Did an academic boycott help to end apartheid? (original) (raw)

The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel

2014

Last year, the British scholar Alan Johnson spoke up against a resolution to boycott Israel at the National University of Ireland, Galway. As he recounts the experience, "Anti-Israel student activists tried to break up the meeting by banging on the tables, using the Israeli flag as a toilet wipe, and screaming at me, again and again, 'Fuck off our fucking campus you fucking Zionist!'" This outburst came from students "whose heads were filled with the common sense of intellectual circles in Europe-Zionism is racism, the Zionists 'ethnically cleansed' the natives from the land in 1948, Israel is an 'Apartheid State,' Israel is committing a slow genocide against the remaining Palestinians, and so on." Johnson recognizes that students who recite this litany of angry accusations are "in thrall to anAnti-Zionist Ideology" that turns them into dedicated "Anti-Zionist Subjects." Most probably know little if anything about the history of Zionism or have any first-hand experience of Israel, but this ignorance does not keep them from eagerly participating in the BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement or from putting forward resolutions such as the one to which Johnson objected. Johnson's essay appears in Cary Nelson and Gabriel Noah Brahm's impressively comprehensive collection The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel.

The Fallacy of Academic Freedom and the Academic Boycott of Israel

CR: The New Centennial Review, 2008

If you're outraged at conditions, then you can't possibly be free or happy until you devote all your time to changing them and do nothing but that. But you can't change anything if you want to hold onto a good job, a good way of life and avoid sacrifice.-César Chávez The world witnessed the apex of the siege on Gaza in early 2008 when Palestinians once again took control of their destiny and blew up the apartheid wall imprisoning the population inside the Gaza Strip. Although many of Israel's violations against the Geneva Conventions have been highlighted in some of the international media-such as blocking fuel, medicine, food, and water from entering Gaza or preventing medical patients from

On the Calls to Boycott Israeli Academia (Part I)

If Israel is a contentious topic of conversation in mainstream and alternative news media, in everyday exchanges at the grocery store or the dinner table, it comes with at least as much vitriol when discussed in academia. Recent calls by members of professional associations such as the American Studies Association (ASA), the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), the Modern Language Association (MLA), and the American Anthropological Association (AAA) to adopt resolutions boycotting Israeli academia attest to this. As someone whose work focuses on what can be learned from an analysis of contemporary Israel and of Zionism, I find the way in which the debates about the calls for an academic boycott are framed-by both pro-and anti-boycott sides-to shut down possibilities for thinking and for politics more broadly. As an anthropologist CONNECT WITH US

Milestones in the history of the Israeli BDS movement: A brief chronology

2010

Traubman (2002), over 270 European scientists, including about 10 Israelis signed this letter. http://www.inminds.co.uk/boycott-news-0033.html 13 One should note that the idea of an academic boycott against Israel first originated at the "World Conference against Racism" in Durban, South Africa in 2001.

Peace Studies War – Boycotting Israel for the sake of international law?

2013

This article considers the current boycott of Israeli academics by the Sydney Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies (CPACS)-an affiliate of the University of Sydney-arguing that the boycott suppresses academic freedom, does not promote international law or peace, and is fundamentally racist. It was written in answer to an argument in defence of the boycott recently posted on the Australian-government supported website "The Conversation" by CPACS lecturer Paul Duffill (Jan. 15), who argued "the International Court of Justice ruled in July 2004 that Israel is occupying Palestinian territory in violation of international law", and therefore "a peace centre can hardly be expected to be 'neutral' or disinterested.'"