Joel and Ethan Coen don’t agree with boycott

See Norm on Serious Men.

Israeli academics won’t go to Ariel College while the boycotters see no difference between Ariel and Tel Aviv

This piece is written by Saul

How the boycott campaign in UCU exploits Israeli naivity.

Just like Easters of old, May is not a good time for Jews; or at least those Jews who are opposed to the singling out of Israel for unique punishment by the UCU.

As regular as clockwork, the UCU has a motion calling for the continuing demonization and exclusion of the Jewish state.  Nothing new there.  What is new is that this exclusion is now being made in the name of “Israeli colleagues” themselves.   But if we look in a bit more detail at what it is precisely the UCU’s “Israeli colleagues” are calling for, we can see the gap that exists between what the Israeli academics have said and how their statements are being dishonestly exploited by the anti-Zionist boycott campaigners.

In a motion proposed by the LSE UCU, – “Threats to academic freedom in Israel and Palestine” – we read the following:

Congress notes:

6.      the petition from 155 Israeli academics expressing their “unwillingness to take part in any type of academic activity taking place in the college operating in the settlement of Ariel”, calling Ariel an illegal settlement whose existence contravenes international law and the Geneva Convention.

The nature of this petition and its limits are clear – to avoid any type of academic activity that offers the opportunity of the Israeli right to treat the Occupied Territories as a part of Israel proper.  Of course opposition to the settlers is not restricted to 155 academics but is a widepsread position in Israel.  The point here, however, is that the call cited by the motion relates solely to Ariel college and the Occupied Territories.

However, when we return to the UCU motion that cites this petition, something magic happens. The Israeli campaign which targets Ariel and the occupation of the West Bank now appears alongside the campaign to boycott Israeli academia in general:

Congress instructs NEC to:………

circulate to all members

o    the call by the Israeli academics

o    the PACBI call for academic and cultural boycott of Israel.

What the LSE UCU has done here – and what it is encouraging the UCU to do – is to dishonestly appropriate and exploit a legitimate political concern of a number of Israelis concerning one aspect of contemporary Israel – its occupation of the West Bank – to serve the entirely illegitimate aim of demonising and excluding Israel as a whole.

First the LSE motion tells UCU to circulate the call by the Israeli acdemics.  In the very next line, it tells UCU to circulate the call to boycott Israeli academics.  Perhaps Mike Cushman, the brains behind LSE UCU, cannot see the irony?

Alongside the abuse of Israeli academic intentions lurks a second irony.

In failing to distinguish the distinction between Israel and the Occupied Territories (a distinction inherent in the petition, but dissolved in the motion), the UCU anti-Zionists join hands with the Israeli right. While the settlers seek to incorporate the West Bank to Israel, the  boycotters seek to incorporate Israel into Palestine. In so doing, both groups seek to erase the legal and political distinction between the legitimate Israeli nation-state and the illegally occupied lands of the West Bank all in the name of (a differently evaluated) unitary state.

Of course, Israeli academics – or any other Israelis – should be free to express whatever political perspectives they have, and to sign any petition they want, in spite of the fact that those with lesser principles outside Israel will exploit such actions for their own illegitimate and exclusionary ends.  The responsibility for this abuse is entirely the responsibility of the abusers themselves – in this case, UCU LSE and, should the motion pass, the UCU as a whole.

Press TV, on behalf of the Iranian regime, seems to support the Israeli academics too; as does Norman Finkelstein; as does Electronic Intifada.

Click here for David Hirsh’s analysis of the possible boycott of Ariel from 2005.

This piece is written by Saul

The myth of BDS Universalism

From  falsedichotomies.com   and Harry’s Place.

Wildcat strike on Israeli railway follows arrest, beating of union leader

From Eric Lee at TULIP, Trade Unions Linking Israel and Palestine.

Proponents of a boycott of Israel – and of its trade unions – will often claim that the unions aren’t real unions.  They’re just arms of the Zionist state.

But of course the facts are entirely different.  Israel’s unions are very real indeed, and sometimes the conflicts between unions and employers can get very sharp.

We had an example of this last week when a wildcat strike of railway workers was triggered by the arrest (and alleged beating) of the leader of the union and nine others.

The full story is here – on the TULIP website.

It’s not only the railway workers, but singers at the Israel National Opera who are embroiled in dispute with their employers.  The singers are threatening strike action this week.

Meanwhile, in some unions idiotic anti-Jewish sentiments are still given a platform.  The most recent example comes from Norway, where a union website published a letter from a member claiming that Jews ran the country in 1945.  Anywhere else and that might be insignificant, but as Norwegian unions have been particularly hostile toward Israel in recent years, that takes on an added meaning.

Finally, we’re now only five weeks away from the TULIP launch event in London.  If you can attend, please do make sure to RSVP to ericlee@tuliponline.org.  I hope to see many of you there.

Eric Lee

David Hirsh to speak at University of Johannesburg Seminar on Academic Boycotts

The Faculty of Law, University of Johannesburg cordially invites you to a morning symposium on the following topic:

‘Are Academic Boycotts Justifiable?’

The symposium will seek to address from a variety of perspectives the question whether academic boycotts are justifiable or not. Naturally, the symposium takes place in a context where this has been debated in relation to the relationship
between UJ and Ben-Gurion University. The seminar will seek to explore the broader principled questions relating to academic boycotts in general as well as those that are more specific to the Israel/Palestine and UJ/BGU relationship.

Speakers will include:

Ran Greenstein (University of the Witwatersrand)
David Hirsh (Goldsmiths College, University of London)
Na’eem Jeenah (Afro-Middle East Centre)
Joel Fishman (Scholars for Peace in the Middle East)

The seminar will take place in the form of discussion between the speakers, those in favour and those against academic boycotts. Ample time will be allowed for discussion from the floor. Anyone interested in the issue is welcome. Please RSVP for catering purposes to Aubrey Louw (aubreyl@uj.ac.za).
DATE: 13 May 2011
TIME: 09h00 – 11h30
VENUE: UJ Auckland Park Campus A Ring 617
(A Ring floor 6).

flyer pdf here

The University of Johannesburg Boycott

Here are links to the debate from last october relating to the decision of the University of Johannesburg to cut its scientific links with Ben Gurion University in Israel.  Included here are pieces from Desmond Tutu, Robert Fine, Ran Greenstein, David Newman, Neve Gordon, David Hirsh and Farrid Essack.

Here is David Hirsh’s short critique of the apartheid analogy.

Here is David Hirsh’s more recent piece on the UJ boycott.

Here is Peter Alexander’s reply to David Hirsh.

This is David Hirsh’s reply to Peter Alexander:

There are reasons to be sceptical of the campaign to exclude Israel, and only Israel, from the global academic community.

One is that it holds scholars responsible for the actions of their state.  Peter Alexander says that there is no threat to scholars and that it is only academic institutions which should be held responsible for Israeli human rights abuses.  He says that scholarly collaboration should continue, alongside an official policy of cutting links.  But he hangs too much on this distinction between individuals and their institutions.  It is clear that a campaign against Israeli institutions would be given life in universities around the world by an exclusion of actual Israeli people.  The Israeli water scientists would be sent home with their institution.

Another reason for scepticism is the exclusive focus on Israel.  This is not a consistent campaign against human rights abuses in general, it is a campaign against Israeli human rights abuses.  Peter makes the case for this in two ways.  First he makes a distinction between a ‘moral’ boycott and a ‘political’ boycott.  A moral one, he implies would have to be consistent but a political one wouldn’t.  That is because everything hinges, for him, on his second point, ‘the call’ by ‘the oppressed’ to boycott ‘the oppressors’.  He says there is no call from Afghans or Iraqis to boycott British or American universities and there is no call from Chinese or Tibetan people to boycott Chinese universities.  There is only a ‘call’ from ‘the Palestinians’, as though they spoke with one voice.  In fact, some people in Palestine push for an anti-normalization policy and some people in Palestine fight politically and practically for further engagement with Israelis.  One important trade union delegation to Palestine came back recently, reporting that their Palestinian colleagues absolutely opposed boycotting Israeli trade unions.  Firstly, ‘the call’ from Palestine is complex and a mixed picture, second, we also need to make our own political judgments as to what we do.

Peter hangs a lot on a simplistic view of Israel and Palestine as oppressors and oppressed.  But Palestine and Israel are two nations which emerged out of the rubble of the Ottoman Empire, European Nazism and British and French imperialism; they were forged in the disfiguring heat of Arab nationalism, Islamic and Jewish fundamentalism, anti-Arab racism, Israeli nationalism, Middle Eastern antisemitism, and the Cold War.

We should embrace a politics of peace between Israel and Palestine, not a petty politics of humiliating Jewish professors.  We should oppose the de-humanisers in both nations, not choose one national flag to wave against the other.

Arabs fighting for democracy are being gunned down by tyrants from Egypt to Libya, from Syria to Bahrain; and that is before we even look at the oppression of democrats, trade unionists and women in Iran and Saudi Arabia.   The emotionally charged focus on Israel as the villain of the Middle East looks ever more strange and ever more forced.

Peter says the key similarity between apartheid South Africa and Israel is the campaign for an academic boycott.  While the campaign mobilizes the alleged similarities so people will support a boycott, Peter mobilizes the boycott to demonstrate the alleged similiarities.

I raised the issue of antisemitism in my argument against the boycott.  I think Israel is singled out, for no politically or morally relevant reason, for punishment.  I think that the history of antisemitism in Europe and now in the Middle East is such that singling out Jews arbitrarily for punishment is a dangerous thing to do.  To go easy on our criticism of the antisemitism of some of Israel’s deadly enemies is also dangerous.  There is an increasing body of evidence that the boycott movement brings with it a disproportional hostility to those who oppose it, many of whom are Jews.  Jews are challenged to criticize Zionism in the terms set out by their accusers on pain of being denounced as racist and as pro-apartheid.   The issue of antisemitism has been raised by the OSCE, by the US state department, by the South African Human Rights Council and by a UK Parliamentary committee.

Peter Alexander simply says that the issue is raised in bad faith, in a dishonest last-ditch attempt to win a losing argument.  He refuses to take the issue seriously.  He refuses to respond.  A fellow sociologist raises the issue with Peter and he looks stonily on and says: you are only pretending to be concerned, and really you do it for selfish and secret reasons.  Instead of examining the antizionist social movements in which antisemitism is alleged to appear, he looks within himself, and finds himself not guilty.  But as a sociologist he should understand that racism is an external and objective phenomenon, not a subjective feeling inside his own soul.

Peter makes much of ‘the call’ by ‘the oppressed’.  But when Jews raise the issue of antisemitism he listens with a glass ear.

For some Engage classics on contemporary antisemitism and boycotts against Israel, click here.

Hirsh’s argument against the academic boycott campaign.  click here.

What’s wrong with PACBI’s “call” for a boycott?  click here.

Michael Yudkin’s argument against the academic boycott campaign.  click here.

For the Engage archive on the Israel / Apartheid analogy click here.

Response from University of Johannesburg

Sociologist Peter Alexander, at the University of Johannesburg, has defended the boycott decision against this critique from David Hirsh.  (double click the image to make it bigger)

David Hirsh argued, amongst other things:

The boycott campaign is not motivated by anti-Semitism, but wherever it goes, anti-Semitism follows. One of its leaders, Bongani Masuku, a Cosatu official, has been found guilty by the South African Human Rights Commission of hate speech. Jews around the world are routinely treated as supporters of apartheid if they dare to oppose the boycott campaign.

When you educate people to boycott only Israel, when you tell them that all Israelis are responsible for human-rights abuses, when you mobilise a global campaign to say that Israel is uniquely racist, and when this campaign becomes central to progressive politics globally, you are, whether you know it or not, incubating anti-Semitic ways of thinking. When ears are closed to concern about anti-Semitism on the basis that such concern is a marker of secret support for Israeli human rights abuses, then you know there is a problem.

Peter Alexander does not relate to this argument and he doesn’t rebut it.  He simply denies it:

Hirsh’s view that UJ is “legitimising an anti-semitic boycott” and “incubating anti-semitic ways of thinking” smacks of a man who is losing an argument.  For myself I am proud to have spent half a century opposing racism including anti-semitism.

He doesn’t say why Bongani Masuku was found guilty of hate speech by the South African Human Rights commission.   He doesn’t make an argument or present any evidence.  He doesn’t show that he is aware that much hostility to Israel is manifested in the language of antisemitism, for example by Hamas, by Hezobllah, by the Iranian government.  He doesn’t show any evidence that he knows what has been going on within the University and College Union, where Jews who oppose the boycott have been bullied out of the “debate”.   He doesn’t show any awareness of what it is like to be a Jewish student on his own campus.  He just responds with haughty, unthinking, denial.

For  the debate around the South African campaign for an academic boycott of Israel, with Desmond Tutu, David Newman, Neve Gordon, David Hirsh, Robert Fine, Ran Greenstein, Uri Avnery, Farid Essack click here.

For some Engage classics on contemporary antisemitism and boycotts against Israel, click here.

Israel is not like apartheid South Africa.  click here.

Hirsh’s argument against the academic boycott campaign.  click here.

What’s wrong with PACBI’s “call” for a boycott?  click here.

Michael Yudkin’s argument against the academic boycott campaign.  click here.

For the Engage archive on the Israel / Apartheid analogy click here.

double click on the image to make it readable

There is also this piece in the M&G, defending UJ’s boycott.

Raining on Sergeant Len Matthews’ Parade

This post by  Zkharya is cross-posted from Harry’s Place.

OK. It’s late, and I have little better to do than sleep or watch 30Rock. This is my officially popping my HP cherry. Something simple, easy and relatively difficult to fuck up (famous last words).

You’ve all heard of this Wikipedia thing? The universal encyclopaedia, that is open to all to edit or contribute towards? It turns out that in can be surprisingly hard to do either.

Take this The Promise, for instance. The subject of accolade from critics of film and television. Yet critically excoriated by such as Professor David Cesarani, Howard Jacobson and, you may not have heard, Jonathan Freedland.

Cesarani is, so far as I can see, the only academic historian of this or any period to have reviewed The Promise. He is not a fan. Jacobson is probably the highest profile author or novelist to have written on it, and he places it in the same bracket as Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children, a work he regards as antisemitic, at least in part, in effect, if not authorial intention. So too, you may be surprised to hear, does Jonathan Freedland, who hitherto has only said so on audio-visual recording during Jewish Book Week 2011.

I do not here give particulars of their critiques, since that follows below. But I also wish to give insight, to those that have not, into the process of editing on Wikipedia.

Now, we are told, its “in house” editors are strictly neutral. When one thinks about it, it was always going to be the case that this could never be quite so. Anyone who designs and creates a site on a subject, for instance, will naturally wish to protect certain features, or even agendas, and may vigorously suppress dissenters. In my experience, this is often called by said editors “vandalism”. But one man’s vandalism, they say, is another’s adornment.  Who decides? How or why?

In the case of the site of The Promise, the relationship between original director, site designer and “neutral” wiki editor was most illuminating. James Heald is such an editor, and, or but, he was appointed by Kominsky to create, and police, the site for The Promise. Many or most of you may know this already, but this information is openly available to anyone who inspects the “edit” and “talk history” accessible on Wikipedia to those who register themselves as editors (a simple process involving submitting an email address). Some portions of these from The Promise are pasted below.

Bear with me, since this becomes, I think, more interesting. I noticed on the Wiki entry on The Promise: Reception, that the quotations from Cesarani were rather skimpy, and looked, in my view, like exercises in damage limitation. I very moderately expanded them (far less than my final version below). With the result that Peter Kominsky himself left a message in the Wiki threads, requesting that James Heald “look at” i.e. delete my contribution.

When I tried to resubmit my expansion, I was accused of “vandalism”, and threatened with being banned, with Kominsky returning to keep an eye on things (see below). Heald made some reasonable criticisms (that I exaggerated Cesarani’s stress on oil, for instance), but, in my view, the rest (from him and his colleague, Nick Cooper) were mostly spurious: their primary intention, was to blunt the thrust of Cesarani’s argument as much as possible, while giving the appearance of airing his sharpest comment. All under Heald’s pretextual claim to neutrality and disinterest (see below the mutual approbation between Kominsky and Heald).

In the end, fulfilling Heald’s rigorous criteria entailed my having to expand the section further, and I would be grateful for any constructive criticism. I think it is basically sound. Heald’s/Kominsky’s version hardly do Cesarani justice, and since the professor from Royal Holloway and Bedford is the only academic thus far to have written such a piece, I think, as one of the universal editoriate, that his critique merits more.

I have also added a transcription of the major criticisms of Jonathan Freedland’s recording, alas only with their precise times, since no transcription of the whole interview is yet available. Is this evidence, linked to the video online, acceptable on Wikipedia? And if not, why not?

I do not hold out much hope of either surviving the “neutrality” of James Heald (or his colleague Nick Cooper). But while Kominsky may be keen that nothing cloud the BAFTA on his horizon (the winners are declared May 22^nd), I fancy I may direct a light, refreshing rain on Sergeant Len Matthews’s parade.

The current Wikipedia account of David Cesarani by James Heald/Peter Kominsky:

Jewish academic historian of the period David Cesarani criticised the series for not bringing out underlying selfish geopolitical motives behind British policy, saying that Kosminsky had “turned the British, who were the chief architects of the Palestine tragedy, into its prime victims…Ultimately, Kosminsky turns a three-sided conflict into a one-sided rant”.

And my extended version:

British academic historian of the period (and the only such to have reviewed The Promise hitherto) David Cesarani accuses Kominsky of having perpetrated “deceit” and “a massive historical distortion. Although The Promise is insufferably didactic, no one mentions the Balfour declaration…’the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’. This was the only promise that mattered because it had the force of international law.” Further, contra Kominsky, “The paratroops were not sent to separate Jews and Arabs”. Regional geo-strategy, oil, access to Egypt (i.e. the Suez canal), India and southern Russian aerial targets were “why the British beefed up the garrison there”. Cesarani then accuses Kominsky of having “turned the British.. the chief architects of the Palestine tragedy, into its prime victims” Yet, “someone must be responsible, though, and the way he (Kominsky) rewrites history that can only be the Jews. Ultimately, Kosminsky turns a three-sided conflict into a one-sided rant.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/04/the-promise-peter-kosminsky

Also my account of Jonathan Freedland’s criticisms:

In a filmed conversation with Howard Jacobson during Jewish Book Week 2011 (see link), Jonathan Freedland, Guardian editor, journalist, author and BBC presenter, first of all says Kominsky panders to antisemitic tropes, such as that of wealthy Jews (00.52.50-58). He then brackets The Promise with works such as Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children, which he and Jacobson consider antisemitic (00.55.58-00.56.00). In an extended discussion with Howard Jacobson (01.13.28-01.14.18), Freedland makes three fundamental criticisms of The Promise:

Jacobson: ..how many you would think educated journalists still talk about Israel as though it’s a consequence of the Holocaust. Which was The Promise, wasn’t it?”

Freedland: The premise of The Promise, so to speak (it lost me first of all at the girl on Business Class), but also these very long, lingering pictures, archive footage from Belsen, I felt three things about that.

One, you don’t have the right to use those pictures, you haven’t earned the right to use those pictures artistically.

Second, I just know looking at that that you’re making a down payment on what you want to say attacking Jews later on in this series. And you’re doing that as your insurance policy, to say, well, look, I was sympathetic on that.

Third, and it was actually explicitly said by a character, a brigadier, briefing the British troops in Palestine -you knew they were saying this was the premise of all Zionism-, the Arabs were here minding their own business for 2000 years, and suddenly, after the Holocaust, Jews arrive…

Jacobson: We drop in out of the clear blue sky, bang, we’ll have that!

http://vimeo.com/22086132

http://www.jewishbookweek.com/2011/last-words.php

Exchanges between Peter Kominsky and wiki editor James Heald, over yours truly and other matters:

Hi James

Just wanted to thank you, (though I know this isn’t why you do it), for the really stunning job you have done on the “Development” and “Character” sections of this page. Beautifully written, very accurate and wonderfully well referenced, (if you don’t mind me saying so). Thank you for all the hard work. Really impressive.

I have some French national press cuttings, if that would be helpful.

Best wishes

Peter Kosminsky (talk) 23:10, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

I wonder if you have seen the addition made to the The Promise reception section by this user? Peter Kosminsky (talk) 21:22, 27 April 2011 (UTC)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jheald

Sorry not to have caught that recent edit on The Promise article, but agree with your call. (I’m away at the moment, with my laptop also in for repair, so internet access is a bit hit & miss).

Many congratulations on the BAFTA nom: good luck for the 22nd! Jheald (talk) 19:14, 28 April 2011 (UTC)

Thank you. Hope you have a lovely break. The guy in question seems to have been involved in some ‘warfare’ over edits in the past so we will need to see how he reacts to my taking down his contribution. Peter Kosminsky (talk) 22:10, 28 April 2011 (UTC)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Peter_Kosminsky

24 June, TULIP launch meeting in London

TULIP will be holding a London launch event at the House of Commons on 24 June.

Details as follows :

On 24 June 2011 from 11 AM to 1 PM, TULIP will hold a London launch event in Committee Room 7 at the House of Commons in London.

The keynote speaker will be Michael Sommer, president of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and of the Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (DGB).

Sommer is an outspoken opponent of the campaign to boycott Israel.

Other speakers from British and other trade unions will be on the panel.

The panel discussion will be followed by a Q&A with the audience.

More details will be available soon and we will announce them here.

Meanwhile, if you would like to attend – please send an email message with the word ‘RSVP’ in the subject line to ericlee@tuliponline.org.

The event is co-sponsored with Trade Union Friends of Israel.

Defiance, not denial

In Ha’aretz, Amnon Be’eri Sulitzeanu’s analyses apparent Holocaust denial on the part of Israel’s Arab citizens:

“In a correct reading of the situation of Arab citizens, the “denial” of the Holocaust should not be understood as a lack of knowledge of the subject or as a failure to recognize its importance for the Jewish people, but as simple defiance: “If you don’t recognize us and our pain, we will retaliate by not recognizing your pain.” Paradoxically, the painful use of “denial” by the Arabs polled in the survey actually implies recognition of the Holocaust and of the depth of the pain it represents for the Jews.

This complexity assumes an additional current and tragic dimension, because the decision of the Education Ministry regarding the matriculation exam is being made parallel to a series of steps by the government, including legislation, whose objective is to forbid Arab citizens and groups from teaching or commemorating − even in a low-key manner − the historical story of the Palestinian tragedy that took place with the establishment of the State of Israel, the Nakba, and to persecute and punish those who do so. In that sense, we can assume that if the above-mentioned survey were to be conducted now, the percentage of Arab “Holocaust deniers” would skyrocket.”

Read the whole thing. Denial is a dangerous game to play. For the adults it may be a tactic, but what will the children understand?