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Calls for an academic boycott of Israel and for universities to stop investing in Israeli companies have struck me with special force because I spent last spring as a Fulbright fellow in Israel, teaching bio-ethics at Bar-Ilan University, outside Tel Aviv. I take issues of complicity very seriously, and thus I tend to be sympathetic to boycotts of regimes -- or corporations -- whose behavior is especially disturbing. Further, I think calls for boycotts by private citizens are particularly appropriate when the United States is supporting the regime in question. So I have been asking myself if I would apply for a Fulbright to Israel today, and whether I would go to Israel now, if two years ago I had applied for a grant for this semester.
Boycott proponents' comparisons of Israel's treatment of Palestinians with apartheid have been unfortunate. The implication is that if a boycott of the apartheid regime in South Africa was morally appropriate, then a boycott of the current Israeli regime is called for as well. The references to South Africa's former government have wasted a lot of time and energy on the pointless question of whether Israel's human-rights abuses approach the level of that famously immoral regime.
I have absolutely no interest in that question. The questions that interest me are: Do Israel's occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and its treatment of the Palestinians constitute a serious abuse of human rights? I'd say yes. Do I think that economic pressure will force the Israeli government to withdraw from the occupied territories? Maybe; it's worth a try. Do I wish that the Bush administration would make aid to Israel contingent on dismantling the settlements? You bet. Because that is obviously a pipe dream, would I support other, nongovernmental boycotts? Yes. Would I then support an academic boycott? Never.
Academic boycotts undermine the basic premise of intellectual life that ideas make a difference, and the corollary that intellectual exchanges across...