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Boycotting the Jews

(Wall Street Journal-Europe, 29Apr05) Gerald M. Steinberg - In truth, the direct impact of unspecified academic sanctions adopted by the Association of University Teachers (AUT), Britain's largest teachers' union, against the faculty at Bar-Ilan and Haifa universities is likely to be minimal. The quality of Israeli academic research is generally very high, and good work still trumps bad politics, even in the nonsense of "post-colonial," post-modern, and post-Chomsky/Said theory. The real threat, as its authors realize, is not from the direct academic impact, but rather from its broader political objectives. The boycott is only a small part of the broader political war against Israel's legitimacy as a sovereign Jewish state, and the effort to label Israel as the next "apartheid regime" is designed to put an end to Zionism. The use of the apartheid label does a gross injustice to those who suffered under the real thing, and is a form of modern anti-Semitism, this time turning the Jewish state into the devil. This is the real tragedy of the AUT boycott decision - while talking about peace, its backers are actually contributing to war and hatred. The writer directs the Program on Conflict Management and Negotiation at Bar-Ilan University and is the editor of NGO Monitor.
2005-04-29 00:00:00
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