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Ahmed Moor: Why I am for academic boycott

Two moral principles that compel us to boycott Israeli academia

By Ahmed Moor | March 12, 2010

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.

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.

The case of Dr. Z is resistant to the coercive component of our analysis. As an anti-Zionist Israeli who actively contributes to undermining Zionism, his behavior already conforms to liberalism’s standards, which are our standards. I do not agree with those who argue that if Dr. Z is truly an anti-Zionist, he must leave Israel and all it stands for behind, like the awesome Ilan Pappe. On the contrary, the Palestine/Israel I hope to see one day will rely on these people. Nor does the argument that Dr. Z is a necessary casualty in a sledgehammer boycott, which by definition is all-encompassing, sit well with me. The idea of collateral damage is inherently illiberal and immoral in my view.

This is where the parity principle can be engaged. Much of the important revisionist (post-Zionist?) scholarship that emerged in the past twenty years from Israel – which we rely on a great deal – emerged from an exclusivist Zionist state framework. The archival material available to Israeli researchers is simply not available to Palestinian scholarship. The Zionist state, through its institutions, has created a structural bias for Jewish scholarship in Israel. Whether that material bias is employed by Dr. Z to undermine the state or not is irrelevant in this context. Dr. Z is afforded access, exclusively because of his privileged role as an Israeli Jew. That access is not available to scholars from the Islamic University in Gaza or Birzeit University in the West Bank, for instance. The much more obvious restrictions on movement imposed by Israel on Palestinian scholars only underline my point here.

Forgetting the state of war that exists between Lebanon and Israel for a moment, let Dr. Hanafi travel abroad to promote his book with Israelis when he is capable of traveling abroad to promote a book with Palestinians from the occupied territories. Let Dr. Z promote his anti-Zionist scholarship in tandem with his peers from Al-Azhar University in the Gaza Strip.

This is the principle of parity as I understand it.

Putting aside the theoretical framework, there are particulars which merit discussion. When Benjamin Netanyahu presented his dissembling and obfuscatory vision for a ‘two-state solution,’ Bar Ilan University provided him with a platform for his dissembling and obfuscation. The fact that Bar Ilan University embraced such an intellectually dishonest policy is important (and my claim that Bar Ilan embraced the policy by providing a platform is debatable) but not unique. Academia is supposed to provide a safe haven for competing (but illiberal? Harvard and Kramer?) ideas, and the free marketplace of collective idea adoption by laypeople acts as the litmus test by which all ideas (and products) are tested.

But I believe that the Zionist state has co-opted the intellectual legitimacy afforded by academia to its own ends. One strong example of this was Ehud Barak’s decision to upgrade the status of Ariel College, which sits in an illegal settlement, to Ariel University. In that case, the military governor of the occupied territories made a political decision to enhance the prestige and increase the funding of an institute of higher learning for whatever reason – it’s not important why he did it. To its credit, the Israeli academy strongly protested Barak’s decision.

I am making a personal judgment here that the reader may disagree with, that Israeli academic institutions are not independent of the Zionist states political aims and goals. I believe that Israeli institutions of higher learning are actually Zionist institutions of higher learning partly as a result of structural issues (funding, tenure, access, etc…), but also as a result of lived experience. The daily lives of academics and the environments they exist in inform their scholarship. In the case of Zionist Israel, that experience taints scholarship. It is true that there are Neve Gordons in Israel, but their scarcity and marginalization in the dominant Jewish Israeli society reinforces rather than disqualifies my judgment. Again, the reader may disagree here.

I mentioned earlier that we have relied on Zionist Israeli scholarship for our own understanding of history. And it is true that Zionist Israeli scientists have provided crucial breakthroughs for the material advancement of humanity; an Israeli woman – Ada Yonath –  recently received the Nobel Prize in chemistry for her pioneering work in that field. But the gains they have helped us make in medicine, technology, and numerous other fields are subordinated to liberal considerations. Scientific research is already restricted by our ethics. Psychology research, for instance, cannot expose subjects in a study to harm, construed broadly. This was not exactly the case when Stanley Milgram conducted his experiments on human suffering and proximity, from which we learned a lot, but our societies have grown since then. Israeli technology may one day cure me of cancer, but do I really want to live in world where those advancements are evaluated independently of the repressive regime in which they are realized?

To sum up, I believe that there are two moral principles that compel us to boycott Israeli academia. First, we seek to coerce Israeli thought leaders, a large portion of whom are academics, into behaving humanely towards their neighbors by more closely binding their individual activity to that of their state. Second, we seek to enforce parity across scholarship. The Zionist Israeli state is largely responsible for the extant disparities, and we are obliged to treat its academics in the same way.

March 12, 2010 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism | Leave a comment

Moment of truth: time to boycott Israel’s entire range of injustice

Rifat Kassis, The Electronic Intifada, 4 March 2010

Words always matter, and names always have a life of their own. But perhaps Palestine and Israel form a context in which words become positions more dramatically than in many others. The authors of the “Moment of Truth” Kairos document, which is the Christian Palestinians’ statement to the world about the occupation of Palestine and a call for support in opposing it, have repeatedly been asked about the use of the word “boycott.” What exactly does this mean? How far exactly does it go? And what exactly does it call for?

The document calls for a complete system of sanctions of Israel. Not simply a boycott of products generated by settlements or of products in general, or of institutions and organizations that are unabashedly complicit in the occupation, but a total boycott. Our occupation is not selective, and so our opposition must not be.

The injustices perpetrated by the State of Israel affect our economy, our education, our health and our mobility; they inhibit our most quotidian and our most far-reaching freedoms; they stigmatize our language and confine our travel; they stifle what we do and buy and make. The occupation is not a random onslaught of power, and it isn’t conducted on some remote soil: it is a complete matrix of control, a strategic, consistent, deliberate, historically constructed, externally condoned and internally sustained attempt to separate Palestinian and Israel rights and lives in the very place where we make and have always made our home. Boycotting Israel signifies boycotting this entire range of injustice.

The boycott is also the manifestation of our right as Palestinians to decide the terms of our own struggle and our own freedom. This certainly doesn’t mean that we don’t value the input of our supporters, both from within Israel and from elsewhere. But we as Palestinians ultimately have the right to choose our own methods of resistance. Resistance itself is a right guaranteed by international law, as expressed by Article 1(4) of Protocol 1 (additional to the Geneva Conventions), for “conflicts in which peoples are fighting against colonial domination and alien occupation and against racist regimes in the exercise of their right of self-determination.” Boycott — which is a powerful yet totally nonviolent tactic — is part of our choice. Indeed, as is stated in “A Moment of Truth,” boycott and disinvestment are “not revenge but rather a serious action to reach a just and definitive peace that will put an end to Israeli occupation of Palestinian and other Arab territories and will guarantee security and peace for all.”

This assertion responds to some of the criticisms we receive from people inside Israel including and in addition to those who have pro-Israeli beliefs, including some of the criticisms we receive more generally from peace-seeking people. Many want to see a “balanced” solution: they claim that Israelis don’t know what’s happening inside the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) and that they’re not directly involved in the occupation; thus, they think that Palestinians should “dialogue” with them, not boycott them, in order to explain our reality. Our answer, though, is that the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign is the way for them to not only hear about but also see, experience and know what their government is doing in Palestine. The occupation is a hierarchy, and Israelis are on top. Every single Israeli is benefiting from its very existence, and so we call, too, for every Israeli to decide where he or she stands. This responsibility is both collective and deeply personal.

Regrettably, the leftist movement within Israel remains very weak. This weakness relates to the fact that strong criticism of Israel is often ignored or dismissed within the international community: many people fear Israel itself, or fear the stigma of being labeled anti-Semitic. This environment of fear and hesitation thus undermines the movement inside Israel and its endeavor to end the occupation. If Israeli activists are perceived as traitors, and so their numbers (as well as the numbers of their international supporters) wane, the Israeli government can continue to claim that no one in the world actually backs their efforts — especially for boycott.

That said, there are indeed Israelis who not only oppose the occupation in theory but who are also avowed public supporters of the boycott campaign. Neve Gordon is one such person. A political science professor at Ben Gurion University (and an American-born Jew who moved to Israel and has raised his family here), Gordon explained how he reached this conclusion in a 20 August 2009 Los Angeles Times op-ed:

“The myth of the united Jerusalem has led to the creation of an apartheid city where Palestinians aren’t citizens and lack basic services. The Israeli peace camp has gradually dwindled so that today it is almost nonexistent, and Israeli politics are moving more and more to the extreme right. It is therefore clear to me that the only way to counter the apartheid trend in Israel is through massive international pressure. The words and condemnations from the Obama Administration and the European Union have yielded no results, not even a settlement freeze, let alone a decision to withdraw from the occupied territories.”

Boycott us, Gordon urges, “For the sake of our children, I am convinced that an international boycott is the only way to save Israel from itself.”

And we must listen. The Israeli occupation must experience the consequences, and the consequences must be visible, tangible and countable. They must become apparent to the Israeli state and society on every level — cultural, political, economic, and academic — as the international community concretely demonstrates its unwillingness to tolerate the ongoing occupation.

Some voices, mainly in Europe, have criticized the nature of the BDS campaign. Some say that it could easily be associated with the Nazi-era call to “boycott the Jews” and therefore be misconstrued as anti-Semitic. As was mentioned earlier, this is another example of the anxiety that inhibits efforts to end the occupation. Others express the kind of hesitancy we also saw before the call to boycott the apartheid regime in South Africa — a hesitancy that took the stance of “But we don’t want to hurt the blacks.”

If we compare the boycott-related reluctance in the South African context to the similar worries that currently affect the Palestinian context, we must see that there will always be justifications to do nothing; people will always harbor concerns, both ideological and practical, that inhibit them from real involvement. And as long as these hesitations are allowed to win out over action, oppressors will continue to oppress. It must not be so.

Other voices criticize the scope of the boycott. They say that it isn’t strategic or feasible, that it will backfire, that they can’t accept it. However, it must be understood that a total boycott is both reasoned and necessary, and that moral standards put forth by the international community, informing us of what we should and should not do and what we can and cannot say, are precisely what the autonomy and solidarity of the BDS campaign (that is, our autonomy to choose our own ethical and practical terms, and our supporters’ solidarity with that independence) attempts to depart from.

That being said, I would still like to pose the following question to those who criticize a complete boycott: would they accept a boycott of settlement products, or some other kind of selective boycott? If so, then we hope they will carry it out. In short, we hope our supporters will do whatever they can. We’ll continue with our own goals, principles and practices, and will be glad to work with those who wish to participate.

Another commentary on an additional source of criticism: some churches worldwide have likewise expressed their skepticism about our call for boycott, and have pushed us to adopt a more “positive” attitude. To them, we wish to say that there is nothing “positive” about the way the occupation is constricting us. Nor is there anything “positive” about the way the Israeli state responds to our dissent (by repressing it), to United Nations resolutions about refugee rights or illegal settlements or humanitarian crises (by ignoring them), or to the massive and vocal international support for the UN-commissioned Goldstone report (by rejecting it). The lofty goal of “balanced dialogue” is impossible in a place where there is no balance, a place that continues to silence our voices. To consult another model, advocating for “positive engagement” with the South African apartheid regime in order to “convince” it to be more humane in dealing with the oppressed proved to be condescending and ineffective.

Clearly, we receive quite a bit of criticism about the BDS movement, but we rarely receive any suggestions for alternatives — and, indeed, the gravity of the situation in Palestine doesn’t leave room for many of them. If the call for a complete boycott was not “justified” some years back, how can they possibly respond to the overwhelming atrocities committed by Israel in Lebanon and Gaza in 2006, or in Gaza in winter 2008-2009? Exactly how epic a catastrophe is necessary in order to “justify” our own measures of resistance? While we discuss the effectiveness of the BDS movement, Israel continues — in concrete and increasingly extreme ways — to keep Gaza in a choke-hold, demolish houses and evict families in East Jerusalem, to build illegal settlements and evade any commitment to a freeze. Israel is tilting more and more dangerously to the right, and turning more and more irrefutably into an apartheid state. To delay opposition, to delay a boycott, is dangerous, too.

Even more than the word “boycott,” of course, the word “apartheid” garners wrath from Israel’s supporters. Former US President Jimmy Carter knows this well, after he authored Palestine Peace Not Apartheid and was widely criticized by prominent pro-Israel figures in his own country. But Carter stands firm on his use of the term “apartheid.” As he explained to the Israeli daily Haaretz in March 2007, “When Israel does occupy this territory deep within the West Bank, and connects the 200-or-so settlements with each other, with a road, and then prohibits the Palestinians from using that road, or in many cases even crossing the road, this perpetrates even worse instances of apartness, or apartheid, than we witnessed even in South Africa.”

Carter’s words once again call us to boycott as the only way to prevent such apartness from becoming even more profoundly and destructively entrenched. Moreover, the threat — the reality — of this apartness must compel us to carry out a complete boycott, not a selective one. The blockade of Gaza is enacted by the State of Israel; the State is the occupation. They are not separate, and they cannot be separated. We must boycott both.

We must be courageous enough to be honest, both in describing the situation we’re subjected to and in calling for its end. In our document “A Moment of Truth,” we strove for this kind of candor and clarity, and we continue to do so. Without a complete boycott — economic, academic, cultural, political, athletic, artistic and so on — Israel’s unjust and illegal policies will continue, and so will passivity within both the Israeli and the international community. The bloodshed will continue, too.

As churches, we must not simply be “strategic”: we must be prophetic. We must raise our voices, and the boycott will strengthen our words with deeds.

Rifat Kassis is International President of Defence for Children International (DCI) and General Director of its section in Palestine. He is also Coordinator and Spokeperson of Karios Palestine – A Moment of Truth.

March 4, 2010 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism | Leave a comment