BOOK-BURNING FOR PALESTINE

ACADEMIC BOYCOTTS ARE THE EPITOME OF A MOVEMENT THAT FLOURISHES IN IGNORANCE.

What academic boycotts look like.

As I wrote in my previous post, the Palestinian case is built on misrepresentations and outright lies. This is good strategy, because facts are not on their side. Slogans, memes and screams work best for an ideology like that.

So it should be no surprise that one of the core tactics of the global “pro-Palestinian” movement is an academic boycott. This contemporary form of book-burning dovetails magnificently with the movement’s anti-intellectual fundamentals.

Israeli academics have been asked to resign from academic journals. Some have submitted articles to scholarly journals only to have them returned unopened. Activists have attempted, though thankfully largely failed, to ban academic partnerships with Israeli institutions and scholars.

There is nothing so antagonistic to the idea of academic inquiry, free expression and the sharing of vital advancements of knowledge than an academic boycott. Yet this is the cause taken up by thousands of British, European and North American academics who have signed petitions to ban Israeli professors from the sorts of international conferences, journals and exchanges that are the lifeblood of ideas. An academic boycott would have banned, in his day, a founder of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Albert Einstein, and his ideas.

Academic boycotts are the epitome of a movement that flourishes in ignorance. If there is anything “progressive” in this approach, it could only be that it promises a creepy form of equality in which everyone has an equivalently truncated level of knowledge.

To support an academic boycott — indeed to do anything other than rail wholeheartedly against it — is to celebrate ignorance over both intellect and self-interest.

This is not, so to speak, an academic matter: Israeli universities produce much of the world’s most advanced research. Israel is consistently ranked among the countries that produce the greatest number of academic papers per capita and many of these represent the most innovative advances in health research and scientific discoveries that will make our lives and the world better. Of the 500 top universities in the world, six are in the tiny state of Israel (with a population of 10 million).

Israel is one of the planet’s most fertile academic, technological, cultural and scientific environments. We close ourselves off to Israeli knowledge and expertise at our own peril. Choosing Palestinian nationalism over the advancement of science and research is a moral atrocity. There is hardly a more ignorant thing a professor could do.

Breast cancer, diabetes, colon cancer, Parkinson’s, West Nile virus, spinal cord injuries — if you or someone you love faces any of these issues, know that there are leading thinkers and researchers at a university near you who care more fervently about the illiberal, hate-filled, violent Palestinian nationalist movement than your loved one’s welfare and survival.

Imagine supporters of these boycotts going to the parents who put them through grad school and telling them that scientific advances against their Alzheimer’s can wait until the Palestinian national question is resolved.

Consider the unmitigated hypocrisy of Stephen Hawking. The late, great scientist boycotted an academic conference in Israel in 2013, joining a global dogpiling. As is the case with many “pro-Palestinian” petition-signers or boycotters, the decision cost him little or nothing. It was a cheap and easy act that allowed the movement for an academic boycott of Israel to crow about having one of the world’s greatest minds endorse their destructive campaign. Neither Hawking’s conscience nor his solidarity with Palestinians extended so far as taking the simple step that would have actually shown some commitment. The device that allowed Hawking to speak electronically and communicate his ideas verbally to the world operates on an Intel chip that was developed in Israel. He didn’t choose to boycott that, did he?

As inexcusable as an academic boycott is, there is something in the Palestinian movement that makes this approach irresistible. The BDS movement advances boycotts against all range of Israelis and Israeli products. Among the few that have gathered much traction is the one that is the most illogical and self-destructive: the academic boycott.

Could it be that those who want to lash out at Israel are convinced that the best way to do it is to kick the Jews where it hurts the most — right in the books? Is it possible there is even a strain of anti-intellectualism and jealousy so pervasive in academia that professors and researchers see the world-leading work being done in Israel in almost every field of human endeavor and seek to punish and suppress it?

Might this bias around Jews and their perceived intellectualism also help explain an otherwise inexplicable aspect of our position: our willingness to excuse Palestinian violence while Israelis are sitting at a negotiating table? A prevalent antisemitic bias is that Jews are masters of argument and disputation; that they are too clever to be beaten in a battle of wits.

For decades, the Israelis have wanted to negotiate, and the Palestinians have wanted to fight. If we accept the supposition that Jews are particularly good at negotiating, then for Palestinians to negotiate is to challenge the Jews on their own turf.

What Palestinians and others should have learned by now, though, is that the Jews are also, it turns out, very good at fighting for their survival. The Palestinians may assume there is something innate to Jews that make them unchallenged in negotiations. History tells us that they are also, since 1948, unchallenged in war. The Palestinian movement and their overseas dupes should wise up to that reality. It could save a lot of Palestinian lives (if that is something they actually care about).

Destructive behaviors — from nonviolent acts like boycotting to the grisliest crimes against humanity — are archetypal of Palestinianism. Constructive acts — creating the infrastructure of a civil society or preparing their kids to aspire to nation-building or self-actualization — are largely absent from the movement. The fact that every strategy in the movement’s arsenal harms Palestinians is secondary as long as they also harm Israelis.

Palestinianism is steeped in irrational, anti-intellectual, self-defeating approaches that harm Palestinians as much as, or more than, they harm Israelis.

Should it be a surprise that such a movement also endorses an academic boycott that, in its fullest expression, would see us all living in caves?