Wall St. Journal (Europe) April 29 2005
http://faculty.biu.ac.il/%7Esteing/conflict/oped/boycott.html
JERUSALEM The phones began ringing late last Friday
afternoon. The BBC, AFP, co-authors, my mother: everyone wanted to know if I
was worried about the vote by British academics to boycott my university. As a
Jew and an Israeli, my automatic answer to any question that contains the word
worry is yes. On the long list, the boycott comes close behind the dangers of
Palestinian terror, the Iranian bomb, Hezbollah’s missiles, Osama bin
Laden, reality TV, Israeli taxi drivers, and the waves of locusts migrating
from North Africa.
In truth, the direct impact of
unspecified academic sanctions adopted by the Association of University
Teachers (AUT) against the faculty at Bar Ilan and Haifa universities is likely
to be minimal. The few viscerally anti-Israel academics are probably not
participating in any joint research projects in any case, to their loss. Two
years ago, my colleague Prof. Miriam Shlesinger, an internationally prominent
linguist, was ousted from the board of a journal in translation studies by an
Egyptian-born editor based in the University of Manchester. And the politically
correct anti-Israel atmosphere has probably led a few anonymous reviewers to
reject research reports submitted to other academic journals - but this is hard
to prove.
In any case, the quality of the Israeli
academic research is generally very high, and good work still trumps bad
politics, even in the nonsense of post-colonial, post-modern and
post-Chomsky/Said theory. In molecular biology, immunology, anti-terror
methodologies, strategic deterrence, and other fields, a political ban on
Israelis would be particularly costly for the banners - not for the banned. And
efforts to understand the factors that distinguish between failure and success
in arms control and peace efforts (my research focus) will be stillborn without
the active participation of serious Israeli researchers in this field.
At the same time, this effort to impose a political
litmus test on academic research has created a serious backlash. Since the
recent revival of the boycott campaign, we have been deluged by emails from
colleagues pledging to defy the policy, and to increase their contact with
Israelis. Many also reject the medieval nature of such censorship, which
contradicts the core principle of the marketplace of ideas.
The real threat from the boycott, as its authors
realize, is not from the direct academic impact, but rather from its broader
political objectives. Although the official terminology refers to occupation
and settlements, and singles out two universities for their alleged complicity,
the Israel-obsessed organizers of the AUT boycott - Susan Blackwell and Steven
Rose, like their counterparts elsewhere - readily admit that this is simply a
tactical decision. They have declared all Israelis who serve in the defense
forces and support the government to be guilty. Bar Ilan and Haifa Universities
were targeted after a blanket boycott resolution against all Israeli academics
failed to get a majority two years ago. The union targeted Haifa because it
said the university was threatening to fire an Israeli political science
lecturer for supporting a student's research into allegations of killings by
Israeli troops. Bar Ilan was sanctioned for its alleged links to the College of
Judea and Samaria, located in the Jewish settlement of Ariel in the West Bank.
A proposal to ban Hebrew University was referred to the unions executive
committee. If examined closely, all the charges are inaccurate and
transparently intended to serve a different goal--in Ms. Blackwell’s
words, to condemn the "illegitimate state of Israel" and to send a message of
support to Palestinians.
The boycott is only a small
part of the broader political war against Israel’s legitimacy as a
sovereign Jewish state, and the effort to label Israel as the next apartheid
regime is designed to put an end to Zionism. The use of the apartheid label
does a gross injustice to those who suffered under the real thing, and is a
form of modern anti-Semitism, this time turning the Jewish state into the
devil. The absurdly exaggerated condemnation of Israel, and the systematic
removal of the environment of terror in the rhetoric of war crimes and ethnic
cleansing is the political counterpart of the ongoing terrorism and military
assaults. Major battles of this political war have taken place in the U.N. --
the 1975 Zionism is racism resolution, for example, or the 2001 Durban
conference on racism where that claim was repeated on campuses such as Columbia
University in New York, in the newsrooms of the BBC and CNN, and via the
non-governmental superpowers such as Amnesty International and Human Rights
Watch.
After the death of Yasser Arafat and the
relative calm on the ground, reflecting the exhaustion of both Israelis and
Palestinians, this political war has heated up, particularly in Britain.
Christian Aid, a powerful group that uses its charitable status for promoting a
blatant ideological agenda, ran its massive Christmas appeal around the theme
of Bethlehem’s Child. This campaign featured the stereotypes of Israeli
aggression and Palestinian victimization, in which the context of terror had
been erased. Similarly, London-based Amnesty International issued a barrage of
such reports, including one purporting to focus on the status of Palestinian
women, in which Israel was blamed for violent attacks by Arab men against their
wives and daughters. And Human Rights Watch, another NGO that competes with
Amnesty in exploiting human rights in the war against Israel, is also active in
the boycott campaign. Together, they contributed to building the environment
for adoption of the AUT boycott.
So perhaps I am
being too clever in dismissing the AUT’s effort to launch a boycott of my
university. For decades, the propaganda war has always accompanied and served
to justify the shooting war. If the anti-Israel forces on campuses and in NGOs
are gaining strength in Britain, Europe and the U.S., this will undermine the
current efforts to expand the cease-fire and conflict management activities in
Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Ramallah and Gaza. And this is the real tragedy of the AUT
boycott decision while talking about peace, its backers are actually
contributing to war and hatred.
Mr. Steinberg directs
the Program on Conflict Management and Negotiation at Bar Ilan University and
is the editor of www.ngo-monitor.org. |
| |
|
|
| Advertisement: |
 |
|
|
