This piece by David Hirsh is in Democratiya 13 and is a longer version of an article that first appeared in Babylon, 'Scandinavia's leading journal on the contemporary Middle East and North Africa'.

I am reluctant to write this article because it should not be necessary. No antiracist and no scholar should need the case to be explicitly set out against a campaign to exclude Israelis from the cultural and economic life of humanity; especially from the global academic community. There is no campaign to exclude anybody else; only Israelis. That a reputable scholarly journal feels it has to commission an article giving reasons why such an exclusion is a bad idea should tell us something worrying about the depth and scope of contemporary antisemitism.

There are a number of reasons to oppose a boycott of Israeli academia and I will, in spite of my reluctance, set them out as clearly as I can in this article. But for me, the central reason, and in fact the reason behind the other reasons, concerns antisemitism. The actual intentions of people who support this boycott are positive and antiracist; they want to help Palestinians. But were it to be instituted the boycott would be in effect if not intent an antisemitic measure; it would normalise an exclusive focus on Jews as fit targets for exclusion and punishment.

To be quite clear, I am saying that it would be better if this debate was not happening; it is not a legitimate debate. I am well aware that I will be accused of being part of a powerful 'Israel lobby' which dishonestly 'plays the antisemitism card' in order to de-legitimize criticism of Israeli human rights abuses. I want antisemitism to remain unthinkable and so I am becoming accustomed to the charge of violating freedom of thought. But people are more and more seeing through the lazy claim that those who raise the issue of contemporary antisemitism do so for instrumental reasons. [1] In truth the libel that Jews aim to benefit instrumentally from antisemitism is an old one, classically articulated in the ninth of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Why should I overcome my reluctance to debate the pros and cons of excluding Israelis? If there were a proposal to exclude women from universities on the basis that their natural aptitude to science was inferior to that of men, then academic journals would not take it seriously by hosting a debate on the proposal. If I were asked to rebut such a proposal, I would refuse, on the basis that there is no debate to be had; it is indisputable fact that women are as intellectually competent as men. A debate on the issue of women's equality, I would argue...

For the whole piece, go to Democratiya