Anti-Zionist boycotts of Israel are AntiSemitic - especially the resolution (passed in April by the executive council) of the Association of University Teachers (AUT)* organized by Sue Blackwell, to boycott academics in Israeli universities which was later reversed in May of 2005.
*(48,000 member AUT is Britain's largest union of university faculty and support staff)
The boycott attempt went way beyond stupid and AntiSemitic; it was a prejudicial attempt to vilify Israel and cut off debate. It passed in April of 2005 because it was rushed through with little debate. A month later it was rescinded.
Sue Blackwell, the main instigator of the boycott resolution, who is not yet credentialed English teacher, paradoxically is an example of closed mindedness by academics who should be supporting all academic freedom not stifling it because it comes out of Israel. But that is not what Blackwell had in mind. (Blackwell has an MPhil in English from the University of Cambridge and is currently writing up her PhD on the acquisition and use of personal pronouns.
"...Sue Blackwell's published views in the Guardian leave no doubt in my mind, that in the main, the people behind the AUT boycott campaign are rather crude Anti-Zionists. Blackwell says that Israel is an `illegitimate state' and goes on to denounce Israeli academics for serving in the IDF, which is compulsory. Other little clues include comments that Israeli Universities have not denounced the occupation. But neither have British Universities denounced the occupation of Iraq. Nor did they denounce internment in Northern Ireland. I think that this group is attempting to use widespread and justified opposition to the Israeli occupation to be mobilized for another agenda." (John Strawson, Reader in Law, University of East London April 2005)
Prominent leftist David Hirsh, a lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths, College, University of London a leading member of ENGAGE, an organization set up by left-wing AUT members determined to overturn the boycott says.
".....the way that she singles out Israel as being the only `illegitimate' state constitutes demonization rather than criticism. She does not criticize Israel's bad policies but instead she understands its bad policies to be an inevitable manifestation of its bad (racist) essence. She wanted AUT to have policy of holding Israeli academics to a much higher standard of behaviour than any other academics..." (Hirsch)
"...500 academics signed the protest from Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and academics worldwide asked to be honorary members of the Israeli universities to show solidarity with Israeli professors. Haifa University prepared to sue AUT for defamation. Thousands, including former Nobel Laureates, asked to join Bar-Ilan University's newly formed International Advisory Board for Academic Freedom." (PRNewswire)
"We commend the AUT members who called the special session that overturned this resolution which violated principles of academic freedom in order to undermine Israel," stated SWU national director Roz Rothstein. "We hope the AUT action today sends a clear message: Anti-Israel extremists cannot continue trying to hijack and subvert institutions to further their political agenda." (PR Newswire Europe, StandWithUs (SWU) Applauds Britain's Teacher's Union Decision Revoking Boycott of Israeli Universities - 5/26/2005 - SWU is a pro Israel advocacy organization advocates for a secure future for Israel - http://www.standwithus.com
"I do not think that an academic boycott of Israeli universities is correct in principle. Boycotts of universities always undermine academic freedom which must be seen as undesirable. The Chinese occupation of Tibet (for nearly 5 decades) has not provoked a call for a boycott for this reason. Exchanging ideas, debating issues, working on common projects, collaborative publishing ventures are valuable in and of themselves." (Strawson)
"The university sector in Israel is currently under attack from the right wing for being too liberal, particularly on the Palestine question. Many academics need our support." (Strawson)
As usual many false claims have been made. There was the well-known accusation, often repeated, that Israeli universities do not permit debate on the Palestinian issue. This was a lie. There is no curb on Israeli academic freedom. As a matter of fact there in at least as many, if not more LEFT wing academics in Israel and Israeli academics have a tradition of questioning authority and the prevailing wisdom no less than the people of Israel constantly complain and question authority and prevailing views. There is likely more diversity of opinion in Israel than anywhere else on the planet.
"Criticism, the more particularly as university teachers should be expected to understand it, implies the free exchange of judgment and idea, the give and take - however harsh - of argument and counter-argument. Anything less is merely the closing of minds. And a boycott - especially a boycott of thinkers, scientists, philosophers, etc, those for whom open-mindedness should be paramount - is an expression of the closing of minds en masse." (Howard Jacobson, The Evening Standard (London, England); 4/27/2005)
"No other country has been singled out for similar treatment. No boycotting of Chinese universities, or universities in African or Arab countries where infringements of human rights are state sponsored and racism is so routine it is part of the curriculum." (ibid)
"`Jewish science' was how the Nazis referred to psychoanalysis and relativity. Because Freud and Einstein were Jewish, the German people had to be protected from the contamination of their work. Now the contaminating science is not Jewish but Israeli. Which we are told is somehow different." (ibid)
One of the co-sponsors (there were two sponsors) of the boycott at Birmingham University in Britain was Sue Blackwell, an English lecturer, who was working on her doctorate, who accuses Israel of ethnic cleansing and claims Israel is illegitimate. On Blackwell's website when the resolution was railroaded through by the executive council of AUT (before it was rescinded a month later) showed Sue Blackwell, the co-sponsor of the resolution dressed in a Palestinian flag making a "V" for victory sign. The caption over the picture said: "Victory to the academic Intifada."
The other co-sponsor was Steven Rose, a Jew and member of the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP). There always will be Jewish AntiSemites and SWP is full of them.
"Steven Rose, an architect of the anti-Israel boycott movement, compared Israel to Nazi Germany. "I regard Israeli academics as shameful and silent, just as ordinary decent Germans were silent their Jewish colleagues were kicked out of universities. In the 1930s Jewish academics in Nazi Germany were being expelled from their universities and fleeing the country. Of course, many German academics disapproved, but they were silent. And British academics continued to deal normally with them. Do you not see the parallels? We have no right to treat Israel as if it were a normal state," said Rose." (Jerusalem Post; 5/27/2005; Yaakov Lappin - and correspondent; Talya Halkin)
Jacobson answers Blackwell:
"To talk of ethnic cleansing as hardwired into the Zionist enterprise is a violence not only to history, it is a violence to Jews living and dead...It hates Israel before there was an Israel to hate. And before Israel there were only Jews..." (ibid)
"While it is simple to refute the claim that the Israelis are the new Nazis - show us the extermination camps, show us the gas chambers, show us the will to wipe out an entire culture - "ethnic cleansing" sticks the easier for being vaguer while doing the same job of making Jews guilty of the very crimes of which they were once the victims. Call it a sort of retroactive justice." (ibid)
Those advocating the boycott attempted to spin the story but they were unsuccessful. Only those already disposed to hating Israel would support this insidious form of AntiSemitism.
"But the vilification of Israel of which the academic boycott is the latest example rests upon contextlessness, Israel's every act an unprovoked aggression, at every turn the doer and not the done to, all mention of war waged by the other side expunged." (ibid)
"Here, too, I recognize the age-old strategies of anti-Semitism. Jews clung together unwholesomely, the anti-Semites said, and never mind that as a deliberate act of segregation they had been herded into ghettos. They were moneylenders and financiers, and never mind that all other opportunities had been closed to them. The Jew was contextless. He came evil into the world. As did, for those who would shun it, Israel." (ibid)
Jacobson goes on to say,
"It is no defense of Israel that it has had to fight against being driven into the sea, because the sea, in her (Blackwell's) view, is where it belongs." (ibid)
On Sue Blackwell's pro-Palestinian website, there is also a link to sites which blame the Jews for 9/11.
Jacobson concludes with:
"Anti-Zionism, now, is anti-Semitic because by the actions of its members the Association of University Teachers has made it so." (ibid)
Blackwell and those who agreed with her were really protesting the fact that MOST of Israeli academics do not agree with them by accepting, as they do, the Arab narrative of what happened in 1948, and before and after the re-establishment of the State of Israel.
Israel did not reject the UN Resolution 181 of 29 November 1947, which called for the establishment of TWO states, one to be Jewish and one to be Arab. And in the war that followed, by what some say can only be considered a miracle because Israel was out-manned, out-gunned, and against insurmountable odds against five Arab armies and volunteers from throughout the Arab world prevented another Holocaust, kept back the attempt by Arabs to perform the final ethnic cleansing of the Jews. Fortunately they did not succeed anymore than Blackwell's boycott resolution.
"This is a victory for the Israeli campuses, where debate and discussion takes place and not bloodshed, where Arab and Jewish students learn side by side, where there are liberal and academic values..." (David Hirsch)
"The resolution was so blatantly prejudiced, such a perversion of academic freedom and so full of distortions about Israel that it unleashed an international storm of protest. Even Sari Nusseibeh, president of Palestinian University Al-Quds, denounced it," noted Rothstein of SWU.
"Ethnic cleansing" is an extremely strong word, and it does not apply to anything in the history of the Zionist project. Around the time of the founding of the State of Israel, many Palestinians left their homes and became refugees. This by itself does not constitute ethnic cleansing, even of some of those who left their homes were forced to do so." (Alexander Massey - June 13th, 2005)
"Ethnic cleansing involves mass-murder, which the Zionists have never been guilty of. Saying that they have is not accurate, and it's not really serious. It smacks of the fanaticism and shrillness that is increasingly a feature of criticism of Israel." (Massey)
Those advocating the boycott equate Zionism with Nazism. You have heard that tirade before. Stay on the Internet awhile and you will definitely hear it again. It is a false charge. This is what David Hirsch says about it,
"....This identification of Nazism with Zionism, we have said, licenses people to relate to Jews who do not identify themselves as anti-Zionists, as though they were Nazis. We have said that the left anti-Zionist story of how Israel was founded and why Israel is uniquely racist is based on a one-sided reading of history. We have criticized the way that this story puts Zionism at the centre of the world; it mirrors the way that open antisemites have put `the Jewish problem' at the centre of world history."
"The clearest danger is that a movement that is based upon an objectively antisemitic politics is a breeding ground for antisemitism. It is inevitable that a movement based on antisemitic politics will create actual antisemites." (Hirsch)
"The left anti-Zionists have to take responsibility for the consequences of their politics and the consequences of the movement that they have played a part in building." (Hirsch)
"Engage has said to the anti-Zionists that they are institutionally antisemitic; that when they say `Zionist' often this functions as code for `Jew'. Left anti-Zionists have always angrily rejected this charge, saying that they are only hostile to Zionist Jews and not at all hostile to Jews in general. This new current of anti-Zionist antisemites answer us: `Yes. We mean Jew. We are antisemites. So What?'" (Hirsch)
"There is a long tradition of antisemitism on the left and in the Labour movement; the 'socialism of fools'. Karl Marx mocked the antisemitic ultra-leftism of Bruno Bauer, who argued against Jewish emancipation in 19th century Germany. The Stalinists in the 1930s organised around antisemitic campaigns, and again in the 50's with the `doctors trials'. Before the second world war, Oswald Moseley came out of the Labour Party to campaign on an `anti-war' antisemtic platform in the East End. Since the 1967 Israeli-Arab war, left antisemitism has routinely clothed itself as anti-Zionism. The Polish Communist Party launched a purge of `Zionist' academics in 1968. In the 1970s and 80s the Soviet Union imprisoned Jews who wanted to live in Israel in the Gulag. Anti-Zionists attacked the rights of Jewish students to organise Jewish societies in the UK in the 80s. Also in the 80s, Jim Allen wrote a play that put some of the blame for the Holocaust onto `Zionism' and that represented Zionism and Nazism as being ideologically related belief systems. There is a commonsense notion present amongst much of the posturing left today of Jews as `oppressors'; Jews are Nazi-Zionists, Jews are rich Capitalists, Jews are scheming Communists, Jews are the shady neo-cons pulling the strings of American imperialism. This fake and racist leftism has to stop. The left has to radically re-educate itself so that it can recognise antisemitism when it sees it." (Hirsch)
"Arguments about whether or not Israel should or should not have been created are now quite irrelevant and should rank along side such historical questions as `should the United States have been created?' or `Are Turks the legitimate inhabitants of Anatolia?'" (John Strawson, Reader in Law, University of East London April 2005)
"The (biggest) migration to Palestine was facilitated by British imperial policy (Balfour Declaration etc.) but was not caused by it. In fact the Jewish population of Palestine fell immediately after the arrival of the British and only really grew significantly after Hitler came to power. (Strawson)
"Despite the language of colonialism deployed by the Yishuv and the Zionist movement, `pioneer,' `agricultural colonies,' `settlement' etc. this was not a typical settlement colony. Land had to be bought from actual owners - unlike British policies of gaining land by deception in Africa or North America and then selling or leasing it to colonists. By 1948 Jewish ownership of land amounted to 7% of the total (UN figures) although the Jewish population was about third of the total. The UN partition plan in 1947 (UNGA resolution 181) was not an exceptional measure, against the background of the partition of India and the forced movement of 10 million Germans after WW2 to allow the reshuffling of Europe's borders as the Soviet Union extended westward. The creation of the State of Israel in 1948 did involve ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, which the partition plan did not envisage. At the end of the war and nakba it should be recalled that no Jews (save for the Mount Scopus enclave) remained East of the green line. Zionism has been particularly heterogeneous involving social democracy, communism, Marxism of all varieties, liberalism, pacifism, moderate and extreme nationalism and overt racism. It was only on the eve of the creation of the state that even a name was agreed. Variations of Zionism argued for an ethnically pure Jewish State in all of Palestine and Jordan, a multi-ethnic state with Jewish autonomy in Palestine, a bi-national state, and partition - and gradations in between. It has to be remembered that it was the Soviet Union, in supporting the UN partition resolution, that described Zionism as the `national liberation movement of the Jewish people.'" (Strawson)
"The argument that Zionism is some false notion of nationalism is based on the assumption that other nationalisms are somehow natural and have some basis in objectivity. Nationalism, by its nature, is based on the notion of exclusion through reference to ethnic, linguistic, historical, locational and cultural criteria. The exclusion is then presented in highly romantic terms often served with a religious or racial sauce, which is used to justify the superiority of the nation over others. Any study of nationalism encounters mythic narratives. These are necessary in order to explain how the people being referred to got to the bit of land on which they now live, developed their language, maybe religion and their `way of life.' Whether these accounts are secular or religious, the narratives dodge inconvenient histories, in particular what happened to the previous inhabitants. Zionism suffers from all these features. It is no worse than British nationalism, invented in the 19th century which tells its people that they invented human rights and the rule of law as early as 1215! The British avoid any real history of their murderous Empire; when do we hear of the genocide against the Carribs, the mass murder of the Irish, the concentration camps in the Boer War, the gulags in Kenya? Zionist history especially since the advent of its revisionist form has been perhaps more challenging than what is common in Britain. Zionism has been filled with many contradictions from the start." (Strawson)
"Reading Herzl, it is amazing that anything happened at all! (In rejecting Hebrew as the language for a Jewish State he says `who amongst us can even order a train ticket in Hebrew?') He envisaged a state on the Swiss model, where only a minority of Jews would live and it could be located anywhere. The idea that Zionism is essentially racist is only consistent with the view that all nationalism is a form of racism. In that case all states that claimed to be based on nationalism would need to be removed as well." (Strawson)