U.S. professors call for boycott of Israel

Feb. 12, 2009

A group of American university professors is calling for an academic and cultural boycott of Israel, marking the first time that a national academic boycott movement has come out of the United States.

Anti-Israel groups in Great Britain have attempted academic boycotts against Israel several times, but the American movement took Israeli professors by surprise. The campaign was founded by 15 academics, mostly from California.

David Lloyd, a professor at the University of Southern California, told Israel’s Ha’aretz that the initiative was “impelled by Israel’s latest brutal assault on Gaza and by our determination to say enough is enough.”

Lloyd also said pro-Israel lobbying groups exert too much control over US politics and the media and have instigated a “campaign of intimidation” against academics who criticize Israel’s policies. Officially called the US Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel, the group released a statement saying that it opposed the “censorship and silencing of the Palestine question in US universities, as well as US society at large” and called for “non-violent punitive measures” against Israel.

Lloyd also stated, albeit incorrectly, that “Hamas has sought direct negotiations with Israel, a pursuit that constitutes de facto recognition of Israel, and has openly discussed abandoning its call for the destruction of the State of Israel conditional on reciprocal guarantees from Israel.”

Israeli academics downplayed the boycott, but Jonathan Rynhold, a professor at Bar Ilan, said the ultimate goal of the boycott is to blur “the distinction between criticism of Israeli policies and criticism of Israel’s existence. Their game is to move the liberals, who accept Israel’s right to exist ... and turn them into radical left-wing critics [who believe] Israel is racist in its core and everything it does is wrong.”