Academic boycott of Israel

Editor—The BMJ “deplores” the call to boycott Israeli institutions.1 I believe that it is a mistake to reject a legitimate means of exerting influence on that state's racist and unlawful treatment of the Palestinian people. Sanctions—economic, sporting, and academic—were part of the pressure that finally ended the apartheid regime in South Africa. The fragmentation of the West Bank by Israeli settlements is reminiscent of that regime's Bantustan policy and has been condemned as such by veterans of the anti-apartheid struggle, including Desmond Tutu and Ronnie Kasrils. The BMJ has been diligent in reporting from Palestine; the denial of clean water supplies; the doubling of cases of child malnutrition in Gaza because of the Israeli blockade; the World Medical Association's condemnation of harassment of health workers in West Bank and Gaza.2 The UN has had to call for an end to Israeli “beating and killing” of its staff.3 Israel's policy of collective punishment and targeting of civilians contravenes the fourth protocol to the Geneva Convention. What price, then, “the universality of science” when the reality of academic life in the occupied territories is of students and professors being shot at, beaten, and humiliated at roadblocks? In addition, the occupiers have closed the universities4 and there is documented involvement of Israeli doctors in torture.5 Those, including Israeli academics and peace campaigners, who support the academic boycott do not do so on the basis of “citizenship, gender, religion, or colour,” as you say; the boycott is specifically focused on official Israeli institutions and those affiliated to them. The arguments used in the BMJ are those used in the 1980s to undermine the anti-apartheid boycott of South Africa. They were wrong then, and they are wrong now.