The academic boycott of Israel is a travesty

There is a comic dimension to this travesty of academic freedom. Lauding the ASA boycott for targeting institutions and not individuals, the saintly Jewish philosopher Judith Butler pointed out in The Nation that “the only request that is being made is that no institutional funding from Israeli institutions be used” for the travel expenses of Israeli scholars. O patria, quanto mi costi! Just how important do these professors think they and their conferences are? But finally there is nothing funny about this. There are first principles at stake in this stunt. Butler instructed that an academic boycott “militates against the spirit of censorship and the practice of calumny that would cut off debate and engage in debased caricatures.” I suggest she put down her Levinas and pick up her Orwell. It is precisely the spirit of censorship, and of conformity of opinion, that animates a boycott of academic institutions. In a sterling letter to the ASA, a group of distinguished American scholars noted this, and protested that “scholars would be punished not because of what they believe—which would be bad enough—but simply because of who they are based on their nationality. … This is discrimination pure and simple.”

For all the politicization of the ASA, it is indifferent to the politics of what it piously deplores. The occupation of the Palestinian territories is a political problem that requires a political solution. In the attempt to attain such a solution, the Palestinians are not inert victims or bystanders to their fate. They are historical actors; and their refusal to accept any of the plans for Palestinian statehood that have been proposed to them—the imperfection of the solution disturbs them more than the imperfection of the problem—is one of the reasons—one of the reasons—that they find themselves in a condition of such weakness. The Israeli settlement of the West Bank indeed must end; but even if it ends, Israel is a state by right with a perfectly understandable anxiety about its security. “We do not support the boycott of Israel,” Mahmoud Abbas, in South Africa for Mandela’s funeral, declared. He supports only a “boycott [of] the products of the settlements.” “We have relations with Israel,” he added, “we have mutual recognition of Israel.” But who is Abu Mazen to speak for the Palestinians, compared with an associate professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego?