Academic Freedom

The famous American cultural critic, H.L. Mencken, once said that, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” I am reminded of this bon mot every time I hear of a BDS campaign that claims to be putting forward a simple answer to the Israel-Palestine problem by proposing a boycott of Israeli goods, divesting in some company or refusing to talk with some Israeli professor. What makes Mencken’s observation apt here is that the Israel Palestinian conflict is virtually the definition of a complex problem. In fact it is a complex problem that is itself part of a very much larger complex problem, or set of problems, that have bedeviled the vast territory of the Middle East for generations if not centuries.

What the social-democratic left has always objected to is not the liberal aspiration to universal rights and freedoms, but rather the way that classical liberalism generally ignored the unequal economic and social conditions of access to those freedoms. The liberal’s abstract universalism affirmed everyone’s equal rights without giving everyone the real means of realizing these formally universal rights. The rich and the poor may have an equal formal right to be elected to political office, for instance, but the poor were effectively excluded from office when it did not pay a full-time salary. For this reason generations of social democrats have insisted that all citizens must be guaranteed access to the institutional resources they need to make effective use of their civil and political rights.

The responses by Cary Nelson and Ernst Benjamin to the Journal of Academic Freedom’s recent forum on academic boycott offer little new to the familiar litany of objections to the academic and cultural boycott of Israel [ACBI]. Moreover, neither response shows any signs of having seriously read and considered what the essays in the forum actually propose. When they do even refer to them, their misreadings are so egregious that one would almost prefer to presume malice than to impute obtuseness to a colleague. Most extraordinary is that they proceed as if the matter at stake were Israeli academic freedom, the protection of Israeli rights to debate and criticize, the defense of a largely illusory body of Israeli academics that are supposedly engaged in a vigorous critique of the occupation of Palestine, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian citizens of Israel along with Bedouins in the South Hebron Hills and the Negev, the ethnically exclusive nature of the State of Israel, etc, etc, etc. It would be wonderful if this flourishing sphere of liberal to left critical thought really existed, but it would still not be the issue on hand.

I am troubled by the circumstances surrounding the publication of Cary Nelson’s and Ernst Benjamin’s responses to the collection of essays supporting the academic boycott of Israeli universities published in the recent issue of Journal of Academic Freedom. JAF is an online peer reviewed, scholarly journal with an editorial board and a current editor chosen after a process of formal interviewing and academic and professional vetting. The editor of a scholarly journal consults with the editorial board about topics for journal issues and then has the autonomy to select submissions after they have gone through a peer review process.