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Academic & Cultural Boycott Reader

About the Campaign http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=868

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Palestinian Call for Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=869

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Palestinian Filmmakers, Artists and Cultural Workers Call for a Cultural Boycott of Israel http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=315

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A Call from Palestine: Palestinian Students’ Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel (PSCABI) http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=1021

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John Berger and 93 other authors, film-makers, musicians and performers call for a cultural boycott of Israel http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=415

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PACBI Guidelines for the International Academic Boycott of Israel http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=1108

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PACBI Guidelines for the International Cultural Boycott of Israel http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=1047

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Implementing the Academic Boycott: Individuals vs. Institutions http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=1125

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Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) - Frequently Asked Questions http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=867

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Academic Boycott and the Israeli Left http://www.zcommunications.org/academic-boycott-and-the-israeli-left-by-omar-barghouti

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Enough. It's time for a boycott http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/10/naomi-klein-boycott-israel

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The Academic Boycott of Israel–Objections and Defense http://www.logosjournal.com/issue_6.3/davidson.htm

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ABOUT THE CAMPAIGN

"The end of apartheid stands as one of the crowning accomplishments of the past century, but we would not have succeeded without the help of international pressure-- in particular the divestment movement of the 1980s. Over the past six months, a similar movement has taken shape, this time aiming at an end to the Israeli occupation". Desmond Tutu

The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel was launched in Ramallah in April 2004 by a group of Palestinian academics and intellectuals to join the growing international boycott movement. The Campaign built on the Palestinian call for a comprehensive economic, cultural and academic boycott of Israel issued in A ugust 2002 and a statement made by Palestinian academics and intellectuals in the occupied territories and in the Diaspora calling for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions in October 2003.

In July 2004, the Campaign issued a statement of principles, addressed to our colleagues in the international community urging them to comprehensively and consistently boycott all Israeli academic and cultural institutions until Israel withdraws from all the lands occupied in 1967, including East Jerusalem; removes all its colonies in those lands; agrees to United Nations resolutions relevant to the restitution of Palestinian refugees rights; and dismantles its system of apartheid. This statement was met with widespread support, and has to date been endorsed by nearly sixty Palestinian academic, cultural and other civil society federations, unions, and organizations, including the Federation of Unions of Palestinian Universities‘ Professors and Employees and the Palestinian NGO

Network in the West Bank. The campaign has also established an advisory committee comprised of well-known public figures and intellectuals.

The Palestinian Campaign is inspired by the historic role played by people of conscience in the international community of scholars and intellectuals who have shouldered the moral responsibility to fight injustice, as exemplified in their struggle to abolish apartheid in South Africa through diverse forms of boycott.

During the past two years various calls for divestment, sanctions and economic boycott of Israeli products as well as a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions have been issued by groups and individuals in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere. These calls recognize that Israeli academic institutions (mostly state controlled) and the vast majority of Israeli intellectuals and academics have either contributed directly to the Israeli occupation or at the very least have been complicit through their silence. In April 2002 British academics issued a call for a moratorium on European research and academic collaboration with Israeli institutions. In France, an appeal to the European Union not to renew its 1995 Association Agreement with Israel was issued by the University

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of Paris-VI (Pierre-et-Marie-Curie) in December 2002 and was endorsed by several other French universities. Similar calls were published in Italy and Australia, while in the United States, student and faculty groups at several universities including New York University, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Princeton launched divestment from Israel campaigns. Most recently the Church of Sweden has called for a boycott of goods produced by Israeli colonies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the Presbyterian Church in the United States has decided to divest from Israel.

Boycotting Israeli academic and cultural institutions is an urgently needed form of pressure against Israel that can bring about its compliance with international law and the requirements for a just peace.

Posted on 21-12-2008 at: http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=868

Advisory Board

Abdel Jawad Saleh

George Giacaman

Ibrahim Dakkak

Jaqueline Sfeir

Jamil Hilal Samia Khoury

Founding Committee

Bashir Abdel Razek

In‘am Obeidi

Islah Jad

Lisa Taraki

Omar Barghouti

Riham Barghouti

Rowan Al-Faqih

Zuhair Sabbagh

Steering Committee

Carmela Armanious

Gabi Baramki

Omar Barghouti

Riham Barghouti

Samia Botmeh

Haidar Eid

Rania Elias

Islah Jad

Linda Tabar

Lisa Taraki

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Palestinian Call for Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel

Whereas Israel‘s colonial oppression of the Palestinian people, which is based on Zionist ideology, comprises the following:

Denial of its responsibility for the Nakba -- in particular the waves of ethnic cleansing and dispossession that created the Palestinian refugee problem -- and therefore refusal to accept the inalienable rights of the refugees and displaced stipulated in and protected by international law;

Military occupation and colonization of the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza since 1967, in violation of international law and UN resolutions;

The entrenched system of racial discrimination and segregation against the Palestinian citizens of Israel, which resembles the defunct apartheid system in South Africa;

Since Israeli academic institutions (mostly state controlled) and the vast majority of Israeli intellectuals and academics have either contributed directly to maintaining, defending or otherwise justifying the above forms of oppression, or have been complicit in them through their silence, Given that all forms of international intervention have until now failed to force Israel to comply with international law or to end its repression of the

Palestinians, which has manifested itself in many forms, including siege, indiscriminate killing, wanton destruction and the racist colonial wall, In view of the fact that people of conscience in the international community of scholars and intellectuals have historically shouldered the moral responsibility to fight injustice, as exemplified in their struggle to abolish apartheid in South Africa through diverse forms of boycott, Recognizing that the growing international boycott movement against Israel has expressed the need for a Palestinian frame of reference outlining guiding principles, In the spirit of international solidarity, moral consistency and resistance to injustice and oppression, We, Palestinian academics and intellectuals, call upon our colleagues in the international community to comprehensively and consistently boycott all Israeli academic and cultural institutions as a contribution to the struggle to end Israel‘s occupation, colonization and system of apartheid, by applying the following:

1. Refrain from participation in any form of academic and cultural cooperation, collaboration or joint projects with Israeli institutions;

2. Advocate a comprehensive boycott of Israeli institutions at the national and international levels, including suspension of all forms of funding and subsidies to these institutions;

3. Promote divestment and disinvestment from Israel by international academic institutions;

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4. Work toward the condemnation of Israeli policies by pressing for resolutions to be adopted by academic, professional and cultural associations and organizations;

5. Support Palestinian academic and cultural institutions directly without requiring them to partner with Israeli counterparts as an explicit or implicit condition for such support.

Endorsed by:

Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees; Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions; Palestinian NGO Network, West Bank; Teachers‘ Federation; Palestinian Writers‘ Federation; Palestinian League of Artists; Palestinian Journalists‘ Federation; General Union of Palestinian Women; Palestinian Lawyers‘ Association; and tens of other Palestinian federations, associations, and civil society organizations.

PACBI, P.O. Box 1701, Ramallah, Palestine; [email protected]; http://www.PACBI.org

Download statement (PDF)

Posted on 21-12-2008

Palestinian Filmmakers, Artists and Cultural Workers Call for a Cultural Boycott of Israel

Dear Filmmakers & Artists, During the past few weeks we have borne witness to the escalation of Israeli aggression into open war on both Palestine and Lebanon.

With Israel’s invasion of Gaza on June 27th, 2006, ministries and educational institutions have been destroyed, as has the plant that supplies nearly 50 percent of Gaza's electricity. Bridges, roads, dozens of homes, and hundreds of dunams of agricultural land have also been destroyed. Sixty-four elected Palestinian legislators, cabinet ministers and officials have been detained without charge. On July 12th, Israel brought its campaign of collective punishment and military violence to Lebanon, with "Operation Just Reward". A complete assault, via land, sea, and air, of the Lebanese population and infrastructure has led to total destruction. In just 3 weeks, almost 1 million Lebanese civilians have been displaced and the death toll has reached 900 Lebanese and 160 Palestinians, with a UN count saying one-third of the dead are children. Additionally, in violation of

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international law, Israel continues to occupy Gaza, the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), and Syria’s Golan Heights. In violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, Israel continues to hold 9,600 Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli jails and detention centers without due process, among them 130 Palestinian women and 388 children, many of them taken from their homes in the middle of the night. We, the undersigned Palestinian filmmakers and artists, appeal to all artists and filmmakers of good conscience around the world to cancel all exhibitions and other cultural events that are scheduled to occur in Israel, to mobilize immediately and not allow the continuation of the Israeli offensive to breed complacency. Like the boycott of South African art institutions during apartheid, cultural workers must speak out against the current Israeli war crimes and atrocities. We call upon the International community to join us in the boycott of Israeli film festivals, Israeli public venues, and Israeli institutions supported by the government, and to end all cooperation with these cultural and artistic institutions that to date have refused to take a stand against the Occupation, the root cause for this colonial conflict. We call upon you to take a stand in order to appeal to the Israeli people to give up their silence, to abandon their apathy, and to face up to their responsibility in the destruction and killing their elected government is wreaking. To the Lebanese and Palestinians terrorized by this Army's planes, bombs and missiles, this silence, apathy and lack of action from Israelis, are regarded as complicit in the ongoing

war crimes, as for those Israeli artists, academics and intellectuals who continue to serve in the Israeli army they are directly implicated in these crimes. We call upon you to give way to action that would replace words spoken too often and forgotten too quickly. We call upon you to make your voices heard in calling for an end to this bloodshed and an end to this oppression that has lasted too long. To endorse or answer this call for a cultural boycott of Israel please send an email with your name, position and country to [email][email protected][/email] Signatures (Alphabetical): 1.AbdelFattah Abu-Srour,Al-Rowwad Cultural Center 2.Abdelsalam Shehadeh,Filmmaker 3.Adila Laidi,Lecturer 4.Ahmed R. S. Qatamesh, Musician/Flutist 5.Ala' Abu Ghoush,Graphic Designer 6.Alexandra Handal,Artist 7.Ali Nassar,Filmmaker 8.Amer Hlehel, Actor/ director 9.Amer Shomali,Artist 10.Anan Brakat,Filmmaker, Arab Cinema School, 11.Annemarie Jacir,Filmmaker 12.Azza El-Hassan,Filmmaker 13.Bahia Munem,Filmmaker 14.Bashar Ibrahem,Film critic 15.Benaz Batrawi,Filmmaker 16.Betty Shamieh,Writer 17.Buthina Canaan Khoury,Filmmaker 18.Carol Michel,International Center of Bethlehem 19.Cherien Dabis,Filmmaker 20.Dahna Abourahme,Filmmaker 21.Dima Abu Ghoush,Filmmaker 22.Emily Jacir,Artist 23.Enas Muthaffar,Filmmaker 24.Fadi Zmorrod,Artist 25.Faten Farhat,Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center 26.Faten Nastas,Artist 27.Firas Abdelrahman,Filmmaker 28.George

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Azar,Photojournalist / Cinematographer 29.Ghada Kanafani, Poet 30.Ghada Terawi,Filmmaker 31.Hadeel Karkar,Writer 32.Hafez Moeen Omar, Artist 33.Hala Al-Yamani,Drama Teacher 34.Hanna Atallah,Filmmaker 35.Hanna Elias,Filmmaker 36.Hanna Musleh,Filmmaker 37.Hany Abu-Assad,Filmmaker 38.Haya Al-Jareedy,Filmmaker 39.Hayan Charara,Writer 40.Hazim Bitar,Filmmaker 41.Hussein Isbitani, Actor 42.Iman Aoun,Ishtar Theatre 43.Iman Hammouri,Popular Art Centre 44.In'am El-Obeidi,Media Department, Birzeit University., 45.Ismail Habbash,Filmmaker 46.Jamil Daraghmeh,Photographer 47.Jibril Awad,Filmmaker 48.John Halaka,Artist 49.Juliano Mer Khamis,Actor & Director 50.Kamal Boullata,Artist 51.Karma Abu-Sharif,Writer 52.Khadijeh.H.Abu-Ali,Filmmaker 53.Khaled Hourani,Artist 54.Khaled Jubran,Musician 55.Khaled Katamish,Dancer 56.Lana Zreik,Movement Director and Actress 57.Larissa Sansour,Artist 58.Leila Sansour,Filmmaker 59.Liana Badr,Filmmaker 60.Liana Saleh,Filmmaker 61.Lina Bokhary,Artist 62.Lisa Suhair Majaj, Writer, Palestine/Cyprus 63.Lois Nakhleh,Artist 64.Mahmoud Massad,Filmmaker 65.Mai Masri,Filmmaker 66.Manal Issa,A.M.Qattan Foundation 67.Marwan Abado,Musician 68.Maysoun Rafeedie, Dancer 69.Mazen Saade,Filmmaker & Writer 70.Michel Khleifi,Filmmaker 71.Miguel Littin,Filmmaker 72.Moeen Omar, Artist 73.Nabila Irshaid,Artist 74.Nada El-Yassir,Filmmaker 75.Nader Jalal,Palestinian Institute for Cultural Development (nawa) 76.Nahed Awwad,Filmmaker 77.Najwa Najjar,Filmmaker 78.Nida Sinnokrot,Artist 79.Nizar Hassan,Filmmaker 80.Noora Baker,Dancer 81.Omar Barghouti,Dance choreographer 82.Omar Qattan,Filmmaker 83.Osama Al-Zain,Filmmaker 84.Osama Qashoo, Filmmaker 85.Radi

Shehadeh,Theatre director 86.Raed Helou, Filmmaker 87.Raeda Ghazaleh, Theatre director, Palestine/ UK 88.Rana Bishara,Artist 89.Rania Elias- Khoury,Yabous Productions 90.Rashid Masharawi,Filmmaker 91.Rawda Atallah,Arab Cultural Association- Nazareth 92.Reem Fadda,Palestinian Association of Contemporary Art 93.Rim Banna,Singer/ Song writer 94.Riyad Deis,Filmmaker 95.Rowan Al Faqih,Filmmaker 96.Rula Halawani,Artist/photographer 97.Rula Khoury,Curator/ Art coordinator 98.Saed Andoni,Filmmaker 99.Saleh Bakri,Actor 100.Salim Abu Jabal,Writer 101.Salwa Mikdadi,Curator 102.Sama Alshaibi,Artist/ Professor, Palestine/USA, 103.Sameh Zoabi,Filmmaker 104.Sami Bukhari,Artist 105.Samia A. Halaby,Artist 106.Samieh Jabbarin,Film/Theatre director 107.Samirah Alkassim, Film Program at AUC, Palestine/USA 108.Shadi Zmorrod,The First Palestinian Circus School 109.Sobhi al-Zobaidi,Filmmaker 110.Suha Barghouti,Popular Art Centre 111.Suheir Hammad, Poet 112.Suleiman Mansour,Artist 113.Suzy Salamy,Filmmaker 114.Taghreed Mishael,Filmmaker 115.Tarek Bishara,Actor/Screenwriter 116.Tariq Shadid, The Musical Intifadah 117.Ula Tabari,Filmmaker 118.Vera Tamari,Artist 119.Vladimir Tamari,Artist 120.Wafa Jamil,Filmmaker 121.Walid Abu Bakr,Writer 122.Yahya Barakat,Filmmaker 123.Yazan Al-Khalili, Photographer 124. Sharaf DarZaid, Dancer, Choreographer International Supporters: 1.Abdel Halim Ghazaly , Egypt 2.Adrian Grima, Writer, Malta 3.Adrian Mitchell, Poet/ Playwright, UK 4.Adriana Auderset, Switzerland 5.Ahmed Shoka, Psychiatrist & Media Consultant, UK 6.Aicha Lemsine :

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Writer, Algeria 7.Ajay Bhardwaj, Filmmaker, India 8.Akif Emre, Writer/ Filmmaker, Turkey 9.Alain Bottarelli, Switzerland 10.Aleana Egan, Artist 11.Allan Siegel, Filmmaker/ Writer, Budapest 12.Amberly Gorman, Artist, USA 13.Amjad Faur, Artist, USA 14.Ammiel Alcalay, Writer/Translator, USA 15.Andrew N. Rubin, Writer, USA 16.Andy Rector, Filmmaker/Critic, USA 17.Angela O'Hara, Filmmaker, Canada 18.Anis M. Fakheruddin, Jordan 19.Anjalika Sagar, Artist, UK 20.Anna Maria Aslanoglu, Dancer, Turkey 21.Annalisa Pelizza, Italy 22.Anne Tsoulis, Writer, Australia 23.Anthony Alessandrini, USA 24.Antoine Bustros, Composer, Canada 25.Antonia Carver, Writer/ Editor, UK/UAE 26.Architects & Planners for Justice in Palestine, UK 27.Art Tibaldo, Filmmaker (Visual Ethnographer), Philippines 28.Artemis Anastasiadou, Filmmaker, Greece 29.Artur Matuck, Brasil 30.Aseel Nasir Dyck, USA 31.Athir Shayota, Artist, Iraq/USA 32.Ayben Altunç, Filmmaker, Turkey 33.Aycin Mazgit,Turkey 34.Bahriye Kabadayi, Director/Asst. Dir., Turkey 35.Barbara Langford, Writer, France 36.Barbara Nimri Aziz, Writer/Radio producer, USA 37.Beth Mahmoud-Howell, Artist/ Interior Designer, USA 38.Bilal Zaiter, Communication Consultant 39.Bilge Diren Güneş, Photograph, Turkey 40.Bing�l Elmas, Filmmaker, Turkey 41.Birsen Canbaz, Turkey 42.Boo Wallin, Musician, UK 43.Brian Johnston, School of Drama,Carnegie Mellon University, USA 44.Brian Tierney, Writer, USA 45.Brian Wood, Writer 46.British Committee for Justice in Palestine (BCJP), UK 47.Bruce Macdonald, Writer, Canada 48.Bulent Arinli, Filmmaker, Turkey 49.Caglar Ozdemiroglu,Turkey 50.Carmen Emilia Jacir, Chile 51.Carol Shyman, Filmmaker/ Festival organizer, France 52.Carolina Rivas, Filmmaker, Mexico 53.Cengiz Kılçer, Poet, Turkey 54.Chris Thomas, Director/

Producer, UK 55.Christine Fye, Filmmaker/Writer/Artist, USA 56.Christine Tackley, Writer, Canada 57.Christof Lehmann Mpsych, Psychologist 58.Christopher Toussaint, Filmaker, Free Spirit Productions, USA 59.Claire Fowler, Filmmaker, Uk 60.Corine Dhondee Filmmaker England 61.Critical Art Ensemble, Artist Collective, USA 62.Csaba Polony, Artist/ Editor/Publisher, USA 63.Cxema Pico,Web Designer, Spain/Ireland 64.Cynthia Madansky, Filmmaker, USA 65.Daoud Sarhandi, Filmmaker, Mexico 66.Dare Dukes, Writer, USA 67.David Farrelly, Poet, Mexico 68.David Vogt, Musician, Norway 69.Deborah Al-Najjar, Writer 70.Debra Zimmerman, Women Make Movies, USA 71.Deirdre Scully, Costumer/ Stylist, USA 72.Denisse Andrade, Mediamaker, USA 73.Deniz Kana, Filmmaker, Turkey 74.Diana El Jeiroudi, Producer/ Director, Syria 75.Dina Redman, Assistant Professor/Artist, USA 76.Dominique George, USA 77.Donna Wallach, USA 78.Douglas Minkler, Artist, USA 79.Dr Vikas Bajpai, India 80.Dr. Giovanna Benedetti, Writer, Panama 81.Dr. Harold Knight, Music Director,USA 82.Dr. P.K.Pokker, India 83.Dr.Herman De Ley, Belgium 84.Ebru Seremetli, Asistant Director, Turkey 85.Eleni Laperi, Artist, Albania 86.Eli Hamo, Filmmaker, Israel 87.Elle Flanders, Filmmaker, Canada 88.Els Roessingh, Cultural Tour Operator, Netherlands 89.Eman Haddad, Palestine 90.Emel Celebi, Editor, Turkey 91.Emel Koç, Writer, Turkey 92.Emma Manning, Dance writer/ Editor, London UK, 93.Enis Riza, Director, Turkey 94.Eric William Ringsby, Filmmaker, USA 95.Erik Hillestad, Music Producer, Norway 96.Esra Ersen, Artist, Turkey 97.Esra Kahraman,Turkey 98.Ettore Stratta, Conductor/ Producer, Italy 99.Evren Aydın, Web Designer, Turkey 100.Excentrik, Musician/Poet 101.Fabiola Nabil Naguib, Artist/ Writer, Canada 102.Fareea Dangor,

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South Africa 103.Filiz Ultav Cakir, Turkey 104.Firuz Kutal, Graphic designer/ Animator, Norway 105.Frederic Choffat, Filmmaker, Switzerland 106.Fredwreck Farid Nassar, Record Producer, USA 107.Gert Soer, Jordan 108.Ghalia Mohder, USA 109.Ginger Parra, USA 110.Gita Hashemi, Artist, Canada 111.Giulia Grassilli, Human Rights Nights, Italy. 112.G�khan Erkut, Filmmaker,Turkey 113.Gonzalo Pinto, Artist/ Photographer, Chile 114.Gregory Berger, Filmmaker 115.Gustave Weltsek, Arts Educator, Canada 116.Guzella Bayindir, Nazim Hikmet Cultural House,Turkey 117.H. Michael Wieben, artist, Portugal/U.S.A. 118.Hadi El Debek, Artist ,USA 119.Haifa Bint-Kadi, Mosaic Artist, USA 120.Haifa Zangana, Novelist/ Artist 121.Hakan Bulut, Photographer, Turkey 122.Hamied Oqabi, Filmmaker, Yemen 123.Hamra Abbas, Artist, Pakistan 124.Hanan Thabet, Egypt/ Palestine/ USA 125.Hans Noll, Ph.D., USA 126.Hans Noll, USA 127.Harry Halbreich, Musicologist, Belgium) 128.Hayam Noir, Poet/ Artist/ Writer, United States 129.Hekim Coşkun, Turkey 130.Henry Chalfant, Filmmaker, USA 131.Hilda Meers, Writer, Scotland 132.Honey Al Sayed, Radio Broadcaster 133.Huda Siksek, Artist, Canada 134.Huseyin Kuzu, Screenwriter, Turkey 135.Hyder Yusafzai, Pakistan 136.Irene veenstra, Art Historian, Netherlands 137.Iron Sheik, Hip Hop Artist, USA 138.Isik Ezber, Publisher, Turkey 139.Isis Saratial Misdary, Theatre Director, Egypt/USA 140.Islam el Azzazi, filmmaker, Egypt 141.Isra' Muzaffar, Palestine 142.Jae Soo Lee, Filmmaker, Korea 143.Jamelie Hassan, Artist, Canada 144.James Scully, Poet/Writer, USA 145.Jana Traboulsi, Graphic Designer, Lebanon 146.Janet Baus, filmmaker, USA 147.Janine Halbreich-Euvrard, Author/ film critic,France 148.Jawad Metni, Filmmaker 149.Jayce Salloum, Artist, Canada 150.Jeff Sacks, Writer/translator, USA 151.Jenifer Dixon, Writer, USA 152.Jeremy Pikser,

Screenwriter, USA 153.Joe Namy, USA 154.John Chalcraft, Writer, UK 155.John Halaka, Visual Artist, USA 156.John Wight, Scotland 157.Johnny McAllister, Filmmaker, Ireland 158.Jordan Flaherty, Writer/ Filmmaker, USA 159.Jorge Coronado, USA 160.Josh On, Internet Artist, USA 161.Joslyn Barnes, Writer/Producer, USA 162.Judy Keller, USA 163.Julian Samuel, Film-maker, Canada 164.Julian Samuel, Filmmaker, Canada 165.Juliana Saad, Writer/ Translator, Brazil 166.Kais Al-Zubaidi, Filmmaker, Syria 167.Karim Haddad , Composer, Lebanon 168.Kathleen Chalfant, Actor, USA 169.Keith Hammond, Philosopher, UK 170.Ken Loach, Filmmaker, UK 171.Kevin Noble, Culture/ Conflict Group, USA 172.Khaled d. Ramadan, Filmmaker/ Video Maker, Lebanon/ Denmark 173.Khalo Matabane, Filmmaker, South Africa 174.Koen Augustijnen, Choreographer, Belgium 175.Koen Verbesselt, Belgium 176.Kolin Kobayashi, Artist/ Videomaker/ Writer, France 177.Kristen Ess, Writer and Filmmaker 178.Kurt E. Heartsong, USA 179.Laura Marks, Writer, Canada 180.Leigh Brady, Ireland 181.Leonid Alexeienko, Singer/ song writer, Ukraine 182.Liz Magnes, Independent musician 183.Lucia Sommer, Artist, USA 184.Luma Abu Ayyash, USA 185.Maggie Foyer, Dancer/ Writer, UK/ South Africa 186.Mahmoud A. El Lozy, Theatre Director, Egypt 187.Mahmoud Hojeij, Filmmaker, Lebanon 188.Mahnoor Yar Khan, Drama Therapist, India 189.Mais Darwazah, Graphic Designer/Filmmaker, Jordan 190.Manish Jain, filmmaker, India 191.Marco Paulo Rolla, Artist, Brasil 192.Marcos Hill, Art historian, Brasil 193.Marieke Bosman, UK 194.Marina Crespin, Filmmaker,Turkey 195.Mary Ellen Davis, Filmmaker, Canada 196.Mary Tuma, Artist, USA 197.Mat Callahan, Musician/ Author, USA/ Switzerland 198.May Odeh, Palestine 199.Maymanah Farhat, Art

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historian, Lebanon/USA 200.Maysoon Pachachi, Filmmaker, UK 201.Mayss Al Zou'bi. 202.Me Young, Filmmaker, South Korea 203.Mehmet S�nmez, Turkey 204.Melek Ozman, Filmmaker, Turkey 205.Melissa Herman, Filmmaker, UK 206.Merdad Antoine Hage. Filmmaker, Canada. 207.Merdad Hage, Filmmaker, Canada 208.Miacarla Stevens, South Africa 209.Michel Euvrard, Film critic, France) 210.Michel Moushabeck, Editor, Musician, USA 211.Mike Johnson, Musician/songwriter, USA 212.Milli Martinelli, Italy 213.Mira Hashem, Palestine 214.Mizuko Yakuwa, Artist, Japan 215.Mo'tasem Raiq Zayed, Palestine 216.Moataz Dajani, Artist, Palestine 217.Moe Seager, Writer, France/ USA 218.Mohamad Hashem, Beirut International Film Festival, Lebanon 219.Mohamed Al-Daradji, Director/Producer, Iraq/UK 220.Mona Abaza, Egypt 221.Mona Baker, UK 222.Mona El-Bayoumi, Artist, Egypt/USA 223.Mona Hallak, Lebanon 224.Muhammad-Khalil ibn Abdullah "K. Real", Rapper/Actor, USA 225.Murat Demirtas, Sculpture, Turkey 226.Mustafa Aykara, Turkey 227.Mustafa Emin Buyukcoskun, Filmmaker, Turkey 228.Mustafa Temiztas, Filmmaker, Turkey 229.Mustafa Yıldırım, Artist, Turkey 230.N.D.Jayaprakash, India. 231.Nabil Shaban, Filmaker/ Actor/ Writer, United Kingdom 232.Nada Shabout, Art historian, USA 233.Nadia El Fani, Filmmaker, Tunisia 234.Nadine Kanso-designer 235.Nadra Zarifeh, Date Palm Film Festival, New Zealand 236.Naeem Mohaiemen, Filmmaker/Artist, Bangladesh/US 237.Nalan Sakizli, Producer, Turkey 238.Nancy Evans, Musician, UK 239.Natalie Jarudi, Lebanon 240.Nathan Austin, USA 241.Nawel Skandrani, Choreographer, Tunisia 242.Nazly Dangor, South Africa 243.Neery Melkonian, Critic/ Curator, USA 244.Nessa Arif, Indonesia 245.Nial O' Sullivan, Filmmaker, Ireland. 246.Niam Itani,

Screenwriter/ Filmmaker, Lebanon 247.Nicholas Rowe, Writer/ Choreographer, Australia 248.Nicole Aragi, USA 249.Nihad Kresevljakovic, Filmmaker/Writer, Bosnia 250.Nilgün Yurdalan, Turkey 251.Nina Wester, Director/Theatre writer, Norway/Sweden 252.Nitin Paranjape, filmmaker, India 253.Nu'man El-Bakri, United Kingdom 254.Nurdan Arca, Filmmaker, Turkey 255.Nurit Peled-Elhanan, Israel 256.Omer Tuncer, Documentary Director-Producer, Turkey 257.Oraib Toukan, Artist 258.Orwa Hallak, Producer/ Director, UAE 259.Orwa Nyrabia, Proaction Film, Syria 260.Oz Shelach, Writer 261.Ozcan Yurdalan, Turkey 262.ضzhan ضnder, Filmmaker, Turkey 263.P. J. Laska, Poet, USA 264.Pankaj Butalia, Filmmaker, India 265.Partho Sen-Gupta, Filmmaker, France/India 266.Pat Philips, Concert Producer, USA 267.Patricia Alessandrini, Composer, France 268.Patricia Barry, USA 269.Paul Manning, Canada 270.Peter Belmont, USA 271.Pierre Abi Saab, Lebanon 272.Pierre Toupart, Artist, Mauritania 273.Pieter Van Bogaert, Critic/ Curator, Belgium 274.Pilar Salamanca, Writer, Spain 275.Prof. Bertell Ollman, USA 276.Prof. Dr. Nasr Abu Zayd, The Netherlands 277.Prof. Haim Bresheeth, UK 278.Prof. Said Abdelwahed, Palestine 279.Prof. Steve Kurtz, USA 280.R. Worrell, Artist, USA 281.Rachella Mizrachi, Israel 282.Racia Adar, Assistant Director,Turkey 283.Raed Asfour, AlBalad Theater, Jordan 284.Rahul Varma, Playwright, Canada 285.Rajdeep Singh Gill, Curator/ Cultural Theorist, Canada 286.Rajie Cook, Artist, USA 287.Ralph D. Miller, Canada 288.Rami Mufti. 289.Rania Mattini 290.Raphaëlle Vierling, Artist, France 291.Rasha Salti, Curator/ Writer, Palestine/Lebanon 292.Raymond Williams, UK 293.Recep Yeter, Photographer, Turkey 294.Reem Saleh, Lebanon/ Qatar 295.Reena Katz, Artisit, Canada 296.Renee Tajima-Pe�a, Filmmaker, USA 297.Ricardo Lopez,

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Actor, USA 298.Richard Fung, Video artist/ Academic, Canada 299.Richard Schaaf, Writer/Publisher, USA 300.Roman Vater, Translator, Israel 301.Ronan O' Suilleabhain, Filmmaker, Ireland 302.Rose Issa, Curator, UK 303.Rowland Selame, Psychologist/ Filmmaker, USA 304.Roza El-Hassan, Artist, Hungary 305.Rush Rehm, actor/director, USA 306.Sahar Nasser, Freelance Producer, Egypt 307.Sally Hibbin, Producer, UK 308.Sama Abu Ayyash, Annual Giving (Museums), USA 309.Samirah Alkassim, Filmmaker, Egypt/Jordan 310.Seda Gürel, Assistant Director,Turkey 311.Sehbal Senyurt, Filmmaker, Turkey 312.Selda Ba usta, Turkey 313.Selda Salman, Executive producer, Turkey 314.Selda Tuncer, Turkey 315.Selva Tachdjian, Artist, France, 316.Semra Sander, Producer, Turkey 317.Şenol Eskin, Turkey 318.Serene Haddad, Photographer, UK 319.Serpil Oztas, Turkey 320.Sevgi ضzdemiroğlu, Turkey 321.Sevil Serbes, Poet, Turkey/UK 322.Shammi Nanda, filmmaker, India 323.Sherene Seikaly, USA 324.Sherif El-Azma, Filmmaker/ Video artist, Egypt 325.Sherine Salama,Filmmaker, Palestine/Australia/ Egypt 326.Shilpa Jain, filmmaker, India 327.Shirabe Yamada, Palestine/Japan 328.Shmuel Yerushalmi, Poet, Israel 329.Shuruq As'ad, Palestine 330.Sibel Ercan, Turkey 331.Sibylle Mansour, Filmmaker, Germany 332.Simon Coveaney, Filmmaker, Ireland 333.Sinan Sakizli, Composer, Turkey 334.Sonja Krohn. Artist, Norway 335.Sophie Fiennes, Filmmaker, UK 336.Souhad Rafey, Curator, USA 337.Soydan Kenes, Filmmaker, Nazim Hikmet Cultural House, Turkey 338.Steff Bossert, Director of Photography, Switzerland 339.Stephan Milich, Germany 340.Sulaf Elsalfiti, Canada 341.Sumitra Rajkumar, Filmmaker, India/ USA 342.Sura Faraj, Publisher/Editor, USA 343.Susan Abulhawa, Writer, USA 344.Susan Benn, Performing Arts Labs Ltd, UK 345.Susan Falls, USA 346.Susan Nathan, Author

347.Suzanne Klotz, Artist, US 348.Sylvat Aziz, Canada 349.Tahsin ف bilen, Director, Turkey 350.Tami Gold, Filmmaker/ Artist, USA 351.Tarcin Celebi, Turkey 352.Tariq Dajani, Photographer, UK/Sweden 353.Terri Ginsberg, USA 354.Tex Kerschen, USA 355.Thabit Tambwe, Poet, Uganda 356.Tiger TV Collective, USA 357.Tima Al-Jamil, Lebanon 358.Tina Bastajian, Filmmaker, Netherlands 359.Tina Fischer, Artist, Turkey 360.Tina Gharavi, Filmmaker, UK 361.Tülin Erarslan, Filmmaker, Turkey 362.Tuncay Y lmaz, Turkey 363.Uğur Karak�cek, Turkey 364.Ulku Guney, Turkey 365.Umit Boran, Filmmaker, Turkey 366.Umit Gulsen, Turkey 367.Uri Even-Chen, Israel. ـ.368 stün Bilgen Reinart, Turkey 369.Vandecan Myriam, Belgium 370.Varteni Mosditchian, Artist/Painter 371.Vasif Kortun, Curator, Turkey 372.Virginia Williams, Executive Producer, USA 373.Volkan Kavas, Filmmaker, Turkey 374.Walter Bernstein, Writer/Director, USA 375.Wayne Anthony, Filmmaker, Ireland 376.Wayne Cyr, USA 377.William Wells, Townhouse Gallery, Egypt 378.Yasin Ali Türkeri, Filmmaker, Turkey 379.Yigit Dogan, Turkey 380.Yücel ـ nlü, Filmmaker, Turkey 381.Zaher El-Bizri, Painter/Designer, Lebanon 382.Zehra Güleray, Screenwriter, Turkey 383.Ziad Muna, Palestine 384.Zivia Desai Keiper, Uhuru Productions / Tri Continental Film Festival, South Africa


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A Call from Palestine: Palestinian Students’ Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel (PSCABI)

"Gaza today has become the test of our indispensable morality and common humanity"

Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) National Committee

The Palestinian Students’ Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel (PSCABI) calls upon freedom-loving students all over the world to stand in solidarity with us by boycotting Israeli academic institutions for their complicity in perpetuating Israel‘s illegal military occupation and apartheid system. We note the historic action taken by thousands of courageous students of British and American universities in occupying their campuses in a show of solidarity with the brutally oppressed Palestinian people in Gaza. We also deeply appreciate the decision by Hampshire College to divest from companies profiting from the Israeli occupation. Such pressure on Israel is the most likely to contribute to ending its denial of our rights, including the right to education. In this regard, we fully endorse the call for boycott issued by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, PACBI, in

2004 [1]. We emphasize our endorsement of the BDS call issued by more than 170 Palestinian civil society organizations in July 2005 [2]. We also support the Call from Gaza issued by a group of civil society organizations in the second week of the Gaza Massacre (Gaza 2009) [3]. Our goal, as students, is to play a role in promoting the global BDS movement which has gained an unprecedented momentum as a result of the latest genocidal war launched by Israel against the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip. We address our fellow students to take whatever step possible, however small, to stand up for justice, international law and the inalienable rights of the indigenous people of Palestine by applying effective and sustainable pressure on Israel, particularly in the form of BDS, to help put an end to its colonial and racist regime over the Palestinians. We strongly urge our fellow university students all over the world to: (1) Support all the efforts aimed at boycotting Israeli academic institutions; (2) Pressure university administrations to divest from Israel and from companies directly or indirectly supporting the Israeli occupation and apartheid policies; (3) Promote student union resolutions condemning Israeli violations of international law and human rights and endorsing BDS in any form;

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(4) Support the Palestinian student movement directly. To break the medieval and barbaric Israeli siege of Gaza, people of conscience need to move with a sense of urgency and purpose. Israel must be compelled to pay a heavy price for its war crimes and crimes against humanity through the intensification of the boycott against it and against institutions and corporations complicit in its crimes. As in the anti-apartheid struggle in solidarity with the black majority in South Africa, students concerned about justice and sustainable peace have a moral duty to support our boycott efforts. The Palestinian Students’ Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel (PSCABI) Endorsed by: Progressive Student Union Bloc; Fateh Youth Organization; the Progressive Student Labor Front; Islamic Bloc; Islamic League of Palestinian Students; Student Unity Bloc; Students Affairs (University of Palestine).

[1] http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=869 [2] 52/node=q?/net.bdsmovement.www//:httphttp://www.bdsmovement.net/?q=node/52 [3] http://www.odsg.org/co/index.php/component/content/article/1100-a-call-from-gaza.html


John Berger and 93 other authors, film-makers, musicians and performers call for a cultural boycott of Israel PACBI is pleased to announce that in a letter that appears in today’s Guardian, the 94, including the renowned author John Berger; UK musicians and song-writers Brian Eno and Leon Rosselson; filmmakers Sophie Fiennes, Elia Suleiman and Haim Bresheeth; documentary maker Jenny Morgan; singer Reem Kelani; writers Arundhati Roy, Ahdaf Soueif, and Eduardo Galeano, call on their colleagues not to visit, exhibit or perform in Israel.

The letter comes after the August 2006 statement issued by Palestinian filmmakers, artists, writers, and other cultural workers calling for a cultural boycott of Israel. The statement can be viewed at: http://www.pacbi.org/boycott_news_more.php?id=315_0_1_0_C The Berger letter, signed by artists from across Europe, North and South America, as well as Palestinians and Israelis, reads: “There is a fragile ceasefire in Lebanon, albeit daily violated by Israeli overflights. Meanwhile the day to day brutality of the Israeli army in Gaza and the West Bank continues. Ten Palestinians are killed for every Israeli death; more than 200, many of them children, have been killed since the

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summer. UN resolutions are flouted, human rights violated as Palestinian land is stolen, houses demolished and crops destroyed. For archbishop Desmond Tutu, as for the Jewish (former ANC military commander presently South African minister of security), Ronnie Kasrils, the situation of the Palestinians is worse than that of black South Africans under apartheid. Meantime Western governments refer to Israel’s ‘legitimate right’ of self-defence, and continue to supply weaponry. The challenge of apartheid was fought better. The non-violent international response to apartheid was a campaign of boycott, divestment, and, finally UN imposed sanctions which enabled the regime to change without terrible bloodshed. Today Palestinians teachers, writers, film-makers and non-governmental organisations have called for a comparable academic and cultural boycott of Israel as offering another path to a just peace. This call has been endorsed internationally by university teachers in many European countries, by film-makers and architects, and by some brave Israeli dissidents. It is now time for others to join the campaign – as Primo Levi asked: If not now, when? We call on creative writers and artists to support our Palestinian and Israeli colleagues by endorsing the boycott call. Read the Palestinian call (www.pacbi.org). Don’t visit, exhibit or perform in Israel!” To endorse the letter and add your name, contact [email][email protected][/email]

An introductory letter from John Berger follows the list of signatories below. Updated list of signatures as of 28 January 2007: Aguirre, Carmen, (dramatist) Ajalon, Jamika (artist) Al Bayati, Hana (film-maker) Alam, Shahid (essayist) Alcalay, Ammiel, (poet) Alkadhi, Rheim (artist) Al-Qattan, Omar (film-maker) Amiry, Suad (architect) Appignanesi, Richard (writer and editor) Aziz, Sylvat (artist) Bednarski, Cezary (architect) Beguinstain, Teresa (aesthetics) Benner, Ron (artist) Berger, John (writer and artist) Beveridge, Karl (photographer) Beverley, John (writer) Biggs, Simon (artist) Bini, Oscar Abudara (filmmaker) Bove, Paul (editor and writer) Brandt, Chris Hirschman (writer) Bresheeth, Haim (film-maker) Brittain, Victoria (writer) Brown, Mark (theatre critic) Budney, Jen (curator) Cameron, Lindsley (author) Carew, Keggie (artist) Casana, Manuel Molins (dramatist) Chanan, Michael (writer and film-maker) Chirot, David-Baptiste (artist/writer) Chrysakis,. Thanos (composer) Cohen, Mitchel (poet and editor) Collen, Lindsey (novelist) Conde, Carole (photographer) Cooper, Peter (theatre director, actor) Courtney, Andrew (artist) Cox, Molly Hankwitz (artist and writer) Creativity commons collective Crowthers, Malcolm (photographer) Curthoys, Ned (writer) D’Agostino, Ornella (choreographer) Davis, Mary Ellen (film-maker) Davis, Matt (musician)

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Davis, R.G. (theatre director) Deane, Raymond (composer) Deutsch, Stephen (composer) Diaz Munoz, Roberto (writer) Dibb, Mike (film maker) Dickler, Howard (writer) Di Prima, Diane (poet) Diski, Jenny (novelist) Donoghue, Ben (film maker) Dutschke, Gretchen (author) Engel, Kathy (poet) Eno, Brian (musician) Erfanian, Eshrat (artist) Euvrard, Michel (film critic) Felshin Nina (curator) Fiennes, Sophie (film-maker) Fisher, Jean (writer) Fox, Steve (architect) Frere, Jane (video artist) Fried, Klaus (film maker) Galeano, Eduardo (writer) Galvin, Dallas (editor and writer) Garcia, Adela (poet) Ghaibah, Anas (TV director) Ghazaleh, Raeda (theatre director) Ghazoul, Ferial (writer) Ghossein, Mirene (writer and editor) Gill, Rajdeep Singh (curator) Ginsberg, Terri (film theorist) Gordon, Avery (writer) Gover, Yerach (writer) Graf, Michael (visual artist) Greene, Susan (muralist) Greyson, John (film-maker) Guillen, Maria Munoz (dancer) Halaby, Samia (artist) Halama, Henry (artist) Halbreich, Harry (musicologist) Halbreich-Euvrard, Janine (author and film critic) Hamka, Nada (artist) Hanley, Cliff (artist) Hashemi, Gita (artist) Hassan, Jamelie (artist) Hencke, Elaine (fabric artist) Heredia, Shai (curator) Huleileh, Serene (dancer/choreographer) Humm, Maggie (writer)

Hussien, Reham (translator) Jacir, Annemarie (filmmaker and poet) James, Rob (writer) Jencks, Charles (architect and author) Jenik, Adriene (media artist) Jimeno, Dolores (writer) Joly, Magdalene (dancer and musician) Karabelia, Vassia (art historian) Kauff, Tarak (writer) Kaya, Mircan (musician) Kelani, Reem (singer) King, Nick (writer) Knupp, Rainer (movement artist) Kukovec, Dunja (art historian) Kumar, Vinod (writer) Laitinen, Matti (writer) Lane, Joel (poet) Lederhandler, Lazer (translator) Levidow, Les (writer and musician) Lipman, Beate (film maker) Loshitzky, Yosefa (writer) Lozano, Rian (curator) Macrae, Mike (architect) Makhoul, Sana (art historian) Malinowitz, Harriet (writer) Manrique Cantos, Maria (painter) Marlat, Daphne (writer) Marqusee, Mike (author) Masri, Hala (theatre coordinator) Massarat, Mariam (translator) Matelli, Federica (curator) Mayers, Natasha (visual artist) McCaughey, Peter (artist) Metcalfe, Rohelia Hamilton (Film-maker) Mezzano. Luis (architect) Mieville, China (author) Miyoshi, Masao (writer) Montagnino, Carlo (artist) Montoya, Roberto (writer) Morgan, Jenny (film-maker) Muldoon, Claire (actor and writer) Muldoon, Roland (actor and writer) Muller, Nat (curator) Munnigh, Fidel (writer and translator) Muntadas, Antoni (artist) Naguib, Fabiola Nabil (artist and writer) Neufeldt, Brigitte (artist) Noonan, Maire (artist)

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Nunez, Alejandra Perez (sound artist) Ostrow, Saul (critic/curator) Pace, Ian (pianist) Pangbourne, Annabelle (composer) Parker, Cornelia (artist) Patterson, Ian (poet) Payes, Adolfo (painter and sculptor) Pennell, Miranda (film-maker) Pietaro, John (musician) Pratt, Minnie (poet) Prince, Renate (architect) Radhakrishnan, R (writer) Reinart, Ustun (writer) Rifkin, Adrian (writer) Rodenbeck. Judith (writer) Rosselson, Leon (song writer and author) Roy, Arundhati (novelist) Rozas, Ixiar (writer) Rubin, Andrew (writer) Sacks, Jeff (translator) Salloum, Jayce (artist) Salti, Rasha (writer) Sampaio, Miriam (artist) Samuel, Julian (novelist) Sances, Jos (artist) Saraste, Leena (photographer) Sarlin, Paige (film-maker) Schlesinger, Lisa (writer and dramatist) Scordى a, Cinzia (performer0 Serra, Toni /Abu Ali (videomaker) Shammas, Anton (novelist and film-maker) Shibli, Ahlam (artist) Shiri, Keith (curator) Shyman, Carol (translator and film-maker) Simons, Patrick (composer) Skeates, Les (poet and essayist) Smith, John (artist-film-maker) Solt, John (poet) Somes-Charlton, Chris (director) Soueif, Ahdaf (novelist) Staikou, Evi (artist) Streamas, John (writer) Suleiman, Elia (film maker) Sureda, Joseph Ramis (dancer) Szpakowski, Michael (composer) Tachdjian, Selva (artist) Tanbay, Zeynap) (dancer and choreographer)

Tres (artist) Tudela, Ana Navarrete (artist) Twair, Pat (journalist) Valldosera, Eulalia (artist) Van Zwanenberg, Roger (publisher) Varma, Rahul (playwrite) Wadimoff, Nicolas (filmmaker) Walkley, Ron (architect) Waller, John (architect) Walsh, Shannon (film-maker) Ward, David (composer) Wellman, David (writer) Westenra, Charlie (theatre director) Wiles, Rich (photographic artist) Williams, Patrick (writer) Younghusband, Gene (media theorist) Youssef, Marcus (playwrite) Yurur, Ahmet (composer) Yurur, Carol Stevens (writer) Zangana, Haifa (novelist) From John Berger: I would like to make a few personal remarks about this world-wide appeal to teachers, intellectuals and artists to join the cultural boycott of the state of Israel, as called for by over a hundred Palestinian academics and artists, and - very importantly - also by a number of Israeli public figures, who outspokenly oppose their country’s illegal occupation of the Palestine territories of the West Bank and Gaza. Their call is attached, together with my After Guernica drawing. I hope you will feel able to add your signature, to the attached letter, which we intend to publish in national newspapers. The boycott is an active protest against two forms of exclusion which have persisted, despite many other forms of protestations, for over sixty years - for almost three generations. During this period the state of Israel has

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consistently excluded itself from any international obligation to heed UN resolutions or the judgement of any international court. To date, it has defied 246 Security Council Resolutions! As a direct consequence seven million Palestinians have been excluded from the right to live as they wish on land internationally acknowledged to be theirs; and now increasingly, with every week that passes, they are being excluded from their right to any future at all as a nation. As Nelson Mandela has pointed out, boycott is not a principle, it is a tactic depending upon circumstances. A tactic which allows people, as distinct from their elected but often craven governments, to apply a certain pressure on those wielding power in what they, the boycotters, consider to be an unjust or immoral way. (In white South Africa yesterday and in Israel today, the immorality was, or is being, coded into a form of racist apartheid). Boycott is not a principle. When it becomes one, it itself risks to become exclusive and racist. No boycott, in our sense of the term, should be directed against an individual, a people, or a nation as such. A boycott is directed against a policy and the institutions which support that policy either actively or tacitly. Its aim is not to reject, but to bring about change. How to apply a cultural boycott? A boycott of goods is a simpler proposition, but in this case it would probably be less effective, and speed is of the essence, because the situation is deteriorating every month (which is precisely why some of the most powerful world political leaders, hoping

for the worst, keep silent.). How to apply a boycott? For academics it’s perhaps a little clearer - a question of declining invitations from state institutions and explaining why. For invited actors, musicians, jugglers or poets it can be more complicated. I’m convinced, in any case, that its application should not be systematised; it has to come from a personal choice based on a personal assessment. For instance. An important mainstream Israeli publisher today is asking to publish three of my books. I intend to apply the boycott with an explanation. There exist, however, a few small, marginal Israeli publishers who expressly work to encourage exchanges and bridges between Arabs and Israelis, and if one of them should ask to publish something of mine, I would unhesitatingly agree and furthermore waive aside any question of author’s royalties. I don’t ask other writers supporting the boycott to come necessarily to exactly the same conclusion. I simply offer an example. What is important is that we make our chosen protests together, and that we speak out, thus breaking the silence of connivance maintained by those who claim to represent us, and thus ourselves representing, briefly by our common action, the incalculable number of people who have been appalled by recent events but lack the opportunity of making their sense of outrage effective. John Berger


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PACBI Guidelines for the International Academic Boycott of Israel

Since its founding in 2004, PACBI has advocated a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions, based on the premise that these institutions are complicit in the system of oppression that has denied Palestinians their basic rights guaranteed by international law. This position is in line with the authoritative call by the Palestinian Council for Higher Education for "non-cooperation in the scientific and technical fields between Palestinian and Israeli universities"[1]. Academic institutions in particular are part of the ideological and institutional scaffolding of the Zionist colonial project in Palestine, and as such are deeply implicated in maintaining the structures of domination over the Palestinian people. Since its founding, the Israeli academy has cast its lot with the hegemonic political-military establishment in Israel, and notwithstanding the efforts of a handful of principled academics, carries on business-as-usual in support of the status quo. The beginnings of the academic boycott of Israel can be traced to 2002, the year in which Israel launched its destructive assault upon Palestinian cities, towns, refugee camps and villages, targeting the institutions of Palestinian society and wreaking havoc on communities,

residential neighborhoods, and urban infrastructure. The April 2002 statement by 120 European academics and researchers urging the adoption of a moratorium on EU and European Science Foundation support for Israel was followed by a number of pro-boycott initiatives in the same year by academics in the USA, France, Norway, and Australia. Particularly noteworthy have been the annual congresses of UK academics’ unions, where boycott-related resolutions have been debated and passed since 2002. PACBI’s key partner in the UK, BRICUP [2] has been instrumental in the ongoing struggle to popularize the academic boycott in the union movement in the UK and beyond. In October 2003, the first Palestinian Call for Boycott was issued by a group of Palestinian academics and intellectuals in the diaspora and the occupied Palestinian Territory. Building on all previous boycott initiatives, PACBI issued its Call for an Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel in Ramallah in 2004, providing the Palestinian reference for a steadily growing and sustainable institutional academic boycott effort throughout the world. The lethal Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip in December 2008-January 2009 served as a catalyst for further activism, and the period since then has witnessed a tremendous growth of initiatives in the spirit of BDS and targeting Israeli academic institutions. Such efforts have come from Australia, Canada, Norway, Sweden, Scotland, Lebanon, Spain and the United States. Particularly encouraging has been the founding of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural boycott of Israel (USACBI), inspired by PACBI and basing itself

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upon the PACBI Call. During five years of intensive work with partners in several countries to promote the academic boycott against Israel, PACBI has examined many academic projects and events, assessing the applicability of the boycott criteria to them and, accordingly, has issued open letters, statements or advisory opinions on them. Based on this experience and in response to the burgeoning demand for PACBI’s specific guidelines on applying the academic boycott to diverse projects, from conferences to exchange programs and research efforts, the Campaign lays out below unambiguous, consistent and coherent criteria and guidelines that specifically address the nuances and particularities of the academy. These guidelines are mainly intended to assist academics around the world in adhering to the Palestinian call for boycott, as a contribution towards establishing a just peace in our region. Similar guidelines for the cultural boycott have been issued by PACBI [3]. Academic Boycott Guidelines Inspired by the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa as well as the long tradition of civil resistance against settler-colonialism in Palestine, the PACBI Call [4] urges academics and cultural workers “to comprehensively and consistently boycott all Israeli academic and cultural institutions as a contribution to the struggle to end Israel‘s occupation, colonization and system of apartheid, by applying the following:

1. Refrain from participation in any form of academic and cultural cooperation, collaboration or joint projects with Israeli institutions; 2. Advocate a comprehensive boycott of Israeli institutions at the national and international levels, including suspension of all forms of funding and subsidies to these institutions; 3. Promote divestment and disinvestment from Israel by international academic institutions; 4. Work toward the condemnation of Israeli policies by pressing for resolutions to be adopted by academic, professional and cultural associations and organizations; 5. Support Palestinian academic and cultural institutions directly without requiring them to partner with Israeli counterparts as an explicit or implicit condition for such support.” Before discussing the various categories of academic activities that fall under the boycott call, and as a general overriding rule, it is important to stress that virtually all Israeli academic institutions, unless proven otherwise, are complicit in maintaining the Israeli occupation and denial of basic Palestinian rights, whether through their silence, actual involvement in justifying, whitewashing or otherwise deliberately diverting attention from Israel’s violations of international law and human rights, or indeed through their direct collaboration with state agencies in the design and commission of these violations. Accordingly, these institutions, all their activities, and all the events they sponsor or support must

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be boycotted. Events and projects involving individuals explicitly representing these complicit institutions should be boycotted, by the same token. Mere institutional affiliation to the Israeli academy is therefore not a sufficient condition for applying the boycott. While an individual’s academic freedom should be fully and consistently respected in this context, an individual academic, Israeli or not, cannot be exempt from being subject to boycotts that conscientious citizens around the world (beyond the scope of the PACBI boycott criteria) may call for in response to what is widely perceived as a particularly offensive act or statement by the academic in question (such as direct or indirect incitement to violence; justification -- an indirect form of advocacy -- of war crimes and other grave violations of international law; racial slurs; actual participation in human rights violations; etc.). At this level, Israeli academics should not be automatically exempted from due criticism or any lawful form of protest, including boycott; they should be treated like all other offenders in the same category, not better or worse. The following guidelines may not be completely exhaustive and certainly do not preempt, replace or void other, common-sense rationales for boycott, particularly when a researcher, speaker, or event is shown to be explicitly justifying, advocating or promoting war crimes, racial discrimination, apartheid, suppression of fundamental human rights and serious violations of international law. Based on the above, PACBI urges

academics, academics’ associations/unions and academic institutions around the world, where possible and as relevant, to boycott and/or work towards the cancellation or annulment of events, activities, agreements, or projects that promote the normalization of Israel in the global academy, whitewash Israel’s violations of international law and Palestinians rights, or violate the boycott. Specifically, the Palestinian academic boycott against Israel applies to the following events, activities, or situations: 1. Academic events (such as conferences, symposia, workshops, book and museum exhibits) convened or co-sponsored by Israeli institutions. All academic events, whether held in Israel or abroad, and convened or co-sponsored by Israeli academic institutions or their departments and institutes, deserve to be boycotted on institutional grounds. These boycottable activities include panels and other activities sponsored or organized by Israeli academic bodies or associations at international conferences outside Israel. Importantly, they also include the convening in Israel of meetings of international bodies and associations. 2. Institutional cooperation agreements with Israeli universities or research institutes. These agreements, concluded between international and Israeli universities, typically involve the exchange of faculty and students and, more importantly, the conduct of joint research. Many of these schemes are sponsored and funded by the European Union (in the case of Europe), and independent and government foundations elsewhere. For example,

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the five-year EU Framework programs, in which Israel has been the only non-European participant, have been crucial to the development of research at Israeli universities. European academic activists have been campaigning for the suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement since 2002; under this Agreement, Israeli and European universities exchange academic staff and students and engage in other activities, mainly through the Erasmus Mundus and Tempus schemes [5]. It should be noted that Israel is in violation of the terms of this Agreement, particularly of the second article [6]. 3. Study abroad schemes in Israel for international students. These programs are usually housed at Israeli universities and are part of the Israeli propaganda effort, designed to give international students a “positive experience” of Israel. Publicity and recruitment for these schemes are organized through students’ affairs offices or academic departments (such as Middle East and international studies centers) at universities abroad. 4. Addresses and talks at international venues by official representatives of Israeli academic institutions such as presidents and rectors. 5. Special honors or recognition granted to official representatives of Israeli academic institutions (such as the bestowal of honorary degrees and other awards) or to Israeli academic or research institutions. Such institutions and their official representatives are complicit and as such should be denied this recognition. 6. Palestinian/Arab-Israeli collaborative

research projects or events, especially those funded by the various EU and international grant-giving bodies. It is widely known that the easiest route to securing a research grant for a Palestinian academic is to apply with an Israeli partner. This is a case of politically motivated research par excellence, and contributes to enhancing the legitimacy of Israeli institutions as centers of excellence instead of directly and independently strengthening the research capacity of Palestinian institutions. The argument that “science is above politics” is often used to justify such collaborations. In PACBI’s view, no normal collaboration between the institutions of the oppressor and the oppressed, or indeed between the academics of the oppressor and oppressed can be possible while the structures of domination remain in place. In fact, such projects do nothing to challenge the status quo and contribute to its endurance. As an example, Palestinian/Arab-Israeli research efforts in the field of water and environment take as given the apartheid reality; tackling Palestinian/Arab and Israeli water and environmental “problems” as commensurate, without recognizing the apartheid reality, only contributes to the continuation of that reality. As in the cultural field, events and projects (such as those involving educators, psychologists, or historians) involving Palestinians and/or Arabs and Israelis that promote “balance” between the “two sides” in presenting their respective narratives or “traumas,” as if on par, or are otherwise based on the false premise that the colonizers and the colonized, the oppressors and the oppressed, are equally responsible for

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the “conflict,” are intentionally deceptive, intellectually dishonest and morally reprehensible. Such events and projects, often seeking to encourage dialogue or “reconciliation between the two sides” without addressing the requirements of justice, promote the normalization and perpetuation of oppression and injustice. All such events and projects that bring Palestinians and/or Arabs and Israelis together, unless based on unambiguous recognition of Palestinian rights and framed within the explicit context of opposition to occupation and other forms of Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, are strong candidates for boycott. Other factors that PACBI takes into consideration in evaluating such events and projects are the sources of funding, the design of the project or event, the objectives of the sponsoring organization(s), the participants, and similar relevant factors. 7. Research and development activities in the framework of agreements or contracts between the Israeli government and other governments or institutions. Researchers in such projects are based at American, European or other universities. Examples include the United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF), an institution established by the US and Israeli governments in 1972 to sponsor research by Israelis and Americans, and the “Eureka Initiative,” a European inter-governmental initiative set up in 1985 that includes Israel as the only non-European member. 8. Research and development activities on behalf of international corporations involving contracts or other institutional

agreements with departments or centers at Israeli universities. 9. Institutional membership of Israeli associations in world bodies. While challenging such membership is not easy, targeted and selective campaigns demanding the suspension of Israeli membership in international forums contribute towards pressuring the state until it respects international law. Just as South Africa’s membership was suspended in world academic--among other--bodies during apartheid, so must Israel’s. 10. Publishing in or refereeing articles for academic journals based at Israeli universities. These journals include those published by international associations but housed at Israeli universities. Efforts should be made to re-locate the editorial offices of these journals to universities outside Israel. 11. Advising on hiring or promotion decisions at Israeli universities through refereeing the work of candidates [7], or refereeing research proposals for Israeli funding institutions. Such services, routinely provided by academics to their profession, must be withheld from complicit institutions. PACBI www.PACBI.org [email protected] Notes: [1] The Palestinian Council for Higher Education, composed of heads of Palestinian universities and representatives from the community, has, since the 1990’s, adhered to its

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principled position of non-cooperation with Israeli universities until Israel ends its occupation; this position was reiterated in a statement of thanks to the UK academic union NATFHE in 2006: http://www.mohe.gov.ps/ENG/news/index.html#7 [2] www.BRICUP.org.uk [3] http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=1045 [4] http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=869 [5] See http://ec.europa.eu/education/external-relation-programmes/doc70_en.htm and http://ec.europa.eu/education/external-relation-programmes/doc72_en.htm [6] http://www.bdsmovement.net/?q=node/179 [7] In 2002, more than 700 European academics signed this declaration: "I can no longer in good conscience continue to cooperate with official Israeli institutions, including universities. I will attend no scientific conferences in Israel, and I will not participate as referee in hiring or promotion decisions by Israeli universities, or in the decisions of Israeli funding agencies. I will continue to collaborate with, and host, Israeli scientific colleagues on an individual basis." (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2002/jul/08/highereducation.israel )


PACBI Guidelines for the International Cultural Boycott of Israel

Since April 2004, PACBI has called upon intellectuals and academics worldwide to “comprehensively and consistently boycott all Israeli academic and cultural institutions as a contribution to the struggle to end Israel’s occupation, colonization and system of apartheid.” [1] In 2006, a decisive majority of Palestinian cultural workers, including most filmmakers and artists, supported by hundreds of international cultural workers, appealed to all international artists and filmmakers of good conscience to join the institutional cultural boycott against Israel. [2] In response, the renowned British artist and writer, John Berger, issued a statement that was backed by dozens of prominent international artists, writers and filmmakers calling on their colleagues everywhere to endorse the Palestinian cultural boycott call. [3] In the spirit of this cultural boycott and consistent with its logic, on 8 May 2008, in a half-page advertisement in the International Herald Tribune under the banner “No Reason to Celebrate,” tens of leading international cultural figures -- including Mahmoud Darwish, Augusto Boal, Ken Loach, Andre Brink, Ella Shohat, Judith Butler, Vincenzo Consolo, Ilan Pappe, David Toscana and

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Aharon Shabtai -- signed a statement responding to worldwide celebrations of Israel’s “60th anniversary” saying [4]: “There is no reason to celebrate! Israel at 60 is a state that is still denying Palestinian refugees their UN-sanctioned rights, simply because they are ‘non-Jews.’ It is still illegally occupying Palestinian and other Arab lands, in violation of numerous UN resolutions. It is still persistently and grossly breaching international law and infringing fundamental human rights with impunity afforded to it through munificent US and European economic, diplomatic and political support. It is still treating its own Palestinian citizens with institutionalized discrimination.” The cultural boycott campaign against apartheid South Africa has been a major source of inspiration in formulating the Palestinian boycott calls and their criteria. In that context, the key argument put forth by the South African regime and its apologists around the world against the anti-apartheid cultural and sports boycott -- that boycotts violate the freedom of expression and cultural exchange -- was resolutely refuted by the director of the United Nations Centre Against Apartheid, Enuga S. Reddy, who in 1984 wrote [5]: “It is rather strange, to say the least, that the South African regime which denies all freedoms ... to the African majority ... should become a defender of the freedom of artists and sportsmen of the world. We have a list of people who have performed in South Africa because of ignorance of the situation or the lure of money or unconcern over racism. They need to be persuaded to stop entertaining apartheid, to stop profiting from apartheid money and to

stop serving the propaganda purposes of the apartheid regime.” Similarly, the Palestinian boycott call targets cultural institutions, projects and events that continue to serve the purposes of the Israeli colonial and apartheid regime. During five years of intense work with partners in several countries to promote the cultural boycott against Israel, PACBI has thoroughly scrutinized tens of cultural projects and events, assessing the applicability of the boycott criteria to them and, accordingly, has issued open letters, statements or advisory opinions on them. The two most important conclusions reached in this respect were: (a) many of these events and projects fall into an uncertain, grey area that is challenging to appraise, and (b) the boycott must target not only the complicit institutions but also the inherent and organic links between them which reproduce the machinery of colonial subjugation and apartheid. Based on this experience and in response to the burgeoning demand for PACBI’s specific guidelines on applying the cultural boycott to diverse projects, from film festivals to art exhibits to musical and dance performances to conferences, the Campaign lays out below unambiguous, consistent and coherent criteria and guidelines that specifically address the nuances and particularities of the field of culture. These criteria are mainly intended to help guide cultural workers and organizers around the world in adhering to the Palestinian call for boycott, as a contribution towards establishing a just peace in our region.

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Cultural Boycott Criteria In all the following, “product” refers to cultural products such as films and other art forms; “event” refers to film festivals, conferences, art exhibits, dance and musical performances, tours by artists and writers, among other activities. Before discussing the various categories of cultural products and events and as a general overriding rule, virtually all Israeli cultural institutions, unless proven otherwise, are complicit in maintaining the Israeli occupation and denial of basic Palestinian rights, whether through their silence or actual involvement in justifying, whitewashing or otherwise deliberately diverting attention from Israel’s violations of international law and human rights. Accordingly, these institutions, all their products, and all the events they sponsor or support must be boycotted. Events and projects involving individuals explicitly representing these complicit institutions should be boycotted, by the same token. The following criteria may not be completely exhaustive and certainly do not preempt, replace or void other, common-sense rationales for boycott, particularly when a cultural product or event is shown to be explicitly justifying, advocating or promoting war crimes, racial discrimination, apartheid, suppression of fundamental human rights and serious violations of international law. Based on the above, the Palestinian cultural boycott against Israel applies in the following situations: (1) Cultural product is commissioned by an official Israeli body All cultural products commissioned by an official Israeli body (e.g., government ministry, municipality, embassy, consulate, state or other public film fund, etc.) deserve

to be boycotted on institutional grounds, as they are commissioned and thus funded by the Israeli state -- or any of its complicit institutions -- specifically to help the state’s propaganda or “rebranding” efforts aimed at diluting, justifying, whitewashing or otherwise diverting attention from the Israeli occupation and other violations of Palestinian rights and international law. However, this level of explicit complicity is difficult to ascertain quite often, as information on such direct commissioning may not be readily available or may even be intentionally concealed. (2) Product is funded by an official Israeli body, but not commissioned (no political strings) The term “political strings” here specifically refers to those conditions that obligate a fund recipient to directly or indirectly serve the Israeli government’s “rebranding” or propaganda efforts. Products funded by official Israeli bodies -- as defined in category (1) above -- but not commissioned, therefore not attached to any political strings, are not per se subject to boycott. Individual cultural products that receive state funding as part of the individual cultural worker’s entitlement as a tax-paying citizen, without her/him being bound to serve the state’s political and PR interests, are not boycottable, according to the PACBI criteria. Accepting such political strings, on the other hand, would clearly turn the cultural product or event into a form of complicity, by contributing to Israel’s efforts to whitewash or obscure its colonial and apartheid reality, and would render it boycottable, as a result. While an individual’s freedom of expression, particularly artistic expression, should be fully and consistently respected in this context, an individual artist, filmmaker, writer, etc., Israeli or not, cannot be exempt from being subject to boycotts that conscientious citizens around the world

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(beyond the scope of the PACBI boycott criteria) may call for in response to what is widely perceived as a particularly offensive act or statement by the cultural worker in question (such as direct or indirect incitement to violence; justification -- an indirect form of advocacy -- of war crimes and other grave violations of international law; racial slurs; actual participation in human rights violations; etc.). At this level, Israeli cultural workers should not be automatically exempted from due criticism or any lawful form of protest, including boycott; they should be treated like all other offenders in the same category, not better or worse. (3) Event is partially or fully sponsored or funded by an official Israeli body The general principle is that an event or project carried out under the sponsorship/aegis of or in affiliation with an official Israeli body constitutes complicity and therefore is deserving of boycott. It is also well documented now that Israeli artists, writers and other cultural workers applying for state funding to cover the cost of their -- or their cultural products’ -- participation in international events must accept to contribute to Israel’s official propaganda efforts. To that end, the cultural worker must sign a contract with the Israeli Foreign Ministry binding her/him to “undertake to act faithfully, responsibly and tirelessly to provide the Ministry with the highest professional services. The service provider is aware that the purpose of ordering services from him is to promote the policy interests of the State of Israel via culture and art, including contributing to creating a positive image for Israel.” [6] (4) Product is not funded or sponsored by an official Israeli body Unless violating any of the above criteria, in the absence of official Israeli sponsorship,

the individual product of an Israeli cultural worker per se is not boycottable, regardless of its content or merit. (5) Event or project promotes false symmetry or “balance” Cultural events and projects involving Palestinians and/or Arabs and Israelis that promote “balance” between the “two sides” in presenting their respective narratives, as if on par, or are otherwise based on the false premise that the colonizers and the colonized, the oppressors and the oppressed, are equally responsible for the “conflict,” are intentionally deceptive, intellectually dishonest and morally reprehensible. Such events and projects, often seeking to encourage dialogue or “reconciliation between the two sides” without addressing the requirements of justice, promote the normalization of oppression and injustice. All such events and projects that bring Palestinians and/or Arabs and Israelis together, unless framed within the explicit context of opposition to occupation and other forms of Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, are strong candidates for boycott. Other factors that PACBI takes into consideration in evaluating such events and projects are the sources of funding, the design of the program, the objectives of the sponsoring organization(s), the participants, and similar relevant factors. References: [1] http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=869 [2] http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=315 [3] http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=415 [4] http://www.pngo.net/data/files/engli

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sh_statements/08/PNGO-THT-HP5208(2).pdf [5] http://www.anc.org.za/un/reddy/cultural_boycott.html [6] http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1005287.html


Implementing the Academic Boycott: Individuals vs. Institutions

PACBI column for the November 2009 Newsletter of BRICUP

We have shared with readers of the BRICUP Newsletter the recently publicized PACBI guidelines for the academic and cultural boycott of Israel [1]. We are very heartened by the steady mail we have been receiving in recent months from academics, artists, and activists around the world who contact us to ensure that their implementation of the boycott in their particular circumstances and contexts is in harmony with our guidelines. While implementing the cultural boycott of Israel may sometimes encounter grey areas due to the fact that artistic activity is not limited within institutional boundaries (and PACBI calls for an institutional boycott), we believe that the situation is a great deal clearer when it comes to practicing the academic boycott. We offer the following advice in response to questions from some academics about attending conferences held at or sponsored by Israeli academic institutions. There has been an inaccurate impression that since the Palestinian boycott call is institutional, only institutions are expected to observe it. By this logic, individual academics, if they are not representing their universities or institutions, may

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participate in academic conferences in Israel without breaking the boycott. For the sake of clarity, we note that when we advocate an institutional boycott, we mean that the target of the boycott should be all Israeli institutions; those whom we urge to implement the boycott, however, are institutions as well as individual academics. PACBI believes that we have not yet reached the critical point where international academic institutions and bodies will boycott Israel and refrain from cooperating with Israeli institutions. Regardless of that, we believe that the success of the academic boycott hinges on the consistent and principled practice of individual academics faced with opportunities or invitations to attend conferences organized by Israeli academic institutions. There is no doubt in our mind that such opportunities and invitations must be rejected. We would like to reiterate that PACBI has advocated a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions, based on the premise that these institutions are complicit in the system of oppression that has denied Palestinians their basic rights guaranteed by international law. This position is in line with the authoritative call by the Palestinian Council for Higher Education for "non-cooperation in the scientific and technical fields between Palestinian and Israeli universities.” Israeli academic institutions in particular are part of the ideological and institutional scaffolding of the Zionist colonial project in Palestine, and as such are deeply implicated in maintaining the structures of domination over the Palestinian

people. Since its founding, the Israeli academy has cast its lot with the hegemonic political-military establishment in Israel, and notwithstanding the efforts of a handful of principled academics, carries on business-as-usual in support of the status quo. By attending conferences in Israel, international academics—whether intentionally or inadvertently--effectively lend legitimacy to the Israeli colonial project; they affirm that Israeli universities are a normal member of the international academy, and that no special stigma attaches itself to the Israeli academy. The message these academics send is that Israeli academic institutions can continue to enjoy recognition, legitimacy, and approval from academics the world over, not to mention unfettered access to research funds and other material benefits. As a matter of fact, and judging by the unprecedented outpouring of support for BDS the world over, we believe that the uncritical acceptance of the Israeli academy as a neutral and untainted institution is being challenged. More and more principled academics are realizing that they should withdraw their “stamp of approval,” as it were, and join the academic boycott. We stress that as a general overriding rule, virtually all Israeli academic institutions, unless proven otherwise, are complicit in maintaining Israeli apartheid and colonial rule, whether through their silence, actual involvement in justifying, whitewashing or otherwise deliberately diverting attention from Israel’s violations of international law and human rights, or indeed through their direct

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collaboration with state agencies in the design and commission of these violations. Accordingly, these institutions, all their activities, and all the events they sponsor or support must be boycotted. We trust in the sense of justice of our international colleagues to do what is right: boycott the Israeli academy and all its activities and projects! [1] PACBI Guidelines for Applying the International Academic Boycott of Israel: http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=1107 ; Guidelines for Implementing the International Cultural Boycott of Israel: http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=1047

http://www.bricup.org.uk/documents/archive/bricupnewsletter22.pdf


Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) Frequently Asked Questions What is the underlying principle of calls for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS)? It is no longer denied that Israel has oppressed the Palestinian people for decades in multiple forms: occupying, colonizing, ethnically cleansing, racially discriminating, in short, denying Palestinians the fundamental rights for freedom, equality and self-determination. Despite abundant condemnation of Israel’s policies by the UN and all relevant international conventions, the international community of nations has failed to bring about Israel’s compliance with international law or its respect for basic human rights. Israel’s crimes have continued with utter impunity. The time has come for action, not just words. BDS are the most effective non-violent, morally consistent means for achieving justice and genuine peace in the region through concerted international pressure similar to that applied on South African apartheid. What is the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI)? PACBI was launched in Ramallah in April 2004 by a group of Palestinian academics and intellectuals to join the growing international boycott

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movement. In July 2004, the Campaign issued a Call for Boycott addressed to the international community, urging it to comprehensively and consistently boycott all Israeli academic and cultural institutions until Israel withdraws from all the lands occupied in 1967, including East Jerusalem; removes all its colonies in those lands; agrees to United Nations resolutions relevant to the restitution of Palestinian refugees’ rights; and dismantles its system of apartheid. This statement was met with widespread support, and has to date been endorsed by nearly sixty Palestinian academic, cultural and other civil society federations, unions, and organizations, including the Federation of Unions of Palestinian Universities' Professors and Employees and the Palestinian NGO Network (PNGO) in the West Bank. What is the Call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS)? On July 9, 2005, one year after the historic Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which found Israel's Wall built on occupied Palestinian territory to be illegal, a clear majority of Palestinian civil society called upon international civil society organizations and people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel, similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era, until Israel meets its obligation to recognize the Palestinian people's inalienable right to self-determination and fully complies with international law. BDS has been endorsed by over 170 Palestinian parties, organizations, trade unions and movements representing the Palestinian people in the 1967 and 1948 territories

and in the diaspora. On July 13, 2005 the UN International Civil Society Conference adopted the Palestinian Call for BDS. Does Academic Boycott Infringe on Academic Freedom? It may; but who’s Academic Freedom is being referred to within this context? That of Israeli academics. Are we to regard only the academic freedom of Israelis as worthy? Plus, the privileging of academic freedom as a super-value above all other freedoms is in principle antithetical to the very foundation of human rights. The fact that Palestinians are denied basic rights as well as academic freedom under Israel's military occupation is ignored. The fact that, with the exception of a tiny yet crucial minority, Israeli academics are largely supportive of their state’s oppression or are acquiescently silent about it is ignored. The fact that Israeli academic institutions have been and continue to be entirely complicit in the continuing aggressions against Palestinian society is ignored. The fact that Israeli academic institutions are themselves directly engaged in violations of Palestinian human rights and international law is ignored. BDS is opposed by many Israelis who support the Palestinian struggle. By calling for BDS, aren’t we alienating these Israeli supporters?

Although the views of Israeli supporters regarding methods of struggle should be taken into consideration, Palestinians have the ultimate right to decide on the best method for attaining freedom from an illegal occupation and systematically oppressive regime. Supporters of the Palestinian struggle within the

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international community and within Israel itself have to stop attempting to dictate the terms of the struggle but support the Palestinian right to resist an illegal occupation, especially when the form of resistance is non-violent, as is the case with calls for BDS. BDS are morally sound and effective means of struggle that challenge the world to force Israeli compliance with international law; they therefore serve the cause of ending oppression and establishing a just and sustainable peace. That should be the most urgent consideration for morally consistent individuals supporting genuine peace. Won’t BDS also hurt those Israelis who support the Palestinian struggle? Israelis who oppose the occupation should be doing so on moral grounds and must be willing to accept that there is a price to pay to end the colonial oppression being perpetrated in their names and perpetuated through the complicity of most of their society. Rather than focusing on the possibility that some morally consistent, non-Zionist members of the Israeli left may be inadvertently affected by boycott, one must emphasize the impact boycott might have on the overall establishment in Israel. The price that some conscientious Israelis may pay as an unavoidable byproduct of the boycott is quite modest when compared to the price Palestinians have to pay for the lack of boycotts or any similarly effective pressures on Israel. Challenging the fanatic, militaristic Israeli establishment may indeed strengthen its grip on power in the short run -- extreme populism and the rise of

fascist tendencies in Israel attest to that; but in the longer run it will weaken that establishment, just as in South Africa. Repression under apartheid did not die down in a smooth downwards spiral, after all. This will serve not only the Palestinians, but also, in the longer term, the true left in Israel. Aren’t BDS tactics unpopular in the international community? Recent breakthroughs in the positions of the US Presbyterian church, the Anglican church and some mainstream, progressive Jewish-American organizations -- not to mention the fast spreading boycott movement in Europe and calls for divestment in the United States -- indicate that there is an encouragingly growing acceptance in the west of the need to effectively pressure Israel to end injustice. Those who do oppose boycott of Israel were generally in favor of the comprehensive, blanket boycotts (in all fields, including academia) of the apartheid regime in South Africa. To oppose one and support the other entails that either they are hypocritical or else they have good reasons to believe that such pressure measures cannot be as effective in the Israeli case as in its South African predecessor. We have yet to read or hear one good argument supporting this unfounded belief. Treating Israel as a state outside of history, unaccountable to international law and morally untouchable is simply wrong. It reflects not only moral inconsistency but political blindness as well, as it serves to perpetuate Israel's rarely matched oppression of the people of Palestine.

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Can BDS really be effective in ending the Israeli occupation and oppression? History shows us that boycotts and sanctions can be effective. In December 1989, a recommendation by the European Parliament to freeze funds allocated to scientific cooperation with Israel until it reopened the Palestinian universities prompted the Israeli government to announce the gradual reopening of colleges and vocational training centers in the occupied territories in February 1990. In effect, on the rare occasions when Israel did at all contemplate changing its racist oppressive policies, it was mainly attributed to facing concerted pressures by the international community. But of course, the most obvious example of the effectiveness of BDS campaigns is South Africa. After calling for boycott and sanctions against Israel in 2002, the South African Minister for Intelligence Services, Ronnie Kasrils, stated: “we in South Africa know about racial oppression. We fought it and defeated it because it was unjust… South Africa is an example of what is possible”.


Academic Boycott and the Israeli Left By Omar Barghouti Thursday, April 14, 2005

Some of the most committed Israeli opponents of their state's illegal military occupation of the Palestinian territories have recently expressed serious reservations about, if not strident opposition to, the Palestinian call for boycott** of Israel's academic and cultural institutions. We think that their concerns are worth addressing.

Almost all of the publicized reservations we have seen are prefaced with moral support for the right of Palestinians to resist the occupation -- non-violently, most would write -- even by calling for boycotts to achieve that goal. A common theme in their antagonism to the academic boycott, however, is the pragmatic consideration that such a boycott may be "counterproductive" in the struggle to end the occupation. They allow themselves to raise this objection because they regard themselves as partners of Palestinians in the anti-occupation camp, not as outsiders patronizing us. In some cases, this premise is valid. Most of the time, however, it is not. Israelis who arrogate to themselves the exclusive right to arbitrate every issue dealing with the Palestinians ought to think twice about their self-appointed role as sole licensers of the form the anti-occupation struggle should take.

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Israelis who are opposed to the occupation should be doing so on moral grounds, above everything else, and should not dictate the agenda of the struggle. This remains a struggle of Palestinians and their supporters -- including conscientious Israelis -- led by Palestinians against Israel's racist and colonial policies. It is high time to recognize this profound fact.

Another crucial issue that demands consideration here is the fact that even conscientious Israelis are objectively in a situation of conflict of interest: boycotts, even of the most sensitive and nuanced types, will in all likelihood hurt their interests. Does this morally rob them of the right to opine or give Palestinians advice about boycott, as their views will always be tainted by self-interest? No, but the fact that their interests are on the line should not be ignored either in judging the degree of fairness of their opinions. A few principled academics, like Ilan Pappe, have decisively overcome this conflict of interest by declaring their readiness to accept the price that they may have to pay as a result of implementing any meaningful boycott against Israeli academic institutions. Such admirable moral clarity and consistency should set an example to other Israeli academics.

Regardless of intentions and moral considerations, we do think it is important to lay out the most recurrent and serious pragmatic/political arguments raised by progressive Israelis, and to respond to each of them with due deliberation.

The "counterproductive-ness" claim -- by far the most potent of all assertions -- rests on the following arguments:

First Claim: Academic boycotts in general hurt the one sector in the oppressor society that is most likely to be sympathetic to the struggle of the oppressed. Israel is no exception, it is held.

Response: Even if this holds in other places, in Israel it simply does not. Israeli academics by and large serve in the occupation army, and hardly ever publicly denounce Israel's occupation, its system of racial discrimination against its own Palestinian citizens or its obdurate denial of the internationally-sanctioned rights of Palestinian refugees. This constitutes collusion -- even if passive, at times -- with their state's criminal oppression of the Palestinian people. Moreover, Israeli academics' organizations, such as university senates or professional associations, have been totally silent on the conduct of those academics who have contributed to the occupation regime either through direct service as advisors or as producers of "knowledge" useful to the project of control, oppression, and occupation. As far as we know, no racist or complicit academic has ever been publicly censured by representative bodies or associations of academics. Many of those Israelis who object to the academic boycott admit, quite freely, the complicity of the academy as a whole in the colonial project, both historically and in the present.

Second Claim: Academic boycott by its very nature contradicts academic freedom.

Response: This claim needs to be examined carefully. We think that the freedom that Israeli academics appear keen to preserve is the freedom to

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continue being scholars, i.e. to have an uninterrupted flow of research funds, to continue to get grants to be released from teaching, to take sabbaticals, to continue to be able to write, engage in scholarly debate, and to do all the things respectable academics are supposed to do. But can they or should they be able to enjoy these freedoms (which sound more like privileges to us) without any regard to what is going on outside the walls of the academy, to the role of their institutions in the perpetuation of colonial rule? We are faced here again with the problem of Israelis seeing the world from their vantage point, and assuming -- and demanding -- that others do the same. Why does the world owe it to Israel's academics to help them perpetuate their privileged position?

Third Claim: Israeli academics opposed to the occupation are themselves largely antagonistic to boycott. Insisting on boycott, therefore, runs the risk of losing them. Palestinians cannot afford that, particularly given their evident political weakness.

Response: Although the views of our Israeli supporters regarding methods of struggle matter to us, they are not our only, or even our most significant, consideration. As argued above, we hope that their opposition to the crimes committed in their names is based on more than pragmatic considerations, and that they are capable of seeing themselves in the wider context of the struggle, thereby overcoming the tendency to feel that they lie at the center of the universe. The boycott is a morally sound means of struggle that challenges the world to force Israeli compliance with international law; it therefore serves Palestinian interests in

the struggle for emancipation, self-determination and equality. That is our most urgent consideration.

Fourth Claim: Conscientious Israelis who are exempted from the call for boycott will be isolated even further by their Israeli colleagues if they accept such a privilege. This will hurt their standing and diminish their ability to influence those colleagues' attitudes towards the occupation.

Response: This is even less relevant than the consideration raised in the third claim! The above response amply addresses it.

Fifth Claim: Although the Palestinian call for boycott explicitly calls for "institutional" not individual boycott, by exempting "conscientious Israeli academics" opposed to occupation and oppression, it implies that the rest of Israeli academic individuals are to be boycotted. This apparent contradiction sheds some doubt on the sincerity or coherence of the Palestinian call.

Response: Although as a matter of principle we refuse to be put in the seat of the accused in this not-so-innocent case of questioning our integrity, we shall respond to this charge. One year after the Palestinian call for boycott was issued, PACBI's record of public statements, press releases, published articles and letters should put to rest any doubts about our moral and political consistency. Our Call explicitly and unequivocally calls for institutional boycott, period. The fact that we go out of our way to "Exclude from the above actions against Israeli institutions any conscientious Israeli academics and intellectuals opposed to their state's colonial and racist policies" follows

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from our realization that there is always a grey area where an academic may be perceived as representing her/his institution rather than her/himself. We were cautious and nuanced enough to address that eventuality. This does not imply anything beyond what it says. Our discourse has always avoided double-talk and mixed messages, unlike that of most of our detractors.

One final and crucial point to make is where were those critics of boycott during the years of comprehensive, blanket boycotts (in all fields, including academia) of the apartheid regime in South Africa? Did they object then to the far more stringent criteria of the boycott? If not, it is fair to conclude that they must be either hypocritical or else they have good reasons to believe that such punitive measures cannot be as effective in the Israeli apartheid case as in its South African predecessor. We have yet to read or hear one good argument supporting this unfounded belief. The burden of proof lies flatly on their laps, not ours.

Treating Israel as a state outside of history, unaccountable to international law and morally untouchable has got to come to an end. It reflects moral inconsistency and political blindness; furthermore, it serves to perpetuate Israel's rarely matched oppression of the people of Palestine, and, by extension, it inhibits the struggle for genuine peace based on justice and the universal principle of equal humanity.

--------------------------------- * Founding members of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI)

** The full text of PACBI's Call for Boycott can be read at: http://right2edu.birzeit.edu/news/article178

Posted at: http://www.zcommunications.org/academic-boycott-and-the-israeli-left-by-omar-barghouti

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Enough. It's time for a boycott By Naomi Klein

The best way to end the bloody occupation is to target Israel with the kind of movement that ended apartheid in South Africa

It's time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa. In July 2005 a huge coalition of Palestinian groups laid out plans to do just that. They called on "people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era". The campaign Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions was born.

Every day that Israel pounds Gaza brings more converts to the BDS cause - even among Israeli Jews. In the midst of the assault roughly 500 Israelis, dozens of them well-known artists and scholars, sent a letter to foreign ambassadors in Israel. It calls for "the adoption of immediate restrictive measures and sanctions" and draws a clear parallel with the anti-apartheid struggle. "The boycott on South Africa was effective, but Israel is handled with kid gloves ... This international backing must stop."

Yet even in the face of these clear calls, many of us still can't go there. The reasons are complex, emotional and understandable. But they simply aren't good enough. Economic sanctions are the most effective tool in the non-violent arsenal: surrendering them verges on active complicity. Here are the top four objections to the BDS strategy, followed by counter-arguments.

Punitive measures will alienate rather than persuade Israelis.

The world has tried what used to be called "constructive engagement". It has failed utterly. Since 2006 Israel has been steadily escalating its criminality: expanding settlements, launching an outrageous war against Lebanon, and imposing collective punishment on Gaza through the brutal blockade. Despite this escalation, Israel has not faced punitive measures - quite the opposite. The weapons and $3bn in annual aid the US sends Israel are only the beginning. Throughout this key period, Israel has enjoyed a dramatic improvement in its diplomatic, cultural and trade relations with a variety of other allies. For instance, in 2007 Israel became the first country outside Latin America to sign a free-trade deal with the Mercosur bloc. In the first nine months of 2008, Israeli exports to Canada went up 45%. A new deal with the EU is set to double Israel's exports of processed food. And in December European ministers "upgraded" the EU-Israel association agreement, a reward long sought by Jerusalem.

It is in this context that Israeli leaders started their latest war: confident they would face no meaningful costs. It is remarkable that over seven days of wartime trading, the Tel Aviv Stock

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Exchange's flagship index actually went up 10.7%. When carrots don't work, sticks are needed.

Israel is not South Africa.

Of course it isn't. The relevance of the South African model is that it proves BDS tactics can be effective when weaker measures (protests, petitions, backroom lobbying) fail. And there are deeply distressing echoes of apartheid in the occupied territories: the colour-coded IDs and travel permits, the bulldozed homes and forced displacement, the settler-only roads. Ronnie Kasrils, a prominent South African politician, said the architecture of segregation he saw in the West Bank and Gaza was "infinitely worse than apartheid". That was in 2007, before Israel began its full-scale war against the open-air prison that is Gaza.

Why single out Israel when the US, Britain and other western countries do the same things in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Boycott is not a dogma; it is a tactic. The reason the strategy should be tried is practical: in a country so small and trade-dependent, it could actually work.

Boycotts sever communication; we need more dialogue, not less.

This one I'll answer with a personal story. For eight years, my books have been published in Israel by a commercial house called Babel. But when I published The Shock Doctrine, I wanted to respect the boycott. On the advice of BDS activists, including the wonderful writer John Berger, I

contacted a small publisher called Andalus. Andalus is an activist press, deeply involved in the anti-occupation movement and the only Israeli publisher devoted exclusively to translating Arabic writing into Hebrew. We drafted a contract that guarantees that all proceeds go to Andalus's work, and none to me. I am boycotting the Israeli economy but not Israelis.

Our modest publishing plan required dozens of phone calls, emails and instant messages, stretching between Tel Aviv, Ramallah, Paris, Toronto and Gaza City. My point is this: as soon as you start a boycott strategy, dialogue grows dramatically. The argument that boycotts will cut us off from one another is particularly specious given the array of cheap information technologies at our fingertips. We are drowning in ways to rant at each other across national boundaries. No boycott can stop us.

Just about now, many a proud Zionist is gearing up for major point-scoring: don't I know that many of these very hi-tech toys come from Israeli research parks, world leaders in infotech? True enough, but not all of them. Several days into Israel's Gaza assault, Richard Ramsey, managing director of a British telecom specialising in voice-over-internet services, sent an email to the Israeli tech firm MobileMax: "As a result of the Israeli government action in the last few days we will no longer be in a position to consider doing business with yourself or any other Israeli company."

Ramsey says his decision wasn't political; he just didn't want to lose customers. "We can't afford to lose any

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of our clients," he explains, "so it was purely commercially defensive."

It was this kind of cold business calculation that led many companies to pull out of South Africa two decades ago. And it's precisely the kind of calculation that is our most realistic hope of bringing justice, so long denied, to Palestine.

A version of this column was published in the Nation (thenation.com)

naomiklein.org

Posted at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/10/naomi-klein-boycott-israel

The Academic Boycott of Israel - Objections and Defense by Lawrence Davidson

Introductory Comments and a General Defense

Boycotts are historically common and popular forms of protest. Unlike sanctions, which are enforced by governments and sometimes destroy the lives of millions of ordinary people (as in the case of the 12-years of sanctions against Iraq, and the on-going Western sanctions against Hamas and the Gaza Strip), boycotts can be a grassroots means of protest against the policies of governments. They can be undertaken by ordinary people to defend fellow human beings who are oppressed and designed in such a way as to cause as little damage as possible to the lives of innocent people. Boycotts have historically been undertaken at many levels: they have been carried out against companies or industries (for instance, the American California grape boycott of the 1970s); and against states (for instance the boycott of apartheid South Africa). Thus, from an historical point of view, there is plenty of precedents for the tactic of boycott. And, as in the case of South Africa, public pressure through boycotts can eventually encourage governments and organizations such as the United

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Nations to take action against particularly oppressive regime.

Nonetheless, the boycott against Israel, and in particular that aspect of it directed against academic institutions, has drawn a great amount of criticism. Much of this has come from people who are partisans of Israel. But some of it has its origins among those who have genuine concerns that innocent Israelis are being unnecessarily hurt, or that the boycott is undermining valued principles such as academic freedom and the free flow of ideas. It is to this latter group that the following arguments are addressed in the hope of taking up their concerns and, if not putting them to rest, at least putting them in a context that makes understandable the historical trade-offs inevitably involved in any struggle for justice.

First of all, the academic boycott of Israel is part of a broader boycott and divestment effort which involves economic, cultural and sports agendas. The academic boycott specifically is based on several premises. One is that, to date, all but a very small number of Israeli academics remain quiescent in the face of the violent colonial war their government wages against the Palestinian people in the Occupied Territories. As a group they have had nothing to say about Israeli violations of scores of United Nations resolutions and the transgression of international law in the form of the Fourth Geneva Convention. This includes not only human rights violations of a general nature, but also, specifically, the systematic destruction of Palestinian education and academic freedoms. Nor, as a group, have they come to the

defense of their few fellow Israeli academics who have been spoken of as traitors for publically criticizing Israeli policies against the Palestinians.

A second, and related premise, though one that is often unnoted, is the fact that educational institutions are principal agents for shaping the perceptions of whole generations. If, in the midst of extreme practices leading to oppression such as we have been witnessing in the Occupied Territories, these institutions lend their active or passive support to aggressive colonialist practices, then others may legitimately criticize them and, if the situation persists, boycott them.

Third, I would point out that the boycott against Israel is whole heartedly supported by Palestinian civil society. In 2003 and again in 2005 Palestinians teachers and a wide range of other professionals called for the boycott of Israel, including Israeli academia. Today over 60 Palestinian federations and NGOs have signed on to this call. In every case these groups, as well, organizers of the boycott outside of Palestine, view this tactic as the best non-violent way by which non-Israelis the world over can express their concern for what is now the world’s longest post-Second World War occupation and one which presents us with very dangerous ethnic and racial issues.

There has been a great hew and cry against the violent tactics of resistence to Israeli occupation evolved by the Palestinians. Though the first Intifada started with little more than rock throwing it was condemned in the West as a “dangerous escalation” of the Middle East crisis. It also brought the

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Palestinians no relief. The Second Intifada is certainly much more violent in its nature and has included the infamous tactic of suicide bombing. The organizers of the boycott condemn this tactic even while understanding that it is a product of despair and desperation that the occupation itself has created. Many have asked themselves what people outside of Israel and the Occupied Territories can do to put non-violent pressure on Israel to end the occupation. The boycott is one of their answers.

Consideration of General Objections

Objections to the Academic Boycott of Israel have not been consistent. They have tended to shift over time. For instance, at the beginning of the boycott (circa 2002) there was the demand that academia, and particularly scientific fields, be kept out of politics. While as an ideal this may be an admirable, in reality the bulk of higher education and its academicians never escape politics. As we found in the United States during the Vietnam War, various government agencies quickly recruited an array of academic departments and individuals, ranging from chemists to sociologists, to support their war effort. The intimidation and bribery directed at the rest of academia to remain quiet (and therefore passively supportive of government policy) was effective until the war itself became vastly unpopular. Israeli educational institutions have been similarly co-opted. Various academic departments, professors and administrators have developed for profit and non-profit links with the military, corporate, media and political

institutions that support and sustain occupation.

Normally, states do not support academic freedom or the free flow of ideas in cases that impact government policies, particularly when the government has committed itself to military action. Through various means of bribery and pressure they attempt to enforce only two alternatives, quiescence or active support. In times of stress, opposition comes to equal disloyalty and threatens academic funding and careers. The academy, then, is not a neutral arena on matters important to government. As Lisa Taraki, who is a professor at Birzeit University on the West Bank has argued, the academy can easily become “a haven for many scholars either in the outright service of repressive states, or for those who have rewritten history in defense of colonial projects.”2

In the current context, there are numerous examples of the direct involvement of Israeli academia and academic related professions in promoting and sustaining the oppressive measures of the Israeli government. In general terms, almost all Israeli academics find themselves actively or passively supporting the occupation by virtue of Israel’s policy of universal Jewish conscription. (This is a policy that does not democratize the Israeli army, so much as it militarizes Israeli civilian society). Thus, the majority of Israeli academics are military veterans and many will do reserve duty in the Territories. If they wish to resist serving as part of the occupation forces they can do so by joining the Refusnik organizations. Very few choose to do so. More

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concretely, the Israeli government has turned to academia for occupation administrators (the first “civilian” administrator of the West Bank was Menahem Milson of Hebrew University) and it has used academic demographers, architects, communications experts, medical experts and others to make and carry out policy that sustains occupation. Then there is the active role taken by Bar-Ilan University in validating courses given by colleges now being established in illegal settlements

The argument for isolating academia from politics was later augmented with the assertion that “in the end the best way to resolve issues is to pursue dialogue, not boycotts.” However, one of the reasons the boycott has become necessary is precisely because “dialogue” on the Palestinian issue has been historically stifled. For decades Zionists had a near monopoly on the information flow in the West concerning the Palestinian situation. One can still see this in the fact that the vast majority of coverage in the press and on televison, particularly in the United States, gives mostly the Israeli side of the story. To the extent that this is breaking down, those offering the Palestinian point of view are now consistently labeled anti-Semites and supporters of terrorism. Indeed, the Zionists in the United States go so far as to threaten the careers of those who vocally challenge them. Such a libelous approach hardly qualifies the Zionist leadership as defenders of academic freedom. In truth, what they seek is to maintain a monopoly on the information flow about Israel and Palestine. This is an environment that discourages dialogue and makes necessary other, more direct and effective tactics seeking justice for the Palestinians.3

Moreover, ‘intellectual exchanges’ have been going on between Israelis and the rest of the world since 1948 and with Zionists for longer than that. It has made not a bit of difference to the oppressive and colonialist policies of successive Israeli governments. Given this history, even if the Zionists were now to engage in honest “dialogue,” it is unlikely to achieve anything in the future unless, simultaneously, other sorts of pressure are applied.

As noted, one of the earliest tactics to silence and discredit advocates of the boycott has been use of the red herring label of anti-Semitism. We are told that the boycott of Israel, including the academic boycott, is inherently anti-Semitic ‘in effect if not in intent.’ This argument is based on a dishonest equating of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism and conveniently ignores the mounting crescendo of Jewish voices against Zionist and Israeli colonialist practices.4 It also ignores the fact that not only was the boycott call started by Jewish scholars in the United Kingdom (Professors Hilary and Steven Rose), but also that many of the supporters of the boycott are Jewish, a few are even Israeli Jews. Indeed, as many non-Zionist Jews have argued, it is not the pursuit of legitimate means of protest against violations of human rights by Israel that feeds anti-Semitic discourse. Rather it is the current Israeli practices and the Zionist colonial project that does so.

Finally, there was the short lived argument that the issues involved in the conflict between Israel and Palestine are very complex, and a boycott reduces them to overly simplistic dueling camps of good and evil. This assertion could not be

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sustained in the light of UN resolutions and the widely documented Israeli violations of international law by Human Rights organizations. These published findings suggest that the confiscation of land, the destruction of homes and businesses, the act of ethnic cleansing, all relentlessly pursued over the last 60 years, is not “complicated.” Indeed, it is all horribly simple. And, because more and more people have come to understand this, the argument based on complexity is now rarely heard.

Let us now turn to serious issues concerning the objectives, scope and potential effectiveness of the boycott.

Consideration of Specific Objections

Argument 1: Futility. The academic boycott is ineffective, it cannot influence the policies of the Israeli government, and will only harden positions due to resentment over outside pressure.

If the first part of this argument were really true, the Zionist response to the boycott effort would not be so strenuous. The Israeli government would not be starting up high powered commissions to counter the boycott, in the U.S. Zionist organizations and spokespersons would not be extending time, energy and money, to label the academic boycott effort as the “hijacking of academic freedom,” and rushing to launch a number of anti-boycott petitions. The near hysterical outcry coming from Zionists indicates a high level of insecurity and fear. Some Israelis have already acknowledged the potential of the boycott. Senior Israeli economist Yoram Gabai was quoted in

the San Francisco Chronicle, 8 August 2002, as saying: "Faster than expected, we will find ourselves in the time warp of (white-dominated) Rhodesia in the 1970s and South Africa in the 1980s: enforced isolation from without and an isolationism from within....The enormous price of isolation will drag us into withdrawing from the [occupied] territories, either in the context of a peace treaty or without one as a unilateral act.”5 This is not mere speculation on his part. The power of national isolation, including that of academic isolation, was recently attested to by Frederik de Klerk, the former President of South Africa who initiated the move away from apartheid and toward democracy. “Suddenly the doors of the universities and libraries [of the world] were closed to our bright students, which stimulated and motivated advocates of change.”6

As Gabai’s prediction suggests, the academic boycott does not work in a vacuum. It is but one component in a broader boycott program that seeks to put pressure on all aspects of Israeli society. Historically, such a broad approach can be most effective when directed toward democracies, a club to which Israel claims membership. Here individuals can be encouraged to pressure their governments for changes in behavior. But even so, it takes sustained effort to alter public opinion. In the case of Israel, this is because internally generated perceptions, much like white South Africa under apartheid, are so inbred that the ability of Israeli citizens to understand the consequences of their national policies on the Palestinians is limited. As the self-defeating results of the last several Israeli elections point out, a majority of

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Israelis are literally stuck in a self-reinforcing and distorting information environment where positions cannot get any “harder.” As in the case of South Africa, external pressure is the only non-violent way to move the Israelis to a realization that something is terribly wrong with their outlook and behavior and that there is a need to change both leadership and direction.

Even if one is skeptical of the ability of Israelis to break out of their perceptual straitjacket, an international boycott targeting all aspects of Israeli society has strong and beneficial symbolic value. Such a boycott raises international consciousness over inhumane and unjust behavior, lets ordinary citizens the world over know that there is a way they can get involved and do something to promote human rights and justice, and serves as a warning for other would be oppressors that it is not only other governments that they need to worry about. In the end, economic and cultural isolation has its own dynamic and, as Gabai fears, can wear away at the resolve of those Israeli elites that fancy themselves players on an international level.

Finally, the academic boycott has obviously been quite effective in generating heated discussion in many venues (mainstream newspapers, television, student publications, internet discussion lists and blogs). In this way the negative details of the Zionist enterprise have inevitably forced themselves onto the consciousness of many people, within and outside academia. Thus, even the Zionist efforts to discredit those who support the boycott, and de-legitimize the boycott as a strategy of protest, have

unintentionally helped provide a superb forum for debating the facts about Palestine and the occupation. If the boycott achieves nothing more than this it will have achieved a great deal.

Argument 2: Misguided - The academic boycott targets the wrong people and hurts Palestinians as well as Israelis. It harms collaborative efforts between Israeli and Palestinian universities.

The assertions that the academic boycott hurts Palestinians and harms collaborative efforts are dubious at best. While in the past there have been minor collaborations between Israeli and Palestinian academic institutions in the Occupied Territories, these have now all but ceased. This is due to inevitable estrangement and suspicion that has come along with the continuing colonization and military domination of the Occupied Territories. Also, Israeli policies forbid the travel of Israeli citizens into the Occupied Territories (except if they are going to and from colonies illegal under international law) and make it extremely onerous for Palestinians in those regions to enter Israel. If the Israelis claim that these policies have been made necessary by the Palestinian uprising, supporters of the boycott answer that the uprising has been made necessary and inevitable by the Israeli occupation and its brutal nature. Part of that brutal nature has been the employment of tactics designed to prevent Palestinian colleges and universities from functioning in any normal manner. These tactics include prolonged shut downs, military raids and travel restrictions that impede students and faculty from reaching campuses.

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No organized protest or resistence to this consistent and prolonged attack on Palestinian academia has come from Israeli academic groups, colleges, or universities. As the late Tanya Reinhart, who served for many years as a Professor of Linguistics at Tel Aviv University, and was one of the few Israeli academics to publically stand against Israeli occupation policies, has observed, “Never in its history did the senate of any Israeli university pass a resolution protesting the frequent closure of Palestinian universities, let alone voice protest over the devastation sowed there during the last uprising. It is not that a motion in that direction failed to gather a majority, there was no such motion anywhere in Israeli academia.”7 Even with the qualitative increase in the level of violence used by the Israeli army in the second intifada, Israeli academia continues to do practically nothing to pressure their government.8 There is something markedly hypocritical in the fact that many of those individuals and organizations (Israeli or otherwise) which have so vocally attacked the boycott, have not raised their voices against the destruction of Palestinian academia and society in general.9

The claim that the boycott “targets the wrong people” is a more complicated one and deserves close consideration. Almost all of the complaints registered against the boycott of Israel, academic or otherwise, put forth examples of humane, well intentioned, Israeli individuals (whose existence we certainly acknowledge) who are allegedly being punished unfairly by the boycott (see also discussion of the category of Academic Freedom below). It is to be noted that the academic boycott’s main targets are Israel’s educational institutions and not individuals per se.

Nonetheless, there are scholars attached to those institutions who now find it more difficult to place publishable material, particularly in European journals, there are Israeli doctors who now find it more difficult to receive research assistance from abroad, there are Israeli academics who have been asked to leave the boards of scholarly journals, etc. Taken as individual cases, there is no doubt that such situations result in frustration, inconvenience, the disruption of research agendas for a range of individuals, some of whom may not be active supporters of the occupation. Unfortunately this is unavoidable and, given the continuing complicity of Israeli academia in general with the occupation, necessary. Shahid Alam has put forth this point accurately and succinctly: “I believe it is reasonable and moral to impose temporary and partial limits on the academic freedom of a few Israelis if this can help to restore the fundamental rights of millions of Palestinians.”10

When it comes to hurting the “wrong people,” the most notable cases are those relatively few heroic Israeli academics who have put their careers on the line to stand up against the injustice of their country’s colonial policies. For example, there is Ilan Pappe. Pappe is a well published instructor who, until recently, was attached to Department of Political Science at Haifa University. He is strong and vocal supporter of justice for the Palestinians and advocate for political reform in Israel. Here is what Professor Pappe says about the need for a boycott of Israel: “It is a call from the inside to the outside to exert economic and cultural pressure on the Jewish

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state so as to bring home the message that there is a price tag attached to the continuation of the occupation.” The academic boycott makes sense to Pappe as “part of the overall campaign for external pressure.” He continues, “Within such a call, it makes no sense for an activist like myself to call on sanctions or pressure on business, factories, cultural festivals, etc. while demanding immunity for my own peers and sphere of activity – academia.”11 Professor Pappe understands that he may also be hurt by such a boycott, but he recognizes that the sacrifice is necessary given the horrible situation we now find ourselves in.

In the end, the anti-boycott focus on individuals just creates a red-herring that deflects attention away from the larger, and more important, issue. As Pappe indicates, individual Israelis (and their academic institutions) simply cannot abstract themselves from that larger issue. Israel is their country. Olmert, Sharon, Natanyahu, Barak, Begin, Shamir, etc. were and are their Prime Ministers. The only Prime Minister to take tentative steps in the direction of a just peace, Yitzhak Rabin, was assassinated. Clearly, the Occupation is their collective sin. Those, on the outside who support the boycott, understand present day Israel for what it really is – a society that has institutionalized discriminatory policies, created de facto first, second, and third class citizenship categories and has, for forty years now, maintained policies of occupation and colonization that have systematically destroyed Palestinian society. As a consequence, Israeli academic, cultural and sports institutions (and their employees) will now themselves become relatively more

isolated. If they find this uncomfortable, there is always an escape route: pay heed to Professors Pappe, Rinehart and others who point to the horror Israel is causing others and act to change the situation.

Argument 3: Academic Freedom - The boycott violates the principle of academic freedom and as such is unacceptable.

The boycott’s impingement on the academic freedom of Israeli scholars has been repeatedly condemned. It has been called “contemptible,” “ hypocritical,” and “an unacceptable breakdown in the norms of intellectual freedom” (these terms have not been applied by these same critics to the destruction of Palestinian academic freedom). For simplicity sake, let us work from the statement of Dena S. Davis, a law professor at Cleveland State University, published in the Chronicle of Higher Education on April 18, 2003. Davis writes that “Academic boycotts undermine the basic premise of intellectual life that ideas make a difference, and the corollary that intellectual exchanges across cultures can open minds.”12 Unfortunately, there is nothing necessary about the assumption that the “difference” ideas make results in a more humane world or more humane outlooks. Thus, it is not only positive ideas that can make a difference. As noted above, Israeli Zionists (be they academics or politicians, cultural leaders, businessmen, etc.), have been interacting with the world outside of Israel since 1948. This sharing of ideas with the outside has made no positive difference in the evolution of Zionist oppression against both Palestinians

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inside and outside of Israel proper. However, it may very well have made a negative difference and prolonged and deepened Israeli injustice in this regard. Free communication on the part of Zionists has allowed them to build solid support within the American population and its politicians based on racist stereotyping of Arabs generally and Palestinians in particular, as well as the correspondingly gross over-idealization of the Zionist movement and its results. Thus, historically, unimpaired ‘intellectual life’ and ‘exchanges across cultures’ have not only failed to lead to the humanization of Zionism or its policies but have led to the corruption of the political establishment in Washington, D.C.13

This makes problematic the claim that academic freedom somehow operates in a vacuum and, in and of itself, always leads to the good, or the betterment of the world. Nonetheless, supporters of the boycott agree that its opposite, the obstruction of the “free flow of ideas” ought to be undertaken only in extreme circumstances. Unfortunately, that is exactly the situation successive Israeli governments have brought about. Keeping to the realm of academia, proof of the severity of the situation (and the hypocrisy of anti-boycott critics in their failure to face up to it) can be found in the condition of academic life in the Occupied Territories.14 Here, Israel’s illegal occupation has destroyed intellectual life for the Palestinians. The practice of “exchanging visits” and “talking to each other,” such as it has been over the last 40 years, on the part of Israeli academics have not produced the courage or insight to stand up and protest this destruction. If Israeli academics are truly interested in academic freedom as a valuable

principle they should be claiming for the Palestinians the same rights of academic freedom they claim for themselves. Their pointed failure to do so makes them subject to the general boycott of Israel that is now evolving as a consequence of Israeli policies.

Not taking Israelis policies into consideration is one of the more obvious weak links in the hew and cry over the boycott coming from a wide range of well placed Israelis and Europeans, ranging from politicians to university presidents.15 Like the vast majority of Israeli academics, none of them has ever raised their voices over the destruction of Palestinian academic freedom at the hands of the Israeli occupation. Only when it is Israeli academics who are under threat of boycott do these academic knights mount their horses and take up their shields. As Margaret Pappano of Queens University in Ontario has observed, “you cannot let decades of gross injustices to one side pass and then suddenly leap to the defense of the other side without implicating yourself in a political position.”16 Those who now want to make an issue over academic freedom for Israelis have got to explain where they have been for the past forty years of attacks on Palestinian education in the Occupied Territories.

Argument 4: Inconsistency - The boycott adherents unfairly single out Israel while ignoring all other military occupations in places such as Tibet, Chechnya, etc.

How do those who claim that boycott supporters are ‘picking’ on Israel know that they also ignore the behavior of the Chinese in Tibet, Russians in Chechnya,

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Americans in Iraq, and so on? Boycott supporters are generally not one issue people and many of us do support well intentioned efforts to isolate other oppressive regimes beyond that of Israel. However, for a good number of those who support this boycott the struggle against Israeli occupation is a high priority. There are a number of reasons for this.

First, many of us, Jews, Muslims, Christians, or non-denominational Americans, Europeans, and others, feel a special affinity for Israeli/Palestine. We all have emotional, cultural, or religious ties to the Holy Land, even the non-religious among us. What the Zionists refuse to acknowledge is that the place their mythology makes special for them, is also special to a lot of other folks based on other interpretations of the same myth and other forms of oral and written tradition as well.

Second, one can argue that just because other nations behave badly does not let the Israelis off the hook. After all, the Israelis now have the dubious distinction of running the longest post-WWII occupation in the world. There is no reason why boycott supporters should not start with the problem that has persisted longest and then work backwards.

Third, and most importantly, the Israeli-Palestinian crisis can be seen as more politically important for citizens of the Western nations than other contemporary crises and examples of oppression. This is because Zionist influence spreads far beyond Israel’s area of dominion, and now negatively influences the formulation of Middle East foreign policy in the West. In other words, unlike the Chinese, Russians, and other oppressive

regimes, the Israelis and their supporters directly influence (in what we feel is a corrupting way) the policy makers of our own countries. Thus their actions have import beyond the Occupied Territories and potentially affect the lives of ordinary citizens of most Western nations. This particularly obvious in the case of United States where for the last sixty years the American treasury has been utilized as a bottomless well of “charity” for the Zionist state. In the United States Zionist lobbies are extremely powerful with both political parties, Congress and the media. George W. Bush’s his neo-conservative advisers actually see Israel and its illegal, aggressive behavior as a model for their own policies.17

Argument 5: Giving Comfort to Terrorists – The boycott of Israel ignores the (alleged) facts that (A) the Israeli army is in the Occupied Territories as an act of self-defense against suicide bombers and other terrorists and (B) boycott efforts only encourage and lend comfort to these terrorists.

(A) It is highly questionable whether the Israeli army is in the Occupied Territories to protect Israel from terrorists. Much more likely is the proposition that the IDF is in the Occupied Territories to protect Israel’s colonial settlers who, in turn, are in the Occupied Territories to possess “Judea,” “Samaria.” To this end, the IDF is also in the Occupied Territories to prevent the creation of a viable Palestinian state. It is these acts of possession and prevention which produce Palestinian resistence in all its forms.

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It should be obvious to anyone not ideologically blinded or misled by a self-censoring Western press that forty years of land confiscation, destruction of crops, houses, and other Palestinian property, the destruction of Palestinian civil society to a point that now approaches cultural genocide, the construction of illegal colonies, and the importation of 100,000s of illegal settlers are not “acts of self-defense.” On the other hand, one can reasonably define resistence to these actions on the part of the Palestinians (the major part of which has been relatively non-violent but unreported) as in fact acts of self-defense. The international community through the actions of the United Nations, the International Criminal Court and the testimony of respected world leaders, has made it quite clear that Israeli occupation constitutes an on-going case of severe injustice. To cite but one example, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a man who certainly knows injustice when he sees it, recently declared, “I have been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa. I have seen the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about.” He goes on to condemn the general dispossession of the Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line.18 And then Jimmy Carter’s latest book on the Middle East has demonstrated that what stands in the way of peace is Israeli apartheid.

(B) The charge that boycott efforts encourage or lend comfort to terrorists is entirely ad hoc. How do those who make these claims know that they are

true? In fact, it is quite possible that, as Shahid Alam has suggested, the boycott, functioning as a manifestation of “world conscience,” can “mitigate the Palestinian’s deep despair”and hopefully lead to a reduction of violence of both the “colonizer and the colonized.”19 In any case, it bears repeating that the boycott represents a non-violent alternative route to oppose a regime which many people outside of Israel see as itself terrorist.

Conclusion

Israeli goals in the occupied territories have always aimed at possession and absorption of these lands. Israeli behavior, colonialist and oppressive, follows from this fact. One can verify this for oneself by going to any of the human rights organizations that document Israeli policy in the territories, including Israeli organizations, and simply trace the actions of the occupier from 1967 onward. With the advent of the Sharon government and its successors the scale of destruction and brutality has risen to new and shocking levels. As Ilan Pappe has observed, under the leadership of Israel’s most recent Prime Ministers the occupation has become “a horror story of abuse and callousness ....The trend is for worse to come, with a sense of an Israeli government that feels it has a ‘green light’ from the United States to do whatever it wishes in the occupied territories.”

These Israeli leaders have been put into power by an overwhelming majority of Israelis. For instance, in the election of February 2001 Ariel Sharon received 62% of ballots cast. In the January 2003 election the Israeli public reconfirmed

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their allegiance to radical right wing parties, by once more putting these forces in command of the government. After Sharon’s unexpected death the Israeli citizenry chose as their leaders the close associates of Sharon. What this electoral history indicates is that the majority of Israelis are either unwilling or unable to understand the real origins of their own insecurity and the nature of the occupation.

It is under these circumstances that outside pressure becomes the only viable way of encouraging change in Israel. Under normal circumstances one would look to the government of the United States, Israel’s ally and patron, to apply the necessary pressure. However, we all know that American leaders are operating under the same delusions as those of Israel as to the nature of and reasons for the occupation. For instance, the prospect of changing the perceptions of the U.S. Congress on this issue is even less likely than dislodging the expansionists form power in Jerusalem.

This leaves us with the strategy of a grassroots, international movement to boycott Israel at all possible levels: economic, cultural, and academic. Those of us who support this effort are proud of our stand and convinced of its just nature and necessity. And, as this detailed article attests, we are willing to defend it against all who would question its validity or the motives of its participants.

Notes

2. Http://www.pjpo.org?letter_taraki.html 3. Taking just the year 2003 we find that American Zionist groups have launched their own targeted boycotts of the New

York Times, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, and Los Angeles Times, when they believed that those newspapers gave too much attention to the Palestinians. http://www.jewishpeacethread.com/http://www.jfjfp.org/http://www.jewsagainsttheoccupation.org./ 5. “Israelis Feel The Boycott Sting: Creeping Sense of Isolation as Culture, Economy takes hits” http://www.sfgate.com/cgi_bin/article.cgi?file=chronile/archive/2002/08/06/mn33709.dtl 6. Ha’aretz supplement in English, 16 May 2003 http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/shart.jhtml?itemno=293793 7. Z net, 4 February 2003 http://www.Zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=2961&sectionID=22 8. Making reference to the boycott, Tim Shallice, professor at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College, London observed, “Are mainstream [academic and] science organizations in Israel sponsoring fact-finding commissions over Jenin? Are they publishing detailed analyses of what has been happening over the last 18 months in the Occupied Territories? Are they making clear the long-term dangers of colonist policies? If the answer to these questions is Yes, then I am wrong to sign [on].” Http://www.pjpo.org/letter_Shallice.html 9. “No one has of course mention anything about Palestinian freedom of inquiry and the sanctity of the Palestinian academy in this raging debate. What I have to say about this is particularly relevant to Israeli academics, since the vast majority of them have been carrying on their business as usual for the past 35 years oblivious to what is happening to their Palestinian counterparts, not to mention to the Palestinian nation as a whole.” Lisa Taraki, Lecturer at Birzeit University in the West Bank. Http://www.pjpo.org/letter_taraki.html 10. M. Shahid Alam, “The Academic Boycott of Israel,”

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http://www.counterpunch.org/alam0731.html 11. Ilan Pappe, “Arguments in Favor of the Boycott,” http://www.solidarite-palestine.org/rdp-int-030131-html 12. Chronicle of Higher Education, 18 April 2003, p. B13 13. It is to be noted that those few very brave Israelis, both academic and non-academic, who have taken a stand against such policies have not done so because they had access to foreign academics or foreigners per se. 14. These conditions are well documented at Birzeit University’s Right To Education website, ADVANCE \d 4http://right2edu.birzeit.edu 15. A partial list of university presidents who have recently raised their voices against the boycott includes Gilles Patry, University in Ottawa; Amy Guttman, University of Pennsylvania; John Casteen, University of Virginia; Lee Bollinger, Columbia University; Karen Hitchcock, Queens University in Ontario; Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, University of California at Berkeley; Principle Heather Munroe-Blum, McGill University in Montreal; and David Skorton, Cornell University. 16. “The Ivory Tower Behind the Apartheid Wall,” posted at http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article7124.shtml 17. This position is convincingly argued by Melani McAlister in her book Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East 1945-2000 (University of California Press, 2001). See also Michael Lind, “The Weird Men Behind George Bush” (New Statesman, 7 April 2003) 18. The Guardian, 29 April 2003 19. Shahid Alam, ibid. Posted at: http://www.logosjournal.com/issue_6.3/davidson.htm

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