Although the academic boycott a British faculty union imposed on two Israeli universities last spring has been overturned, anti-Israel bias continues to harm scholars and distort research, said participants in a conference here this week at Bar-Ilan University.

“Discrimination on the grounds of citizenship is still a live issue,” declared Michael Yudkin, a

biochemist at the University of Oxford.

Scholars and public figures from the United States, Britain, and Israel said that virulent anti-Israel sentiment, much of it emanating from the academic left, has created an atmosphere in which students and faculty members in some fields are intimidated if they do not accept the proposition that Israel’s existence is illegitimate.

The conference, entitled “Academic Freedom and the Politics of Boycotts,” was sponsored by Bar-Ilan’s International Advisory Board for Academic Freedom and the American Jewish Congress.

Last April, the Association of University Teachers in Britain called on its members to refrain from collaborating in academic or cultural projects with colleagues at Bar-Ilan and the University of Haifa, on the grounds that the two Israeli institutions were believed to have violated the rights of Palestinians and of faculty members who supported the Palestinian cause. The boycott was the latest in a series of actions taken by anti-Israel faculty members seeking to ostracize colleagues of Israeli nationality. The decision caused an outcry within the academic community in Britain, as well as in the United States, Israel, and elsewhere, and a month later it was rescinded.

Mr. Yudkin said that a boycott of a particular country’s academic institutions violates the principle of the universality of science. A boycott interferes with the ability of scholars at boycotted institutions to pursue their research, and it does so on the basis of political grounds that have no bearing on the scholarly activity.

“Exclusion of one group damages the objectivity on which science depends,” he noted, “because the worth of scientific knowledge does not depend on the identity of the person who produces it.”

Unlike some other speakers at the conference, however, Mr. Yudkin did not reject an academic boycott in all circumstances.

“What would we have said in the late 1930s if there had been a prospect that a boycott of German and Austrian science would have helped the overthrow of Hitler?” he asked.

Expanding on a paper he and three colleagues wrote in Nature in 2003, he stipulated four criteria that would have to be met if a boycott were to be justified:

• The danger presented by the rogue country would have to be extreme.
• There would have to be a realistic probability that an academic boycott would succeed in making the regime change its behavior.
• Support for the boycott among scientists would have to be widespread.
• The boycott would have to be part of a larger diplomatic system of sanctions.

While the boycott of South African institutions in the 1980s has been cited by the organizers of the boycott against Israel, the analogy is inappropriate, said Adrian Guelke of Queen’s University, in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Furthermore, he said, the academic boycott contributed little to the downfall of apartheid.

“Even at the time there were those who argued that it was counterproductive. It mainly harmed the liberal opponents of the regime at English-speaking institutions, so there were many of us who supported the sports boycott but opposed the academic one,” said Mr. Guelke, who was born and educated in South Africa.

Most speakers believed that there is unlikely to be another official boycott. The current threat to academic freedom comes from the anti-Israel dogma that has become prevalent in some fields, they said.

Wendy Sandler, a linguist at the University of Haifa, said she avoids attending conferences in her field in England because the strong anti-Israel bias of many of her British colleagues makes any encounter with them extremely uncomfortable.

David Newman, chairman of the political-science department at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, in southern Israel, criticized the conference organizers for not inviting or soliciting papers from any proponents of the boycott, and even from left-wing Israeli social scientists.

However, Gerald Steinberg, a Bar-Ilan political scientist who is chairman of the International Advisory Board for Academic Freedom’s conference committee, defended that decision.

“We debated inviting them, but these people are obsessive anti-Israel activists,” he said. “Inviting them would have turned the conference into a circus and focused it on whether Israel has a right to exist, rather than on the subject of academic freedom.”

Source: http://chronicle.com/daily/2006/01/2006012702n.htm