Academic
Boycott: In Support of Paris VI
by Tanya Reinhart
Dissident Voice
January 29, 2003
In April 2002,
following the Israel's "operation" in Jenin, first calls for
institutional academic boycott of Israeli universities appeared in England and
in France. The British petition called
to freeze European Union contracts with Israeli university as long as Israel
continues its present policy. What
started as the individual voice of concerned academics, has become lately a
formal resolution of a French university.
The Administrative council (board of Governors) of the prestigious Marie
Curie university - Paris VI issued in
its meeting of December 16, 2002 the following resolution:
"The
Israeli occupation of territories in the West Bank and Gaza renders it impossible
for our Palestinian colleagues in higher education to teach or pursue their
research: the renewal of the European Union-Israel Association Agreement, in
particular as regards research (6th Framework Program for Community RTD) is a
form of support for the current political policies of the State of Israel and
would contravene Article 2 of this agreement (relationships between the
parties, as well as all the stipulations of this agreement, which are based on
the observance of human rights and democratic principles guiding their domestic
and foreign policies and which are a key feature of this agreement)"
(Paris VI university press release)
This decision
raised an enormous storm in France.
Bodies ranging from the Jewish Lobby, to conservative parties all came
up with the standard anti-Semitism accusations. "Several hundred
protesters, including the philosophers Bernard Henri-Lèvy and Alain
Finkielkraut, a leading Paris politician, the Nazi-hunting lawyer Arno
Klarsfeld and Roger Cukier, the president of the Jewish umbrella organisation
CRIF, waved banners and chanted slogans outside the campus entrance"
(Guardian Jan 7, 2003). Threats of potential consequences and budgetary cuts if
the university does not retract its decision came from official governmental
sources. Under this pressure a second
discussion of the resolution was scheduled for this week.
But Paris VI did
sustain the pressure. In the board
meeting on Monday January 27, 2003, the previous resolution was reconfirmed
with an overwhelming majority. A similar resolution was subsequently approved by
two other French universities in Grenoble and in Montpellier. Below is my expression of support, to
appear (in French) in Le Monde.
*
It is not easy
for an Israeli academic to support the calls for boycott of Israeli academic
institutions these days. Like any other segment of the Israeli society, the
universities are paying the price of Israel's war against the Palestinians,
with severe budget cuts and deteriorating research conditions. A freeze of the EU funds would, no doubt,
make things even tougher. It is
therefore understandable that the Israeli academia is mobilizing its forces to
attack any such boycott attempt.
Understandable, but not just.
Most of the
Israeli academics, just like their colleagues in France, supported the boycott
of apartheid South Africa, which contributed to the end of apartheid. This means that they recognize boycott as a
legitimate means for the international community to enforce a change, when
serious breaches of moral and civil principles occur. The question, then, is whether the analogy between Israel and
South Africa's apartheid is correct.
I believe that
even much before its present atrocities, Israel has followed the South-African
Apartheid model. Behind the smokescreen of the Oslo "Peace process",
Israel has been pushing the Palestinians in the occupied territories into
smaller and smaller isolated enclaves-- a direct copy of the Bantustans model.
Unlike South Africa, however, Israel has managed so far to sell its policy as a
big compromise for peace. Aided by a battalion of cooperating 'peace-camp'
intellectuals, they managed to convince the world that it is possible to
establish a Palestinians state without land-reserves, without water, without a
glimpse of a chance of economic independence, in isolated ghettos surrounded by
fences, settlements, bypass roads and Israeli army posts -- a virtual state
which serves one purpose: separation (Apartheid).
But what Israel
is doing under Sharon far exceeds the crimes of the South Africa's white
regime. It has been taking the form of systematic ethnic cleansing, which South
Africa never attempted. Since April last year (following the Jenin
"operation") we are witnessing the daily invisible killing of the
sick and wounded being deprived of medical care, the weak who cannot survive in
the new poverty conditions, and those who are bound to reach starvation.
Since the US is
backing Israel, and the European governments are silent, it is the moral right
and duty of the people of the world to do whatever they can on their own to
stop Israel and save the Palestinians. In fact, a boycott on Israeli
institutions, economy and society is already taking place and growing:
consumers boycott, tourism boycott, divestment movement in the US campuses, and
cultural boycott. As in the case of South Africa, academic boycott is just one
specific realization, yet it drew most fire, and the question which underlies
the debate around this is whether there is something special about the Israeli
academia that exempts it from the ongoing general boycott, e.g. something that
distinguishes it sharply from the white academia of South Africa at the time?
The traditional
spirit of the academia is that intellectual responsibility includes the
safeguarding of moral principles. What could help to exempt the Israeli
academia would be some institutional record of such safeguarding. But there is none. Never in its history did
the senate of any Israeli university pass a resolution protesting the frequent
closure of Palestinian universities, let alone voice protest over the
devastation sowed there during the last uprising. It is not that a motion in that direction failed to gather a
majority, there was no such motion anywhere in the Israeli academia. Even the closure of Al Quds University in
Jerusalem last July left the Israeli academia unmoved. If in extreme situations
of violations of human rights and moral principles, the academia refuses to
criticize and take a side, it collaborates with the oppressing system.
At the
individual level, there are pockets of resistance and opposition in the Israeli
academia, as anywhere else in the Israeli society. Indeed, close to four
hundred (out of the tens of thousands of) Israeli academics signed a petition
supporting conscientious draft objectors. But the individual intentions are not
what is under consideration here, because the boycott is institutional. (I do
not support individual boycott, like stopping overseas collaborations with
individual Israeli scholars.) The Israeli academia, as a whole, is not
different than the white academia of South Africa. In both places there were also dissidents. It is sometimes a
trait of intellectuals that they can choose the option of dissent. But the dissidents do not represent the
academia; they are not dissidents thanks to the mainstream academia, but rather
despite of it. Some of the real
dissidents of the Israeli academia are being constantly harassed, publicly or
behind the screens, by university authorities.
If one needs
more indication of how detached the Israeli academia is from the perception of
the apartheid reality, one can read the arguments of the Israeli opponents of
the boycott. Thus, Jerusalem professor Idan Segev urges the intellectual
community opposing the occupation to help in "constructing an open
dialogue between Israeli and Palestinian universities". Rather than
boycotting, the EU should "help us
organize an international scientific congress in one of the universities of the
West Bank" (Liberation, Jan 7, 2003).
Though the Jerusalem campus is about 15 minutes drive from the prisons
of the West Bank, Prof Segev appears to have no idea about what is happening in
these prisons. He never heard that the
Palestinian academic life is on the verge of paralysis, that the towns and
village are isolated and locked, that there is curfew most of the time. It is in this pastoral setting that he
believes a scientific conference will promote dialogue.
The first step in promoting dialogue would be to
remove Israeli tanks from the gates of Palestinian universities.
Tanya Reinhart is Professor
of Linguistics at Tel Aviv University. She is the author of Israel/Palestine:
How to End the War of 1948 (Seven Stories
Press, 2002), one of the most important books on the Israel-Palestinian
conflict to date. Visit her website: http://www.tau.ac.il/~reinhart