"I WILL GO TO EDINBURGH"

Robert Moss

Here is my response to AUT. I am slated to speak at a symposium at the University of Edinburgh in August. I will take a few moments at the beginning of my presentation to deplore the boycott from the lectern.

"As a chair professor at a major U.S. University, and as a member of the American Association of University Professors, I wish to express my outrage at the one-sided, anti-Israel and anti-Semitic resolution adopted (without debate) by the AUT..

"I will henceforth refuse to review scientific papers originating in the U.K., and will recommend that my colleagues take a similar stance. It is of course unfair to penalize all British academics for the stupidity of some of their colleagues, but until those who claim to speak for them come to their senses (not to say reclaim their integrity) and rescind this racist resolution, I feel that I have no other way to effectively express my protest."

Regarding the AUT recent decision to boycott Haifa University and Bar Ilan University in Israel, I am shocked to learn that, in addition to a call for boycott, the AUT is ready to offer a waiver to scholars on condition that they publicly state their willingness to conform to the political orthodoxy espoused by the academics who sponsored your motion.

Oaths of political loyalty do not belong to academia. They belong to illiberal minds and repressive regimes. Based on this, the AUT's definition of academic freedom is the freedom to agree with its views only. Given the circumstances, I wish to express in no uncertain terms my unconditional and undivided solidarity with both universities and their faculties. I know many people, both at Haifa University and at Bar Ilan University, of different political persuasion and from different walks of life. The diversity of those faculties reflects the authentic spirit of academia. The AUT invitation to boycott them betrays that spirit because it advocates a uniformity of views, under pain of boycott.

In solidarity with my colleagues and as a symbolic gesture to defend the spirit of a free academia, I wish to be added to the boycott blacklist. Please include me. I hope that other colleagues of all political persuasions will join me.

Cover for a deeper prejudice by Ed Morgan

This week Britain's umbrella academics' union, the Association of University Teachers (AUT) voted to boycott two Israeli universities. It seems that while British physicians still take the Hippocratic oath, doctors in other fields are taking a hypocritical one. As Alan Dershowitz notes elsewhere on this page, the campaign resurrected a more limited version of a motion that failed at the AUT two years ago, which called for a boycott of all Israeli institutions.

Last spring I began a sabbatical year from the University of Toronto, where I teach international law and Canadian constitutional law, by teaching at Haifa University -- one of the two targeted institutions. I can say first hand that the reasons for the boycott seem so off-base it is hard to believe that they are anything but camouflage for a deeper prejudice. Indeed, the moving force behind the AUT motion, Birmingham University lecturer Sue Blackwell, gave away the poorly kept secret when she explained that Israelis, being, well, Israeli, simply "cannot expect to be treated as normal citizens from a normal state." Articulating a falsehood that would astonish anyone who has ever had the bruising experience of arguing a position -- any position -- in an Israeli institution, she declared that, "You cannot talk about academic freedom and free debate in Israel in the same way you can talk about it in the U.K."...

The embargo against Haifa University was apparently prompted by a letter written by Ilan Pappe, a historian, who says he was mistreated by the university when he supported a student's master's thesis that claimed that Jewish forces massacred Arab civilians during the 1948 war. The letter, which was circulated to the AUT before the vote, omitted that the student himself subsequently retracted the claim and conceded that the evidence for it simply was not there. Of course, the letter also didn't say -- because it goes without saying -- that Dr. Pappe enjoys sufficient freedom of expression to allow him to advocate for an international boycott of the very university that employs him.

Moreover, Haifa is hardly the first place that one would expect Israel's detractors to look. I can assure readers that my own course, International Criminal Law, prompted the most freewheeling discussions of terrorism and civil rights, from virtually every possible ideological perspective, that I have experienced anywhere. Arabs comprise roughly 20% of the Haifa student body -- about the same percentage as in the Israeli population at large -- and were as vocal in classroom debate as their Jewish counterparts were with them and, for that matter, with each other. I have taught this material in North American, East African, and European universities; almost inevitably, one side of the political divide is in vogue and will expound its position at length, while another side is too chilled to articulate itself at all. Haifa was, in my experience, the notable exception.

As for the faculty, whatever the AUT may think, the dominant viewpoint is distinctly to the left of the political spectrum. Several law professors volunteer their time with Adullah, the country's largest Arab litigation clinic located in a village near Haifa. Others that I met spend their time advocating the property rights of the country's disposed, or theorizing about the role of the state in regulating the workplace or in administering sharia law courts for the Muslim community. Constitutional law, as it happens, is taught at Haifa University by a cadre of young lecturers armed with doctorates from the University of Toronto and deeply imbued with Canadian multicultural sensitivities and the ethic of the Charter of Rights. International law and criminal law, perhaps the two fields most central to the legal context of the Middle East conflict, are both taught by Palestinians to Israeli students, not the other way around.

Haifa University, like all human institutions, is not perfect. It may or may not have admonished Dr. Pappe unjustifiably. But to express solidarity for one lecturer and his student by boycotting, and thereby undermining, all lecturers and their students, is a fallacy that should have given pause to even the most zealous AUT members.

As a final note, the university's commitment to equity has caused it to experiment with progressive admissions policies for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. One such program aims at admitting students to law school from Israel's struggling Ethiopian community. As a consequence, one is likely to have more visible minority students in a Haifa U. class than in any Canadian law school class. But, of course, one feature of the AUT motion is that it levels the field. All students and faculty, whether Jewish, Muslim or Christian, or white, black or brown, have one thing in common: they are from Israel, and thus are to be boycotted.

Saad al-Din Ibrahim is one of Egypt's foremost sociologists and founder of the respected Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies at the American University of Cairo. He is also an outspoken pro-democracy activist who in 2000 dared to criticize President Hosni Mubarak's reported intention to install his son Gamal as his successor. Professor Ibrahim was peremptorily sentenced to seven years of hard labor and his center was shut down and ransacked. He was released three years later as a result of heavy American pressure.

Professor Hashem Aghajari is a prominent Iranian historian and political dissident. In 2002 he was convicted of blasphemy and sentenced to death for stating that people should not blindly follow the teaching of religious leaders. The verdict was reaffirmed in May 2004, only to be commuted shortly afterward to five years in prison in response to mass student demonstrations throughout Iran. As he was freed on bail on July 31, 2004, a tearful Aghajari told reporters, "I hope there will come a day when no one goes to prison in Iran for his opinions, let alone be sentenced to death."

As a longstanding member of the British Association for University Teachers (AUT), I cannot recall a single motion to boycott Egypt or Iran for these appalling human rights violations. Nor, for that matter, do I recall the AUT lifting a finger to ease the abysmal denial of academic freedoms and human rights in the Middle East, where repressive leaders supersede state institutions, where citizenship is largely synonymous with submission, and where physical force constitutes the main instrument of political discourse...