Summary
The institutional boycott of Israeli academic institutions called for by PACBI since 2004, on the ground of their complicity in occupation, racial discrimination and denial of refugee rights — not a boycott of individual academics (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights, PDF p.100-101, p.121).
Details
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PACBI’s initial 2004 call had an exclusion clause for conscientious Israeli academics opposed to their state’s policies; criticism and opposition to ideological tests led PACBI to omit it (PDF p.100).
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The boycott “is not merely a means to an end but rather a part of that end”: the academy is itself one of the pillars of the oppressive order (PDF p.101).
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Against the American Association of University Professors: academic freedom “carries with it obligations, such as the duty to respect the academic freedom of others” (UN definition, PDF p.95); where persistent denial of basic rights is recognized, resisting injustice supersedes considerations about academic freedom (PDF p.99-100).
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The Association of University Teachers’ April 2005 boycott of Bar Ilan and Haifa was the tactic’s defining early episode (PDF p.84-85, p.92).
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Appendix 3 prints PACBI’s revised August 2010 guidelines for the academic boycott: the general rule that all Israeli academic institutions are complicit unless proven otherwise; institutional affiliation alone is not sufficient, representation is; and twelve boycottable categories, including events convened or co-sponsored by Israeli institutions, cooperation agreements (the EU Framework programmes and the EU-Israel Association Agreement are named), study-abroad schemes in Israel, honours for official representatives, Palestinian/Arab-Israeli collaborative research, binational R&D frameworks such as the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation and the Eureka Initiative, institutional membership in world bodies, publishing in or refereeing for journals based at Israeli universities, and refereeing for Israeli hiring, promotion and funding decisions (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights, PDF p.237-245).
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In Stern’s testimony, the 2007 University and College Union resolution advancing an academic boycott of Israel is the occasion for Lee Bollinger’s statement and the over-400-presidents ad; Stern rejects a counter-boycott and any academic boycott as such: “An academic boycott is a blacklist” (Written Testimony of Kenneth S. Stern, PDF p.2-3).
Related pages
Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights, PACBI, Cultural boycott, BDS movement, Haifa University, Hebrew University, Written Testimony of Kenneth S. Stern, Academic freedom