Real History and the anti-Israei boycott

Posted Monday, July 8, 2002

Alphabetical index (text) Index to the Traditional Enemies of Free Speech

It might be thought that this flagrant assault on academic freedom would have triggered outrage

London, Sunday, July 7, 2002

Editorial Opinion

IT is deeply embarrassing for British academia that it has taken the intervention of an American scholar to draw attention to the disgraceful treatment of Dr Miriam Shlesinger and Professor Gideon Toury. As we report today, Stephen Greenblatt, a professor at Harvard University, is leading the protest against the dismissal of the Israeli academics from the board of two scholarly journals run by Mona Baker, a teacher at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST). Dr Shlesinger and Prof Toury have been dismissed solely because of their nationality.

The fact of the Israelis' dismissal was noted in a short report in the Times Higher Educational Supplement of June 28. It might be thought that the disclosure of this flagrant assault on academic freedom by a senior scholar at a British university - Ms Baker heads UMIST's Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies - would have triggered outrage on redbrick campuses and in ivy-clad quads. Not so. Even the authorities at UMIST have run for cover, saying only that they are "dealing internally" with Mrs Baker's actions.
A few useful links to look at and pass on: pictures illustrating Israeli military activities, as extolled by The Daily Telegraph, in the Middle East

Israeli Defence Force (Wehrmacht) shoots a child
Israeli settlers (10 pictures)
Droll female soldier
School children and soldier
Soldier dragging little kid
Israeli heroes with their trophy kills (5 pictures)

It has been left, therefore, to Prof Greenblatt, one of the world's most eminent Shakespearean scholars, to draw attention to this case. As Prof Greenblatt observes in his open letter to Mrs Baker, it is "particularly grotesque, of course, that the journals you run concern translation and intercultural communication". By excluding scholars simply because they are Israeli, he continues, she has violated "the essential spirit of scholarly freedom and the pursuit of truth".

Mrs Baker's actions are part of an organised "academic boycott" of Israeli academics and institutions, a campaign which is trying, among other things, to suspend European Union funding of Israeli universities (though not, of course, the EU's generous financing of Yasser Arafat). She justifies her dismissal of Dr Shlesinger and Prof Toury on the grounds that the behaviour of "Israel has gone beyond just war crimes".

As offensive as her remarks are, she enjoys the freedom to make them. But the action she has taken is morally repugnant and intellectually absurd. Does she propose that scholars from all countries that are judged to behave badly should be excluded from academic life? Should Russian academics be sacked from scholarly journals if Russian troops make further incursions into Chechnya? And what about African intellectuals from states engaged in torture and atrocities?

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Israel has been given special treatment. There was a time when South Africa was the chosen enemy of the intellectual Left. Today, it seems to have been replaced by the Jewish state, whose relations with the Palestinian people are regarded by many academics as comparable to apartheid. Israel also performs the useful role of proxy villain for America. As much as British academics tend to hate the United States, many of them hope one day to work there for the higher salaries which American universities pay - the so-called "cash dash" across the Atlantic. How much easier to focus on the alleged wickedness of America's "client state" in the Middle East. Certainly, few British academics took a stand against Tom Paulin, a lecturer in English at Oxford University, when he said in April that Jewish settlers in Israel "should be shot dead".

Dons are entitled to their juvenile opinions. What is so depressing about the UMIST case is the fact that those same opinions have been translated into action without a peep of protest from scholars in this country. It is not, perhaps, surprising that Pakistan brought such deplorable pressure to bear on its tennis player, Aisam Ul-Haq Qureshi, to end his doubles partnership at Wimbledon with the Israeli Amir Hadad.

But it is nothing short of astonishing that the same criteria are now being applied by an academic employed by a respected British university. Dr Shlesinger and Prof Toury are scholars who happen to be Israeli. But they have fallen victim to a sub-Marxian world view in which all consciousness is political, and identity is defined in terms of global political struggle, real or imagined.

Not all attacks on Israel and Israelis are necessarily anti-Semitic, although Jewish people, with painful experience over the centuries of exclusion from academic institutions, are understandably anxious and angry about this case. But this is not a controversy specifically about anti-semitism. What is at stake in this case - and Prof Greenblatt deserves praise for recognising this - is the principle of academic freedom which underpins the idea of a university and, as Cardinal Newman wrote, enables such institutions to "educate the intellect to reason well in all matters, to reach out towards truth and to grasp it".

The academics who have remained so silent during this case are the teachers of the nation's youth, the custodians of the best and the brightest. That, more even than Mrs Baker's original action, is a cause for the deepest shame.