Teaching in Transnational Israel: An Ethics of Difference

Shira Wolosky

Prolegomena

The slogan of the BDS movement is that Israel is an

apartheid state, an unjust state, indeed, an unjustified

state.

Salim Joubran is a justice of the Israeli Supreme

Court. Hossam Haick, a Professor at the Technion,

Israel's prestigious university of science and

technology, whose Ph.D. is from the Technion, where his

father also graduated, will teach the first ever massive

open online course, or MOOC, on nanotechnology in Arabic.

He states: “If the Middle East was like the Technion, we

would already have peace. In the pure academy, you feel

totally equal with every person. And you are appreciated

based on your excellence.” 1 Omar Barghouti, a leading

activist of BDS and of the Academic Boycott resolution

recently passed by the American Studies Association, has

his M.A. from Tel Aviv University.

Israel is not an apartheid state. BDS, in its

slogan of apartheid, represents itself as a movement for

human rights. In fact it is a political movement whose

goal is not the righting of human rights wrongs, or even

righting the human rights wrongs of Palestinians. If

that were the case it might make mention in its

resolutions of the fact that today, every day, thousands

of Palestinians are under attack and siege in Syria,

caught in the civil war where tens of thousands of

civilians are being displaced, wounded and killed.2 As

Norman Finkelstein, a vocal critic of Israel states, the

BDS movement is masking its intentions. “At least be

honest what you want – ‘we want to abolish Israel and

this is our strategy for doing it.’”3 Omar Barghouti has

openly declared that the two state solution "was never a

moral solution to start with." Of BDS he says: "The

current phase has all the emblematic properties of what

may be considered the final chapter of the Zionist

project." His express goal of a one-state solution is on

in which “by definition, Jews will be a minority.”34 As

Roger Cohen, a writer strongly critical of Israel,

concludes, what this means is the end of Israel

altogether. Of the BDS he writes:

Its stated aim is to end the occupation, secure “full equality” for Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel, and fight for the right of return of all Palestinian refugees. The first objective is essential to Israel’s future. The second is laudable. The third, combined with the second, equals the end of Israel as a Jewish state. This is the hidden agenda of B.D.S., its unacceptable subterfuge: beguile, disguise and suffocate.

The anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa contained no such ambiguity. As Diana Shaw Clark, anactivist on behalf of a two-state solution, wrote tome in an email, “People affiliated with divestment in South Africa had no agenda other than the liberation and enfranchisement of an oppressed majority.”

This is not the case in Israel, where the triple objective of B.D.S. would, in Clark’s words, “doom Israel as a national home for the Jews.” Mellifluoustalk of democracy and rights and justice masks the B.D.S. objective that is nothing other than the end of the Jewish state for which the United Nations gave an unambiguous mandate in 1947. 5

The call for Israel to become a democratic state for all

its citizens is tautological. Israel is today a

democratic state for all its citizens. This is not to

claim complete social justice across all sectors, or to

disclaim the urgent need for greater opportunity, access,

and investment across all sectors. In terms of

education, Arabic is an official language of Israel;

Arabs run their own educational system teaching their own

cultures in their own language. This system does not

receive equal investment. In terms of higher education,

the access of Arab students is not equal. Yet a fifth of

Israel's medical students are Arab, as are a third of the

students at the University of Haifa. In Tel Aviv, 30% of

Israeli universities' medical school students are Arab. However,

overall only 9 % of university students are Arab. 6

Discrimination, lack of equal opportunity, lack of

equal investment should and must be addressed within

Israeli democratic society. Nonetheless, Israeli

democracy is committed to minority rights, in ways that

are outstanding in the Middle East. This is one place in

which the extraordinary inconsistencies of an academic

boycott in particular emerge. As many have recognized,

an academic boycott is self-contradictory and self-

defeating. How can a boycott for freedom of speech

itself boycott freedom of speech?7 Boycotts in fact

institute the very transgression they are protesting –

restriction of freedom and rights of expression.8

As I will go on to discuss in describing my own,

personal experience teaching in Israel, targeting Israeli

universities is especially damaging, self-contradictory

and ironic. The university is a protected place for free

exploration and expression of ideas, a true public sphere

(which Israel provides and protects throughout its extant

– unlike, one must add, the Palestinian and other Arab

countries surrounding it, where Christians are under

assault, rival members of militias silence and attack

each other, women are restricted, gays are outcasts.

Saudi Arabia restricts entire areas to Muslims only. On

March 25, 2014, they barred an American- Jewish

journalist from accompanying President Obama on a visit

there). If the claim is that universities supported by

governments whose policies are objectionable should be

boycotted, then the boycotters of Israel should be

boycotting themselves. American universities, whose

salaries and other support they accept, are funded by a

government whose policies around the world such as

supporting Israel they protest and reject.9 But

universities themselves, and in Israel very vehemently,

provide scenes of open argument from many varying

viewpoints, among faculty and students.

Inside Israel, universities constitutes a core scene

in which Arab and other students are able to encounter

each other in an arena of free discourse exchange,

critical thinking, access to multiple viewpoints.

Indeed, Israeli universities provide a rare place and

time in which students from different backgrounds are

together in a common endeavor, that of learning and

earning a degree. It offers an opportunity for

intersection that should be commended and supported, not

resolved against. Any interruption or condemnation of

such a scene closes and devalues just the ethics that are

the supposed aims of the boycott in the form of

interchange, multiplicity of viewpoints, recognition and

respect.

Thus far, inside Israel. What about the West Bank?

The West Bank offers a tragic and recalcitrant

battlefield of conflicting narratives. In my mind there

is no question that Israel must withdraw from the West

Bank, since we do not want to govern people who do not

want to be governed by us. A majority of Israelis agree

with this and feel this way, although certainly some

resist this recognition. This is a serious problem

internal to Israel – how to pursue a politics that

accomplishes withdrawal. As of now, Israel is caught in

the terrible vise of attempting to respect democratic

norms and human rights in the face of ongoing assaults on

its security.10 Rockets from Gaza, attacks on civilians,

all with the express intent of causing harm and

destruction to ordinary people, is something Israelis

(Arab and Jew) daily face. Nonetheless, I and most other

Israelis see the only path for ourselves in order to

uphold our own democratic and moral values is withdrawal.

Boycott supporters, in their failure to acknowledge

the incredible complexity of confict as the context for

Israeli actions; or the continuing attacks on Israel and

the denial of its fundamental legitimacy; practice

distortion to the point of fabrication. In academic

terms, the West bank also lists an impressive number of

institutions of higher education: Arab American

University Al-Quds Open University Al-Quds

University , An-Najah National University Bethlehem Bible

College Bethlehem University, Birzeit University Edward

Said National Conservatory of Music Hebron University

Ibrahimieh College Khodori Institute, Tulkarm, Palestine

Polytechnic University Al Ahlia University of Palestine.11

Internal conflict, reluctance to cede territory for

both security and ideological reasons, distrust of the

partner all contribute to the failure to achieve

withdrawal from the West Bank on the part of the

Israelis. But the looming obstacle above all others is

the refusal of recognition of Israel on the part of

(some) Palestinians. As Omar Barghouti has said

expressly, and what remains the underlying motive of the

boycott of Israel among those in its vanguard, is that

Israel itself has no legitimacy. The boycott, and

Palestinian politics itself, wants to claim a right to

self-determination that it denies to Israel as a Jewish

State. To be a state with a cultural identity is not

anti-democratic – unless Norway and Denmark, The

Netherlands and France, Germany and Britain are not

democracies. As Michael Walzer has repeatedly argued,

one project of Norway is to reproduce Norway: its

language, culture, way of life. Certainly Arab countries

and Palestinians themselves are committed to the

continuity and heritage of Islam, as of Arab social forms

and language. They do not by any means deny this right

to be who they are to themselves. What then makes them

deny it to Israel? The claim to accept Israel as one-

state so as to create a true democracy is basely

prevaricating. Aside from the fact that there is as of

today no Arab precedent or example of a democracy that

grants equal rights to minorities (Turkey struggles with

its Kurds, has a violent history with its Armenians, and

is now in a state of internal struggle over its

democratic norms; Lebanon, which long was offered as the

model for peaceful and respectful co-existence then broke

up into a fifteen year civil war and today sees its Shia

and Sunni populations on the edge of violence). Most

importantly, democracy does not necessitate the

suppression or denial of cultural identity. Even the

United States, which is outstanding as a nation undefined

by ethnicity, has a decided cultural identity of shared

history, values, political forms and norms.12 The denial

to Israel of its right to self-determination while

claiming such a right for the Palestinians gravely

contributes to the conflict between them rather than

towards its solution. A narrative that denies the

legitimacy of Jews to self-determination is one that

cannot be reconciled to a two-state solution, to mutual

respect of difference which alone, I believe, can be the

basis and foundation of peaceful co-existence and

hopefully positive recognition.

I. Transnational Israel

Among those who initiate, those who support, and those

who are concerned about the issues raised by the academic

boycott initiatives against Israel, few, I suspect, have

a very vivid picture of what academic life in Israel is

like. Since I am the one being boycotted, I would like

to share my experience there.

About one third of the students in the classes I

teach at the Hebrew University are Arab, mainly women:

Christian and Muslim and secular, studying with other

Israelis who are Russian, American, British, French,

Ethiopian, and/or whose parents arrived from European and

Arab countries at various times and in various ways,

including expulsion or flight. My first point, then, is

that Israel is a transnational state.

By transnational I do not mean postnational, a term

with which it is often associated but which I think

points in a different direction. Transnationalism, I

would argue, allows continued recognition of national

polity, which in fact has been the only political format

for democracy to date. It also recognizes, however, that

especially today, many individuals claim more than one

national affiliation. This situation is best described

as multiple memberships. Each person may affiliate with,

identify with, participate in and belong to more than one

community, in varying ways and degrees, and with varying

and at times shifting priorities. Among these

memberships there can be – inevitably are – tensions and

conflicts. To be Arab/Israeli, Jewish/woman, Arab/woman,

traditional/modern is no easy feat. What is called

identity is, I propose, much better conceived in terms of

membership. Identity as a term implies something static,

self-same, unified, fixed, essentialist (idem: Latin for

same). Membership instead emphasizes active affiliation

and participation in a culture or group with which you

identify, in ways that are not static but shifting,

slackening and strengthening, altering in in balance and

tension and confirmation with each other. This is

especially the case in today's globalized world.

Nonetheless, as membership more is involved than identity

conceived as self-description, more than an open

performative selfhood such as Judith Butler theorizes.

Membership is not only self-referring in the way the

term 'identity,' whether open or closed, implies, as if

one were self-identical. Membership acknowledges how

other people than yourself partly shape who a self, that

selves emerge out of interactions with others both as a

past and as a future. Free self-performance is an

abstraction not unlike the liberal self it critiques. It

is moreover an abstraction that is ethically bereft. It

admits no obligations to others, no continuity of ties,

no past or future for memory or hope in a shared world

where each person, ideally as individual choice,

nonetheless hopes to contribute to ongoing projects that

create a world for that self and also for others.

To speak of national polity today is not to speak of

unitary ethnicity, which few nations have ever been or

had anyway. Claiming such a unitary existence would

moreover betray the difference that ethnicity both

represents and requires, as I shall argue below. Such a

unitary ethnicity is certainly not, and has never been

the case in Israel. Israel is an immigrant nation, whose

citizens come from many places, cultures, and languages.

It is a multiethnic and pluralist society (much much

more, alas, than are the Arab societies which surround

it). Besides Jews, there are Druze and Bahai and Arab

Christians and Arab Muslims. Each has equal formal,

legal rights, if not fully social and economic equality

(although all enjoy universal health coverage, something

that can't be said for Americans). Each has full

cultural rights, to speak and study and dress and marry

and celebrate and mourn in its own cultural way (much

much more than, for example, France). But the Jews are

themselves an intense variety of backgrounds, kinds,

customs, beliefs. To be Jewish is almost by definition

to be transnational. It is to belong to and identify

with a variety of communities, in multiple affiliations

and memberships.

In my view, transnationalism is a far better way of

positing Jewish life today. It is more apt than diaspora

or exile. Transnationalism acknowledges the age old fact

that Jews were historically members of their local

communities, but with relationships to other Jewish

communities in the world and also to Israel, as a

religious center of reference and today as the Jewish

national polity. These relations can be considered

lateral rather than hierarchical. The Jewish national

polity has however the distinctive claim of allowing Jews

for the first time in two millennia to have be self-

governing as Jews, with their culture the public

(although not exclusive) culture, speaking a language,

observing a calendar, celebrating holidays according to

Jewish cultural forms. This is no more than Norwegians

do, or French, or Germans in their democratic polities in

which a specific culture is the public one. As to what

makes Jewish culture Jewish, the answer is entirely

immanent and pragmatic: the historical continuity of a

set of texts and practices and languages. Jews are those

who identify with, belong to, and wish to contribute to

the continued existence of just those texts, practices

and languages as an ongoing historical project. To

claim that a national polity provides a unique, and given

history, essential mode for doing this is to claim for

Israel no more than would be claimed for Poland, Latvia,

or Palestinians.

II. The Classroom as Public Sphere

Transnational Israel, made up of its wide range of

persons each with his and her own multiple affiliations,

which orient them both towards themselves as individuals

and to others with whom they share (and also do not

share) various forms of membership – gender, religion,

heritage, locality, ethnicity: these are the students

whom I meet, and who meet each other, in my classes.

These students do, and should, keep each their own

commitments, their memberships and participation in the

different cultures that they are part of, a self-

formation through affiliation perhaps especially

pronounced among the Arab women I teach. What can offset

the closure that affiliation also can bring is exactly

multiplicity itself. Through multiple memberships

individuals can resist being determined and controlled by

any one identification or group. Diverse memberships can

provide critical stances on each others. Interchange,

reciprocity, argument, conflict, subversion,

confirmation, are among the ways in which multiple

memberships can bear on each other. The result can be

confusion, doubt, excruciating conflict, and also renewed

commitment, ethical sensitivity, experienced by

strengthened, enlarged, complex selves who refer beyond

their own private existence into public concerns that

shape their world. Transformation of any of their

membership groups may also be taken on.

My own teaching has centered mainly in courses on

American culture; on feminist theory; and also on

religion and theory. Each of these topics opens to

cultural adventure, as the diverse students of my classes

encounter each other. In my view, the Israeli university

should be specifically lauded and supported as a central

space in which different sectors who otherwise have few

social spaces for doing so can meet each other, all

pursuing a common project of education in however

different fields and ways, and before or outside the

structure of lives separated by work, family, locality.

Certainly that is how I view my own classroom: as a

civic scene, beyond whatever material is under

discussion. I see student engagement in the class as

civic training to democratic participation and cultural

activism. Critical analysis of texts, however

canonical; considered debate of positions, however

apparently authoritative; perhaps above all, the

ability, the desire to address each other in ways that

respect difference but also explore terms and seek

accommodation: these are the educational opportunities

I see the classroom to offer. Class discussions become

intent scenes of exchange and debate, where persons from

and within very distinct contexts are invited and goaded

to address and attend each other.

Especially my class on Feminist Theory is an

extraordinary experience. Together my students and myself

discover a language that names and places our own lives,

revealing issues and situations we did not even know were

there. It is especially challenging for women to learn

to use their voices, to project their voices into the

public sphere, to participate in discussion and debate.

Critical thinking and bringing it to expression runs

counter to their social roles, often against religious

norms, although not – as we also explore – necessarily

dictated by religious texts themselves as examined

through different modes of interpretation and different

(women) interpreters. Such questions of speaking and

being heard, of resisting silencing both external and

internal are core concerns throughout feminist theory.13

In the classroom there are women with hair covering and

without hair covering, Muslim and Jewish, as well as

Christians and many other sorts of transnational

Israelis, traditional to many varying degrees. My goal

is to create the classroom as itself a public sphere.

It is the chance for women to develop analytical and

critical skills for interpreting texts, however sacred or

standard, for examining and becoming conscious of their

own narratives, and that there are different ones. The

class is driven by the attempt to open speaking space to

those unfamiliar to it. I try to slow discussion down,

to open time for each person to speak despite hesitation.

I try to ask questions that will invite other questions.

I try to create an atmosphere in which students will

speak to each other.

Topics in my course of feminism include body image

and comportment as forms of social coercion; the

political theories of liberalism and communitarianism,

weighing how selves conceived through private self-

determination compare with selves conceived as embedded

in culture. Women’s history provides a powerful entry

into new recognitions, revealing ways in which one's own

experience is not one's own only, not limited to the

specific contexts which each woman herself inhabits. Not

only legal, economic, and social debilities are examined,

but crucially the very lack of access to public discourse

denying women the possibility of shaping the laws under

which they live and its social, economic modes. Women's

invisible work in the home, the continued inequalities of

work opportunities and conditions, but also of

commitments to family and community are discussed, and

how to balance them. Not least, histories of religious

institution in America, of access to sacred texts, of

debates about how these are interpreted and perhaps most

urgently by whom – with women's emergence as interpreters

of their own religious traditions and claim to religious

authority – has special resonance in this Middle Eastern

classroom.

Some texts open extraordinary scenes of cultural

encounter and confrontation. The portrait of a young

girl in Henry James's Daisy Miller, who, defiant of social

convention, dies from the malaria she contracts when she

visits the Roman Forum unchaperoned at night with an

Italian man, splits the class among those who sympathize

with her independence and those who see in her end a fit

warning against wildness. Most women in the class,

however, join together riveted on the women's points of

view we uncover, the social, political, historical and

psychological attempts to bring the hidden, which is to

say ignored and erased lives of women into the light of

record and recognition. Yet most women in my class,

Jewish and Arab Christian and Moslem, identify themselves

closely with the tradition(s) and communities they see

themselves to be part of. Theirs is not a performative

individualism, answerable only to themselves. There is no

'identity' apart from their memberships, to which on the

whole they remain deeply attached. To address them and

to listen to them is to respect these community

memberships, while also developing critical perspectives

on them, and discovering the terms and norms of other

communities in which other students are members in ways

that are both critical and respectful. This means

exploring the resources within the cultures themselves

for recognizing and respecting other cultures, for

upholding one’s own particularity while also upholding

the Other’s.

This is the university world which is now under

attack and boycott. From a feminist stance I wonder: in

these discussions of human rights, are women human? The

many places in which women are severely constrained does

not occasion calls for boycotts and are not condemned by

resolutions. Instead it is the academy in Israel which

is denounced, where women have most important opportunity

to emerge into voice and participation.

III. An Ethics of Difference

What approach might help move towards reconciliation

between Israelis and Palestinians? Boycotts, and indeed

most negotiations, derive in and reflect conflicting

narratives, each claiming its own right to history, to

justice, to self-determination. But approached as a

conflict of rights, what often results is denial of one's

rights by the other: denial of the history, justice, and

self-determination of the other. The two remain

incompatible. Recent moral theories, however,

particularly feminist ones, propose a different approach,

that of responsibility rather than of rights.14 This is

also the moral theory of Emmanuel Levinas, who is perhaps

more than any other philosopher the source of discourses

of the Other that have become so pivotal and prominent in

ethical-political discussions. But far from betraying

his own ethic of the Other in his support of Israel as is

often argued, Levinas offers a path through conflicting

rights towards responsibility and respect of difference,

including the difference of a Jewish-cultural

(democratic) Israel in the Middle East.15

Levinasian philosophy opens with a notion not of

sameness, which paradoxically generates conflict as

claims to identical rights compete with each other; but

rather with difference, both as a fact and as a norm.

Difference, particularity, especially in the form of

nationality, has become the term of suspicion, as the

source of conflict in the world. There are many

histories to this discourse against nationality. What is

very odd, is how the historically eternal Other of

Western discourse, the Jew, has now become the enemy of

an Otherness now claimed for post-colonial peoples. The

granting of peoplehood to post-colonials is upheld due to

their prior suffering and domination, but denied to Jews

seeking self-determination in Israel. Yet this in fact

has reaffirmed Jewish Otherness: the Jew has simply

become the Other of the Other. Israel is the Other of

the nations, against whom all the discomfort, suspicion,

guilt and blame directed towards national particularity

is now focused and finds expression.

What is at fault and dangerous in national formation

is not its recognition of the value of difference and

particularity, but their denial. Respect for difference

would create respect for other national formations.

Asserting one's own rights and rightness against those of

others is a denial of difference, not its affirmation.

Asserting one's domination over others is a form of

unitary claim – claim to one's own formation as the only

or most valid one, justified in overwhelming and

determining those different from or outside one's own.

The refusal to leave or make room for others, inside

one's own polity or against the polity of others, is not

an assertion of difference but only of one's own

sameness.

Levinasian ethics recognizes difference and

otherness as a good. Not only does it in fact constitute

the world we live in, but it is good that it does so.

Reversing millennia of philosophical preference for unity

as what bestows order, truth and meaning on the world,

but which in practice has led to efforts of domination of

one apparently superior form over others; Levinas

declares the good of multiplicity.

Multiplicity is first premise. It is both the ultimate

and the desirable condition of the world we inhabit,

despite centuries of lament at the absence of unity,

concord, and consensus; against the fragility, the

disagreement multiplicity entails. Yet, as Madison wrote

in Federalist 10, the remedies for faction – destroying

liberty or imposing sameness – are worse than the

disease.16 Upholding difference does not mean justifying

any mode of politics that claims its own difference to

permit the suppression of the difference of others, in

their midst or outside it. Upholding difference instead

calls for arrangements that respect and sustain

difference, resisting any claim to its suppression. It

involves what might be called a mode of positive negative

liberty: enacting respect for the difference of others as

long as that difference respects difference.

Recognizing the legitimacy, not to mention rich

wealth, of difference is an entirely different premise

for negotiation that that of competing demands each of

which claim is own exclusive right at the expense of the

other. In the Israel/Palestine conflict, respecting

difference would require each side to acknowledge, if not

the correctness of the narrative of the other, at least

the validity that the other has a narrative. The

Palestinians would accept the legitimacy of the Jewish

narrative of historic tie to the land and return to it,

rather than rejecting the notion of the Jews as a people

(rather than only a religion); they would admit each to

have attachment to the land the other also claims; they

would admit the validity and indeed value of cultural and

religious difference in a region until now considered

purely and rightly Moslem. The Israelis must accept (as

a majority, polls show, in fact have done) the legitimacy

of a Palestinian attachment to the same land, the

validity of a national state in which they can determine

their own lives; also of the Palestinian narrative that

for them the arrival of the Jews has been a catastrophe,

that they have suffered displacement on many levels, and

that their own deep narrative of who they are in history

and culture has been offended. Mutual recognition and

respect for difference would still involve difficult

negotiations about how to make room for the others

version of history and claims from it even when it

impinges on and challenges one's own. Only then is co-

existence, even positive responsibility, in a shared

world of differences imaginable. Only then can different

narratives reside together. Each would have to cede

something to the other, in respect of the other's

existence as other, as different; and in responsibility

to the lives and welfare of each as living together as

others in a world irreducibly multiple.

1 Tom Friedman NYT Fb 18 20142 With Israel providing medical care to Syrian wounded.3 http://vimeo.com/36854424#sthash.Wy4XBGnC.dpuf4 Barghouti December 2003 http://electronicintifada.net/content/relative-humanity-fundamental-obstacle-one-state-solution-historic-palestine-12/4939. Other statements by BDS activists include: As’ad Abu Khalil: “Justice and freedom for the Palestinians are incompatible with the existence of the State of Israel.”Ahmed Moor: “OK, fine. So BDS does mean the end of the Jewish state….I view the BDS movement as a long-term project with radically transformative potential….In other words, BDS is not another step on the way to the final showdown; BDS is The Final Showdown.” http://mondoweiss.net/2010/04/bds-is-a-long-term-project-with-radically-transformative-potential.html April 22 2010.5 Roger Cohen (NYT Feb 10 2014). Cf Leon Wieseltier, "I read that “Israeli academic institutions are part of the ideological and institutional scaffolding of the Zionist settler-colonial project.” That is not anti-occupation, it is anti-Zionist; it is the foul diction of delegitimation, the old vocabulary of anti-Israel propaganda. (It also ignores the fact that Israeli universities are where criticism of the occupation flourishes.). New Republic Dec 17 2013.6 In 2007/08 of the applicants who were accepted and studying, 83.3% were Jews, and 13.4% were Arabs. Of all applicants for second-degree studies at universities, of those who who were accepted and studying,93.2% were Jews and 4.9% were Arabs; and of the applicants who were rejected, 82.8% were Jews, and 15% were Arabs. The proportion of Arabs among all students at colleges of education was 28.5%, comparedwith 11.8% of the students in universities, 5.9% at the Open University, and 5.7% at academic colleges. Of the Arab first-degree recipients, 42.8% were enrolled in colleges of education, and 40.3% were enrolled in universities. The share of Arabs out of all first-degree recipients was 31.8% in colleges of education, compared with 8.7% in universities, 4.7% in academic colleges, and 3.7% in the OpenUniversity.7 The statement on the American Studies website that "We are now witnessing accelerating efforts to curtail speech, to exercise censorship, and to carry out retaliatory action against individuals on the basis of their political views or associations, " by "ScholarsCondemn[ing] Censorship and Intimidation of Israel Critics" calls forthe writers, as Leon Wieseltier puts it, to pick up their Orwell (New

Republic Dec 17 2013). 8 See for example Stanley Fish "Academic Freedom Against Itself" NY Times October 28, 2013 and November 11, 2013. Cf Richard Slotkin, letter against the ASA boycott, who declares himself "strongly opposed to the Israeli government’s policies in the Occupied Territories, and (in other forums) support a call for “disinvestment”by universities as a way of directly pressuring the Israeli government. But this call for boycott is wrong in principle, politically impotent, intellectually dishonest, and morally obtuse. The boycott is, first and foremost, a violation of the principles of academic freedom, free association and open inquiry that are the essence of scholarly life. . . The ASA cannot credibly accuse Israeli universities of systematically violating the canons of academic freedom. Israeli universities are one of the primary loci ofopposition to government policies, and of joint projects in aid of Palestinian scholars, students and educational institutions. . . Finally, the boycott is morally obtuse. Asked why Israel is singled out, when so many other states are worse violators of human rights and UN resolutions, ASA President Curtis Marez answered “one has to start somewhere.” So Israel - not Bashar Assad’s Syria, or Khamenei’sIran; not the People’s Republic of China which commits cultural genocide in Tibet; or Cuba, which remains a police state and persecutes dissidents and homosexuals; not even North Korea, most people’s notion of hell on earth. The choice seems either arbitrary, or a reflection of ideological bias.http://www.theasa.net/from_the_editors/item/asa_members_vote_to_endorse_academic_boycott/9 The claim, as for example in an Open Letter in Defense of Academic Freedom in Palestine/Israel and the United States posted on the ASA official website (which reads like a BDS site), that the ASA "resolution did not call for the boycotting of individual scholars ortermination of collaborations between Israeli and U.S. scholars and students. Nor did it call for the cessation of dialogue with these scholars; in fact the ASA is inviting Palestinian and Israeli scholars to its conference in November. What the resolution calls foris the boycott of Israeli academic institutions because they have been directly or indirectly complicit in the systematic maintenance of the illegal occupation of Palestinian territory.". This is disingenuous. Most Israeli scholars travel to conferences on fundingfrom their universities. To boycott university funded projects is toboycott them. And to hold academic institutions directly (or

indirectly for that matter) complicit in government policies is to breach every protection of or respect for academic autonomy. 10 Here may be the place to mention that many specific details of bothfact and interpretation can be challenged re boycott claims. The MLAresolution now pending, for example, condemns the "denials of entry to the West Bank by U.S. academics who have been invited to teach, confer, or do research at Palestinian universities." But according toa report issued by MLA members opposing this resolution, in 2012, only 142 Americans were denied entry to Israel and the disputed territories out of 626,000 who wanted to enter, a refusal rate of about 0.023 percent. The U.S. restricts entry to its own borders at amuch higher rate—5.4 percent in 2012 for Israeli applications for “B”visas, as reported by both the Israeli embassy in the U.S. and the U.S. State Department. 25 Cubans were just denied visas to the U.S. One needs to add that no Israeli academics are permitted to travel freely to Arab Countries; that these countries are closed to people with Israeli entry stamps on their passports.11 Wikipedia12 Charles Taylor; Michael Walzer.13 Shira Wolosky, Feminist Theory across Disciplines: Feminist Community and American Women's Poetry (NY: Routledge, 2013).14 Carole Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984) and the many writings that have built upon it.15 Judith Butler, Parting Ways (NY: Columbia University Press, 2012).16 "As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed."