Studies in Antisemitism

The University, Free Speech, and BDS

Doron S. Ben-Atar, Andrew Pessin, Doron S. Ben-Atar, Andrew Pessin

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780253034106
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia ebraica

Many scholars have endured the struggle against rising anti-Israel sentiments on college and university campuses worldwide. This volume of personal essays documents and analyzes the deleterious impact of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement on the most cherished Western institutions. These essays illustrate how anti-Israelism corrodes the academy and its treasured ideals of free speech, civility, respectful discourse, and open research. Nearly every chapter attests to the blurred distinction between anti-Israelism and antisemitism, as well as to hostile learning climates where many Jewish students, staff, and faculty feel increasingly unwelcome and unsafe. Anti-Zionism on Campus provides a testament to the specific ways anti-Israelism manifests on campuses and considers how this chilling and disturbing trend can be combatted.

I. SCHOLARS’ ESSAYS

1

BDS and Self-Righteous Moralists

Dan Avnon

Dan Avnon tells of his experience with the BDS movement in Australia. His political work for equality and human rights for all citizens of Israel notwithstanding, he became the target of a very public, if personal, boycott by the director of the University of Sydney’s Center for Peace Studies, just because he is an Israeli. This episode demonstrates that the peaceful, social justice declarations of the BDS movement are disingenuous, that BDS targets all Jewish Israelis as part of its program to ultimately end Israel’s existence. Avnon highlights how overreaction to the incident by the anti-BDS legal organization Shurat HaDin actually undermined the opposition to BDS and criticizes the self-righteous moralism that has come to dominate the discourse of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

IN THE COURSE of the years 2012–2014, I was subject to the actions of the Sydney chapter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, led by a University of Sydney faculty member, Professor Jake Lynch. For Lynch and his associates, I was an embodied representation of Israel, a country whose policies they detest and whose scholars and scientists they boycott.

I had not previously been singled out for boycott merely because of my being a Jewish-Israeli scholar and surely had never been boycotted by the left-wing edges of political activism, whereas ironically, in Israel, I have occasionally been condemned by academic and nonacademic self-anointed Jewish and patriotic zealots. The novelty of this experience—being boycotted due to my national identity and organizational affiliation—is in the backdrop of my reflections.

I will address two aspects of my BDS experiences. First, I’ll explain how by subjecting me to their propaganda, leaflets, and demonstrations, the BDS activists enabled me to realize that their actual goal is to end Israel’s existence as an independent Jewish state. That’s the political aspect. Second, my experiences during the two years of having my image formed and used by various political players provided me with an opportunity to reflect on an attendant dimension of the situation: the morality of protagonists from both pro- and anti-BDS sides of the divide. From this perspective, I’ll raise some initial speculations about an overlooked political vice and its harmful effects: self-righteous moralism.¹ I will relate a few episodes that cause or lead me to suggest that self-righteousness may be a particular sensation (of self) that transforms potentially sensitive and sensible people into insensitive and dogmatic champions of absolute justice: self-made, if you will.

The Background

I heard about the faculty exchange fellowship of the Sir Zelman Cowen Universities Fund, which supports exchanges between the University of Sydney and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in a chance encounter with a colleague who had been a recipient of this fellowship. It was on a late Thursday afternoon, and the deadline for application was less than a week away. Since I had no prior contacts in Australia, I perused the University of Sydney’s website, seeking scholars who would perhaps be interested in sponsoring my application for this grant. I then dashed off a rather hurried email to five unwitting colleagues. Four of them, all senior scholars at the University of Sydney, responded within a couple of hours, agreeing to my using their names on my application form. A fifth, the director of the University of Sydney’s Center for Peace and Conflict Studies, Jake Lynch, who, unbeknownst to me, was a zealous supporter of the BDS movement, sent me a surprising response.²

Here are the transcripts of my email correspondence with Lynch.³ The time listed is Israeli local time.

Nov. 16, 2012 02:02

Dear Professor Lynch:

I apologise for dropping into your inbox without an introduction. I am the former Head of the Federmann School of Public Policy and Governance at the Hebrew University, and a political theorist at the Department of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In my political philosophy niche I specialise in the philosophy of Martin Buber.

I will be on sabbatical leave during the 2013–14 academic year. I would like to spend time in Australia to learn about Australia’s civic education policy and curriculum. This is an area of research (and of active, hands-on curriculum development) that has been at the core of my work in the past decade. This work included the writing and implementation of Israel’s only (State-sanctioned) program in civics written for joint Jewish-Arab, religious/non-religious high-school kids.

I intend to devote my sabbatical to a comparative study of civic education in societies undergoing demographic (and consequently cultural) changes.

As part of my sabbatical I would like to come to Sydney for two months in 2014 to work on this research. I was alerted today to the possibility of applying to a Hebrew University–University of Sydney fellowship that would fund part of my stay at the University. The application deadline is tomorrow. So, I am working frenetically to get this done on time.

My (embarrassingly urgent) request is: can I mention you as a contact person at your university? I have gone through the list of faculty and schools at the University of Sydney, and you seem to be a colleague whom I would like to meet when I am there. This courtesy will enable me to apply.

Attached are the application forms, partially completed. I attach them so that you can see who I am (academically). No need for you to do anything with or about them.

Thank you for your attention. I hope that you can reply “yes” and this will enable me to complete the application and hope for the best.

Best wishes,

Dan Avnon

Nov. 16, 2012 04:23

Dear Professor Avnon,

Thank you for your email, no apologies necessary.

Indeed, it is I who must apologize to you, for I am bound, by our Center’s policy, to decline your request. My apology to you is on a personal level, for neither I nor the Center have anything against you—and your research sounds interesting and worthwhile. However, we are supporters of the campaign of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, and that includes the call for an academic boycott of Israeli universities.

I have attached the letter I wrote to the University Vice Chancellor, after a meeting of my Center’s governing Council, and a separate meeting open to the whole university community, when we adopted the policy—along with his response.

Our Center’s policy is not the policy of the University, as you will see, but it does foreclose our entering into any such arrangements as you propose.

Yours sincerely, Jake

Associate Professor Jake Lynch

BA, Dip Journalism Studies, PhD

Director, Center for Peace and Conflict Studies

I sent the email late at night (02:02), and Lynch’s reply arrived at 04:23, when I was asleep. When I opened my inbox a few hours later, I found his response. Since the response was written in what seemed to be personal terms—“on a personal level, for neither I nor the Center have anything against you”—I naively assumed that this was indeed a personal communication and that a person-to-person response was in order. Hence my reply:

Nov. 16, 2012 11:02

Dear Jake (if I may),

I had no idea that this is your stand, and that the specific fellowship to which I am applying is a symbol of what you oppose!

I hope to have the opportunity to discuss this issue with you. As an opening comment, I find it ironic . . . [that for you I am] a symbol of all that you find reprehensible. It is ironic because like myself, many (probably most) [Israeli] intellectuals and scholars in relevant fields are doing our best to effect change in Israeli political culture. We pay prices for going against the institutional grain. And then we turn around and meet such a “blind to the person” policy.

One common tendency that must be changed if we ever want to live sane lives is to debunk categorical and stereotypical thinking when dealing with human beings. I attach an article that I wrote precisely on this issue.⁴ You need not read beyond the first two pages. The gist of what I have to say about this is there.

There is so much to be said about this thorny issue (between principle and practice). . . . Should I have the good fortune of receiving this fellowship and coming to Sydney, perhaps we’ll meet (personally) and explore fresh looks at the principled position that you outlined in your letter.

Best personal wishes,

Dan

Lynch never responded to my email. I later learned from University of Sydney colleagues that within a few minutes of sending his reply to me he had sent a copy of my request and his response to a host of recipients, apparently to gain credit for his ability to boycott Israelis. As for me, I filed this correspondence and went on with my life, for a very short while.

In late November 2012, a week after my nondialogical exchange with Lynch, I was contacted by an Australian journalist, Christian Kerr of the Australian, who was writing a story about Lynch’s decision to boycott me. From the moment of front-page publication of Kerr’s report on December 6, 2012, Lynch’s decision to publicize my personal request and to trumpet it as his anti-Israel catch of the year created for me a public persona with a life of its own. What attracted attention in Australia and elsewhere was the fact that Lynch had chosen to boycott a scholar whose work proactively promoted civic equality in Israel between majority Jews and minority Palestinian-Israeli Arabs. This curious choice helped anti-BDS activists point to deep contradictions between BDS claims to promote social justice in Israel on the one hand and boycotting someone associated with that very activity on the other hand.

From the distance of my Jerusalem computer, it seemed to me that Lynch’s actions had backfired. The dean of the University of Sydney’s Faculty of Humanities, Professor Duncan Iveson, stood up for the basic values that underpin scholarly exchange and scientific research.⁵ Various items in the Australian press indicated that, by and large, the BDS movement was a marginal, peripheral fringe group. Many Australian citizens, scholars, and a few public figures wrote to me private emails with touching messages of support, expressing their disdain for BDS activism and their objection to the use of university positions as bully pulpits. This sentiment seemed prevalent and prevailed until the ill-advised intervention of Shurat HaDin, an international organization that decided to press legal charges against Lynch. The Shurat HaDin interference led to a reversal in the tide of public sentiment. I’ll address this aspect of my experiences shortly.

At this point, I want to present arguments that seem to me sufficient to convince readers that BDS is a dishonest project that may be misleading well-intentioned activists to adopt practices that result in unintended, harmful consequences. Following the presentation of my position regarding the BDS movement, I’ll turn to a directly related and troubling issue: the use of this case by nationalistic Israeli activists as an opportunity to attack my work in promoting democratic civic education in Israel and—from a different quarter—to use my case in an ill-advised manner to delegalize Lynch and his BDS ilk. The two parts of my report are linked by my characterizing the actions of leading activists on all sides of the BDS debate as self-righteous moralists. This feature is relevant to a principled study of civic activism, beyond the context of this particular skirmish.

Why I Oppose the BDS Movement: Their Deceptive Goals

There are many reasoned and, at times, passionate discourses against the BDS movement.⁶ I won’t try to summarize these claims; they are readily available to anyone with access to the internet and to university libraries and databases. I’ll highlight my impression that the activities of the academic boycotters are, in fact, part of a broader and deeply troubling agenda to undermine the very existence of Israel.

Let’s begin with the BDS movement’s declared goals. Without delving into the intricacies of the BDS program, the summary of its goals is as follows: “Ending [Israel’s] occupation and colonization of all Arab lands occupied in June 1967 and dismantling the Wall; recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and respecting, protecting, and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution 194.”⁷

The goals seem to be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction and Overview: The Silencing / Andrew Pessin and Doron S. Ben-Atar
• I. Scholars’ Essays
• II. Students’ Essays
• III. Concluding Thoughts
• Index
• Back Cover