Cheerleaders for “Wiping Israel Off The Map”Maimon Schwarzschild

The British academic trade unions have again voted for a “comprehensive and consistent boycott” of all Israeli scholars and academic institutions: expressing an all-but-explicit hope for the extinction of the Jewish state.

Bruce Kesler posts Steven Plaut’s draft of how the British universities might have worded a boycott of Czechoslovakia in 1938:

While we have tried other forms of persuasion, the racist regime in Czechoslovakia continues to abuse the human rights of the country’s ethnic Germans, denying the Sudeten Germans their right to self-determination…

Our own corresponent, Menachem Kellner at Haifa University, emails this report:

First of all, there is resistance to this latest academic assault on honesty and decency.

A US group opposing the boycott, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East – http://www.spme.net/ – has been very active and very effective.  This group includes many left-of-centre academics.

A group of left-wing UK academics have banded together to fight the boycott under the heading of “Engage” –  http://www.engageonline.org.uk/home/index.php.

Here is my own two-cents-worth on the boycott situation:

Actually, in formal terms, there is no boycott. There is a call from the “Congress” of the University and College Union (UCU) for all members to engage in various activities which in practice (if not in language) constitute: 

   –  an attack on Israeli academia
   –  an uncritical adoption of the pro-Arab line
   –  the demonization of Israel

without calling for an explicit boycott of Israel institutions or individuals. To see the actual text of this mealy-mouthed and chicken-hearted attempt at condemning Israel while avoiding lawsuits, see:
http://www.ucu.org.uk/

So what is all the fuss about?  I think that there is a lot to make a fuss about:
      a) This sets an extremely dangerous precedent. 120,000 UK lecturers are now on record as adopting the Palestinian ‘narrative’ and in effect rejecting the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish and democratic state.
      b)  The dangers of a snowball effect are obvious.  Campus radicals in the US are relentlessly eager for “divestment” in Israel – and US universities are a force on Wall Street.
      c)  The British boycott discourages the good guys.
      d)  It encourages the bad guys.

What is happening here? If you really want to know, I can recommend two books to you:

–  Markovits, Andrei:  Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America. Princeton University Press, 2007
–  Cohen, Nick:  What’s Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way. London: Fourth Estate, 2007.

They are both written by very smart people with impeccable left-wing credentials, who are appalled by the way in which the left has been hijacked by enemies of freedom. Markovits is a profound and sophisticated political scientist who sees anti-Americanism, and its little sister, anti-Zionism, as parts of the ideology of pan-Europeanism. Cohen, a journalist, was prompted to write his book by the sight of his fellow leftists supporting Saddam Hussein, since their hatred of the US trumped every other consideration. Both books make extremely depressing reading.  Still, not all Europeans, of course, buy into this ideology: witness the recent French elections.

In my view, put schematically and simply, all too many ‘intellectuals’ in the West have been seduced into thinking that all things western/rational/enlightenment are ‘hegemonic’ evils (how they love that word!). In other words nothing that Israel, a western-oriented, democratic, US-allied state, can do is right; nothing its enemies can do is wrong.

But, not all academics, not even all British academics, are morons. So what happened to the UCU? Two hundred odd (and I mean odd!) representatives were chosen at local chapter meetings. Who attends such meetings? True believers, minor-league academic politicians, and the like.  This is true, but it is hardly comforting. The default position in UK academia, and in too much of US academia, and even in certain parts of Israeli academia, is that Israel is the world’s most dangerous state. Britain’s Guardian, the newspaper of record of UK intellectuals, makes the NYTimes appear like a Zionist house-organ. It is against this background that all too many UK academics allowed their union to be hijacked by Israel-hating extremists.

Third, is all this anti-Semitism? I think that is a dangerous tack to make.  Not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic, not all critics of Israel hate Jews, and certainly Israel has lots not to be proud of – and lots more to be extremely proud of.  If we define an anti-Semite as someone who hates Jews more than is really necessary, as the old saying has it, then it is clear to me that the leadership of the boycott movement is riddled with Jew-haters, a few of whom are Israeli Jews themselves (see Isaiah 49:17). It is equally clear to me that many people who support these boycotts do so out of naivete, foolishness, herd-thinking, etc., but not because they hate Jews as such. They do not seem to give much of a damn about the Palestinians, either, but combining hi-falutin moral rhetoric with a fundamental lack of seriousness is not something only academics do – although we seem to do it particularly well.

What is to be done? I am not in favor of organized counter-boycotts – although I was very happy when Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg cancelled his trip to the UK recently:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=863233&contrassID=1&subContrassID=1

To my mind, the most effective thing to do is to foster ever-more and ever-closer connections between UK and Israeli academe. If our government had an ounce of sense – there I am being messianic – funds would be allocated to bring UK academics over to Israel and Israeli academics to the UK. Till that happens, I guess that vociferous protests will have to suffice.

For my full thinking on all this, read my article on the International Advisory Board for Academic Freedom website http://www.biu.ac.il/academic_freedom/.

Long live the Zionist Revolution!

Kellner writes more temperately than I would.  Anyone who knows Britain intimately will have very little doubt, I think, about the visceral anti-semitic impulses behind these “anti-Zionist” boycotts.