GLOBAL: Nobel laureates slam Israel academic boycotts

The recent threat of a boycott by the University of Johannesburg in South Africa against Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel has prompted 38 Nobel laureates to issue a statement condemning boycotts and divestment campaigns against Israeli academics and academic institutions.

The laureates said such calls, by Johannesburg as well as initiatives at the universities of California and Georgia in the United States, were in direct opposition to principles of academic freedom and intellectual inquiry.

"Academic and cultural boycotts, divestments and sanctions in the academy are antithetical to principles of academic and scientific freedom, antithetical to principles of freedom of expression and inquiry, and may well constitute discrimination by virtue of national origin," the laureates said in a statement released last weekend.

The laureates were riled by the threat of a boycott by the University of Johannesburg (UJ) of Ben-Gurion University.

The University of Johannesburg's senate met at the end of September and threatened to end its relationship with Ben-Gurion unless it worked with Palestinian universities on research projects and stopped its "direct and indirect support for the Israeli military and the occupation".

"The conditions are that the memorandum of understanding governing the relationship between the two institutions be amended to include Palestinian universities chosen with the direct involvement of UJ," the university said in a statement.

The Johannesburg senate said if the two conditions were not met within six months, the memorandum of understanding would automatically lapse on 1 April 2011.

Led by Roger Kornberg of Stanford University and Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas at Austin, the Nobel laureates - many of them not Jewish and most based in the US - were also unhappy with student government divestment efforts at the University of California.

They also condemned the attempt to divest pension funds from companies doing business with Israel or Israeli companies, as well as an initiative to shut down the Georgia Law Enforcement and Education Centre at Georgia State University, which has training and research links with similar institutions in Israel.

The statement was released with the support of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, a network of more than 60,000 faculty and scholars on 4,000 campuses across the world, which strives for peace in the Middle East.

Students, academics and university officials were encouraged "to promote and provide opportunities for civil academic discourse where parties can engage in the search for resolution to conflicts and problems rather than serve as incubators for polemics, propaganda, incitement and further misunderstanding and mistrust".

Comment:
Perhaps establishing an exchange programme between the universities and academics would result in more productive change and dialogue than a boycott. Look at the recent dynamic results of sending 75 students from the University of the Free State in South Africa to the US!

Susan Knowles
US Department of State