TOXIFYING ISRAEL

Dear Professor Lipstadt:

I didn’t plan on writing to you so soon after our exchange about Holocaust denial. But something disturbing happened to me recently that seems to exemplify much of what you have been saying, and now it’s up close and personal. I don’t want to sound melodramatic, but I am a bit shaken by what I experienced.

I was visiting a friend at a large public university. The campus was astir. The previous night a lecture on Israel had been canceled or, more properly put, shut down. The Israeli lecturer—a professor at Hebrew University—never got to speak. He was shouted down by students from various groups, including Students for Justice in Palestine. These students could not have disagreed with what he said because he never got to say anything. He was Israeli, and that was reason enough to deny him the right to speak. The next night my friend and I went to what we anticipated would be a pleasant party. Most of the people there were social activists involved in various progressive causes—including environmental and women’s issues—that I’m passionate about, too. I was hanging out with a small group consisting of both Jews and non-Jews, students whom I knew from previous visits to this campus. I was probably the most strongly identifying Jew in this rather congenial group, where the conversation flowed freely.

Someone brought up the incident with the Israeli lecturer, and I responded by criticizing the protesters’ behavior and their failure to adhere to the fundamental notion of civil discourse. I suppose that in a democracy people have a “right” to shout at a speaker, but the university, I argued, should be a venue for the free exchange of ideas. These protesters, I contended, were not interested in that exchange. The other students seemed taken aback that I was in favor of the Israeli speaking on campus. Not only were they highly critical of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, which was certainly their right, but they also began to say some disturbing things, such as “Israel is an illegitimate, nondemocratic country. A state should not be founded on religious identity. It’s an anachronism. It’s racist.” Then something even more disturbing happened. The loudest person among them, a guy I hardly know, began to move from trashing Israel’s policies to associating me with them. “You Jews don’t belong there, running everything. Zionism is what’s at the heart of the problem. You Zionists have got to recognize that Israel is a colonizing state.” Most painful was when he said, “If you can’t accept the truth about Israel and Zionism, you’re not a progressive.”

In his eyes, I, as a Jew, was directly responsible for whatever Israel did. He used the terms “Israelis,” “Jews,” and “Zionists” interchangeably. Moreover, he seemed to have only the foggiest notion of what Zionism was and of the history of the Jews in the region. He had no trouble concluding that because Israel was a Jewish state, it was ipso facto racist and colonial. I was so taken aback by what he was saying, I was unable to pull my thoughts together to reply to him. Then things got worse. A few other students chimed in with statements like, “Of course we’ll never have a real conversation about Israel in this country because you-all have such control of the media, Congress, and American foreign policy. The Jewish lobby decides what it wants and gets it.” They went on like that for a while, mentioning AIPAC and wealthy pro-Israel American Jews. These were not people situated at the far left of the political spectrum, from whom I might have expected this. They were just ordinary college kids who seemed to be echoing what they had heard elsewhere, which made what they were saying even more frightening. What should I have done?

Yours,

Abigail

Dear Abigail and Joe:

It seems that in the space of a few days, Abigail, you have actually lived much of what we have been writing about in these letters. I wish there was something I could say that would ease your discomfort, but you have encountered some attitudes that are very real and very disturbing. Sadly, the rhetoric that you encountered is not just a university-based phenomenon.

That verbal assault on the Israeli speaker is not unique. In 2016, protesters at London’s King’s College disrupted a talk by Ami Ayalon, the former head of Shin Bet, Israel’s version of our FBI. Students from a pro-Palestinian group chanted, threw chairs, smashed windows, and repeatedly set off the fire alarm in the room where Ayalon was speaking about the two-state solution to the Israel/Palestine situation, which is something he strongly supports. In 2015, representatives from the Palestinian Solidarity Committee of University of Texas–Austin entered an event sponsored by the university’s Institute for Israel Studies. They refused to sit, listen, or leave and stood there chanting “Long live intifada.”1 That same year Moshe Halbertal, a distinguished Israeli law professor and world-renowned philosopher, was scheduled to speak at the University of Minnesota on the moral challenge an army faces when it is engaged in fighting “asymmetric wars,” which are defined as conflicts between professional armies and resistance or insurgent movements. Halbertal is known for his position that the army must always “err on the side of protecting” civilian insurgents, even if this threatens its soldiers’ well-being. As his lecture began, protesters stood up and began to shout him down. When the police finally ejected them from the room, they situated themselves outside the building in a place where their chanting could be heard, making it difficult for those in the hall to listen to the lecture.2

These tactics are not new. They have been used against Israeli speakers in the past and are part of the broader effort known as the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, or BDS. Founded in 2005 by Palestinian organizations, it advocates for the following: (1) boycotting Israeli-made products and services, as well as public events in which Israelis participate; (2) the divestment by governments and private institutions of investments in Israeli companies; and (3) the establishment of international sanctions against Israel. Its goal is to punish Israel for what it terms Israel’s “apartheid” policies toward Israeli and Palestinian Arabs. But Arab-sponsored boycotts against Israel go back decades, to the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine, international supporters of the Zionist movement, and Jews in general. In 1945, before the United Nations vote on the partition of Palestine, before the establishment of the Jewish state, the Arab League prohibited its members from doing any business with “Zionists/Jews” and with companies that did business with Zionists. Eventually they expanded the boycott to encompass “anything Jewish.” In the 1950s the Saudi Arabian government established a boycott of all businesses throughout the world that were owned by Jews, did business with Jews, or employed Jews.3 After the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the Arab League prevented anyone whose passport bore an Israeli stamp from entering most Arab and Muslim-majority nations. When I was a student at Hebrew University in 1967, I had to have a “clean” American passport—one without any Israeli visa stamps—in order to visit Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. When I hesitatingly explained to the clerk at the American embassy in Athens what I needed, he replied, rather matter-of-factly, “Oh, we get that request all the time.”

The boycott in the academic world today against Israelis has its roots, in some measure, in the 2001 United Nations–sponsored Durban World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance. There were actually two gatherings in Durban—the official United Nations conference and one sponsored by a group of about three thousand nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The discussion about Israel at both meetings was vituperative and overshadowed all other issues on the meetings’ agendas. The final declaration adopted by the NGO forum laid the groundwork for the BDS movement by equating Zionism with racism and calling for a boycott of Israel.

One of the stated goals of the BDS movement is establishing a right of return for Palestinians throughout the world, which in practical terms would result in Jews being in the minority in Israel, and its end as a Jewish state.4 The statements that form the foundation of the BDS movement are, as some critics have noted, “the antithesis of a call for peace and reconciliation between two people in a compromise situation.”5 One of the founders of the BDS movement, Omar Barghouti, has explicitly stated, “We definitely oppose a Jewish state in any part of Palestine.”6 He told the Electronic Intifada, “I am completely and categorically against bi-nationalism because it assumes that there are two nations with equal moral claims to the land.”7 Ignoring these statements and his call for the “right of return to 1948 lands,” he nonetheless insists that BDS has “consistently avoided taking any position regarding the one-state/two-state debate.”8 But some BDS organizers do call for the creation of “one secular and democratic state for all those living in historic Palestine.”9

BDS-inspired academic and cultural boycotts can be inconsistent and capricious. Some BDS advocates argue that only Israeli academic institutions should be boycotted and not individual Israeli scholars.10 If Israeli academics attend a conference without institutional support and their research has been done independent of their institution, they are welcome. But this is a false distinction, designed to make BDS appear reasonable and to give the impression that it is not a blacklist. Scholars generally attend academic conferences with their institution’s financial support. Even if they were to pay their own expenses, their research has been conducted as part of their university work. Restrictions against scholars who have been supported by Israeli institutions would a priori eliminate all scientists who conduct laboratory research in Israel. It would also eliminate those who use university libraries or university-issued computers. And what about Israeli Muslim, Christian, or Druze scholars who teach at Israeli institutions? Are they included in the boycott? Or Israelis who teach at American institutions with branches in Israel, such as New York University?

In 2006, some BDS organizers proposed that only those Israeli academics who support their government’s “apartheid” policies be boycotted. Unsurprisingly, no official protocol for creating this loyalty test was ever established. But that didn’t stop individual academics from implementing this policy on their own. At the 2012 South African Sociological Association convention, an Israeli who was about to participate in a panel discussion was asked by a professor from a South African university to “denounce Israeli apartheid” as a precondition of his participation. When the Israeli declined to do so, an association board member invited the other panelists and the audience to leave the room and reassemble at a different venue, so that the Israeli was free to exercise his freedom of speech and present his paper—to an empty room.11

In 2015 the American Jewish pop star Matisyahu was disinvited from appearing at Rototom Sunsplash, an annual international reggae music festival held in Spain that was, ironically, devoted to “the promotion of peace, equality, human rights and social justice.”12 He was told by festival organizers that the pressure to disinvite him came from BDS members, and that if he made a public statement in support of Palestinian statehood and against Israeli “war crimes,” he would be able to perform.13 When he refused to do so, his performance was canceled and Rototom Sunsplash issued the following statement:

Rototom Sunsplash, after having repeatedly sought dialogue in the face of the artist’s unavailability to give a clear statement against war and on the right of the Palestinian people to their own state, has decided to cancel [his] concert.

Even though Rototom Sunsplash’s other goals included examining the “rise in Islamophobia in Western countries, as well as the situation of the prisoners in Guantánamo,” no European performers were required to denounce expressions of Islamophobia in their countries, and American performers were not required to share their views on the United States policy toward prisoners in Guantánamo. After an international outcry at the festival’s assertion that an American Jewish musician was answerable for Israeli government policy, the invitation was reinstated. Rototom Sunsplash apologized for the disinvitation and stated that it “rejects antisemitism and any form of discrimination towards the Jewish community.”14

But it’s not only Jewish performers who have been subjected to such pressure. When Taylor Swift expressed interest in performing in Israel, Ramah Kudaimi of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights told the Daily Beast that if she did so, it would “help Israel whitewash its denial of Palestinian rights” and would threaten her career. Other artists have been subjected to similar threats.15

In 2002, Mona Baker, a professor of translation studies at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology and the publisher of two scholarly journals—Translator and Translation Studies Abstracts—dismissed Gideon Toury, a professor at Tel Aviv University, from the advisory board of Translator. She also dismissed Miriam Shlesinger, a lecturer in translation studies at Bar-Ilan University, from the advisory board of Translation Studies Abstracts. Ironically, both Toury and Shlesinger oppose the Israeli government’s policies vis-à-vis the Palestinians.16 The late British physicist Stephen Hawking, who had previously visited Israel on several occasions, canceled a planned appearance at the President’s Conference in Israel in 2013 because he had “come under heavy pressure from activists who favor an academic boycott of Israel, both within Britain and outside it, [and] decided to listen to his Palestinian colleagues and stay home.”17

But BDS has not only targeted those visiting Israel. In 2009, the Melbourne International Film Festival scheduled a screening of Looking for Eric, a film by British director Ken Loach. When Loach learned that the Israeli embassy was a sponsor of the festival, he canceled the screening in protest of Israel’s “illegal occupation of Palestinian land, destruction of homes and livelihoods.”18 In 2012, American author Alice Walker refused to allow a new Hebrew translation of her novel The Color Purple to be published in Israel, “which is guilty of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people.”19

There are, of course, academics, filmmakers, artists, and intellectuals who continue to participate in events in Israel. But the growing list of those joining this boycott effort is disturbing. There are artists and scholars who, without making any public statements, simply decline invitations to appear in Israel. In the academic world, BDS often operates in a covert, unofficial fashion. A particular graduate student may not be accepted, a job applicant not considered, a paper rejected, or a conference invitation not issued because the person in question is Israeli.

A particularly cruel irony inherent in the targeting of Israeli academics, artists, and intellectuals is that a disproportionate number of them publicly oppose many of Israel’s settlement policies. Instead of encouraging their efforts, BDS lumps them in with the very people and policies that they oppose. All this does is bar Israeli advocates for change from participating in the larger conversation with like-minded Palestinian individuals, and instead empower extremists on both sides. British sociologist David Hirsh rightly observes that “much of the important communication between Palestinians and Israelis has been conducted via academic engagement.” If one wants to resolve this political situation, efforts should be made to “facilitate communication, not exclusion, [to] listen, not close down voices.”20

Ultimately, however, the personal politics of those affected by BDS are irrelevant. Law professor Martha Nussbaum notes that nobody should be fired for a political position, left or right. Boycotts are “blunt instruments.” They assume that all those associated with an institution hold a singular view.21 A central tenet of academic freedom is that a scholar’s academic work and politics are separate and distinct from each other. In America in the 1940s and 1950s, men and women who were fired or blacklisted from jobs in academia and entertainment because they had in the past been members of the Communist Party were victims of the same type of discrimination. How ironic it is that leftist BDS supporters have adopted the tactics of right-wing McCarthyites.

A boycott strikes at the free exchange of ideas, which is why the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) firmly opposes it.22 The BDS movement is a direct descendant of Marxist antisemitism and anti-Zionism. BDS activism on the college campus is a deliberate challenge to the liberal Jews—students and academics—who may strongly disagree with Israeli government policies but who oppose the idea of a boycott on ethical and political grounds. They often feel their only option is silence. I hope that won’t be your response.

Yours,

DEL