Part 1. In the first post in this series, I argued that the AUT boycotters aren't really troubled by the fact that the boycott transgresses principles of academic and intellectual freedom. They concede as much either (and in truth mostly) by not bothering to respond to criticism on these grounds at all, or now and again explicitly, by saying that norms of academic freedom have to give way to other considerations. The other considerations, of course, though formulated variously, are the wrongs perpetrated by Israel against the Palestinian people, centring mainly on Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and the policies associated with enforcing it.
However, those of us opposing the boycott have pointed out its arbitrary and selective nature in targeting Israeli academics alone - as my friend Eve Garrard said on this blog, 'boycott[ing] Israel, rather than those countries whose human rights failures outrank Israel's by orders of magnitude, such as China, Sudan, North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Russia, Zimbabwe, Congo and many others...' (See also here.) Do the boycotters have a compelling answer to this criticism? If they do, they've been keeping it to themselves.
One type of answer that has been tried - by Sue Blackwell, Keele AUT, and a speaker at one of the meetings I participated in - appeals to what might be called, loosely, procedural criteria, rather than substantive ones: the AUT should boycott Israeli academics because it has been called upon to do so by Palestinian organizations, including the AUT's sister organization. But this cannot be a self-sufficient, free-standing justification; it would require us (absurdly) to boycott anyone if called upon to do so by someone. There needs to be a substantive justification that points to Israeli academics, and them only, as appropriate targets of boycott. In this connection I have also heard it said that perhaps the reason we're contemplating a boycott of Israeli, and not, say, Chinese universities, is simply that nobody has brought a resolution to the AUT for a boycott of Chinese universities. But this, too, pushes the question back to the substance of the issue: why is it that nobody in the AUT is concerned enough about human rights abuses in China and Russia, and the various other countries mentioned by Eve, to bring forward such resolutions to blacklist the academics of those countries as well? Why are AUT boycott supporters focused so exclusively on one country?
In all that I've read and heard, the response - such as it is - to this question has been bald and simple. It consists of listing the wrongs, injustices and crimes (real or alleged) for which Israel is responsible... and that's it. As if the case for special, negative treatment of Israeli scholars and teachers makes itself, provided you speak only about Israel and say nothing else about anywhere else. In other words, no comparative data: whatever you do, don't mention Russia in Chechnya, or China in Tiananmen Square and Tibet, or Sudan in Darfur where tens of thousands of people have been killed (to speak only of killed), or other countries in the Middle East itself which do not, by and large, have a glowing record on human rights. You could think here also about Iraq: at the time of the Saddam Hussein regime, when over a period of more than two decades you might have been looking at an average killing rate of 10,000 a year; or since the Iraq war and on the assumption that most of the boycott's supporters opposed it. Did the AUT ever move towards blacklisting Iraqi academics then, during the time of Saddam? Do any of the boycotters, now, argue for a boycott of US and UK universities?
None of this is addressed in the arguments of those supporting the boycott of Israeli universities, except, as I've already said, by their passing it over in silence. Can silence be a persuasive argument in the matter? It obviously can't; no more than it would be persuasive to 'argue' that there is no injustice in Israel's continued occupation of the West Bank by simply not speaking about the occupation. The proponents of the boycott, it seems, have no substantive case they feel able to articulate.
Part 2. A particularly notable example of the double standard involved in the thinking behind the AUT boycott may be found in the following passage from an article by Hilary and Steven Rose, writing in last week's THES (subscription only). They say:
Apart from a handful of brave dissidents, the community [i.e. the Israeli academic community] is silent. There is no equivalent anger to that of British academia's reaction to the illegal Iraq war. Indeed, in response to the European call for a moratorium, launched in 2002, inviting researchers not to collaborate with colleagues at Israeli universities in making research bids, the universities were swift to set up a joint committee to resist what they called an academic boycott. Those in the Israeli academic community do not consider freedom to be indivisible: the only freedom most seem to care about is their own.I leave aside the factual content of this passage, to focus on its self-serving logic. For note that 'British academia' is implicitly exonerated here collectively - presumably, therefore, to remain a boycott-free zone - because there were many critics of 'the illegal Iraq war' among academics in this country. But as the Roses are all too well aware, the intended AUT boycott against Israeli universities isn't to operate entirely collectively; it makes exception for those Israeli academics who speak out against the policies of the Israeli government. Why, then, shouldn't those British academics who were supporters of the Iraq war be the objects of a blacklisting exercise from, say, France or Russia - with exception made for all the good anti-war academics (like the Roses)?
One may go further. Hilary and Steven Rose, and other AUT members who think like they do, are ready to cut off their counterparts in Israel from the normal courtesies, facilities and benefits of academic cooperation. But by the logical failure just identified, they spare those of their British colleagues who did not and do not speak out against 'the illegal Iraq war', or indeed who have been in favour of it, the same prejudicial treatment. How two senior academics, with all the training and experience within their respective disciplines they must possess, can have missed the obvious parallels there are for them here is at first baffling. But when you see it close up, as applied not now to the somewhat distant scholars and teachers of Haifa or Tel Aviv, but to colleagues in Oxford, London, Manchester, Glasgow, you can observe how poisonous is the policy being recommended by the boycotters. By their own lights they should be calling for French and Russian academic associations to blacklist British academics who either supported the war in Iraq or did not speak out, or speak out sufficiently loudly, against it. And they themselves should be blacklisting such people: refusing to participate in conferences with them; refusing to referee research applications coming from colleagues with the 'wrong' views; declining to adjudicate articles by them or to consider them for appointments.
The failure of logic by the Roses in this THES article is perhaps, therefore, understandable after all. Close up, the boycott policy cannot be contemplated; the disgrace to the profession, to the calling of academics and intellectuals, is too blatant. When it is moved further away, so that the act - the blacklisting of others for their views - becomes more 'mediated', the mind contemplating it can more easily get by.