Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions: Myths and Slogans

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The call for AAA to boycott Israeli universities is based on misrepresentations of the actual practices of Israeli universities and on intellectual distortions being proliferated in the academy, including anthropology.

Many thousands of Israeli Arabs are integrated in Israeli higher education and they advocate for an even greater share in it. One-third of the undergraduate students of Haifa U are Arab. Increasing numbers hold faculty positions throughout Israel, and a Bedouin is president of an Israeli college. A host of interactions and joint projects on topics such as arid-zone research, medicine and conflict resolution involve Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank and are carried on between Israeli and Palestinian universities.

Palestinians are not advocating boycott. Like most Israelis, they can be critical of Israel and at the same time appreciate one of the world’s most advanced systems of higher education and scientific research and the direct and measurable benefits it brings. Israeli higher education fosters cooperation and community between Arabs and Jews.

There are valid criticisms of Israel. The question is why has Israel been singled out for boycott? Palestinian universities on the West Bank and Gaza are explicitly criticized in UN reports for abuses of human rights. To compare Israel to South Africa and the situation of Palestinians to that of Black South Africans under apartheid is a canard rejected outright by anyone who knows anything about that system.

When Israel is singled out for boycott and censure, the anti-Israel polemics are tainted with sadly familiar and thinly disguised animosities and slanders. Academics can and must abet the discourse by disentangling genuine criticism that needs to be addressed from polemics that mask political and ideological agendas. We can usefully interrogate the repeated representation of Israeli Jews as post-colonial invaders of indigenous Arab lands. This narrative casts Israel as a European implant, an agent of Western imperialism. This colonial-settler paradigm blatantly ignores where most Jews lived, how they viewed themselves and how others have viewed them over the past two thousand years, and runs counter to the history of the area.

The point of this claim is that Jews are not indigenous. This original sin lays the foundation for the current campaign against the Jewish state. It is one that anthropologists would do well to examine critically.

At least until the 1970s, academic discourse complemented the discourse of the international community that supported partition of Palestine into Jewish and Palestinian Arab states. Both had legitimacy and were entitled to independence in a contested land. The League of Nations and subsequent bodies declared Jews were entitled to reconstitution. They could re-turn, re-claim, re-store, and re-build and re-constitute themselves as a modern people. The “re” means, of course, again. This small word reflects the real and vital connection that modern Jews have with preceding generations that never gave up hope of returning to their homeland. A substantial scholarly literature details the re-acquisition of Hebrew and its re-introduction as a modern language, a singular achievement among the peoples of the world. A significant body of research examines the adoption of original Hebrew terms in personal and place names in a landscape recognized by Jews and gentiles as associated with Jews. Gainsaying the authenticity of these connections too often slips into anti-Zionist and anti-Israel polemics.

The claim that Jews are not indigenous and are but mere colonial-settlers should provoke at least some question about Palestine’s indigenous. Since ancient times Palestine/Israel has been a crossroads country on land paths between Africa and Asia and a vital transit point between Europe and the East through ports and the via maris. Which residents of Palestine can we determine with certainty have been continually resident?

Approximately two millennia ago there were from one to three million people in what is now called Palestine/Israel. In 1800, there were 250,000; in 1900 only 500,000. Today that same territory, from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, holds about 10 million or about 20 times the population of just one century ago. Moreover, what we now call Israel/Palestine was for many centuries embedded in large empires and without discrete definition. Non-existent borders allowed for multi-directional permeability between that territory and the Ottoman Empire and beyond.

In the 19th century, Palestine and the Eastern Mediterranean littoral began to be incorporated into an international economic system stimulated by European capitalist energy: Significant numbers of Egyptians moved into Palestine; Bedouins came from the south to a sparsely populated Negev; Circassians came from the Caucasus; European and American millenarians established colonies, as did Jews who migrated from Europe and other parts of the Ottoman Empire. There is no factual basis for Jews being singled out as the only non-indigenous, yet this is the argument being put forward. It is not innocent, and has implications for the discussion at hand.

Consider Arab claims to indigeneity, whether by Christians or Muslims. Invoking and then secularizing supersessionism, some Palestinian Christians claim to be resident in the land continuously since the time of Jesus. There is no documentary evidence for this, yet their tradition and collective memory of belonging in the land has been privileged in a kind of supersessionism, as though it supported denying the continuity and vitality of the Jewish people anywhere, to say nothing of contemporary Israelis.

There are also Muslim Palestinians who assert ancient continuities that extend beyond Christian and Jewish rule to a distant pagan past, specifically to the Canaanites and particularly the Jebusites who lived in pre-Davidic Jerusalem. This narrative often erases the existence of Hebrews, including from the ancient past; if they did exist, it claims they have no connection with present day Jews. Again, no documentary evidence for this.

How is this relevant to the boycott campaign? The illegitimacy of the Jewish presence is the subtext that underpins BDS polemics. It is not a consequence of contemporary Israeli actions. It is not only post-1967 Jewish settlement policies in the territories that are at issue. It is not even 1948 or the 1917 Balfour Declaration. BDS rejects the legitimacy of Zionism and the right of the Jewish people to a homeland in Israel.

To endorse a boycott is not merely to object to Israeli policies on the West Bank. Boycott makes common cause with those who still object to partition and the two-state solution. Underlying BDS is the conviction that the land belongs solely and exclusively to the Arabs. Criticism is legitimate but denying the right of the Jewish state to exist requires a singular suspension of critical judgment.

These apparently simple but malicious petitions belie the reality: Israel/Palestine is a complex place where blame and responsibility must both be addressed with care and nuance. The Arab/Israeli conflict may well harbor no binaries of good and evil, right and wrong. Critical academics view competing arguments with both skepticism and respect.

The argument about being indigenous is being used in some contemporary academic discourses as a rhetorical cudgel to batter the Jewish state and support related polemical frameworks, especially apartheid—a sleight of hand that pretends Israelis are Middle Eastern equivalents to Boers or other ex-Europeans.. Invoking indigeneity automatically conjures up demands for rectifying injustice. It was crucial in these efforts beginning with the ILO’s program to develop international conventions that protected native peoples of Central and South America and extended to pre-Columbian peoples elsewhere including Australian Aborigines. But it does not fit the Arab/Israeli dispute.

For millennia, Jews were largely located in the Middle East and North Africa. Small communities lived in Europe two thousand years ago, but a significant majority continued to live in this area, including what is now Israel. Not until the 16th to 18th centuries did the population balance begin to shift. In 1800, 40% of world Jewry still lived in or proximate to the Ottoman Empire. Only in the 200 years from the 18th century through the Holocaust did the majority of world Jewry spread throughout Europe. Significantly, Europeans viewed Jews as outsiders and referred to them as Orientals. Today there is a new and significant Diaspora in the US, but an equally large Jewish community has returned to where it was located for most of its history.

Nearly half of Israel’s Jews are decidedly non-European and never left the country or region. They are Jews from Arab lands who lived among the literally hundreds of millions of Arab Muslims. With the rise of Arab nationalism and fundamentalism in the twentieth century they have been persecuted like the Kurds, Azeris, Maronites, Chaldeans, Yezidis and a host of other minorities whose home has also been continuously in the Middle East. For the Middle East’s ancient Jewish communities, Israel provided a necessary refuge. Yet for political reasons it is convenient for some to consider them and other Jews non-indigenous, colonial-settlers.

Others argue that BDS speaks truth to power. Enlarging the focus of the lens reveals that allegedly all-powerful Israel is a vulnerable target in the madness of the contemporary Middle East. Hamas is explicit, defining Israel as a theological impossibility that requires jihad. Even secular Palestinians are reluctant to forego the rights that may accrue to having exclusive indigeneity.

The prestige of the AAA would be compromised if it sided with one of the parties to a complicated political/national dispute. Adopting slogans befits a partisan political lobby, not a professional academic organization. There are a plethora of forums and associations in which political judgments of individual AAA members may be expressed and lead to public action. By subjecting arguments to rigorous examination, and encouraging research that contributes to critical and nuanced understanding, the AAA can maintain its important role as an organization of scholars devoted to the study of humankind.

 

Sam Edelman is the director of Academic Engagement of the Israel on Campus Coalition; past executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, the American Jewish University; and CSU Chico emeritus professor of Jewish, Israel Studies, and Communication Studies.

Ilan Troen is director of the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies and Stoll Family Chair of Israel Studies at Brandeis. He is editor of Israel Studies (Indiana University Press) and was previously dean of Humanities and Social Sciences at Ben-Gurion University (Israel).

Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions: Myths and Slogans

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