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Please, do not publish on Kibbutz (Haifa University) - Boycott Israeli Apartheid, put an end to racism and colonialism.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)