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Marcus Sheff is a media and communications professional based in Israel. He was a student activist in the UK before making aliyah in 1987. After completing his army service, he worked as a journalist at The Nation and The Jerusalem Post and as a correspondent for several foreign publications before setting up a leading advertising and publishing firm. Today he is Managing Director of Intermedia, a media communications company.
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By Marcus Sheff
January 2, 2005
Life is just not fair sometimes. Just a couple of weeks after a group of the maddest of mad Israel-bashers came together at SOAS in London University to attempt to revive the anti-Israel academic boycott campaign, it was announced that Israeli researchers are developing a vaccine that enables the recovery of AIDS patients' immune systems.
The boycotters must be tearing their hair out in despair. After all, it's one thing for an esoteric translation periodical in Manchester, UK to boycott a couple of Israeli contributors or for an Oxford don to exercise his distaste for Jews under the smug disguise of refusing a research place to some poor Israeli graduate student because he served in the IDF. But now, a bunch of know-it-all Israeli scientists might have worked out how stop the progression of a terrible plague that affects 40 million people worldwide. The vaccine will require multi-center international trials. How do you boycott a potentially life-saving therapy like that?
That fact is that the boycott campaign is not exactly what you would call a rip-roaring success in any case. To cite the above examples, the Journal publisher Mona Baker faced overwhelming criticism starting with her peers and going to the highest levels of the British government, as well as a wave of resignations from other academic members of her board. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of her position. Meanwhile, Andrew Wilkie, the Oxford Don with an ax to grind was disciplined for discriminating on the grounds of ethnicity. Actually, you would have thought it might have occurred to him that you can't disqualify potential post-grads on the basis of their race, but given the hostile atmosphere towards Jews in Europe, he clearly thought he could get away with disguising his prejudice behind trendy "anti-Israelism".
It's a waste of breath to point out that the boycotters only discriminate against Jews. Indonesian and Russian colleagues are welcome although children have been routinely kidnapped and women systematically raped by the Indonesian army in Ache and even as the bloody war in Chechnya continues, punctuated by the Russian army's scorched earth policies that have left 200,000 dead. Little urge is shown in penalizing Brazilian academics despite thousands of people killed in confrontations with the police and the widespread extra-judicial executions, torture and ill-treatment in police stations, prisons and juvenile detention centers. Nor is there any great enthusiasm for the isolation of Turkish researchers despite the oppression of the Kurdish minority, the judicial harassment of human rights defenders and the occupation of northern Cyprus, which Turkey invaded in 1974.
It goes without saying that Moroccan academics are safe despite the continued occupation of the Western Sahara or the building of a separation fence on occupied territory, as are their colleagues in Egypt (where Mona Baker comes from), Saudi Arabia and Tunisia, where the state arrests, tortures and sentences opponents to death with impunity. And Africa -- don't even go there. Literally. In fact American and British Universities are bursting with scholars from all of these nations. But unsurprisingly, it is only Israelis who get the boycotters excited.
But then, these committed thinkers should really take their principles to the logical conclusion. As the excellent "Israel 21c" site points out, Israeli researchers are developing a breakthrough treatment for late-stage leukemia. A successful Israeli experiment has brought the prospect of using human embryonic stem cells to treat heart attacks a stage closer.
Israeli stents are giving heart patients a new lease of life. Israelis have invented a simple blood test that distinguishes between mild and more severe cases of multiple sclerosis early on, while two of the top three medications to treat multiple sclerosis were developed in Israel. Hadassah University doctors are tricking the immune system into fighting cancers, training cells to be 'cancer killers' after transfusions for cancer patients with metastatic solid tumors. And Israeli scientists are investigating a breakthrough for Parkinson's sufferers through stem cell injection that could halt the spread of this terrible affliction.
There are dozens of medical breakthroughs developed by Israelis, in an enormous range of medical specializations that are giving renewed hope to sufferers all over the world, and I appeal to the boycotters to think very carefully before taking advantage of them.
There is however one invention that I positively urge the Israel-haters to boycott. An Israeli company called Given Imaging has developed a camera pill that one swallows. It then takes pictures of the digestive tract and the only real alternative is a thorough rectal endoscopy. But sometimes, you have to suffer for your principles.
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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