Doug Henwood Talks

Financial Times - May 31, 2007

Boycotting Israel

Gesture politics are rarely edifying. At times, though, they are
downright stupid. Yesterday’s decision by Britain’s University and
College Union (UCU) of academics, to boycott their counterparts in
Israel because of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, is a good
example.

No reader of these columns would be in any doubt about the Financial
Times’ view of the occupation and the continuing and expanding
colonisation of Palestinian land: illegal, immoral, self-defeating
for Israel and incendiary for the Middle East.

Yet there are five solid reasons why this is a fatuous move, of no
use to Palestinians struggling for an independent state or to
Israelis opposing the occupation, fighting the moral corrosion it
causes their society and - against all odds - hold-ing out for a
resolution to the conflict offering security to Israel and justice to
the Palestinians.

First, the very notion of an academic boycott is intrinsically
absurd. The academy is, by definition, the arena for debate and
enquiry, indeed for controversy. The sharper that is, the more likely
that truth is what will emerge.

Second, Israeli academics have, on the whole, an honourable record of
opposing the occupation. It is from the universities that army
conscripts have campaigned against serving in the occupied territories.

Only yesterday leading academics demanded the government allow
students from Gaza to travel to study in West Bank universities.

Third, there is an issue of selective double standards: why not
target Russian academics over Chechnya, Chinese lecturers over Tibet,
Indian academics over Kashmir?

Fourth, the timing of this ill-thought through initiative could
hardly be worse. For the first time in more than a generation, the
pro-Israel lobby in the US, where informed debate on the Middle East
is far less vigorous than it is in Israel, is being openly challenged
and can no longer rely on bullying Americans into a consensus that is
bad for Israel and makes it impossible for the US to articulate its
own national interest in the region.

Fifth, and directly related to that, this meaningless boycott is a
political gift to Israel’s irredentist right, which can now resume
its facile equation of criticism of Israeli policy with anti-Semitism
- and pin the blame for both on Europe.

For this futile gesture reinforces the sense of siege and existential
threat that has been the essential tool of the Israeli right going
back a century to Ze’ev Jabotinsky and the Revisionist Zionists.
Benjamin Netanyahu, their modern paladin who is already well set to
return to power, must be positively ecstatic.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 31st, 2007 at 5:48 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.