Now that the forces of democracy and light appear at least temporarily to
have triumphed, and rabid 'anti-semites' such as myself and Desmond Tutu
have been banished to the outer darkness to brandish our 'evangelical
sloganeering', 'latent anti-semitism' and 'moral bankruptcy' (the words of
Dave Wood) in futility at the Bush-led forces of freedom, those of you whose
limit of activism expresses itself only in ensuring that the state of Israel
can do exactly as it pleases can happily go back to sleep again.
You are at least for the time being secure in the knowledge that your
preferred form of 'constructive engagement' with Israeli academia can
continue to make the same rapid progress and vital, strategic input to
securing a just peace for Palestinians and Israelis alike that it
has....since 1967. But I shouldn't hold your breath.
As for myself, I think what I'll do is carry on doing what I did before,
which is (hopefully) facing up to anti-semitism and anti-palestinianism as
though there is no difference between them, and treating those two imposters
just the same. And the Palestinian people can rest secure in the knowledge
that one more external institution has left them safe in the hands of the
Israeli IDF and its 'code of moral purity', and to the tender mercies of
such bastions of upright nobility as Binyamin Netenyahu and Ariel Sharon.
Oh and David? The reason why we 'picked on' Israeli Universities? Because
they, or at least numbers of the people working there and in Palestinian
Universities, asked us to... quite simple, really. And as to your excuse
that until and unless every oppressive regime can be addressed
instantaneously then there is no legitimacy in tackling them one by one...
if a level 1 student at your University produced reasoning like that in an
essay on moral philosophy, they'd deserve to fail - we do what we can, when
we can.
And as for the AUT boycott itself, I'll leave you with the words of Jose
Marti: an idea, once awakened, can never be put back to sleep again.
Cheers,
Dr Jon Cloke,
Department of Geography,
Durham University
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