EclectEcon

It looks as if some of the leaders of the UK's UCU will be attempting to implement a formal boycott of Israeli universities and academics again this Wednesday at the UCU's annual congress. This boycott has never made any sense to me since it castigates academics and universities in a country that does more for democracy, freedom, and human rights than any other country in the region. Why doesn't the UCU go after Saudi Arabia or Iran or Syria or, for that matter, China? One plausible explanation for the behaviour of those promoting the boycott is simple: anti-Semitism.

For more, see the excellent work by Engage. As David Hirsch says in an article recently reproduced in Engage,

No antiracist and no scholar should need the case to be explicitly set out against a campaign to exclude Israelis from the cultural and economic life of humanity; especially from the global academic community. There is no campaign to exclude anybody else; only Israelis. That a reputable scholarly journal feels it has to commission an article giving reasons why such an exclusion is a bad idea should tell us something worrying about the depth and scope of contemporary antisemitism.