04 June 2007
The Independent
www.independent.co.uk

Steven Rose: Why pick on Israel? Because its actions are wrong

Academic freedom, it appears, applies to Israelis but not to Palestinians

The University and College Union annual congress last week voted by a
two-thirds majority to organise a campus tour for Palestinian academic trade
unionists to explain why they had called for an academic and cultural
boycott of Israel, and to encourage UCU members to consider the moral
implications of links with Israeli universities. Not surprisingly, this
overwhelming vote met with a roar of hostility from what we have learned to
call the Israel lobby.

Our government, long accustomed to sitting on its hands when any serious
attempt to censure Israel is made, predictably joined the chorus. More
surprisingly, the Independent's editorialist and its columnist Joan Smith
followed along. The boycott, we are told, damages academic freedom, picks on
Israel, and encourages anti-Semitism on British campuses.

Entirely suppressed in this harrumphing has been any thought about why
Palestinian university teachers and their union, as well as all the NGOs in
the Occupied Territories, have called for a boycott. Academic freedom, it
appears, applies to Israelis but not Palestinians, whose universities have
been arbitrarily closed, Bir Zeit for a full four years. Students and
teachers have been killed or imprisoned. Attendance at university is made
hazardous or impossible by the everyday imposition of checkpoints. Research
is blocked by Israeli refusal to allow books or equipment to be imported.

Even within Israel itself, some universities sit on illegally expropriated
land, Arab student unions are not recognised and there are increasing covert
restrictions on Arab-Israelis (20 per cent of the population) entering
university at all. No Israeli academic trade union or professional
association has expressed solidarity with their Palestinian colleagues a few
kilometres away across the wall, though the boycott call may finally
encourage them to do so.

When challenged, Israelis cite examples of collaboration with Palestinians:
bridges, not borders. Fine, but because Palestinian academics from Gaza or
the West bank are not permitted to enter pre-1967 Israel, how real can such
collaborations be? If academic freedom means anything, it must be
indivisible. And what are Palestinians to make of the uncensured insistence
by senior Israeli academics that their family size constitutes a demographic
threat to the Jewish state?

But why should academics, culture workers, architects and doctors in the UK,
who have all in recent months called for forms of boycott of Israel, take
such action? Why pick on Israel, we are asked. After all, as Joan Smith
points out, there are lots of ugly regimes around. How about boycotting the
UK until troops are removed from Iraq? But boycott is merely a specific
tactic, a non-violent weapon available to individual members of civil
society. It is only one form of protest: many boycott supporters are at
least as actively involved in the various campaigns against the UK's illegal
war in Iraq as in any boycott of Israel.

No one asks those campaigning against China's occupation of Tibet why not
Israel or Darfur? If opponents of our boycott call want to make a case for
boycotting Cuba (one boycott that Israel, following its American paymaster
at the UN, habitually supports) they are free to do so. The issue is not
"Why Israel?" but "Why not Israel?" Yet the secular western press, so
willing to express discomfort with states that describe themselves as
"Islamic Republics" is seemingly untroubled by the ethnic assumptions
underlying the claims of a Jewish republic.

Further, it is precisely because Israel prides itself on its academic
prowess (just as South Africa did of its sporting prowess) that the idea of
an academic boycott is so painful. Israel has uniquely strong academic links
with Europe, and despite its Middle-East location and constant breaches of
European legislation on human rights, receives considerable financial
research support from the EU. That's why the Israeli cabinet felt it
necessary to set up an anti-boycott committee under that well-known
campaigner for a greater Israel, Binyamin Netanyahu, and why teams of
Israeli academics toured the UK before the UCU vote to try to block the
boycott call.

Lurking behind the thinking of even well-meaning opponents of the boycott is
that it is in some way anti-Semitic. This ignores the fact that the boycott
is of Israeli institutions, not individuals (so it would affect the tiny
number of Palestinian academics in Israeli institutions, but not a Jewish
Israeli working in the UK or US). Second, it ignores the fact that the
British Jewish community is itself intensely divided over Israel, between
those who will defend Israel at all costs, and the increasingly vocal
critics who insist "not in our name". Even a cursory look at the signatories
of the various boycott calls will show the large number of prominent Jewish
figures among them. It really isn't good enough to attack the messenger as
anti-Semitic or a self-hating Jew rather than deal with the message itself,
that Israel's conduct is unacceptable.

What could be a more democratic way of bringing debate on to university
campuses than the instruction to the UCU to organise a campus tour for
Palestinian academic trade unionists to engage in discussion before UCU
members decide whether to support their call for a boycott? Those who
cherish the idea of the university as the house of reason will surely
welcome the opportunity for calm discussion of a controversial issue.

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The writer is secretary of the British Committee for the Universities of
Palestine

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