Under er eit brev frå professor Ilan Pappe datert 14. mai som ligg ute p
Znet:
Saka dreier seg om å kasta Pappe ut frå stillinga si på universitetet i
Haifa avdi han freistar forsvara det som i vest blir kalt akademisk fridom.
Saka er interessant: For det fyrste avdi den syner skilnaden mellom Israel
og andre "vestlege demokrati" - korleis Israel er ein stat med totalitære
drag.
Men også på ein annan måte: Israel er ei forskingsstormakt, og er særs
sårbar for akademisk boykott. Og ei slik sak er kan difor vera eit svært god
startskot for ein akademikarboykott. Då må det til eit samspel mellom
akademikarar og td. KK.
Utfordringa er hermed gjeve - her kjem brevet frå Pappe:
Dear Friends,
I have received today an invitation to stand for a trial in my university,
the university of Haifa. The prosecution, represented by Haifa Dean's of
humanities demands my expulsion from the university due to the positions I
have taken on the Katz affair. It calls upon the court “to judge Dr. Pappe
on the offences he has committed and to use to the full the court's legal
authority to expel him from the university". These offences are in a
nutshell my past critique of the university's conduct in the Katz affair,
the MA student who discovered the Tantura massacre in 1948 and was
disqualified for that. The reason the university waited so long is that now
the time is ripe in Israel for any act of silencing academic freedom. My
intent to teach a course on the Nakbah next year and my support for boycott
on Israel has led the university to the conclusion that I can only be
stopped by expulsion.
Judging by past procedures this is not a request, but already a verdict,
given the position of the person in question in the university and the way
things had been done in the past. The ostensible procedure of a 'fair trial'
does not exist and hence I do not even intend to participate in a
McCarthyist charade.
I do not appeal to you for my own sake. I ask you at this stage before a
final decision has been taken to voice your opinion in whatever form you can
and to whatever stage you have access to, not in order to prevent my
expulsion (in many ways in the present atmosphere in Israel it will come
now, and if not now later on, as the Israeli academia has deiced almost
unanimously to support the government and to help silence any criticism). I
ask those who are willing to do so, to take this case as part of your
overall appreciation of, and attitude to, the preset situation in Israel.
This should shed light also on the debate whether or not to boycott Israeli
academia.
This is not, I stress, and an appeal for personal help - my situation is far
better than that of my colleagues in the occupied territories living under
the daily harassment and brutal abuses of the Israeli army. It is an opening
gambit and many of colleagues, especially my Palestinian Israeli colleagues,
can be next. A testimony to the tragic circumstances of my own university is
that I know there is no use in distributing this letter on its internal
web-site, as all of my colleagues in the past when it came to the crucial
moment - for understandable reasons - felt they could do very little to help
me, without risking their own position in the university.
I know many of you have access to world media and can help to expose the
already dismal picture and false pretense of Israel of being the 'only
democracy in the Middle East'.
Yours
Ilan Pappe
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---- Israeli academic freedom in general is under attack, as witnessed by the government's response to the 250 university professors who signed a statement supporting the refuseniks. (See Neve Gordon, The Nation, May. 9, 2002) Ilan Pappe has a BA from Hebrew University and a PhD from Oxford. He is a senior lecturer in Political Science at Haifa University and is the Academic
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