Barghouti: Ariel U boycott is first step
Reageer (0)by Philip Weiss
9-1-2011
More than 150 Israeli academics have now called for a boycott of Ariel University Center of Samaria in the occupied West Bank in part because it was built to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state. (Yes and the colonization of East Jerusalem proceeds apace today, and how do people come to terms with that reality?) Omar Barghouti welcomes the action, and responds in part:
As in the South African academic boycott, for Israeli academics to endorse a boycott of their own institutions does not mean that they must quit their jobs or seek employment elsewhere, as some dishonestly claim. There are diverse ways to fight colonialism and apartheid from within without committing career suicide. It may mean, for starters, ending their personal complicity in projects that violate human rights and international law by refusing to be part of them and urging others to follow suit; applying pressure on their institutions and academic associations to condemn the occupation and apartheid and end all complicity, partly by challenging the organic partnership between these institutions and the state's system of colonial oppression; and, most crucially, inviting world academics and academic institutions to join the boycott, as brave South African academics had done in the struggle against apartheid there.
World academics should seriously consider an academic boycott of the Ariel college-colony, at the very least, as a first step towards a full boycott of all Israeli academic institutions involved in planning, implementing, justifying or whitewashing Israel's colonial rule and apartheid. While at it, they may want to consider the compelling boycott case against Hebrew University, too, as an institution that has been guilty -- for several more decades than Ariel -- of maintaining a campus mostly on Palestinian territory occupied by Israel in 1967, in clear violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, among other violations.
