Shimon Peres's name topped the list of several Nobel prize laureates today in a letter to the Guardian today opposing the AUT boycott of two Israeli universities. The only other two names I recognised were Elie Wiesel and Betty Williams.
George Monbiot said that "satire died on the day Henry Kissinger received the Nobel peace prize". I'd say it's been resurrected by this letter:
There is nothing more intrinsic to the academic spirit than the free exchange of ideas. Academic freedom has never been the property of a few and must not be manipulated by them. Therefore, mixing science with politics, and limiting academic freedom by boycotts, is wrong.
We, scholars from various disciplines who have devoted our academic lives to the advancement of humankind [priceless! the butcher of Qana is a scholar now.], express our unequivocal support for the separation of science from politics. The Nobel prizes we were honoured to receive were granted without the slightest consideration of nationality, ethnicity, religion or gender. Any deviation from this principle should not be allowed.
Supporting a boycott will undermine these principles. It is our hope that academic reasoning will overcome political rhetoric.
I would be wondering why the Guardian publishes such self-serving tosh but they did publish a couple of decent letters too. Like this one
One fact omitted from the anti-boycott advert in the Guardian (May 20) is that the boycott by the Association of University Teachers (AUT) of Bar-Ilan University is based on its support for Ariel College, an exclusively Jewish settlement constructed on illegally seized land in the occupied West Bank. Bar-Ilan supervises degree programmes at Ariel. The AUT resolution, which we hope is upheld this week, states that a boycott of Bar-Ilan should persist "until it severs all academic links" with Ariel. As the Israeli commentator Tom Segev pointed out in Ha'aretz, the boycott hurts only "those Israelis who support the perpetuation of the Israeli presence in the occupied territories".
We call on the British government and the EU to fall in line with the principled stance of the AUT. States must ensure that no Israeli institution that contributes to the violations of international law inherent in the land seizures and construction of illegal settlements in the Israeli-occupied Palestin ian territories should qualify for any government or EU-sponsored assistance.
This too was signed by lots of people. And then there was this
It is not AUT members supporting the boycott that remind me of the foe that the "people of Britain" triumphed over 60 years ago (to quote the anti-boycott ad) but the Israeli state with its repeated armed incursions into occupied land, destruction of houses and construction of a wall to exclude those of the wrong race or religion. The AUT should stand firm.
Andy North
Birmingham NUT executive.
before giving the last word to zionists thus:
Sue Blackwell, of Birmingham University, asserts that: "Israel is an apartheid state. It has many parallels with South Africa and the (academic) boycott campaign models itself on the campaign against South Africa."
As expat South Africans, some of us intimately involved in the anti-apartheid struggle, we reject this parallel. Israel may adopt policies with which we disagree, but the institutions of social democratic Israel do not bear comparison with the authoritarian and racist structures of apartheid South Africa. To equate this with Israel distorts the historical record.
We would wish to support those in Palestine and Israel who are seeking to forge dialogue, and we cannot see that an academic boycott would enhance that process.
This last one I find quite disturbing. Israel retains 92% of its surface area for Jews only, it bans non-Jewish refugees from returning to their land and it invites colonial settlers from around the world. Assuming that these "anti-apartheid" activists are Jews then it seems that they are like those Jews who supported Martin Luther King whilst supporting Israel as ardently as anyone could. They opposed segregation in America but supported in Palestine.
Israel Shahak had this to say about such people
Surely one is driven to the hypothesis that quite a few of Martin Luther King's rabbinical supporters were either anti-Black racists who supported him for tactical reasons of 'Jewish interest' (wishing to win Black support for American Jewry and for Israel's policies) or were accomplished hypocrites, to the point of schizophrenia, capable of passing very rapidly from a hidden enjoyment of rabid racism to a proclaimed attachment to an anti-racist struggle - and back - and back again.
How else does one explain this?
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