Cover for a deeper prejudice
by Ed Morgan
This commentary was first published in the National Post on April 27, 2005.
This week Britain's umbrella academics' union, the Association of University Teachers (AUT) voted to boycott two Israeli universities. It seems that while British physicians still take the Hippocratic oath, doctors in other fields are taking a hypocritical one.
As Alan Dershowitz notes elsewhere on this page, the campaign resurrected a more limited version of a motion that failed at the AUT two years ago, which called for a boycott of all Israeli institutions.
Last spring I began a sabbatical year from the University of Toronto, where I teach international law and Canadian constitutional law, by teaching at Haifa University -- one of the two targeted institutions. I can say first hand that the reasons for the boycott seem so off-base it is hard to believe that they are anything but camouflage for a deeper prejudice. Indeed, the moving force behind the AUT motion, Birmingham University lecturer Sue Blackwell, gave away the poorly kept secret when she explained that Israelis, being, well, Israeli, simply "cannot expect to be treated as normal citizens from a normal state." Articulating a falsehood that would astonish anyone who has ever had the bruising experience of arguing a position -- any position -- in an Israeli institution, she declared that, "You cannot talk about academic freedom and free debate in Israel in the same way you can talk about it in the U.K."
The embargo against Haifa University was apparently prompted by a letter written by Ilan Pappe, a historian, who says he was mistreated by the university when he supported a student's master's thesis that claimed that Jewish forces massacred Arab civilians during the 1948 war. The letter, which was circulated to the AUT before the vote, omitted that the student himself subsequently retracted the claim and conceded that the evidence for it simply was not there. Of course, the letter also didn't say -- because it goes without saying -- that Dr. Pappe enjoys sufficient freedom of expression to allow him to advocate for an international boycott of the very university that employs him.
Moreover, Haifa is hardly the first place that one would expect Israel's detractors to look. I can assure readers that my own course, International Criminal Law, prompted the most freewheeling discussions of terrorism and civil rights, from virtually every possible ideological perspective, that I have experienced anywhere. Arabs comprise roughly 20% of the Haifa student body -- about the same percentage as in the Israeli population at large -- and were as vocal in classroom debate as their Jewish counterparts were with them and, for that matter, with each other. I have taught this material in North American, East African, and European universities; almost inevitably, one side of the political divide is in vogue and will expound its position at length, while another side is too chilled to articulate itself at all. Haifa was, in my experience, the notable exception.
As for the faculty, whatever the AUT may think, the dominant viewpoint is distinctly to the left of the political spectrum. Several law professors volunteer their time with Adullah, the country's largest Arab litigation clinic located in a village near Haifa. Others that I met spend their time advocating the property rights of the country's disposed, or theorizing about the role of the state in regulating the workplace or in administering sharia law courts for the Muslim community. Constitutional law, as it happens, is taught at Haifa University by a cadre of young lecturers armed with doctorates from the University of Toronto and deeply imbued with Canadian multicultural sensitivities and the ethic of the Charter of Rights. International law and criminal law, perhaps the two fields most central to the legal context of the Middle East conflict, are both taught by Palestinians to Israeli students, not the other way around.
Haifa University, like all human institutions, is not perfect. It may or may not have admonished Dr. Pappe unjustifiably. But to express solidarity for one lecturer and his student by boycotting, and thereby undermining, all lecturers and their students, is a fallacy that should have given pause to even the most zealous AUT members.
As a final note, the university's commitment to equity has caused it to experiment with progressive admissions policies for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. One such program aims at admitting students to law school from Israel's struggling Ethiopian community. As a consequence, one is likely to have more visible minority students in a Haifa U. class than in any Canadian law school class. But, of course, one feature of the AUT motion is that it levels the field. All students and faculty, whether Jewish, Muslim or Christian, or white, black or brown, have one thing in common: they are from Israel, and thus are to be boycotted.
