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| Monday, May 8, 2005 |
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"Boycotting the
Jews"
By Gerald M.
Steinberg |
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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.
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