Today there is a meeting at Ben Gurion University in Israel to discuss the use of computers in terrorism and counter-terrorism, sponsored by NATO. One Jewish professor from California, the Director of one of the largest artificial intelligence research labs in the U.S. will not be there. He had been invited but was then “dis-invited” in light of his political views.
Last week the British University and College Union (UCU) held its first conference and passed a motion which is falsely represented as “boycotting Israeli academe”. One comment made in reports compared the impact of such a boycott on Israel to the impact that the Anti-Apartheid sporting boycott had on South Africa. Judging by the hysteria that has flowed from both Israel and Jewish supporters of Israel in the USA, this characterization hit the spot.
Since the motion has been misreported, I will reproduce it below (slight correction made to formatting error on original .pdf)
Resolution 30
Boycott of Israeli academic institutionsCongress notes that Israel’s 40-year occupation has seriously damaged the fabric of Palestinian society through annexation, illegal settlement, collective punishment and restriction of movement.
Congress deplores the denial of educational rights for Palestinians by invasions, closures, checkpoints, curfews, and shootings and arrests of teachers, lecturers and students.
Congress condemns the complicity of Israeli academia in the occupation, which has provoked a call from Palestinian trade unions for a comprehensive and consistent international boycott of all Israeli academic institutions.
Congress believes that in these circumstances passivity or neutrality is unacceptable and criticism of Israel cannot be construed as anti-semitic.
Congress instructs the NEC to
§ circulate the full text of the Palestinian boycott call to all branches/LAs for information and discussion;
§ encourage members to consider the moral implications of existing and proposed links with Israeli academic institutions;
§ organise a UK-wide campus tour for Palestinian academic/educational trade unionists;
§ issue guidance to members on appropriate forms of action; actively encourage and support branches to create direct educational§ links with Palestinian educational institutions and to help set up nationally sponsored programmes for teacher exchanges, sabbatical placements and research.
You will see that though the 61% in favor of the motion clearly want individual institutions and academics to engage in a boycott, the motion itself does not commit UCU to one.
The hysteria which the motion has caused can be seen from this Haaretz report which does at least manage to get a semi-accurate report of the motion buried later down.
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni on Friday conveyed to her British counterpart Margaret Beckett the severity with which Israel views the intentions of a British lecturers union to boycott Israel’s academic institutions.
In a telephone conversation between the two, Livni told her colleague that the British University and College Union’s (UCU) boycott plans are in utter conflict with the good relations maintained by Israel and Britain.
And of course any criticism of Israel must be countered by invoking memories of the Holocaust.
Professor Uriel Reichman, President of the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, said Thursday night that the British boycott is “a modern reformulation of Judenreine” a German expression used by the Nazis meaning “Jew free,” describing areas they had emptied of a Jewish presence.
The professor called on Anglo-Jewry to send their children to learn in Israel “instead of sending them to institutions where there exists one-sided preaching for the elimination of the Jewish State.”
In a rather strange article in the Jerusalem Post harranging the delegates by Jeremy Newmark (described as “CEO of the Jewish Leadership Council and a Board member of the Fair Play Campaign Group” so he clearly has no bias) we have the main UK body organizing protests against the war in Iraq described as the “anti-Zionist Stop the War Coalition”
And if reasoned argument and abuse cannot persuade individuals and institutions to not pass a boycott, there are always threats.
Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor renowned for his staunch defence of Israel and high-profile legal victories, including his role in the O.J. Simpson trial, vowed to “devastate and bankrupt” lecturers who supported such boycotts.
<snip>
Prof Dershowitz said he had started work on legal moves to fight any boycott.
He told the Times Higher Educational Supplement that these would include using a US law – banning discrimination on the basis of nationality – against UK universities with research ties to US colleges. US academics might also be urged to accept honorary posts at Israeli colleges in order to become boycott targets.
“I will obtain legislation dealing with this issue, imposing sanctions that will devastate and bankrupt those who seek to impose bankruptcy on Israeli academics,” he told the journal.
Sue Blackwell, a UCU activist and member of the British Committee for Universities of Palestine, said: “This is the typical response of the Israeli lobby which will do anything to avoid debating the real issue – the 40-year occupation of Palestine.” Jewish groups have attacked the UCU vote, which was opposed by Sally Hunt, its general secretary.
All of this Israeli and American Jewish concern for academic freedom contrasts with the treatment handed out to Dr. Yigal Arens of the University of Southern California. As Haaretz reported back in January about the meeting starting today.
Dr. Bracha Shapira of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, one of the organizers of the conference, has stated that the organizers have chosen to remain silent. Arens, who immigrated many years ago to California, heads two centers that deal with information systems on matters of intelligence, the war against terror and digital government.
At the beginning of January a colleague, an American professor, invited him to participate in a working group that will convene this coming summer at Ben-Gurion University. The conference, which is funded by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), will deal with the role played by the Internet in terror and its prevention. The colleague said that the organizers, and among them Shapira, would be very glad if Arens accepted the invitation.
Five days later, before Arens replied to the invitation, his American colleague informed him that he should forget the whole thing. He related that the Israeli organizers had told him that government personnel who had been invited to the meeting would not feel comfortable in his presence. Arens sent an e-mail to Shapira and asked that she explain the withdrawal of the invitation. She replied that his American colleague had “exceeded his authority in extending the invitation without full consultation with the conference organizers.”
Arens is the son of a former Defense Minister and head of Likud. He refused to serve in the Israeli Army and emmigrated to the USA. His political views are clearly unacceptable in Israel. What are those view? Well back to the Haaretz report.
According to Arens, the organizers had been aware initially of his political background. They learned about it from his American colleague who wanted to make certain, at Arens’ request, that they would spare him any unpleasantness, which according to him had been his lot at previous conferences in Israel.
The organizers of a conference at an academic institution that benefits from public monies do not believe it is the public’s right to know whether there is anything of substance in the grave suspicion that a scientists’ political opinions disqualify him from entering their gates. Arens, in fact, concealed nothing. For many years he has supported two states for two peoples, but today he fears “that a two-state solution is no longer practically possible.”
Arens believes that Israel should be a state for all its citizens, supports the right of return for Palestinian refugees and is opposed to any form of discrimination among citizens on the basis of their ethnic or religious background.
An email he sent to Israeli academics in January which is the basis of the Haaretz report is reproduced here but the US Jewish group MuzzleWatch reports on a recent email he has been circulating which comments on the reaction to the UCU motion.
A group of Israeli academics was in Brighton, in the UK, this week, trying to convince the University and College Union (UCU) that a boycott of Israeli universities is unjustified. Professor Zvi HaCohen of Ben-Gurion University is quoted in Ha’aretz of May 17, 2007, arguing that Israeli universities should not be boycotted because, inter alia, they “have no influence over the policies of the government or the parties.” This may or may not be the case, but what he isn’t saying is that the Israeli government exercises political influence over what are supposed to be academic decisions of Israeli researchers, and at least some of them — even at his own university! — are happy to go along.
It throws more light on why he was “dis-invited” to the seminar paid for partly by US and British taxpayers through NATO.
Before I managed to respond, I received a urgent call from Prof. Kantor. He apologized profusely and said that he had been told by the Israelis that government personnel would be present — people who would feel uncomfortable if I participated. He was instructed to rescind the invitation, which he was doing.
I was pretty amazed by this whole thing.
Not so much by the fact that Israeli government personnel would not want me to be present at a terrorism-related meeting. Not even so much by the fact that an Israeli researcher would accept governmental influence on academics. But by the fact that they would be so brazen as to state precisely what their reasoning was to an American outsider at a time when a boycott of Israeli academics was being fought, and that the American professor would agree to go along!
I asked Prof. Kantor how he would have reacted if American officials demanded that he not invite critics of US policy. He responded with mealy mouth excuses for the Israelis. For them these are “life and death issues”, you see. So it’s different.
So it is pretty two faced for the Israelis to ban Arens when as he puts it, “Israeli academics and officials are running around condemning others who would mix politics and science by proposing to boycott Israeli universities”
