STATEMENT IN FAVOUR OF A UCT ACADEMIC BOYCOTT OF ISRAELI UNIVERSITIES AND STATE INSTITUTIONS
While the merits and demerits of the academic boycott as a non-violent, moral and political weapon against countries/institutions that violate human rights (both individual and collective) can be rigorously debated, the current call to the University of Cape Town (UCT) to adopt an academic boycott of Israeli institutions is certainly not anti-Semitic.
Universities are regarded as institutions which ought to facilitate and strengthen the exchange of ideas as a key means for furthering learning and knowledge production. In enabling this objective, there is a view that a university should be a non-partisan space where all views, irrespective of their objectivity and ethical basis, should be heard and discussed – and that this is a non-negotiable cornerstone of academic freedom. However, while in principal the universal tenets of academic freedom are to be respected so that there is maximum exposure to all perspectives, there are a number of other considerations to be taken into account.
State funded academic institutions are part of the many mechanisms by which a government exercises its ideological and political power. Even innocuous-seeming public amenities such as water and electricity are political tools when it comes to the inclusion and/or exclusion of people with regard to the delivery and cost of these services. Therefore, when dealing with an inherently unjust state, a boycott of any of its institutions serves to challenge the system by which this state functions.
The Israeli state is currently in violation of numerous international codes of conduct – both with regard to the Arab people and their land in the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem and to the Palestinian Arab population within the borders of the state. Mass expulsions of civilian populations, military occupation and control, the building of illegal Israeli Jewish settlements, illegal exploitation of natural resources like land and water, denial of civilian freedom of movement, detention without trial, indefinite imprisonment of activists without being charged, collective punishment of the families of activists alleged to have committed crimes of resistance to these violations, as well as the denial of full civil rights to Palestinian Arabs who hold Israeli citizenship – all these violations of international law have led to the vast majority of United Nations member-states condemning Israel actions and demanding respect for and the implementation of Palestinian rights.
Israel, however, since its inception in 1948, has continued to flaunt its military superiority and ignore this international condemnation, and so, despite this diplomatic pressure, has successfully continued to pursue policies of discrimination and expansionism. It is in this context , and the worsening of the human rights and economic condition of the Palestinian people as a whole, that, over the past decade, an international movement has called for the isolation of Apartheid Israel in the same way that the South African state Apartheid was isolated.