The members of the American Studies Association have endorsed the Association’s participation in a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. In an election that attracted 1252 voters, the largest number of participants in the organization’s history, 66.05% of voters endorsed the resolution, while 30.5% of voters voted no and 3.43% abstained...
...The resolution is in solidarity with scholars and students deprived of their academic freedom and it aspires to enlarge that freedom for all, including Palestinians. The ASA’s endorsement of the academic boycott emerges from the context of US military and other support for Israel; Israel’s violation of international law and UN resolutions; the documented impact of the Israeli occupation on Palestinian scholars and students; the extent to which Israeli institutions of higher education are a party to state policies that violate human rights; and finally, the support of such a resolution by a majority of ASA members.
Full text of the ASA press release
The ASA is the oldest and largest association in the United States devoted to the interdisciplinary study of American culture and history, with 5000 members and 2,200 library and institutional subscribers.
The action follows a similar resolution from the Association for Asian American studies in April, another from the Teachers Union of Ireland, and the decision by Stephen Hawking to join the academic boycott last December. While this action is obviously largely symbolic, it nonetheless paves the way for other academic institutions to peak their heads out and follow suit.
The academic boycott of Israeli institutions is but one piece of the BDS tactic (Boycott Divest Sanction) that Palestinian civil society asked the world nearly ten years ago to take up, in response to Israeli treatment of Palestinians both within Israel's legal borders and outside those borders. The rationale for the academic boycott is given in this recent editorial by Omar Barghouti:
Unlike the South African academic boycott, which was a “blanket” boycott of academics and institutions, the PACBI call explicitly targets Israeli academic institutions because of their complicity, to varying degrees, in planning, implementing, justifying or whitewashing aspects of Israel’s occupation, racial discrimination and denial of refugee rights. This collusion takes many forms, from systematically providing the military-intelligence establishment with indispensable research—on demography, geography, hydrology, and psychology, among other disciplines—to tolerating and often rewarding racist speech, theories and “scientific” research. It also includes institutionalizing discrimination against Palestinian Arab citizens, among them scholars and students; suppressing Israeli academic research on Zionism and the Nakba; and the construction of campus facilities and dormitories in the occupied Palestinian territory, as Hebrew University has done in East Jerusalem, for instance.
Predictably, the usual suspects have already attacked the decision as antisemetic.
Alan Dershowitz, as is his habit, constructed a straw man to torch, accusing the ASA of boycotting
Israelis rather than
Israeli institutions, then was able to make the story about "the enduring prejudice against Jews," rather than the enduring illegal occupation and theft of Palestinian land.
Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, said, "This vote to boycott Israel, one of the most democratic and academically free nations on the globe, shows the Orwellian anti-Semitism and moral bankruptcy of the American Studies Association."
Larry Summers called the boycott "antisemetic in effect."
Other bizarre arguments against the academic boycott include the fact that there are worse regimes in the world, the unspoken conclusion being, I guess, that activists need to go down the checklist in order from worst to best (?) before addressing Israel/Palestine. Also--booga booga--Angela Davis supports the boycott! And Mahmood Abbas, while in South Africa for Nelson Mandela's funeral, came out against a boycott of Israel. Why yes, he did, against Israel. But not against a boycott of the Israeli settlements.
In conclusion, I'll quote again from Barghouti's article:
Whether or not BDS is reaching a tipping point, it is hard to deny that recent BDS developments have led to an explosion of interest in scrutinizing and criticizing aspects of Israel’s regime of occupation, colonization and apartheid(pdf) against the Palestinian people. They have also opened a critically needed free space for debating Israel’s denial of Palestinian rights, underlining what legal scholar Noura Erakat calls “an ethic of legitimate dissent.” Calling for a boycott of Israel and its complicit institutions is still quite controversial in the US, but it is no longer taboo.