Newsletter

January 2014

The non-boycott of Israeli science

Elizabeth Redden

When the physicist Stephen Hawking cited the
academic boycott as his reason forcanceling a trip to a conference in Israel
last spring, anop-ed inThe Guardianargued that the famous scientist’s
public stand “hits Israel where it hurts: science.”

“[W]hat winds Israel up is the fact that this
rejection is by a famous scientist and that science and technology drive its
economy," wrote Hilary and Steven Rose, co-founders of the British Committee for
the Universities of Palestine. "Hawking’s decision threatens to open a
floodgate with more and more scientists coming to regard Israel as a pariah
state.”

So far it’s been more of a trickle than a flood. In
the U.S., the academic boycott movement, which is aimed at pressuring Israel to
change its policies vis-à-vis the occupation of the Palestinian territories, has
achieved some symbolically significant victories in the past year. Both the Association
for Asian American Studies and the American
Studies Association backed the boycott against Israeli universities,
followed by the leadership council of the Native
American and Indigenous Studies Association. In science,
however, the boycott movement has so far made comparatively few inroads.

“For us, it’s meaningless,” said Yair Rotstein, the
executive director of the United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF),
which was established in 1972 with an endowment funded by both countries. The
boycott, he said, is something blown up in the media: for all practical
purposes, “there really is no boycott.” Rotstein said that of about 7,000
requests to prospective external reviewers it sends each year, the foundation
gets just one response on average from a scientist declining for political
reasons.

Meanwhile, the BSF grants about $16 million in
awards each year to American and Israeli scientists working on joint projects,
having funded over the years, according to Rotstein, 42 Nobel Laureates. And
since 2012, the BSF has partnered with the National Science Foundation to
support collaborative research in biology, chemistry,computational neuroscience
andcomputer science(The BSF gets an additional $3 million a year from the
Israeli government to support these joint BSF-NSF projects.)

“The relations are widening,” Rotstein said.

“What’s happened in the last 10, 15, 20 years is
that Israeli science has really come into its own,” said Al Teich, a research
professor of science, technology, and international affairs at George Washington
University. Teich is also the former director of science and policy programs at
the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and a member of
BSF’s board.

“The country has become a major scientific power,
disproportionate to the size of the country and the size of the scientific
establishment. Of course there are political ties, emotional ties, between the
U.S. and Israel, but Israeli science is increasingly recognized throughout the
world,” Teich said.

The joint Cornell University-Technion-Israel
Institute of Technology campus being built in New York City was widely seen as
abig step forward for the international reputation of Israeli science. And just
last week Israel achieved recognition as the firstnon-European membernationof
the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, in what Israel’s
science, technology and space ministerhailed inThe Jerusalem Postas a
case of scientific interests trumping political ones: “Israeli science continues
to prove that it has the power to bridge the political disagreements we have
with Europe,” Yaakov Peri said.

Israel is also a participant in the European Union’s
€80 billion (more than $109 billion) research funding program, Horizon 2020. For
months it was unclear whether Israel would be able to join the massive research
program after Israeli officials objected tonew EU guidelinesbarring funding to
entities and projects located outside Israel’s pre-1967 borders, specifically
the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem
The two countries ultimately reacheda compromise late last month, with the EU
determining that it would attach an appendix stating the applicability of its
guidelines while Israel would add its own appendix saying it disagreed with the
guidelines on political and legal grounds.

Steven Rose, the co-author ofThe Guardianop-ed
on Hawking and an emeritus professor of neuroscience at the Open University,
said he saw the EU’s “decision to reassert that it will not support any trading
or research links with Israeli institutions with branches/locations in Occupied
Palestine” – and the forcing of a compromise on this issue – as a positive sign
for the boycott movement.

“[I]t is clear that the boycott campaign is
beginning to bite,” Rose wrote in an email. “Much of it is manifest in quiet
refusals by EU scientists to Israeli invitations. But some is more public.
Witness the [American Studies Association’s] recent boycott vote – very clearly
and succinctly worded.”

Asfar as scienceassociationsgo,however, a
spokeswoman for the largest American-based science association, AAAS, said that
the group has not been approached about participating in the academic boycott
movement. In 2006, the association released a statementcondemning a proposed
boycott resolution on the part of a British faculty union “as antithetical to
the positive role of free scientific inquiry in improving the lives of all
citizens of the world, and in promoting cooperation among nations, despite
political differences.”

The American Physical Society’s Committee on
International Freedom of Scientists issueda statementin July affirming “the
principle of open scientific discourse and cooperation among scientists,
regardless of nationality or political belief” and urging all academic
organizations to refrain from any boycott of science and research.

“Even during the worst days of the former Soviet
Union, we certainly had physicists attend conferences all over the world; we
never did anything in any way to inhibit the communication among scientists,”
said Michael Lubell, the APS’s director of public affairs and the Mark W.
Zemansky professor of physics at the City College of New York.

“Quite the contrary we believe that communication
among scientists can actually advance issues within the foreign policy arena.”

David Klein, a professor of mathematics and director
of the climate science program at California State University at Northridge, is
a member of the organizing collective for the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and
Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI). He doesn’t expect major science
associations to back a boycott resolution any time soon: “the natural sciences
and mathematics community are not very good on this issue,” he said. “There’s a
dedication to Israel that is stronger than maybe in other fields.”

That said, Klein does expect an increasing number of
scientists and mathematicians to individually endorse the boycott. Among the
scholars whohave signed their namesto USACBI’s call are Robert Trivers, a
biologist at Rutgers University and a winner of the prestigious Crafoord Prize,
the physicist Jean Bricmont, of Belgium’s Catholic University of Louvain, and
the mathematician Ivar Ekeland, of the University of British Columbia.

Science’s relative disinterest in the boycott
movement aside, “I think that the ASA endorsement of the academic boycott was
extremely significant and I think it could lead to the normalization of this as
a proposal and eventually maybe a university faculty senate endorsing the
boycott,” Klein said. “But I think there’s an intermediary stepping stone for
that to happen, which is for more student governments to endorse the boycott.
Several already have.”

Samuel M.Edelman, the executive director of the
Center for Academic Engagement and faculty affairs adviser for the Israel on
Campus Coalition, argued, however, that the academic boycott movement has to
date targeted “the low-hanging fruit — easy, susceptible organizations that are
really fairly marginal in academia.”

By contrast there’s not much inclination toward a
boycott, Edelman said, in “the larger professional organizations that have very
strong ties with Israeli colleagues and Israeli institutions, especially in the
STEM fields, in science, technology, engineering, and medicine and also business
and law. There are strong institutional connections and there are many, many
thousands of individual joint faculty research projects between American faculty
and Israeli faculty.”

Supporters of Israeli higher education are pointing
to the many scientific ties in the current fight over the boycott. An ad
campaign against the boycott, scheduled to start today inThe New York Times,has
the headline: "Boycott a Cure for Cancer? Stop Drip Irrigation in Africa?
Prevent Scientific Cooperation Between Nations?" The ad goes on to denounce the
American Studies Association and to highlight research at Israeli universities
that has led to drugs in the United States to treat Alzheimer’s, cancer,
diabetes and multiple sclerosis.

A "U.S.-Israel Innovation Index" released last month
by the U.S.-Israel Science and Technology Foundation attempts to quantify the
scope of research collaboration between the two countries. “As we talk about
U.S.-Israel relationships in light of some of the policies of academic
institutions, the fact that they ought to be focused on is as of 2010, 2,259
co-authored scientific publications came out between the U.S. and Israel,” said
Ann Liebschutz, the foundation’s executive director.

“This is what matters.”

Inside Higher Ed, December 20, 2013.