In February, members of the American Studies Association voted to allow a boycott of Israeli academic institutions to protest the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.
As of October 5th, more than 500 anthropologists — including at Harvard, Columbia, and Yale universities have joined the boycott.
What is the point of an academic boycott? The American Association of University (AAU) Professors say they “strike directly at the free exchange of ideas.”
The idea to boycott Israeli products came from Palestinian activists and academics, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas.
All of the academic organizations boycotting Israel are not boycotting any other country. Harvard, Yale, Georgetown, Brown, Johns Hopkins and Columbia universities, all have students which are boycotting Israel.
The pro-boycott statement says that “Israeli academic institutions are complicit with the occupation and oppression of Palestinians.”
The Israeli Anthropological Association sent a letter to the AAA calling any academic boycott of Israel “a moral insult to our integrity. Punishing scholars in Israel for the acts of their government is not only meaningless, ineffectual and counterproductive; it is first and foremost a breach of academic freedom and freedom of speech.”
The AAUP also recently issued a statement in support of Steve Salaita, who had been offered a position to teach at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign but lost it after he condemned Israel’s actions during its recent war with Hamas through statements on Twitter that the university found disturbing. Salaita has written that he publicly condemns anti-Semitism. He wrote in a piece published in the Chicago Tribune:
The point that Jewish people and the behavior of the Israeli state should not be conflated is one I have made consistently both in my academic writing and on my personal Twitter account, I have tweeted, “I refuse to implicate all Jewish people in the practices of the Israeli state.” I have also tweeted, “I refuse to conceptualize #Israel/#Palestine as Jewish-Arab acrimony. I am in solidarity with many Jews and in disagreement with many Arabs.”
And so when I wrote in one of the controversial tweets, “Israel: transforming ‘anti-Semitism’ from something horrible to something honorable since 1948,” my point was not that there is any honor in anti-Semitism, but that calling legitimate criticism of Israeli government policies an act of anti-Semitism drains the word of meaning and undermines the very real experiences of those who suffer its horrors. Likewise, the intent of my tweet that settlers should “go missing” was a call for an end to the settlements, which the international community largely agrees are counterproductive to peace, not a call to violence.
The university disagreed with him on the meaning of his tweets.
InsideHigherEd.com recently quoted Henry Reichman, the chair of the AAUP’s committee on academic freedom and tenure, as saying:
“I think efforts to promote the academic boycott of Israel will continue and perhaps even intensify, but at the same time I also think that attempts to restrict the academic freedom of pro-boycott advocates and other advocates of the Palestinian side, whether they advocate a boycott or not, will also increase.
“I’m not happy about either development. I think they’re both a function of the duration of this conflict and the seeming intractability of it.”
