"Where is the world? Is it dead?" exclaimed the bereaved mother in Rafah on Al-Jazeera. Before her lay the lifeless body of her little child.

Faced with overwhelming Israeli oppression, Palestinians under occupation, in refugee camps and in the heart of Israel's distinct form of apartheid have increasingly reached out to the world for understanding, for compassion, and, more importantly, for solidarity. Palestinians do not beg for sympathy. We deeply resent patronization, for we are no longer a nation of hapless victims. We are resisting racial and colonial oppression, aspiring to attain justice and genuine peace. Above all, we are struggling for the universal principle of equal humanity.

But we cannot do it alone. We need international support.

The question of Palestine was created by the world -- mostly the western part of it -- and it is the world that must rise to its moral responsibility to resolve it. The renowned French philosopher Etienne Balibar captures this exceptional feature saying that the Palestinian cause is a "universal" one because "it is a test for the recognition of right, and the implementation of international law."[1] Indeed, in few other causes in modern history has the fundamental primacy of the rule of law and moral principles been put to such a fatal challenge.

Given its uncontested military superiority, the unquestioning and all-embracing support it enjoys from the world's only empire and the lack of political will by Arab and European states to hold it in check, Israel has been gravely violating international law, with audacious impunity, showing little if any consideration for the UN or world public opinion. Only consistent, systematic and broad international pressures can help end Israel's oppression and injustice, through ascertaining its status as a pariah state.

This article focuses on the ethical dimension of boycott, a tactic which I regard not only as a justified form of international intervention, but an imperative one as well. More specifically, academic and cultural boycott is examined, due to its evidently controversial nature.

The Palestinian call for academic and cultural boycott of Israel [2] is specifically premised upon Israel's systematic and ongoing oppression of the Palestinian people which takes three basic forms:

 

First: Israel's rejection of the Palestinian refugees' right of return to their lands and properties, as stipulated in international law, and denying any responsibility for the Nakba -- the massive dispossession and ethnic cleansing campaign carried out by Zionists around 1948, transforming close to 800,000 Palestinians into refugees. A virtual consensus exists among Israelis, including academics and other intellectuals, on rejecting the legally and morally binding rights of Palestinian refugees.[3]

The most peculiar dimension in the popular and academic Israeli discourses on the creation of the state is substituting the concept of "independence" for colonization and birth for destruction. Even committed "leftists" often grieve over the loss of Israel's "moral superiority" after occupying the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, as if prior to that Israel were as civil, legitimate and law-abiding as Finland! Ironically, while stubbornly rejecting Palestinian refugee rights, Israeli academics have played a central role in the massive campaigns demanding, and often winning, restitution, repatriation and compensation rights for Jewish refugees of the World War II era.

 

Second: the military colonization of the West Bank and Gaza Strip since 1967, with all what it entails in land expropriations, house demolitions, indiscriminate killings, and, most ominously, the colonial wall -- declared illegal by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in July of this year -- which serves to facilitate Israel's unremitting land grab and gradual ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.[4] Israeli universities -- all government controlled -- have not only been complicit in planning, maintaining and furnishing the justification for various aspects of the occupation, but have also directly participated in acts of colonization. Besides the voluminous record of individual acts of collusion by Israeli academics, the academic institutions themselves have never refrained from committing colonial crimes themselves.

The Hebrew University has been slowly but consistently expropriating lands and expelling their Palestinian owners in occupied East Jerusalem.

Tel Aviv University (TAU) refuses to date to acknowledge the fact that it sits on top of an ethnically cleansed Palestinian village.[5] Some of TAU's departments are also organically linked to the military and intelligence establishment.

Bar Ilan University not only operates a campus on the illegal colony of Ariel near Nablus, but has also awarded Ariel Sharon an honorary doctorate for his role in the March 2002 reoccupation of Palestinian cities, which witnessed atrocities in Jenin and Nablus as well as wanton destruction and indiscriminate killings in all the major Palestinian cities and refugee camps in the West Bank.

Ben Gurion University has supported in various ways the slow ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian Bedouins in the Negev or has witnessed in condemning silence the decades-old policy of racial discrimination prevailing there. In one glaring example, its scholars conducted from 1995 to 2000 a confidential study [6] commissioned by the Health Ministry on the high incidence rate of severe birth defects and cancer among Palestinian Bedouins living near a polluting Israeli industrial site. Although the researchers established a clear correlation between the industrial pollutants and the mortality rate of the Palestinian citizens in the area -- "65% higher than among equivalent communities in Israel" -- as well as their cancer rate -- "double the national average" -- the findings were kept secret in accordance with the academics' agreement with the ministry. It was only recently leaked to the press, by chance.

Haifa University boasts one of the most racist academics in Israel: Prof. Arnon Sofer, the infamous "prophet of the Arab demographic threat," who relentlessly and influentially provides academic justification for ethnically cleansing Palestinians -- including citizens of Israel -- in innovative shapes and forms.[7] Moreover, the University has itself sponsored a wide campaign attempting to cover up a Zionist massacre in the Palestinian village of Tantura, near Haifa, during the Nakba, and went through motions to fire, discredit or silence Prof. Ilan Pappe and one of his students for daring to reveal the facts about this massacre.

It is perhaps common knowledge now that the Palestinians have suffered grave human losses due to Israel's 37-year-old occupation. But what seems to escape the mainstream opinion makers is that during the current intifada, the Israeli army has crossed many of its former red lines, committing crimes that are reminiscent in form -- though certainly not in scale -- of Nazi crimes against European Jews, as British MP Oona King had once stated.[8] And the Israeli army accurately represents and is supported by Israeli society at large, mainly due to the fact that the IDF is still, relatively speaking, a people's army.[9]

 

From forcing a Palestinian violinist to play at a military roadblock near Nablus [10], to executing a 13-year-old refugee girl in Rafah in cold blood,[11] to engraving the Star of David on the arms of teenage Palestinian boys, to inscribing ID numbers on the foreheads and forearms of Palestinians, young and old,[12] Israel has acted with nauseating criminality and shocking impunity. Despite all this, Israeli academics and intellectuals who have explicitly called for an end to the occupation have remained in a depressingly tiny minority. Moreover, no Israeli academic body or professional union has to date publicly called for an end to occupation and the other forms of Israeli oppression. If this does not define complicity, what does?

 

Third: The third form of Israeli oppression is hardly ever mentioned in the western media or in academia: the system of racial discrimination against Palestinian-Arabs [13] who are officially "citizens" of Israel, a state which categorically precludes them from its self-definition and severely punishes them when they eventually shout "j'accuse!". The entire state apparatus, including the education system, is designed to keep Palestinian-Arab citizens of Israel disempowered, largely dispossessed and lacking equal status in the laws and practices of the state. Moreover, despite being the natives, the indigenous population of the land, or perhaps because of it, they are increasingly being viewed by the Israeli Jewish settler majority as unwanted, or, worse, as a demographic threat that ought to be dealt with, resolutely. Polls have steadily shown that a solid majority of two thirds of all Israeli Jews supports "encouraging the Arabs to leave" by various means.[14]

 

In every vital aspect of life, from land ownership to access to higher education and jobs, Israel has for been practicing its own form of apartheid for 56 years. Of all the areas of racial discrimination, education stands out. A ground-breaking Human Rights Watch study published in 2001 concludes:

"The hurdles Palestinian Arab students face from kindergarten to university function like a series of sieves with sequentially finer holes. At each stage, the education system filters out a higher proportion of Palestinian Arab students than Jewish students. ... . And Israel's courts have yet to use ... laws or more general principles of equality to protect Palestinian Arab children from discrimination in education." [15]

Despite the above, I agree with those who argue that Israel is not identical to South Africa; that it is more complex, more multi-dimensional and even more sinister, in some respect. But, no matter how we define Israel, the fundamental and undisputed existence in it of a system of racial discrimination based on religious/ethnic identity is what motivates calls for South Africa-like sanctions against Israel. "Apartheid," "Zionist settler-colonialism," "Jewish supremacy," ...etc. are all variations on the name of the ailment. What matters is how best to cure it. Taking into consideration all 3 dimensions of Israel's oppression mentioned above, it can be concluded that a sufficient family resemblance between Israel and South Africa exists to grant advocating South Africa style remedies.

I agree with those who argue that Israel is not identical to South Africa, that it is more complex, more multi-dimensional and even more sinister, in some respect. But, no matter how we define Israel, the fundamental and undisputed existence in it of a system of racial discrimination based on religious/ethnic identity attributes is what calls for South Africa-like sanctions against Israel. Apartheid, Zionist settler-colonialism, Jewish supremacy, ...etc. are all variations on the name of the ailment. What matters is how best to cure it. Taking into consideration all 3 dimensions of Israel's oppression mentioned above, it can be concluded that a sufficient family resemblance between Israel and South Africa exists to grant advocating South Africa style remedies.

Some distinguished supporters of the Palestinian cause [16] have argued against applying South-Africa style sanctions and boycotts to Israel for various reasons, most significant of which are: