Still, imposing itself as a foreign colonial cheating, lying "peace partner" in an alien land by sheer violence, brutality and dehumanization of the indigenous Palestinian population will never work for USrael.
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This story ran on page A1 of the Boston Globe on 20 February 2003.
Israeli academics hit back against boycott
By Patrick Healy, Globe Staff, 2/20/2003
JERUSALEM - After a year of suffering outright hostility, verbal abuse, and countless snubs, Israeli scientists and intellectuals have begun fighting back against European and American colleagues who are boycotting Israel as a way to force the Israeli government to make peace with the Palestinians.
Many Israelis say they are breaking with tradition and putting professional niceties aside to condemn these overseas colleagues as radicalized anti-Semites. The boycott's stakes, Israelis say, are too high to ignore: The movement aims to shut down not only international academic exchanges and tourism, but also science research, a crucial and stable piece of Israel's weakened economy, worth about $5.4 billion.
In recent months, Israeli academic groups have denounced three French universities as anti-Semitic after the schools endorsed the boycott; the Israeli criticism caused one of the schools to distance itself later from the boycott. Israeli writers also decried a recent decision by a bookshop in Oxford, England, to boycott an Israeli publisher. And in an incident that roiled Israel's leading campus, Hebrew University, an American college professor recently compared Israel's treatment of the Palestinians to Nazi Germany's genocidal policy toward the Jews - a statement that drew wide outcry.
''Innocent people are being harmed here who have nothing to do with politics, and it only adds fuel to the burning conflict with the Palestinians,'' said Nachman Ben-Yehuda, dean of social sciences at Hebrew University. ''People want to do something.''
The year-old, British-based boycott movement is gunning specifically for special European Union programs that bring together Israeli and European researchers and scientists. The EU has not gone along with the boycott, but individual scholars say they and their programs here have been hit. The Israel Science Foundation, for instance, has seen the number of its research workshops fall by half, and scholars are split about whether the boycott or terrorism is to blame.
The boycott has taken on an emotional cast for many Israelis recently, too, since the Feb. 1 death of Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon aboard the space shuttle Columbia, because Ramon has become a symbol of the scientific exchanges that the boycott seeks to halt.
''I hear concerns about my `relationship with Israel' all the time, and it sickens me,'' said David Hansel, a tenured neuroscientist whose lab is at Universite Rene Descartes, in Paris, and who also works five months a year at Hebrew University. ''In France, at least, I feel people are trying to build momentum for this boycott, criticizing Israel and also identifying colleagues who are Jewish or Israeli.''
Hansel, a French citizen, said he has been up for a promotion there for several months, but colleagues have told him it has been blocked because of his affiliation with Hebrew University. He says he has also received e-mail that he found anti-Semitic; one colleague wrote, for instance, that ''Hebrew ... likes to cross all borders, geographical, disciplinary, and otherwise.''
Given the importance of international collaboration in the sciences, tens of thousands of Europeans and Americans have signed anti-boycott petitions, compared with several hundred who have signed pro-boycott petitions. Even so, when a foreign scholar is invited here now and sends regrets, it raises eyebrows.
''They have the fallback of saying it's the violence, but the broad perception here is that they don't want to closely associate themselves with Israel,'' said Aaron Benavot, a sociologist at Hebrew University.
He called the boycott ''an absolute failure'' because no major organizations have joined it, but said there has been a toll on some individual scholars.
In recent interviews with almost two-dozen Israeli scholars, impatience with the boycott was notable. An American offshoot, protest movements on 50 US campuses calling for the schools to divest from Israeli companies, has proved more dispiriting than troubling, because professors are not directly affected. Yet Israeli academics say they are determined to find new ways to blunt these attacks.
After the governing council of Universite Pierre et Marie Curie, in Paris, approved a pro-boycott statement in December, some Israeli scholars coordinated an e-mail campaign to denounce it. The council subsequently watered down the statement, but did not rescind it; two other universities, in Grenoble and Montpellier, have also endorsed the boycott.
Benavot said he was considering surveying Israeli academics to measure the impact of the boycott. The results may be useful to underscore the weakness of the campaign, he said. Another scholar, Oren Yiftachel, an associate professor of geography at Ben Gurion University, is helping organize a book by Israeli and Palestinian scholars on political conflict.
''The boycott is a diversion from the real issues, so we need to start focusing on those issues,'' said Yiftachel, who recalls experiencing a ''flexing of boycott muscle'' last year when the journal Political Geography asked him to revise an essay in part by adding a comparison of Israel to apartheid South Africa.
He did not make the change; publication of the essay is still pending.
Israeli researchers have also gained a symbolically important ally against the boycott - the Palestine Academy for Science and Technology, whose secretary general told the Globe that he opposes the Europeans' efforts. But in a sign of the briar patch that is Middle East politics, the academy leader also complained that Israeli academics are not doing enough to help Palestinians, who have seen some West Bank universities closed by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government.
''I always thought science brought people closer together, regardless of politics,'' said Imad Khatib, the secretary general, whose offices in Ramallah were damaged by Israeli bombardment last spring, during a broad military campaign that helped inspire the boycott.
Despite the Israeli opposition, supporters of the boycott say they believe they are gaining ground, particularly with the actions at the three French universities this winter.
Steven Rose, who spearheaded the boycott with his wife, Hilary, described the movement as an ''act of conscience'' against ''the way the Zionist project is being pursued.'' A biologist at Britain's Open University, Rose also dismissed the notion that the boycott was politicizing science.
''European Union science research is political in its own right, with its own criteria, own industrial goals and targets, and it's a fair target,'' Rose said.
Yet for some Israeli intellectuals, the European ostracization seems like an ugly turn back in history.
Informed by the Inner Bookshop of Oxford that, because of the Sharon government's policies, the books of Israel's Astrolog Publishers were no longer welcome on its shelves, editor Elisha Ben-Mordechai said he felt sorrow at first, then anger.
''Look, if they want to not buy our books, that's not a problem,'' said Ben-Mordechai. ''But to send me a letter that I am to blame for all that happens to the [Palestinians], all that happens in the territories - well, I was born in a refugee camp, my wife was born in a refugee camp. This is outrageous.''
Patrick Healy can be reached by e-mail at phealy@globe.com
This story ran on page A1 of the Boston Globe on 2/20/2003.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.
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