2005-04-23-ceasefire

By Ira Sharkansky

I was saddened, but not surprised, by the news that the Association of University Teachers in Britain has declared a boycott against the Israeli universities Bar Ilan and Haifa. Still pending is a proposed boycott against the Hebrew University.

Why not surprised? The issue has been around for a while, and it's a natural for academics who yearn to demonstrate their standing with fashions that lean heavily to the left.

Boycott actions include demands that university teachers do not collaborate with Israelis, do not allow Israeli academics to publish in professional journals, participate in professional conferences, or receive research funds from international bodies.

The charge against Bar Ilan is that it maintains branch campuses in the occupied territories. The charge against Haifa is that it rejected a masters thesis that had claimed an Israeli military unit had slaughtered civilians during the 1948 war. The charge against Hebrew University involves a claim that the university has built dormitories on land owned by Arabs. In response, the university cites court decisions that the Arabs in question are squatting on land that they do not own.

The details are less important than the action. The Hebrew University asserts that sponsors of the boycott did not ask the university about its side of a story, but simply adopted as true Arab allegations. Assertions of apartheid and anti-Arab actions by Haifa University overlook the fact that some 35 percent of Haifa's students are Arabs.

Why now, when the Israeli-Palestinian front has been relatively quiet, and when Israel is wrenching itself toward a difficult withdrawal of Jewish settlements from Gaza and part of the West Bank?

It's tempting to scream "anti-Semites," but that would only be true in part. One of the British newspapers reports that a Jewish lecturer at Birmingham University is among the boycott's sponsors. There is also a Jewish lecturer (political scientist, no less) at Haifa who urges his foreign colleagues to boycott his university and the rest of the Israeli establishment. "Self-hating Jews?" I do not know the individuals involved.

Sadness competes with anger in my feelings. I lament the quality of higher education in institutions whose lecturers march to political slogans that seem so much at odds with the facts. I do not feel any differently about the Jews who join the march. Like their Gentile colleagues, they have every right to demonstrate their ignorance and shallowness. If they are self-hating, that is their problem and not mine.

Tonight we will celebrate Pesach at the home of my brother-in-law, a retired professor from the Hebrew University and now the director of a new brain science center at Bar Ilan University. He is a distinguished physiologist. Among the guests will be a Gentile who is a long-time collaborator from Germany, who comes most years to join in our family Seder. I am sure that we will mention the boycott. But we will concentrate on the text and songs that celebrate freedom, and the food.

Chag Sameach.

Sharkansky is a member of the political science department at Hebrew University in Jerusalem