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Dena S. Davis is a professor at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law at Cleveland State University. Her most recent book is Genetic Dilemmas: Reproductive Technology, Parental Choices, and Children's Futures (Routledge, 2001).
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By Dena S. Davis
April 20, 2003
Originally published in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Calls for an academic boycott of Israel and for universities to stop investing in Israeli companies have struck me with special force because I spent last spring as a Fulbright fellow in Israel, teaching bio-ethics at Bar-Ilan University, outside Tel Aviv. I take issues of complicity very seriously, and thus I tend to be sympathetic to boycotts of regimes -- or corporations -- whose behavior is especially disturbing. Further, I think calls for boycotts by private citizens are particularly appropriate when the United States is supporting the regime in question. So I have been asking myself if I would apply for a Fulbright to Israel today, and whether I would go to Israel now, if two years ago I had applied for a grant for this semester.
Boycott proponents' comparisons of Israel's treatment of Palestinians with apartheid have been unfortunate. The implication is that if a boycott of the apartheid regime in South Africa was morally appropriate, then a boycott of the current Israeli regime is called for as well. The references to South Africa's former government have wasted a lot of time and energy on the pointless question of whether Israel's human-rights abuses approach the level of that famously immoral regime.
I have absolutely no interest in that question. The questions that interest me are: Do Israel's occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and its treatment of the Palestinians constitute a serious abuse of human rights? I'd say yes. Do I think that economic pressure will force the Israeli government to withdraw from the occupied territories? Maybe; it's worth a try. Do I wish that the Bush administration would make aid to Israel contingent on dismantling the settlements? You bet. Because that is obviously a pipe dream, would I support other, nongovernmental boycotts? Yes. Would I then support an academic boycott? Never.
Academic boycotts undermine the basic premise of intellectual life that ideas make a difference, and the corollary that intellectual exchanges across cultures can open minds. Over the last decade, I have been fortunate enough to do a lot of travel related to my academic work; every trip reminded me of how important it is for people to talk with one another.
About 10 years ago, for instance, I was in Prague with my teenage son, staying in the home of Eva, a Czech physician at a geriatrics institute. Eva is a very bright woman with amazingly good English, whose own travel had been limited to the Soviet Union and the Balkans because her father's anti-Soviet politics had branded the entire family as untrustworthy. I gave a couple of talks on bioethics at Eva's institute, but the real learning went on in the evening, when Eva, her father, my son, and I sat around the kitchen table.
I was astonished to hear Eva's idea of race relations in America. She insisted that blacks and whites never rode public transport together, ate together, attended the same schools, or lived in the same neighborhoods. When I told her about the black family that owns the house next to mine and about my son's black social-studies teacher, she was amazed. She didn't think that I was lying, yet she could not easily give up the Soviet-instilled image of the United States that she had had all her life. Perhaps she was embarrassed to realize that, despite the passion with which Czechs had thrown off the Soviet regime, some aspects of that world had survived unquestioned. Eva and I both learned something about the power of propaganda from those kitchen talks.
What did I learn on my recent Fulbright adventure in Israel? I learned that the peace movement is not as moribund as it is regularly portrayed in the American press. Almost every afternoon, as I walked down Ibn Gvirol Street in Tel Aviv, I saw a group of young people holding a banner that called for the West Bank settlers to "come home" to Israel. They were astonished when I stopped to talk and offered to buy them ice-cream cones; they told me that these days, almost all visiting Americans are right-wing. Last May, I was one of 65,000 people who met in Rabin Square to demonstrate for peace. The crowd included the mother of an Israeli soldier who had been killed on guard duty that very week. My Fulbright host -- an observant Jew so committed to peace that he and his wife, so as not to ride on the Sabbath, had arrived in Tel Aviv from Jerusalem the night before, stayed with relatives, and then walked three miles to the rally -- gamely translated every speech and song for me.
I learned that life in Israel goes on despite the fear of terrorist attacks, and that the Israelis' situation, often called "unbearable" in the American press, does not begin to approach that of the Palestinians. Yes, I had colleagues who avoided buses, agonized over whether to allow their children to go on school trips, and refused to enter restaurants that did not employ security guards. But when I went to hear Zubin Mehta conduct the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, every seat was filled.
The contrast between my daily life and the way my life was envisioned by friends and colleagues back home was amazing, almost ludicrous. One person even e-mailed me to ask how it was possible to teach with tanks rumbling by. In reality, my days consisted of teaching, attending modern-dance performances, walking all over Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, reading on the beach, and hanging out in coffee shops. Not until a fellow Fulbright scholar took me to Ramallah did I see the war-torn vision that my American friends imagined as my daily experience.
The questions my students asked were fascinating. The law students were obsessed with the issue of how it is possible to run a country in which 50 states have separate legal systems. Both my law and philosophy students were disgusted with the fragmented state of Israeli politics, but they were appalled at the American two-party, winner-take-all system. They thought it unfair and undemocratic that a party that loses an election by only 1 percent of the vote ends up with nothing.
Our most frequent topic, however, was the separation of church and state. In Israel, for example, the lack of civil marriage makes it impossible for a Jew to marry a non-Jew (unless the couple goes abroad to get married, in which case their union is acknowledged when they return to Israel). I saw that as a huge human-rights issue, but my Israeli acquaintances saw it as a minor inconvenience. Living in Israel made me realize that my deepest belief as an American is that a person's religion or ethnicity should be no business of her government.
In Israel, I discovered Web sites that provide information about daily life for Palestinians and how to donate money to help young Arabs become civil-rights lawyers, or to help Jewish and Arab women work toward peace. I also learned, as a Jew, to be much more comfortable with my criticism of the Israeli government. I no longer think of myself as being opposed to Israel, but as being in solidarity with Noam, Anat, Dafna, Or, Dov, Shyli, and all my other new Israeli friends who vote for peace, bring food to starving Palestinian villagers, and use their own bodies to prevent Israeli tanks from bulldozing Arab homes.
What I learned above all else is that academic boycotts are counterproductive. Only by talking with people, exchanging visits, and seeing for oneself can one effect change. I did a lot more to oppose the current regime in Israel by going there than I ever would have done by staying home.
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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