Howard Jacobson, the author of “Kalooki Nights,” has written a devastating indictment of the British academic boycott of Israeli scholars, in a remarkable essay in The Independent (hat tip: Jackson Dyer):
If anti-Semitism is repugnant to humanity, then it is no less repugnant to humanity to single out one country for your hatred, to hate it beyond reason and against evidence, to pluck it from the complex contextuality of history as though it authored its own misfortunes and misdeeds as the devil authored evil, to deny it any understanding (which is not the same as sympathy or succor), and — most odious of all — to seek to silence its voices.
For make no mistake, this is what an intellectual boycott means. We silence you. We will not let you speak. To rub it in — and this would be childish were it not villainous — the UCU resolution includes proposals to "organize a UK-wide campus tour for Palestinian academics/educational trade unionists".
In other words, we will hear them, we will not hear you. Anyone familiar with the emotional politics of the campus will be able to imagine the rapturous applause awaiting these Palestinian educational trade unionists — given free rein to vent their grievances while the other side of the argument is gagged.
The 40th anniversary of the Six Day War was always going to be a good time for pressing ahead with this boycott. . . . Compare what was said about [the Six Day War] at the time with what is said about it now and it is hard to believe it is the same event. No one then, not even members of the far Left who, if anything, rather favored Israel both for its being progressive and the underdog, would have recognized today’s version — an expansionist adventure carried out by a barbarously racist Neo-Colonial power which should never have existed in the first place.
. . . Though there has been no resolution of the Six Day War, though it is palpably still being fought on almost every border and indeed in almost every town — A 40 Years And Still Counting War — something that felt like a resolution happened, a victory of sorts, and that victory made fools of us all. . . . In the act of appearing to win and exacting seeming-victor’s terms, Israel went — for as long as it took the Left to regroup and change its mind — from being victim to being villain, from the repository of all our hopes to a Pandora’s box of colonial greed, ethnic intolerance, religious bigotry, military savagery, and whatever else your politics require that you put in it. . . .
It is probably futile to imagine what would have happened had victory gone the other way. But it is not unreasonable to suppose that had the Arab countries won decisively Israel would not exist. Annihilation has, after all, been (as it continues to be) the declared aim of most of the states and organizations that surround it. . . .
Whether the enlightened Universities of Birmingham and Brighton would have enforced an academic boycott of these conquering Arab countries, we can only guess. But since there are many Arab countries, in actual as opposed to imaginary existence, whose practices one might think deserving of a boycott but who have so far escaped one, I think we have to guess not.
. . . The illegitimacy of Israel is a rabbit pulled out of the hat. A defeated, diminished or depleted Israel would have posed no problem of legitimacy. We could have visited its remains in sorrow, as we visit Auschwitz. Israel only became illegal when it did not go away. . . .
The charge of being "complicit in the occupation" begs more questions than can be addressed here, but its chief assumption — the assumption on which the entire boycott is based — is breathtaking. An Israeli scholar dare not be in even the most partial agreement with his government. For an Israeli academic not to think exactly as they think on the campuses of Birmingham and Brighton is to be guilty of a crime for which the punishment is expulsion from the international community of thought.
Will someone, in the light of that, explain to me what universities are for? Is not scholarship meant to constitute a sacred bond, an implicit assurance that here at least, in the free academy of the mind, the conversation will always go on no matter how bitter the disagreement, no matter how unorthodox or incorrect or even offensive the views expressed? Can that person be fit to teach, I ask, who closes his intelligence to such an exchange, who seeks to silence opinions he does not share, and who believes the only truth is his?
This is a small excerpt from a brilliant essay that should be read in its entirety.
POSTSCRIPT: Alan Dershowitz blogs:
Israel has more academic freedom — for Jews and Muslims alike — than any Arab or Muslim nation and than the vast majority of countries in the world. . . .Yet the British Union has singled out Israel alone for boycott. Again, this has nothing to do with protecting academic freedom or scientific inquiry. It has everything to do with anti-Israel bigotry.
Now academics around the world are fighting back against this British bigotry. Led by more than a dozen Nobel Prize winners, thousands of American academics have signed a petition declaring themselves to be honorary Israelis for purposes of any academic boycott. They have pledged to refuse to participate in any events from which Israeli academics are boycotted. Any academic who wishes to join this moral response to an immoral boycott can email ScholarsforPeace@aol.com.
The petition is here. Look at all the signatures here. (Hat tips: BtB and One Jerusalem).