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If anyone had ever told
British academics that there would come a time when they would punish
colleagues because of the views they held, and would treat them as pariahs
and try to destroy their livelihoods in order to intimidate others into
toeing the sole approved political line, they would have been incredulous.
In the western tradition the universities are, after all, the custodians
of free intellectual inquiry and open debate. Censorship, suppression of
ideas and intellectual intimidation are associated with totalitarian
regimes which attempt to coerce people into the approved way of thinking.
Yet that is what is now happening in British universities -- and the
pariah is, of course, Israel.
As the Guardian reported yesterday, the Association of University Teachers
is about to debate a proposed boycott of Israeli academics who refuse to
denounce their government's policies in the occupied territories. But the
motion will 'exclude "conscientious Israeli academics and intellectuals
opposed to their state's colonial and racist policies".'
So in true totalitarian tradition, those who denounce their own will be
permit-ted to have a livelihood. Gee, thanks! To survive in the cradle of
free expression, Israelis will have to betray their own people.
This is a natural development from the implicit -- and sometimes
explicitly stated -- assumption that has been coursing through British
intellectual circles in the current hate-fest against Israel, that only
those British Jews who denounce Israel's policies can be considered to be
British; anyone who supports Israel is guilty of 'dual loyalty'.
This requirement to denounce Israel as the price of continued social
acceptance is doubly disgusting. First, it is a profound betrayal of the
cardinal principle of intellec-tual endeavour, which is freedom of speech
and debate. And second, it is a mon-strous inversion of right and wrong,
victim and victimiser which turns Israel, the victim of unbroken
annihilatory Arab terror for the past half century, into the regional
bully while sanitising Palestinian aggression.
Yes, the Palestinians have suffered hardship and restrictions in the last
few years; but that is because they have been engaged in a murderous war
against Israel which has deliberately targeted innocent civilians and
against which Israel, like any other country, has had to defend itself.
Before this current intifada started, the Palestinians were living under
Palestinian gover-nance. If they genuinely foreswore their war of
extermination against Israel, there would be no barrier to their quest for
self-government and prosperity. To pretend that their difficulties are
caused by the victims of their own aggression is simply Orwellian
double-speak.
An unnamed academic defends the boycott in the Guardian story 'as a means
of registering my protest against Israelis' lack of respect for human
rights and continuing illegal occupation of Palestinian land.' This parrot
mindlessly repeats the mantra of the left about the 'illegal occupation'
in apparent ignorance of the fact that
a) the occupation is perfectly legal under international law as the
defensive measure against attack that it was;
b) that it is not 'Palestinian land' at all but territory that belonged to
the British colonial power until it was illegally occupied by Jordan and
Egypt and is now -- since they have washed their hands of it -- most
fairly to be described as no-man's land; and
c) that parts of these territories, such as Hebron, are the sites of
Jewish settlement of great antiquity, predating the Arab colonisation by
several centuries but where Jews were massacred and driven out by Arab
occu-piers. If we're talking colonisation here, the Jews of Palestine were
the historic victims.
What is notable about the AUT motion is that it reflects the truly
shocking ignorance of the region's history and current political reality,
the resulting deep gullibility to propaganda based on lies, and the
consequent vicious double standards and prejudice that now characterise
British received opinion on the subject of Israel. Yet these are our
university teachers, the very people responsible for shaping the
assumptions of a society, whose own profound ignorance, prejudice and
twisted morality are now on such conspicuous display. |
