About the author ESSaY

Eve
Excluding Israelis: An Intellectual
Garrard
Eve Garrard is senior lecturer in the
Anatomy of the Academic Boycott
Centre for Professional Ethics at Keele By Eve Garrard February 2008
University in the United Kingdom. Prior
to joining Keele, she worked for several
years for the Open University, and has a
strong interest in teaching philosophy
to adult beginning students. Much of
her teaching is now in applied ethics, to
health care (and other) professionals. Her
research interests are in moral theory
(especially theory of motivation); applied
ethics, including bioethics; and also
philosophical issues connected with the
idea of evil. She has published papers on
the nature of evil and of forgiveness, and
has co-edited a book on moral philosophy
and the Holocaust.
She is a signatory of the Euston
Manifesto, and a guest-blogger on
normblog.

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On 31 May 2007, the University and College Union (UCU)—the academics’
union in the UK—passed a motion at its annual conference instructing its
executive to circulate a call for a boycott of Israeli universities, and to organize
a UK-wide tour of branches by Palestinian academics to discuss this. It also
declared that in the circumstances of ‘the complicity of Israeli academia in
the occupation … criticism of Israel cannot be construed as antisemitic.’1
Four months later, on 28 September, the Union announced that its legal
advisers had warned it that such a boycott would be unlawful, because it would
constitute discrimination. The opinion came from Lord Lester QC, who had
himself played a significant role in creating Britain’s anti-discrimination legisla-
tion; hence his views about the possibility of the boycott being in breach of that
legislation seemed likely to be authoritative. The Union therefore called off the
debate, and for the time being, at any rate, the boycott proposal collapsed.
In between these two events, throughout an exceptionally gray, wet British
summer, a very intense and acrimonious debate took place in the universities
and colleges, and in the national press, and on the internet, in particular on some
of the political blogs and also on the Union activists’ e-list. The political history
of the boycott campaign in the UCU, if it ever gets written, will be extremely
interesting, revealing such things as the role played by the
Socialist Workers Party, whose members and sympathiz-
ers were disproportionately represented both in the ranks
of the boycotters and among local union representatives;
the extent to which those who supported the boycott
proposal were reluctant to allow the union membership to
be balloted on this highly divisive topic; and such passing
peculiarities as the unexpected intervention of the British
Medical Journal. However, I do not propose to write that
history here. My aim is rather to present an intellectual
anatomy of the debate itself, since the arguments on both
sides were so illuminating, and so full of significance
for wider debates about Zionism and antisemitism.
Why boycott?
There was one main argument in support of the boycott:
the claim that Israel oppresses the Palestinians. There is
much Palestinian suffering, and, so this argument goes,
Israel is entirely responsible for it. Other arguments favor-
ing a boycott emerged in response to various objections
to it, but this appeal to Palestinian suffering and Israeli
oppression was the bedrock claim, and boycotters returned
to and reiterated it again and again, especially when the
weaknesses of their other arguments were demonstrated.
Facing this claim were two central objections to
the boycott, deriving from different and independent
moral principles (though as we shall see the two argu-
ments rapidly became intertwined); with a third, more
consequences-oriented, set of considerations bringing
up the rear.2 The first of these objections was the claim
that an academic boycott would violate the principle of
academic freedom, a principle which is not only impor-
tant in its own right, being essential to the flourishing of
the academy, but also one which is peculiarly under the
protection of academics. If they don’t respect academic
freedom, so it was often argued, why should anyone else?
The second main argument against the boycott was that
it would be unjust—it would involve discrimination against
Israel. Why is Israel being singled out for hostile treatment,
it was asked, when there are so many worse malefactors in
the world today? Very few people in the universities, even
among the most dedicated boycotters, were prepared to say
openly that Israel is actually the worst country in the world,
and any such claim couldn’t of course be supported, in the
light of far greater and bloodier oppression elsewhere. So
what could justify singling it out for boycotting, when other
and much worse states (China, Russia, Sudan, North Korea,
Zimbabwe, Syria, Iran, Libya, Burma …..) are left untroubled
by any adverse attentions from the UCU? Singling Israel out
alone among the nations for punishment can’t be justified,
so this argument claimed, and hence it is discriminatory;
and furthermore, since Israel is the only Jewish state, and
is supported by many Jews in other countries, unjusti-
fied discrimination against it is effectively antisemitic.
With respect to the first argument, about the threat
which a boycott poses to academic freedom, the immediate
response from boycotters was to point out that academic
freedom, though important, is not the only important
consideration—sometimes factors take priority, such as
the fight against oppression. Some pro-boycotters also
argued in this context that Palestinians don’t have aca-
demic freedom,3 so a boycott of Israel aiming to improve
the situation of Palestinian academics and students would
actually defend academic freedom rather than undermine
it; and in any case, they claimed, Israeli universities mis-
use their academic freedom. 4 (No-one actually said that
improvement of the conditions of Palestinian academ-
ics and students was the principal aim of the proposed
boycott, and, indeed, its precise aims never became
clear. In particular, the conditions which would count
as success, and hence would lead to the boycott being
“…[T]he argument also leaves quite
unexplained why socialists…don’t feel the
same need to declare their purity in the face
of other regimes”
lifted, were never fully spelled out by its supporters.)
This defense of the boycott, in terms of the overriding
importance of fighting oppression, effectively forged a
tight connection between the concern about academic
freedom and the concern about unjust selectivity. This
was because it immediately raised the following question:
if Israel’s misdeeds are important enough to override the
value of academic freedom, then why isn’t the same true
of Russia, China, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Syria, Iran, and so
on (and on)? Why is Israel being singled out? Attempts
to answer that question, and the pressing home of the
Excluding Israelis: An Intellectual Anatomy of the Academic Boycott 2
question in the face of those attempts, became the princi-
pal locus of the debate. Very few anti-boycotters claimed
that Israel is faultless; what they said was that it is not
alone in this condition, and what they demanded of the
pro-boycotters was that they specify exactly which feature
of Israel is supposed to distinguish it from other faulty
polities and justify singling it out for distinctively hostile
treatment. In response to this demand, the pro-boycotters
put forward a remarkably wide range of considerations;
however few, if any, of them survived the forensic atten-
tion which they received from the boycott’s adversaries.
Worse than all the others?
One of the commonest and most persistent justifications
given for singling out Israel was the claim that Israel is an
apartheid state. Since the original apartheid state, South
Africa, was the subject of a successful academic boycott,
there could be no legitimate objection to boycotting Israel.
The anti-boycotters naturally responded to this claim by
pointing out the many ways in which Israel is radically dif-
ferent from apartheid South Africa: the vibrant free press in
Israel, in which the government can be and often is fiercely
criticized; the large numbers of Arab students and staff at
top Israeli universities; and most importantly, the fact that
every Israeli citizen, Jew or Arab, has the vote. The oc-
cupation of the Palestinian territories, even if it is entirely
wrong, simply isn’t the same as apartheid—and if it were,
then other occupying powers such as China, Russia, and
Turkey would also have to be regarded as apartheid states.
Pro-boycotters commonly responded to these argu-
ments by reverting to descriptions of Israeli wrongdoing
and Palestinian suffering; here as elsewhere in the debate
boycotters regularly failed to address the fact that the
singling-out argument is a comparative one—why this
country?—which can only be answered by a suitable
comparison of this country with others. But the claim that
Israel is an apartheid state continued to be made, in spite
of its inaccuracy, throughout the campaign. And it’s easy
to see why: the rhetorical power of the analogy, its ability
to associate Israel with appalling racism and also with
ultimate defeat, was too great for boycotters to want to
abandon it, even though other regimes are far more similar
to apartheid South Africa, in terms both of racism and of
the oppression of large numbers of people, than Israel is.
Another attempt to specify the factor which allegedly
justifies singling out Israel for boycott was the claim that it’s
an occupying power, and (supposedly) we care more about
occupations than about other human rights abuses—we are
all strongly committed to the Peace of Westphalia5, on this
account. But, as many people pointed out, there are other
occupying powers whose occupations are far worse and
bloodier than Israel’s, but which haven’t been boycotted
by the UCU, nor are they likely to be—China is an obvi-
ous example. Nor is it obvious that we do care more about
occupations than about other kinds of rights-violations,
or that we draw the fine distinctions between different
kinds of occupation which is needed to explain the special
“No broadly philosophical discussion of the
nature and proper aims of academic boycotts
ever took place, nor was there any principled
investigation of which states, if any, would be
justified targets”
condemnation of Israel, rather than other occupying
powers; and even if we do, it isn’t at all clear that we should.
Next up came the claim that the reason for focussing
on Israel was that a boycott would be more likely to work
with Israel, possibly because it’s a democracy, than it
would with any of the other malefactors whose misdeeds
are so markedly worse. No serious attempt to back up this
assertion was ever provided, nor was there evidence that
boycotts of any other states had actually been considered
by the Union. No broadly philosophical discussion of
the nature and proper aims of academic boycotts ever
took place, nor was there any principled investigation
of which states, if any, would be justified targets—those
union activists who thought that boycott was an appropri-
ate activity for academics always had Israel in mind.
An interesting variation on the claim about effectiveness
came from the original mover of the boycott proposal, Tom
Hickey of Brighton University, who argued that because
Israeli, and more broadly Jewish, culture is especially
committed to education and scholarship, an academic
boycott would be especially effective against the Jewish
state.6 That is, the fact that Israel is committed to some
humane and civilized values was given as a reason for
Excluding Israelis: An Intellectual Anatomy of the Academic Boycott 3
treating it as a particularly desirable target for boycott.
This supposed justification had a peculiarly perverse
flavor, seeking to punish Israel for its virtues rather than
“It was hard not to believe that this was
something to do with the adverse effects on
an academic’s career that refusing to have
dealings with American academia might
produce”
its vices, and implying that regimes lacking those virtues
would be less appropriate targets for punitive treatment.
Another justification which was sometimes put forward
adumbrated a theme that would become steadily more
dominant: the claim that Israel is supported by America, so
fighting Israel is a way of fighting American imperialism.
The underlying assumption here is that fighting American
imperialism is more important than preserving academic
freedom, and more important than refraining from unjust
selectivity—an assumption which, to put it mildly, is itself
in need of supporting argument. And more significantly,
this assumption doesn’t explain why it’s Israel which should
be boycotted, rather than America itself. If America is the
source of what’s objectionable about Israel, why should it
not be the overt target of the boycott? But the possibility
of boycotting America was never raised, even by people
whose hostility to it was loudly and frequently voiced. It
was hard not to believe that this was something to do with
the adverse effects on an academic’s career that refusing
to have dealings with American academia might produce.
The final argument for singling out Israel which I
will mention here is the view that this selectivity is right
because the Israelis are really like us—they’re ‘one of
us’—so we naturally hold them to Western standards of
behavior. Indeed, Israelis are constantly saying that they
hold themselves to Western standards, so it’s right that they
should be judged accordingly. Leave aside the problem that
the history of the West contains many and terrible episodes
where Jews were emphatically not regarded as being ‘one of
us’. A more pressing problem is that it does seem to follow
from this putative justification that if Israel dropped its
commitment to Western standards, then there would be
much less reason to single it out for further attention, and
boycotters would turn their hostile attentions elsewhere.
On this view we should cut more slack to countries which
are unashamedly oppressive and tyrannical, and be harsher
to countries which explicitly endorse liberal values. This
prioritizes, to a remarkable extent, criticism of the vice of
hypocrisy (which Israel must be supposed to possess above
all others—itself a claim entirely lacking in support) at the
expense of ignoring the rather more terrible vices of tyr-
anny and mass murder. It may be that those who deploy this
justification for singling Israel out for boycott are driven
by an unspoken assumption that we should only judge
polities by the standards which they themselves respect.
But this is itself a peculiarly unattractive view: as a general
principle, it would permanently sink any hope of appealing
to human rights in the face of the systematic oppression
and killing which disfigure so many parts of the planet.
The narcissism of Not-In-My-Name
A distinctive version of this line of argument was pro-
vided by Richard Kuper, the Chair of Jews for Justice
for Palestinians. Kuper explained that Israel’s com-
mitment to Western values justifies singling it out
for punitive treatment, because if we don’t, then we,
as Westerners, will be complicit in its misdeeds; it’s
important that we should say, ‘No, not in our name’.7
(Steven Rose, Secretary of the British Committee for
the Universities of Palestine, and a prime mover in the
boycott campaign, also expressed some of this concern
about complicity8, as did various other boycott sympathiz-
ers, such as the architectural critic Charles Jencks.9)
But this justification for singling out Israel is really
focused on the need to purify us, to enable us to keep our
hands clean—and better still, to show the world that they’re
clean. The unattractive and frivolous narcissism of this ar-
gument, with its self-absorbed concentration upon our own
moral condition, has the effect of putting us and our moral
purity at centre stage, instead of the problems of those who
have to live and act in the terrible dilemmas of the Middle
East. And the argument also leaves quite unexplained why
socialists like Kuper and Rose don’t feel the same need to
declare their purity in the face of other regimes, regimes
which claim adherence to socialist values while engaging
in oppressions far more deadly than that of Israel (North
Korea is an obvious example, as is China). The argument
about complicity implies that socialists are complicit in
Excluding Israelis: An Intellectual Anatomy of the Academic Boycott 4
the horrors those regimes have committed unless they
loudly and publicly say, ‘No, not in my name’, and demon-
strate their sincerity by calling for an academic boycott of
those polities. In the absence of such calls, this supposed
reason for singling out Israel does not sound convincing.
Perhaps the most notable feature of these various
attempts to provide a reason for singling Israel out for
exceptional adverse treatment is that they manifestly
beg the question at issue—they deploy and rely on the
very selectivity which they are supposed to be justifying.
The oppression argument; the occupation argument;
the claim that academic freedom isn’t always the most
important consideration; the concern about complic-
ity: all these themselves embody the selectivity which
they purport to be accounting for, since all of them focus
on aspects of Israel which can be found, often in much
worse forms, in other countries which remain free from
“…[T]here was a very markedly non-random
distribution of boycott demands: Israel was
the only candidate”
the UCU’s boycotting attentions. Since these arguments
exemplify that selectivity, they can’t adequately explain it.
The failure of these attempts to defend the boycott
by identifying a feature of Israel which it uniquely pos-
sesses, and which justifies uniquely punitive treatment,
led in due course to two interesting attempts to provide
a justification, while acknowledging the absence of any
such unique feature. These arguments cut through the
dialectical knot by simply denying that there’s anything
wrong with singling-out; hence, they claim, the absence
of a uniquely bad feature in Israel is no bar to a legitimate
exceptionalism in the treatment of the Jewish state.
The first of these arguments denies, as a general mat-
ter, that we need to give any reason at all for focussing on
one moral issue rather than another. Which cause we take
up, its adherents say, is a matter of personal decision, and
there’s nothing wrong with sometimes adopting a rather
less serious cause in preference to a more serious one.
Now, there is indeed some truth in this. If a person has a
particular concern for animals, for example, then she may
reasonably devote her time and money to animal welfare,
even though there are also children in need whom she
could, if she chose, help instead. But if that’s what’s going on
in the case of the boycott, if support for it is just a matter of
personal choice, then we would expect to see a random dis-
tribution of such choices, or at the very least a fair scattering
of concern, with some people calling for a boycott of China,
others telling us to boycott Syrian universities, or Egyptian
ones, or Saudi Arabian ones, or those in Zimbabwe, or
North Korea, or Iran, or Burma, or Pakistan, or India, or
Russia, or the USA—there are plenty of candidates, after
all. But we didn’t see anything like this. There was a very
markedly non-random distribution of boycott demands:
Israel was the only candidate. And in the face of this notable
lack of randomness, the point about personal choice loses
grip. It is highly implausible to suppose that that’s what
was going on in the well-integrated Union campaign.
The alternative defense of singling-out involved
a slightly richer line of reasoning. The claim here was
that singling-out for punishment isn’t objectionable,
because it’s always legitimate to punish a wrongdoer,
whether or not other wrongdoers also get punished. It’s
irrelevant, on this view, whether other countries deserve
to be boycotted, since all that matters is whether Israel
is actually a wrongdoer. If it is, then it’s right to pun-
ish it, whether or not we punish other wrongdoers.
Again there is some intuitive appeal in this argument.
We do think it’s right to punish the murderers whom we
catch and convict, for example, even though there are
many others whom we don’t punish since we don’t man-
age to convict them. But even if there are times when it’s
right to punish one malefactor independently of what we
do to others, there are also quite obviously times when
this would be entirely wrong. Suppose we had a policy of
punishing only the women who drink and drive, say, and
not the men, maybe on the grounds that we can’t catch
and punish all drink-drivers, and women may (perhaps)
be more susceptible to the deterrent effects of punish-
ment than men. This would clearly be unjustified, and
indeed it’s inconceivable that anyone would try to justify
it. There simply is no general principle that says that it’s
permissible to punish some malefactors but not others.
Sometimes this can be justified, but sometimes it can’t—it
has to be decided case by case. And cases where lesser
rather than greater offenders are selected for punish-
ment cry out for further explanation and justification. 
Excluding Israelis: An Intellectual Anatomy of the Academic Boycott 5
 Furthermore, where the only group targeted for
punishment is one for whom there is a history of dis-
criminatory hostility, and where the nature and effect
of the punishment would be to further the very ends of
ostracism and exclusion which that past discrimination
“The singular focus on Israel created an
explanatory gap—why this country?
—which could readily be filled by some very
traditional discriminatory attitudes towards
Jews”
pursued, then the singling-out of that group for specially
punitive treatment begins to look ethically very dubi-
ous indeed. So this attempt to defend the singling-out
of Israel for hostile attention, by appeal to the supposed
principle that it’s always legitimate to punish an of-
fender regardless of what happens to other offenders,
also fails to work, since that principle is in fact false.
In the absence of an adequate justification for the
singling-out of Israel for special hostility, some of those
fighting the boycott proposal became convinced that it
was antisemitic, in effect and in some cases in intention.
They pointed out that singling out an individual or country
for special hostility without justification is discrimina-
tory; and given that Israel is the only Jewish state, and is
supported by many Jews outside its borders, unjustified
discrimination against it would be discrimination against
Jews—that is, antisemitism. The UCU proposal had
attempted to pre-empt this charge by declaring that in the
current context criticism of Israel cannot be construed
as antisemitic, but since absolutely no supporting argu-
ment was ever provided for this extraordinary claim, and
since obvious counter-examples (for example, from the
public statements of Hezbullah or Hamas) are so easy to
find, this clause in the boycott proposal tended rather to
strengthen the charge of antisemitism than to weaken it.
Antisemitism in effect
The standard response to the charge of antisemitism was
outrage and offense on the part of the boycotters. This was
understandable, since it’s a serious charge, but the effect of
this response was to change the subject under discussion
to the wounded feelings of the boycotters, and away from
a consideration of the truth (or otherwise) of the charge.10
Such consideration as there was generally took the form of
saying that criticism of Israel isn’t the same as antisemi-
tism; this was, however, irrelevant, since no anti-boycotters
ever claimed that it was the same, and in any case a boycott
is not a form of criticism but rather a form of punishment.
Many of the boycotters clearly felt, and said, that the pro-
posal couldn’t be antisemitic, since they themselves didn’t
hate Jews11. This error—of considering antisemitism as
purely a matter of how people feel, rather than of what they
actually do—is one which is now rarely made by academics
about other forms of racism, since the idea of indirect or
institutional racism is well-established and well-known in
the UK. The persistence of this purely psychological
approach to antisemitism itself calls for further
explanation.
That a boycott would in practise discriminate against
Jews seems fairly plausible. That the motives of the boycot-
ters were discriminatory was harder to ascertain, and is
unlikely to have been universally the case, although this
view of their motivation was to some extent supported by
the way in which many boycotters chose to describe events
in the Middle East. From their accounts of the Palestinian
plight, few of their listeners would have realized that Israel
had been established by the UN, promptly attacked by all its
Arab neighbors, subjected to constant terrorist attacks on
its civilians, and made the object of genocidal threats by its
enemies. Only its wrongdoings were acknowledged—all too
often the pro-boycott narrative was one in which the com-
plexities of the Middle East were flattened out into a simple
morality play, in which the Palestinians were cast in the role
of pure and innocent victims, with Israel being presented as
the locus of unrelieved malevolence and guilt. Indeed, many
boycotters were ready to compare Israel to the Nazis—for
example, by declaring the situation in Gaza to be like that in
the Warsaw Ghetto. Calamitous though the state of Gaza is,
the differences between the two cases are gross and glaring;
and in view of these deep disanalogies, the insistence on
drawing this comparison had a peculiarly repellent qual-
ity, deriving perhaps from its exploitation of the terrible
history of the Nazis and the Jews. It was hard to tell why
some people felt the need to paint the swastika onto the
foreheads of the Jews of Israel in this way, to covertly sug-
gest that the Nazis have been reincarnated as Israeli Jews
and that Israel is the new Third Reich. Not all boycotters
Excluding Israelis: An Intellectual Anatomy of the Academic Boycott 6
shared these views, but few actually disavowed them;
and insofar as they endorsed such innuendos they were
peddling a new version of a very old stereotype, that Jews
are secretly planning to kill millions of innocent people.
Another familiar anti-Jewish motif was discernible in
the pro-boycotters’ increasing insistence, especially after
the collapse of the boycott, that they were the victims of
a “well funded” international Zionist lobby that is at-
tempting to suppress criticism of Israel12—a claim which
both fed on, and gave new life to, a standard antisemitic
trope. But there was also a different reason for regard-
ing the pro-boycott campaign as effectively antisemitic.
Supporters of the boycott made much of its symbolic
power, and they were right to do so—a boycott is indeed
a powerfully symbolic weapon. Supporting a boycott
was felt by its proponents to show how much Israeli
wrongdoing is rejected, how much solidarity is felt with
and offered to Palestinian victims. But symbolism is a
complex matter, and often it is not entirely or even largely
under the control of the person deploying the symbols.
“The arguments for the boycott never
succeeded in showing why Israel should
be treated in this discriminatory way, and
the legal advice that was eventually given
underscored this fact”
Other symbols, other layers of meaning, were also
involved in the boycott proposals. One effect of singling
out Israel for adverse treatment, particularly by people
claiming to act in the name of justice, was to imply that
its offenses were peculiarly objectionable, peculiarly in
need of punishment. Why else, after all, was it the only
one for which the UCU was considering a boycott? No-one
needed to say that it’s the most heinous offender to pres-
ent it in this light, and indeed supporters of the boycott
generally didn’t say this, since it’s so obviously false. But
nonetheless, at the symbolic level, the identification was
made. This was part of the mechanics, so to speak, of the
demonization of Israel, of its construction as the special,
intolerable wrongdoer, whose lesser offenses are more
objectionable than greater offences by other polities.
Whatever the motives of the boycott supporters, the
symbolism of the boycott was always likely to have the
effect of encouraging antisemitism. The singular focus on
Israel created an explanatory gap—why this country?—
which could readily be filled by some very traditional
discriminatory attitudes towards Jews; and this was likely
to happen however much the supporters of a boycott
claimed that they were only targeting Israelis and not Jews.
Any boycott is a call for ostracism, exclusion and punish-
ment. The boycott proposal encouraged antisemitic views
and attitudes partly because this content—the demand for
ostracism and exclusion—mapped so neatly onto tradition-
al antisemitic goals and practices. (And here, perhaps, we
do find some truth in the claim that Israel is being selected
for boycott because it’s most likely to work with her. Insofar
as the aim of a boycott is to encourage hostility to and
rejection of its target, then this is indeed most likely to be
effective with Israel, since there is already a space in our
culture for just that rejection of and hostility towards Jews.)
The arguments for the boycott never succeeded in
showing why Israel should be treated in this discrimina-
tory way, and the legal advice that was eventually given
underscored this fact. The whole episode was immensely
damaging to all concerned: those parts of the left involved
in the pro-boycott movement were associated with illegal
discrimination; academics (and others) fighting the boycott
felt the whiff of antisemitism in the air, and also came to
feel that their union could not be relied on to refrain from
discriminating against them; and the Union itself was
torn apart for months by a savage dispute which drove
many people away from union activism and some of them
out of the union altogether. In the aftermath, many pro-
boycotters have expressed outrage that (as they see it) their
freedom of speech has been curtailed by lawyers, and have
demanded that the Union further investigate the adequacy
of the legal advice they were given. (The irony of the boycot-
ters’ demand that academic freedom of speech should be
unconstrained by any other considerations has not been
lost on those who fought the boycott proposals.) It would
be nice to be able to say that what I’ve provided here is the
anatomy of a failure, but it’s by no means certain that we’ve
heard the last of the boycott project. Watch this space.
Excluding Israelis: An Intellectual Anatomy of the Academic Boycott 7
1 See Motion 30, http://www.ucu.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=2555
2 The supposed bad consequences ranged from the predicted ineffectiveness, and even counter-effectiveness, of an academic boycott, to its probable
encouragement of antisemitism. I discuss some aspects of the latter concern below.
3 Philip Marfleet (University of East London): “Israeli academic freedom comes at the cost of the denial of even the most basic freedoms of Palestinian
academics and students.” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/05/31/nunis131.xml
4 “The academic freedom of Israel has generated illegal, racist and oppressive behavior by Israeli universities”, Why Boycott Israeli Universities?, British
Committee for the Universities of Palestine, April 2007, p.18.
5 Signed in 1648, the Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years War between rival German principalities and is widely regarded as enshrining the principle
of the sovereign equality of states most famously expressed in Article 2 of the UN Charter of 1948.
6 “In the case of Israel, we are speaking about a society whose dominant self image is one of a bastion of civilization in a sea of medieval reaction. And we are
speaking of a culture, both in Israel and in the long history of the Jewish diaspora, in which education and scholarship are held in high regard. That is why
an academic boycott might have a desirable political effect in Israel, an effect that might not be expected elsewhere.” Tom Hickey, British Medical Journal,
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/335/7611/124http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/335/7611/124
7 “It is precisely because Israel invites evaluation in terms of Western values that it matters so much to us, for we are complicit if we fail to say ‘No, Not in
Our Name’ (and that, incidentally, is why it matters so much to Jews in the West for whom Israel in effect speaks twice).” Richard Kuper, http://normblog.
typepad.com/normblog/2006/01/reply_to_normbl.html
8 Steven Rose (Professor of Biology, The Open University) http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/steven_rose/2006/05/why_an_academic_boycott_of_
isr.html
9 Charles Jencks, letter to The Independent, cited here: http://www.coursestuff.co.uk/ENVT1010/designers/charles_jencks.html
10 At the time of the first academic boycott attempt in 2005, the AUT—precursor union to the UCU—responded indignantly to concerns about antisemitism
in just this way: “[T]he AUT deplores the witch-hunting of colleagues, including AUT members, who are participating in the academic boycott of Israel.
We recognize that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, and resolve to give all possible support to members of AUT who are unjustly accused of antisemitism
because of their political opposition to Israeli government policy.” http://www.aut.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=122 The web-page on which this appeared
is no longer available—it disappeared shortly after the first boycott resolution was overturned. For commentary on it at the time, see: http://normblog.
typepad.com/normblog/2005/05/beyond_the_boyc.html A variant of the indignation response can be seen in David Clark (a previous political advisor to
the Labour government) writing in the Guardian: “those leveling charges of antisemitism against the left …. do it not because they believe it, but because
they know the left takes its anti-racism seriously and is susceptible to this kind of blackmail. There has been enough of this intellectual thuggery on both
sides, and it’s time someone called a stop to it.” http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1724459,00.html
11 Supporting evidence for this claim often took the form of citing the speaker’s Jewish and/or Israeli friends. For a notable example of such citations see
Patrick Bateson (Provost of King’s College Cambridge) writing at an early stage in the boycott movement http://www.monabaker.com/pMachine/more.
php?id=A2745_0_1_0_M. For the claim that the boycott can’t be antisemitic since its supporters include Jews, and also the increasingly common claim that
the charge of antisemitism is simply a device to deflect criticism, see Ghada Karmi (honorary research fellow and assistant lecturer, University of Exeter)
http://www.bitterlemons-international.org/previous.php?opt=1&id=187#765
12 See, for example, Alex Callinicos (Professor of European Studies, King’s College London), writing in Socialist Worker: http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/
art.php?id=13103

Excluding Israelis: An Intellectual Anatomy of the Academic Boycott 8