This Tuesday evening in Los Angeles, Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors is
hosting Cornell law professor William A. Jacobson as he presents “The
Case for Israel and Academic Freedom.” At the forefront of the fight
against the American Studies Association (ASA) academic boycott of Israel,
Jacobson will argue that the boycott is anti-educational, anti-peace, and based
on misconceptions and omissions about the history and legality of the conflict.
Prof. Jacobson is the founder and publisher of two popular
websites, Legal Insurrection and College Insurrection, which have covered the
Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement for years. He has been cited in major
publications such as The Jerusalem Post,
The Times of Israel, Forbes, National Review, Commentary,
and elsewhere. Through Legal Insurrection, Jacobson was instrumental in
obtaining rejections of the academic boycott by over 250 University Presidents,
and has filed a challenge to the ASA’s tax exempt status.
I asked him a few questions in advance of Tuesday’s event.
Mark Tapson: First,
tell us briefly about Legal Insurrection and College Insurrection, and their
purpose.
William Jacobson: Legal Insurrection went live on
October 12, 2008, less than a month before the presidential election. There was
no long-term plan to start it. Rather, it reflected my growing
frustration with what I saw as blatant media bias in favor of Obama, and a
general mania surrounding the Obama campaign. Since then, we have covered
a wide range of political and legal issues, concentrating on those areas in
which the two overlap. We have earned a name for ourselves by grabbing onto
issues and candidates and doing the type of in-depth research and exhaustive
follow-up that are hard to find these days.
As an example, our coverage of Elizabeth Warren drove many
of the issues with which she struggled in her 2012 Senate campaign and was so
extensive that we preserved the research in a separate website,
ElizabethWarrenWiki.org.
College Insurrection was started in August 2012, as we found
ourselves focusing more and more on the problems non-liberal students faced on
campuses. Unlike Legal Insurrection, which focuses on creating original
content, College Insurrection is more of an aggregator, pulling stories from
college newspapers and other media.
MT: What
is your objection to the American Studies Association boycott and to academic
boycotts in general?
WJ: Systematic academic boycotts are
anti-educational and destructive far beyond the individuals or entities
boycotted. The ASA boycott, if it were to be adopted universally as its backers
propose, would affect not just the academic freedom of Israelis, but also of
all those who want to engage in the free exchange of ideas. Joint research
would be cut off, as would student and faculty research exchanges. That takes
the choice away from individuals, including students. By what right to faculty
have the right to take educational opportunities away from students? It's the
height of faculty arrogance.
Moreover, where does it stop? The purported justifications
for the academic boycott apply to dozens of countries, including the United
States. Our universities are built on what once were Native American lands, we
had slavery and segregation, "institutional racism" allegedly still
exists at our universities, and our universities widely participate in
Department of Defense related research. So why aren't these American academic
boycotters of Israel also boycotting their own universities? It's beyond
hypocrisy, it's a singling out of the only Jewish nation in the world for
treatment based on standards applied to no one else. Substitute
"black" for "Jewish" and you'd call it racism; so it is, as
former Harvard President Lawrence Sommers said, anti-Semitic in fact, if not in
intent.
MT: The Cornell Daily Sun mentioned recently that you compared the boycott to your “personal experiences
studying abroad in Moscow under Soviet rule and said the lack of an academic
boycott against the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin could have contributed to
its eventual downfall.” Can you elaborate on that?
WJ: The Daily Sun did not accurately paraphrase
that part of my lecture. I discussed my experiences as an exchange student in
the Soviet Union in the 1980s, and how despite the horrors of the Soviet system
under Stalin and others, we still wanted academic interaction. My point was
that we felt, in the early 1980s, that our presence in Moscow and interaction
with Soviets was important regardless of what the Soviet system represented,
and no one was suggesting an academic boycott. These academic interactions
in the 1980s may have contributed to the eventual downfall of the Soviet
system as the more free flow of information enlightened Soviet citizens to
ideas of liberty.
MT: What
do you say to the ASA and to BDS activists who insist that Israel is an apartheid
state?
WJ: They are either ignorant, or deliberate
propagandists. Apartheid was a unique system of racial domination by a minority
over a majority based on racial classification, above and beyond the types of
discrimination that exist in every country. Much as the Holocaust was unique in
that it systematized and industrialized genocide, so too Apartheid was unique
which is why it is considered under international law to be a Crime Against
Humanity.
The Rome Convention on the Crime of Apartheid is very
specific that it requires systematized domination through acts which themselves
are crimes, of one "racial group" over another. That is not what is
happening in Israel. Israel is a majority ruled nation, not minority ruled. Israeli
Jews are themselves mutli-racial, with approximately half being refugees from
or the descendants of refugees from Arab lands. Israel also has gone to great
effort to rescue non-white Jewish populations.
The divisions in Israel are religious or ethnic, not racial,
which is common throughout the world. No one claims that majority Islamic
domination in the Middle East and elsewhere is "Apartheid," so why is
that label applied to the only Jewish state? If religious domination
constituted Apartheid, then every country which has adopted in whole or in part
Islamic law would be an Apartheid state. But that's not the way anyone uses the
term, except as to Israel.
I could go on and on, but the short answer is that the term
"Apartheid" has been so broadened by enemies of Israel that the
terminology as applied to Israel has become a weapon divorced from legal and
historical reality. That even John Kerry and some Israeli politicians use the
term inaccurately is a testament to the success of the decades-long propaganda
campaign against Israel.
MT: The New York Times seemed to suggest months ago that the ASA is a rather
insignificant organization and that the backlash against its boycott has been almost
overkill. Do you think the Times was
underestimating the boycott? Do you think the BDS movement in general is
faltering or gaining ground?
WJ: We
should take BDS seriously because it is a malignant ideology which seeks to
dehumanize Israeli Jews. The best evidence of where BDS leads was the
publication on multiple social media platforms of a Nazi-era anti-Semitic
cartoon by Vassar Students for Justice in Palestine. It didn't start at Vassar
with Nazi-inspired demonization of Jews, but that's where it inevitably led. So
we should fight the BDS movement early, before it spreads like it has in
Europe, where anti-Zionism and anti-Semitic violence go hand in hand.
That
said, we don't need to panic. In the United States support for Israel is at
historic highs, and there is no meaningful political movement espousing
anti-Israeli platforms. Let's keep it that way.
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 6/17/14)
