I’m happy to address your concerns. I’m writing to you as the nation mourns Kader Asmal and celebrates his life’s achievements. The following brief excerpt from an essay Asmal wrote a year ago almost to the day is fitting:
The Palestinians have been betrayed by those who believe in the legal system that holds the world together… The European Union grants Israel the enormous advantage of preferential trading… and billions of American dollars … allows Israel to have the most technologically advanced army… It is time to delegitimise this entity. We did that to the apartheid government in South Africa, and the same must happen to Israel. We spent years trying to isolate South Africa, and the campaign grew to embrace a worldwide call for state-ordained boycotts, including military, economic, sporting, academic and cultural sanctions. These campaigns stirred the conscience of the world (http://mg.co.za/article/2010-06-25-world-must-deny-legitimacy-to-israel).
You write, “Academic boycotts did not feature as a strategy at the time.” This contradicts Asmal, at that time a founding member of the anti-apartheid movement in exile. There are numerous other references and a vast number of articles on the academic boycott which can be made available to you. While primarily, the struggle within played the most important role, external pressure was not insignificant. The political scientist Shireen Hassim writes:
the academic boycott undoubtedly had an impact on both the apartheid state and on white academics and university administrations. The boycott, together with the more successful sports boycott and economic divestment campaigns, helped to strengthen the struggle of black people for justice. University administrations could no longer hide behind an excuse of neutrality but had to issue statements on their opposition to apartheid and introduce programs of redress. Academic associations (some more than others) examined the nature and conditions of research in their disciplines, and faculty unions became part of broader struggles for justice rather than bodies protecting narrow professional interests. Universities became sites of intense debate, and, indeed, intellectuals became critically involved in debates about the nature of current and future South African societies. In the wake of the boycott, there was not a curtailing of academic freedom, then, but a flourishing of intellectual thought that was rich, varied, and exciting.
Also, Israel, far from being “singled out” as you maintain is actually pampered by the US and the EU as Asmal complained. Ran Greenstein from Wits University who lived in Israel and has written scholarly articles comparing Israel and apartheid South Africa argues that in fact Israel “singles out” itself because of its inhuman and brutal policies which is an affront to those of us who lived under apartheid and people of conscience all over the world. Greenstein also points out that governments in the West have imposed varying forms of sanctions at various times against Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Serbia, North Korea, Burma, Zimbabwe and various other countries, have invoked international human rights legislation to prosecute political leaders and have used military force on a massive scale against some of these countries. Greenstein writes, “None of these steps have been used against Israel. With the exception of few feeble legal enquiries, almost always opposed by the UK and the USA, Israeli war crimes and violations of human rights have gone unpunished. If Israel has been ‘singled out’ in this respect, it has been for a privileged treatment.”
You also make the incredible claim that BGU is a “left wing” university. When the Israeli military bombed Gaza in 2008/2009 killing close to 1 400 mostly civilians including almost 400 children, BGU outdid all other Israeli universities by giving soldiers hundreds of rand each day and other benefits. As part of their training Israeli military pilots receive BA degrees from BGU in one year. BGU also harasses students and academics who are critical of the Israeli state. Neve Gordon an academic from BGU who expressed support for the boycott was severely threatened by BGU’s president Rivka Carmi. Researchers have found that BGU’s water research and biotechnology institutes and laboratories have clear links with Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest private military contractor and the Jewish National Fund which has expropriated vast properties belonging to millions of Palestinians. (see www.ujpetition.com and http://mg.co.za/article/2011-04-29-science-in-the-service-of-bad-politics/). Neither BGU nor any other Israeli institution has ever voiced the slightest criticism, as institutions, of daily human rights violations, the detention of thousands of Palestinians including hundreds of children and the daily humiliation and suppression of the academic freedom of Palestinians. The Israeli academy provides the practical and ideological support necessary for the maintenance of the occupation and even for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, extrajudicial killings, racial segregation, and land expropriation.
Palestinians, the overwhelming number of whom support the international boycott of Israel, work with what you call “dissident” individuals. These “agents of change” are valued members of the movement for social justice whether Jewish, Christian, Muslim or atheist. The boycott is an institutional boycott. Apropos the contrasting of different kinds of boycotts: We are talking of boycotts which are effective and tactical. Greenstein writes,
… it made sense to boycott South African cricket and rugby teams to disrupt the sense of normality of sports-mad white South Africans. This tactic would not work in, say, Burma or Sudan, whose oppressive elites have limited interest in sports. When we consider the campaign against the Israeli occupation and oppression of Palestinians, a careful choice of targets must guide action. While Israeli Jews are not the only ones who violate human rights, as the stronger side they are the chief culprits today. Their greatest source of vulnerability is the obsessive need to feel an integral part of the West and the global community. This feeling is particularly strong among the elites, including academics. It is central to their professional identity and it contributes to a sense of political complacency. With their eyes firmly turned to the West, they have become blind to Palestinians living under conditions of military occupation and suffering from massive violation of human rights.
Academic freedom in the case of violent occupation, apartheid, genocide and gross human rights abuse must surely bear some reference to these conditions. Failure to recognise this means that the concept of freedom generally, and academic freedom in particular, becomes bereft of meaning.
Palestinians do not have academic freedom. They run a gauntlet of soldiers, checkpoints, and the threat of arrest in order to be able to get to their institutions to perform basic tasks like teaching and researching. They often teach classes that are sparsely populated, usually because students could not get through the checkpoints. The basic rights of academics, as explained by UNESCO, do not exist for Palestinian academics and students in the occupied Palestinian territories. UNESCO requires that higher-education teaching personnel “should be enabled throughout their careers to participate in international gatherings on higher education research, [and] to travel abroad without political restrictions.” For most Palestinian academics from the occupied territories, such opportunities are based on a range of factors that are out of their control and firmly in the control of the occupation authorities: whether they will be allowed to pass through checkpoints on their way to the border, allowed to leave the country, required to hand over their papers to the occupation authorities for vetting before they are allowed to leave, monitored at foreign institutions or conferences they might be traveling to, and interrogated on their return.
The freedom of Palestinians to teach and study is contingent on a number of factors related to the occupation. There is not much freedom to do research or to disseminate research for an academic who is confined, for months at a time, in a canton of a few square miles and whose virtually every move is dictated by military occupation authorities. Oren Ben-Dor therefore argues that, “A boycott to foster real academic freedom in Israel should unite academics all over the world…[T]he boycott I wish to see is a boycott intended to produce academic freedom.”
As South Africans who fought against apartheid we should know better than to offer an apologia for apartheid in Israel. The HSRC produced a comprehensive and scholarly report providing very detailed evidence concerning apartheid in Israel ( http://www.hsrc.ac.za/Research_Publication-21366.phtml). A few days ago Archbishop Desmond Tutu reiterated his support for justice for the Palestinians and non-violent action against Israel. It is a brief appeal and appropriate since it relates to the work of your faculty. The Archbishop’s focus was on the vital role of art and music in speaking to a common humanity: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZveHdjtoNw&feature=uploademailsee).
Also relevant to your faculty, prominent South African architects with a connection to Israel have spoken out forcefully against apartheid in Israel. One such person is emeritus professor of architecture, Alan Lipman. Another is Arthur Goldreich. Consider the view of Arthur Goldreich, a founder of the architecture department of Jerusalem’s Bezalel Academy who in the 1940s was a fighter with Israel’s Palmach and in the early sixties a member of the ANC’s MK: “I watched Jerusalem with horror and great doubt and fear for the future. There were those who said what’s happening is architecture, not politics. You can’t talk about planning as an abstraction. It’s called establishing facts on the ground.” Goldreich was expressing dismay at the way architecture and planning evolved as tools for illegal Israeli territorial expansion.
I find it strange that you quote Boyte but fail to apply it to the issues you are concerned about. If agency is important then surely it is critical that the people to be engaged with are Palestinians. Not once do you deign to mention them or discuss their freedoms as an oppressed people or their academic freedom. This is disturbing. In fact it is their agency which called for an academic boycott of Israel (http://www.pacbi.org/). On their website we see countless academics, artists, designers, novelists, dramatists, filmmakers, and architects from around the world who support the boycott. They include the likes of John Berger, Harold Pinter, Ken Loach, Adrienne Rich, Arundhati Roy, Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover, Alice Walker, Judith Butler, Pete Seeger, Vanessa Redgrave, our own Zapiro, Allan Horwitz and Steven Markowitz as well as people like Cynthia Nixon (yes of Sex and the City fame!) I hope one day you will join this growing list.
During our struggle against an intransigent apartheid state the governments of Reagan and Thatcher which supported apartheid here, as you are aware, pursued ‘constructive engagement’. Similarly, the Israeli state wants ‘normalisation’ while they continue violating every human rights law and international convention that exists. They use ‘peace talks’ yet continue to expand illegal settlements. We must engage with those Israelis who want peace with justice as we do. They understand that isolating Israel is the only non- violent option to achieve a peaceful society.
Kim, I’ve just read Sasha Polakow-Suransky’s ‘The Unspoken Alliance-Israel’s secret relationship with Apartheid South Africa’ (Jacana, 2010). On page 119 he talks about the role the old RAU played in this cosy alliance. I’m proud of the decision the UJ Senate took, it signals a move away from this past toward transformation. I’m glad you enjoyed my talk on the need to put principles before lucre. Space will not allow me to be effusive enough about your striking paintings. A short extract from Breyten Breytenbach’s epic poem (Human and Rousseau, 2009) to his close friend and the late Palestinian eminence grise and poet, Mahmoud Darwish, will have to do, together with an appropriate plea that I hope you will heed.
drapeer geen vlag oor my kis of my kus nie,
‘n vlag is om ‘n hemp van te knip
vir die hawelose
‘n vlag is die lap waarmee die nar
in die sirkus kinders mag leer lag oor kleur
en die klanke van verraad
ons vlag waai vry om die Nakba* te onthou
toe die olyfboom toegevou is in dooie vuur…
Ilan Pappe, an Israeli academic hounded out of Haifa University wrote: “I appeal to you today to be part of a historical movement and moment that may bring an end to more than a century of colonisation, occupation and dispossession of Palestinians. I appeal to you as an Israeli Jew, who for years wished, and looked, for other ways to bring an end to the evil perpetrated against the Palestinians in the occupied territories, inside Israel and in the refugee camps.”
*The Nakba (or catastrophe) refers to the expulsion of over 700 000 Palestinians through terrorising Palestinians in hundreds of villages and cities, including a series of massacres by those who went on to establish the state of Israel in 1948. These Palestinians and other Palestinians who were forced to leave later and their descendants today comprise over 6 million people-the biggest refugee population in the history of humanity. Although international law demands they return to their homeland, Israel refuses to abide by international law. The majority of these refugees live in squalid camps in neighbouring countries. Any Jewish person including most with no historical connection to Israel can automatically become citizens of Israel and receive generous financial and other benefits.
Nice article posted here. Helpful video link.. Thanks
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