Academic Freedom and the Boycott of Israeli Universities: On
the Necessity of Angry Knowledge
Conor McCarthy, Conor McCarthy
College Literature, Volume 43, Number 1, Winter 2016, pp. 264-274 (Review)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
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https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2016.0003
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COLLEGE LITERATURE: A JOURNAL OF CRITICAL LITERARY STUDIES 43.1 Winter 2016
Print ISSN 0093-3139 E-ISSN 1542-4286
© Johns Hopkins University Press and West Chester University 2016
REVIEW ESSAY
ACADEMIC FREEDOM AND THE BOYCOTT OF
ISRAELI UNIVERSITIES: ON THE NECESSITY OF
ANGRY KNOWLEDGE
CONOR McCARTHY
Dawson, Ashley, and Bill V. Mullen, eds. 2015. Against Apartheid:
The Case for Boycotting Israeli Universities. Chicago: Haymarket.
$19.95 sc. 300 pp.
Nelson, Cary, and Gabriel Noah Brahm, eds. 2015. The Case
Against Academic Boycotts of Israel. Chicago: MLA Members for
Scholars’ Rights. $34.99 sc. 552 pp.
Lim, Audrea, ed. 2012. The Case for Sanctions Against Israel.
London: Verso. $14.95 sc. 244 pp.
Bilgrami, Akeel, and Jonathan Cole, eds. 2015. Who’s Afraid of
Academic Freedom? New York: Columbia University Press. $35.00
hc. 448 pp.
I should begin this essay by declaring my own background in the discussion.
I am a long-time activist in Palestine solidarity, having been a founding
member of both the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign in 2001 and of
Academics for Palestine, an Irish group working for the academic boycott,
Conor McCarthy | REVIEW ESSAY 265
in 2014. I have moved from a position of doubt and unease in regard to the
academic boycott to one of commitment to it.
What is the history or background of the boycott movement? It is
a subset of the wider campaign for “BDS” or “boycott, divestment and
sanctions”—that is, in favor of boycotting Israeli institutions, divesting
from Israeli companies, and sanctioning the state until it ceases the
Occupation, accepts its obligations to the Palestinian people, and
acknowledges its responsibilities vis-à-vis the refugees of 1948 and 1967.
Various ineective and controversial attempts were made in the United
Kingdom as far back as 2002 to instigate boycott of Israeli scholars or
institutions. However, the modern BDS campaign has its origin in the call
issued in 2005 by a wide array of organizations in Palestinian civil society.
The broader context of the call was the collapse of the Oslo peace process
of the 1990s and the second intifada, which began in September 2000. The
recognition of Oslo’s aws, and the awareness that these aws stemmed
in part from the corruption and failure of the Palestinian leadership
(embodied in such senior gures in Fatah as Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud
Abbas), was matched by the realization that violent action by guerrilla
groups, secular or Islamist, was neither militarily eective nor politically
sustainable in the face of Israeli civilian casualties. More specically, the
BDS call was deliberately issued exactly a year after the International
Court of Justice’s Advisory Opinion on the West Bank Wall, or “separation
barrier.” The Advisory Opinion placed obligations on the governments of
third countries, but as soon as it became apparent that these governments
were not going to take any action regarding the wall, the necessity of civil
society action was clear.
In other words, the BDS campaign derives from the realization that
politics traditionally conceived had failed Palestinian society and indeed—
insofar as the Oslo process installed security apparatuses while not adding
to the security of the Palestinian population, and insofar as it did not
prevent the expansion of settlement activity and other iniquitous elements
of the Occupation—that the “peace process” was actually functioning (as
it does to this day) as a g leaf for further Israeli conquest.
The new action was to come from “civil society” and to appeal to both
the Palestinian people and international opinion over the heads of the
outmoded, corrupt, and comprador Palestinian political elite. On July 9,
2005, the call went out from “representatives of Palestinian civil society” to
“international civil society organizations and people of conscience all over
the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives
against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era”
(Lim 2012, 24). This pressure was to be maintained until Israel honored
266 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 43.1 Winter 2016
its obligation to recognize “the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to
self-determination,” and meet its obligations under international law by
ceasing its occupation and colonization of Arab lands and by dismantling
the Wall; by according Palestinian citizens of Israel full legal equality;
and by respecting, protecting, and promoting the rights of Palestinian
refugees under UN Resolution 194.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that the BDS initiative has been
the most successful campaign regarding Palestine in the last decade or
more. Where the Obama administration, with the support of the Quartet,
has repeatedly tried to restart the “peace process” and been stymied
largely by the stubbornness and arrogance of Israeli governments led by
Benjamin Netanyahu, BDS has grown from being the marginal preserve
of dedicated and committed activists to something much larger, wider,
and more mainstream. That mainstreaming is evidenced, for example,
when US Secretary of State John Kerry, in frustration as the latest talks
initiative broke down in 2014, warned Israel that if it does not make
concrete moves towards peace and a two state solution it might nd itself
subject to boycott.
Within the BDS movement, the academic boycott has attained increasing
success, as well as eliciting frequently erce and often unprincipled
reaction from Israel’s “friends” in the American and European academy.
These poles of success and controversy are best represented by the vote
at the annual meeting of the Association for American Studies in 2013 in
favor of the academic boycott, and by Steven Salaita’s loss of a position he
had just been oered at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
in 2014.
The politics of universities, no matter how closeted, always sits in some
dynamic, occasionally belated, relationship with ideas and politics in the
“real world.” Of course in this case, the matter of boycott has intruded
directly into the realm of higher learning itself. There it encounters
various conceptions of the role of the university, of the functions and
responsibilities of pedagogy and research in both civil and political
society. Unsurprisingly, this has produced an increasing ow of writing
both academic and political, insofar as one can distinguish between the
two. In hand here are four volumes which represent various elements of
the debate: The Case for Sanctions Against Israel, edited by Audrea Lim and
published by Verso in 2012; The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel,
edited by Cary Nelson and Gabriel Noah Brahm, published by MLA
Members for Scholars’ Rights in 2015; Who’s Aaid of Academic Freedom?
edited by Akeel Bilgrami and Jonathan Cole, also published this year
by Columbia University Press; and most recently, Against Apartheid: The
Conor McCarthy | REVIEW ESSAY 267
Case for Boycotting Israeli Universities, edited by Ashley Dawson and Bill V.
Mullen, and published this fall by Haymarket. Space prevents me from
commenting on or describing every element of each book, so I will be
selective but also as fair as I can.
Articles in these volumes seem to me to comprise two broad types.
Firstly, there are those that analyze the Israeli machinery of domination—
colonization, militarization, checkpoints, Jews-only roads, settlement
construction, the Wall, military operations (Cast Lead, Protective Edge),
resource appropriation (water, land), and so on, on the critical side; and
those that make the case for Israel’s democracy, embattlement, liberal
values, its history of alleged persecution and invasion by its neighbors, by
those (mostly in the Nelson and Brahm volume) who seek to “defend” the
Jewish state. Secondly, there are those that address boycott as such. To this
reviewer, it is the latter essays that are of the greatest interest here.
To say this may seem heartless; or blind to the “discipline of detail” (in
Edward Said’s Foucauldian idiom) that is the operation of the Occupation;
or blind to the long history of anti-Semitism of which the boycott is, in
the eyes of Israel’s “defenders,” the culmination. But it seems to me that
those arguments, important and content-rich as they may be, are in this
context a sideline. For the fact is that the analysis of Israeli settler-co-
lonialism, or the argument for the central status of the long history of
Jew-hatred, operate as sucient but not necessary occasions for the debate
about boycott. These arguments are important, but they would take place
irrespective of the argument about the boycott.
The Verso volume is the earliest and it contains twenty-six essays, as well
as a chronology and a section on “resources”: links to activist movements
(Jewish Voices for Peace), sources of news on Palestine (Electronic Intifada),
and a battery of boycott or BDS movements and campaigns. As its title
suggests, its arguments are addressed more widely than simply to the
academic boycott. Importantly and valuably, it includes the text of the
original 2005 call for boycott. Contributors include artists such as the great
English lmmaker Ken Loach and the novelist and critic John Berger.
Most useful, as I’ve been saying, are those contributions which confront
the boycott issue straight up. One such is that by radical journalist and
writer Naomi Klein. She simply sets out what she reckons are the four
most frequently invoked arguments against BDS, and then, since “they
simply aren’t good enough,” places beside them the counter-arguments
(Lim 2012, 175). So, to the idea that punitive measures will alienate rather
than persuade Israelis, Klein points out that “constructive engagement”
has been tried with Israel and has abjectly failed (176). In spite of the
continuation and deepening of the occupation in the last decade, Israel’s