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Comment and Opinion

Fathom Journal: The new assault on Israeli academia (and us), by Cary Nelson

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As the fall semester begins, we are sure to see a renewal of anti-Israel activism on many college campuses, especially behind the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The collapse of the Kerry peace initiative and the summer war in Gaza have raised the temperature in an already fiery debate. The group leading these efforts, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) this summer issued updated guidelines. The new guidelines are alarming. The old rules were already the source of the most far reaching, comprehensive, and invasive academic boycott recommendations; the new ones extend themselves into virtually every element of higher education worldwide. They represent not only a relentless assault on academic freedom but also an effort to deprive universities, their faculties, and their students of much of the freedom of choice, agency, and association that have defined higher education’s principles and ideals for a century.

BDS has, appropriately, come under fire for many reasons, among them that it amounts to a blacklist of Israeli scholars. Examples of this blacklisting are already legion, beginning with early boycott efforts in Britain, in which an Oxford professor refused an Israeli student permission to work in his lab because the student had served in the IDF and Israeli scholars were thrown off the editorial boards of journals.

To evade this criticism, PACBI has offered pious reassurances that the guidelines preserve and honour academic freedom, but it prescribes one specific practice after another practice which leaves academic freedom in tatters. The guidelines forbid institutions from building joint programmes and working with one another in multiple ways, and they detail elaborate protocols for blacklisting individual faculty members, staff, and students in countries throughout the world. These are police state style regulations aimed at ending higher education as we know it.

Read the article in full at Fathom Journal.