The fierce debate about calls for an academic boycott of Israel has been stimulated afresh by the dismissal of two Israeli scholars from the editorial boards of learned journals.
Professor Mona Baker, of the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (Umist), who owns the journals, said she took the action against friends to back the boycott call after agonising for a long time.
She dismissed Gideon Toury, a professor in Tel Aviv University’s school of cultural studies, from the international advisory board of Translation Studies Abstracts; and Miriam Schlesinger, a senior lecturer in translation studies at Bar-Ilan University, from the editorial board of The Translator: Studies in Intercultural Communication. Ironically, Schlesinger is a former chairperson of Amnesty International’s Israeli branch and has criticised her country’s policies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Baker, who said she had been inundated with hate mail, added that it was not a personal action but a political one against representatives of institutions of a state that was committing atrocities.
But her move provoked five protest resignations from the international advisory board of The Translator. Franz Pêchhacker, an associate professor at the University of Vienna’s department of translation and interpreting, said it was a ”misguided political action on the part of an editor” and would lead to the journal becoming biased and suffering in quality. Umist refused to comment, saying it was a matter for an individual academic.
Academics incensed by the Sharon government’s policies towards the Palestinians have tried to use Israel’s close research links with the European Union and the European Science Foundation as leverage. One of the campaigners is Professor Steven Rose, of the Open University, a Jew who lost relatives in the Holocaust. He floated proposals for a boycott in a letter to The Guardian and has since posted a letter on the website www.pjpo.org that criticises military reoccupation of Palestinian territories and human rights violations. This has been signed by more than 750 European academics, including Baker.
”Under these circumstances,” writes Rose, ”I can no longer … cooperate with official Israeli institutions, including universities. I will attend no scientific conferences in Israel, and I will not participate as referee in hiring or promotion decisions by Israeli universities, or in the decisions of Israeli funding agencies. I will continue to collaborate with, and host, Israeli scientific colleagues on an individual basis.”
His wife, Professor Hilary Rose, of City University, said: ”What you are seeing is a huge, intense debate going on all over academic life.” She said she had pulled out of a European conference on science and gender to which she was committed because an Israeli delegation had been invited.
But Leonid Ryzhik, a maths lecturer at Chicago University, who has set up an opposing website, aaisc.net, has raised nearly 900 signatures denouncing the boycott as an ”alarming and non-constructive development”.
Expressing pain for Palestinian sufferings, his statement on the site says Israel was ready to end the conflict by a historic compromise before the intifada. ”The recent calls for a moratorium on contacts with Israel, and other calls for boycott, miss the mark in many respects,” it says. ”For the Israeli public, a boycott reinforces the perception that it must fend for itself. Within the Palestinian community, it sends the message to the non-compromising extremists that their strategy of violence is bearing fruit.
”If anything, academic contacts deserve to be cultivated as they are a proven path both to better science and to understanding between nations.”
The lecturers’ union, Natfhe, passed a motion at its annual conference asking institutions to review their links with Israel with a view to severing them. The Association of University Teachers also passed a critical motion.
The issue has provoked fierce debate within the Campaign for Aca-demic Freedom and Standards about whether the boycott is exercising academic freedom or abusing it.
Petitions are circulating at Harvard and other United States universities to disinvest from Israel. One, at the University of California, cites the precedent of the anti-apartheid campaign in asking the university to ”use its influence — political and financial — to pressure Israel to respect the human rights of the Palestinian people”. —