Merely convenient because what is the country, and what the campaign, most commonly adverted to by the boycott-itchy in the way of comparison with Israel? Yes, you've got it in one: apartheid South Africa and the anti-apartheid campaign. Self-serving to say - as he almost certainly does not believe - that the victims whose case presents the most hopeless prospect are to be abandoned by the rest of us.Īnd then merely convenient. Craven to utter it - that we should exercise ourselves only on behalf of those for whom there may be more hope. Just picture Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch reorienting their work according to this method: henceforth they will speak out on behalf of people wronged in democratic countries, where their work is most likely to be effective they will not exercise themselves to help anyone languishing in the concentration camps and jails, or suffering in the torture chambers, of the most vicious regimes. I cannot remember when I last saw so craven, self-serving and merely convenient an argument as this: the impulse of solidarity scaled back so that you don't need to express or mobilize it in support of the victims of the most oppressive tyrannies. The Israelis, in short, might be movable where China, Iran, Zimbabwe are not. The essence of Hickey's answer is that Israel may be especially suitable for an academic boycott because of its civilized values and high regard for education, such as other places of obscurantist darkness do not respect and possess.
That is why an academic boycott might have a desirable political effect in Israel, an effect that might not be expected elsewhere.Leave aside for now the accusation of anti-Semitism and the business about 'the merits of each individual case'. And we are speaking of a culture, both in Israel and in the long history of the Jewish diaspora, in which education and scholarship are held in high regard. In the case of Israel, we are speaking about a society whose dominant self image is one of a bastion of civilisation in a sea of medieval reaction. We are asked why we do not propose a boycott of other states whose policies are barbaric and inhuman, such as China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, or Zimbabwe.īut whether a boycott is appropriate in such places depends on the merits of each individual case. Hickey writes: We are accused of unfairly singling out Israel - the Jewish state - and hence of being anti-semites. It comes in his effort to explain why Israel is picked out by the boycott-itchy with such loving concentration when there are so many other human rights-violating countries, with transgressions of easily comparable or much greater magnitude.
To try to mitigate the tedium that may arise from this, I'll begin with an argument of Hickey's which I, at least, haven't previously devoted much space to. (The text, sent to me by a friend, is behind a subscription wall except for the first two paragraphs but the whole of it can be found round at Engage.) It is to highlight how wretched a piece of advocacy Hickey's is that I return to this subject and go over some ground already covered. If you want to see how poverty-stricken their case has become, just take a look at the piece by Tom Hickey on the BMJ's website. Since then I have written less about it, mainly because every single argument of the pro-boycotters has been met, and met in spades, and they have no answers to the questions repeatedly put to them. During 2005 I wrote a fair bit against the proposed academic boycott of Israel (see the links given at the bottom of this post).