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| The emergence of a silent academic boycott of Israel
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Professor Richard Seaford, head of the department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter
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LONDON (EJP) --- The International Advisory Board for Academic Freedom at Bar Ilan University, set up last year to combat the boycott motion instigated by the Association of University Teachers, has warned that a silent boycott between British academics and their Israeli counterparts already exists and has called on an anti-boycott network of some 500 academics around the world to oppose it.
Last week the head of the department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter in the UK, Professor Richard Seaford, was asked to review a book by the editor of the Israeli journal, ‘Scripta Classica Israelica’.
In his correspondence with the editor, Dr Daniela Dueck from Bar Ilan University, Prof Seaford said he was unable to accept the invitation for reasons “she would not like” but maintained it was nothing personal.
“I have, along with many other British academics, signed the academic boycott of Israel, in the face of the brutal and illegal expansionism and the slow-motion ethnic cleansing, being practised by your government.”
“I am aware of the honest arguments for and against a boycott, and that even some Israeli academics support the boycott and many do not. Whatever your views, I hope you will understand that my view is based on a widely shared moral outrage,” he added.
Seaford also told Dr Dueck that she was welcome to report him to anyone she liked.
Why should Israel negotiate?
In January of this year, following the Hamas victory in the Palestinian elections, Seaford published a letter in the British newspaper, The Independent, calling the charge that Hamas’s success will make negotiations impossible a myth.
In the letter he said, “What negotiations? Why should Israel negotiate when it is a thousand times more powerful than the Palestinians, and continues to create settlements with the de facto support of the US and the EU?”
In 1990, Prof Seaford was a signatory to a campaign opposing the Israeli law of return. Signatories declared opposition to “the state of Israel as a Jewish state and to the Zionist movement”.
The campaign statement declared, “The Zionist structure of the state of Israel is at the heart of the racism and oppression against the Palestinian people, and should be dismantled.
Similar boycotts
There have been a number of similar boycott incidents in the UK. In March, a monthly dance magazine, Dance Europe, refused to publish an article on an Israeli choreographer and her dance company because she was Israeli and the editor “opposes Israeli occupation”. The editor told the choreographer, Sally Ann Freeland, that she would publish the article only if Freeland condemned “the occupation”. She refused and the article was not published.
In 2003, Professor Andrew Wilkie, an Oxford University pathology lecturer and a fellow of Pembroke College, provoked outrage by rejecting an application from an Israeli PhD student based solely on his nationality. Prof Wilkie said he was not prepared to take Israelis because of the “gross human rights abuses”.
In 2002, Professor of linguistics at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, Mona Baker, a pro-Palestinian activist, dismissed Gideon Toury, a professor at Tel Aviv University, and Miriam Shlesinger, a lecturer at Bar-Ilan, from their positions on the board of two journals published by her company.
Later this month the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education, the largest university and college trade union in the UK, will discuss a motion to boycott Israeli institutions at their annual conference.
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