Academic boycott: free speech or sordid vilification of Israel?

posted on: Mar 29, 2015

All states commit crimes, but only one state is pronounced immoral and fatally flawed. And only that one – the whole world over – is subject to cultural and academic boycotts: Israel. A case against an academic boycott of Israel might seem so easy to make that we’d hardly need more than a paragraph or two in which to do it. So why publish a 550-page book, including 25 essays by leading scholars and journalists, accompanied by 30 pages of documents? A good question without an obvious answer, until we discover in this impressive anthology that the American Studies Association (ASA) is not the only academic organization to have recently passed resolutions supporting the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS).

Preceded by several historically misleading and morally suspect paragraphs beginning with “Whereas,” the BDS resolutions passed by the ASA, the Association for Asian-American Studies, and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (The Modern Language Association defeated a resolution, but sadly not without a battle) call on Israel to withdraw to its 1967 borders, end its occupation and “colonization” of all Arab lands, and respect the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties, as stipulated in United Nations Resolution 194.

Source: www.haaretz.com