During 2005 I wrote a fair bit against the proposed academic boycott of Israel (see the links given at the bottom of this post). Since then I have written less about it, mainly because every single argument of the pro-boycotters has been met, and met in spades, and they have no answers to the questions repeatedly put to them. If you want to see how poverty-stricken their case has become, just take a look at the piece by Tom Hickey on the BMJ's website. (The text, sent to me by a friend, is behind a subscription wall except for the first two paragraphs; but the whole of it can be found round at Engage.) It is to highlight how wretched a piece of advocacy Hickey's is that I return to this subject and go over some ground already covered.
To try to mitigate the tedium that may arise from this, I'll begin with an argument of Hickey's which I, at least, haven't previously devoted much space to. It comes in his effort to explain why Israel is picked out by the boycott-itchy with such loving concentration when there are so many other human rights-violating countries, with transgressions of easily comparable or much greater magnitude. Hickey writes:
We are accused of unfairly singling out Israel - the Jewish state - and hence of being anti-semites. We are asked why we do not propose a boycott of other states whose policies are barbaric and inhuman, such as China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, or Zimbabwe.Leave aside for now the accusation of anti-Semitism and the business about 'the merits of each individual case'. I'll come back to both. The essence of Hickey's answer is that Israel may be especially suitable for an academic boycott because of its civilized values and high regard for education, such as other places of obscurantist darkness do not respect and possess. The Israelis, in short, might be movable where China, Iran, Zimbabwe are not.But whether a boycott is appropriate in such places depends on the merits of each individual case. In the case of Israel, we are speaking about a society whose dominant self image is one of a bastion of civilisation in a sea of medieval reaction. And we are speaking of a culture, both in Israel and in the long history of the Jewish diaspora, in which education and scholarship are held in high regard. That is why an academic boycott might have a desirable political effect in Israel, an effect that might not be expected elsewhere.
I cannot remember when I last saw so craven, self-serving and merely convenient an argument as this: the impulse of solidarity scaled back so that you don't need to express or mobilize it in support of the victims of the most oppressive tyrannies. Just picture Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch reorienting their work according to this method: henceforth they will speak out on behalf of people wronged in democratic countries, where their work is most likely to be effective; they will not exercise themselves to help anyone languishing in the concentration camps and jails, or suffering in the torture chambers, of the most vicious regimes. Craven to utter it - that we should exercise ourselves only on behalf of those for whom there may be more hope. Self-serving to say - as he almost certainly does not believe - that the victims whose case presents the most hopeless prospect are to be abandoned by the rest of us.
And then merely convenient. Merely convenient because what is the country, and what the campaign, most commonly adverted to by the boycott-itchy in the way of comparison with Israel? Yes, you've got it in one: apartheid South Africa and the anti-apartheid campaign. You can take it as read that all of those who now press for an academic boycott of Israel - to a man, woman, and 'anti-Zionist' groupthink junkie - either did support, or would have supported (had they been of an age then), the academic boycott targeting South African universities and academics. Many of them are in the habit of saying, when it suits them, that Israel is very like apartheid South Africa. Apartheid South Africa, however, was a bastion, not of those humane civilized values which (we are now told by Hickey) make Israel a particularly relishable target for boycott, but of overt, official, legalized racism. Why did the logic suggesting softer, more pliable targets not apply back then? Or why, to put the same thing differently, doesn't that former willingness to take on a regime not especially receptive to civilized values apply now to places like Zimbabwe, China, Sudan? The answer is that it doesn't apply because Hickey's logic here is one of mere convenience: it's a matter of knowing who you want to boycott and finding an argument that will home in just on them.
A quick round-up, now, of his other arguments.
First, he says that whether boycotts are appropriate for anywhere else than Israel depends on 'the merits of each individual case'. The only trouble is, he doesn't, and won't, discuss the merits of any other case. As I've said before, the boycott-itchy proceed by the non-comparative method: they tell you about Israel's faults - as Hickey does here and which are genuine: the occupation, the settlements - but they never make comparative reference to, for example, the numbers of people now starving (including, some of them, to death) in Zimbabwe, or those tens of thousands murdered, raped, displaced in Darfur, or indeed anything or anywhere else. To do so would unsettle their case.
Second, he varnishes the campaign for an academic boycott of Israel as being merely 'a proposal to debate the appropriateness' of a boycott. Hogwash. Hickey evidently never heard about the way in which setting an agenda, what you put on it and what you leave off it, may itself have an influence upon outcomes. He hasn't yet risen to the insight that even discussing something, and the terms in which it is discussed, can sometimes be prejudicial to one or another party that the discussion involves. The trade union of British academics just keeps having to discuss an academic boycott of Israel and of no other place.
Third, Hickey speaks of an accusation against the boycott supporters of anti-Semitism, and asserts that this can't be right since there are Jews amongst their number. The point has been explained now many times. No serious-minded person thinks support for an academic boycott of Israel shows that the person whose support it is must be an anti-Semite. However, a policy can be anti-Semitic in its consequences even if many or most, or even all, of those pushing for it are not personally antagonistic towards Jews. This is something recognized as elementary in relation to every other kind of racism. Racism doesn't reside only in overt prejudice or hatred. Institutions and practices can be racist, use of language can secrete racist assumptions which the language-user isn't even aware of, and so forth. Opponents of the boycott repeatedly call upon those who support it to give a reason individuating Israel as a country uniquely worthy of being boycotted. No one seems able to oblige - so we who oppose the boycott say that the Jewish state and the mainly Jewish academics within it are to be targeted without good reason, and alone amongst all the countries and academics of the world. The policy is anti-Semitic in consequence. The boycott brigade have no answer to this, so they just keep banging on as if someone has charged them, personally, with harbouring anti-Semitic attitudes.
The fact, moreover, that there are Jews amongst the boycotters proves nothing one way or the other about whether a boycott of Israeli universities and academics would be anti-Semitic - as you can see from the short paragraph here beginning 'Imagine a policy...'
Fourth, Hickey complains that the charge of anti-Semitism is 'offensive'. With the explanation having just been repeated here, yet once more, about the real meaning of that charge, all I want to say to this is - ahhh, diddums. The boycott-itchy are happy to have their Israeli colleagues treated as global pariahs; nothing offensive about that. But if you criticize their policy whose effect it would be, they who favour the policy are going to be offended - they're ever so sensitive. The little diddums.
Fifth, and last, Hickey says that 'doing nothing (or nothing effective), would... make us complicit'. It takes us back to 'First', does it not? Content to be complicit, at least through his union, in every other kind of national occupation, oppression, human rights problem, Hickey is worried only about complicity with Israeli wrongdoing.
What a miserable farrago of special pleading the politics of the academic boycott has become. (Thanks: AC.)
[For what it's worth, you can vote in a BMJ poll on this here and see the way the votes are stacking up here.]