Pizzas galore!

These values are serious – even, momentous. When they are given their due weight, can an academic boycott ever be justified? We suggest that the answer is yes – though only rarely. Prima facie, a boycott may be justified:

- When the person or institution to be boycotted does not meet the criterion of being a scholar or place of learning: This is a criterion with minimal content, but it would exclude, for example, the Holocaust-denying “Institute of Historical Review” and the professional anti-Semites who contribute to its defamatory activities. It is not a place of learning, and they are not scholars. They are mere impersonators. They may therefore be “boycotted” without fear of compromising either of the two principles.

- When the person or institution to be boycotted violates either or both of the two principles: For example, where freedom of research is denied to the employees of the institution. Another application of this exception is the counter-boycott. It meets the boycotter with a reciprocal gesture of rejection. A counter-boycott is justified in the face of a boycott. It is not open to the same objections as the boycott itself.

These are the two exceptions. Do Israeli institutions or academics come within either one of them?

Is the academic boycott of Israel justified?

Beyond formulaic denunciations of Israel, the boycotters rarely offer a rational account of why it is right to shun Israel or its academic institutions. The supporters of the UCU resolutions, for example, relied instead upon the unargued assertions that a boycott was justified because:

- First, Israel's universities are complicit in its misdeeds. Some boycotters allege active complicity; others, a complicity that arises either through failure to condemn the State’s misdeeds or because the universities are themselves organs of the state.

- Second, Israel’s misdeeds justify the boycott regardless of the universities' own complicity in them. The universities are an important aspect of the prestige that Israel enjoys in the world, and this prestige is not deserved because of its treatment of the Palestinians.

Israel’s misdeeds for these purposes (according to PACBI) comprise the “ethnic cleansing” during the 1948 War, the “military occupation and colonisation” following the 1967 War, and the “entrenched system of racial discrimination and segregation against the Palestinian citizens of Israel.” That is to say, the “misdeeds” are constitutive of the State itself, and can only be remedied by Israel embracing its own extinction. (That these “misdeeds” are either false accounts of the relevant facts, or consequences of much more complex processes in which Arab aggression played a significant part, is of no concern to PACBI or its fellow travelling supporters in Britain.) PACBI desires academics worldwide to boycott Israel’s universities until Israel itself disappears. It does not wish to remedy an injustice, it wants instead to perpetrate a greater one. The PACBI model resolution, to remind ourselves, is the one endorsed by the UCU.

Even if true, which they are not, these assertions would not justify a boycott. Complicity in the state’s misdeeds, still less the mere fact of those misdeeds, violates neither of the two academic principles. In any event, it is the utter irrationality of the boycotters’ position, its disconnectedness from the ordinary canons of argument – the marshalling of evidence, the advancing of coherent theses, the acknowledging of objections, and so on – that must strike, urgently and forcibly, any disinterested person of good will.

Consider, for example, the “complicity” complaint. It does not stand up to a moment’s scrutiny. Any doubts on the matter would be dispelled by reading the “Open Letter from Faculty Members” at Courage to Refuse.

Or consider the boycotters’ explanation that they are merely responding to a request for assistance from another trades union – in this case, a Palestinian one. First of all, this is just not true – the PACBI call was itself a response to the activities of British boycotters. But in any event, requests for assistance have to be judged on their merit – trades union solidarity does not trump considerations of justice. Furthermore, if the boycotters limit themselves to responding to formal requests for assistance, they exclude from consideration the very parts of the world that should be of greatest concern to them – that is, those nations in which autonomous organisations such as trades unions are not free to operate.

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