On the table is a movement for “academic and cultural boycott” of Israel as a whole and the UCLA connections to the cause (“UCLA professor helps launch boycott of Israel,” Feb. 23). The group’s Web site references “Israel’s colonial and discriminatory policies” and “the fact that people of conscience in the international community have historically shouldered the moral responsibility to fight injustice,” as in the anti-apartheid campaigns of the 1980s.
The movement for an anti-Israeli academic boycott first gained steam in the U.K. in the early 2000s after the Al-Aqsa intifada. Thus those who support have joined certain European (and of course Arab) brethren as international “people of conscience.” But their single-minded emphasis on South African, and now Israeli, guilt leaves one wondering what movements conscientious academics are fighting where no familiarly “colonial” figures are involved ““ for example, in the Congo, or among the non-Arab and Christian peoples of Sudan.
The existence of oppression elsewhere does not eliminate the need for an anti-Israel campaign. One does not have to fight injustice everywhere to fight it anywhere. Yet comparisons do become important when the aims of a campaign are so overwhelmingly symbolic. It is highly unlikely that even a broad academic boycott will have any practical impact on Israel’s actions. But singling out Israel for symbolic disgrace should worry us.
It has been difficult to have an honest and reasonable discussion about possible connections between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Both sides are responsible for this. On the one hand, pro-Israel groups and figures routinely fuse the two. On the other, anti-Israel groups just as routinely protest, expressing equal outrage at the mere thought that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism might be connected.
Is it reasonable to single Israel out for a boycott all over the world? One need not enter into some propaganda about why Israel has done everything right and its enemies everything wrong to see that such focused shaming is unfair. Instead of serving as an act of practical solidarity with Palestine, it will merely be a boon to a long-standing and deeply anti-Semitic project, intense throughout the Muslim world, of delegitimizing the Israeli state enough that its eventual elimination will be acceptable. The fact that this is the expressed policy of the elected Palestinian government tends to go unmentioned in the boycott literature.
Like many current nation-states, Israel was formed relatively recently out of the ashes of imperialism. Though it has committed human rights abuses in (arguably) excessive estimation of its self-defense needs, these abuses are moderate in scale when put alongside comparable regimes (even with regards to their treatment of Palestinians). The refugee crisis of its birth should be compared not to some academic ideal of global justice. Here the anomaly seems to be the Palestinians, not Israel. They and their Arab sponsors continue to demand complete reversal of their 1948 loss. Few Germans demand a restoration of their Czech or Polish homelands, and I doubt many Western academics would be interested in such claims.
Israel is one of the only nation-states on earth whose existential legitimacy is continually questioned and threatened. This singling-out is obviously, with very few exceptions, anti-Semitism, and we tend to recognize it as such. Yet the boycott campaign plays into exactly the same politics of double standards and unrealistic expectations. Iran, for example, is a confessional dictatorship with a long history of human rights abuses, including the forcible “martyrdom” of young children (a practice eagerly taken up en masse by Palestinian society). Yet we have no equivalent term to “Zionism” for this or any other state, and you will probably never hear the plea “I’m anti-Iranian but not anti-Muslim.”
The whole concept of boycotting “culture” is strange. From a certain progressive perspective, Israel’s is the only culture in the region worth any respect at all, as it provides things like free expression and women’s rights. If I was seeking a culture in that part of the world to criticize, I would pick the one that has produced a series of economically and politically moribund autocracies, that spouts bigotry from its state presses day after day, and that brutally oppresses women and homosexuals. But it would never occur to me to make this an official boycott, and if I tried to start one, I am sure many of the academics who have passed the point of no return with Israel would eagerly tell me how my deep-seated Western anti-Arab prejudices are involved.
Schulman is a doctoral student in the political science department.