Reject boycott of Israel. By Walter Reich. Philadelphia Inquirer, January 7, 2013.
Reich:
An
American academic organization is poised to begin sweeping a respected segment
of academia into the dustbin of intellectual and moral irrelevancy.
At its
annual meeting this week, the 30,000-member Modern Language Association will
hold a session aimed at strategizing how to mount academic boycotts against
Israel, and will consider a resolution critical of Israel for the violation of
academic rights while ignoring the immensely greater violations of academic
rights, as well as far more basic and universal rights, in dozens of countries
around the world. This could well presage a future MLA resolution to boycott
Israeli universities.
If the
MLA were the first academic body to take a stand against Israel, that act would
be of limited consequence. But three others, hijacked by political activists,
have already voted to boycott Israeli universities. If the MLA sets out on a
similar path, it will deeply damage the claim academia has to intellectual and
moral leadership in America.
In
April, the Association for Asian Studies voted to boycott Israeli universities.
In December, the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association announced
its boycott. And the next day, the American Studies Association (ASA) said that
its members had voted to boycott as well.
The
boycott effort has been led by the “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions”
movement. Spearheaded by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural
Boycott of Israel, it has sought to enlist the world’s academic organizations
to label Israel an “apartheid state.”
In
parts of academia, this movement has a receptive audience. Many academics in
the humanities and social sciences are partial to theories and ideologies, such
as postcolonialism, that incline them to see the world as having been ravaged
by Western imperialist powers. In their eyes, the worst current offender is the
United States. And, the BDS activists insist, another is Israel – which, they
argue, victimizes Palestinians through occupation and the violation of their
human rights. This movement has had enormous success in Europe, and is
beginning to have it in America.
This
isn’t a harmless, quixotic enterprise. Academics have immense influence through
their public actions and pronouncements and on the students who ultimately
become the politicians, journalists, writers, and other artists who will define
their country’s political and cultural agendas.
But
boycotting Israeli academic institutions not only trashes the sacrosanct
academic principle of the free exchange of ideas; it’s also hypocritical and
wrong. Most egregiously, it targets Israel to the exclusion of countries with
immeasurably worse human-rights records.
What
about targeting China, which long ago occupied Tibet, imported Chinese settlers
into it, and has set up a system that the Dalai Lama has called “Chinese
apartheid”? Chinese officials put their dissidents in “black prisons” and
psychiatric hospitals, fire academics, and hound journalists and artists who
dissent from the party line.
What
about targeting Saudi Arabia? It disenfranchises its women, forbids political
parties, punishes homosexuality, and sharply restricts freedom of movement,
expression, and religion.
What
about targeting the many other countries that carry out human-rights violations
enormously greater and graver than Israel’s – Russia and Iran, for example?
What
about targeting American universities? They take money from the U.S.
government, which some academics have excoriated for human-rights violations
and other evils. In fact, many members of the boycotting societies take federal
funds for their salaries and work. Why don’t they boycott themselves?
They
should listen to Sari Nusseibeh, the Palestinian president of Al-Quds
University in Jerusalem, who said in response to earlier British efforts to
boycott Israeli academics: “If we are to look at Israeli society, it is within
the academic community that we've had the most progressive, pro-peace views and
views that have come out in favor of seeing us as equals.”
They
should listen to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who said,
during Nelson Mandela's funeral, that Palestinians “do not support the boycott
of Israel.”
And
they should listen to Lee C. Bollinger, president of Columbia University, who,
in response to a British academic union’s vote in support of the anti-Israel
boycotters, said that the union “should add Columbia to its boycott list, for
we do not intend to draw distinctions between our mission and that of the
universities you are seeking to punish.”
Since
the ASA’s boycott vote, the presidents of at least 125 universities, including
Penn, Drexel, Haverford, Swarthmore, and Princeton, have rejected it, and at
least five have withdrawn their institutional memberships from that group. It’s
urgent that many more academic leaders speak out quickly and forcefully against
this betrayal of the values that for so long have sustained higher education in
this country – and against the politicization of the academic enterprise.
If they
do, one hopes the MLA’s leaders and members, and other academics, will listen.
The good name of American academia will depend on it.
