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Adam Dickter - Staff Writer
In the latest academic skirmish over Israel, more than 500 educators as of midweek have signed
an online letter calling on Israeli scholars to declare where they stand on
their government’s policies.
“Given the destructive nature of Israeli government action against
Palestinian education and academic freedom … we feel it is only fair to ask
the Israeli academic leadership where it stands on the issue of current
Israeli policy,” reads the petition.
The letter is addressed to Menachem Magidor, president of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, in response to his bid to found a forum to combat
ongoing efforts to isolate Israeli academics.
Calling for a discussion on academic freedom “within a context free of
hypocrisy,” the signatories represent themselves as “defenders of academic
freedom and supporters of the academic boycott against Israel,” although at least one, Zachary Lockman of New York University, insists he is not a supporter of the boycott.
In a letter to the New
York Sun on
April 9, Lockman, director of NYU’s Havop Kevorkian Center for Near East Studies, writes that his center
“regularly hosts Israeli scholars, professors and speakers.” Lockman added
that the petition “simply reminds those Israeli academics that they also have
a responsibility to speak up about the effects of their own government’s
policies on Palestinian education and academic freedom.”
Although the petition, posted last month at the URL academicboycott.org, does
not directly call for a boycott, Andrew Marks, founder of International
Academic Friends of Israel, sees the challenge as a new front in that effort.
“The approach they are taking now is asking academics to declare their
position vis-a-vis the Middle
East conflict,” says
Marks, chair of the physiology department at Columbia University. “I think the analogy would be to call on all U.S. academics to declare their position on the Iraq war.”
Martin Kramer, who monitors and has written extensively about campus
anti-Israel activity, says divestment and boycott campaigns lately “have lost
momentum. But there are constant efforts to persuade individual scholars to
support an academic boycott, as a matter of individual conscience. The latest
petitions use deliberately vague language, to bring in new recruits. This is
boycott by stealth, to build a constituency that will come into play at the
next big Palestinian-Israeli crisis.”
The petition was organized by Lawrence Davidson, a history professor at West Chester University in Pennsylvania, and Mona Baker, a publishing executive in Manchester, England.
In an e-mail to The Jewish Week, Davidson said he believed American academics
should also be called upon to “take a stand.”
In an article last September in the online newsletter Counterpunch, Davidson
and Baker jointly wrote that “all but a small number of Israeli academics
remain quiescent in the face of the violent colonial war the government wages
in the Occupied Territories. As a group they have had nothing to say about
Israeli violations of scores of United Nations resolutions and the
transgression of international law in the form of the Fourth Geneva
Convention.”
Marks said the boycott movement “is a continuing effort to single out just
the Israeli academic community and make demands on them not being made on
others anywhere else in the world, [namely] to make public their personal
political beliefs that are in no way connected to their academic positions.”
Addressing the charge of inconsistency in the Counterpunch article, Baker and
Davidson write that while many boycott advocates support causes related to
other areas, “for many of us, Jews, Muslims, Christians or non-denominational
Americans, Europeans and Arabs feel a special affinity for the
Israeli-Palestinian crisis. We all have emotional, cultural or religious ties
to the Holy Land …”
Marks said the boycott effort served to isolate Israeli academics who are
“one of the most pro-peace segments of the Israeli population. Many have
worked together with Palestinian colleagues to train Palestinian students.”
But Baker and Davidson say such collaborative efforts have largely been
scuttled by the ongoing crisis.
Marks founded International Academic Friends of Israel last year in response
to a series of boycott efforts in Europe. “We
started out doing e-mail,” he recalls. “But then we got the idea that the
best way to counteract was by actually holding meetings in Israel, inviting international academics to come.”
To date, the group has sponsored a half-dozen
conferences, with another planned for October in Eilat, a heart disease
symposium involving more than 30 international scientists who will address
several hundred cardiologists, mostly Israelis.
“Our goal is to support the academic community in Israel and keep the lines of communication and exchange of
ideas open,” says Marks.
Susan Heller Pinto, director of Middle East and
International Affairs at the Anti-Defamation League, said that while overt
boycott and divestment efforts pop up from time to time, it was difficult to
fully gauge the extent of their impact on the ground.
“Most cases are never reported,” says Heller Pinto. “An Israeli professor has
his journal article rejected … a request for sabbatical is denied … People
have their suspicions but nothing can be proven.”
In one high-profile case last year, a professor of molecular medicine was
suspended from Oxford University after he reportedly denied a lab study slot to a
Ph.D. candidate on the basis that he had served in the Israeli army.
Marks said that student, Amit Duvshani, had recently been accepted into his
physiology lab study program at Columbia, but insisted “he didn’t get any favoritism.”
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