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The University and College Union on May 30 passed two boycott resolutions. Resolution 30 endorsed the call for an academic boycott of Israel by a Palestinian boycott group, PACBI. It also committed union funds to promoting it on campuses. But it did not commit the university teachers’ union itself to a boycott. Resolution 31 condemned the US and EU boycott of the Palestinian Authority (that is, the “suspension of aid”). Israel’s universities, which are liberal institutions, are to be shunned; the authority, which is governed by a party committed to the destruction of Israel, is to be embraced.

What happens when people are boycotted? The ordinary courtesies of life are no longer extended to them. They are not acknowledged in the street; their goods are not bought, their services are not employed. The boycott is an act of violence, though of a paradoxical kind – one of recoil and expulsion rather than assault. It announces a certain moral distaste; it is always self-congratulatory: “I am too fine a person to have anything to do with those people.”

All boycotts are problematic; academic boycotts especially so. They violate two important principles – the principle known as “the universality of science and learning” and freedom of expression.

The first principle is that academics do not discriminate against colleagues on the basis of factors that are irrelevant to their academic work. There are three justifications for the principle: the advance of science is potentially of benefit to all mankind; the value of a given contribution to science ought to be judged on its own merits; scientists’ cooperation transcends race, citizenship, religion.

Freedom of expression is one of the principal means by which we realise ourselves. It is by speaking or writing that we discover who we are. To limit or deny self-expression is thus an attack at the root of what it is to be human. It is not sufficient for my freedom of expression for me simply to be free to speak. What matters to me is that people should also be free to hear me. Boycotts put a barrier in front of the speaker. When he addresses another, that other turns away.

Beyond formulaic denunciations of Israel, the boycotters rarely offer a rational account of why it is right to shun Israel’s 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 organs of the State.

Secondly, 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.

Even if true, these assertions do 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. Consider 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” in which 358 academics criticised the Israeli Government’s actions in the occupied territories.

Or consider the boycotters’ defensive position, that Israel should be held to a higher standard than, say, Iran or North Korea, because it is a democracy. The position in turn exists in two versions: first, because Israel is a democracy, the entire people are to be associated with the actions of the Government. The effect is to give a free pass to tyrannies and to disclose a basic misunderstanding of the nature of democratic accountability. Democracies make rulers accountable to the people; they do not make the people accountable to third parties. To think otherwise is to embrace a pseudo-democratic version of the belief in collective national guilt. Secondly, because Israel purports to respect law and human rights, it should be sanctioned if it fails to do so. But there is not a single country that does not purport to respect law and human rights.

It may be enough to say: “The boycotters are wrong” and leave it at that. But the boycotters are not just adopting bad politics derived from faulty thinking. There is an edge of malice to their campaign. Their desire to hurt, to punish, outstrips their ability even to identify with any precision their targets – all Israeli universities without exception? All academics within those universities? Israeli academics in non-Israeli universities? They cannot say. And so the question arises – does this malice have a name? To be blunt, is it anti-Semitic?

The academic boycott resonates with earlier boycotts of Jews, whether those of medieval Europe or the Third Reich. The history of anti-Semitism is in part the history of boycotts of Jews. Each boycott derives from a principle of exclusion: Jews and/or the Jewish State are to be excluded from public life, from the community of nations, because they are dangerous and malign. We see an essential continuity here, but even if we are wrong about this, the boycott has indeed been an essential tool of anti-Semites for at least a thousand years. And who but the crassest of individuals, those least sensitive to the burden of anti-Semitism’s history on Jews, would wish to impose precisely that sanction on the Jewish State today?

Second, it is predicated on the defamation of Jews. The Jewish State, in pursuance of its racist ideology, is perceived as pure aggressor, and the Palestinians as pure victims. The boycotters would deny to Jews the rights that they uphold for other peoples. They adhere to the principle of national self-determination, except in the Jews’ case. They affirm international law, except in Israel’s case. They are outraged by the Jewish nature of the State of Israel, but are untroubled (say) by the Islamic nature of Iran or of Saudi Arabia. They regard Zionism as uniquely pernicious, rather than as merely another nationalism. They are indifferent to Jewish suffering, while being sensitive to the suffering of nonJews. They overstate, on every occasion, and beyond reason, any case that could be made against Israel’s actions, and wildly overstate the significance of the Israel/Palestine conflict – indeed, they put Jews at the centre of world affairs.

Longstanding anti-Semites now embrace “anti-Zionism” as a cover for their Jew-hatred. This is because, in relation to Israel, the antiSemite finds a protected voice. The desire to destroy Jews has been reconfigured as the desire to destroy or dismantle the Jewish State. Boycotters may have Jewish friends, they may be Jews themselves – but in supporting a boycott they have put themselves in anti-Semitism’s camp.

Take a step back, and ask the most fundamental of questions. What is anti-Semitism? Anti-Semitism consists, first, of beliefs about Jews that are both false and hostile, and secondly, of injurious things said to or about Jews, or done to them, in consequence of those beliefs. It is no enlargement at all to rewrite this definition as follows. Anti-Semitism consists, first, of beliefs about Jews or the Jewish State that are both false and hostile, and secondly, of injurious things said to or about Jews or the Jewish State, or done to them, in consequence of those beliefs. Anti-Semites wrong Jews and the Jewish State, and they are wrong about Jews and the Jewish State. Many antiSemites also want to hurt Jews and the Jewish State or deny to them freedoms or rights enjoyed by nonJews or the generality of states.

The fight against the boycott is one aspect, perhaps the most urgent aspect, of the contemporary fight against anti-Semitism.

Anthony Julius is Visiting Professor in the English Department at Birkbeck, University of London. Alan Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard

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