"Boycotting academics is boycotting knowledge and debate, and it is often
boycotting criticism as well as support, and does absolutely no good at
all..."
And yet, on the other hand.... We have actually been circulated with a
number of petitions/requests by those Palestinian Universities that feel
that boycotting Israeli cultural and academic links does have a definite
impact, a la Apartheid.
Those of you who took part in the anti-Apartheid boycott will remember
(forgive me David) the suggestions of inter alia Margaret Thatcher that
'constructive engagement' was the best way to encourage those naughty old
white South Africans to change their ways.. it wasn't until after the fall
of Apartheid that it was more generally admitted by South African
politicians that the boycott had made the South African economy
unsustainable (as was widely declared in a number of South African papers at
the time), particularly after Barclays Bank was forced to disinvest.
The situation as regards Israel is very different, although the Apartheid
tendencies there show a lot of similarities. The Israeli state can afford to
declare its outright defiance of international opinion because it is
basically kept afloat on a sea of US dollars; the US regime, in the throes
of Empire and saturated by the die-hard Zionist tendencies of the US right
and the evangelical christian movement as a whole, is not about to turn off
the tap and it may well be a long time before it does so.
Nobody is pretending that a boycott of Israeli Universities and academics is
going to have the slightest effect economically; but the boycott of
Apartheid South Africa wasn't simply an economic boycott - even in the
middle of that boycott, refusing to let English cricket teams tour there or
black South African musicians tour here seemed a bit extreme.
Similarly any boycott of Israel isn't merely economic, and neither is the
non-economic component of that boycott irrelevant; if we believe in
fundamental academic freedoms, how can we support and sustain the idea that
Israel has a racially-orientated two-tier higher education system in which
one race is severely materially disadvantaged as deliberate policy, not to
mention has to try and undertake its education at the very real risk of
being shot or shelled by the IDF?
Everybody is aware that there are large numbers of Israelis academics who
abhor what is going on in their country; we would all be wounded by the fact
that those voices would no longer have the same contact and expression as
before. But those voices are not the voices of power in Israel, and for
every Israeli academic who is sympathetic to the Palestinian cause there are
others, maybe the majority, who support what Ariel Sharon does and have no
truck with the peaceniks.
A boycott is the weapon of the weak and those who support the weak, in the
same way that passive resistance was for Gandhian nationalists against the
power of empire, or conscientious objection was for the small groups in the
UK opposing the First World War in the UK. Because it is a weapon of
weakness does not, however, mean that it won't work or, even if it doesn't
work, that it shouldn't be tried.
Dr Jon Cloke,
Lecturer,
Geography Department,
University of Durham,
Science site,
Durham DH1 3LE
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