Critics of the AAUP Report

Omar Barghouti, Rema Hammami, Sondra Hale, Hilary Rose, Lisa Taraki

Omar Barghouti
Rema Hammami
Sondra Hale
Hilary Rose
Lisa Taraki

Omar Barghouti,
Independent Researcher, Palestine

—Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 29(2)

The American Association of University Professors ought to be commended for taking this timely and valuable initiative, promoting an open debate on academic boycotts and their bearing on the principle of academic freedom. In this paper, I shall limit myself to critiquing the AAUP’s position on academic boycotts and academic freedom as expressed in its Committee A report “On Academic Boycotts.”

From my perspective, three sets of problems arise from the AAUP stance on this issue: in a reverse order of importance, conceptual, functional, and ethical. Together, they pose a considerable challenge to the coherence of the AAUP’s position on the academic boycott of Israel, and they call into question the consistency of this position with the organization’s long-standing policies and modes of intervention in cases where its principles are breached. Most important, by positing its particular notion of academic freedom as being of “paramount importance,” the AAUP effectively, if not intentionally, circumscribes the scope of the moral obligations of scholars in responding to situations of oppression when carrying out such obligations conflicts with that notion.

Conceptual Inadequacy

Among other problematic aspects, the AAUP’s conception of academic freedom appears to be restricted to intrastate conflicts, mainly “governmental policies” that suppress the “free exchange of ideas among academics.” This leaves out academics in contexts of colonialism, military occupation, and other forms of national oppression where “material and institutional foreclosures . . . make it impossible for certain historical subjects to lay claim to the discourse of rights itself,” as philosopher Judith Butler eloquently argues.1 Academic freedom, from this angle, becomes the exclusive privilege of some academics but not others.

Moreover, by privileging academic freedom as above all other freedoms, the AAUP’s notion contradicts seminal international norms set by the United Nations. The 1993 World Conference on Human Rights proclaimed, “All human rights are universal, indivisible . . . interdependent and interrelated. The international community must treat human rights globally in a fair and equal manner, on the same footing, and with the same emphasis.”2 Finally, by turning the free flow of ideas into an absolute, unconditional value, the AAUP comes into conflict with the internationally accepted conception of academic freedom, as defined by the UN Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, which states:

Academic freedom includes the liberty of individuals to express freely opinions about the institution or system in which they work, to fulfill their functions without discrimination or fear of repression by the state or any other actor, to participate in professional or representative academic bodies, and to enjoy all the internationally recognized human rights applicable to other individuals in the same jurisdiction. The enjoyment of academic freedom carries with it obligations, such as the duty to respect the academic freedom of others, to ensure the fair discussion of contrary views, and to treat all without discrimination on any of the prohibited grounds.3 (Emphasis added.)

When scholars neglect or altogether abandon their said obligations, they thereby forfeit their right to exercise academic freedom. This rights-obligations equation is the general underlying principle of international law’s position on human rights. It also was one of the foundations of the AAUP’s initial view of academic freedom, as expressed in its 1915 Declaration of Principles, which conditioned this freedom upon “correlative obligations” to further the “integrity” and “progress” of scientific inquiry. Without adhering to a set of inclusive and evolving obligations, academic institutions and associations inhibit their ability to discourage academics from engaging in acts or advocating views that are deemed bigoted,hateful, or incendiary.

Should a professor be free to write, “Among [Jews], you will not find the phenomenon so typical of [Islamic-Christian] culture: doubts, a sense of guilt, the selftormenting approach. . . . There is no condemnation, no regret, no problem of conscience among [Israelis] and [Jews], anywhere, in any social stratum, of any social position”? In fact, if we substitute for the words in brackets—in order, “Arabs,” “Judeo-Christian,” “Arabs,” and “Muslims”—the above would become an exact quotation from a book by David Bukay of Haifa University.4 A Palestinian student of Bukay’s filed a complaint against him alleging racially prejudiced utterance. The university’s rector exonerated Bukay of any wrongdoing, although Israel’s deputy attorney general ordered an investigation against Bukay “on suspicion of incitement to racism.”5 In this case, the institution itself becomes implicated.

Criminal law aside, should an academic institution tolerate, under the rubric of academic freedom, a hypothetical lecturer’s advocacy of the “Christianization of Brooklyn,” say, or some “scientific” research explicitly intended to counter the “Jewish demographic threat” in New York? Arnon Soffer of Haifa University has worked for years on what is exactly the same, the “Judaization of the Galilee,” and he is launching projects aimed at fighting the perceived “Arab demographic threat” in Israel. 6 In his university and in the Israeli academic establishment at large, Soffer is highly regarded and often praised.

Do academics who uphold Nazi ideology, deny the Holocaust, or espouse anti-Semitic theories enjoy the freedom to advocate their views in class? Should they? Does the AAUP notion of academic freedom have the competence to consistently address such thorny cases?

Operational Inconsistency

Throughout its report, the AAUP fails to maintain fairness and commensurability when dealing with Israeli academics and their Palestinian counterparts. According to the report, what provoked the AAUP’s “prompt” condemnation was the perceived violation of a specific aspect of the academic freedom of Israeli scholars—their right to interact freely with international academics—as a result of the British Association of University Teachers’ (AUT) later-rescinded decision to boycott two Israeli universities. The injustices that prompted the AUT’s motion and that comprised, among several other breaches of human rights, the more radical and comprehensive denial of Palestinian academic freedom did not invite even censure from the AAUP. Indeed, when the AAUP report refers to these injustices at all, it reduces them to “what some see as the Israeli occupation’s denial of rights to Palestinians,” implying that most do not see military occupation as antithetical to the very claim to or exercise of freedom and rights.

Moreover, while the AAUP has approved numerous resolutions condemning regimes and institutions that limit the freedoms of citizens and faculty,” the organization, to the best of my knowledge, has never taken a public stand in response to Israel’s military closure of Palestinian universities and schools for several consecutive years in the late 1980s and early 1990s and its simultaneous “criminalization” of all forms of alternative, “underground” education.7 Despite ample documentation by major human rights organizations and UN organs as well as extensive media reports, Israel’s current policy of hampering and often denying Palestinians access to their schools and universities—through its illegal, colonial wall; roadblocks; and “Israelis-only” roads—has also been ignored by the AAUP. The same can be said about the Israeli army’s intentional shoot-to-harm policy against demonstrators, including even schoolchildren.8

Another aspect of the violations of the Palestinian right to education that has eluded the AAUP censure system is Israel’s contravention of the right to equality in education of its own Palestinian Arab citizens. A groundbreaking 2001 study by Human Rights Watch reaches the following conclusions:

Discrimination at every level of the [Israeli] education system winnows out a progressively larger proportion of Palestinian Arab children as they progress through the school system—or channels those who persevere away from the opportunities of higher education. The hurdles Palestinian Arab students face from kindergarten to university function like a series of sieves with sequentially finer holes. At each stage, the education system filters out a higher proportion of Palestinian Arab students than Jewish students. . . . Although Israel’s constitutional law does not explicitly recognize the right to education, its ordinary statutes effectively provide such a right. However, these laws, which prohibit discrimination by individual schools, do not specifically prohibit discrimination by the national government. And Israel’s courts have yet to use either these laws or more general principles of equality to protect Palestinian Arab children from discrimination in education.9

Doesn’t this institutionalized racial discrimination evoke parallels with South African apartheid? According to former Israeli education minister Shulamit Aloni, Israel is “no different from racist South Africa.”10 Also, member of Knesset Roman Bronfman criticized what he termed “an apartheid regime in the occupied territories,” adding, “The policy of apartheid has also infiltrated sovereign Israel, and discriminates daily against Israeli Arabs and other minorities.”11 Doesn’t this call for a similar divestment initiative in response? It is worth mentioning that in the South African case, the AAUP expressly justified its call for sanctions as directed “against apartheid” in general, whereas in the Palestinian case, it restricted its interest to “violations of academic freedom.”

And if calls for academic boycotts, as a rule, invite the AAUP’s censure, did the organization condemn the American Library Association when it implemented an academic boycott against South Africa in the 1980s? What about the Anti-Defamation League’s call for a counter-boycott of British universities after the AUT boycott decision?12

Ethical Responsibility

The AAUP report, “On Academic Boycotts,” states, “If there is no objective test for determining what constitutes an extraordinary situation, as there surely is not, then what criteria should guide decisions about whether a boycott should be supported?” (Emphasis added.) While “objective” criteria may indeed be an abstract ideal that one can strive for without ever realizing, some ethical principles have acquired sufficient universal endorsement to be considered relatively objective, at least in our era. Prohibitions against committing acts of genocide or murdering children are two obvious examples. The growing body of UN conventions and principles must be viewed as the closest approximation to objective criteria we can be guided by to adjudicate conflicts of rights and freedoms, particularly in situations of oppression.

UN norms and regulations may not all be consistent, but they are mostly informed by the ultimate ethical principle of the equal worth of all human lives and the indivisibility and interdependence of human rights to which every human being has a claim. Arguably, the violation of these principles was the strongest motivation behind the AAUP’s laudable call for divestment from South Africa during apartheid. This precedent is worth highlighting, as it deals with criteria, implicit as they may be, for deciding what constitutes an “extraordinary situation” necessitating exceptional measures of intervention.

The AAUP’s support for a form of boycott against South Africa can be interpreted or extrapolated to show that, when a prevailing and persistent denial of basic human rights is recognized, the ethical responsibility of every free person and every association of free persons, academic institutions included, to resist injustice supersedes other considerations about whether such acts of resistance may directly or indirectly injure academic freedom. This does not necessarily mean that academic freedom is relegated to a lower status among other rights. It simply implies that in contexts of dire oppression, the obligation to help save human lives and to protect the inalienable rights of the oppressed to live as free, equal humans acquires an overriding urgency and an immediate priority. This is precisely the logic that has informed the call for boycott issued by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI).

Misunderstanding the PACBI Call

Legitimate criticism from the AAUP and other organizations and individuals of the “exclusion clause” in the Palestinian call for boycott, coupled with PACBI’s resolute opposition to alleged “ideological tests” or “blacklisting,” convinced the campaign to omit this clause altogether. The intention of including it in the first place was not to draw lists, but to bring as much nuance as practicably possible to the call in order to better address the inevitable gray-area situations where it is not clear whether academics or intellectuals are acting in their personal capacities or as representatives of institutions subject to boycott.13

But overall, the AAUP largely misread the PACBI call. Since it is accustomed to dealing with violations of academic freedom perpetrated by governments or university administrations against academics, the AAUP report seems to preclude the possibility of institutional complicity of the academy itself in maintaining or furthering a system of oppression outside the academy’s gates, as is the case in Israel.

PACBI’s call specifically targets Israeli academic institutions because of their complicity in perpetuating Israel’s occupation, racial discrimination, and denial of refugee rights. This collusion takes various forms, from systematically providing the military-intelligence establishment with indispensable research—on demography, geography, hydrology, and psychology, among other disciplines—that directly benefits the occupation apparatus to tolerating and often rewarding racist speech, theories, and “scientific” research; to institutionalizing discrimination against Palestinian Arab citizens; to suppressing Israeli academic research on the Nakba, the catastrophe of dispossession and ethnic cleansing of more than 750,000 Palestinians and the destruction of more than 400 villages during the creation of Israel; and to directly committing acts that contravene international law, such as the construction of campuses or dormitories in the occupied Palestinian territory, as Hebrew University has done, for instance.14

Accordingly, although the ultimate objective of the boycott is to bring about Israel’s compliance with international law and its respect for Palestinian human and political rights, PACBI’s targeting of the Israeli academy is not merely a means to an end, but rather a part of that end. This is especially true when taking into account the fact that the academic boycott is one component of a general campaign for boycott, divestment, and sanctions adopted by a decisive majority of Palestinian civil society.

Regardless of prevailing conditions of oppression, the AAUP has been consistent in opposing academic boycotts, preferring economic boycotts in extreme situations. In justifying its preference, the AAUP argues, among other points, that an academic boycott injures blameless academics. But doesn’t an economic boycott hurt many more innocent bystanders, and not just in the academic community? Boycott is never an exact science, if any science is. Even when focused on the most legitimate target, it invariably causes injury to others who cannot with any fairness be held responsible for the disputed policy. The AAUP-endorsed economic boycott of South Africa during apartheid certainly resulted in harming innocent civilians, academics included. And as in the South African boycott, rather than focusing on the “error margin,” as important as it is, proponents of the boycott must emphasize the emancipating impact that a comprehensive and sustained boycott can have not only on the lives of the oppressed, but also on the lives of the oppressors, while doing their utmost to reduce the possibility of inadvertently hurting innocent individuals. As South African leader Ronnie Kasrils and British writer Victoria Brittain have argued, “The boycotts and sanctions ultimately helped liberate both blacks and whites in South Africa. Palestinians and Israelis will similarly benefit from this nonviolent campaign that Palestinians are calling for.”15 The Israeli boycott, in this light, can be a crucial catalyst to processes of transformation that promise to bring us closer to realizing a just and durable peace anchored in the fundamental and universal right to equality.

Recommendations

a. Consistent with its long-standing principles and practices, the AAUP is urged to censure Israel for its systematic infringement of Palestinian rights, including academic freedom.

b. Following its action in South Africa, the AAUP is urged to consider calling for divestment from companies that directly or indirectly prolong Israel’s military occupation, colonization, and other forms of grave oppression of the Palestinians. UN standards similar to but more comprehensive than the Global Sullivan Principles of Corporate Social Responsibility ought to be the proper frame of reference guiding such divestment.

c. Recognizing the evolving centrality of the United Nations in establishing international principles in most situations affecting freedoms, rights, and conflict resolution, the AAUP is advised to revamp its notion of academic freedom and its principles of intervention in extraordinary situations to conform with international standards and to become more relevant globally and more responsive to situations of conflicting freedoms and rights. This would bring the AAUP’s conception of academic freedom closer to the ideal evoked in the preamble to this paper.¨

Notes

1. Judith Butler, “Israel/Palestine and the Paradoxes of Academic Freedom,” Radical Philosophy 135 ( January-February 2006): 8–17.

2. United Nations World Conference on Human Rights,“Vienna Declaration and Program of Action,” July 12, 1993,http://www.unhchr.ch/huridocda/huridoca.nsf/(Symbol)/A.CONF.157.23.En?OpenDocument.

3. UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, “The Right to Education (Art.13),” December 8, 1999, http://www.unhchr.ch/tbs/doc.nsf/(Symbol)/ae1a0b126d068e868025683c003c8b3b?Opendocument.

4. David Bukay, “The First Cultural Flaw in Thinking: The Arab Personality,” in Bukay, Arab-Islamic Political Culture: A Key Source to Understanding Arab Politics and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Shaarei Tikva, Israel: Ariel Center for Policy Research, 2003).

5. Meron Rapoport, “In the Name of Truth,” Ha’aretz, April 28, 2005.

6. For more on this point, see Esther Zandberg, “Unacceptable Norms,” Ha’aretz, September 26, 2004; and Lily Galili, “A Jewish Demographic State,” Ha’aretz, July 1, 2002.

7. Birzeit University’s Public Relations Office, “The Criminalization of Education: Academic Freedom and Human Rights at Birzeit University during the Palestinian Uprising,” December 1989, 2.

8. Tel Aviv University professor Tanya Reinhart wrote at the beginning of this Intifada that “a common practice [among Israeli sharpshooters] is shooting a rubber-coated metal bullet straight in the eye—a little game of well-trained soldiers, which requires maximum precision.” http://www.tau.ac.il/~reinhart/political/DontSayYouDidntKnow.html. See also, Physicians for Human Rights, “Evaluation of the Use of Force in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank,” November 3, 2000,http://www.phrusa.org/research/forensics/israel/Israel_force_2.html.

9. Human Rights Watch, “Second Class: Discrimination against Palestinian Arab Children in Israel's Schools,” September 2001, http://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/israel2.

10. Roee Nahmias, “Israeli Terror Is Worse,” Yedioth Ahronoth, July 29, 2005.

11. Roman Bronfman, “The Hong Kong of the Middle East,” Ha’aretz, May 20, 2005.

12. Yair Sheleg, “ADL’s Boss Threatens Boycott of UK Academe,” Ha’aretz, May 18, 2005.

13. The PACBI statement can be read in full at: http://www. pacbi.org/boycott_news_more.php?id=123_0_1_0_C.

14. Oren Ben-Dor argues that one of the purposes of the proposed academic boycott is to “provide a means to transcend the publicly sanctioned limits of debate,” adding, “Such freedom is precisely what is absent in Israel.” Oren Ben-Dor, “Academic Freedom in Israel Is Central to Resolving the Conflict,” CounterPunch, May 21/22, 2005, http://www.counterpunch.
org/bendor05212005.html.

15. Ronnie Kasrils and Victoria Brittain, “Both Palestinians and Israelis Will Benefit from a Boycott,” Guardian, May 25, 2005.

The individual papers published in this special section of Academe are reflections on the AAUP report On Academic Boycotts,which appears on pages 39–43. The papers were prepared for a conference on academic boycotts that was to have been held in February 2006 at the Rockefeller Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy. Although the conference was canceled, the AAUP resolved to publish the papers so as to present the viewpoints that would have been debated at the conference. All conference invitees were invited to submit their papers for publication; some chose not to do so, as Joan Wallach Scott explains in the introduction that follows. The publication of this issue of Academe and these papers was supported by the Ford Foundation and the Nathan Cummings Foundation. Ernst Benjamin and Joan Wallach Scott, both members of the subcommittee of Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure that organized the conference, edited the papers. The opinions expressed in the papers are those of the authors and do not represent the views or policies of the AAUP.

Rema Hammami,
Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Master’s Program in Women’s Studies,
Birzeit University

In January 2002, Chivvis Moore, a fifty-seven-year-old American instructor of English language at Birzeit University, arrived at Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport after visiting her family for the winter break. Moore’s passport showed that she had a work permit from the Israeli civil administration to teach at Birzeit that had expired many months before. What it did not show was that the university lawyer had spent the previous few months in a futile attempt to get Moore’s and other foreign faculty’s work permits renewed by the Israeli authorities. As usual, the officer in charge had not issued an official refusal but had simply stated that “there were no work permits being issued.” Even before Moore took the chance of going home to visit her ailing mother, she faced the constant worry of being picked up at a military checkpoint with an expired visa, and she lived as a virtual prisoner in Ramallah, only crossing the checkpoint that blocked the way to the university when the soldiers weren’t there.

On arrival at the airport, she explained what had happened and was taken by airport security to a lockup inside the building and told she would be deported on the next available flight. Luckily, another female deportee inside the lockup had a mobile phone through which she was able to contact the university, which immediately contacted an Israeli human rights lawyer on her behalf. The lawyer explained to Moore that if she did actually get deported, she would probably never be able to reenter the country again; to stop the deportation, the lawyer would need to buy time. Over the next twenty-four hours, the security officers kept constant pressure on Moore, threatening that she would be incarcerated in an Israeli prison if she refused deportation. In the meantime, sick with a fearinduced migraine, Moore finally consented to board a flight but began vomiting as soon as she reached the plane. A sympathetic pilot explained that he could refuse to carry her if he deemed her medically unfit for travel. This he did, and the frustrated airport security personnel were forced to escort her back to the airport lockup. The lawyer, Lea Tsemel, was finally able to make enough fuss to get her released from the lockup and then spent the next month fighting with the various authorities until she wore them down into issuing a new work permit. All parties involved hoped that the massive expenditure in resources—time, energy, and money—to get the six-month work permit so that Moore could simply resume teaching English to Birzeit students would not repeat itself. But in fact, every subsequent time that Moore has needed to renew her work permit, the university has had to avail itself of Lea Tsemel’s intervention again.

Because Birzeit University has no guarantee of getting foreign faculty work permits from the Israeli authorities, these faculty have two choices: try for an elusive work permit or try entering Israel as a tourist. Over the last few years, most have taken the latter route, whose cost is the need to exit and reenter the country every three months, at considerable expense, always with a worry that one might be refused reentry. Another American faculty member, a professor of European history who had taken the tourist visa path, was denied entry at Haifa in September 2004. As with Moore, Roger Heacock explained to officials that he taught at Birzeit, that their records would show that at various times the Israeli civil administration had given him a work permit, but that for the last few years their refusal to issue a permit had forced him to depend on tourist visas. Due to the immediate intervention of the same Israeli human rights lawyer, Heacock was given a short “stay of execution,” a one-week visa, in order to try to get the needed work permit. Again, only after intense work by the human rights lawyer was Heacock finally issued the permit. But as with Moore, the permit was given only on a “one-time” basis.

While one might argue that both cases positively prove that Israel does have legal mechanisms and systems of recourse that Palestinian academic institutions can avail themselves of, in fact this is not always the case. Khaled al Nashef, a Palestinian of Austrian nationality without a West Bank residency card, was the director of Birzeit’s Institute of Archaeology until March 2002. After the refusal of the civil administration to issue him a work permit, he had been forced to rely on a tourist visa. In 2002, he was denied entry by Israeli border control through Jordan, after having exited to keep his tourist visa in order. When he called university administrators, they suggested that he try entering through Ben Gurion Airport, saying that the university would pay for the flight. After flying to Cyprus and attempting to enter the country through the Tel Aviv airport, he was again denied entry and was deported too quickly for a lawyer to be able to intervene. The human rights lawyer who had helped the other two Birzeit faculty said she could help only if he was on Israeli territory—that is, he had to fly into Ben Gurion Airport again. But Nashef, understandably traumatized by his experience, made the difficult decision to forgo putting himself through the same experience, one that came with absolutely no guarantee that, at the end of it, he would be able to resume his career at Birzeit.

I have started with these three cases because I think they most directly speak to the AAUP’s advocacy, as stated in “The AAUP Opposes Academic Boycotts,” of “the paramount importance of the freest possible international movement of scholars and ideas” and suggest most clearly how this principle is violated by the Israeli state when it comes to international scholars attempting to teach at Palestinian universities. Israel, as the occupying authority in the West Bank and Gaza, has the power to decide who does and does not cross the borders it controls to reach Palestinian universities; thus it has the power to enact or violate the AAUP’s core principles of academic freedom in relation to Palestinian universities.

But there are a number of ironies here. First, and most obvious, is the fact that the AAUP condemned the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) and the British Association of University Teachers (AUT) boycott calls based on the fact that they would deny Israeli scholars the “freest possible international movement” and foreclose their “freedom . . . to work with academic colleagues,” the very rights that the state of Israel regularly denies international scholars in relation to Palestinian academics and institutions. The less obvious irony is that the cases of the three scholars mentioned above, while speaking most directly to the principles enshrined in the AAUP position on academic freedom, are in fact relatively benign violations of Palestinian academic rights in comparison to the host of Israeli actions that have affected Palestinian academic life. Even the scholars whose experiences I have cited suggested that this aspect of Israeli treatment of Palestinian academic institutions was “not the main story.”

So what is the main story? For Palestinian educators and their colleagues, there are the open and dramatic examples of direct Israeli military actions against Palestinian educational institutions, personnel, and students. These have included closure of universities, military takeover of schools, the bombing and vandalism of educational institutions (including the Palestinian Ministry of Education), incarceration or harassment of students and faculty, and, in some cases, the killing of students and faculty. While these are the most material and quantifiable instances, the main story actually takes place on a less overt and dramatic level: through the ways that military occupation comprehensively delimits the possibility for Palestinians to functionally or legally access a range of civic and human rights. Over forty-nine years, the Israeli state has evolved an immense and sophisticated military, bureaucratic, and “legal” infrastructure in order to keep control over Palestinian territory (for the sake of Israeli settlement), to limit Palestinians’ access to their own territory, and to enable the suppression of opposition to this process of dispossession. It is through the everyday workings of this infrastructure that the most constant and debilitating actions affecting Palestinian society and its educational life take place.

I offer a few mundane examples from my own working life: fourteen of my graduate students in gender studies had their education summarily terminated in November 2000 because Israel would not allow them (along with the rest of the population) to reach the West Bank from Gaza; our graduate program cannot avail itself of a much-needed scholar in gender legal studies because she is a Gaza resident also unable to get permission from Israel to access the West Bank; and in the West Bank, our graduate program no longer has students from the northern and southern regions (who once made up 25 percent of our enrollment) because of the disruptive impact of military checkpoints. One of our brightest graduates cannot avail herself of a PhD scholarship to the United Kingdom because Israel denies her a travel permit due to her political background. Simply to reach my classroom every day, I must cross two Israeli military checkpoints, with nineteen-year-old Israeli soldiers deciding when and whether I shall get there.

Clearly, my colleagues’, my students’, and my own rights to academic freedom are under constant abrogation by Israel, not because it targets our academic freedom per se, but because by its very logic of action as an infrastructure of occupation and territorial dispossession, it abrogates the rights on which our academic freedom depends. For years, Palestinian universities, human rights organizations, and their supporters have tried to deal with these circumstances through piecemeal mobilizations to win back a few students or faculty academic rights, but to little effect. Thus, what is important about the interventions undertaken by PACBI and the AUT academic boycott statements was their attempt to mobilize for a transformation of the very structural context that violates Palestinian civil and human rights, rather than construing the problem as a series of individual violations of a narrowly conceived set of academic rights.

However, while supporting the larger aims of both boycotts, I did not sign either statement, but not because I share the same concerns about them as the AAUP—I have no ethical or moral qualms about the boycott statement or AUT’s position, as such. But given the highly charged international atmosphere that any criticism of Israel’s occupation provokes, I thought that neither approach (a broad boycott of Israeli academic institutions or a targeted boycott of two of them) was strategically framed in ways that might have an effective impact. On the one hand, as summed up by the AAUP’s report that academic institutions are “conducted for the common good,” universities and academics are assumed to be positive moral forces in society, regardless of the context, thus making them particularly difficult symbolic targets of criticism. More fundamentally, by focusing on Israeli academic institutions (particularly in the way undertaken by the AUT), the problem of redressing violations of Palestinian rights became narrowed in public debate to a face-off between Israeli and Palestinian academic rights, a problem exemplified by the AAUP’s position that the use of a boycott in an attempt to defend Palestinian academic freedom actually constitutes a violation of Israeli academic freedom. A more broad-based framing of the issue is necessary, and a more strategic approach to action is called for. These must be done in ways that can encompass and positively mobilize those sectors of the Israeli public, including academics, who are clearly against their government’s ongoing military occupation but who saw in the boycott a compounding of their political isolation within their own national community with isolation from their global peers.

Five years ago, as part of a group of Palestinian and Israeli “civil society actors,” I was invited to South Africa to learn firsthand from African National Congress leaders and members of the former apartheid government about their experience of the democratic transition to majority rule. When F. W. de Klerk was asked about the role of sanctions in bringing down the apartheid regime, he actively denied they had any impact. Instead, he argued that ways and means to get around economic sanctions were always found and that the apartheid regime had simply come to consciousness that apartheid was morally wrong. That ways to detour economic sanctions could always be found was convincing; what was not was the idea of the magical shift in the apartheid regime’s moral awareness. When pushed, de Klerk insisted that no, it wasn’t sanctions that brought about the shift—it was “international isolation.” Sanctions and boycotts are a message; that is, they work primarily at the symbolic level to tell a regime that because of its behavior, it is considered outside the international moral order.

The Israeli public has already shown how it can be swayed by even the threat of sanctions: for example, the election of Yitzhak Rabin following the threat by the U.S. administration to block loan guarantees if the Shamir government kept building settlements in occupied territory. Even the reaction to the AUT call was not simply one of counterattack; many Israeli colleagues who had been against the boycott said it had awakened many academics to the fact that the world was not treating Israel’s occupation as “business as usual,” and that it had been a reminder that being members in the global community of scholars could not simply be taken for granted.

The PACBI and AUT calls focused on academic sanctions because this was the area of their members’ ethical responsibility as well as their natural political community. As is suggested by my paper thus far, I see the need for a much wider sanctions movement, one that involves a wider activist community beyond academics and their particular area of competence. But what type of sanctions should be called for by academia within its particular area of responsibility and competence? The AAUP’s position, as it stands, absolves the academic community from having to take any responsible action toward the Israeli state’s abrogation of Palestinians’ civic, human, and thus academic rights. It is a morally untenable position. At the same time, the AAUP report suggests a number of moral dilemmas that would arise if, for instance, sanctions were undertaken against individuals. They have also raised the dilemma of the relation of academics and academic institutions vis-à-vis their own government’s actions and policies. Academic institutions are neither independent of their nation-state context, nor purely extensions of that state. So to what extent, and under what circumstances, should academics be expected to take responsibility for their state’s actions?

A way out of these dilemmas for the academic community is a sanctions strategy that clearly puts the onus on the role of states while making a clear-cut distinction between academic activities and resources that constitute “privileges” rather than “rights.” This would mean a focus on calling for an end to bilateral and multilateral state-level exchange and research-support agreements, rather than for an end to all academic exchanges regardless of their institutional parameters. Such a strategy would be based on the principle that the access of academics to interstate transfers of academic opportunities should not be considered in and of itself an academic right, but as constituting a privilege for states and, thus, for academics. The Israeli state, regardless of its government’s behavior, has been extraordinarily privileged by a host of bilateral and multilateral academic agreements. In 1999, it became the first non–European Union country to be given full status in the EU Framework Program for Research and Development, which provided funding and infrastructure for more than six hundred research projects to be undertaken jointly between Israeli universities, research institutes, and industries between 1999 and 2002. The agreement was undertaken between the EU and an Israeli interministerial committee, which included the Israeli Council on Higher Education and which is continuously renewed. More than thirty-five countries have state-level “cultural agreements” with Israel that promote exchange of students through the provision of state-sponsored scholarship funds. With the United States, the special U.S.-Israel Science and Technology Commission was founded in 1993, with a $30 million investment shared by both governments to further links in scientific research and development between the two states. The U.S. government has at least another two state-level research funding agreements with the Israeli government through the United States Agency for International Development.1

These agreements do not constitute “academic rights”; they are privileges given to the Israeli state, privileges that its nationals are able to take advantage of. Making these state-level privileges a focus of sanctions means taking a clear stand that the problem and its solution lies with state actors, and that responsible citizenship means calling for an end to states giving or receiving these privileges when in violation of human, civil, or academic rights. In addition, a state-level focus does not end the right or ability of Israeli academics and researchers to be part of the global academic community. Every single Israeli university has a myriad of privately sponsored, institutionalized exchange programs with universities in Europe and North America that are not called into question. Instead, focusing only on state-level privileges puts a moral focus on the actions of the Israeli state, while the academic rights of Israeli scholars are not only protected, but defended.

Palestinians and Israelis are facing a shared catastrophic future. A large burden of responsibility for this lies with the international community and its forty-nine year commitment to the politics of “constructive engagement” with each generation of new Israeli government policy toward the occupied territories. Now, more than ever, a conceptualization of academic freedom that condemns people of conscience to passivity while governments create disaster is untenable. ¨

Note

1. These include the Cooperative Development Research Program, to support collaborative research of scientists from Israel, the United States, and their counterparts in developing countries, and the Middle East Regional Cooperation Program, to support joint research projects between Arab and Israeli scientists on topics relevant to the development of the Middle East region.

The individual papers published in this special section of Academe are reflections on the AAUP report On Academic Boycotts,which appears on pages 39–43. The papers were prepared for a conference on academic boycotts that was to have been held in February 2006 at the Rockefeller Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy. Although the conference was canceled, the AAUP resolved to publish the papers so as to present the viewpoints that would have been debated at the conference. All conference invitees were invited to submit their papers for publication; some chose not to do so, as Joan Wallach Scott explains in the introduction that follows. The publication of this issue of Academe and these papers was supported by the Ford Foundation and the Nathan Cummings Foundation. Ernst Benjamin and Joan Wallach Scott, both members of the subcommittee of Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure that organized the conference, edited the papers. The opinions expressed in the papers are those of the authors and do not represent the views or policies of the AAUP.

Sondra Hale,
Professor of Anthropology and Women’s Studies,
University of California, Los Angeles

This is a time when many in the United States (and perhaps elsewhere) are discussing whether or not we need to transform the concept of academic freedom to address the changing political climate and, therefore, the changing nature of universities. Among the critics are Berkeley historian Beshara Doumani, who argues in the introduction to a collection of essays on academic freedom that institutions of higher education have been increasingly subjected to “surveillance, intervention, and control.”1 Many have written about the changes wrought by the commercialization and privatization of the university, making the production of knowledge for the public good increasingly difficult. No matter if we define academic freedom as an individual right of free speech or as a “professional privilege based on a codification of a set of understandings . . . that allows faculty to regulate their affairs according to their own set of standards,” we still need to ask if this academic freedom makes any sense in a context of occupation and conflict, that is, in the absence of “critiques of professional norms, national identity and hierarchical power relations.”2 What does it mean in the United States to refer to such an abstract freedom in the face of the USA Patriot Act, the “war on terrorism,” and the incessant assaults on the university as the last bastion of critical inquiry in the United States? We are forced to ask, in observing both the U.S. and Palestinian cases, whose freedom is being defended.

We are at a crossroads and need to think carefully about how to reconfigure the concept and praxis of academic freedom so that it can serve just as well in a world where war and systematic misinformation campaigns are the norm and where peace and the free pursuit of knowledge the exception. At stake is the continuation of the academy as the bastion of informed, independent, and alternative perspectives crucial to a better understanding of the world we live in.3

The Moral Imperatives

If ever there was a time for the AAUP to call for an academic boycott, this is it. If not now, then when? Can an organization as principled as the AAUP truly say that one should never use academic boycotts as a strategy to end the suppression of academic freedom in Palestine or anywhere else?

How can we discuss academic freedom in the absence of basic human rights? More explicitly, how can we take a “neutral” position that purports to protect the academic freedom (ergo, human rights) of Israeli institutions and academics and Palestinians in the occupied territories? Who is protecting the academic freedom of Palestinian institutions and academics? The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is the longestrunning occupation in contemporary times, and intervening, surveilling, and controlling educational institutions is an integral part of the success of the occupation. Perhaps the nail in the coffin of free education for Palestinians is the building of the wall that serves as a major obstacle for many Palestinians to continue schooling on a regular basis, if at all. The wall is a recent obstacle, but for many years other strategies have been employed to deny the free pursuit of education and the development of Palestinian society through education—strategies such as checkpoints, curfews, closures, invasions of campus grounds, harassment, removal of equipment, and arrests of teachers. The figures, maps, and statistics are available on these points. The portrait is clear: Palestinian education is an endangered species.

Yet as Tel Aviv University Linguistics professor Tanya Reinhart noted in the February 4, 2003, issue of ZNet,

never in its history did the senate of any Israeli university pass a resolution protesting the frequent closures of Palestinian universities, let alone voice protest over the devastation sowed there during the last uprising. . . . If in extreme situations of violations of human rights and moral principles, the academia [sic] refuses to criticize and take a side, it collaborates with the oppressing system.4

Through all of the withholding of education from Palestinians, Israeli academics continue to enjoy material advantages internationally—for example, obtaining visiting teaching posts and fellowships, having their articles published in international journals, getting their books published, receiving general academic funding, and traveling at will. Shahid Alam, professor of economics at Northeastern University, argues, as do many others, that Israeli educational institutions, as arms of the state, are serving the state “through their links with the military, the political parties, the media, and the economy.”5 Or, as Mona Baker, Manchester University director of the Center for Translation of Intercultural Studies, claims, “Israeli academic and research institutions are a major source of prestige, legitimacy, and income for Israel.”6 Whose academic freedom is the AAUP supporting?

The AAUP Report “On Academic Boycotts”

A series of 1970 commentaries in Academe on institutional neutrality asked “how bad things would have to get before the principle of academic neutrality were no longer absolute.”7 Arguably, in modern history, only a few national institutions have been so systematically subjected to a full range of devastating and sustained strategies by another political entity as have Palestinian universities by the state of Israel.8 Although I am always dubious of this kind of exceptionalism, the fact is that the Palestinian case is exceptional and should be treated accordingly.

The AAUP’s report “On Academic Boycotts” forwards the argument that, although economic boycotts can be effective, academic boycotts are not. I have implied above that an academic boycott is an economic boycott. Striking at the economic privileges of Israeli academics weakens their economic gains and, thus, the gain of the state. An academic boycott would contribute to the international movement to boycott Israeli goods.

However, there is another curious aspect of the AAUP’s statement about academic boycotts, namely, that there is no consideration of the material aspect of academic freedom. In the AAUP statement, ideas are treated as if they have no materiality, as if they are separate from the material base of society. In this way, ideas are treated as if they are above society, apart from society. If we concretize ideas, see them as part of the material base, then an academic boycott can make a lot of sense. The economic privilege of the idea people is challenged.

The last issue in the AAUP statement that I want to challenge is the notion of one truth. I am asking if, by supporting Israeli institutions in their “search for truth and its free expression,” we are overlooking Palestinian institutions in their search for truth. Don’t we need to recognize the existence of multiple truths? Furthermore, by seeming to accept the truth of one side (the academic freedom of Israeli educational institutions), don’t we automatically negate the truth of the other side (the trammeled academic freedom of Palestinians)? Wouldn’t an academic boycott be effective in raising the consciousness (even if not succeeding, at first, in appealing to the conscience) of Israeli academics to join many in the international community in protesting state control and repression of Palestinian educational institutions? One cannot help but think that the academic freedom of Israelis would gain deeper resonance.

As a North American free-speech and academic-freedom advocate, I am arguing that academics should take any measures at our disposal (for our power is limited) to contribute first to effecting the development of human rights and economic equalization and then to developing within that framework a newly wrought academic freedom for Israelis and Palestinians. We can take a first step with an institutional, targeted academic boycott.¨

Notes

1. Beshara Doumani, “Between Coercion and Privatization: Rethinking Academic Freedom in the Twenty-First Century,” in Academic Freedom After September 11, ed. Beshara Doumani (New York: Zone Books, 2006), 11–57.

2. Ibid., 11.

3. Beshara Doumani, “Academic Freedom Post-9/11,” ISIM Review 15 (Spring 2005): 23.

4. Tanya Reinhart, “Academic Boycott: In Support of Paris IV,” ZNet, February 4, 2003, http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=2961.

5. Quoted in Mona Baker and Lawrence Davidson, “In Defense of the Boycott,” CounterPunch, September 18, 2003, 3.

6. Mona Baker, “On the Distinction Between Institutions and Individuals” (conference paper, “Resisting Israeli Apartheid: Strategies and Principles,” London, December 5, 2004).

7. Quoted in “On Academic Boycotts” on page 41 of this issue of Academe.

8. One might be able to argue that there have been situations of genocide in which educational institutions have been systematically destroyed. In the case of the Nuba in the mountains of western Sudan, successive governments have carried out various strategies of cultural annihilation.

The individual papers published in this special section of Academe are reflections on the AAUP report On Academic Boycotts,which appears on pages 39–43. The papers were prepared for a conference on academic boycotts that was to have been held in February 2006 at the Rockefeller Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy. Although the conference was canceled, the AAUP resolved to publish the papers so as to present the viewpoints that would have been debated at the conference. All conference invitees were invited to submit their papers for publication; some chose not to do so, as Joan Wallach Scott explains in the introduction that follows. The publication of this issue of Academe and these papers was supported by the Ford Foundation and the Nathan Cummings Foundation. Ernst Benjamin and Joan Wallach Scott, both members of the subcommittee of Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure that organized the conference, edited the papers. The opinions expressed in the papers are those of the authors and do not represent the views or policies of the AAUP.

Hilary Rose,
Emerita Professor of Social Policy,
University of Bradford and Co-Convenor,British Committee for the Universities of Palestine

It is not easy for any academic to call for a boycott—our lives are committed to the production and sharing of knowledge, a commitment and practice we speak of as “academic freedom.”1 However, as I shall argue, that freedom cannot be understood without reference to the material conditions of knowledge production and sharing, specifically, in the context of this discussion, in the case of Israeli and Palestinian universities.

From Moratorium to Boycott

In “On Academic Boycotts,” the AAUP opens its account of the origins of the present discussion with the resolutions by the United Kingdom’s Association of University Teachers (AUT) calling for the boycott of two Israeli universities, Bar-Ilan and Haifa. To understand how these resolutions came to be passed requires putting them into context. In recent years, and especially with the growth of Israeli human-rights abuses, collective punishments, house demolitions, targeted assassinations, and, most recently, the construction of the “separation wall,” judged illegal by the International Court of Justice, the majority of European citizens have become profoundly concerned by Israel’s policies.2 A Eurobarometer study in 2003 reported that 59 percent of those surveyed saw Israel as the country posing the greatest threat to world peace.3 A report by Amnesty International documenting the abuse of human rights by Israel challenges its inclusion in Europe-Israel trade agreements and in the European Research Area. The defense of human rights is a precondition of participation in the European Union, whether as a member or as a trading and research partner, hence the call initiated by Hilary and Steven Rose for a moratorium on EU funding of research collaboration with Israel in April 2002. Later that year, this call was adopted as a resolution by the AUT, and it still stands.4 Some French universities—as institutions, not just individuals or even trade unions—took a much stronger position of complete boycott, which unleashed a powerful Zionist backlash claiming the move was anti-Semitic, and most, but not all, subsequently rescinded their statements.5 In July 2004, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) issued its call for a comprehensive boycott and later that year, we in the United Kingdom established the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP), whose twin aims are (a) to support Palestinian universities, staff, and students and (b) to oppose the continued illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, with its concomitant breaches of international conventions of human rights, its refusal to accept UN resolutions or the rulings of the International Court, and its persistent suppression of Palestinian academic freedom.6

In support of these aims, BRICUP works (a) to put pressure on the EU and the UK government for the exclusion of Israel from the European Research Area; (b) to develop policies that encourage individual academics to break their professional links with Israel by such actions as refusing to collaborate on research with Israeli institutions, to referee papers or grant applications issuing from such institutions, or to attend academic conferences in Israel and supporting Israeli academic colleagues working with Palestinian colleagues in their demand for self-determination and academic freedom; (c) to work within our trades unions and professional organizations in support of such actions; and (d) to explore forms of support for Palestinian academic colleagues.

Note that the initial moratorium call and the subsequent BRICUP statement referred specifically to an institutional boycott, not to one aimed at individuals of any specific nationality or ethnicity. We saw the “exceptionalist” clause in the initial PACBI call, which excluded Israeli academics working directly with Palestinians for peace and justice from the boycott, as a generous gesture not wanting to condemn all academics working in Israeli universities, even though most were silent when protest was needed. Interestingly, the AUT’s call for the academic boycott of apartheid South Africa was also exceptionalist. Such a clause did not merit the fatuous Israeli lobby claim that a civil society group, with powers only of moral persuasion, could unleash a force resembling McCarthyism. Recently, PACBI has clarified and reaffirmed its commitment to an institutional boycott of academic institutions as part of a wider project of boycott, divestment,and sanctions directed against the state of Israel.

A constant difficulty for the boycott movement has been that strong and well-funded Zionist interests constantly seek to displace Israel as the target of criticism and instead to relocate the focus of discussion on an abstract, context-free discourse about “academic freedom,” in which the illegal Israeli occupation, military repression, and very real physical and psychological sufferings of the Palestinian people disappear. This ideological and politically driven impulse to defend Israel and her universities, right or wrong, particularly strong in rightwing quarters but disturbingly widespread across the political spectrum, has been able to derive strength by commandeering the discourse of academic freedom.7

Different Locations and Perspectives

The European calls for boycott reflect an important transatlantic difference from American views in both our understanding of the present political situation and our historical experiences. The AAUP report is an expression of the American Constitution’s First Amendment, an important but abstract statement of principle. The American experience of the cold war and McCarthyism as a period when academic freedom and free speech suffered has properly affected the AAUP’s thinking, and its self-criticism of its own lack of activism in those difficult years is to be welcomed. Even more welcome is its defense, alongside others (such as the American Civil Liberties Union), against the new McCarthyism, which was both formalized in and unleashed by the USA Patriot Act.

We in Britain have no such foundational text as the First Amendment. Our nearest equivalent is the European Social Charter, which places human rights at the center of the EU’s developing constitution. European culture has also been profoundly shaped by Immanuel Kant and Denis Diderot, those theorists of constrained rights, and by the experience of war and occupation. In the United Kingdom, the National Council for Civil Liberties was created by left and liberal intellectuals, not in the defense of free speech per se but in the concrete and practical defense of the civil rights of unemployed workers in the 1930s in the face of police violence against legitimate peaceful protest. Thus for us, the concepts of academic freedom and its close kin, freedom of speech, cannot be placed in a discourse of ahistoric abstraction but must be related to specific contexts.

Thus statements such as those of Haifa professor of geography Arnon Soffer—who has said, “If we want to remain alive we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day. If we don’t kill we will cease to exist. The only thing that concerns me is how to ensure that the [Jewish] boys and men who are going to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings”—would be covered by the AAUP’s call for freedom of expression, “however repugnant the views expressed.”8 By contrast, in Britain, Soffer’s comments would fall under the rubric of hate speech and be subject to prosecution, just as currently the leader of the British National Party is on trial for expressing not dissimilar sentiments concerning Muslims, as is also an imam from the Finsbury Mosque for comments concerning Jews. Providing the trial is fair, British political and ethical culture endorse such restrictions on the freedom of speech.9

On Academic Complicity and Academic Silence

Soffer’s comments, which were not repudiated by Haifa, along with the university’s promotion of a conference, from which Palestinian Israelis were excluded, on demographic proposals for ensuring a permanent Jewish majority in Israel, point to a more general problem in treating Israeli universities as divorced from the interests and policies of the Israeli regime.10 An “academic boycott is usually at least once removed from the real target,” the AAUP’s “On Academic Boycotts” argues. Often, maybe. This is perhaps why an academic boycott of Chinese or Indonesian universities—or, for that matter, American or British universities—may not be appropriate. But sometimes such a boycott is not so readily “removed from the real target.”

The AAUP statement cites the example of Nazi Germany and poses, but does not answer, the question whether supporters of academic freedom should have continued research cooperation once the Nazis were in power. What might an answer look like? In practice, even left and liberal geneticists, not least from the United Kingdom (for example, the eminent Marxist geneticist J. B. S. Haldane), actively collaborated with German geneticists, even those who provided the “scientific” foundations for the concept of “lives not worth living” and Rassenhygiene (racial hygiene), right up to the outbreak of war. This cooperation continued while German universities complied with the racist dismissal of Jews from academic posts. What stopped scholarly exchange was not a challenge from defenders of academic freedom, even though the German universities were complicit in the destruction of that very freedom, but the declaration of war. When Germany fell, the allies restored many of those selfsame leading geneticists as heads of laboratories. If this was academic freedom, it was not an appropriate memorial for the 6 million slaughtered in the camps. Here, an absolutist principle of academic freedom, it could be argued, failed to challenge institutionalized racism, thus facilitating the eugenic project of the Final Solution. Even after the Nazis were defeated, this academic freedom took it upon itself to forgive the scientific racists, thus erasing from public view their culpability in genocide.

This attempt to answer the AAUP’s question casts light on the danger of too abstract a concept of academic freedom, but it should not be misunderstood as an overt or covert attempt to compare the Nazi period with the present discussion of the case for the academic boycott of Israel. That is not my purpose. Instead, I refer to Edward Said’s argument that for the Jewish people the greatest tragedy and horror is the Holocaust while for the Palestinians it is the Naqba. Tragedy and horror cannot be measured or compared.

The case for an academic boycott of Israel is that it both challenges the policies of the Israeli government and also draws attention to the complicity of the universities themselves. We are constantly told that the Israeli universities are one of the major sources of criticism of and opposition to the state, yet despite the heroic efforts of a very few, what is mostly audible is the silence of Israeli academia. Silence on the part of good men, Edmund Burke trenchantly observed, is all that is needed for evil to be done. Far from being the bastions of criticism of government policy, the universities have not harbored many dissidents; rather, they have tended to harass and restrain such individuals. Israel academic associations also remain silent in the face of flagrant breaches of law and human rights, in contrast, for example, to the protest by the American Sociological Association over the Iraq war.11 Some academics, such as Soffer, actively promote government policies associated with illegal acts and breaches of fundamental human rights. Many have argued that Haifa University treats its Arab students systematically as second-class citizens.12 Further, Haifa does not even defend the academic freedom of its own Jewish students, as evidenced by the case of Teddy Katz, who was forced to retract his thesis identifying a massacre carried out by the Israeli military. Bar-Ilan, until it broke its links in the wake of the AUT votes last year, supervised the work of the College of Judea and Samaria in the illegal settlement of Ariel in the illegally occupied West Bank. This is good reason, in the words of the AAUP’s “On Academic Boycotts,” to “feel no obligation to support or contribute to institutions that are not free or that sail under false colours.” The distinction between “no obligation to support” and the call for an institutional boycott comes close to equivocation. In concrete terms, what does the AAUP think it or its members should do about Bar-Ilan and Ariel?

Economic Boycotts Versus Symbolic Boycotts

The AAUP has previously expressed appropriate concern about the consequences of university research protected by patents, the USA Patriot Act, and the proposed selfcensoring by academic journals and of researchers in the sharing of information with colleagues from certain nations.13 However, what perhaps has not been clearly recognized is the extent to which these practices are no longer isolated breaches of previously accepted norms of academic freedom but have become pervasive features of a new system of knowledge production, especially in the biological and information sciences, largely funded by industry and the military, and associated with today’s globalized capitalist economy. “Intellectual property” is the term that so brutally links the cultural and the economic. It stalks the universities of the world.

And it is precisely in the context of today’s knowledge economy, rather than in some abstract universe, that the distinction that the AAUP wishes to draw between a potentially acceptable economic boycott and an unacceptable, “largely symbolic” academic boycott becomes unsustainable. (For that matter, why is an academic boycott not acceptable when an economic boycott is? Surely not because it is symbolic, since it hits hard where it matters—the amour propre of academics in Israel and their position in the global marketplace, above all, in informatics and biotechnology.)

Inclusion in the European Research Area is thus partly about the privileged minority of Jews of European or North American origin within Israel feeling they belong to “the West” and its research and cultural community, and it is partly pushed materially by the financial hunger of researchers. The Israeli economy is distorted by its massive expenditures on illegal settlements, illegal roads, the illegal wall and, of course, the illegal military occupation itself; it is not just Israel’s poor who are feeling the pinch but even the hitherto well-financed universities. Meanwhile, Europeans are all too aware of the extent of the financial as well as political support of Israel on the part of the United States and of the failure of the United States to use its powers to put pressure on Israel to negotiate a just peace.

As Nelson Mandela pointed out, boycotts are tactics in political struggle. The universities in Israel are an important part of the state apparatus. It is precisely because of the strength of the Israel academy and its centrality in Israeli economic, social, and cultural life that an academic boycott becomes such a crucial strategic instrument. In a different context, it might be different. Consider the South African situation, where it was not the academic but the sporting boycott of apartheid that dramatically raised public awareness and thus pressure for change, leading ultimately to UN sanctions. The concern felt by the Israeli state regarding the effect of a boycott on its cherished centers of knowledge and learning is demonstrated by the fact that it was not merely the Israeli university administrations that mobilized to reverse the AUT resolutions: the Likud cabinet itself was moved to establish an antiboycott committee chaired by Binyamin Netanyahu.

When the Israeli government intervenes in this way, it is surely clear that the issues involved are political as much as academic and that the government and academia are involved together in an ultimately unacceptable compact. While the implications of the recent Palestinian elections are far from clear, an academic boycott of Israel would be an expression of the despair of European civil society, including academics, over the failure of our governments and the European Union to help pressure Israel to negotiate with the Palestinians so as to build a just peace. But we also need the voices and commitment of American academics to build a policy of boycotts, divestment, and sanctions as a nonviolent form of political pressure.

Notes

1. This response to the AAUP’s “On Academic Boycotts” is a personal statement, but it has benefited from extensive discussion with colleagues from the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine: Martha Mundy, Steven Rose, Jonathan Rosenhead, and David Seddon.

2. This criticism of Israel also encompasses opposition to the deliberate killing of civilians, even when engaged in armed struggle with the aim of achieving national liberation—an opposition affirmed in international law.

3. Flash Eurobarometer 151, “Iraq and Peace in the World,” November 2003, 80, http://ec.europa.eu/comm/external_relations/iraq/doc/fl151_iraq_full_report.pdf.

.4 Association of University Professors, “AUT Rebuts Claim over Middle East Policy,” December 12, 2002, http://www.aut.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=271 (accessed April 31, 2006).

5.The French position was set out on the Web site www.pjpo.org. This server has since closed, but a cross reference is available at www.Europalestine.com/article.php3?id_articles=1727. Accessed July 20, 2006.

6. The full PACBI statement is available at www.pacbi.org. Accessed July 20, 2006. The Web address for BRICUP is www.bricup.org.uk.

7. The power of the Israel lobby was documented by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in “The Israel Lobby,” London Review of Books 28 (6), available online at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01_.html.

8. Arnon Soffer, “It’s the Demography, Stupid,” Jerusalem Post, May 21, 2004, Upfront supplement. Soffer also claims that he is the intellectual architect of the separation wall. The AAUP language cited is from its report “Academic Freedom and National Security in a Time of Crisis,” published in Academe 89 (November– December 2003): 34–59.

9. I write with the memory of the Irish Republican Army bombing campaigns, when the routinely prejudiced conduct of the courts was grasped in the common joke, “Innocent till proved Irish.” An e-mail message from an Israeli academic laconically asked how Soffer’s proposal would have gone down in New York if it was made by an American Arab vis-à-vis New York Jews. (Personal communication.)

10. In Israel, the relative independence of institutions from the state—such as the army, the judiciary, and others—has weakened. Thus military refusniks who will not serve in the occupied territories are insisting on the rule of international law, but the Israeli courts deny their argument. Thus we see scholars, even of Judith Butler’s sophistication, using “state” where conventional analysis would indicate government. I take her conflation of categories as echoing the conflation on the ground, but this needs systematic analysis and not mere echo. ( Judith Butler, “Israel-Palestine and the Paradoxes of Academic Freedom,” Radical Philosophy 135 ( January–February 2006).

11. ASA News, “Sociological Association Takes Position on Conflict in Iraq,” August 1, 2003, http://www.asanet.org/page.ww?name=Sociological+Association+Takes+Position+on+Conflict+in+Iraq&
section=Press.

12. I have heard this point routinely made by both antiracist Israeli Haifa academics (for example, at the Faculty for Israel-Palestine Peace conference in Jerusalem in January 2004) and by Palestinian ex-students from Haifa currently studying or teaching in Britain.

13. “Academic Freedom and National Security in a Time of Crisis,” Academe 89 (November–December 2003): 34–59.

The individual papers published in this special section of Academe are reflections on the AAUP report On Academic Boycotts,which appears on pages 39–43. The papers were prepared for a conference on academic boycotts that was to have been held in February 2006 at the Rockefeller Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy. Although the conference was canceled, the AAUP resolved to publish the papers so as to present the viewpoints that would have been debated at the conference. All conference invitees were invited to submit their papers for publication; some chose not to do so, as Joan Wallach Scott explains in the introduction that follows. The publication of this issue of Academe and these papers was supported by the Ford Foundation and the Nathan Cummings Foundation. Ernst Benjamin and Joan Wallach Scott, both members of the subcommittee of Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure that organized the conference, edited the papers. The opinions expressed in the papers are those of the authors and do not represent the views or policies of the AAUP.

Lisa Taraki,
Associate Professor of Sociology, Birzeit University

My comments on the AAUP’s report “On Academic Boycotts” are made with the recognition that I share common ground with the Association on an issue of importance. The AAUP gives academics and their associations a legitimate role in politics and political struggles, both at the local and global levels. I also find encouraging the AAUP’s recognition of the complexities of academic boycotts, despite its “broad and unconditional” condemnation of them.

However, I find that the Association’s position does not allow for the full realization of the potential for political engagement by academics and their associations in the struggle against injustice, tyranny, and the stifling of basic freedoms. I think this limitation stems from the AAUP’s representation of the academy and its notion of academic freedom and from its reluctance to pass judgment on the circumstances that may call for drastic actions such as boycotts. I also think that there has been a misreading of the Palestinian call to boycott.

In clarifying its position on academic boycotts, the AAUP states, “The Association’s defense of academic freedom, as explained in the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, rests on the principle that ‘[i]nstitutions of higher education are conducted for the common good . . . [which] depends on the free search for truth and its free exposition.’” If this is a general statement of what academic institutions should be, then we cannot disagree with it as an ideal. However, as we all know, the reality is different, and that is what should guide our judgments and our actions. Universities are not completely autonomous institutions, linked, as they are, with the economic and political needs of the state. Universities are among the most important ideological arenas where state power and prevailing social and political hierarchies are reproduced and legitimized. This is particularly so in the case of Israel, where a close partnership has existed from the very beginning between the academy and the political-military-intelligence establishment. In addition, in the Israeli academy, disciplines such as demography, archaeology, sociology, and even architecture have long been part of the colonial project, whether directly or indirectly. That those who work outside the reigning paradigms in these disciplines are in a small minority is testimony to this overriding reality.

I do not doubt that the authors of the report would agree, as scholars, with the gist of what I have said about the academy as a historical and current reality. But I would respectfully submit that the position of the AAUP, based as it is on an absolute, abstract, and ahistorical notion of the academy, may open the door—in practice—to an abdication of responsibility by academics to be critical of all varieties of regimes and institutions, whether they are political or academic. Furthermore, by casting a halo of sanctity around the abstract notion of academic freedom, the AAUP—in its public function as an association of faculty—may have inadvertently made the critique of regimes of oppression very difficult.

I submit that the notions of university autonomy and academic freedom need to be examined critically. The AAUP report gives the impression that these are selfevident; I think they are not.

I think that the abstract ideas of academic freedom and the free exchange of ideas cannot be the only norms influencing the political engagement of academics. Often, when oppression characterizes all social and political relations and structures, as in the case of apartheidera South Africa or indeed Palestine, there are equally important and sometimes more important freedoms that must be fought for, even—or I would say especially—by academics and intellectuals.

This is the question I would pose: if it was possible in the 1980s for the Association to determine that the situation in South Africa was grave enough to warrant calls for divestment, why does it not take the position that it is possible to assess the degree of gravity of a particular situation, such as that in Palestine or indeed anywhere else, and advocate a response? I believe that it would be a failing of academics and intellectuals not to be able to identify “extraordinary situations” of violations of basic principles of self-determination, freedom, and justice. Otherwise, no situation would be judged graver than any other, and the cause of justice would be that much more retarded. In the case of Palestine, these violations, along with grave breaches of international law—not to mention the evidence for war crimes—are only too well established in international documents, scholarly works, and media reports, and I find it disconcerting that the AAUP’s report does not take a position on whether Israel’s occupation denies Palestinians their rights.

The AAUP report presents four main arguments against academic boycotts: (1) boycotts curtail the freedom of academics to work with colleagues, disrupt the international movement of scholars and ideas, and strike at the free exchange of ideas; (2) boycotts punish academics who are not complicit with the state policies that are the boycotts’ real target; (3) boycotts can compound a regime’s repression of freedoms by cutting off contacts with an institution’s or country’s academics; and (4) faculty or ideas that could contribute to changing state policy are harmed when communication with outside institutions is cut off.

In attempting to understand the AAUP’s arguments against academic boycotts, I find that there has been a conflation of the different rationales for boycotts and, consequently, a misreading of the Palestinian call for the boycott of the Israeli academy. The report does not make a clear distinction between boycotting institutions because of their suppression of the academic freedom of their members and boycotting them because of their complicity in systems of oppression larger than the academy. Since this distinction is not made explicit in the report, the arguments used to refute the rationale for a boycott on the grounds of the violation of academic freedom are not sufficiently distinguished from those arguments used to reject boycotts arising from the complicity of institutions in oppression. It follows that the report does not distinguish between what is the best way academics can respond to institutions’ suppression of academic freedom and what may be the appropriate instrument or tactic in a political struggle whose aim is to bring about a change in the larger status quo.

In light of this, I find that the report’s critique of the academic boycott of Israel as undermining exactly the freedoms one wants to defend is misconstrued. The freedoms that the Palestinian campaign seeks to defend are the freedoms of a people, not only the academic freedoms of a small minority of Palestinian academics (as important as these may be to us as academics who have a direct interest in enjoying them). The aim of the academic boycott of Israel is not to safeguard academic freedom as an abstract principle, nor to obtain better conditions for academic freedom in Palestine, but to obtain justice for Palestinians.

The AAUP’s report cites an article written by Omar Barghouti and me, critiquing our view that “the march to freedom [may] temporarily restrict a subset of freedoms enjoyed by only a small portion of the population.” The portion of the population in question consists of members of the Israeli academy, and indeed our boycott is not intended to obtain better conditions for academic freedom at Israeli universities, nor to protest or redress specific infringements on academic freedom at specific Israeli institutions. Rather, it aims to bring about a change in the policy and practices of the Israeli state through targeting one institutional arena implicated in the state’s violation of international law. The overriding principle is not academic freedom (whether for Palestinians or Israelis) but freedom from colonial rule and oppression. The underlying principle here is the equality of human beings in moral worth and their equal right to live in freedom, as expressed in the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This same principle informed the struggle in South Africa and the international support it received. Our call for boycott urges the international academic community “to comprehensively and consistently boycott all Israeli academic and cultural institutions as a contribution to the struggle to end Israel’s occupation, colonization and system of apartheid.”1 Our rationale for targeting the academy stems from our view of the relation of the academy to state structures and the role of academics and their institutions in legitimizing oppression.

I would be avoiding the academic freedom issue if I did not address its place in the decision to boycott the Israeli academy. First of all, it should be made clear that the British Association of University Teachers’ (AUT) decision to boycott Haifa University had to do with the suppression of dissent at the university. Regardless of how one evaluates the soundness of the AUT approach, it is clear that the issue of academic freedom in this instance is not unrelated to the larger issue of oppression. To me, the suppression of dissenting voices in the Israeli academy is one indicator among others of the complicity of university administrations and faculty bodies in the occupation and, indeed, in racism. While our aim is not to reform the Israeli academy and increase academic freedom there, it is clear that the expansion of freedoms in Israeli universities will invariably lead to an enlargement of the space for dissent and thus will contribute to the struggle for justice. In this regard, I would like to quote ex-Israeli academic Oren Ben-Dor, who has expressed this better than I am able to:

Academic freedom is not some idle abstraction which unconditionally shields academic pursuits. . . . Its purpose is to provide a means to transcend the publicly sanctioned limits of debate. . . . Israeli universities have, by and large, been conscripted into the Israeli national consensus. The absence of academic freedom is evident . . . in the pervasive marginalisation of the debate about the racist nature of the Zionist state, and about the catastrophe which Zionism inflicted on the Palestinian people. . . . A boycott to foster real academic freedom in Israel should unite academics all over the world. What is at stake is the primordial freedom to question the racist assumptions that lie at the heart of nationalistic ideology and historiography. Thus, such a boycott is even more important than a general boycott of Israel as a criminal state, to which Israeli academics would be subject like the rest of the Israeli population. . . . [T]he boycott I wish to see is a boycott intended to produce academic freedom.2

The story of the complicity of the Israeli academy in the system of oppression is a long and complicated one. This history has yet to be written, although there is plenty of evidence and sufficient basis for an indictment. Here, I would only wish to document two stark facts about the Israeli academy and Israeli academics that to us justify the institutional boycott that we advocate: (1) no university or association of faculty has ever issued a statement expressing opposition to the occupation or considering it an impediment to the realization of Palestinian rights, including the right of faculty and students to a normal academic life; and (2) there is a near total lack of any institutional censure of the racism that appears in the guise of scholarship. The remarkable tolerance of the Israeli academy and its members for racist pronouncements, analyses, and policy recommendations issued by academics is entirely in keeping with the normalization of discourses of exclusion pervading Israeli society, finding daily expression in the media, the educational system, the government, the military, and civil society.

In closing, I would like to discuss briefly what I think the international academic community—and especially American academics and their representative organizations—can do to support Palestinian rights, including the right of academics and students to the pursuit of a “normal” academic life. Gestures of solidarity and commitment to justice can include public statements against the continued colonization of Palestinian land and the advocacy of divestment initiatives of the sort already launched at American universities by student activists. The American academy may not be ready for an academic boycott. But I urge you to consider the meaning and consequences of the privileged position the Israeli academy enjoys in international academic networks. To my mind, privileging the Israeli academy, whether in preferential treatment for financial support or through normalizing its place in the academic landscape, is a contribution to the normalization of occupation, oppression, and injustice. ¨

Notes

1. Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, “Call for Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel,” http://pacbi.org/campaign_statement.htm.

2. Oren Ben-Dor, “The Boycott Should Continue: A Fight to Foster Real Academic Freedom in Israel Should Unite Academics All Over the World,” Independent, May 30, 2005.

The individual papers published in this special section of Academe are reflections on the AAUP report On Academic Boycotts,which appears on pages 39–43. The papers were prepared for a conference on academic boycotts that was to have been held in February 2006 at the Rockefeller Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy. Although the conference was canceled, the AAUP resolved to publish the papers so as to present the viewpoints that would have been debated at the conference. All conference invitees were invited to submit their papers for publication; some chose not to do so, as Joan Wallach Scott explains in the introduction that follows. The publication of this issue of Academe and these papers was supported by the Ford Foundation and the Nathan Cummings Foundation. Ernst Benjamin and Joan Wallach Scott, both members of the subcommittee of Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure that organized the conference, edited the papers. The opinions expressed in the papers are those of the authors and do not represent the views or policies of the AAUP.

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