Academic boycotts of Israel

Proposals for an academic boycott of Israel have been inspired by the historic academic boycotts of South Africa which were an attempt to pressure South Africa to end its policies of Apartheid.

Proposals for this boycott have been made by academics and organisations in the United Kingdom to boycott Israeli universities and academics. The goal of proposed academic boycotts is to isolate Israel in order to force a change in Israel's policies towards the Palestinians which opponents claim to be discriminatory or oppressive.

The proposals have been opposed by many scholars and politicians, who describe the campaign as "profoundly unjust" and relying on what they consider to be a "false" analogy with South Africa. One critical statement has said that the boycotters apply "different standards" to Israel than other countries, that the boycott is "counterproductive and retrograde" and that the campaign is antisemitic and comparable to Nazi boycotts of Jewish shops in the 1930s.

Guardian open letter, 2002

The idea of an academic boycott against Israelis first emerged on April 6, 2002 in an open letter to The Guardian initiated by Steven and Hilary Rose, professors in biology at the Open University and social policy at the University of Bradford respectively, who called for a moratorium on all cultural and research links with Israel. It read:

“

Despite widespread international condemnation for its policy of violent repression against the Palestinian people in the Occupied Territories, the Israeli government appears impervious to moral appeals from world leaders. The major potential source of effective criticism, the United States, seems reluctant to act. However there are ways of exerting pressure from within Europe. Odd though it may appear, many national and European cultural and research institutions, including especially those funded from the EU and the European Science Foundation, regard Israel as a European state for the purposes of awarding grants and contracts. (No other Middle Eastern state is so regarded). Would it not therefore be timely if at both national and European level a moratorium was called upon any further such support unless and until Israel abide by UN resolutions and open serious peace negotiations with the Palestinians, along the lines proposed in many peace plans including most recently that sponsored by the Saudis and the Arab League.

”

By July 2002, the open letter had gained over 700 signatories, including those of ten Israeli academics.

In response to the open letter, Leonid Ryzhik, a lecturer in mathematics at the University of Chicago, led a rival web-based petition that condemned the original's "unjustly righteous tone" and warned that the boycott has a "broader risk of very disruptive repercussions for a wide range of international scientific and cultural contacts". By July 2002, the counter petition has gathered almost 1000 signatories.

United Kingdom

Mona Baker, Miriam Shlesinger and Gideon Toury

Mona Baker, an Egyptian professor of translation studies at the University of Manchester in England and a signatory of the 2002 open letter, decided in early June 2002 to remove two Israeli academics — Dr. Miriam Shlesinger of Bar-Ilan University, a former chair of Amnesty International, Israel; and Professor Gideon Toury of Tel Aviv University — from the editorial boards of the journals Translator and Translation Studies Abstracts that Baker and her husband publish.

Manfred Gerstenfeld claims that Baker offered to allow the academics to remain on the board only on condition that they leave and sever all ties with Israel. Baker claims to have never made any such statements. Her views are articulated on her web site.

Mona Baker's email to Prof Toury read:

Dear Gideon, I have been agonising for weeks over an important decision: to ask you and Miriam, respectively, to resign from the boards of the Translator and Translation Studies Abstracts. I have already asked Miriam and she refused. I have 'unappointed' her as she puts it, and if you decide to do the same I will have to officially unappoint you too.

I do not expect you to feel happy about this, and I very much regret hurting your feelings and Miriam's. My decision is political, not personal.

As far as I am concerned, I will always regard and treat you both as friends, on a personal level, but I do not wish to continue an official association with any Israeli under the present circumstances.

Prof Toury replied:

I would appreciate it if the announcement made it clear that 'he' (that is, I) was appointed as a scholar and unappointed as an Israeli.

In response to a barrage of negative mail, critical media attention, and a denunciation from Tony Blair, Mona Baker told a reporter from the Daily Telegraph:

This is my interpretation of the boycott statement that I've signed and I've tried to make that clear but it doesn't seem to be getting through. I am not actually boycotting Israelis, I am boycotting Israeli institutions. I am convinced that long after this is all over, as it was with the Jews in the Holocaust, people will start admitting that they should have done something, that it was deplorable and that academia was cowardly if it hadn't moved on this.

She also clarified her position on her web site where she stated that she had received a large amount of hate mail, which is "now a common tactic of the Zionist lobby" and that Israel's treatment of the Palestinians "justifies relatively extreme measures such as academic and cultural boycotts."

Association of University Teachers

On April 22, 2005, the Council of Association of University Teachers (AUT) voted to boycott two Israeli universities: Haifa University and Bar-Ilan University. The motions to AUT Council were prompted by the call for a boycott from nearly 60 Palestinian academics and others. The AUT Council voted to boycott Bar-Ilan because it runs courses at colleges in the West Bank (referring to Ariel College) and "is thus directly involved with the occupation of Palestinian territories contrary to United Nations resolutions". It boycotted Haifa because it was alleged that the university had wrongly disciplined a lecturer. The action against the lecturer was supposedly for supporting a student who wrote about attacks on Palestinians during the founding of the state of Israel. Some aspects of the student's research had been falsified (see this page) and the University denied having disciplined the lecturer. Union members claimed that Staff and students [of Israeli universities] who seek to research Israel's history in full are often "victimised".

Condemnation and backlash

The AUT's decision was immediately condemned by Jewish groups and many members of the AUT. Critics of the boycott within and outside the AUT noted that at the meeting at which the boycott motion was passed the leadership cut short the debate citing a lack of time. Specifically, the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Union of Jewish Students accused the AUT of purposely holding the vote during Passover, when many Jewish members could not be present.

The presidents of Jerusalem-based al-Quds University and Hebrew University issued a joint statement condemning the boycott effort as unproductive towards ending the "shared tragedy" but rather could prolong it:

“

"Bridging political gulfs - rather than widening them further apart - between nations and individuals thus becomes an educational duty as well as a functional necessity, requiring exchange and dialogue rather than confrontation and antagonism. Our disaffection with, and condemnation of acts of academic boycotts and discrimination against scholars and institutions, is predicated on the principles of academic freedom, human rights, and equality between nations and among individuals.

”

One of the university presidents, Sari Nusseibeh of al-Quds University, continued: "If we are to look at Israeli society, it is within the academic community that we've had the most progressive pro-peace views and views that have come out in favor of seeing us as equals [...] If you want to punish any sector, this is the last one to approach." He acknowledges, however, that his view is a minority one amongst Palestinian academics.

Zvi Ravner, Israel’s deputy ambassador in London, noted that "[t]he last time that Jews were boycotted in universities was in 1930s Germany."

The British National Postgraduate Committee also voted to oppose the boycott. Project officer Andre Oboler said that the boycott "runs contrary to our objective, which is to advance in the public interest the education of postgraduate students within the UK".

Cancellation of boycott

After the backlash and condemnation - both internal and external - members of the AUT, headed by Open University lecturer and Engage founder Jon Pike - gathered enough signatures to call a special meeting on the subject. The meeting was held on May 26, 2005, at Friends Meeting House in London. Supporters of rival positions gathered on the streets outside this meeting. Pro-boycott demonstrators called for the AUT to maintain its course against what they described as ""unbelievable pressure", while anti-boycott demonstrators suggested that the decision had been influenced by anti-Semitism , and argued that the AUT's integrity was being threatened by a group of "leftwing extremists". At the meeting the AUT membership decided to cancel the boycott of both Israeli universities. Reasons cited for the decision were: the damage to academic freedom, the hampering of dialogue and peace effort between Israelis and Palestinians, and that boycotting Israel alone could not be justified.

National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education

In May 2006, on the last day of its final conference, National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE) passed motion 198C, a call to boycott Israeli academics who did not vocally speak out against their government.

The following portions of the resolution are quoted by Brian Klug

• "The conference invites members to consider their own responsibility for ensuring equity and non-discrimination in contacts with Israeli educational institutions or individuals, and to consider the appropriateness of a boycott of those that do not publicly dissociate themselves from such policies."
• "The conference notes continuing Israeli apartheid policies, including construction of the exclusion wall, and discriminatory educational practices. It recalls its motion of solidarity last year for the AUT resolution to exercise moral and professional responsibility."

The resolution was dismissed by the AUT, the union into which the NATFHE was merging into.

Overall four attempts were made to pass pro-boycott motions at the annual conferences of the University teachers, especially following its reorganisation as the University and College Union in 2008. Threatened by legal action on the one hand, and opposed by all University heads on the other, these never went beyond the declarative stage.

Criticism

A group of eight Nobel laureates denounced the policy before it was passed, suggesting that it would limit academic freedom. Frank Wilczek of MIT was critical of the measure: "The primary value of the scientific community is pursuit of understanding through free and open discourse. The clarity of that beacon to humanity should not be compromised for transient political concerns."

Brian Klug makes this criticism of the NATFHE motion:

"In short, the intention of the Natfhe motion - what it seeks and why - is obscure. But even if the policy and rationale were clear and unambiguous, there is a deeper problem with motions of this sort that prevents them from attracting a broad base of support: they rely on the false (or limited) analogy implied by the word 'apartheid'. This is not to say that there are no points of comparison, for there are - just as there are in a host of other countries where minority ethnic and national groups are oppressed. Nor is it even to say that the suffering experienced by Palestinians is less than that endured by 'non-whites' in South Africa: it may or may not be (although I am not sure how to do the sums). But as I have argued elsewhere: 'The validity of the analogy does not depend on a catalogue of atrocities, however appalling'."

The Association of Jewish Sixthformers (AJ6) issued a press release expressing dismay and concern "about the affects [sic] of any boycott on Jewish and Israeli Sixthformers." Specifically, AJ6 pointed to "partnerships and exchange visits with Israeli schools and colleges may be under threat", that "Jewish students who study in Israel during their Gap Years are worried that teachers may refuse to provide them with references for these programmes."

The Anti-Defamation League issued a statement which condemned the motion explaining:

"It is profoundly unjust for academics in the only democratic country in the Middle East -- the only country where scholarship and debate are permitted to freely flourish -- to be held to an ideological test and the threat of being blacklisted because of their views. No one would expect a British or American professor to have to withstand such scrutiny of their political views. Yet, when it comes to Israel a different standard applies".

The British government, through Foreign and Commonwealth Office Minister Lord Triesman, issued a statement that the motion was "counterproductive and retrograde" although the British Government recognized "the independence of the NATFHE."

Paul Mackney, the general secretary of NATFHE, was sent over 15,000 messages from boycott opponents.

Response to criticism

Mackney, the general secretary of NATFHE and who opposed the motion as passed, is quoted after the fact by the Guardian:

"The ironic thing, is if we had put this to delegates a couple of weeks ago, before the international pro-Israeli lobby started this massive campaign emailing delegates and trying to deny us our democratic right to discuss whatever we like, it probably wouldn't have passed. People feel bullied, and what we have seen is a hardening of attitudes. All they achieved was making the delegates determined to debate and pass the motion."

Tamara Traubmann and Benjamin Joffe-Walt, reporting for the Guardian, conducted an analysis of "whether the campaigns against such boycotts are actually motivated by concerns for academic freedom, or whether they are using the universalist ideal to stifle critical discussion of Israel." They describe their findings this way:

"Through discussions with anti-boycott campaigners and a trace of the most common emails (not necessarily abusive) sent to the union and handed over by Natfhe, we found the vast majority of the tens of thousands of emails originated not with groups fighting for academic freedom, but with lobby groups and thinktanks that regularly work to delegitimise criticisms of Israel."

University and College Union

On May 30, 2007, the congress of the University and College Union (created by the merger of AUT and NATFHE) voted (by 158 votes to 99) on Motion 30, which called for the UCU to circulate a boycott request by Palestinian trade unions to all branches for information and discussion. It called on lecturers to "consider the moral implications of existing and proposed links with Israeli academic institutions."

“

Motion 30 as amended: Congress notes that Israel's 40-year occupation has seriously damaged the fabric of Palestinian society through annexation, illegal settlement, collective punishment and restriction of movement. Congress deplores the denial of educational rights for Palestinians by invasions, closures, checkpoints, curfews, and shootings and arrests of teachers, lecturers and students. Congress condemns the complicity of Israeli academia in the occupation, which has provoked a call from Palestinian trade unions for a comprehensive and consistent international boycott of all Israeli academic institutions. Congress believes that in these circumstances passivity or neutrality is unacceptable and criticism of Israel cannot be construed as anti-semitic. Congress instructs the NEC to circulate the full text of the Palestinian boycott call to all branches/LAs for information and discussion; encourage members to consider the moral implications of existing and proposed links with Israeli academic institutions; organise a UK-wide campus tour for Palestinian academic/educational trade unionists; issue guidance to members on appropriate forms of action. actively encourage and support branches to create direct links with Palestinian educational institutions and to help set up nationally sponsored programmes for teacher exchanges, sabbatical placements, and research.

”

In September 2007, delegates at the Liberal Democrat conference voted to condemn the UCU's "perverse" decision. They called for University and College Union members to reject the proposal and continue to engage in "the fullest possible dialogue" with their Israeli and Palestinian counterparts.

Susan Fuhrman, President of Teachers College, Columbia University said, saying, "As the president of an academic institution dedicated in large part to the preparation of teachers, I believe that universities and all centers of learning must be allowed to function as safe havens for freedom of discussion, debate and intellectual inquiry, standing apart from national and international politics and partisan strife. Only thus can they continue to produce scholarship that informs the policies and laws of democratic societies and stand as islands of hope in a frequently polarized world. ... Teachers College welcomes dialogue with Israeli scholars and universities and stands with Columbia University President Lee Bollinger in expressing solidarity with them by inviting UCU to boycott us, as well."

Japanese physicist Shin-ichi Kurokawa of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization in Tsukuba, Japan, wrote to the general secretary of UCU. He said the proposed boycott "clearly violates" Statute 5 of the International Council for Science.

On 28 September 2007, UCU issued a press release stating that they had received legal advice that "an academic boycott of Israel would be unlawful and cannot be implemented". They had therefore decided to call off the tour.

Developments in 2009

A joint open letter by a group of academics was published in the Guardian 16 January 2009. The letter called on the British government and the British people to take all feasible steps to oblige Israel to stop its "military aggression and colonial occupation" of the Palestinian land and its "criminal use of force". Suggesting to start with a programme of boycott, divestment and sanctions .

Despite the calls for boycott on the part of the UCU, no boycott as such has been implemented. Faced by the possibility of legal action against discrimination, the UCU has never taken their boycott calls further than the declarative stage.

There has been a great deal of discussion concerning the links between the calls for boycott and a growth of anti-semitism in the UK, and on British campuses in particular. While organisations such as Engage or the SPME argue that widespread anti-semitism is at the root of the problem, this has been disputed by some academics who argue that this is a self defeating argument.

United States

No American school has ever divested from or imposed an academic boycott on Israel despite strong boycott campaigns. Former President of Harvard University Larry Summers has called Israel-boycott efforts "anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent.”

Boycott campaign

Haaretz reported that in the wake of the 2008–2009 Israel–Gaza conflict‎, a group of American professors has joined the boycott call:

"While Israeli academics have grown used to such news from Great Britain, where anti-Israel groups several times attempted to establish academic boycotts, the formation of the United States movement marks the first time that a national academic boycott movement has come out of America."

The group name is "U.S. Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel."

15 academics, mostly based in California, founded the campaign mostly but according to David Lloyd (academic) (a professor of Irish literature and post-colonial studies at USC) it is "currently expanding to create a network that embraces the United States as a whole."

Hampshire College

In February 2009, false reports circulated that Hampshire College in Amherst, MA, had become the first of any college or university in the U.S. to divest from companies on the grounds of their involvement in the Israeli occupation of Palestine. This was claimed to have been a direct result of a two-year intensive campaign by the campus group, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP).

The trustees of Hampshire College "strenuously denied" assertions by the Hampshire chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine that an investment decision made Hampshire the first American college to sell stock in companies specifically because they do business with Israel. Students had petitioned for divestment from a list of companies that do business in Israel. Sigmund Roos, chairman of the Hampshire board of trustees, told the Boston Globe that the trustees never reviewed the group's petition. "We never took it up," he said. "Students know that." The trustees' actual decision was to sell its shares in a fund holds in some 200 companies, including some with business practices that the college defines as not "socially responsible." These practices include manufacturing military weapons, unsafe workplaces, and poor environmental practices. After the board's action, Hampshire continued to hold stock in at least three Israeli companies, two companies included in the Students for Justice in Palestine petition, and hundreds of other companies that do business with Israel

Opposition from the American Federation of Teachers (AFT)

In March 2009, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) reiterated its opposition to any academic boycott of Israel (or any other country) but added that discussion of the Israel-Palestinian conflict should be encouraged. AFT President Randi Weingarten stated that:

"We believe academic boycotts were a bad idea in 2002 and are a bad idea now. Academic boycotts are inconsistent with the democratic values of academic freedom and free expression... We want to make clear that this position does not in any way discourage an open discussion and debate of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or of ways to resolve it. However, we expect that such a discussion would not be one-sided and would consider the behavior of all the relevant actors. An academic boycott of Israel, or of any country, for that matter, would effectively suppress free speech without helping to resolve the conflict."

Canada

Main article: CUPE Ontario and disinvestment from Israel

In January 2009, the Ontario branch of the Canadian Union of Public Employees brought forward a proposal to ban Israeli academics from teaching at Ontario Universities. CUPE-Ontario leader Sid Ryan stated, "we are ready to say Israeli academics should not be on our campuses unless they explicitly condemn the university bombing and the assault on Gaza in general." Ryan subsequently said, "Academic freedom goes both ways. What we are saying is if they want to remain silent and be complicit in these kinds of actions, why should they enjoy the freedom to come and teach in other countries like Canada?" CUPE's national president, Paul Moist, issued a statement declaring his opposition to the motion and saying, "I will be using my influence in any debates on such a resolution to oppose its adoption."

Shortly after its original statement, CUPE removed its call to boycott individual academics from its website and replaced it with statement that called instead for a boycott "aimed at academic institutions and the institutional connections that exist between universities here and those in Israel." Tyler Shipley, spokesperson for CUPE local 3903 at York University, told the Toronto Star that his group will begin to advocate for York to sever financial ties to Israel.

Some observers have questioned what practical effect the either the CUPE resoluton will have since the 20,000 university workers represented by CUPE Ontario include campus staff but almost no full-time faculty.

Australia

The University of Western Sydney’s Student Association (UWSSA) formally affiliated to the PACBI Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel in February 2009.

Criticism

Proposed academic boycotts of Israel have been the subject of contentious debate. Some issues that have been highlighted are:

• Are academic boycotts of Israel ethically justified?
• Would they be an effective and positive agent of change?
• Are there overriding issues of academic freedom?
• Are the proposals a cover for anti-Semitism?
• Is Israel being unjustly singled out?

A prominent Palestinian academic, president of Al-Quds University, Sari Nusseibeh, has argued against academic boycotts of Israel, telling Associated Press "If we are to look at Israeli society, it is within the academic community that we've had the most progressive pro-peace views and views that have come out in favor of seeing us as equals... If you want to punish any sector, this is the last one to approach." He acknowledges, however, that his view is a minority one amongst Palestinian academics.

Comparisons to academic boycotts of South Africa

Main article: Academic boycotts of South Africa

The academic boycott of South Africa is frequently invoked as a model for more recent efforts to organize academic boycotts of Israel.

Some invoke the comparison to claim that an academic boycott of Israel should not be controversial based on a misconception that the academic boycott of South Africa was uncontroversial and straightforward. The reality, at the time, was very different. The effort was the subject of significant criticism and contentious debate from diverse segments. Andrew Beckett writes, in the Guardian, on this frequent mistaken comparison: "In truth, boycotts are blunt weapons. Even the most apparently straightforward and justified ones, on closer inspection, have their controversies and injustices."

Others, such as Hillary and Stephen Rose in Nature, make the comparison and argue for an academic boycott of Israel based on a belief that the academic boycott of South Africa was effective in ending apartheid. George Fink responds to this claim in a letter to Nature:

“

The assertion [...] that the boycott of South Africa by the world's academic communities 'was instrumental in ending apartheid in South Africa' is a deception. Apartheid was actually terminated by two pivotal and interrelated political events. First, the United States Congress, on 29 September 1986, overrode President Reagan's veto and imposed strict economic sanctions on South Africa. Second, F. W. de Klerk was elected president of South Africa on 14 September 1989. Two months later (16 November 1989), de Klerk announced the scrapping of the Separate Amenities Act, then, on 11 February 1990, freed Nelson Mandela from prison. The rest is historical detail.

”

Accusations of Antisemitism

Anthony Julius and Alan Dershowitz argue that despite a small number of Jews who have supported boycotts, the boycotts themselves are antisemitic, using their anti-Zionism as a cover for "Jew hatred." They compare the boycotts to the 1222 Canterbury Council sharply limiting Christian contact with Jews, and Nazi boycotts of Jewish shops in the 1930s, as well as Arab League attempts to economically isolate Israel and refrain from purchasing "anything Jewish."

Harvard President Larry Summers "blasted" the boycotts as "antisemitic":

“[T]here is much that should be, indeed that must be, debated regarding Israeli policy...But the academic boycott resolution passed by the British professors union in the way that it singles out Israel is in my judgment anti-Semitic in both effect and in intent.”

Summers had previously argued that a proposed boycott was antisemitic "in effect, if not intent". This position was criticized by Judith Butler, in an article entitled "No, it's not anti-semitic". Bulter argues the distinction of effective anti-semitism, and intentional anti-semiticism is at best controversial. "If we think that to criticise Israeli violence, or to call for economic pressure to be put on the Israeli state to change its policies, is to be ‘effectively anti-semitic’, we will fail to voice our opposition for fear of being named as part of an anti-semitic enterprise. No label could be worse for a Jew, who knows that, ethically and politically, the position with which it would be unbearable to identify is that of the anti-semite."

Israel

There have been academic supporters of the boycott from within Israel itself.

On August 20, 2009, Israeli Professor Neve Gordon wrote in an Los Angeles Times editorial that he had decided to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel movement. He stated that Israel had become so right wing and 'an apartheid state' that he felt he had no choice but to support this course of action.

Dr Gordon faced intense national and international criticism. In response, the Jewish Voice for Peace organization circled a petition to "Defend academic freedom. Defend the right to talk about boycott, divestment, and sanctions."

According to the petition:

“

We are protecting here more than one person and one job. Help us protect the ability to talk openly about the Israeli occupation and about nonviolent options to address it, such a boycott, divestment, and sanctions.

”

See also

• Academic boycott of South Africa
• Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions
• Disinvestment from Israel
• Economic and political boycotts of Israel
• International Academic Friends of Israel
• New antisemitism
• Sanctions against Iranian scientists

External links

• Official Stop the Boycott campaign website
• Palestinian campaign for the academic and cultural boycott of Israel
• Engage: A group campaigning against a boycott of Israel
• The Academic Boycott of Israel: Why Britain by Ronnie Fraser, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs
• Anti-Zionism and antisemitism: cosmopolitan reflections - David Hirsh
• How to Fight Anti-Israeli Campaigns on Campus by Manfred Gerstenfeld
• 2007-2008: Another Year of Global Academic Anti-Semitism and Anti-Israelism by Manfred Gerstenfeld