A well served boycott

The recently voted NATFHE boycott of Israeli universities and Academics has opened a Pandora's box. From everywhere, people are starting to speak about the collaboration of Israeli academics with the miltary and the security personnel in designing warfare and efficient torture methods against the palestinians.

It is naive to think that a country and a superpower like Israel can occupy and opress an entire population while divorced from its knowledge machine and advanced expertise center ! But that tells us a lot about how much Israel can conceal of its brutality from the public and expert opinion worldwide, thanks to its lobbies and well trained propagandists (about the well trained propagandists I may post something soon).

Jonathan Cook exposes and documents some aspects of this collaboration.

UPDATE: During my morning walk with the family dog, reflecting further on this post I wrote yesterday late before I went to bed, I realized that I was one of those naive people who never made the connection between Israeli Academia and occupation. I have worked with one Israeli academic a long time ago and have a good memory of the person. Although we knew he served in the IDF (they all do), he never talked about this and was a cheerful person, very agreable to work with. Being part of the Academia people, specially in the Sciences, we rarely discuss politics or other matters than Science. May be if I was a historian, things would have been different, but I never really made the connection in my mind. This is why reading the recent articles about the subject, I was surprised to see that the relations are more than circonstantial, they are constitutive. Even if I have always defended the boycott, my position was more related to the moral aspect of the duty to boycott those who do not condemn forcefully human rights violations by Israel, without other considerations. Many Israelis who opposed the boycott but were neverhteless sympathetic to the Palestinian cause have advanced pragmatic arguments against it. Most of the time, you cannot oppose moral arguments to pragmatic ones.

This is why I am updating the post with a link to an article by the two Palestinian academics who defended the boycott. In their article they offer counter arguments to Israelis who oppose the boycott because it is counterproductive.

Full text of Palestinian Academics call for International Boycott of Israel