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Meet the New Loyalty Oath

What else to call this rebarbative, bullying demand that Israeli universities swear their opposition to Tel Aviv in order to escape a British boycott? Oh, yes, classic English anti-Semitism: 

Israeli universities cooperate with the occupation, and therefore, all coopertion with them should be boycotted," declared Tom Hickey, one of the Britons. "Israel commits terrible, exceptional crimes in the occupied territories. However, he added that he would be willing to cooperate with any Israeli college that publicly denounced its government's activities.

Given that the targeted universities everyday produce scholarship that refutes the worst Jewish chauvinism and mythologies about "Greater Israel," there is absolutely no moral or intellectual legitimacy for an academic boycott. As one professor at Ben-Gurion University pointed out, there is "widespread cooperation between our universities and Palestinian and Jordanian universities; the proposed boycott will damage this cooperation."  Indeed, if there is to be any internal advancement of the peace process and the end of Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, will not the most persuasive and heeded cases come from liberal Israeli scholars?

What makes this boycott particularly egregious, of course, is that universities of, say, Zimbabwe, Indonesia, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, Venezuela, Cuba, et al. have not been asked to take the same commissar-enacted pledge against their own governments, which not only routinely violate human rights, but commission no public investigations into those violations.

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