A
Double Standard On Academic Freedom In the Middle East
By George Bisharat
19 September, 2007
Baltimore
Sun
Two
hundred thousand Palestinian children began school in the Gaza Strip
this month without a full complement of textbooks. Why? Because Israel,
which maintains a stranglehold over this small strip of land along the
Mediterranean even after withdrawing its settlers from there in 2005,
considers paper, ink and binding materials not to be "fundamental
humanitarian needs."
Israel, attempting to throttle
the democratically elected Hamas government, generally permits only
food, medicine and fuel to enter Gaza, and allows virtually no Palestinian
exports to leave. Lately, it held up delivery of materials needed for
printing textbooks. As a result, Gaza students began the year facing
a 30 percent shortage of texts.
No full-page advertisements
in major American newspapers have publicized Israel's violations of
Palestinian children's right to an education. No editors, syndicated
columnists or presidents of major universities in this country have
denounced this callous measure. Our politicians have demanded no remedial
action. Instead, they continue, verbally and materially, to support
Israel in its near-total blockade of 1.5 million Palestinians, kids
and all.
Israel's trampling of Palestinian
students' right to education - the key to a lifetime of opportunity
- has rarely evoked official protest from American leaders. The Israeli
army has closed Palestinian universities for years at a time. Israeli
military authorities have barred Palestinian occupational therapy students
from traveling from Gaza to the West Bank to obtain vital clinical training.
Hundreds of Israeli checkpoints
and roadblocks can turn a routine trip to a local school into a harrowing
ordeal. Israeli gunfire has even killed Palestinian schoolchildren sitting
in their classrooms. None of these offenses has merited so much as a
congressional resolution, let alone more serious efforts to curb Israeli
behavior, such as government-imposed sanctions.
In response to this policy
double standard - complete indulgence of Israel on the one hand, and
indifference to violations of Palestinian rights on the other hand -
a movement has emerged for a citizens' boycott of Israel. Churches,
unions and professional associations in the United States, Canada, Europe
and South Africa have urged a variety of nonviolent measures to compel
Israel's compliance with international law.
American Presbyterians have
studied divesting church funds from firms that profit from continuing
Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. Unison, the United Kingdom's
1.3 million-member union of public servants, voted in June to boycott
Israeli goods. In May, a British union of professors opened a yearlong
debate over a possible boycott of Israeli academic institutions.
The latter action provoked
particularly indignant protest by Israel's U.S. supporters as an offense
against "academic freedom." Yet many Israeli academic institutions
either benefit from or participate in Israeli government actions that
violate Palestinian rights.
Tel Aviv University sits
in part over land belonging to Sheikh Muwannis, a Palestinian village
whose residents were expelled by Jewish militias or fled in fear in
March 1948. These and other Palestinian refugees have been denied their
right to return to their homes or to receive compensation for their
seized properties.
Hebrew University in Jerusalem
uses more than 800 acres of land illegally expropriated from Palestinian
private owners in the West Bank after the 1967 war. Bar-Ilan University
has established a branch in an illegal Israeli settlement in the West
Bank.
The threatened boycott would
target Israeli institutions, not individuals. Thus, formal research
and other agreements with Israeli universities would be suspended. But
invitations to Israeli professors to join conferences or to publish
in foreign journals would continue.
Nonetheless, it is likely
that the boycott would impose limitations on freedom for some Israeli
academics. Is this fair?
Boycotts are always somewhat
blunt tools, and they inevitably impose costs on some who are undeserving
of them. That was true of the boycott of apartheid South Africa, which
applied to all academics - as well as athletes, businesspeople, artists
and others. At the time, the international community weighed the cost
to academic freedom against the advancement of justice and equal rights
for black South Africans, and the choice was clear.
Two hundred thousand Palestinian
schoolchildren are wondering how the world will respond faced with a
similar choice today.
George Bisharat,
a professor of law at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco,
writes frequently on the Middle East.
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