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May 9, 2002
Alex Lynch
American
Mainstream Media:
Insitutionalized Subjectivity
Alexander Cockburn
The Armey Plan:
Palestine to Ft. Worth?
May 8, 2002
James
Masterson
Hysteria
and Panic
About France
Robert Fisk
The Solution to this Filthy War: Foreign
Occupation
Edward
Hammond
and Jan van Aken
Pentagon
Pushed for Offensive BioWeapons Development
David Vest
From Ground Zero to the Bronx
May 7, 2002
Patrick
Cockburn
Bone
Apart:
The Graveyard of Napoleon's Defeated Army
Philip
Farruggio
Muffler
Shop Medicine
Norman
Madarasz
French
Elections:
Pandora's Ballot
Tom Turnipseed
A Travesty of Justice
May 6, 2002
Fran Schor
Invasion
of Iraq:
Coming Soon
Dave Marsh
Love Hurts
John Chuckman
The
Paradoxes of Israel
Rep. Ron Paul
End Corporate Welfare, Pull
the Plug on the Ex-Im Bank
Hussein
Ibish
Devastation
Only Feeds Resistance to Israeli Rule
May 5, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
High and Dry in the Mojave
May 4, 2002
Robert
Fisk
Sharon
the Merciless
and Arafat the Corrupt
Sam Bahour
New United States of Israel
Alexander
Cockburn
Extreme
Solutions:
Priests and Palestinians
May 3, 2002
Arundhati Roy
Democracy and
Religious Fascism
Wayne
Madsen
Dispatch
from Paris:
Le Pen's Strange Coalition
Yigal Bronner
A Journey to Beit Jalla
CounterPunch
Wire
Otto
Reich Named to Board of School of the Americas
John Troyer
Hatemongers Try to Cleanse History:
Gays and 9/11
John Stauber
Big
Food/Tobacco/Booze
Attacks "Mad Cow" Authors
Kathleen Christison
Before There Was Terrorism
May 2, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
Rep.
Dick Armey Calls for Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians
Rami Kaplan
Israeli Soldiers Resisting
the Occupation:
Why We Refuse to Fight
Carol
Norris
Subterranean
Mini-Nuke Blues
Bernard Weiner
A Peek Inside Colin Powell's Personal
Diary
May 1, 2002
Badiou,
Michel, Lazarus
French
Elections:
What is to be Done?
Baruch Kimmerling
The Battle of Jenin as
an Inter-Ethnic War
Edward
Hammond
Hiding
History:
NAS Suppresses Chem/Bio War Documents
Kristen Schurr
Inside Gaza
Sam Bahour
Corporate
America and
the Israeli Occupation
Jacques Ranciere
Prisoners of the Infinite
April 30, 2002
Mike Leon
Chomsky,
Letters to the Writer and the Peace Movement
Dave Marsh
The FBI and the Music
Industry: Paying the Cost to Feed the Boss
Steen
Sohn
Something
Rotten in Denmark:
New Danish Government's Alliance with Far Right
Desmond Tutu
Apartheid in the Holy Land
Christopher
Reilly
Kissinger:
the Wanted Man
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
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Five
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Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
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
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by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
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May
10, 2002
In Defense of Sanctions Against
Israel
by Lisa Taraki
The recent proposals to impose sanctions on the
Israeli academy have caused a great deal of controversy in the
US, in Europe to some extent, and of course within Israel itself.
Some have argued that collective boycotts are often the first
sign of fascist and anti-liberal tendencies; at least one American
academic has insinuated that it is tantamount to an anti-Jewish
campaign. I am not addressing myself principally to these arguments,
since I view them as attempts to intimidate and stifle debate.
These charges are, however, a good point
from which to examine the question of the proposed sanctions
against Israeli academia, since they bring to light one of the
central problems relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Briefly put, Israeli colonial policy has enjoyed immunity from
criticism and condemnation for many decades. The recent flagrant
disregard for UN Security Council Resolutions, the debacle surrounding
the UN fact-finding mission, the US government's complicity in
the ongoing violent colonial war waged against the Palestinian
people and its state and civil institutions, and the unprecedented
measures recently proposed by the US Congress all point to this
special status that Israel enjoys in the corridors of world power,
ranging from governments to international bodies like the United
Nations.
I suspect that many of the arguments
put forward to exempt Israeli academia from sanctions (even though
they are couched in the universalist language of protection of
free inquiry and in defense of academic freedom) are colored
by and derive their legitimacy from this deep-seated exceptionalism.
I know that many individuals who supported the boycott of South
African universities in the anti-apartheid era are arguing vigorously
now against the proposed sanctions against Israeli institutions,
the vast majority of which, it is important to add, happen to
be state institutions.
One of the most common arguments against
the boycott is that it is a form of collective punishment which
will hurt those Israeli scholars who have built ties with Palestinian
colleagues (some may be engaged in joint research projects with
Palestinians) and are actively engaged in the struggle against
the colonial occupation of Palestinian lands. Some have even
argued that the boycott might actually limit the capacity of
Israeli human rights and other activists to fight for justice
in Palestine.
I would like to make several comments
concerning these arguments from my position here in the Palestinian
academy.
First, to respond to arguments concerning
the academy as an institution, I would like to point out that
the academy has never been the sacred place it is purported to
be. It has been a haven for many scholars either in the outright
service of repressive states, or for those who have rewritten
history in defense of colonial projects. European and American
universities are no exception, and I daresay that the Israeli
academy is not either. The academy, therefore, has not always
lived up to what some may consider its moral duty to expose oppression
and unmask the oppressor, and to write history from the perspective
of the dispossessed. Sanctions negatively affecting academics,
in my view, are no more objectionable than those affecting growers,
manufacturers, exporters (not to mention small retailers, poor
workers, farmers, and soldiers).
Regarding the Israeli academy in particular,
I admit that the sanctions may negatively affect the scholarly
pursuits of those few Israeli scholars engaged in the struggle
for justice in Palestine, and will compromise joint projects
with Palestinian scholars (although the latter seem to have been
disrupted of their own accord, under the weight of the ongoing
repression, in recent months). It will also undoubtedly disrupt
the projects and activities of many Israeli academics. That,
however, is precisely the point. A sanctions/boycott campaign
is a severe measure called for in exceptional circumstances.
The question, then, is whether we are there yet, whether the
conditions justifying such dramatic action prevail. From my perspective
here in Palestine, the time has come for such extreme measures.
It has been shown beyond doubt that the "international community"
has not delivered--neither in protecting the Palestinian people,
nor in the search for a peace with justice. The flagrant disregard
for recent UN Security Council Resolutions is the latest in a
long history of making exceptions for Israel. The latest--and
ongoing--colonial war being waged against Palestinians has shown
that relying on governments and international bodies does not
guarantee that justice will prevail. Popular public opinion has
been mobilized, however, and pressure is beginning to build up.
The academic sanction/boycott campaign is part of this campaign
of pressure, as a message to the international and Israeli scholarly
community that business cannot go on as usual at a time when
a systematic campaign is underway to dismantle the infrastructures
of a nascent state and civil society, including research institutes
and universities. In fact, promoting "business as usual"
can be considered a sign of agreement with the status quo, constituting,
in effect, a political position (I refer parenthetically here
to a letter written by a European academic to an Israeli colleague
to the effect that coming to Israel at this time would constitute
taking a political stand, and that therefore it was better to
suspend such collegial visits). In short, this campaign is meant
to render the Israeli colonial project unacceptable, non-negotiable,
and immoral.
No one has of course mentioned anything
about Palestinian freedom of inquiry and the sanctity of the
Palestinian academy in this raging debate. What I have to say
about this is particularly relevant to Israeli academics, since
the vast majority of them have been carrying on their business
as usual for the past 35 years oblivious to what is happening
to their Palestinian counterparts, not to mention to the Palestinian
nation as a whole. Focusing only on my institution, Birzeit University,
I would ask these academics if they know that since March 2001
we have not had one day when our access to our campus in Birzeit
was unfettered, not blocked by concrete barriers and tanks? That
we are still in the first week of teaching of the second semester
of this academic year, when we should have been preparing for
final exams and the end of the academic year? Do they know that
since 1967, thousands of Palestinian students and faculty have
been arrested, tortured, and deported for their opposition to
the occupation? Do they know that it is extremely difficult for
Palestinian scholars to travel abroad and partake in international
scholarly activities? These realities reflect the fact that Palestinian
universities have been subjected to an insidious and unacknowledged
form of collective punishment for several decades now, and continue
to pay the price for it. Are we not as scholars obliged to condemn
this form of collective punishment?
I know that there are Israeli scholars
who are aware of this and who have offered us their solidarity
and have fought the occupation tirelessly, beginning in the dark
decades of the 1970s and 1980s and until now. But they are alone
out there in the world of business-as-usual, and they know this
better than we. The vast majority of Israeli scholars are unmoved
by the fact that their state, in their name, is carrying out
a violent colonial war against the Palestinians and committing
some of the worst violations of humanitarian law. The recent
reports from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch do
not leave this in doubt.
Lisa Taraki
is an Associate Professor of Sociology ar Birzeit University
in Palestine.
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