians,
or non-denominational Americans, Europeans, and Arabs, feel a
special affinity for the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. We all have
emotional, cultural, or religious ties to the Holy Land, even
the non-religious among us. What the Zionists seem not to understand
is that the place their mythology makes special for them, is
also special to a lot of other folks based on other interpretations
of the same myth and other forms of oral and written tradition
as well.
Second, one can argue that just because
other nations behave badly does not let the Israelis off the
hook. After all, the Israelis now have the dubious distinction
of running the longest post-WWII occupation in the world. There
is no reason why we, as a movement, should not start with the
problem that has persisted longest and then work backwards.
Third, and perhaps most importantly,
the Israeli-Palestinian crisis can be seen as more important
for citizens of the Western nations than other contemporary crises
and examples of oppression. This is because Zionist influence
spreads far beyond Israel's area of dominion, and now widely
influences many of the key domestic agendas in the West. In other
words, unlike the Chinese, Russians, and other oppressive regimes,
the Israelis and their supporters directly influence the policy
makers of our own countries. Thus their actions have import beyond
the Occupied Territories and potentially affect the lives of
ordinary citizens of most Western nations. This particularly
obvious in the case of United States. Here Zionist lobbies are
extremely powerful with both Congress and the media, and the
administration of George W. Bush and his neo-conservative advisers
see Israel and its aggressive behavior as a model for their own
policies.21 Numerous examples of how this influence is exerted
can be found on the web site of the Project for the New American
Century.22
Argument 5: Giving
Comfort to Terrorists --The boycott of Israel ignores the (alleged)
facts that (A) the Israeli army is in the Occupied Territories
as an act of self-defense against suicide bombers and other terrorists
and (B) boycott efforts only encourage and lend comfort to these
terrorists.
(A) We who support the boycott do not
see how inaccurate historical arguments amount to
anything other than additional red-herrings that seek to distract
attention from main issues. The Israeli army and settlers are
in the Occupied Territories to possess "Judea,"
"Samaria" and Gaza.
The resulting thirty five years of land confiscation, destruction
of crops, houses, and other Palestinian property, the destruction
of Palestinian civil society, the construction of illegal colonies,
and the importation of 100,000s of illegal settlers are not
"acts of self-defense." On the other hand, one
can reasonably define resistence to these actions on the part
of the Palestinians (whether one happens to approve of any particular
tactic or not) as in fact acts of self-defense. The international
community through the actions of the United Nations and the testimony
of respected world leaders, has made it quite clear that Israeli
occupation constitutes an on-going case of severe injustice.
To cite but one example, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a man who certainly
knows injustice when he sees it, recently declared, "I have
been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it
reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South
Africa. I have seen the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints
and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers
prevented us from moving about." He goes on to condemn
the general dispossession of the Palestinians on both sides of
the Green Line.23
(B) The charge that boycott efforts encourage
or lend comfort to terrorists is entirely ad hoc. How do those
who make these claims know that they are true? In fact, it is
quite possible that, as Shahid Alam has suggested, the boycott,
functioning as a manifestation of "world conscience,"
can "mitigate the Palestinian's deep despair"and hopefully
lead to a reduction of violence of both the "colonizer and
the colonized."24 In any case, it bears repeating that
the boycott represents a non-violent alternative route to oppose
a regime which many of us see as itself terrorist.
Conclusion
Israeli goals in the occupied territories have always aimed at
possession and absorption of these lands. Israeli behavior,
colonialist and oppressive, follows from this fact. One can verify
this for oneself by going to any of the human rights organizations
that document Israeli policy in the territories, including Israeli
organizations, and simply trace the actions of the occupier from
1967 onward. However, with the advent of the Sharon government
the scale of destruction and brutality has risen to new and shocking
levels. As Ilan Pappe has observed, under Ariel Sharon occupation
has become "a horror story of abuse and callousness ....The
trend is for worse to come, with a sense of an Israeli government
that feels it has a 'green light' from the U.S. to do whatever
it wishes in the occupied territories."
The Sharon government was put into power
by an overwhelming majority vote of Israelis in the election
of February 2001. Sharon received 62% of ballots cast. In the
January 2003 election the Israeli public reconfirmed their allegiance
to Sharon, his Likud party, and allied right wing parties, by
once more putting these forces in command of the government.
What this electoral history indicates is that the majority of
Israelis are either unwilling or unable to understand the real
origins of their own insecurity and the nature of the occupation.
It is under these circumstances that
outside pressure becomes the only viable way of encouraging change
in Israel. Under normal circumstances one would look to the government
of the United States, Israel's ally and patron, to apply the
necessary pressure. However, we all know that the U.S. is itself
operating under the same delusions as Israel as to the nature
of and reasons for the occupation. The prospect of changing the
perceptions of the U.S. Congress on this issue is even less likely
than dislodging Sharon from leadership in Israel.
This leaves us with the strategy of a
grassroots, international movement to boycott Israel at all possible
levels: economic, cultural, and academic. We are proud of this
effort and convinced of its necessity and just nature. And, as
this detailed article attests, we are willing to defend it against
all who would question its validity or the motives of its participants.
Mona Baker is a professor of translation studies at the
University of Manchester. Lawrence Davidson is a professor
of history at West Chester University in Pennsylvania. They can
be reached at: ldavidson1945@msn.com
1. See http://www.breastfeeding.com/
2. Most if not all individuals in the
boycott are also actively engaged in various other forms of protest
and awareness-raising activities, ranging from applying pressure
on their political representatives, to speaking about the Middle
East conflict at public venues, to participating in peaceful
rallies and marches, andperhaps most importantly maintaining
dialogue with peace activists in Israel and the Occupied territories
and extending to them and to the beleaguered Palestinians in
the West Bank and Gaza the moral support and solidarity that
they desperately need.
3. M. Shahid Alam, "The
Academic Boycott of Israel,"
4. http://www.pjpo.org/letter_taraki.html
5. With the exception of the Ultra Orthodox,
all able bodied Israeli Jews are subject to military service.
Indeed, there appears to be a de facto requirement that all
non-Ultra Orthodox Israeli Jews must have served in the military
just to be hired in most professions! It is an unwritten way
of filtering out non-Jews from the professional job market.
6 "Israeli Medical Association shirks
'political aspects' of torture," Derek Summerfeld, British
Medical Journal 1995; 311:755.
7. Just in 2003 American Zionist groups
have launched their own targeted boycotts of the New York Times,
Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, and Los Angeles Times,
when they believed that those newspapers gave too much attention
to the Palestinians. See http://by4fd.bay.hotmail.msn.com/
8. http://www3.sympatico.ca/sr.gowans/distractions.html
9. For a very small sample of such voices
see http://www.jewsagainstzionism.com/
http://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/
http://www.jewishpeacethread.com/
http://www.jfjfp.org/
http://www.newprofile.org/english/index.html
http://www.jewsagainsttheoccupation.org/
10. Motion no. 56: Witch hunts (passed
at the AUT Summer Council in Scarborough, May 2003): "Council
deplores the witch-hunting of colleagues, including AUT members,
who are participating in the academic boycott of Israel. Council
recognizes that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism, and resolves
to give all possible support to members of AUT who are unjustly
accused of anti-Semitism because of their political opposition
to Israeli government policy.
11.
Linguist discussion list, 10 April 2003
12. "Israelis Feel The Boycott Sting:
Creeping Sense of Isolation as Culture, Economy takes hits"
13. Ha'aretz supplement in English, 16
May 2003 http://www.haaretz.com/
14. See Gallop-Maariv opinion poll at
http://www.gamla.org.il/english/article/2000/july/poll3.html
15. Z net, 4 February 2003 http://www.Zmag.org/content/
16. Making reference to the boycott,
Tim Shallice, professor at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience,
University College, London observed, "Are mainstream [academic
and] science organizations in Israel sponsoring fact-finding
commissions over Jenin? Are they publishing detailed analyses
of what has been happening over the last 18 months in the Occupied
Territories? Are they making clear the long-term dangers of colonist
policies? If the answer to these questions is Yes, then I am
wrong to sign [on]." Http://www.pjpo.org/letter_Shallice.html
17. "No one has of course mention
anything about Palestinian freedom of inquiry and the sanctity
of the Palestinian academy in this raging debate. What I have
to say about this is particularly relevant to Israeli academics,
since the vast majority of them have been carrying on their business
as usual for the past 35 years oblivious to what is happening
to their Palestinian counterparts, not to mention to the Palestinian
nation as a whole." Lisa Taraki, Lecturer at Birzeit University
in the West Bank. Http://www.pjpo.org/letter_taraki.html
18. Shahid Alam, ibid.
19. Ilan Pappe, "Arguments
in Favor of the Boycott,"
20. Chronicle of Higher Education,
18 April 2003, p. B13
21. This position is convincingly argued
by Melani McAlister in her book Epic Encounters: Culture, Media,
and U.S. Interests in the Middle East 1945-2000 (University of
California Press, 2001). See also Michael Lind, "The Weird
Men Behind George Bush" (New Statesman, 7 April 2003)
22. http://www.newamericancentury.org
23. The Guardian, 29 April 2003
24. Shahid Alam, ibid.
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
Keep CounterPunch
Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
|