PUNISHMENT FOR PEOPLE WHO DON’T DESERVE IT
Joan Smith

The Independent – United Kingdom
Published: May 31, 2007

All over the world, repressive regimes are doing their best to
prevent the free exchange of ideas. They threaten, imprison and murder
journalists, authors and academics, and if they can’t do it themselves
they get their proxies to do it, which is what probably lies behind
the unsolved murder of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya in Moscow
last autumn. Three months later, the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant
Dink was assassinated in Istanbul, and shortly after my old friend
Orhan Pamuk went into temporary exile, driven out of his own country
by death threats and a failed prosecution for supposedly insulting
Turkish identity.

These are dark times for those of us who believe that the free exchange
of ideas is a prerequisite of democracy, so my heart sinks whenever I
see misguided people urging cultural or academic boycotts of countries
whose governments they dislike. The ANC did it during the apartheid
years in South Africa, urging not just an economic and sporting boycott
but a cultural one as well, leading to an absurd situation where the
London production of a play by an author who opposed the regime was
threatened with a demonstration by anti-apartheid pickets. I was young
and naive at the time, so naturally I refused a request from a South
African women’s magazine which wanted to serialise my first novel,
only realising afterwards that the regime was no doubt perfectly
content at the prospect of a left-wing, feminist writer indulging
in self-censorship.

Twenty years later, the question of an academic boycott of Israel is
having a similar effect, dividing opponents of the current government
in that country. In Bournemouth yesterday, British academics ignored a
plea from Sally Hunt, general secretary of the University and College
Union (UCU), not to back calls for a boycott, reigniting arguments
which have been causing heated and sometimes bad-tempered debates
among British academics for the past five years.

The idea of a boycott returned to the agenda this week when delegates
from Brighton University and the University of East London urged
the conference to condemn the "complicity of Israeli academia in the
occupation of Palestine" and demanded a "comprehensive and consistent
international boycott of all Israeli academic institutions". Yesterday
Ms Hunt argued against the motion, suggesting that the supporters of
a boycott were out of step with the rest of the union. "Most want to
retain dialogue with trade unionists on all sides – not just those we
agree with," she said. She pointed out that this is the UCU’s approach
in Zimbabwe and Colombia, two regimes with at least as poor a human
rights record as Israel’s in the Occupied Territories.

Ms Hunt lost the vote but her position is absolutely right, and I
say this as someone who believes that the policies of the present
Israeli government towards Palestine and Lebanon are bullying,
counter-productive and a violation of human rights. It is obvious
to all but the most deluded Zionist that Israel will never live in
peace until it returns to its 1967 borders and allows the Palestinians
to share the economic prosperity enjoyed by most of Israel’s Jewish
population; the Israeli government also needs to abandon the fantasy
that it can defeat Hizbollah militarily, a conclusion that leading
Israeli politicians are still resisting in spite of the utter failure
last summer of their invasion of Lebanon, which caused terrible
civilian casualties and the widespread destruction of Lebanese
infrastructure.

As a result, Hizbollah’s domestic popularity has soared, entrenching
the Islamist organisation even deeper in a country which desperately
needs secular politics and producing quite the opposite effect to what
was intended; some commentators even argue that Tony Blair’s shameful
reluctance to call for a swift ceasefire made his departure from office
this summer inevitable, once again demonstrating the capacity of the
Arab-Israeli conflict to have an impact outside the Middle East. Indeed
I suspect it is the Israeli government’s stubborn refusal to listen
to a torrent of criticism from European politicians and human rights
organisations which lies behind the calls for an academic boycott,
and as a symptom of frustration it is just about comprehensible.

Frustration is closely linked to feelings of impotence, however, and
impotence rarely produces good politics. The principles at stake here
don’t apply only to Israel, even though it is more often the focus
of debates about academic boycotts than regimes elsewhere which are
as bad or worse; Putin’s Russia, for example, which is fast becoming
a rogue state that has no respect for the law and subjects the few
brave people who openly defy the government to relentless harassment
and threats. If academic boycotts really were an effective means
of shaming governments and changing policy, UCU delegates would be
threatening to withdraw co-operation from Russian universities –
and from academic institutions in countries which have fallen under
the influence of political Islam.

No matter how much I dislike the current Israeli government, I know
it isn’t Iran or Saudi Arabia, and it certainly doesn’t speak for
every single one of its citizens; it isn’t even Venezuela, where the
government is closing down TV stations. If individual academics in
Israel are slanting their research to suit the government, I have
no problem with the idea that their bias should be challenged and
exposed, but academic institutions should not be made a scapegoat
for government policies. On the contrary, boycotting them isolates
and undermines the very people the rest of us most need to engage with.

If the boycott is put into practice as now appears likely, it will
have a disastrous effect on individual careers and the exchanging
and challenging of ideas which is at the heart of academic freedom;
British academics will be urged not to attend conferences at
Israeli universities or invite Israeli colleagues to this country,
while some British academics might refuse to peer-review articles
for academic journals. You can call this a boycott, and produce all
sorts of justifications, but what it really amounts to is collective
punishment of Israeli academics, some of whom actively oppose their
government’s policy, and a form of censorship.

I have spent too much time observing the dire effects of censorship,
as carried out by authoritarian regimes and religious extremists,
to start recommending it as a means of effecting political change,
even to well-meaning people who can’t think of anything else to
do. If you believe in universal human rights, for the Palestinians
in the Occupied Territories or anybody else, the way to bring about
change is to identify and support those who agree with you and work
on changing the minds of those who don’t. Leave censorship to the
Putins and Mugabes and Chavezes, who already do it much too well.