stand up against the blacklist of Israeli academics

This issue is as least as important, as a matter of freedom of speech and support of Enlightenment values, as the Mohammed cartoons, and people aren’t paying enough attention to it. Some people are paying attention, though.

Juan Cole has asked his academic readers to sign the petition in support of Israeli scholars:

Yet another attempt is being made to institute an academic boycott in Europe of Israeli professors. Academics, please sign this petition and stand up. Israeli academics as a class have not done anything wrong and it is not right to subject them to a blanket ban.

Bravo to Cole.

Jeff Weintraub is also urging his readers to sign the petition.

Al Quds University president Sari Nusseibeh is urging his Palestinian colleagues to oppose the blacklist on Israeli scholars.

And there is an extraordinary cri de coeur by David Hirsch, of the University of London, against the blacklist.

Jews would be challenged to demonstrate their political cleanliness. An academic boycott would mean that UK based academic journals would refuse to publish papers from Israelis researching or teaching in Israel. Israelis would be excluded from academic conferences. Israelis would be disbarred from taking part in joint projects with UK academics. Israeli Jews that refused to identify themselves as anti-Zionists would be punished for the actions of their government in a way that no other academic on the planet is punished - at least by people claiming to be antiracists and on the left….
Not only is our union damagingly split by this moralistic and posturing gesture politics, so is the Palestine Solidarity movement in general. There ought to be a strong and united movement around the world to campaign for a free and democratic Palestine. Most decent people are alienated from the movement that exists by the feeling that it hates Israel more than it loves Palestine. We need to build on the basis of a new kind of language - we need to argue for peace and mutual recognition, not for war against the “oppressors”. The boycott campaign gives up on building a Middle East peace movement and replaces it with a lame and symbolic politics of despair and anger.

Hirsch touches on a point that indicts not just the usual suspects (the left) but the elites of the West—for their narcissism and condescension:

There is a significant stream of contemporary ‘anti-imperialism’ that routinely adopts this imperialist double-standard: liberty, womens’ emancipation and human rights are ‘western’ inventions, good enough for ‘us’, but not important for ‘the other’. …

And, eerily, he echoes something I wrote about here (the moral bankruptcy of “not in our name” arguments):

As well as punishing Israelis, the boycott has the added bonus of exonerating ‘us’. It is a ‘not in my name’ policy. It appeals to people who have an impossible need to feel themselves to be morally pure even though they live in a dirty world of complexity, conflict and injustice. They want to be able to feel that the corruption of the existing world is not their responsibility. Choosing to punish Israeli academics does not commit them to doing the hard work of changing the world, of building bridges, of making links; it does not take up any time or effort; it saves them from a feeling of complicity in the bad things that go on in the world. The fact that it does worse than nothing for Palestine is neither here nor there. [emphases added]

There is a deranged detachment from reality in some quarters in America, and it’s not only the far left and the Democrats and the liberals who show signs of denial. I’ll write more about this another time.