Open Letter by 3,000 Professors Against Academic Boycotts

The moral rot in our universities continues, expressed most fully in the BDS resolutions that faculty senates — aping their pro-Hamas students in their vicious little campus encampments — pass. These resolutions call on their universities to halt all cooperation with Israeli institutions, faculty, and students, so that Israeli teachers and researchers will no longer be allowed to work in the U.S., Israeli students will be denied the right to study in the U.S., and Israeli lecturers will see their lectures in the U.S. cancelled. Now a group of 3,000 faculty members at American universities have issued a collective open letter calling for an end to this tolerance of academic boycotts, about which more can be found here: “3,000 Academics Denounce Boycotts of Israel in New Letter,” by Dion J. Pierre, Algemeiner, July 24, 2024:

Nearly 3,000 scholars have signed an open letter which condemns academic boycotts of Israel and calls on university officials to protect the academy from the caprices of politics.

Circulated by several higher education nonprofits, the letter comes amid anti-Zionist students and faculty clamoring for universities to sever ties with Israel and adopt the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement (BDS), a demand that was at the center of an explosion of “encampment” protests which roiled campuses across the country at the end of spring semester.

Formally launched in 2005, the BDS campaign opposes Zionism — a movement supporting the Jewish people’s right to self-determination — and rejects Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish nation-state. It seeks to isolate the country comprehensively with economic, political, and cultural boycotts as the first step toward its eventual elimination….

The BDS movement does not admit of the Jewish state’s continued existence, no matter how reduced it may be in size. Its supporters make clear that they want a “Palestine” that will “be free/from the river to the sea.” That means only one thing: the disappearance of the Jewish state, and that state’s replacement by a 23rd Arab state. This is politicide. And since these supporters of BDS also contemplate the complete expulsion, by force, of the Jews of Israel, there is the suggestion of possible mass murder should those Jews resist being expelled.

An overwhelming majority of Middle East scholars support boycotting Israel, according to a survey published in November 2022, which found that 91 percent of 500 responding experts from the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) and the American Political Science Association (APSA) “support at least some boycotts” of Israel….

91% of those teaching Middle East studies support “at least some boycotts” of the tiny Jewish state, which is testimony to the staggering anti-Israel bias among those entrusted with teaching young Americans about the Middle East, Israel, and “Palestine.” It’s as if 91% of the professors teaching the history of modern Russia turned out to be Communists, determined to defend the Soviet state from its critics. What do all those people screaming about the need for academic “diversity” have to say about 91% of the teachers of Middle East subjects being adamantly opposed to the Jewish state? Where is the diversity they claim to want?

There are 1.7 million teachers at the post-secondary level in America. Will the 3,000 professors who signed this open letter be enough to “galvanize” tens or hundreds of thousands of other college and university teachers into taking a stand against BDS? It’s going to be uphill all the way. But the House Committee on Education and the Workplace is conducting its own unstoppable investigation into American universities and their tolerance for anti-Israel and antisemitic acts, attitudes, and atmospherics on their campuses; a half-dozen presidential heads – Claudine Gay of Harvard is one example – have rolled as a result, and many more are sure to follow.