Boycotting the Academy

Targeting Israeli institutions by marginalising them is akin to seeing its recruits as footsoldiers of Zionism clad in khaki. Some are no doubt “complicit” in implementing policy the way academics in the West might be for refusing to condemn the war in Iraq as illegal. But punishing institutions wholesale, especially academic ones, is far from constructive.

As an American organisation formed ostensibly to seek peace and promote Israeli “civil rights”, Meretz USA described in a resolution, the UCU would be better served by promoting links between Israeli and Palestinian academics “to advance dialogue”; foster peace research; and encourage discussions about “non-governmental peace initiatives such as the Geneva Institute” (June 10, 2007).

Historical context is certainly a guide here. Throughout the 20th century, the legitimacy of sanctions and boycotts was challenged and debated on both sides of the Atlantic. The liberal architectural critic Lewis Mumford believed in 1939 that an intellectual as well as economic quarantine had to be imposed on totalitarian aggressors. Japan might be deprived of a market for its “silk and cheapjack goods”; Germany and Italy would be similarly deprived of markets for wine and olive oil. But their academics would also stay home, damned by Mumford as cheap propagandists.

Opponents found such measures unpalatable: the American Quaker professor of Swarthmore College William I. Hull thought them cruel and ineffective in implementing policy changes. His pamphlet entitled “International ‘Sanctions’” (1932) is still relevant. Besides, the then “Axis” of evil had no ears for a stern critique of their actions.

The boycott may well fail precisely because it will be effective for all the wrong reasons, irrespective of how plausible the arguments of Dershowitz and other supporters of Israel may be. Ironically, Dershowitz’s attempt to bankrupt British institutions may be similarly destructive, given that some UCU members actually opposed the boycott motion in the first place.

Such mutual ruination will do little to advance the peace process. As for academic freedom, the Harvard jurist has evidently run separate standards. The campaign to prevent a colleague, Norman Finkelstein of DePaul University, from gaining tenure just as the UCU was attacked, seems to indicate a remarkable disregard for the processes of “academic freedom”. But such are the trials of defending Israel these days.