Academic boycott is worthwhile debate
The Charlatan
23 January 2009
Ben Saifer
With the Canadian government offering its full support for Israel’s recent destruction of the Gaza Strip and its imprisoned population, discussion of an academic boycott of Israeli Universities has re-entered mainstream debate.
In 2005, 171 Palestinian organizations called on international civil society to implement a campaign of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel until it fulfilled three basic demands: full equality for all citizens of Israel, an end to its illegal occupation, and the affirmation of international law and UN resolutions for Palestinian refugees.
The campaign arose out of the sober assessment that the so-called Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” was simply a mirage. By discarding international law, this process has pitted occupied against occupier in a well-scripted exercise in asymmetrical power relations.
As with the South African BDS campaign, which played an important role in ending that country’s apartheid system, academic boycott is an integral element of the BDS strategy against Israeli apartheid.
Contrary to popular misconceptions, the academic boycott is institutional in nature and calls for cutting all institutional links with Israeli universities. It does not target individual academics based on their nationality or political views.
While some courageous intellectuals teach in Israeli institutions, no Israeli university has ever taken a public stand against Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, nor has any representative body of Israeli academics ever criticized their government’s denial of the Palestinian right to education.
Israel has repeatedly shut down entire Palestinian universities for months and sometimes even years at a time. The basic right to freedom of movement is denied to Palestinian students who must contend with checkpoints, the Wall and apartheid roads in their daily struggle to attend class. Most recently, Dec. 28 2008, Israel bombed the Islamic University of Gaza.
This is a mere sampling of the hardships imposed on Palestinian students living under Israeli military occupation.
Nevertheless, while hundreds of North American university presidents publicly condemned the 2007 proposal by British academics to boycott Israeli universities, these same presidents remain silent about the wholesale destruction of the Palestinian education system by Israel.
This touches Carleton students in a very real way.
In July 2007, Carleton’s interim president Samy Mahmoud publicly opposed the boycott. August 2007 current president Roseanne Runte did the same, in her role as president of Old Dominion University.
President Runte’s opposition to boycott was restated in her Jan. 13 e-mail to the Carleton community. The context is important as this email was sent in response to a Jan. 11 letter from 55 Carleton professors she condemn Israel’s aerial bombardment of the Islamic University of Gaza.
In her e-mail, the president admitted that “if [she] has a personal opinion, […] she should not use the position of president to give it expression and weight. By so doing, it could be implied that this position was one adopted by the institution as a whole.”
By publicly opposing the academic boycott of Israeli universities and remaining silent about the physical destruction of a Palestinian one, President Runte has taken an explicitly political position on behalf of Carleton University.
In response, Students Against Israeli Apartheid (SAIA) Carleton calls for a public debate with the Carleton administration on the academic boycott of Israel. This request falls in line with the president’s stated belief that universities “must include a respectful context for representing the most diverse points of view.”
The administration is welcome to invite any speaker they wish to represent their position. Such a debate will allow the Carleton community to form their own opinion on the administration’s position.
We have sent a formal request to this effect.
To ensure that Carleton remains a space committed to free expression and dialogue, the necessity of this debate is unquestionable.
As the people of Gaza pick their lives up out of the ashes, the urgency ofsuch a debate cannot be denied.
