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 Topic: boycotts against Israeli academia

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  • boycotts against Israeli academia
     OP - May 05, 2015, 08:01 PM
    This has been bugging me for some time. I saw this list of scholars who called for a boycott of Israeli academia:
    http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/18811/over-100-middle-east-scholars-and-librarians-call-

    One of the signatories was Fred Donner, author of "Muhammad and the Believers". This ... upset me. I expected better from him.

    I know that humans are a political animal and that everyone's got an opinion.

    But when a professor signs something like that, I see this as his abuse of a scholarly position to take a political stance and, in fact, an anti-academic stance. There are plenty of Israeli scholars who have made real contributions to the field: among them, Suliman Bashear - a Druze Palestinian, who had to move to Israel because otherwise he would have been killed. If Israel didn't exist exactly how much scholarship could take place in the remains? How's Nineveh doing these days?

    Boycotting Israeli academic institutions hurts scholarship in every way possible. So, to Dr Donner - don't do this. At least, don't do more of this.
  • boycotts against Israeli academia
     Reply #1 - May 05, 2015, 08:19 PM
    It's maybe worth reading this article by Jonathan Hyslop on the experience of the academic boycott in South Africa.

    http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/archive/seanArchives/journal989/article0046403.html
    Quote
    In the current debate about calls for an academic boycott of Israel, the history of the boycott of South Africa during the apartheid era has become an important standard. That history is represented in strikingly different ways by the opposing camps. For proponents of a boycott of Israeli universities, the South African campaign is a clear precedent to follow. In the eyes of the drafters of the AAUP report On Academic Boycotts, on the other hand, the AAUP never supported an academic boycott of South Africa. According to the statement, what they backed was a campaign for economic divestment.

    Throughout the high point of the academic boycott, from the early 1980s to the end of that decade, I was on the staff of the University of Witwatersrand, better known as Wits, the Johannesburg university where I still work. The campus was highly politicized, and as a member of the executive of the academic staff association, I followed the issue of the academic boycott closely and participated in many discussions about it. For a time, I supported a selective form of the academic boycott.

    But far from being an unproblematic strategy, the South African academic boycott was riddled with conflicts among its supporters, inconsistencies, and minor injustices. It was plagued by the problem of unintended consequences. In my view, it had no important political effect in undermining apartheid and, I will suggest in this paper, may have had a minor negative impact on postapartheid society.

    ....

    Which side are you on?
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