Excluding Israelis: An Intellectual Anatomy of the Academic Boycott
With respect to the first argument, about the threat which a boycott poses to academic freedom, the immediate response from boycotters was to point out that academic freedom, though important, is not the only important consideration - sometimes factors take priority, such as the fight against oppression. Some pro-boycotters also argued in this context that Palestinians don't have academic freedom [3], so a boycott of Israel aiming to improve the situation of Palestinian academics and students would actually defend academic freedom rather than undermine it; and in any case, they claimed, Israeli universities misuse their academic freedom [4]. (No-one actually said that improvement of the conditions of Palestinian academics and students was the principal aim of the proposed boycott, and, indeed, its precise aims never became clear. In particular, the conditions which would count as success, and hence would lead to the boycott being lifted, were never fully spelled out by its supporters.)
"In response to this demand, the pro-boycotters put forward a remarkably wide range of considerations; however few, if any, of them survived the forensic attention which they received from the boycott's adversaries"
This defense of the boycott, in terms of the overriding importance of fighting oppression, effectively forged a tight connection between the concern about academic freedom and the concern about unjust selectivity. This was because it immediately raised the following question: if Israel's misdeeds are important enough to override the value of academic freedom, then why isn't the same true of Russia, China, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Syria, Iran, and so on (and on)? Why is Israel being singled out? Attempts to answer that question, and the pressing home of the question in the face of those attempts, became the principal locus of the debate. Very few anti-boycotters claimed that Israel is faultless; what they said was that it is not alone in this condition, and what they demanded of the pro-boycotters was that they specify exactly which feature of Israel is supposed to distinguish it from other faulty polities and justify singling it out for distinctively hostile treatment. In response to this demand, the pro-boycotters put forward a remarkably wide range of considerations; however few, if any, of them survived the forensic attention which they received from the boycott's adversaries.
Worse than all the others?
One of the commonest and most persistent justifications given for singling out Israel was the claim that Israel is an apartheid state. Since the original apartheid state, South Africa, was the subject of a successful academic boycott, there could be no legitimate objection to boycotting Israel. The anti-boycotters naturally responded to this claim by pointing out the many ways in which Israel is radically different from apartheid South Africa: the vibrant free press in Israel, in which the government can be and often is fiercely criticized; the large numbers of Arab students and staff at top Israeli universities; and most importantly, the fact that every Israeli citizen, Jew or Arab, has the vote. The occupation of the Palestinian territories, even if it is entirely wrong, simply isn't the same as apartheid - and if it were, then other occupying powers such as China, Russia, and Turkey would also have to be regarded as apartheid states.
Pro-boycotters commonly responded to these arguments by reverting to descriptions of Israeli wrongdoing and Palestinian suffering; here as elsewhere in the debate boycotters regularly failed to address the fact that the singling-out argument is a comparative one - why this country? - which can only be answered by a suitable comparison of this country with others. But the claim that Israel is an apartheid state continued to be made, in spite of its inaccuracy, throughout the campaign. And it's easy to see why: the rhetorical power of the analogy, its ability to associate Israel with appalling racism and also with ultimate defeat, was too great for boycotters to want to abandon it, even though other regimes are far more similar to apartheid South Africa, in terms both of racism and of the oppression of large numbers of people, than Israel is.
