February 5, 2014--Boycott Israel?

When the American Studies Association late last year voted to exclude Israeli academic institutions from participating in events it sponsors, it was a blip on the academic landscape. After all, the ASA has only a few thousand members and, truth be told, who cares.

But when Secretary of State John Kerry made some relatively innocuous comments about a larger, economic boycott of Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nearly had a stroke.

Forget for the moment that Kerry was not advocating a boycott but rather referring to talk about it that he feels will grow louder if the American-sponsored peace talks between Palestinians and Israelis fail to produce even a fig leaf of results, the very fact that Netanyahu went, pardon the reference, ballistic should tell us something.

That "something" being that there is a growing movement among some Western people (Jews as well as non-Jews, which is significant) and corporations to boycott Israel if the government in Jerusalem continues to expand the occupation of the West Bank and refuses to get serious in negotiations with the Palestinians.

Netanyahu and his associates can try to ignore more local calls for a boycott (by New York Times op-ed columnist and Palestinian human rights activist, Omar Barghouti, for example) but they cannot so easily  shrug it off when the $200 billion Dutch Pension fund PGGM begins to divest itself of investments in Israel and Secretary Kerry says that unless there is serious progress on a deal the nascent boycott will be dwarfed by what will follow--in his words, a "boycott on steroids."

That's what friends are for--not to threaten (as Netanyahu sees it), but when necessary for your well-being, to tell you the unpleasant truth. And, in Kerry's case, to, by implication, imply such a boycott would be understandable. Kerry also knows how to play hardball.

So, he's not Netanyahu's best friend.

A boycott would be understandable because even reasonably objective observers are seeing comparisons between today's Israel and yesterday's South Africa.

How else to put it--with so many Palestinians forced to live behind militarized fences, allowed to enter and leave at the behest of Israeli occupiers of their territory, it feels to many to be too much like the old South African apartheid state.

And, recall, the worldwide imposition of economic sanctions ultimately brought an end to that hideous era. And, it appears, equivalent sanctions may be gaining the attention of even Iran's formally impervious "supreme leaders."

Perhaps, then, an expanding boycott of Israel may be the best and only thing that will enable the peace movement there to again assert itself.

December 18, 2013--Professing

Having been one at a number of institutions, from up-close observation, professors are not among my favorite professionals. For the most part, I prefer dentists.

Professors--tenured professors--have about the best job in the history of the world.

With what other kind of work can one make a very comfortable living with generous benefits, work two to three days a week, eight or at most nine months a year, and have frequent vacations? Almost as many as members of Congress. And then every few years have sabbaticals, which for a half to a full year offer full or half salary with no classroom or other university responsibilities. And, perhaps best of all, with tenure a professor can work until he or she drops and in no way be let go. Even for demonstrable incompetence or lack of research and publications.

And with all of this, professors are often among the world's most prolific whiners. About their university responsibilities (many would like to be paid, and paid more, for doing even less); about university politics (usually much to do about nothing or at most very little); about their colleagues and administrators; and about much that goes on in the world.

Criticizing and complaining they are very good at, but doing something about it is another matter.

So I was not surprised when a day or two ago, the American Studies Association, with about 5,000 professors as members, voted by a two-to-one margin to boycott Israeli academic institutions to protest Israel's treatment of Palestinians.

This means they will oppose academic exchange programs and Israeli professors will no longer be welcome as ASA members; invited to ASA-sponsored events; or, if the ASA has anything to do about it, be allowed to have sabbaticals in the U.S.

Next month, the much larger and more influential Modern Language Association will vote to ask the State Department to criticize Israel for allegedly barring American professors from going to Gaza or the West Bank when invited by Palestinian institutions.

The boycott is the first the ASA has ever instituted and what the MLA is calling for is equally unprecedented. They have not seen fit to take similar action in regard to Russian or Chinese academic institutions even though those governments curtail basic freedoms for almost all of their citizens. They did not call for the boycott of South African institutions during the Apartheid years. They are apparently OK with Iranian, Egyptian, Cuban, Venezuelan, Saudi Arabian, and Pakistani academic institutions though basic freedoms are severely restricted in these and, sadly, many other countries.

The fundamental case in favor of lifetime employment--tenure--is to protect academic freedom. To make professors impervious to arbitrary or ideological retribution when they express their contrarian views. So it is more than a little ironic that the ASA, for which one of its principals is the protection of freedom of thought and scholarly activity, would so blatantly, for ideological reasons, take such a censorious position.

The good news is that the major higher education organization in the United States, the American Association of University Professors opposes the boycott, saying that it makes little sense to focus on Israeli universities where criticism of government policy often originates.

Even Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas opposes the boycott. He said that it is inappropriate, as the ASA did, to compare Israel to Apartheid in South Africa. Further--

We are neighbors of Israel, we have agreements with israel, we are not asking anyone to boycott products of Israel.

But members of the ASA do not perceive any contradictions in their position. One member said that--

People who truly believe in academic freedom would realize protesting the blatant and systemic denial of academic freedom to Palestinians, which coupled with material deprivation of a staggering scale, far out ways concerns we in the West might have about our own rather privileged academic freedoms.

I am having trouble figuring out why we in the West who have the privilege of academic freedom should be immunized from the consequences of denying it to others.

I may have once been a professor, but I need help from other professors to help me understand and parse this tortured tangle of rationalization.