The boycott of Israeli academics and academic institutions has always made me a little uneasy. We all read books by Israeli academics that at their humanist best elucidate and inform, and at their racist worst reveal something about the Zionist zeitgeist. I read Ha’aretz, Ynet and the Jerusalem Post on a daily basis – and communicate pretty regularly with Israelis through email (the majority of whom admittedly, are anti-Zionists). Despite all this, I do support the academic boycott. The issue is very muddy, however.

Ahmed Moor, MondoWeiss, 12 March 2010

The issue of academic boycotts has achieved renewed attention here in Beirut after a Beirut-based publishing house decided to translate Amos Oz’s novel “A tale of Love and Darkness.” Oz’s books have previously been published in Arabic in both Egypt and Jordan, but the context is a little different here; Lebanon is still at war with Israel and anti-normalization currents remain strong, as they should. More recently, a professor at the American University of Beirut, Sari Hanafi, co-authored a book with two Israelis at Tel Aviv University – something that has angered many people here. Lebanese civil society is currently organizing around the issue, which is an explosive one. Hanafi appears to have made a poor decision.

Academia is usually a bastion of (relative) liberalism anywhere in the world. A recent study helped explain why; it’s something to do with type-casting. Opponents of the academic boycott of Israeli institutions can plausibly argue that Israeli academics mostly need our support and historically resist the jingoistic anti-intellectualism that runs rampant in Zionist society vis-à-vis non-Jewish human rights and anti-Zionism. I am sympathetic to their arguments, which is why I have so much trouble with this issue. But academia is easily segregated into different global disciples. What I mean to draw attention to is the fact that engineers are not post-colonial scholars and vice versa. That fact enables us to draw finer distinctions.

There is a straightforward case for boycotting Israeli engineers and others who directly enhance the occupation by, for instance, building unmanned drones. These are not the cases I wish to discuss here.

Instead, I’ll put forth a hypothetical case. Dr. Z is an anti-Zionist history lecturer at an Israeli institute of higher learning who actively contributes to the delegitimization of Zionism through his research. He feels strongly that Palestine/Israel ought to be one country and that Jewish privilege has no place in a modern democratic state. He is, in every way, an ally to the cause for equal rights in Palestine/Israel. So, why do I feel he should be boycotted?

After a lot of thought and discussion with friends, I managed to identify two principles that offer a decision-making framework on the issue of academic boycott: coercion and parity.

Boycott is a coercive measure adopted to influence the behavior of different actors. Because Israel is a democracy for Jews, it follows that Jewish people in Israel have an opportunity to correct the racist government policies of their government and society. However, there is no evidence that most Israeli Jews have the desire to relinquish Jewish privilege in Palestine/Israel. Many Israelis will decry the evils of occupation and military administration of a civilian population, but very few of those are actively willing to confront the extremists in their midst or in their government. Therefore, our boycott effort is specifically aimed at making the lives of Israeli thought leaders more difficult, so that they can exert the democratic pressure that is their sole purview to bear. It is this coercive element of BDS that compelled Avraham Burg to describe BDS as a form of violence.

I respectfully disagree with Burg; Zionist Israelis can hardly be counted on to relinquish their racial privilege in the absence of pressure. More importantly, BDS is an expression of Palestinian agency which is non-violent according to more traditional definitions of violence. I hope the reader will forgive me for not attempting to define violence in this context.

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Submitted by Sullivan on Sat, 2010-03-13 10:04

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