the anti-Israei boycott — Jun 2002

By HAIM WATZMAN

TWO Israeli faculty members have been dismissed from the boards of British journals of translation studies as part of the academic boycott of Israel declared in
April by a group of European scholars and intellectuals.

Miriam Shlesinger, a senior lecturer in translation studies at
Bar-Ilan University, was dismissed from the editorial board of The Translator:
Studies in Intercultural
Communication, and Gideon
Toury, a professor in Tel-Aviv
University’s School of Cultural Studies, was dismissed from the international advisory board of Translation Studies
Abstracts. Both journals are published by St.

Jerome Publishing and are privately owned by their editor and publisher,
Mona Baker of the University of
Manchester Institute of Science and
Technology.

According to the two dismissed
Israelis, Ms. Baker contacted them by e-mail two weeks ago asking for their resignations, in keeping with the boycott.
When they refused, Ms. Baker notified them of their dismissals.

Another editorial board member,
Franz Poechhacker, resigned from
The Translator’s international advisory board to protest Ms. Shlesinger’s dismissal. He said that three other members of the advisory panel and one member of the editorial board, Anthony
Pym of Universitat Rovira i Virgili, in Spain, had also resigned. “The removal of an individual on the basis of her passport is incompatible with the aim of improving relations between cultures,” Mr.

Pym wrote in an e-mail message. “This is a completely misguided political action on the part of an editor,” declared Mr.
Poechhacker, an associate professor in the
University of Vienna’s department of translation and interpreting. He called
The Translator one of the top journals in the field of translation studies. Mr. Poechhacker said that Ms.
Baker had indicated that she would no longer accept articles from Israeli researchers in the field.

“If that is indeed the case,
the journal will become biased and
suffer in quality, a much more serious
result than the decision to dismiss two
individuals. Researchers in the field
will not have access to any Israeli
scholars,” he said.

Ms. Shlesinger, who has served two years on the editorial board of The
Translator and was previously a member of its international advisory board, is a former chairman of Amnesty International’s
Israeli chapter and is a critic of
Israel’s policies in the West Bank and
Gaza Strip. But she said that an academic boycott “is not how science should be done.”

The dismissals were also decried by
Yves Gambier of the Center for
Translation and Interpreting of the
University of Turku, Finland, and president of the European Society of
Translation Studies. Mr. Toury is vice president of the society, and Ms.
Shlesinger a member of the organization’s board.

“It would be profoundly unjust and contrary to our ethics to cut off individuals who have chosen to work precisely to overcome attitudes of parochialism, self-isolation, chauvinism,”
Mr. Gambier stated in the organization’s most recent newsletter.

St. Jerome Publishing said that Ms.
Baker would not comment on the dismissals.
The organizers of the academic boycott believe that it will pressure Israel to end what they believe is its unjustified aggression against the Palestinians in the
West Bank and Gaza Strip.