Muhammad Idrees Ahmad

In April, the 40,000 member National Union of Journalists voted to boycott Israel, and yesterday the 120,000-member UCU, Britain’s largest union of university educators voted to boycott Israel proving that British academia remains one of the few territories unoccupied by Israel. The following statement from PACBI highlights why this is such an historical development:

The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) salutes the historic decision by the University and College Union (UCU) Congress today to support motions that endorse the logic of academic boycott against Israel, in response to the complicity of the Israeli academy in perpetuating Israel’s illegal military occupation and apartheid system.

Academic boycott has been advocated in the past as an effective tool in resisting injustice. In the 1920s, Mahatma Gandhi called for boycotting British-run academic institutions, to increase Indian self-reliance and also to protest the role of those institutions in maintaining British colonial domination over India. In the 1950s, the African National Congress (ANC) called for a comprehensive boycott of the entire South African academy, as a means to further isolate the apartheid regime. To their credit, British academics were among the very first to adopt the latter boycott. Moral consistency makes it imperative to hold Israel to the same standards.

Israel is now widely recognized as a state that actually practices apartheid, as evidenced in recent declarations by international figures from Jimmy Carter and UN Special Rapporteur on human rights Prof. John Dugard to Archbishop Desmond Tutu and South African government minister Ronnie Kasrils, among many others. During the ongoing occupation of Palestinian land, Israel’s policies have included house demolitions; Jews-only colonies and roads; uprooting hundreds of thousands of trees; indiscriminate killings of Palestinian civilians, particularly children; relentless theft of land and water resources; and denying millions of their freedom of movement by slicing up the occupied Palestinian territory into Bantustans — some entirely caged by walls, fences and hundreds of roadblocks.

Throughout forty years of Israeli military occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), Israeli academics have duly continued to serve in the occupation army, thereby participating in, or at least witnessing, crimes committed on a daily basis against the civilian population of Palestine. No Israeli academic institution, association, or union has ever publicly opposed Israel’s occupation and colonization, its system of racial discrimination against its own Palestinian citizens, or its obstinate denial of the internationally-sanctioned rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties. Furthermore, the Israeli academy has been in direct or indirect collusion with the military-intelligence establishment, providing it with “academic” research services to sustain its oppression.

This courageous and morally laudable decision by the UCU to apply effective pressure against Israel in the pursuit of justice and genuine peace is only the latest measure adopted by an international community that can no longer tolerate Israel’s impunity in trashing human rights principles and international law. In the last few months alone, groups heeding — to various degrees — Palestinian calls for boycott and effective pressure against Israel have included the British National Union of Journalists (NUJ); Aosdana, the Irish state-sponsored academy of artists; Congress Of South African Trade Unions (COSATU); and prominent British and international architects led by Architects for Peace and Justice in Palestine (APJP).

Once again, the taboo has been shattered. It has now become more legitimate than ever to denounce Israel’s oppressive policies and to hold the state and all its complicit institutions accountable for human rights abuses, war crimes, and the longest military occupation in modern history. The Israeli academy will no longer be able to enjoy international recognition, cooperation, and generous support while remaining an accessory to crimes committed against the Palestinians.

Palestinians are now more confident than ever that international civil society is indeed capable of shouldering the moral responsibility of standing up to injustice and demanding freedom, self-determination, and unmitigated equality for all.

Here is how John Chalcraft, a lecturer on government at the London School of Economics and a proponent of the boycott motion, describes the logic behind it.

At stake is not the boycott of individual Israelis, nor some political test, but the withdrawal of institutional collaboration – in relation to funding, visits, conferences, joint publication and the like – with Israeli universities.

Academics will be unimpressed by the erroneous claim that Israeli universities have seriously opposed Israeli violations. No Israeli academic institution has ever taken a public stand against Israel’s 40-year military occupation. On the contrary, the Israeli academy has long provided intellectual, linguistic, logistical, technical, scientific and human support for an occupation in direct violation of international law.

Moreover, Israeli universities have never seriously opposed the infrastructural degradation of Palestinian education, the killing and injuring of students, or the checkpoints, border controls, land seizure and the illegal separation wall, which heavily restrict Palestinian academic and educational activity.

The movement for boycott is in no way anti-semitic. It includes Jews and non-Jews, and stands against racist prejudice of all kinds. The boycott is motivated by opposition to systematic discrimination.

More challenging is the argument that the boycott is counterproductive, compared to dialogue and collaboration. The example of South Africa, however, teaches otherwise. The international boycott movement had a tremendous impact in breaking down apartheid. Crucially, Israel now, like South Africa then, considers itself part of the west. When western civil society says enough is enough, Israelis, not to mention western governments, will take notice.

Is it unfair to single Israel out? It is not clear that there are other heavily militarised, nuclear-armed, expansionist apartheid states with extensive illegal settlement, land seizure and wall-building activity. There are certainly other violators of international law, and the case for boycotting each must be made on its merits. That does not weaken the case for a nonviolent, international movement regarding Israel. To say that it does is simply special pleading.

As for academic freedom, it should be remembered that the situation has long involved the denial of Palestinians’ academic freedom. The point of the boycott, which will certainly involve forms of institutional disruption, is to end this vicious discrimination and the massive and structural violation of academic freedom involved. The boycott, moreover, will encourage and give protection to Israeli academics critical of academic complicity and occupation, and stands in solidarity with Palestinians whose freedoms have long been repressed.

Finally, for those who argue that this somehow impinges on Israel’s academic freedom, the following report from the Jewish daily Forward, should put things in perspective.

Yigal Arens, a University of Southern California computer science professor who is an outspoken critic of Israel, said this week that his invitation to an upcoming conference at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev was rescinded as a result of what he described as his anti-Zionist views. The NATO-sponsored conference, set to take place June 4-5, is being billed as an apolitical event that will explore the role of the Internet in combating terrorism.

The accusation from Arens, left-wing son of right-wing former Israeli defense minister Moshe Arens, comes as America’s mainstream Jewish community is mobilizing to defeat the academic boycott…

Arens and his left-wing supporters say that his story undercuts a fundamental tenet of the anti-boycott movement, which holds that Israeli academic institutions are an unfair target because they are not political in nature…

Arens told the Forward that in early January he received a call from Paul Kantor, a library and information science professor at Rutgers University, inviting him to participate in an international conference, “Security Informatics and Terrorism — Patrolling the Web.” The conference was being co-organized by Kantor and Ben-Gurion University professor Bracha Shapira.

According to Arens, he expressed concern to Kantor that he be treated with respect, as he felt snubbed while attending a conference in the Jewish state several years ago.

A week after their initial conversation, Arens said, Kantor rescinded the invitation, saying that Israeli government officials who would be at the conference were uncomfortable with the idea of his participation.