It is miraculous to observe the ease with which some people go about undermining their own cause.
Hundreds of scholars at universities in Europe and the U.S. have signed two petitions this spring calling for boycott of academic and research links with Israel until that country’s “violent repression against the Palestinian people” stops. The petitions, which can be found at www.pjpo.org, have of course generated counter-petitions, mostly American in origin (www.aaisc.net). Meanwhile, in Boston, a coalition of students and faculty members at Harvard and MIT tried to persuade the universities to divest any endowment funds invested in companies that do business in Israel. Then this summer, a British editor, Mona Baker, fired two Israelis from the advisory and editorial boards of two prestigious journals in translation studies. She said that she is boycotting them as representatives of Israeli academic institutions.
This sort of rudeness has paved the way for some majestic grandstanding on the other side. Take Larry Summers, the first Jewish president of Harvard University. Last week, he chose to use his annual address to the university to denounce all these actions as-you guessed it-“anti-Semitism,” in its “effect if not [its] intent.”
Summers’ remarks could be interpreted in this light: he’s still reeling after coming to blows with Cornel West, a popular black professor at Harvard whom he had rightly accused of spending time doing nonsense (like recording a rap album). West got incensed and left for Princeton in a huff. Summers ended up fighting accusations of cultural intolerance. Nothing like denouncing other people’s intolerance to detract attention from himself.
But the Harvard president should have gone easy on the epithets. One need not be an anti-Semite to be concerned over Israel’s actions in Palestine. Its incursions have left hundreds dead and thousands homeless. It has ignored dozens of U.N. resolutions and provokes constant criticism from every respectable human rights group, among them Amnesty International.
In all this, Israel has been driven by an embittered brand of Judaism. This Judaism measures the gravity of any catastrophe by the number of Jewish last names on the list of casualties (and puzzles over ambiguities like Miller or Rose). It has denounced its critics as bigots and the Jewish among them as “self-hating Jews.” As exclusive as an old-time country club, it has become obsessed with eugenics. It frowns upon intermarriage, and has set up youth groups for the purpose, as some students have gleaned, of having young Jews date each other and not goyim (gentiles). And its stubborn insistence on packing as many Jews as possible in precisely the one narrow strip of land where they are least wanted mocks one of Israel’s strongest reasons for existence-to avert a future Holocaust.
And yet
So you can understand the frustration felt by pro-Palestinian academics and students. What else could they possibly do about this besides the “empty talk”? Even discussing the issue on campus could invite some nasty reaction-as Jonathan Sternberg found out last year after he denounced Zionism on the pages of this newspaper. Sternberg claimed to have received hate mail and had to remove his e-mail address and phone number from the WU directory.
Still, diverting money from Israeli projects is a bad idea. Academic sanctions would mostly hurt the doves in Israel. Secular universities are the main supporters of the peace camp there. Israeli academics regularly work on projects with their Palestinian colleagues. Many of them criticize their country’s policies in exactly the same words as do the petitions. Miriam Shlesinger, one of the scholars fired by the British editor, is a former chairman of the Israeli chapter of Amnesty International-the same group that regularly censures Israeli actions. The strong pacifist sentiment in the academia has even endured the recent bombing at Hebrew University. So the calls to boycott Israeli scholarship, even if they don’t alienate the peaceniks, will end up ridiculing them in the eyes of the Israeli public.
As for your enemies…
Those who call for boycott of Israeli companies or products are even more misguided. In Norway, for instance, supermarkets considered marking Israeli goods with a special sticker to make them easier to detect and avoid. Though supermarkets have a right to do this, the customers who refuse to buy the marked products are actually slowing down the resolution of the conflict.
True, Israeli business helps support its military machine. It also gives jobs to people-half of whom then turn around and vote for Ariel Sharon. The boycott, however, would have the effect of making the country poorer. This would in turn make its citizens less averse to war because they would have less to lose from any conflict. Already, it is the wealthier slices of Israeli society that are most in favor of peace. Their houses, stock portfolios, and high-paying jobs all urge the same thing-financial security. The richer ordinary Israelis become, the likelier it is they will vote to end this nagging conflict, just to get on with making a good livelihood. Pro-Palestinian activists should think about helping fatten up both sides, not starve them into bitterness and desperation.