Today the AUT Council decides whether to leave the boycott policy in place or to rescind it. Boycott supporters have affirmed repeatedly that their sole concern in supporting the boycott is a concern for human rights - the human rights of Palestinians. Critics of the boycott argue that it is hard to understand why just Israeli academics are picked out as the targets of a blacklist if human rights are what this is about, given how many other - and worse - offenders there are when measured by the same criterion. They say that a blacklist of Israeli scholars and teachers is prejudicially selective and aims to demonize Israel within the family of nations.
To this the supporters of the boycott have no adequate answer. All they have are two historical references. The more scurrilous one is Nazi Germany. The other is apartheid South Africa. I believe these both nicely confirm the critics' charge of demonization. I'm not going to sully this blog by engaging with the Nazi Germany parallel. As to apartheid South Africa, not only do the blacklisters conveniently pass over all the many ways, pertaining to human rights, in which Israel is not at all like South Africa, they also pass over the circumstance that in the conflict between the South African state and the majority of South Africa's population there were not two stories, two legitimacies. There was one story - of a racist and oppressive state and society. The story of Israel and the Palestinians is a story of two nations, each with its own legitimate claim to self-determination within its own state, with injustices committed by Israel, and ongoing, against the Palestinians, but also with a denial of Israel's very right to existence from day one and a decades-long war against it, including, most recently, a campaign of murder against its civilians. Some of the boycotters are untroubled by this other side of the story, because they simply don't allow that there is one. Israel is, for them, a pariah and illegitimate nation.
That is what is at stake today.