Cary Nelson, Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is the author or editor of 30 books. His op-eds have appeared in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Dreams Deferred

A Concise Guide to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict & the Movement to Boycott Israel

Indiana University Press

Contents

ACADEMIC BOYCOTTS

Academic boycotts range from calls to sever some or all relationships with a single university to wholesale efforts to boycott all the universities of a given country. Such boycotts may encompass refusing to participate in any and all activities at the target universities; refusing to write letters of recommendation for students seeking to study there; closing down joint degree programs or research projects with the boycotted universities; refusing to provide external evaluations for faculty or student projects at the targeted schools; refusing to publish articles by students and faculty at boycotted schools; blocking boycotted universities from access to resources from disciplinary organizations like announcements of academic positions or fellowship opportunities; removing faculty from editorial boards; and blacklisting and shunning of faculty. Such boycotts interrupt the free flow of ideas and block the pursuit of knowledge, a principle underpinning the very essence of academic freedom; and the argument raised by some that boycotts focused on institutions will not affect individual scholars and students is completely specious. Boycotts generate norms that isolate individual faculty, effectively creating blacklists. Several of BDS's recommendations take advantage of the power dynamic between students and faculty to the detriment of the former.

— CN

RUSSELL BERMAN, ROBERT FINE, DAVID HIRSH, & CARY NELSON

INTRODUCTION

There is one and only one country — Israel — that is the target of an international movement to boycott its universities. The movement is opposed by many academic leaders: more than 450 college and university presidents signed a statement opposing academic boycotts in 2007 as a result of an organized drive to gather signatures; more than 250 issued their own anti-boycott statements in 2014, this time spontaneously; and, although a number of academic organizations have endorsed boycotts, every major multidisciplinary academic organization that has addressed the issue opposes them as well. Yet faculty members in some humanities and social science disciplines continue to approve them as a political strategy, while those in agriculture, computer science, engineering, medicine, and the sciences show little or no interest in them. Proposals to boycott Israeli universities continue to gain limited faculty support, publicity in the press has grown, and there is a long-term potential for impact on public opinion and national policy (Debra Cohen).

In April 2013, the Association for Asian American Studies became the first US academic disciplinary association to vote for a boycott of Israeli universities and academic institutions. Rendered by a small organization, the decision received relatively little press attention. But in December 2013, 66 percent of the 1,252 members of the American Studies Association who voted (out of a total organizational membership of 5,000) voted as well to boycott Israeli academia, and that decision was widely noted and condemned. That same month the council of the small Native American and Indigenous Studies Association voted unanimously to join the boycott effort. Six months later, in July 2014, two more small academic groups — the African Literature Association and the Critical Ethnic Studies Association — added their names to the roster of boycotters. Yet another association, the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies, voted for the boycott of Israeli universities in April 2015. A number of boycott advocates in these groups belong to several academic organizations and have leadership roles in more than one disciplinary boycott effort.

In November 2015 the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) endorsed a broader boycott resolution condemning not only discrimination but also the "military siege and apartheid imposed by Israel on its own Palestinian citizens" and calling not only for a boycott of Israeli universities but also for the "boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) of economic, military, and cultural entities and projects sponsored by the state of Israel." In an effort to connect with the NWSA's core commitments, the group condemned the "sexual and gender-based violence, perpetrated [by Israel] against Palestinians and other Arabs in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, within Israel and in the Golan Heights," thereby not only creating a fictional claim about the only Middle Eastern country with relatively full gender equality, roughly comparable to that of the US except for some cultural practices in conservative religious communities, but also ignoring the real violence against women and repression of women's rights throughout much of the Arab world. Embracing an ahistorical "intersectional" perspective, the NWSA argues that all oppression is "interconnected," but apparently some examples of oppression are more interconnected than others. Over a period of years, NWSA has marginalized itself with its single-minded radical politics; 88.4 percent of those voting endorsed the BDS resolution. Far more serious — both because of the size of the organization and the centrality of the discipline — is the academic boycott resolution overwhelmingly endorsed at the business meeting of the American Anthropological Association. It has gone to the AAA's 10,000 members for an association-wide vote in spring 2016.

None of these boycott resolutions is likely to have any impact on Israeli policy. What they will do is signal the increasingly partisan political profile of a number of humanities and interpretive social science disciplines. For the second year in a row, historians at the January 2016 business meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA) wisely rejected their own anti-Israel resolution (Rosenberg), but its sponsors will no doubt return, and meanwhile the 30,000-member Modern Language Association will be debating an anti-Israel resolution in 2016 and 2017. If the traditional core disciplines like English and history should join the BDS movement they will have compromised their reputations — one can even say discredited themselves — as places for open discussion and debate. Already too many faculty consider themselves to be communicating a fact, not expressing an opinion, when they tell their students Israel is a settler-colonialist state, or, worse still, a genocidal one. The humanities — which have been significantly defunded over a period of decades, and which now resort increasingly to hiring contingent faculty who are not eligible for tenure — will as a whole suffer a continued loss of public and institutional respect if they make BDS the public face of their disciplines. Who will want to fund propaganda machines posing as academic pursuits? Although the most passionate BDS advocates have persuaded themselves they have their hands on the levers of history and can reshape Middle East politics, it is really their own professional futures that are in the balance. Even though they are unlikely to have a significant impact on Israel's behavior, however, these efforts can over time shape the climate of opinion, and in the short term they can impose very real injustices.

Recognition that adopting a polarizing anti-Israel resolution will simultaneously divide an organization's membership and compromise its public profile has helped defeat a number of such proposals in addition to those presented at the AHA. In its October 2013 meeting in Boston, members of the American Public Health Association's Executive Council rejected a resolution condemning Israel's medical practices toward Palestinians by a vote of 74 to 36. The American Library Association's Council has also turned down BDS initiatives by wide margins. In both cases, concern about the organization taking political stands and interest in the adjudicable facts about Israel were mixed with outreach efforts to win the day. It is notable, however, that interest in the facts varies, even among academics, and some organizations are more open to considering factual evidence than others. Some are more powerfully swayed by emotion. There is typically, moreover, a core of activists who are actually eager to polarize their disciplines, as they see pro-Israel colleagues as the enemy within, and they consider it a priority to alienate, exile, and cast them out.

Graduate students in fields like anthropology, history, literature, and Middle East studies now frequently avoid specializing in Israel studies — even if it is their first choice of fields — for concern, justifiably, that it will cost them their careers, denying them jobs, publication opportunities, and fellowships. BDS has succeeded in intimidating graduate students and young faculty to the level where wariness of anti-Israel forces shapes their lifelong career choices. At professional meetings one commonly meets graduate students and young faculty who are afraid even to attend sessions devoted to BDS for fear they will be seen there and people they know will then ask them where they stand. This deeply damaging but largely unpublicized trend is at least as serious as the campus anti-Semitism frequently reported by undergraduates.

ACADEMIC BOYCOTTS VIOLATE ACADEMIC FREEDOM

Because it imposes a political constraint on academic activity — prohibiting cooperation with the Israeli academic world based on a set of political judgments and litmus tests — a boycott would interrupt the free flow of ideas within the international scholarly community. That would block the unencumbered pursuit of knowledge, a principle that defines both academic freedom and the academy as a whole. Disciplinary organizations that advocate a boycott of universities have therefore broken faith with the scholarly community and betrayed deeply held academic values. Scholars should be free to pursue their research free from mandates of political correctness. To endorse that principle, however, means that academic boycotts must be renounced.

Some defenders of the boycott contend that they can call for fellow scholars to boycott Israeli universities without in any way undermining academic freedom, infringing on academic culture, or impeding the free flow of ideas. They argue that their ends — ameliorating the conditions of Palestinian life — justify their means: restricting others' academic freedom. This is an illusion: the boycott movement is poisoning debate in Britain, Canada, the US, and a number of European countries. It aspires to eliminate connections between Israeli universities and those in the West, thus having a chilling effect on and compromising the world of ideas. By trying to limit what individual scholars do, what conferences they attend, and with whom they collaborate, the supporters of the boycott restrict academic freedom. By trying to eliminate study abroad in Israel rooted in ties with Israeli institutions, they also restrict the academic freedom of students. These will be the real effects of the boycott, which is designed to dissuade scholars from activities in Israel or cooperation with Israeli institutions. It is remarkable and disconcerting that scholars who vote for the boycott are so prepared to endanger the foundational principles of scholarly work in the interest of pursuing a political agenda.

Some boycott proponents disingenuously deny such effects, claiming that the boycott does not restrict academic freedom because — and this remains the crux of their defense — it is directed exclusively against institutions and not against individuals: it prohibits cooperation with Israeli academic institutions, not with individual Israelis. This purported focus on institutions enables advocates to insist boycotts are ethical. Yet this differentiation between institutions and individuals is untenable. Effective scholarship always depends on institutional support for individual scholars; individual scholars can thrive only because of their institutional contexts and the resources and sponsorships that institutions make available: colleagues, students, classrooms, libraries, laboratories, and of course financial support, including salary and research funding. Strip away the institution, and the individual scholar barely survives. Yet boycotts are premised on the illusion that one can strip away the infrastructure without harming the individual scholar at all. Given that the individual necessarily depends on the institution, however, the distinction between the two, which is central to the argument that the boycott does not infringe on any individual scholar's academic freedom, melts away. A boycott of academic institutions is necessarily an attack on individual academics, no matter how much the boycott apologists implausibly assert the contrary. To pretend to welcome collaboration with Israeli scholars, while insisting that no funding come from Israeli institutions, is dishonest.

The argument is put forward that Palestinian civil society has called for a blanket boycott of Israeli academic institutions. There is an empirical question concerning how true this is — to the chagrin of BDS leaders, the call for a boycott of Israeli products and institutions is rejected by Mahmoud Abbas (1935-) and the Palestinian Authority of which he is president. But the more fundamental problem is the idea that Palestinian civil society is one homogenous bloc with one opinion. To work on this assumption is to diminish the subjectivity of Palestinians, to deny plurality within the Palestinian people, to attribute to Palestinians a single voice that is in fact an echo of that of BDS advocates. An academic boycott blocks our ears to points of view we don't want to hear, or don't want to admit might exist, or indeed to anything that questions our own self-certainty. It grants us license to invent what we assume others think, in this case Israeli academics, rather than hear what they actually say. The principle of academic freedom does not license any and all behavior but it is nonetheless fundamental. It contains norms of openness, understanding, inquiry, criticism, self-criticism, and dialogue, which we abandon at our peril.

Academic institutions in Israel proper as anywhere else, are fundamentally communities of scholars. They protect scholars. They make it possible for scholars to research and to teach. They defend the academic freedom of scholars. The premise of the "institutional boycott" is that in Israel, universities are bad but scholars are (possibly, exceptionally) good. The premise is that universities are organs of the state while individual scholars are employees who may (possibly, exceptionally) be not guilty of supporting Israeli "apartheid" or some similar formulation. But academic institutions are a necessary part of the structure of academic freedom. If there were no universities, scholars would band together and invent them to create frameworks within which they could function as professional researchers and teachers, and within which they could collectively defend their academic freedom.

Israeli academic institutions are not materially different from academic institutions in other free countries. They are not segregated by race, religion, or gender; they have relative autonomy from the state; they defend academic freedom and freedom of criticism, not least against government and political pressures. There are of course threats to academic freedom in Israel, as there are in the US and elsewhere, but the record of Israeli institutions is a good one in defending scholars from political interference. As in the US and other democratic countries, wartime hysteria and the unreflective patriotism that accompanies it means dissenting Israeli academics can be subject to verbal attacks; the issue in that context is whether faculty in Israel or elsewhere are formally sanctioned, not whether they suffer public criticism. Israel's record in these matters is not perfect, but it is comparable to that of the US — which is to say that it is on the whole quite free. There is little or no academic freedom in many Arab countries.

TARGETING INDIVIDUAL STUDENTS & FACULTY — THE BDS GUIDELINES

The international BDS movement sometimes characterizes itself as the Western action arm of PACBI, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel, but it is more accurate to describe PACBI as a subset of the broader BDS movement. BDS now makes it very clear how aggressively its guidelines target individuals. The BDS/PACBI guidelines for academic boycotts — revised and expanded in July 2014 (http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=1108) — now make much more explicit that individual faculty and students, not just institutions, will and should be targeted. The guidelines irrefutably betray the claim that BDS doesn't target individuals. Indeed, they expose that claim to be is the core deception in at the heart of almost every BDS resolution, past or present.