|
Academic boycott as international solidarity
The academic boycott of Israel
Lawrence Davidson and Islah Jad
Boycotts are age-old undertakings. Unlike sanctions, which are enforced by
governments and sometimes destroy the lives of millions of ordinary people (as
in the case of the twelve-year sanctions against Iraq), boycotts are most often
grassroots means of protest against the
policies of governments. They can be
undertaken by ordinary people to defend fellow human beings who are oppressed by
governments and armies, and they can be deliberately restricted in scope to
cause as little damage as possible to the lives of innocent people. Boycotts
have historically been undertaken at many levels: they can be carried out
against companies or industries (for instance, the California grape boycott of
the 1970s, or the ongoing worldwide boycott of Nestlé products1); and against
states (for instance the Jewish-initiated boycott of goods from Nazi Germany, or
today’s evolving boycott of Israeli products and institutions in the face of
that country’s colonialist occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan
Heights). Thus, from a historical point of view, there is plenty of precedents
for the tactic of boycott. And, as in the case of South Africa, public pressure
through boycotts can eventually help force governments and organizations such as
the United Nations to apply sanctions against a particular regime. In our view,
an academic boycott of Israel should form part of a broader boycott and
divestment effort involving economic, cultural and sports agendas.
The call for a moratorium on relations with Israeli academic institutions has
drawn widespread criticism. Much of this has come from people who are, to some
degree, partisans of Israel. But some of it has its origins among those who have
genuine concerns that innocent Israelis are being unnecessarily hurt, or that
the boycott is undermining valued principles such as academic freedom and the
free flow of ideas. It is to this latter group that we would like to address the
following arguments in the hope of taking up their concerns and, if not putting
them to rest, at least putting them in a context that makes understandable the
historical trade-offs inevitably involved in this struggle for justice.
The call for a specifically academic boycott is based on several premisses.
One is that, to date, all but a small number of Israeli academics have remained
quiescent in the face of the violent colonial war their government is waging in
the Occupied Territories. As a group they have had nothing to say about Israeli
violations of scores of United Nations resolutions and the transgression of
international law in the form of the Fourth Geneva Convention. This includes not
only human rights violations of a general nature but also, specifically, the
systematic destruction of Palestinian education and academia. Nor, as a group,
have they come to the defence of their very few fellow academics who have been
persecuted for openly criticizing Israeli policies against the Palestinians. A
second and related premiss is that educational institutions and their teachers
are principal agents in the shaping of future generations’ perceptions of their
country’s relations with their neighbours and the world. If, in the midst of
extreme practices of oppression such as we have been witnessing in the Occupied
Territories, these institutions do not analyse and explain the world in a
way that promotes justice and reasonable compromise, but rather acquiesce in
aggressive colonialist practices, then others may legitimately boycott them.
Actions of boycott represent a non-violent way by which non-Israelis the
world over can express their concern for what is now the world’s longest
post-Second World War occupation and one of its bloodiest and most ethnically
oriented. There has been a great outcry against the violent tactics of
resistance to Israeli occupation evolving among the Palestinians. Though the
first Intifada started with little more than rock-throwing, it was condemned in
the West as a ‘dangerous escalation’ of the Middle East crisis. It also brought
the Palestinians no relief. The second intifada is certainly much more violent
in its nature and now includes the infamous tactic of suicide bombing. The
organizers of the boycott condemn this tactic even whilst understanding that it
is a product of despair and desperation that the occupation itself has
created.
back |
