Call for boycott of Israel provokes debate, division among academics

Associated Press / SFGate

[RCW2001]

JILL LAWLESS, Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, July 10, 2002
©2002 Associated Press

URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2002/07/10/international1612EDT0702.DTL

(07-10) 13:12 PDT LONDON (AP) --

Hundreds of European academics have called a boycott of Israeli universities to protest treatment of the Palestinians -- a move that has led to the firing of two Israelis from British publications and prompted allegations of discrimination and intellectual censorship.

Boycott supporters insist they're exerting political pressure on the Israeli government. But Miriam Shlesinger says she is a victim of academic discrimination. A lecturer in translation studies at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv, Shlesinger was fired from a journal, The Translator, by an editor who supports the boycott.

"I was appointed as a scholar," Shlesinger said Wednesday. "But I was dismissed as an Israeli."

The boycott, as it appears in an Internet petition, calls on academics not to "cooperate with official Israeli institutions, including universities" to protest the "military reoccupation of the Palestinian territories in the West Bank and Gaza Strip" -- a reference to Israel's military campaign begun in March in response to attacks by Palestinian suicide bombers.

The petition commits signatories not to travel to Israel for conferences or to "participate as referee in hiring or promotion decisions by Israeli universities," but says they should "continue to collaborate with, and host, Israeli scientific colleagues on an individual basis."

Steven Rose, a professor at Britain's Open University who started the campaign, likens it to the cultural and sporting sanctions imposed on apartheid South Africa.

"We are concerned with boycotting or refusing to collaborate with Israeli institutions," Rose told British Broadcasting Corp. radio. "Unfortunately institutions are expressed through individuals ... That means that some of our friends are actually going to suffer for it."

More than 750 academics -- most from Europe but including 10 from Israel -- have signed the petition or a related one calling for a moratorium on European Union cultural and scientific ties to Israel until Israel "abide(s) by U.N. resolutions and open(s) serious peace negotiations with the Palestinians."

Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the 1967 Mideast war. Peace negotiations that began with an interim accord in 1993 broke down in January 2001 when the Palestinians did not accept an Israeli proposal of a state in all of Gaza, more than 90 percent of the West Bank and a foothold in Jerusalem.

Ongoing violence has scuttled all peace efforts since then. Israel has imposed tough restrictions on the West Bank to stop suicide attacks on Israeli civilians, but the Palestinians charge that the Israeli measures are collective punishment.

Amnon Rubinstein, a former Israeli Minister of Education and former dean of Tel Aviv University law school, said the boycott was outrageous.

"There are many disputes and many accusations against many other states, and I haven't heard of a petition like this against any other country," he said.

Last month, Shlesinger was asked to step down from the editorial board of The Translator, a semiannual journal, by owner and editor Mona Baker. Baker, a professor at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, signed the Internet petition.

Baker also asked Tel Aviv University professor Gideon Toury to resign from the advisory board of another journal she owns, Translation Studies Abstracts. When Shlesinger and Toury refused, Baker fired them.

"It has nothing to do with our views," Shlesinger told The Associated Press. "We were dismissed because we have the wrong passports."

Baker's husband said she was unwilling to speak to the media Wednesday. Ken Baker -- who is managing director of St. Jerome, the journals' publisher -- said Toury and Shlesinger were fired not because they are Israeli, but because they work for Israeli universities.

"This is a boycott of Israeli academic institutions, " Baker said. "If an Israeli happened to be working for an American institution, or a British institution, or a Swedish institution, we'd have no problem with that whatsoever."

Baker was quoted by The Guardian newspaper as saying she fired the two academics based on "my interpretation of the boycott statement that I've signed."

Efraim Inbar, a professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University, criticized the boycott, saying: "I think between academics to boycott someone because of their government policies which they have no control over is disgraceful."

Britain's National Union of Students also condemned the boycott.

"To exclude people because of their nationality is abhorrent and nothing short of racism, and should be universally condemned," the union's anti-racism campaigner, Daniel Rose, was quoted as saying by The Guardian.

The boycott also has been condemned by Jewish groups such as the anti-Defamation League and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and petitions denouncing it have sprouted on the Internet. One, based at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, claims to have received 13,000 signatures, while another, set up in the United States and signed by more than 1,000 academics, calls the boycott an "alarming and non-constructive development."

"The chilling of contacts targets those in Israel who are reaching out to interact with the world community," it says.

That irony is not lost on Shlesinger, a left-winger and former head of Israel's chapter of Amnesty International who opposes current Israeli policies toward the Palestinians.

Israeli Prime Minister "Ariel Sharon is not going to end the occupation because Miriam Shlesinger has been thrown off the board of The Translator," she said. "Even a massive academic boycott is not going to cause the government to change its ways. It doesn't do anything except undermine science."

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On the Net:

Pro-boycott site, www.pjpo.org

Anti-boycott site, www.aaisc.net

[Right Wing Professor]

I'm running a personal boycott myself. I will have nothing to do professionally with anyone who signs this petition or any similar one. However, it's unlikely the boycott will have much impact, since as far as I can tell, almost all the signatories are nonentities, with whom I'd be unlikely to interact anyway. . Note how the UK signatories are mostly from the Open University (British correspondence school), and a few redbricks; just a single name from Oxford or Cambridge, and that's a feminist and an academic mediocrity.

The two Irish signatories are clearly not Irish. The two Germans are clearly not German. There are scads of French, which I'm afraid seems to confirm what a cess-pit that country has turned into. One of the two non-Arab signatories from the US is rabid communist ideologue and faux-biologist Richard Lewontin; there's also a gentleman from Athabasca Univesity who seems to be unaware what country he's in.

All in all, a sorry bunch.

Interestingly, I know a lot of the names on the anti-boycott petition. There's the editor of the leading journal in my field, and a couple of score or so of other top scientists whose work I'm personally familiar with, including a couple of Nobel medalists and my research advisor. For quite a number of reasons, it's a list I'm much happier to be seen on :-)

[Right Wing Professor]

A little more harmless fun:

(sent to:boycott@pjpo.org)

I note with some satisfaction that few of the signatories of your petition have any academic eminence. On the other hand, I recognize far more of the names on the anti-boycott petition; they include editors of the premier journals in my field, several of the most eminent scientists, and a couple of Nobel medalists. Doesn't the apparent correlation between anti-Israel sentiment and mediocrity worry you?

[PA Engineer]

Thanks for the post RWP. The list from france is definitely a confirmation of more than just their anti-semetic status. bttt.

[vance]

I am surprised you would even post the anti-boycott site.

[Torie]

I thought Richard Lewontin was an academic heavyweight. I had him as a professor a zillion years ago at the University of Chicago. He was an effective teacher, and fair. Yes, he was left wing, very left wing, but that didn't really intrude into the classroom much.

[F.J. Mitchell]

I stand with the Israelis, semi-literate that I am, but overjoyed to learn that advanced degrees in education , does not neccessarily damage the brain or soul.

[FreeReporting]

Those who boycott Israel are guilty of intellectual laziness. It has become clear to those who bother to read the news carefully and who dare to think for themselves that far from being oppressors, the Israelis are caught in a situation that they had no hand in manufacturing.

[Right Wing Professor]

I thought Richard Lewontin was an academic heavyweight. I had him as a professor a zillion years ago at the University of Chicago. He was an effective teacher, and fair. Yes, he was left wing, very left wing, but that didn't really intrude into the classroom much.

I agree he was, once, a heavyweight. Unfortunately, his ideology eventually corrupted his science, as when he and Gould went after EO Wilson (a colleague) because they felt that Sociobiology was antithetical to Marxism.