To critics of the academic boycott of Israel: What about “academic freedom” for the children of Gaza?
It has been nearly a decade since the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement started in 2005, seeking justice and rights for Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories. It has steadily increased in size and force; one recent sign of its growing strength and influence is that both national governments, and states within the U.S., have issued declarations against it. An entire generation of university students here and abroad is now discussing divestment from firms that do business in the occupied territories. Nearly every month student governments pass divestment bills.
Although more and more academic organizations are hearing cases for the academic boycott of Israeli institutions, and many boycott resolutions have passed, a few key arguments against the academic boycott continue to wield persuasive power. After all, it’s one thing to say that one will not invest in companies involved in supporting an illegal occupation; it’s rather another to say that one will not collaborate with an entire state’s academic institutions. On the face of things, this seems to go against everything the academy stands for.
At this point, the debate is deadlocked around a single set of talking points. But these points miss the most essential element: the rights, and lives, of Palestinians. Let’s first review the main debate, then get to the heart of the matter.
Critics of the academic boycott argue that the academy is a place for the free circulation of ideas, that dialogue between U.S. and Israeli institutions remains a critical means for improving the chances for peace, and that the boycott would prevent scholars and students, especially those in Jewish studies, from carrying on research and learning in Israel that is essential to their profession and education.
Those who are in favor of the academic boycott point to the actual language of the BDS tenets, which insists that individual scholars are free to collaborate, attend conferences, and do research together, among other things. They say this is a boycott of institutions, not individuals. And they point to the utter failure of decades of “discussion,” whose only result seems to be the election of a hard-right government committed to making an illegal occupation permanent and enshrining the rights and privileges of one group over and against those of another.
Nevertheless, many critics of the boycott still see any boycott whatsoever as an abridgment of their academic freedom. And so it goes — a constant back and forth, with little hope of resolution.
What is absolutely necessary to break the deadlock and to really judge the legitimacy and the justness of the academic boycott of Israeli institutions is exactly what we lack in the United States: a full spectrum of information about Israel-Palestine. Speaking as an academic: We need data. What works against this is the fact that even information from neutral sources, such as the United Nations, and human rights groups, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, is routinely suppressed, ignored or distorted in the mainstream media. And in its place, what we find over and over again in the debates about the boycott is a concern about ourselves: “What will happen to us if the boycott is successful?” But in focusing on this potential harm, we make ourselves blind to the existing, and voluminously documented, harms already and continually done to the academic freedoms of Palestinians.
Now, more and more of that information is coming out, from reputable, neutral sources. This information paints a fuller picture of what academic life looks like in Israel/Palestine, where even going to school is challenging and often deadly. And while this information is, as noted above, usually absent from the mainstream media, all it takes is a modicum of curiosity and the desire to know — something academics are supposed to be endowed with — to find this data. Once one does, one is able to start having a truly informed debate about an academic boycott of Israel. We simply have to know more about the academic and educational rights that are denied Palestinians — the very rights for which the boycott exists. Only after seriously considering that information in as ethical a way as possible and balancing those concerns against our self-interest can we arrive at an ethically informed choice.
Right after the December 2013 vote of the American Studies Association to honor the call for the academic boycott of Israel, the New York Times quoted me as saying, “People who truly believe in academic freedom would realize protesting the blatant and systemic denial of academic freedom to Palestinians, which is coupled with material deprivation of a staggering scale, far outweighs concerns we in the West might have about our own rather privileged academic freedoms.” In her essay “Exercising Rights: Academic Freedom and Boycott Politics,” Judith Butler expresses a similar notion in a full and comprehensive manner:
One might begin by asking whether there are conditions under which academic freedom can be exercised. The thesis that academic freedom is conditional presupposes that there are institutional structures that make academic freedom possible and protect its ongoing exercise. What does it matter if there are such conditions? Is academic freedom not separable from the conditions of its exercise? My suggestion is that academic freedom is a conditioned freedom and that it cannot rightly be thought or exercised without these conditions…. We might begin to understand checkpoints, erratic closures of universities, and the indefinite detention of students and faculty for espousing political viewpoints as relevant to both the right to education and academic freedom itself.
Source: www.salon.com