On Weds I went to a conference at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan on “Academic Freedom and the Politics of Boycotts.” This was organized by a Committee set up in response to the attempted academic boycott of two Israeli universities (Bar Ilan and Haifa) that was passed by a rump session of the AUT Union in the UK in April 2005, and then rejected by a full meeting of the whole Union a month later. However, certain academic leftist activists committed to the Palestinian cause are still attempting to resurrect this boycott. They are also indulging in other nefarious schemes to undermine Israel.

I particularly went to hear Alan Dershowitz, an excellent speaker. He presented a lucid analysis of why these boycotts are directed at Israel. He asked that any Union or other organization that is considering a boycott of Israel be asked to establish a list of human rights violators in the world, and he was confidant, as a lawyer who has spent many years working on international human right cases, that Israel would be well down the list. In fact, Israel is one of the few or only countries whose Supreme Court has considered the subject of torture in detail, and revealed that the US Supreme Court asked for copies in English of their deliberations when they were recently considering cases relating to Iraqi detainees. He asked rhetorically if the US Supreme Court would tell the US Government where to put its fence with Mexico, which the Israeli Supreme Court has done in regard to the Security Barrier in Israel. He emphasized that there is no comparison of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute with apartheid S. Africa, since among other things the blacks were a huge majority while the Palestinians are a minority. He also dismissed any comparison with the IRA situation, since they have recognized the futility of terrorism and in any case were not trying to destroy Britain. He showed that given Israel’s productivity, especially in health research, all of the world would be the losers of an Israeli academic boycott.

Several people considered the status of academic freedom around the world. Marshall Goldman, an expert on Russia, said that academic freedom after the fall of Communism was established from above, not below, and as such it is very easy for Pres. Putin to reduce such freedoms.

One of the most interesting speakers was Prof. Zeedani from al Quds University in East Jerusalem. He presented a very pro-peace position, and read a statement from Sari Nusseibeh, President of al Quds University. They are entirely against all forms of boycott and do not want to be helped by activists in the UK. He pointed out that the boycott movement arose because the PA Universities Committee asked the Israeli Commission for Higher Education to allow Palestinian students and professors to enter Israel at will, but this was rejected for understandable security reasons (some of the universities are controlled by Hamas). The Palestinian University Committee passed a resolution calling for a boycott of Israeli Universities, although he acknowledged that this was ridiculous because they cannot operate without Israeli cooperation and in fact no such boycott has ever been implemented. Although he presented a very compromising attitude, saying “violence will not lead anywhere,” nevertheless he represents a very small percentage of Palestinian opinion.

Several other speakers considered the differences between boycotts, sanctions and embargoes, and some compared earlier boycotts, for example against German academics prior to WWII and now. All such boycotts were in fact ineffective and hurt some of those most opposed to the Nazis, just as an academic boycott of Israel would mostly hurt left-wing academics sympathetic to the Palestinians. However, some sanctions have worked, including the Jackson-Vanik Amendment that stopped US trade with the USSR and caused them to modify their treatment of Soviet Jews and eventually to allow them to emigrate, and the UN Sanctions against Iraq (remember the “dying” Iraqi children that was all faked and how the “oil for food” program was misused).

Although I only went to a quarter of this conference, I judged that it was a good thing to get a panel of international experts together to discuss this, and anyone can look at the material on the net when it is available.

Theconference was organized by Professor Gerald Steinberg of BIU, an expert onthe Middle East. For further information (program and lectures) view the BIU site at: www.biu.ac.il/rector/academic_freedom/