The choice is to do nothing or try to bring about change
Why we launched the boycott of Israeli institutions
Hilary Rose and Steven Rose
Monday July 15 2002
The Guardian
The carnage in the Middle East continues; today a suicide bomber,
tomorrow an Israeli strike on Palestinians with helicopters, missiles
and tanks. The Israelis continue to invade Palestinian towns and
expand illegal settlements in the occupied territories. Ariel Sharon
refuses to negotiate while "violence" (ie Palestinian resistance)
continues. Our own government sheds crocodile tears at the loss of
life while inviting a prime minister accused of war crimes to lunch
and providing his military with F16 spare parts.
Yet every rational person knows that the only prospect of a just and
lasting peace lies in Israel's recognition of the legitimacy of a
Palestinian state and the Arab world's acceptance of a secure Israel
behind its 1967 borders. That is what every peace plan proposes. But
how to get from here to there? Is there anything that ordinary
citizens, that is civil society, can do to bring pressure to bear to
compel our governments and international institutions to move the
peace process forward?
One of the nonviolent weapons open to civil society to express its
moral outrage is the boycott. Internationally this has been most
successful against apartheid South Africa. It took many years but
ultimately shamed governments and multinational corporations into
isolating this iniquitous regime. The boycott called last year by
Palestinian solidarity movements was against Israeli products. This
too moves slowly, but only a couple of weeks ago it secured a ban on
the sale of settlement-produced goods illegally labelled "made in
Israel".
The international academic, cultural and sporting communities had
played a major part in isolating South Africa and we have increasingly
learned of individuals who thought that cooperating with Israeli
institutions was like collaborating with the apartheid regime. A
writer refused to have her play acted in Israel, a musician turns down
an invitation to perform or an academic to attend a conference.
It was these individual ethical refusals which led us to make the
restricted call for a moratorium on European research and academic
collaboration with Israeli institutions until the Israeli government
opened serious peace negotiations. We noted that Israel, a Middle
Eastern state, was accepted as an integral part of the European
scientific community while its neighbours were not. We canvassed a
draft of the letter among colleagues in the UK and other European
countries, and within days signatures of support came flowing in.
When the letter was published in the Guardian in April, it had over
120 names on it. A matching letter was published in France; its
website now carries more than a thousand names. Another call was
published in Italy, another in Australia. The Association of
University Teachers adopted the moratorium call; the lecturers' union,
Natfhe, an even stronger resolution. In similar vein an advertisement
signed by Jewish Americans appeared in the New York Times calling for
US disinvestment from Israel until peace negotiations were opened.
What is self-evident is that a cultural and economic boycott is slowly
assembling. It is not one monolithic entity. It varies from the very
modest resistance suggested in our initial letter, such as personally
refusing to take part in collaborative research with Israeli
institutions, to more public gestures of opposition. Such acts are
painful, even though the target is institutional, actions often mean a
breach with longstanding colleagues. It is thus important that the
boycott is coupled with positive support for those Israeli refuseniks
who continue to oppose the actions of their elected government.
It is this that makes suggestions, such as that by Jonathan Freedland
in last week's Guardian, that the boycott is in some way comparable to
that imposed by Nazi Germany on Jewish shops, so grotesquely
hyperbolic. It matches the many hate emails that those who have
endorsed the boycott have received, accusing them of anti-semitism or
even Holocaust denial. If the supporters of the Israeli government
cannot distinguish between being opposed to Israeli state policy and
being anti-semitic, it is scarcely surprising that real anti-semites
conflate the two.
Faced with this growing international movement, some have cried
foul. Does the boycott not risk endangering those fragile academic
links between Israelis and Palestinians that do exist? Yet these are
in far greater danger as a result of the restrictions on movement
which the Israeli government places on Palestinian researchers, and
the repeated attempts to close down Palestinian universities. And no
Palestinian has voiced this concern; on the contrary many among their
academic community, such as those at the University at Bir Zeit, have
endorsed the boycott call as helping to draw attention to the brutal
restrictions on their academic freedom to teach, study and research.
The exaggerated attention to the "academic freedom" issues raised by
the unilateral removal from an editorial board of two Israeli
academics by one signatory to the boycott call is like focusing on a
potential local mote to avoid the flagrantinternational beam. This
sudden institutional preoccupation with academic freedom is not
without historical interest.
During the height of the student movement of the late 1960s,
university lecturer Robin Blackburn was sacked for a post-hoc
endorsement of students who removed the London School of Economics
gates. There was a resounding silence at this breach of his right to
free speech. But it is strange to hear academic freedom invoked as an
abstraction in a university world where much research is funded by
corporate industrial interests, and where a biological research topic
can be closed by a patent agreement. Only a couple of weeks ago two
Harvard post-doctoral researchers were threatened with jail for
sending cloned material from the lab in which they were working to one
to which they were moving.
Unlike some of those whistle blowers who have called attention to the
hazards of genetic engineering, no one is likely to lose their jobs as
a result of being boycotted. At worst they risk isolation from the
international academic research community. Those who have been
threatened with dismissal, and worse, for supporting the boycott are
those few courageous Israelis who have endorsed the call.
The choice today for civil society - and academics and researchers are
part of civil society - is to remain silent and do nothing or to try
to bring pressure to bear. Archbishop Desmond Tutu's statement of
support for the boycott closed with this quote from Martin Luther
King: "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things
that matter."
· Hilary Rose is professor of social policy at Bradford
University; Steven Rose is professor of biology at the Open
University. They codrafted the Israel academic moratorium call.
www.pjpo.org
Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : 15-07-02 MEST