‘Professors in Britain Vote to Boycott 2 Israeli Schools’

NY Times: “Professors in Britain Vote to Boycott 2 Israeli Schools,” by Lizette Alvarez, May 8, 2005.

As many of you know, we have argued for several years now that a major factor in making the on-going Millennium Crisis – which has been underway since the crash in tech stocks in April 2000 – so intractable has been the Low Level of Public Discourse pretty much everywhere in the world.

In that lecture, we pointed out how this is as true for the “politically correct” sector as for the Christian right and the numerous varieties of political Islam.

The “hidden gems” in the Mother’s Day Times provide an all-too-sad example of one problem with the PC crowd – their simply wrong-headed equation of Israel with apartheid South Africa.

We are not going to re-hash here and now all the problems with this analogy, which we did to a significant extent in Lecture 2 of the Millennium Crisis series.

Here we will simply point out that many hard-line Israelis believe “the world is against them” not because of their treatment of the Palestinians, but, rather, because they are Jews.

This view has been historically re-inforced by the Palestinian and Arab resort to violence against Zionism / Israel, and the use of boycotts in the economic and social sphere against Israeli institutions – actions that, correctly or not, are resonant for Jews, whether Israeli or not, of actions taken by the Nazis during the Third Reich.

In this context, we and other friends of the Palestinians have long argued that they would be much better off employing a Gandhi-an / Martin Luther King approach in conducting their struggle with Israel / Zionism.

Given this, it’s not hard to imagine our dismay at reading the latest “constitutive misrecognition” in the intervention of British academics against two Israeli universities.

This sort of thing not only further intensifies the Israeli sense of unjust mistreatment isolation from the rest of the world – hence strengthening the wrong-headed consensus against dealing with the Palestinians in a just manner –

but it also confirms the Palestinian right – notably Hamas and the Al Aksa brigades – in their view that Mahmoud Abbas / Abu Mazen is taking the wrong track in attempting to reach a peaceful settlement of this awful situation via negotiation –

something, of course, the right-wing settlers and their political pals in Israel are only all too happy to see, as the conclusion of the article here makes all too clear.

That said, here’s more about the latest example of counter-productive intervention by Western politically correct types in the on-going Israel / Palestine mess – where, despite what most people want to believe, there ARE no good guys or bad guys, but only a bad situation that rarely seems to improve (bold emphasis mine):

Acting in response to an appeal by 60 Palestinian organizations, Britain’s leading higher education union has voted to boycott two Israeli universities.  

The boycott, which has prompted outrage in Israel, the United States and Britain, would bar Israeli faculty members at Haifa University and Bar-Ilan University from taking part in academic conferences or joint research with their British colleagues.

The resolution on the boycott, passed by the Association of University Teachers in late April, would allow an exception only for those academics at the two schools who declare opposition to Israeli policies toward the Palestinians.

Which is about as meaningful and practical as saying that the only American academics they’re going to deal with are those who declare their opposition to the US invasion of Iraq – it might make them feel better, but it’s certainly not going to make a damn bit of positive difference, and, as in this situation, would only be likely to make things worse.

The move has so angered Jewish groups in the United States that one organization, the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, is considering calling on American universities to carry out a counterboycott against British universities.

“This is unreal,” said Abraham H. Foxman, its national director. “These are not ignorant peasants or extremist ideologues. They are intellectuals teaching future generations to respect, to dialogue and to cooperate, and they are saying boycott the Jews again.”

“What about those who are suffering in Cuba and China and Rwanda?” he asked. “Where is the support to deal with Sudan?” …

Parallels were drawn between Israel and South Africa, where education was racially segregated under apartheid.

Using language lifted from a Palestinian call to action, the British motions framed the boycott as a “contribution to the struggle to end Israel’s occupation, colonization and system of apartheid.”

Omar Barghouti, a founding member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, which pushed for the union vote in Britain, said comparing Israeli occupation to South African apartheid was a fair parallel. While Palestinians are not officially barred from Israeli universities, they are effectively kept out, he said. …

But some academics in Britain said severing ties to Israeli universities was counterproductive because they provided opportunities to air differences and hold debate.

“We think to target Israeli universities is to target some of the places that have some of the most open spaces in Israel, spaces that are against the occupation and against anti-Arab racism, spaces where Jews and Palestinians learn together,” said David Hirsh, a professor of sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, who opposes the Israeli occupation but is working to overturn the boycott.

“A lot of people who support this are motivated by an understandable want or wish to help Palestinians,” he said. “What we have also said is that the union has adopted a position that is effectively anti-Semitic because it has chosen to hold the Israeli Jewish academics responsible for the actions of their state and university administrators, when the union doesn’t hold any other academic in the world responsible in that way.”

Exactly.

Neil Goldstein, executive director of the American Jewish Congress, said the boycott evoked “the sorts of techniques that were used to try to deny Jews the right to participate in academic life in prewar Germany.” …

In Britain, where some leading academics, including some Nobel Prize winners, have been highly critical of the boycott, 25 union members are trying to overturn it. They petitioned last week for an emergency council meeting, which now has been called for May 26 in order to hold another debate and a new vote.

The approval of the boycott appeared to surprise even its framers; it had failed in 2003 and was opposed by the academic union’s executive board. This time, the authors of the motions narrowed the boycott to select universities and underscored its endorsements by Palestinian organizations, including the Palestinian higher education trade union. …

Critics of the boycott say punishing Haifa University is a particularly inappropriate way to pressure Israel, because it is one of the country’s most integrated institutions, with Israeli Arabs making up about 20 percent of its student body.

Which shows how little the concrete realities of the situation matter here …

Bar-Ilan University became a target of the boycott because it recognizes credits from the College of Judea and Samaria in the West Bank settlement of Ariel. Palestinians are barred from the settlement, and thus, the college. The British academic union judged that Bar-Ilan had made itself “directly involved with the occupation of Palestinian territories.”

Just last week, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon elevated its [the College of Judea and Samaria] status to university, a move that riled many Israeli academics and was widely viewed as a gambit to strengthen settlements in occupied territory.

As noted above – Sharon and his pals in the settler movement just LOVE this kind of stuff, because they can use it to support their on-going unwillingness to recognize the legitimacy of the Palestinian presence in Israel / Palestine – way to go, dudes …

As we have always said, there are no good guys and bad guys here – and it’s the attempt to find them that almost always ends up making an already terrible situation worse …