Steven Feld, MD, is Medical Director of the Heart and Vascular Diagnostic Clinics in Livingston and Lufkin, Texas, Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine, The University of Texas Medical School at Houston and recipient of the Bristol-Myers Squibb/American College of Cardiology Affiliate Travel Award for cardiovascular research (1995).
Forty years after Israelis fought bravely for six days in June of 1967 to defend their nation from destruction, representatives of Britain’s University and College Union (UCU) called upon their 120,000 members to boycott Israeli academics in the fields of art, education, science and medicine. Meeting in Bournemouth on May 30, 2007, British speaker after speaker falsely accused Israel of racial policies akin to South Africa’s apartheid regime indicating that there is no place for Israel among the community of nations.
Nearly two thousand years after Roman ruin, 19th century Zionist pioneers began to rebuild their nation out of a desolate wasteland described in numerous accounts by visitors to the Holy Land. William Thomson, a missionary for 45 years in Syria and Palestine, wrote in 1882, “How melancholy is this utter desolation! Not a house, not a trace of inhabitants, not even shepherds, to relieve the dull monotony. Was it thus when Peter came from Joppa to Caesarea?” A visitor traveling the same route today would traverse the cities of Tel Aviv, Herzliya and Netanya with over a million people. Thomson continues, “Much of the country through which we have been rambling for a week appears never to have been inhabited, or even cultivated; and there are other parts, you say, still more barren. How could a land as small as Palestine, and with so much waste territory support the vast population assigned to it in the Bible?” Only fifty years later, leading experts in soil and conservation from the U. S. Department of Agriculture were astounded by Jewish settlements in Palestine that were conducting “the most remarkable devotion to soil reclamation of the land…in any country of the New or Old World.”
What have the representatives of the UCU done in their academic career to compare with the miraculous restoration of the modern State of Israel from a sparsely populated wasteland? Israel absorbed Jewish immigrants fleeing persecution not only from Europe, but also from the Arab world where anti-Jewish discrimination persisted even after the defeat of the Vichy governments and fascist forces in North Africa. Israel’s achievements occurred despite a constant state of war imposed by its neighbors. Israeli settlements in biblical Judea and Samaria on the west bank of the Jordan River dot barren hilltops often leaving rusting Jordanian artillery pieces in place, lest the world forget.
Israeli withdrawal from Gaza has resulted in a hail of rockets continuing to this day and causing mass evacuation of the southern Israeli city of Sderot. Elected Hamas terrorists promise more of the same; not only from Gaza, but also from the West Bank, now that Israel’s security fence has foiled further attempts at homicide bombings.
Placed in its historical perspective, the British call for a boycott of Israeli academics amounts to nothing more than a modern version of the Nazi call to boycott Jewish shops. Those who believe in academic freedom should treat the UCU resolution with contempt and greet its proponents with howls of execration.
