ENGAGE - ARCHIVE

Ariel Sharon has intervened into the British debate around proposals for an academic and cultural boycott of Israel. At his cabinet meeting on Sunday he pushed through proposals to upgrade the ‘College of Judea and Samaria’ to full university status. The AUT’s decision to boycott Bar-Ilan University was based on its connections to that college, which is situated in the West Bank settlement of Ariel.

Sharon has thereby chosen to undermine one of the mainstream arguments against boycotting universities, which is that academia should be kept separate from politics. Interior Minister Ophir Pines-Paz (Labor) spoke at the cabinet meeting against bringing politics into higher education unnecessarily. But Likud, Sharon’s right wing party, pushed its position through with a majority of 13 votes to 7.

Uri Avnery, from peace group Gush Shalom, in his letter to the President of Bar Ilan University, strongly contests Bar Ilan’s claim that its links with the settler college is ‘not a political issue.’ Ariel, says Avnery, is not ‘a location in Israel’. Rather, it is a location in a territory under military occupation, a territory which is not and has never been part of the state of Israel. Moreover, Ariel is a special kind of location: it is an armed enclave, created by armed force and dependent for its continued existence on force, and force alone.

The creation of Ariel, argues Avnery, is a severe violation of international law, specifically of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which forbids an occupying power from transferring and settling its own citizens in occupied territory. On the ground, the creation and maintenance of Ariel entailed and continues to entail untold hardships to the Palestinians who happen to live in the nearby town of Salfit and in numerous villages all around. Palestinian inhabitants are exposed to ongoing confiscation of their land so as to feed the land-hunger of the ever-expending Ariel settlement, and their daily lives are subjected to increasingly stringent travel limitations in the name of ‘preserving the settlers' security’.

Sharon has chosen to challenge the boycotters. He has agreed to cut the link between Bar Ilan and the settler college, but he has done this by proclaiming that the settler college is no longer reliant on Bar Ilan because it is now a real university itself. But the college is not a university, even if Sharon and his cabinet say that it is. In any event the Malag (Council for Higher Education), which by law needs to approve the decision in order for anything to happen, will oppose it tooth and nail; it doesn’t have enough money even to fund the existing universities properly. So Sharon’s proclamation is only that. It does not create a university where there isn’t one.

But Sharon’s intervention closely mirrors the position of the boycotters. The boycotters do not see any genuine difference between the fictional University of Judea and Samaria and the bona fide universities in Israel. To the boycotters, no university in Israel is a real university and Tel Aviv University ought to be understood as illegitimate in the same way as the settler college. The boycotters say that Israel as a whole is ‘illegitimate’ and they want to boycott TAU as much as the ‘University of Judea and Samaria’. Sharon now weighs in alongside the boycotters. He also says that there is no difference between TAU and the settler college. He proclaims that they are both equally ‘legitimate’.

Sharon must know that his intervention will encourage the boycotters, whose current strategy is to focus on what they regard as easy targets for boycott, in order to begin a process that they hope will gather sufficient momentum to win a full academic and cultural boycott of Israel in the end. Sharon is trying to give them an easy foothold in the boycotting game. Why?

The campaign for the boycott is convenient for Sharon because it smells of antisemitism. Sharon can exploit the antisemitic aspect of the boycott campaign to solidify Israeli public opinion around his own anti-Arab agenda. His politics paint all opposition to Israel’s sometimes brutal actions as antisemitic. The boycott campaign seems to bolster this claim. The boycott campaign not only criticises the actions of Israel but also the existence of Israel. The boycott campaign singles out the Jewish state as the only state that should be ostracised from the global academic community. So Sharon has acted to encourage the boycotters.

The boycotters will undoubtedly take his bait. They know that their recent ‘victory’ in committing AUT to ostracise academics at Haifa and Bar Ilan is going to be reversed. They will grab the lifeline that Sharon has generously offered. They will try to insist that AUT must now boycott the settler ‘university’. The boycotters are reduced to grasping at straws. They want to cut links with Haifa University, a university with a significant number of Palestinian staff and students, although nobody’s academic freedom has actually been seriously challenged. And now they will insist that AUT takes a position of boycotting the ‘University of Judea and Samaria’, which is in fact a pretend university, created by Ariel Sharon, so that they will have something to boycott.

AUT must draw a line under this whole affair at the forthcoming Special Council. The name of AUT is currently linked, in the UK and in the world, with antisemitism. Many members have already resigned from AUT in disgust. Many more have postponed their resignations because the move to reverse the decision to boycott has gained a huge momentum very quickly, and they are waiting to see if it is successful. If AUT is tempted to continue its boycott campaign by taking Sharon’s bait, and treating the fake university as though it was real, then this will, in the current context, be an act of self-destruction.

AUT must rescue itself and its reputation by irreversibly rejecting the campaign of the boycotters. It must also make a serious commitment to opposing antisemitism in its own ranks, in the universities and in the student movement.

Once it has drawn a line under this affair, it can then move on towards a considered and engaged policy in relation to the Israel/Palestine conflict. It can organise and facilitate positive links with Palestinian and Israeli universities. And it can also criticise what needs to be criticised in Israel: that is, some of the actions of the Israeli state and not the existence of the Israeli state. And it can start by campaigning for academic freedom in both Israel and Palestine and by stating its clear opposition to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. AUT should, in conjunction with the Israeli peace movement, and with Palestinians who oppose the occupation, then campaign against the academic element of Sharon’s plan to annexe part or whole of the West Bank. Only then will AUT be in a position to honestly speak against the building of a university on land that is held as part of a military occupation.

David Hirsh
2 May 2005