Yes to the academic boycott
By ANTHONY ALESSANDRINI
As an advocate for academic freedom, I’ve often had to explain my support for the Palestinian Campaign for an Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), issued in 2004 by Palestinian civil society organizations, including the Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees.
One of the most common misunderstandings of the boycott call is that it targets individual Israeli academics. It doesn’t: It calls for an institutional, not an individual, boycott. The call is for a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions. This is why many defenders of academic freedom support PACBI. As Joan Scott, one of the foremost authorities on academic freedom, expresses it: “It is because we believe so strongly in principles of academic freedom that a strategic boycott of the state that so abuses it makes sense right now.”
A rally for divestment at John Jay College in 2021 (Credit: Dave Sanders)
The reasons for the boycott have become clearer every year for the past 20 years, but especially over the past year. In addition to the unspeakable human cost of Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza, Israel has been carrying out a policy of scholasticide, the systematic obliteration of education through the arrest or killing of educators and the destruction of educational infrastructure. Since October 2024, every university in Gaza has been destroyed, along with 87% of all schools. Israel has killed at least 11,000 students and 529 educators in Gaza and the West Bank in the past year.
SCHOOLS IN GAZA
Over half a million students in Gaza are being deprived of their right to education. Poets, scientists, scholars, psychologists, admissions officers, lab technicians, academic support staff – the same people who make up the PSC membership – have been systematically murdered. As the Middle Eastern Studies Association put it in a statement condemning this cultural genocide, “The very notion of a Palestinian people is itself under attack through Israel’s policy of destroying Gaza’s archaeological, religious and cultural heritage.”
This campaign of scholasticide is not new, nor is it confined to Gaza. The repression of Palestinian education has been ongoing for decades. Curricular materials are subjected to Israeli censors, and Palestinian students, faculty and academic institutions have been under continual attack. Universities have faced arbitrary closures, raids and checkpoints at the hands of the occupation. From 1988 to 1992, all universities were closed by the Israeli military, and since the 2000s, Palestinian academic institutions have been frequent military targets. Between 2000 and 2008, eight universities and over 300 schools were shelled, shot at or raided by the Israeli Army in the West Bank; military and settler attacks, and arbitrary arrests at West Bank schools and universities, have dramatically increased this year.
Israeli policies have also cut off Palestinian teachers and students from academic institutions outside Palestine for more than 50 years. Travel restrictions have prevented them from attending academic conferences or accepting visiting positions, and the Israeli military has the final say over which internationals can be admitted to teach or study at Palestinian universities.
In short, Palestinian academic freedom today is nonexistent. Put differently: While the call to boycott Israeli academic institutions does not target individual Israeli academics, Israeli apartheid policies have always targeted individual Palestinian academics.
Scholar Maya Wind describes how even before 1948, today’s Israeli universities directly contributed to the violent dispossession of Palestinian communities, manufacturing weapons and developing expertise used to drive Palestinians from their lands. After 1967, Israeli universities created “facts on the ground” by contributing to the growth of settlements and, in Wind’s words, “served as pillars of regional demographic engineering and Palestinian dispossession.”
Today, these universities closely collaborate with Israeli weapons manufacturers to develop technology for the Israeli military and security state. To give only a few examples: Bar Ilan University works closely with Israel’s security services, condemned by the United Nations Committee against Torture for their use of illegal interrogation tactics; Ben Gurion University hosts the Homeland Security Institute, whose partnerships include Israeli weapons companies and the Israeli Ministry of Defense; Technion has numerous joint academic programs with the Israeli military, and developed technology for the Caterpillar D9 armored bulldozer used to demolish Palestinian homes (one killed Rachel Corrie in Gaza in 2003); Tel Aviv University runs joint centers with the Israeli military and arms industry; the University of Haifa hosts the Israeli Military Academic Complex that trains senior military staff; and Ariel University is located in an illegal settlement in the occupied West Bank.
SINGLED OUT?
Still some ask: Why single out Israel? PACBI is a specific call for a specific action in support of our Palestinian colleagues, and it calls for us, as academic workers, to respond with solidarity. When the United Farm Workers called for a boycott of grapes in 1965, it would not have been an act of solidarity to have immediately responded, “What about apples?” Similarly, to point to other cases simply as a way to argue against PACBI is to refuse to hear the call for solidarity from our Palestinian colleagues.
Anthony Alessandrini (Credit: Dave Sanders)
AAUP STATEMENT
The American Association of University Professors’ (AAUP) recent “Statement on Academic Boycotts,” while it does not focus on PACBI per se, provides a strong rationale for the idea of a boycott in defense of academic freedom.
Stating clearly that boycotts “can be considered legitimate tactical responses to conditions that are fundamentally incompatible with the mission of higher education,” the AAUP confirms there are instances in which upholding academic freedom may mean withholding our intellectual labor.
Guided by the same principles, some of the largest, most influential and most established academic and professional organizations have endorsed the boycott, including the American Anthropological Association, the American Studies Association, the Middle East Studies Association, the American Comparative Literature Association and the National Women’s Studies Association, among many others.
The list continues to grow. Over the past few months, in response to the Israeli genocide in Gaza, over a dozen colleges and universities throughout North America have begun the process of disclosing connections and divesting from Israeli apartheid.
There are clear guidelines for the boycott, as well as a specific statement explaining PACBI as a boycott of institutions, not individuals. The basics of the call are simple:
- Refrain from participation in any form of academic and cultural cooperation, collaboration or joint projects with Israeli institutions.
- Advocate a comprehensive boycott of Israeli institutions at the national and international levels, including suspension of all forms of funding and subsidies to these institutions.
- Promote divestment and disinvestment from Israel by international academic institutions.
- Work toward the condemnation of Israeli policies by pressing for resolutions to be adopted by academic, professional and cultural associations and organizations.
- Support Palestinian academic and cultural institutions directly without requiring them to partner with Israeli counterparts as an explicit or implicit condition for such support.
THE PSC VIEW
What would this look like specifically for PSC members? One immediate effect of endorsing PACBI would be to declare that PSC members do not support CUNY management’s ongoing efforts to uphold and normalize Israel’s apartheid policies. In May of 2022, Chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez led a delegation of CUNY administrators on a “bridge-building” junket to Israel, but did not meet with a single member of any Palestinian university. A statement from Palestinian academic workers and unions condemned “CUNY management’s whitewashing of Israel’s regime of military occupation, settler colonialism and apartheid, and its relentless attack on Palestinian higher education.”
An endorsement of the academic boycott does not apply to individual Israeli scholars engaged in ordinary forms of academic exchange, including conference presentations, public lectures at campuses or collaboration on research and publication (except collaborating on grants or anything that would materially benefit Israeli institutions). It is a pledge to not engage with institutions that support and enable apartheid, occupation and the ongoing genocide, but it would not compel PSC members to do so. Like a picket line, it is a call for solidarity.
It is also a pledge to create forms of cooperation and collaboration with Palestinian academic institutions. Endorsing the boycott means pledging to act in solidarity with our Palestinian colleagues. The Black feminist tradition has long espoused the notion that no one is free until everyone is free. The same goes for academic freedom: Until everyone has it, no one has it. Endorsing an academic boycott is one small way that PSC members, together with other U.S.-based academic workers, can contribute to a movement for true academic freedom, in Palestine and everywhere.
Anthony Alessandrini is a professor of English at Kingsborough Community College and the chair of the union’s Academic Freedom Committee.
Opposing an academic boycott
By IRWIN YELLOWITZ
Should there be an academic boycott of Israel? No.
Such a boycott is wrong both in principle and for reasons specific to the Israeli situation.
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has been an affiliate of the PSC since 1981. For over a century, it has defended academic freedom and free speech in an academic setting. The AAUP had opposed academic boycotts, but recently revised that policy to allow such boycotts – but with very significant restrictions. The boycott “should target only institutions of higher education that themselves violate academic freedom or the fundamental rights upon which academic freedom depends.”
The AAUP does not support academic boycotts of countries or of individual faculty engaged in academic activities.
UNWISE
I believe this revised statement is unwise despite its careful wording. The AAUP has existed because of its defense of academic freedom and free speech on campus, and an academic boycott ends discussion. The AAUP should seek to encourage the exchange of opinions on any subject, not close that interaction. This certainly applies to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We need free speech, not boycotts.
Even under the new AAUP statement, an academic boycott of Israel is illegitimate. The AAUP statement allows academic boycotts of institutions – not countries, and certainly not faculty – and only if those institutions have violated “academic freedom or the fundamental rights upon which academic freedom depends.” There is no Israeli university that meets that criterion. Thus, calls for an academic boycott of Israel go beyond AAUP standards, be they new or old. They become a tactic within the larger campaign for BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions), which has operated on U.S. campuses for over a decade with limited success. An academic boycott of Israel has no greater claim to success than the BDS movement in general.
If we turn from general principles to the specifics of the Israeli situation, we find once again that an academic boycott is a mistaken policy.
The AAUP statement indicates that an academic boycott should not affect faculty who are engaged in academic activities. However, were there to be an academic boycott of an Israeli university, it would soon impact faculty. Thus, we have a distinction without a difference.
WRONG TARGET
The AAUP does try to make its revised statement on academic boycotts a limited one. Some supporters of an academic boycott of Israel make no such effort. Any call for an academic boycott that targets the country at large, its universities as a group or the faculty within those institutions not only violates the AAUP statement, but good sense.
Faculty in Israel are like faculty in the United States. They have a variety of views on every subject, and they are not shy about expressing these views. That is the basic right of free speech in a democracy, and it should be encouraged. If any members of the academic community in the U.S. oppose Israeli government policy, they can speak out, make their arguments, work to change minds and opinions – but not close the discussion by a boycott. Free speech you do not like should be met by free speech you do like.
In addition, an academic boycott of Israel aims at the wrong target. Assuming the boycotters oppose specific policies of the Israeli government, they will find that many Israeli faculty agree with them. Thus, the boycott negatively impacts those with whom the boycotters may agree, while having little effect on those with whom they disagree.
Opponents of current Israeli policies have many means to oppose those actions. Supporters of the current Israeli government’s policies should defend those activities. Both opponents and supporters should make their case, so long as there is no violence against persons or property. In addition, neither party should demonize the other. This debate will reach beyond those most committed, to the much larger public, who are not so involved.
An academic boycott disturbs this interplay of argument by labeling some views as illicit. It would reshape the open debate that should go on about Israeli policy. It is destructive of free speech, and unfairly targets Israeli faculty for views many of them oppose. It is the wrong policy, and should be opposed.
Irwin Yellowitz is a professor emeritus of history at City College. He is also the New York chair of the academic freedom committee at the American Association of University Professors.
Published: October 29, 2024
