David Newman is professor of Political Geography at Ben Gurion University in Israel, and editor of the journal Geopolitics. He is currently on sabbatical as a visiting Leverhulme scholar at the University of Bristol in the UK

I am sitting in the conference room, observing a group of 36 participants in a discussion. It is intense and once can see the care with which the words are chosen by each speaker. For this is no normal group. It consists of a mixed group of Israeli and Palestinian teachers who are meeting each other for the first time. But even this is not a normal dialogue group, of which there are many. These are religious teachers, affiliated to groups within their respective societies who are normally associated with the most intransigent views concerning the conflict, who are not normally prepared even to recognise – fifteen years after the Oslo Accords – the basic legitimacy of the claims made by the other, who root their arguments in the exclusive and nationalistic rhetoric of religion and fundamentalism.

The time is the first week of the Lebanon War in July 2006. The location is the neutral city of Istanbul. It took weeks and weeks of preparation to get the logistics right, to enable those Palestinian participants from the West Bank who did not have the permits to travel through Israel, to leave via Jordan, to arrange for kosher food for the Jewish participants. It was up and down until the last moment, and then a day before they were all due to depart, hostilities broke out in Southern Lebanon, the first Katyusha rockets were fired into Haifa, and it looked as though all the preparations would count for nothing. But, with one exception, each and every participant arrived.

The project, funded as part of the EU Partnership for Peace project, had been working with the two groups separately for an entire year. The teacher participants on the Israeli side had attended weekly meetings at Ben Gurion University to learn about the Middle East, about Islam, about conflict resolution and had participated in field trips of Arab and Bedouin settlements, places they had never previously visited despite living in close proximity to their invisible neighbours. They were initially suspicious of attending such a programme at the university which was known for its liberal pro-peace faculty, and of the funders, the EU, for its perceived pro-Palestinian bias. They made it clear that they had only come to learn about the “other”, not to have their political opinions changed, a statement they re-asserted at every possible opportunity throughout the year. But, they finally admitted, their understanding of the “other” had changed, they recognized that there was violence and victimization on both sides of the conflict and, some of the braver ones asserted, they were even prepared to try and invite teachers from the other side to their schools to speak to their pupils.

Now in its third year, this Partnership for Peace project is just one example of the many collaborative Israeli-Palestinian projects carried out at Israeli universities. If there is a liberal space within Israel where the two sides can meet and cooperate, even in these most difficult times, it is the universities and Institutes of Higher Education. In some cases, it is for the purpose of pure research, especially in the fields of medicine, biotechnology and water research. In others, it is for the facilitation of meeting, dialogue, learning about the other and simple educating each side about the social, cultural and religious norms, about the normal family and personal experiences of people, who are normally perceived only as enemies and constituting a threat.

When there are issues relating to the individual rights of Palestinians, it is more often than not the Israeli academic community who are the first to sign the petitions and raise a cry. Not only with respect to the basic right of Palestinian institutes of learning to be free and open spaces of learning, but with respect to many political issues relating to Israel’s problematic occupation of the West Bank. For all its faults, Israel remains open to debate and critique and it is hard to think of almost any other country or society in the world where, despite the ongoing conflict, the alternative voices criticising the government and its policies even over basic issues of State security, remain as vocal as they do in Israel.

An academic boycott would destroy all of this. In the false name of liberalism, human rights and academic freedom, those who would attempt to boycott Israeli universities would deny those same rights to a community who are in the forefront of open debate and dialogue, perhaps more than any other society in the Middle East. For the pro-boycotters, there are no two sides to the conflict, there is no injustice or violence visited in both directions, nor is there any historical context. There is only Israel as the single perpetrator of injustice, a country singled out from amongst the many countries in a world where the denial of human rights, accompanied by violence and insecurity, even contemporary acts of genocide, persist in many places. But all this is of no concern to those who champion the cause of boycott. Israel is in their sights, and the fact that open debate, academic freedom and critique of the State are daily occurrences in the Israeli media, universities, coffee houses and taxis, is simply ignored. The boycott slogan has now become a crusade, to single out Israel, and Israeli academics as the lepers of world society.

The fact that the boycott proposal (and it is only a proposal at this stage which still has to be discussed, debated and voted on by all the local branches of the UCU during the coming year) has almost no possibility of being implemented, is beside the point. The Heads of British Universities, as contrasted with the political activists of the academic union (the UCU) – no more than 150 people representing over 120,000 members, most of whom are annoyed that their representatives spend their time vilifying Israel instead of dealing with their pensions, wages and other conditions of employment – have come out strongly against any notion of boycott. So too has the media, not always known for its support of Israel’s positions, and so too have the British government, with clear statements by Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Tony Blair and the Minister of Education Bill Rummel. That is perhaps not surprising. Few of the pro-boycott activists are people who actively engage in the sort of research or dialogue which actually benefit the two peoples, or the wider Middle East. They do not engage in brain cell research, find ways of increasing water supplies in arid regions, or generally engage in dialogue promoting peace and cooperation. They have a single bee in their bonnet and it is Israel.

It is, of course, all too easy for the Israeli and Jewish (and the two are inherently linked to each other, regardless of the fact of whether some of the pro-boycott camp are themselves Jewish or not) side of the equation to come out with collective counter accusations of anti-semitism, because this is how it is perceived even by many rational, liberal thinking academics, many of whom are equally critical of Israeli government policies, but do not allow this to overspill into collective and selective boycott activity. But the anti-Semitism counter argument is too simplistic. Not everyone associated with the pro-boycott campaign is anti-semitic. Many of them are indeed liberal academics who are the first to stand up and defend the rights of any student or member of faculty who believes that his / her rights have been infringed because of their religious or ethnic affiliations, be they Jewish, Moslem, Hindu or anything else.

But equally they cannot be blind to the growing anti-semitism which has visited England, and its university campuses in recent years and which they, even unwittingly, have prepared the ground of legitimacy and opened the backdoor for evildoers to enter. The recent All-Parliamentary report on anti-Semitism (and its members did not include a single Jewish member of Parliament so as not to be accused of bias) point their finger at the growing anti-Semitism on UK campuses. When I, an Israeli professor, lecture at invited seminars and workshops, I am always made to feel at home amongst my peers, but am always approached afterwards by Jewish students – rational, intelligent, non-hysterical young adults – who tell me how uncomfortable it is becoming for them, especially if they display outward signs of their Jewishness, or take part in events organised by the local Jewish or Israeli societies. At first, I thought they were a bit paranoid, over reactive to a difficult political atmosphere which is highly critical of Israel, but having been approached by group after group after group during the past few years, I can no longer deny the very real change of atmosphere which has taken place on campuses and which the singling out of Israel by some of my academic peers, has helped bring about.

Nor have the boycott activities contributed to the reputation of British universities. At the end of the day, the UCU has been instrumental in creating an image of British universities around the world which is not sympathetic. In North America and much of Europe, the UK universities are now perceived as places which deny academic freedom and liberal discourse. Major research funders, such as the EU and medical research organisations in the USA, have stated that they will not fund research at any Institute which itself discriminates against a scholar because of his ethnic, religious or national affiliation. My own experience, both as a student thirty years ago and as a visiting Scholar today, is that British universities are not like that at all and that they remain places for open debate and freedom of expression. But the attempt to boycott a specific group of scholars and to deny them the basic rights which they themselves hold as so valuable, even it is by a small vociferous minority, has damaged the global reputation of these fine Institutions of learning, threatening their very integrity as places of balance and neutrality.

If those promoting the idea of boycott want to contribute to peace, reconciliation and dialogue in the Middle East, there is much they can do. They can start by taking part in collaborative research and conferences with both their Israeli and Palestinian counterparts. They can visit the region and its universities, on both sides of the divide, to have a closer, and more balanced, understanding of the contested national narratives. And they can provide welcoming neutral spaces of open dialogue where both Israeli and Palestinian scholars can come together and pursue research for which Universities exist in the first place – the enhancement of scholarship and the welfare of humankind.