On the letters page of Saturday’s Irish Times the names of over 60 Irish and Ireland-based academics were listed under a petition calling for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. The rubric under which the letter appeared, “Academics call for a ban on Israel,” might have exaggerated their case, but the petitioners are nevertheless quite radical in the scope of their demands:
Aside from its cumbersome language (“refraining, where possible,” as opposed to “refraining, where impossible”?; and that tautological “joint collaboration“), this righteous call to arms is difficult to stomach. The stance taken seems hypocritical at best and possibly pernicious. Three objections spring to mind:
1) Anyone who cracks open a newspaper from time to time might be aware that public opinion in Israel about the country’s foreign policy and the treatment of the Palestinians is far from monolithic. Unlike most of its neighbours, Israel tolerates critical voices, and those voices are often raised in the country’s campuses. For example, mirroring the right-wing U.S. website Campus Watch, Israel Academia Monitor is
[An] Israeli watchdog group that monitors abuses of academic freedom and politicalization of Israeli campuses by extremists and radicals in Israeli academia who probably damage Israel because they want to be accepted by the enemy or by some of Israel’s worst adversaries.
The site contains extensive and vehement attacks on figures in Israeli universities, demonstrating that criticism of Israeli policy is not the exclusive domain of tenured European academics:
Four Israeli universities are today the centers of anti-Israel tenured extremism (nearly all of the extremists by the way are leftist Jews; few Arabs are as venomously outspoken as they), although each of the other schools also has a few such people. Many academic extremists have been part of the international campaign to boycott Israel. Most have been involved in attempts to organize mutiny and insurrection among Israeli soldiers and to promote refusal to serve in the army until Israel adopts the policies endorsed by its Arab communist parties. Many make the University of Colorado�s Ward Churchill look like a sane moderate.
There is some argument over the question of which campus is the very worst. Ben Gurion University is certainly a serious contender for that title, crawling with extremist leftists who do not think Israel has the right to exist. It contains at least one entire department (political science) in which no Zionist, pro-Israel faculty members may teach, and the single pro-Israel non-leftist lecturer there was fired last year for incorrect thinking. The operation of such an anti-pluralist department goes with the blessings of Ben Gurion University President Avishay Braverman, himself a leftist who has now joined trade union thug Amir Peretz, the new anti-productivity anti-market head of the Labor Party.
One wonders what will happen to these beleaguered dissident voices if they are placed in moral quarantine. Some figures among the Israeli left actually support an academic boycott. But isn�t it also possible that cultural isolation will enforce the view among some that a hidden vein of anti-Semitism lies behind such calls? Already some voices have been raised: why not the same treatment of Russia over Chechnya, they ask? This, tangentially, brings us to point number two.
2) Two of the signatories, including the august Seamus Deane, are based in the U.S., at the University of Notre Dame. One doesn’t have to be a master of geopolitical detail to understand that Israel’s “policy of violent aggression” against the Palestinians and Lebanon would be considerably less aggressive if it were not for vast amounts of U.S.-supplied finance and munitions. One could argue that if the 60-plus academics listed were committed to helping the Palestinian cause, this academic Coventry should be expanded to include the several thousand academic institutions operating in the United States. Of course if that were to be the case, they would be effectively boycotting themselves.
3) And why stop at Israel and the United States? Two of the signatories work in the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT). Coincidentally, in the Weekend section of the same edition in which the letter appears, Fintan O’Toole, in one of his seemingly never-ending series of articles extolling the Chinese miracle, waxed lyrical about DIT�s collaboration��joint collaboration�, I suppose�with the Harbin Institute of Technology. Again, it is a hardly a bombshell to announce that China does not exactly bend over backwards to comply with �basic human rights norms.� Yet any university president or senior academic who suggested vetoing academic contacts with China would have their sanity questioned. After all, as O�Toole never tires of informing us, the 21st century is destined to be the Chinese century. So anyone with qualms about the suppression of democracy, Tibet, religious minorities, ethnic minorities, free speech, the peasantry, or family rights just has to suck it up, it seems.
So it appears that demography is destiny, at least when it comes to ethics. To castigate publicly a nation of six-million-or-so is feasible. To do anything more than murmur disquiet when dealing with a country boasting a populace of 300 million, or even 1 billion, is unreasonable.
Finally, this poster does not believe that Israel�s treatment of the Palestinians and its recent failed war in Lebanon can be defended as appropriate responses to perceived threats. However, I don�t think closing lines of communication to one of the epicentres of constructive protest in that nation is going to change anything (let alone improve things), except for making those calling for that isolation feel more secure about their rectitude.
And perhaps this was sheer naivety: but I always thought that those in the academic world were dedicated, even if they wouldn’t dream of explicitly expressing it, to some concept of a community of the mind that transcended national borders. That the modern intellectual, often forced to travel in search of tenure and teaching positions, viewed her or his colleagues qua colleagues, regardless of their ethnicity or nationalism. Of course, such thinking can be dismissed as so much soggy liberalism, irrelevant, maybe even contemptible.