The boycott of Israeli universities by the British Association of University Teachers (AUT), enthusiastically supported by Ronnie Kasrils and Victoria Brittain (”Silence from academe”), was being repealed even as the Mail & Guardian went to press.
The AUT reversed its April boycott by a two-thirds majority, delivering a stinging rebuke to the anti-Israel lobby and ending what had become one of the most embarrassing episodes in the AUT’s history of academic activism.
Opposition to the boycott rallied around three central arguments.
The first was the importance of academic freedom. Holding Israeli scholars and universities to ransom for their government’s behaviour, it was argued, would be as senseless as punishing British academics for their government’s decision to invade Iraq.
Secondly, opponents argued that it would damage efforts at conflict resolution between Israelis and Palestinians. The point was driven home by Palestinian Sari Nusseibeh, president of Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem, who condemned the boycott in a declaration co-signed by the president of Israel’s Hebrew University.
”The reason I don’t believe the boycott is the way to go is that I believe peace must be built on the bridge between two civil societies,” Nusseibeh told The New York Times.
The third and most damning argument against the boycott was that it had no basis in fact or principle.
The occupation is awful. Yet Israel, despite her flaws, is not an apartheid state. While Arab citizens still face informal discrimination, they have the vote, and benefit from the government’s affirmative-action programmes.
Nothing illustrated the hypocrisy of the boycott more than the case of the University of Haifa, one of two institutions singled out by the AUT.
The university is one of the most liberal in Israel and has several Arab department chairs and a dean. Why, then, would the AUT have wished to isolate this model of coexistence?
The left-wing Israeli daily Ha’aretz reported that the boycott was partly inspired by Haifa’s own Ilan Pappe, a radical Israeli historian with a significant following among activists in the Palestinian camp.
Pappe apparently came into conflict with the university after a taking up the cause of a student who had written a thesis about the alleged killing of more than 200 civilians in an Arab village by an Israeli army unit in the 1948 war. The student later retracted his claims after being sued for libel by the surviving members of the army unit.
After finding himself isolated in the university’s academic community, Pappe approached his British colleagues for help; they responded with the boycott campaign.
The AUT boycott sparked worldwide protest, with threats of counter boycotts against British universities. Even the British government expressed its disapproval. The end of the boycott brought sighs of relief all around.
Why Kasrils would want to enlist on the wrong side of this battle is unclear. However, the tone of his article suggests that he considers Israeli academia guilty until proven innocent.
”How many university lecturers have publicly opposed the occupation and colonisation of Palestinian land?” he demands to know.
He does not wait for the answer (which, by the way, is ”plenty”), but proceeds with his call for a boycott.
In so doing, Kasrils plays into the hands of those who would argue that criticism of Israel is anti-Semitism in disguise. Once again, a spectacular own goal by the anti-Israel lobby. And what a shame, when one considers the urgency of the Palestinian cause.
Joel Pollak is a speech writer. He writes in his personal capacity