A group of intellectuals has called on colleagues in international academia to ”comprehensively and consistently boycott all Israeli academic and cultural institutions”, as exemplified in the struggle to abolish apartheid in South Africa.
The call, from the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, was made at an international conference, Resisting Israeli Apartheid: Strategies and Principles, at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London last weekend.
The academics are being urged to refrain from participating in any form of academic and cultural cooperation, collaboration or joint projects with Israeli institutions; to suspend all forms of funding and subsidies to these institutions; to promote divestment from Israel by academic institutions; and to condemn Israeli policies by pressing for resolutions to be adopted by academic, professional and cultural associations and organisations.
Tom Paulin, an English fellow at Hertford College, Oxford University, said in the keynote address that ”a struggle against embedded prejudices and institutions which aim to equate people into tribes and enforce apartheid is an imaginative struggle, a struggle which does not demand that a work of art should be constrained to, and interpreted by, a single ideological struggle”.
Ilan Pappé, a political science lecturer at Israel’s Haifa University, told the conference that the boycott should be comprehensive for it to work,
even though he would be adversely affected. ”For a certain period, everything and everyone that is connected to Israel has to be at this stage part of a pariah society that would stay like this until the end of the refugee situation, the end of occupation and the beginning of new lives for Jews and Arabs in Israel and Palestine.”
West Chester University professor of Middle East history Lawrence Davidson — ”a nice Jewish boy fallen from the faith” — told delegates of a number of divestment initiatives in the United States, including one by the Presbyterian Church to withdraw part of its $8-billion portfolio of investments from Israeli companies and government bonds.
”Charges of anti-Semitism come fast and furious, but there is an important difference between being anti-Semitic and being anti-Zionist,” Davidson said.
In the US, the boycott campaign has gone beyond academia. Corporations such as Caterpillar are now targeted by numerous organisations, including Jewish Voice for Peace, which has been lobbying corporations, churches and institutions to divest from the company, which sells armoured bulldozers to the Israeli military.
Author, journalist and playwright Victoria Brittain told the conference ”boycotts are part of a much wider strategy of isolating Israel, along with divestment”.
Earlier in the week she told the Mail & Guardian: ”The most important lesson from the anti-apartheid struggle is that there is a huge reservoir of good will here. Ordinary people, when they actually have the knowledge of what is happening on the ground, are extraordinarily selfless and filled with ingenuity and are ready to do all kinds of projects.”
There was a strong presence of British Jews at the conference, as well as Jewish academics from Australia, Israel and Switzerland. Few Arabs were present, but two Palestinians, Lisa Taraki and Omar Barghouti, travelled from Israel and the West Bank to support their call for an academic boycott of Israel and to draw attention to the British Committee for Universities for Palestine. They called on the academic community to support Palestinian academic and cultural institutions directly without requiring them to partner with Israeli counterparts.
Although a small group of Zionists picketed the event for its ”anti-Israel bias”, some of them ended up attending the conference.