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From: Varul, Matthias
Sent: 01 December 2008 09:51
To: 'Irina Pereira'; [log in to unmask]
Subject: RE: Do not publish on Kibbutz (Haifa University) - Boycott Israeli
Apartheid
... the South Africa argument again and again - where is the single shred of
evidence that an academic boycott did anything to topple the apartheid
regime? if you can't come up with that all the counter arguments against the
boycott suddenly are valid again... (thanks for acknowledging them, by the
way).
also - the text you quote tacitly acknowledges that the parallel between
South African universities under apartheid and Israeli university is pretty
artificial (if Virginia Tilley could give any evidence for them being equally
suprematist, i'm sure she would have come up with it - particularly as she
chides Zvi Hacohen for the ommission of evidence on the widespread
cooperation with Palestinian and Jordanian institutions... btw: she doesn't
really produce any evidence to the contrary herself)
there may be nothing wrong with singling out a specific case when it comes to
activism in principle - but if you're sacrificing something valuable (such as
academic freedom... you claim you don't like academic boycotts - i'm trying to
believe that), the onus is on you to justify how
a) this is a *special* case (worse than others, or one where we have a
special responsibility)
b) there is a likelihood of beneficial results
you openly admit that a) does not hold in any way (how about
Turkey/Kurdistan, China/Tibet, India/Kashmeer, ourselves/Iraq - to mention
only a few cases where occupation is an issue - totally forgetting the appalling
human rights records of many of the countries our universities are most keen
to cooperate with...)
and to assume b) might be the case requires some mental accrobatics i simply
can't follow... (again: our investment in other countries is *much* higher and
divestment more likely to have any effect - but even here i think it's more
likely to be detrimental - so: no - i wouldn't want to boycott China, or Iran, or
ourselves, or Zimbabwe, or... etc.)
so - the Left thing to do would be not to be smug about your own ethical
credentials but to contribute to a debate of what one can learn of one of the
most significant socialist experiments in the 20th centuries (including how it
may have contributed to the opposite of its humanistic ideals... but that,
again, is something nobody who stands in any kind of marxist tradition should
feel too smug about!)
stop the boycott!
matthias varul
ps
check out these
on Israel/South Africa
http://www.engageonline.org.uk/archives/index.php?id=37
and the debate around the boycott in general
http://www.engageonline.org.uk/archives/
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From: Newsletter of the European Sociological Association (ESA)
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Irina Pereira
Sent: 30 November 2008 15:42
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Do not publish on Kibbutz (Haifa University) - Boycott Israeli Apartheid
Regarding the recent "call for articles on kibbutz" sent by Prof.Michal Palgi, we
ask:
Please, do not publish on Kibbutz (Haifa University) - Boycott Israeli Apartheid,
put an end to racism and colonialism.
On the Academic Boycott of Israel
Virginia Tilley, The Electronic Intifada, 27 May 2007
Academics don't like academic boycotts. In fact, we detest external limits of
any kind. We treasure our own universities for offering precious sanctuary for
critical debate (even though they rarely do) and we don't like to see any of
them banned, even for ostensibly laudable reasons. Sure, universities in some
countries are little more than fig leaves for their regimes. But that's not usually
their fault. So we avoid the lectures of state hacks rather than denounce
them and we protect the universities so that they can nurture that rare point
of light.
Still, in very exceptional cases, an academic boycott comes onto our agenda.
This happens when a country's universities are recognized as central players in
legitimizing a regime that systematically inflicts massive human rights abuses
on its own people and any pretence that the universities are independent
fortresses of principled intellectual thought becomes too insulting to the
human conscience. But since universities in many oppressive regimes fit those
criteria, in practice a second condition is required: their faculties have the
freedom to act differently.
In democratic countries where human rights abuses abound as rampantly as in
Israel, it is not tenable that faculty entertain and promote the notion that
their institutions -- cranking out the architects and professional foot soldiers
of occupation -- have no role in those abuses and can join in mixed company
as fine upstanding members of the international scholarly club. It is especially
not tenable when universities themselves perpetrate discrimination in their
research and their grants and admission policies. University faculties are
supposed to hold their institutions accountable to basic standards of
objectivity, fairness, and non-discrimination. Where they are capable of acting
on those standards and refuse, the hack becomes the hypocrite. Moral
paralysis becomes moral culpability.
On this reasoning, back in the 1980s offended foreign academics launched an
academic boycott of apartheid South Africa, whose universities were finally
rightly identified as bastions of white supremacy and whose white faculties,
privileged by racial democracy, could be held accountable. Similarly, we now
see a boycott of Israeli universities being urged by, among others, Britain's
University and College Union. Israeli academics, naturally enough, are appalled
by the idea of a boycott and the Israeli government is worried that the idea is
gaining momentum. Hence an Israeli academic delegation has to come to
England to wage battle against the boycott, and all the old banners once
waved by apartheid's defenders -- 'academic
freedom', 'balance', 'proportionality' -- are being waved again in this one.
Israeli academic arguments are indeed too reminiscent of apartheid South
Africa to escape the comparison. Especially, South African academics trying to
defeat the boycott typically avoided discussing the abuses of apartheid. Israeli
academic arguments against the boycott also do not discuss the reason for it,
which is Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories and the subjugation of
almost four million civilians under military rule. Instead, they stress the need
for 'balance' -- which, in Israeli parlance, is a code word for shifting attention
entirely away from the occupation to reiterate a tired canon of Israeli
innocence, victimhood, and deniability. And because they do not discuss the
occupation, they do not address their own universities' responsibility for it.
Whatever our conceits of political neutrality, academics never work in a
vacuum. In conflict zones, our work is as inherently political as any other
activity. For example, let us briefly suspend disbelief and accept Ben-Gurion
University Professor Zvi Hacohen's claim, cited in Ha'aretz (15 May 2007)
that 'there is widespread cooperation between our universities and Palestinian
and Jordanian universities', although he does not specify what
this 'widespread' cooperation is. His argument is hardly supported by
Palestinian faculty, whose only public voice on the question has been to
support the boycott.
But in any case, he cannot pretend that such collaboration is apolitical when
Palestinian research partners are held captive under draconian military rule by
his own government and the occupation is wrecking their families' hopes and
lives, their institutions' viability, and their entire community's basic safety. Nor
can he pretend that his own university is politically neutral when it subsists
partly on privileges gained by such appalling human rights violations and
conducts research designed to preserve and strengthen those privileges.
Ignoring such complicity is not neutral: it is enabling. It promotes a veneer of
normalcy over a ghastly human rights situation and so helps shelter it from
scrutiny.
Israel's defenders in this controversy also protest that a boycott violates the
moral economy of academic work. 'Communication, understanding and
international collaboration is what this field is all about,' said Professor Miriam
Schlesinger of Bar Ilan University, who was asked to resign from the board of a
translation journal because she is Israeli. Yet the ethic of communication,
understanding, and collaboration with Palestinian universities is precisely what
Israeli universities have unacceptably abandoned. Instead, Israeli scholars are
casually allowing Palestinian institutions to crumble on their doorsteps, at the
hands of their own government, while they themselves share elevated
discussions in the paneled salons of Oxford and Cambridge.
A third argument is that a boycott is too sweeping, punishing Israel's
intellectual progressives along with nationalist reactionaries and passive
enablers. Schlesinger even calls it 'collective punishment' -- an unfortunate
reference, since Israel's occupation and brutalization of some 4 million people
is often denounced as collective punishment and the phrase suggests, again,
that peculiar Israeli interpretation of the word 'balance'. Yet collective
punishment is wrong where collective responsibility is lacking. Palestinian
civilians in a refugee camp are not capable of controlling and therefore not
responsible for what some militants do to resist occupation, and resisting
occupation is a human right in any case. Israeli professors have the capacity
to take a stand against human rights abuses furthered by their own
institutions and therefore have the moral responsibility to do so.
Hence it is also false moral symmetry for Dr. Schlesinger to equate her right to
serve on the board of an academic journal with the right of Palestinian
students to university education. She was denied her board position not just
because she is Israeli but because she is complicit, through the privileges and
power she enjoys through her nationality and her job, with a brutal
occupation. Palestinians are being denied their right to education solely
because they are not Jews. The former ban, even if controversial, is a moral
gesture; the latter ban is a racist one.
A fourth argument is that Israel is being unfairly singled out. For example,
since the US and Britain have recently teamed up to kill, or cause to die or be
killed, hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq, surely a better case can be
made for boycotting them. This argument trips over the grave of South African
apartheid, however, for South Africa attempted the same claim of
proportionality and the world had none of it. For one thing, state sins are not
measured by death counts alone, nor are they ranked by their measurable
gravity. If they were, we would focus on just one conflict at a time.
For another, Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza strip is not a
foreign policy gone wrong. The entire Israeli state system -- its laws, its
policies, its ideology of Jewish statehood, the privileges that serve its Jewish-
national society -- is implicated in a grand demographic strategy to exclude,
imprison, and subjugate some 50 percent of the state's own territorial
population solely on the basis of their ethnic identity. This distinguishes Israel
from other states behaving badly by casting it into the particular moral abyss
of an apartheid state.
And there's the rub. The small but growing international boycott of Israel
signals that the political ground is shifting -- that its occupation is sliding
conceptually, if not yet legally, into an apartheid model. The UN International
Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid
defines 'the crime of apartheid' as 'inhuman acts' similar to apartheid, such
as 'the deliberate creation of conditions preventing the full development of
such a group or groups' by denying 'the right to education, the right to leave
and to return to their country, the right to a nationality [citizenship], the right
to freedom of movement and residence, the right to freedom of opinion and
expression, and the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association'.
The Convention particularly prohibits any measures 'designed to divide the
population along racial lines by the creation of separate reserves and ghettos'.
If this package does not sound like Israel's military rule over Palestinians, it is
hard to imagine what apartheid outside South Africa would look like or how the
Convention might ever be applied again.
Israel hotly rejects the apartheid analogy, of course, partly on grounds that
Palestinians are not a racial group but a national or ethnic group (defined in
the negative, as non-Jews). Also, Palestinians are not supposed to be Israel's
citizens, but rather are considered citizens of some nonexistent state that
may exist some time in the future. But no one looking at the dismembered and
walled West Bank enclaves now left to the Palestinians can imagine that these
prison camps are intended to constitute a state, and the distinction between
ethnicity and race in this context is losing all meaning. The A-word is
everywhere now, and the boycott is one signal that the apartheid paradigm is
seeding broadly into international civil society. Israel's hapless academics are
fast losing ground fast to its growth.
Because they are in denial about the horrors of the occupation itself, Israeli
academics protesting the boycott may not grasp its real purpose, which is to
force them to confront those horrors. It is not acceptable for them to insist on
ivory-tower privileges with so terrible a human rights catastrophe as the
occupation stark on their doorstep, perpetrated by their own government and
involving their own institutions in its cruelties and deceptions. When Dr.
Schlesinger protests that being treated according to her nationality rather
than her individual character 'was a blow,' she misses the entire point. To
claim a right to principled treatment, one must extend it to others. Israeli
academics must become serious about according their Palestinian colleagues
the dignity and respect they expect themselves. When they do, given their
formidable talents and resources, the occupation will face its toughest
opponents.
Virginia Tilley is a US citizen now working as a senior researcher at the Human
Sciences Research Council in Pretoria. She is the author of The One-State
Solution: A Breakthrough for Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Deadlock.
Irina Pereira (ISCTE, University of Lisbon, Portugal)
Ziyaad Lunat (Carter Center - EUA; and LSE, London UK)
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