Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Qualche volta, le Lobby fanno cilecca

NB1:  Chiunque dice che i Palestinesi devono trovare un modo
non-violento per lottare contro l'occupazione dovrebbe essere, ipso
facto, aperto a discutere un boicottaggio accademico, per giunta
"targeted" a individui e istituzioni complici dell'occupazione; Cosa
c'e di meno violento di un boicottaggio?
NB2:  L'ultimo paragrafo dell'articolo e' molto pertinente a questo NG.
http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/story/0,,1800987,00.html
Israeli university boycott: how a campaign backfired
Tamara Traubmann and Benjamin Joffe-Walt
Tuesday June 20, 2006
The Guardian
Following a heart attack earlier this year, Paul Mackney, then general
secretary of the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher
Education (Natfhe), was lying in hospital last month flipping through
emails on his Blackberry. A proposal calling on the lecturers' union to
encourage an academic boycott of Israel had just been made public, and
flooding his inbox were messages accusing him, among many things, of
being a "Bin Laden-oriented supporter of Islamic terror and propaganda"
and an "ultra anti-semitic Nazi". Later, at the union's annual
conference, he leaned over during a debate to show the most recent:
"Subject: Jew Hater!" it read. "It's nice to hate Jews and single them
out for everything! It's called ANTI-SEMITISM you disgusting piece of
shit."
Mackney was sent over 15,000 messages from boycott opponents. At least
50,000 more were sent to other leaders of Natfhe and the Association of
University Teachers, which passed a similar motion last year. Petitions
with more than 17,000 signatories were sent to the union. While much of
the criticism was well formulated and respectful, there was something
troubling about the massive international campaign.
Mackney's family gave shelter to Jewish refugees during the second
world war. He has campaigned on behalf of Jewish members for policies
for those who do not want to work on the Jewish Sabbath. He opposed the
boycott, speaking out passionately against it just before the votes
were counted at the conference late last month.
But, he said, a reasoned debate was made extraordinarily difficult by
an aggressive campaign involving tens of thousands of activists. "The
ironic thing," Mackney said despondently after the motion was passed,
"is if we had put this to delegates a couple of weeks ago, before the
international pro-Israeli lobby started this massive campaign emailing
delegates and trying to deny us our democratic right to discuss
whatever we like, it probably wouldn't have passed. People feel
bullied, and what we have seen is a hardening of attitudes. All they
achieved was making the delegates determined to debate and pass the
motion."
After a month covering the debate for our respective newspapers, we are
inclined to agree. Most delegates displayed more passion in their
outrage at the heavy-handed tactics used to affect the union's decision
than they did in their support of the rather divisive resolution. It
passed with only a 53% majority. The campaign served the exact end it
sought to avoid.
This is not to criticise the desire of the boycott's opponents to
affect the decision. Natfhe was debating a proposal calling on British
lecturers to boycott Israeli colleagues who do not "publicly dissociate
themselves" from "Israeli apartheid policies". The motion contained
provocative judgments of the Israeli academy and called for a
curtailment of Israeli academic freedoms. Why shouldn't those who value
such freedoms and those who support Israel and its academy lobby
members of the union?
The pickle is trying to determine whether the campaigns against such
boycotts are actually motivated by concerns for academic freedom, or
whether they are using the universalist ideal to stifle critical
discussion of Israel.
We have found much more evidence of the latter. Through discussions
with anti-boycott campaigners and a trace of the most common emails
(not necessarily abusive) sent to the union and handed over by Natfhe,
we found the vast majority of the tens of thousands of emails
originated not with groups fighting for academic freedom, but with
lobby groups and thinktanks that regularly work to delegitimise
criticisms of Israel. We spoke to a number of these groups about their
aims and the extent of their campaigns against the boycott.
The main Israeli anti-boycott organising group is the International
Advisory Board for Academic Freedom, which claims to have a network of
hundreds of American and European academics. With few exceptions, its
principal work is to defend Israeli academic freedoms.
In the US, home to the vast majority of those organising against the
boycott, one major campaigner was the American Jewish Congress, for
which academic freedom is not the central aim. AJC supporters could go
to the website, type in their name and an email would be sent on their
behalf - 5,480 individual emails were sent to each of five union
leaders in this manner.
The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews also held a
website-based email campaign, yielding 5,015 individual emails to each
union leader.
The only US organisation whose mission is explicitly related to
education is Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, a Zionist
organisation working on US campuses "to develop effective responses to
the ideological distortions, including anti-semitic and anti-Zionist
slanders that poison debate". The group organised a large petition and
appealed to its 6,000 supporters to email a letter to union leaders.
Mackney received more than 4,000.
This is not to say such groups do not have a right to counter
criticisms of Israel. It is simply to argue that advocacy of academic
freedom is not the motivation behind the anti-boycott campaign, and the
mission statements of the organisations behind it - all of which
involve pro-Israeli advocacy, rather than academic freedom - do not
match their rhetoric.
Campaigners have used academic freedom as a tactic in a political
campaign seeking to redirect public discussion away from the question
of the complicity of the Israeli academy with the occupation and
discrimination in Israeli universities (a debate they are likely to
lose) towards academic freedom (a debate they are likely to win).
They have so far succeeded, dominating the debate by questioning the
morality of a boycott. Campaigners have argued it will hinder the
international academic cooperation that has aided the peace process.
They have criticised the problematic precedent set by a UK union
boycotting Israeli academics who do not publicly subscribe to the
beliefs of that union. They ask why Israeli academics should be singled
out for rebuke while those working under regimes with equal or worse
human rights violations go unquestioned.
Many boycott supporters engaged with these arguments. Some pointed to
incidents in which the union took a stand against human rights
violations all over the world; others agreed that a boycott is
discriminatory, but argued the boycott of South Africa was both
discriminatory and necessary. For the most part, the boycott's
advocates admitted it would infringe on academic freedom, but argued
that the international community cannot be expected to protect the
academic freedom of one group of people when it is dependent on - and
often aids in - the suppression of the overall freedoms of other
groups, academic and otherwise.
There are merits to both arguments. What is disappointing is that,
while there is a robust public debate over academic freedom and the
discriminatory nature of boycotts (the primary arguments of the
opponents), serious consideration of the makeup and operations of the
Israeli academy (source of the primary arguments of its supporters) has
been largely absent.
About 9% of Arabs are accepted for university studies in Israel,
compared with about 25% of the children of Ashkenazim (Jews of European
origin) and about 16% of the Mizrahim (Jews of north African or Middle
Eastern origin). The percentage of Arabs in university faculties is
about 1%.
While individual Israeli academics have spoken up in defence of
academic freedom in the occupied territories, not one institution has
officially condemned injustices related to the occupation: not when in
Operation Defensive Shield the army sowed destruction on Palestinian
campuses, or when students are arrested on their way to university, and
hundreds cannot reach their classrooms because of the separation wall
or the other restrictions on movement. Under Israeli occupation, all 11
Palestinian universities have been closed at some point, often for
years at a time.
What are flourishing in Israeli universities are special programmes for
the security forces and centres for security studies, in which the
focus is not on academic analysis of the security apparatus, but on
finding academic justification for its activities.
Surely all this should be included in a global debate on the academic
freedoms of Israelis and Palestinians alike.
· Tamara Traubmann is a journalist for the Israeli daily Ha'aretz.
Benjamin Joffe-Walt writes for the Guardian

NB3: Tengo a precisare che probabilmente, se fossi stato membro di un
sindacato in cui si votasee una mozione del genere, mi sarei astenuto.


on finding academic justification for its activities.
E questa e' una puttanata senza nulla a supporto.
-Stefano