A double standard on academic freedom in the Middle East

By George Bisharat

Two hundred thousand Palestinian children began school in the Gaza Strip this month without a full complement of textbooks. Why? Because Israel, which maintains a stranglehold over this small strip of land along the Mediterranean even after withdrawing its settlers from there in 2005, considers paper, ink and binding materials not to be "fundamental humanitarian needs."

Israel, attempting to throttle the democratically elected Hamas government, generally permits only food, medicine and fuel to enter Gaza, and allows virtually no Palestinian exports to leave. Lately, it held up delivery of materials needed for printing textbooks. As a result, Gaza students began the year facing a 30 percent shortage of texts.

No full-page advertisements in major American newspapers have publicized Israel's violations of Palestinian children's right to an education. No editors, syndicated columnists or presidents of major universities in this country have denounced this callous measure. Our politicians have demanded no remedial action. Instead, they continue, verbally and materially, to support Israel in its near-total blockade of 1.5 million Palestinians, kids and all.

Israel's trampling of Palestinian students' right to education - the key to a lifetime of opportunity - has rarely evoked official protest from American leaders. The Israeli army has closed Palestinian universities for years at a time. Israeli military authorities have barred Palestinian occupational therapy students from traveling from Gaza to the West Bank to obtain vital clinical training.

Hundreds of Israeli checkpoints and roadblocks can turn a routine trip to a local school into a harrowing ordeal. Israeli gunfire has even killed Palestinian schoolchildren sitting in their classrooms. None of these offenses has merited so much as a congressional resolution, let alone more serious efforts to curb Israeli behavior, such as government-imposed sanctions.

In response to this policy double standard - complete indulgence of Israel on the one hand, and indifference to violations of Palestinian rights on the other hand - a movement has emerged for a citizens' boycott of Israel. Churches, unions and professional associations in the United States, Canada, Europe and South Africa have urged a variety of nonviolent measures to compel Israel's compliance with international law.

American Presbyterians have studied divesting church funds from firms that profit from continuing Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. Unison, the United Kingdom's 1.3 million-member union of public servants, voted in June to boycott Israeli goods. In May, a British union of professors opened a yearlong debate over a possible boycott of Israeli academic institutions.

The latter action provoked particularly indignant protest by Israel's U.S. supporters as an offense against "academic freedom." Yet many Israeli academic institutions either benefit from or participate in Israeli government actions that violate Palestinian rights.

Tel Aviv University sits in part over land belonging to Sheikh Muwannis, a Palestinian village whose residents were expelled by Jewish militias or fled in fear in March 1948. These and other Palestinian refugees have been denied their right to return to their homes or to receive compensation for their seized properties.

Hebrew University in Jerusalem uses more than 800 acres of land illegally expropriated from Palestinian private owners in the West Bank after the 1967 war. Bar-Ilan University has established a branch in an illegal Israeli settlement in the West Bank.

The threatened boycott would target Israeli institutions, not individuals. Thus, formal research and other agreements with Israeli universities would be suspended. But invitations to Israeli professors to join conferences or to publish in foreign journals would continue.

Nonetheless, it is likely that the boycott would impose limitations on freedom for some Israeli academics. Is this fair?

Boycotts are always somewhat blunt tools, and they inevitably impose costs on some who are undeserving of them. That was true of the boycott of apartheid South Africa, which applied to all academics - as well as athletes, businesspeople, artists and others. At the time, the international community weighed the cost to academic freedom against the advancement of justice and equal rights for black South Africans, and the choice was clear.

Two hundred thousand Palestinian schoolchildren are wondering how the world will respond faced with a similar choice today.


George Bisharat, a professor of law at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, writes frequently on the Middle East.

UN summit urges anti-Israeli boycott

Press TV reports that a UN conference at the European Parliament has criticized Israel for its policies towards Palestinians, calling for a boycott against it.

The 'International Conference of Civil Society in Support of Israeli-Palestinian Peace' in Brussels has been organized by the UN's Committee to restore the Rights of the Palestinian People.

During the conference, British Member of Parliament Clare Short blasted Israel for not being interested in a two-state solution, and criticized the EU for "allowing" Israel to build "an apartheid wall".

"The boycott worked for South Africa, it is time to do it again," Short was quoted as saying on Saturday.

The Israeli separation wall was also attacked by the European Parliament's vice president, Edward McMillan-Scott, who maintained that the wall would not bring peace to Israel.

Pierre Galand, European coordinator of the Committees and Associations for Palestine said Israeli policy is the cause of the current conflict between Fatah and Hamas.

A Boycott Of Israel: Something Has Changed

by John Pilger

From a limestone hill rising above Qalandia refugee camp you can see Jerusalem. I watched a lone figure standing there in the rain, his son holding the tail of his long tattered coat. He extended his hand and did not let go. "I am Ahmed Hamzeh, street entertainer," he said in measured English. "Over there, I played many musical instruments; I sang in Arabic, English and Hebrew, and because I was rather poor, my very small son would chew gum while the monkey did its tricks. When we lost our country, we lost respect. One day a rich Kuwaiti stopped his car in front of us. He shouted at my son, "Show me how a Palestinian picks up his food rations!" So I made the monkey appear to scavenge on the ground, in the gutter. And my son scavenged with him. The Kuwaiti threw coins and my son crawled on his knees to pick them up. This was not right; I was an artist, not a beggar . . . I am not even a peasant now."

"How do you feel about all that?" I asked him.

"Do you expect me to feel hatred? What is that to a Palestinian? I never hated the Jews and their Israel . . . yes, I suppose I hate them now, or maybe I pity them for their stupidity. They can't win. Because we Palestinians are the Jews now and, like the Jews, we will never allow them or the Arabs or you to forget. The youth will guarantee us that, and the youth after them . . .".

That was 40 years ago. On my last trip back to the West Bank, I recognised little of Qalandia, now announced by a vast Israeli checkpoint, a zigzag of sandbags, oil drums and breeze blocks, with conga lines of people, waiting, swatting flies with precious papers. Inside the camp, the tents had been replaced by sturdy hovels, although the queues at single taps were as long, I was assured, and the dust still ran to caramel in the rain. At the United Nations office I asked about Ahmed Hamzeh, the street entertainer. Records were consulted, heads shaken. Someone thought he had been "taken away . . . very ill". No one knew about his son, whose trachoma was surely blindness now. Outside, another generation kicked a punctured football in the dust.

And yet, what Nelson Mandela has called "the greatest moral issue of the age" refuses to be buried in the dust. For every BBC voice that strains to equate occupier with occupied, thief with victim, for every swarm of emails from the fanatics of Zion to those who invert the lies and describe the Israeli state's commitment to the destruction of Palestine, the truth is more powerful now than ever. Documentation of the violent expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 is voluminous. Re-examination of the historical record has put paid to the fable of heroic David in the Six Day War, when Ahmed Hamzeh and his family were driven from their home. The alleged threat of Arab leaders to "throw the Jews into the sea", used to justify the 1967 Israeli onslaught and since repeated relentlessly, is highly questionable.

In 2005, the spectacle of wailing Old Testament zealots leaving Gaza was a fraud. The building of their "settlements" has accelerated on the West Bank, along with the illegal Berlin-style wall dividing farmers from their crops, children from their schools, families from each other. We now know that Israel's destruction of much of Lebanon last year was pre-planned. As the former CIA analyst Kathleen Christison has written, the recent "civil war" in Gaza was actually a coup against the elected Hamas-led government, engineered by Elliott Abrams, the Zionist who runs US policy on Israel and a convicted felon from the Iran-Contra era.

The ethnic cleansing of Palestine is as much America's crusade as Israel's. On 16 August, the Bush administration announced an unprecedented $30bn military "aid package" for Israel, the world's fourth biggest military power, an air power greater than Britain, a nuclear power greater than France. No other country on earth enjoys such immunity, allowing it to act without sanction, as Israel. No other country has such a record of lawlessness: not one of the world's tyrannies comes close. International treaties, such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, ratified by Iran, are ignored by Israel. There is nothing like it in UN history.

But something is changing. Perhaps last summer's panoramic horror beamed from Lebanon on to the world's TV screens provided the catalyst. Or perhaps cynicism of Bush and Blair and the incessant use of the inanity, "terror", together with the day-by-day dissemination of a fabricated insecurity in all our lives, has finally brought the attention of the international community outside the rogue states, Britain and the US, back to one of its principal sources, Israel.

I got a sense of this recently in the United States. A full-page advertisement in the New York Times had the distinct odour of panic. There have been many "friends of Israel" advertisements in the Times, demanding the usual favours, rationalising the usual outrages. This one was different. "Boycott a cure for cancer?" was its main headline, followed by "Stop drip irrigation in Africa? Prevent scientific co-operation between nations?" Who would want to do such things? "Some British academics want to boycott Israelis," was the self-serving answer. It referred to the University and College Union's (UCU) inaugural conference motion in May, calling for discussion within its branches for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. As John Chalcraft of the London School of Economics pointed out, "the Israeli academy has long provided intellectual, linguistic, logistical, technical, scientific and human support for an occupation in direct violation of international law [against which] no Israeli academic institution has ever taken a public stand".

The swell of a boycott is growing inexorably, as if an important marker has been passed, reminiscent of the boycotts that led to sanctions against apartheid South Africa (for more information on the boycott click here). Both Mandela and Desmond Tutu have drawn this parallel; so has South African cabinet minister Ronnie Kasrils and other illustrious Jewish members of the liberation struggle. In Britain, an often Jewish-led academic campaign against Israel's "methodical destruction of [the Palestinian] education system" can be translated by those of us who have reported from the occupied territories into the arbitrary closure of Palestinian universities, the harassment and humiliation of students at checkpoints and the shooting and killing of Palestinian children on their way to school.

These initiatives have been backed by a British group, Independent Jewish Voices, whose 528 signatories include Stephen Fry, Harold Pinter, Mike Leigh and Eric Hobsbawm. The country's biggest union, Unison, has called for an "economic, cultural, academic and sporting boycott" and the right of return for Palestinian families expelled in 1948. Remarkably, the Commons' international development committee has made a similar stand. In April, the membership of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) voted for a boycott only to see it hastily overturned by the national executive council. In the Republic of Ireland, the Irish Congress of Trade Unions has called for divestment from Israeli companies: a campaign aimed at the European Union, which accounts for two-thirds of Israel's exports under an EU-Israel Association Agreement. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler, has said that human rights conditions in the agreement should be invoked and Israel's trading preferences suspended.

This is unusual, for these were once distant voices. And that such grave discussion of a boycott has "gone global" was unforeseen in official Israel, long comforted by its seemingly untouchable myths and great power sponsorship, and confident that the mere threat of anti-Semitism would ensure silence. When the British lecturers' decision was announced, the US Congress passed an absurd resolution describing the UCU as "anti-Semitic". (Eighty congressmen have gone on junkets to Israel this summer.)

This intimidation has worked in the past. The smearing of American academics has denied them promotion, even tenure. The late Edward Said kept an emergency button in his New York apartment connected to the local police station; his offices at Columbia University were once burned down. Following my 2002 film, Palestine is Still the Issue, I received death threats and slanderous abuse, most of it coming from the US where the film was never shown. When the BBC's Independent Panel recently examined the corporation's coverage of the Middle East, it was inundated with emails, "many from abroad, mostly from North America", said its report. Some individuals "sent multiple missives, some were duplicates and there was clear evidence of pressure group mobilisation". The panel's conclusion was that BBC reporting of the Palestinian struggle was not "full and fair" and "in important respects, presents an incomplete and in that sense misleading picture". This was neutralised in BBC press releases.

The courageous Israeli historian, Ilan Pappé, believes a single democratic state, to which the Palestinian refugees are given the right of return, is the only feasible and just solution, and that a sanctions and boycott campaign is critical in achieving this. Would the Israeli population be moved by a worldwide boycott? Although they would rarely admit it, South Africa's whites were moved enough to support an historic change. A boycott of Israeli institutions, goods and services, says Pappé, "will not change the [Israeli] position in a day, but it will send a clear message that [the premises of Zionism] are racist and unacceptable in the 21st century . . . They would have to choose." And so would the rest of us.



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John Pilger is a world-renowned journalist, author and documentary filmmaker, who began his career in 1958 in his homeland, Australia, before moving to London in the 1960s. He has developed his reputation through both his reporting and the various books and documentary films that he has written or produced. He is best known in Britain for his investigative documentaries, particularly those on Cambodia and East Timor. He has acted as a war correspondent during conflicts in Vietnam, Cambodia, Egypt, India, Bangladesh and Biafra. He has worked for BBC Television Australia, BBC Radio, BBC World Service, London Broadcasting, ABC Television, ABC Radio Australia, The Daily Mirror, The Guardian, The Independent, New Statesman, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation: New York, The Age: Melbourne, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Bulletin: Sydney, plus French, Italian, Scandinavian, Canadian, Japanese and other newspapers and periodicals.

To see the latest documentary by John Pilger entitled "The War on Democracy" click here.

For a South African perspective on this issue check out this article.

UK Jews and Israelis behind anti-Israel boycott

Jewish Chronicle investigation reveals Jewish, Israeli academics justify their activity as part of struggle for Palestinian rights, ending Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories:

Named: boycott ringleaders

By By Bernard Josephs and Nicole Hazan

The JC today identifies the key players in the escalating British campaign to boycott Israel. Our investigation shows that many are Jewish or Israeli, and that they justify their stance as part of the struggle for Palestinian rights and ending Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories.

A high proportion are deeply involved in UCU, the University and College Union, which last month sparked an international outcry by voting to facilitate a boycott of Israeli academic institutions.

Anti-boycott figures suggest that the campaign has been fuelled by a well-organised mix of far-left activists and Islamic organisations. In reality, the main proponents are a loosely knit collection of academics and trade unionists linked to groups such as the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Jews for the Boycotting of Israeli Goods, and Bricup, the British Committee for Universities of Palestine.

Israeli Haim Bresheeth, professor of media and culture at the University of East London, seconded the UCU motion, which called for consideration of the morality of ties with Israeli academia and for discussions on boycotting.

Prof Bresheeth told the JC that a boycott was not an easy decision. “I am Jewish and an Israeli, and I don’t wish harm on either side. But how long can this occupation go on?”

Characterising opposition to a boycott as insincere, he added : “What we are asking for is not violent. It is civil action against a military occupation.”

The proposer of the UCU motion was Brighton University philosophy lecturer Tom Hickey, who stressed that should the boycott go ahead, its target would be Israeli universities rather than individual academics. Another speaker for the UCU motion was Richard Seaford, professor of classics and ancient history at Exeter University, whose former pupils include JK Rowling. In 1990, he was a signatory to a campaign against Israel’s law of return. Last year, he refused to review a book for an Israeli journal because of “outrage” at Israel’s “brutal and illegal expansionism”.

Bricup has a large number of Jewish supporters, among them husband and wife Hilary and Steven Rose. Hilary, a professor of social policy at Bradford University, is Bricup’s co-convenor alongside Prof Jonathan Rosenhead. Her husband, an Open University biology professor, is the organisation’s secretary. They have been active in the boycott movement since 2002.

In an online article, Steven Rose wrote: “It really isn’t good enough to attack the messenger as antisemitic or a self-hating Jew rather than deal with the message that Israel’s conduct is unacceptable.”

Prof Rosenhead, of the London School of Economics, hails from a “solid Zionist and Jewish background”. Bricup, he said, had been involved in the discussions about the writing of the UCU motion. “The reaction from the community was what you would expect, but we are looking forward to the debate. It was a triumph that Israel came into existence —but not this Israel.”

Birmingham University lecturer Sue Blackwell, the figurehead of an unsuccessful attempt by UCU’s predecessor, the Association of University Teachers, to force a boycott, pushed through a UCU motion calling for a moratorium on European Union research grants to Israel. In her view, the UCU had put the boycott “back on the agenda”.
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(This makes me wonder whether there is any rational argument which can convince all the Jew-haters out there that Zionism or Judaism are not to be confused with the fact of being born Jewish)