|
July 29, 2002
Tom Stephens
Fast
Track and the
Hypocrites of the House
Linda Belanger
Why Do They Do It?
Alfredo Castro
Colombia's
Disappeared
Anne Brodsky
Inside Pakistan and
Afghanistan with RAWA
Andrew George
The Fires
of Summer:
Don't Blame the Greens
David Vest
A Blind Mule and
a Box of Medals
July 28, 2002
Bob Geary
Our Dinner
with Fidel Castro
July 27, 2002
Ian Daoust
The New
Mahler, Seattle Style
Gavin Keeney
Zizek
and Lenin
Ralph Nader
Citigroup
Heal Thyself
M. Shahid Alam
American
Presidents (Poem)
Mokhiber / Weissman
Push Back: Women Take
on the Corporate Beasts
July 26, 2002
Jerre Skog
American
Dictatorship:
It Couldn't Happen...Could It?
Philip Farruggio
Lie,
Rob and Steal
Rep. Ron Paul
Monitor
Thy Neighbor
Ron Jacobs
Thinking
About the
Weather (Underground)
Walt Brasch
Ashcroft's War on Bookstores
July 25, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Paul
Krugman's Howl:
Populism, War and
the Melting Economy
Gavin Keeney
Van Morrison: In September
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
War
on Terrorism or
Police State?
July 24, 2002
Gary Leupp
An Islam Primer
July 23, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Battle
for Zuni Salt Lake
Ansar Ahmed
Am I with You, George?
Bill Christison
The
Disastrous Foreign Policies of the US: Oppression Abroad Means
Repression at Home
July 22, 2002
Rick Giombetti
Glaxo Raises White Flag
in Paxil Case
Wayne Madsen
Forbidden
Truth
The Press, Bush, Oil
and the Taliban
July 21. 2002
Francis A. Boyle
The Rogue Elephant
Jennifer Harbury
Why are
the FBI & CIA Targeting Me?
Joan Claybrook
Time
for a Special Prosceutor
for Thomas White
Gloria Bergen
The Struggle
of Workers
in Palestine
Dave Marsh
Mr. Big Stuff:
Alan Lomax, Great White Fraud
James T. Phillips
"I'll
Tell You No Lies"
The Human Rubble of War
July 20, 2002
Gavin Keeney
The Grave
New Urbanism
World Trade Center Burlesque
Jacob Levich
"I
Was Schooled in Hate"
Confessions of a
Summer Camp Terror Tot
Thomas Croft
Augusta,
GA
Growing Up in the Deep South
Alexander Cockburn
The
Market Hogwallow:
Popgun Populism Isn't Enough
July 19, 2002
Abe Bonowitz / SueZann
Bosler
A Discussion
with Jeb Bush on the Death Penalty
Jonathan Power
No Need
for War Against Iraq
Rick Giombetti
Qwest
Death Watch
Kurt Nimmo
Of Mice,
Bullets & Bombs
M. Shahid Alam
Through
Racist Eyes:
Is Eurocentrism Unique?
July 18, 2002
Mokhiber / Weissman
Business
As Usual
Jerre Skog
I Spy: Now
Let's be Fair,
the USA Ain't East Germany
Ralph Nader
The CEO
Crimewave:
Corporate Socialism
Mahbubul Karim (Sohel)
The Rising Tensions
Between Spain and Morocco
Alexander Cockburn
Drivel
and Squawk:
Can the Times' Jeff Gerth
Save the White House?
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
INSIDE
EXCLUSIVE
TO
COUNTERPUNCH
SUBSCRIBERS
Published March 15, 2002
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
Buy
This Explosive
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
|
July
31, 2002
The Academic
Boycott of Israel
by M. Shahid Alam
In early April 2002, moved by the massacres in
Jenin and the wanton destruction of civilian infrastructure in
West Bank cities by invading Israeli forces, two British academics,
Hilary Rose and Steven Rose, circulated a call-posted at www.pjpo.org-for
an academic boycott of Israel.
This campaign was directed mostly at
European academics, and so when it reached me nearly two months
later, in the first week of July, there were only six American
academics among the signatories. I carefully read the boycott
statement, which entailed non-cooperation with "official
Israeli institutions, including universities," and decided
to sign on to the list. I also forwarded the call to academics
on my mailing list.
Most of the friends on my mailing list
just ignored the call. Only two responded, and both were more
than a bit troubled that I should support such a thing. One described
this campaign as "destructive," another objected that
this was an "attack" on academic freedom. And once
my name was on the list of signatories, I promptly received two
pieces of hate mail. One of the two, from India.
A few days later I came across a counter
petition initiated by Leonid Ryzhik, a mathematics lecturer at
University of Chicago. In an interview published in The Guardian,
May 27, he said that the boycott campaign was "immoral,
dangerous and misguided, and indirectly encourages the terrorist
murderers in their deadly deeds." And this week, in The
Nation, August 5-12, Martha Nussbaum, an eminent ethical philosopher,
wrote that she felt "relaxed" to be in Israel, where
she had gone to receive an honorary degree from the University
of Haifa, "determined to affirm the worth of scholarly cooperation
in the face of the ugly campaign."
Having declared my support for the academic
boycott of Israel, I believe I must now explain why I can not
view this campaign as "destructive," "ugly"
or supportive of "terrorist murderers." On the contrary,
I see this as a moral gesture, part of a growing campaign by
international civil society to use its moral force to nudge Israelis,
to awaken them to the ugly and destructive reality of their Occupation,
which has now lasted for more than thirty-five years and shows
no sign of ending any time soon. At last, the cumulative weight
of Palestinian suffering has begun to break through the crust
of Israeli protestations of innocence. Although tardy, world
conscience is now preparing to engage Israeli intransigence.
Increasingly, the world outside United
States understands that Israel is not a 'normal' country. The
Zionist movement sought to establish an exclusively Jewish state
in Palestine, a land inhabited almost entirely by Palestinian
Arabs in 1900. Since no people yet has been known to commit collective
suicide, this could only be accomplished by conquest and ethnic
cleansing. This is how Israel emerged in 1948, through conquest
and ethnic cleansing of 800,000 Palestinians.
Yet this was not enough. Although Israel
now sat on 78 percent of historic Palestine, this fell short
of Zionist goals. In 1967 this shortfall was corrected when Israel,
after defeating Egypt, Syria and Jordan, occupied the West Bank
and Gaza. Another, smaller campaign of ethnic cleansing was rolled
into this second round of conquests.
Although the Security Council promptly
passed a resolution, calling for Israeli withdrawal from the
territories it had occupied in 1967, this never had any teeth.
Impressed by Israeli rout of Arab nationalist forces, United
States deepened its partnership with Israel and promptly rewarded
Israel by doubling its military and economic assistance.
As a result, thirty-five years later,
Israel still remains in 'Occupation' of West Bank and Gaza. In
reality, this Occupation is merely a fiction, a farcical cover
under which Israel buys time, time which it uses to insert armed
Israeli settlers, to increase Israeli control and ownership of
Palestinian lands, to push the Palestinians into ever shrinking
enclaves, to escalate the violence against Palestinian resistance,
and to deepen the misery of Palestinian lives till they can be
forced to flee their homes.
The logic of the Occupation is brutal,
and it should be transparent to all but the purblind. If Palestinian
demography prevents annexation, and if Palestinians cannot be
expelled in one fell swoop-as they had been in 1948-then the
same results can still be achieved by forcing the Palestinians
into Bantustans. If a million Palestinians can live in Gaza,
a strip of 100 square miles, the two million in West Bank can
be pushed into similar enclaves, freeing 90 percent of the West
Bank for Jewish settlers. It is about time that we gave up the
fiction of the Occupation, and describe this oppressive regime
by its proper name. This is Aparthied: one country with two systems
of laws, one for the colonizers and one for the colonized.
I have two objectives in rehearsing,
though ever so briefly, this narrative of Palestinian dispossession.
First, it is a narrative that has been denied repeatedly and
falsified massively by Zionists. It therefore needs to be affirmed,
simply and forcefully, again and again, in the expectation that
world conscience will bear witness to the Zionist project of
wiping out the Arab presence from Palestine to make room for
Jewish settlers.
Once this narrative is affirmed; once
it becomes clear that the destruction of Palestinians was necessary-and
always known to be necessary and accepted as necessary-for Israel
to emerge as an exclusive Jewish state; once it is admitted that
the dispossession of Palestinians has involved wars, ethnic cleansing,
massacres, villages destroyed, cities besieged, homes demolished,
children maimed and killed, prisoners tortured, ambulances bombed,
journalists targeted, municipal records destroyed, and trees
uprooted; once all this destructiveness-already accomplished,
and more of it unfolding everyday-is recognized the protestations
about the "destructiveness" or "ugliness"
of an academic boycott of Israel become insupportable, indeed
unconscionable.
Mr. Leonid Ryzhik, of the University
of Chicago, argues that academic boycott "indirectly encourages
the [Palestinian] terrorist murderers in their deadly deeds."
Does he mean to say that this boycott "indirectly encourages"
the Palestinian resistance; and anything that questions, delays
or weakens the extension of the Zionist project to the West Bank
and Gaza must be challenged, and neutralized. It must be affirmed
in the face of such posturing that resistance is a right of the
Palestinians, as it was of all colonized peoples who faced dispossession.
Of necessity, dispossession is implemented by force-unless this
project is aided by pathogens; and, it follows, that resistance
to the colonizer must be violent.
The question is not, why do the Palestinians
resist, or why do they resist by violent means? There is a different
question before world conscience. Why have we for fifty years
abandoned the Palestinians to fight their battles alone, beleaguered
by a colonizer whom they cannot fight alone? Why have we allowed
the Palestinians to be battered, exiled from their lands, herded
into camps-in villages and towns that have been turned into concentration
camps-exposed to the mercy of a colonizer who freely draws upon
the finances, political support and military arsenal of the world's
greatest power? In despair, marginalized, pauperized, facing
extinction as a people, if the Palestinians now use the only
defense they have-to weaponize their death-who is to blame?
And if now world conscience shows the
first signs of acting on behalf of the Palestinians, we can hope
that this will mitigate the Palestinian's deep despair. When
the young Palestinians learn that academics the world over, that
young people on campuses in Britain, France, Canada, and United
States are stirring on their behalf, this will convince them
that they are not alone; and once they are so convinced, they
may be persuaded to renounce their acts of desperation. The academic
boycott of Israel uses non-violent means, it leverages moral
suasion, to reduce the violence of the colonizer as well as the
colonized.
There are people who are shouting "Foul"
at the academic boycott on the plea that this curtails the academic
freedom of Israelis. I will readily admit that it does; this
boycott is expected to work by shrinking some of the international
avenues available to Israeli scientists for pursuing their work.
Still it must be emphasized that this curtailment is temporary;
it will end the moment Israel ends its Occupation. It is also
limited in its scope. It only seeks to limit some of the advantages
Israeli scientists derive from their interactions with the global
scientific community. It does not threaten any fundamental academic
freedoms.
This infringement of academic freedom-temporary
and limited as it is-must be seen in a broader framework. I will
readily concede that academic freedom is an important value,
a value that all humane societies should cherish. But there are
other values that we cherish, other values that may even be more
important, more fundamental than the right to academic freedom.
I believe it is reasonable and moral to impose temporary and
partial limits on the academic freedom of a few Israelis if this
can help to restore the fundamental rights of millions of Palestinians-their
right to life, to their property, to their lands, to freedom
of movement within their own country, to sovereign control over
their destiny, and to equal treatment under the law. This can
only be denied if we confess to a disproportion in the value
we accord to Israeli and Palestinian rights.
One might, of course, argue that this
boycott is wasted effort, since it can have no appreciable impact
on Israeli society and policies. This is a question about the
efficacy of the boycott. There can be little question that Israeli
scientists value the esteem and cooperation of the world's scientific
community as well as access to international funding. It can
therefore be expected that if the boycott spreads, this can begin
to reduce the effectiveness of Israeli scientists. Perhaps more
important, it is unlikely that Israeli polity can ignore the
message that the boycott sends to them: that Israeli violations
of Palestinian rights are repugnant, and will not be allowed
to stand.
At the same time, I refuse to be cowed
by invocations about the 'sanctity' of academia. More than ever
before, universities help to reproduce the power structures of
their societies; they are a potent source of ideologies of imperialism,
race and class exploitation. Israeli universities are no exception.
Through their links with the military, the political parties,
the media and the economy, they have helped to construct, sustain,
and justify the Apartheid. I might have hesitated in adding my
name to the boycott if I knew that Israeli academics had taken
the lead in organizing rallies, in organizing sit-ins, and passing
resolutions protesting the Occupation, or that they had refused
to work on projects that serve the Occupation. To the contrary,
Israeli academia, on the whole, has shown that it is a party
to the Occupation.
The academic boycott offers one of the
few handles available to international civil society for seeking
to end the Occupation. Israel has pursued policies in the Occupied
Territories that would have invited economic sanctions, and even
military intervention, against another country. America's capitulation
to the Israeli lobby has meant that Israel can wage war against
a civilian population-using bombs, rockets, tank shells, and
artillery fire-with impunity. Abandoned, isolated, beleaguered
and unarmed, a few Palestinian men and women have responded to
this massive force by weaponizing their own death, provoking
still greater violence against themselves. But, paradoxically,
this has also pushed world conscience into taking notice of the
affront to humanity that is the Israeli Occupation. The academic
boycott is one small step the detribalized world is now taking
the stop this affront, a step that all men and women who have
risen above tribalism should welcome.
M. Shahid Alam
is professor of economics at Northeastern University, Boston.
His second book, Poverty from the Wealth of Nations was published
by Palgrave (2000). He may be reached at m.alam@neu.edu.
Copyright: M. Shahid Alam.
Today's Features
Tom Stephens
Fast
Track and the
Hypocrites of the House
Linda Belanger
Why Do They Do It?
Alfredo Castro
Colombia's
Disappeared
Anne Brodsky
Inside Pakistan and
Afghanistan with RAWA
Andrew George
The Fires
of Summer:
Don't Blame the Greens
David Vest
A Blind Mule and
a Box of Medals
home / subscribe
/ about us
/ books
/ archives
/ search
/ links
/
|