Palestinians Call for Boycott of Israeli Academia

[Englander]

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article3434.shtml
Victor Kattan, The Electronic Intifada, 15 December 2004

The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel has called upon their colleagues in the international community to "comprehensively and consistently boycott all Israeli academic and cultural institutions" as exemplified in the struggle to abolish apartheid in South Africa through diverse forms of boycott. The call was made at an international conference on "Resisting Israeli Apartheid Strategies and Principles" at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London on Sunday 5 December.

The campaign urges the international community to refrain from participating in any form of academic and cultural cooperation, collaboration or joint projects with Israeli institutions; to suspend all forms of funding and subsidies to these institutions; to promote divestment from Israel by academic institutions; and to condemn Israeli policies by pressing for resolutions to be adopted by academic, professional and cultural associations and organizations - as a contribution to the struggle to end Israel's occupation, colonization and system of apartheid.

Giving the welcoming remarks at the conference, the author, journalist and playwright Victoria Brittain said "many of you may not know how very, very sharp was the struggle for South Africa's freedom. Ten years after majority rule it is easy to forget that just a very few years before that we in the anti-apartheid movement were deeply absorbed in battles over perception, over media bias, over western government indifference and downright lying, which mirror exactly what the solidarity movement is doing for Palestine today."

Tom Paulin, Fellow in English at Hertford College, Oxford University, said in the keynote address that "a struggle against embedded prejudices and institutions which aim to equate people into tribes and enforce apartheid is an imaginative struggle, a struggle which does not demand that a work of art should be constrained to, and interpreted by, a single ideological struggle." He mentioned the work of the late Edward Said who in his book "The End of the Peace Process" wrote that only the force of unyielding principle, held on to from a position of moral strength, was capable of delegitimising apartheid all over the world.