For years, I’ve opposed calls for academic boycotts of Israel. (Here’s one sample and here’s another.) I won’t rehearse all the arguments here. Suffice to say that the life of the mind in universities is irreducibly precious for a deeply challenged civilization that is in so many ways hostile to intellectual life. For all the challenges that universities impose for free thought, all on their own, any decision to restrict academic contacts on any political ground is a case of cutting off a lobe of the brain to spite the face. In a world where many nations impose onerous political conditions on intellectual autonomy, choosing one particular nation’s universities for special opprobrium—especially when discussion in precisely those universities is rambunctious and unimpeded—is flatly wrong.
The State of Israel has just (again) kicked the Palestinians in the head, and demonstrated how deeply it cares to do so that for good measure it has also kicked the Israeli academy in the head. In defiance of Israeli law and the entire Israeli university leadership, Israel’s ministers of education and finance have declared that a college in Ariel, the largest Jewish settlement on the West Bank, is now to be designated an Israeli university and accorded state funds—although under international law it is not located in Israel.
By so doing, the government has taken one more step to normalize the occupation of the West Bank—an occupation that, in their phantasmagorical view, does not exist. Most such steps have to do with property, land theft, water rights, and the like—facts on the ground, as they say. This step displays a new order of overweening, imperial arrogance. Academic autonomy? It will be an Israeli general who takes the final step toward recognizing as a full-fledged university an institution that previously called itself the Ariel University Centre of Samaria.
Israel’s seven university heads opposed this week’s decision, partly on the grounds that a new university is not needed, partly on grounds that budgets are already tight, and partly on the ground that the motive for Ariel’s upgrade in status is flatly political. The government’s Council for Higher Education has a Planning and Budgeting Committee that opposed this decision. But why should such niceties bother a government that proudly wears its contempt for global opinion on its sleeve? For such a government—and, it must be said, for the people who elected it—nothing is so important as an opportunity to humiliate Palestinians in behalf of their Greater Israel lust.
Peretz Lavi, the president of Haifa’s Technion, Israel’s major technological university, said: “This is a black day for the Israeli academy. This is disrespect to the system of high education. It recruits the academy for political purposes, something that never happened before in Israel. The whole idea of ... the Council for Higher Education’s Planning and Budgeting Committee was to create an impassable barrier between politics and the academy.”
According to The Jerusalem Post, “Some protesters held banners showing a divided Star of David with the caption “Don’t let the ‘State of the Settlers’ take over the State of Israel.” But this is precisely what the State of the Settlers has done.
Administering kicks in the head is no doubt precisely their idea. They fan the flames of Israel-hatred. They have kissed the Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions movement that they purport to abhor on both cheeks. They continue to dismantle a dream of decency. They court the apocalypse.
