Leading anti-Zionist British academics responded to the military, terrorist and propaganda war against the Jews by launching divestment and boycott campaigns against Israel in general and Israeli academics in particular. Thus, in 2002, 123 British academics published an open letter in the London Guardiancalling for a “moratorium” on all cultural and research links with Israel. In 2004-2005, the British Association of University Teachers voted to boycott two Israeli universities for their alleged complicity in their government’s military policies. Only after a tremendous struggle and international condemnation was that vote overturned.
Similar divestment and boycott campaigns against Israel were launched throughout the Western world. Although the American Association of University Professors – a professional organization dedicated to advancing academic freedom – are on record as opposing “academic boycotts,” one of its members, Joan Wallach Scott, the former head of the AAUP committee on academic freedom, has publicly condemned the influence of the “pro-Sharon, pro-occupation lobby” on campus. According to Scott, this lobby has exerted a chilling effect on academic freedom reminiscent of the McCarthy era.
The AAUP planned a conference, which had been scheduled to be held in Italy earlier this year, to discuss the concept of academic boycotts. More than a third of the invitees were pro-boycott, though a handful of anti-boycott Israeli academics had also been summoned at the last moment. When anti-Semitic literature was discovered in the conference materials, however, AAUP funders, including the Ford Foundation, pulled out.
Though initially AAUP still planned to host the meeting, the online trade journal Inside Higher Ed reported that AAUP sent a letter to conference participants explaining that holding the conference would “reactivate opposition that has proved too severe to enable us to go forward.”
According to the AAUP website, the organization will be publishing the proceedings of the conference that never took place in their journal Academe. The AAUP remains committed to “academic freedom” and says that “publishing the papers will … demonstrate the quality and variety of positions that would have been represented at the conference,” according to its Web site.
Do these British and other European academics speak for all academics and reasonable people of good will? Thankfully, they do not.
For example, the American Association for the Advancement of Science condemned the boycott, as did British and Scottish church groups and the British government. While some of these petition signers do not agree with all of Israel’s policies, they also oppose boycotts that smack of collective punishment, and racial, national and political profiling.
Interestingly, a good number of petition signers are professors of physics, medicine, math and computer science who, unlike professors of social science and the humanities, are not as politicized. They take their disciplines seriously and do not use them as launch-pads for their political views. They obviously also respect the work of their Israeli scientific counterparts, who are world leaders in technology, science and research. One professor commented: “Science builds bridges. It is an example of collaboration without borders.”
Academics who signed the Scholars for Peace in the Middle East petition characterized the boycott a number of ways: “shameful,” “repugnant,” “discriminatory,” “indefensible,” “anti-Semitic,” “selective,” “appeasement-oriented,” “anti-academic” and as an example of dangerous “group thinking.”
Many petition signers view this boycott as reminiscent of the Nazi era. Petition signers note that no boycotts have been undertaken against academics whose governments engage in real ethnic cleansing and human rights violations; they also note that Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims are not being held accountable for their savage persecution of academics and dissenters.
One academic observed that “the first task of a fascist regime is to boycott academics.”
The truth is, a silent boycott has already begun. Some British academics have refused to write for Israeli journals and refused to publish or review the work of Israeli academics and creative artists in British journals. Exeter Professor Richard Seaford recently refused to contribute an article to an Israeli journal of classical studies because of the “brutal and illegal expansionism and slow-motion ethnic cleansing being practiced by the [Israeli] government.” A UK publication, Dance Europe, rejected an article by an Israeli choreographer unless she “publicly condemns Israeli occupation.”
In my view, those who are pro-boycott or in favor of blacklisting have effectively cut themselves off from the international community of scholars. According to the president of SPME, Dr. Ed Beck, “this boycott offends tolerant and fair-minded people from across the political spectrum.”