Newsletter

September 2002

SAFS Statement on Anti-Israel Boycott

July 31, 2002

This spring a petition,
begun by British Professor Steve Rose of The Open University, called for
a European boycott against Israeli cultural, research, and academic institutions
to protest the Israeli government’s policies toward the Palestinians. Last
month, as one expression of the boycott, Professor Mona Baker, of The University
of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST), and the editor
and owner of two academic journals, The Translaterand Translation
Studies Abstracts, fired Israeli professors, Miriam Shlesinger and
Gideon Toury, from the editorial boards of her journals. These actions
are only the most publicized of the anti-Israel boycott. For example,
Honest Reporting(July 21, 2002) announced that “French social scientists
have refused to conduct a peer review of Israeli counterparts, and Norwegian
veterinarians have rejected a request to supply a DNA clone sample to a
Jerusalem research institute.”

SAFS condemns these actions
as contemptible, political attacks that violate academic freedom, diminish
the dignity of the individual, and debase the scholarly process.
Academic freedom means the right to engage in free inquiry – to research,
teach, and otherwise communicate without regard to prevailing doctrine.
To deny academics participation in the normal activities of scholarship,
simply because they work in Israel, is to deprive them of their academic
freedom.

The boycotters fail to distinguish
between the individual and the nation. They refuse to acknowledge
the importance of the individual Israeli’s thoughts, feelings, or accomplishments;
in short, they declare that the individual is of no account except as a
pawn of international conflict.

Excluding Israeli academics
and scientists from the scholarly community weakens science and the search
for truth. The boycott impedes the progress of scholarship, denies
full opportunity to Israeli and Arab students at Israel’s universities,
and hinders, and perhaps destroys, dozens of international projects that
Israelis are involved in with nationals of many countries, including Palestinian
scholars.

The hallmark of science and
scholarship is reasoned debate, based on logic and evidence. Political
boycotts of scholars are antithetical to truth seeking. It is problematic
whether boycotts are effective in achieving even their short-term political
goals, but they are certainly destructive to the growth and application
of knowledge.

Enough harm has been done.
We call on the signers of the anti-Israel boycott to withdraw their support
of it, as did Professor Richard Dawkins, and for the reinstatement of Professors
Shlesinger and Toury to their editorial boards. It is time to end
this disgraceful episode of academic cannibalism.

See
SAFS website for statements by the NAS and the AAUP on this issue.