Do not submit to Europe-Dr. Eyal Levin

Do not submit to Europe

Last month, I attended a meeting of political science researchers in Washington who were concerned about current trends in American academia, and especially about the efforts to sideline Jewish researchers.

They described incidents in which there were no keffiyehs, no Palestinian flags. Rather, in homegrown American accents and proper liberal terminology, the second generation of Middle Eastern immigrants declared that the time has come for those who grew up in the United States to take over the position that the Jewish community has been enjoying.

And the Jews? They react by quietly running away, gathering together and discretely cutting ties with their Israeli colleagues. Why should they invite a researcher from Tel Aviv as a partner to a study when the invitation alone will turn into a completely preventable political argument? These thoughts, which put Israeli researchers in a compartment alone, happen secretly, almost unconsciously, and they have a single outcome: academic boycott.

When I returned from abroad, and talked about the worrying issues discussed at the meeting, I was dismissed and told to calm down. Most of my Israeli colleagues were in complete denial. Some made the extra effort to tell me about their great relationships with colleagues overseas. And indeed, for a moment, even I began to waver and to ask myself if this meeting had really taken place or if it was merely a bad dream.

I was reminded of the meeting recently, when I read about the European Union's plans for sanctions to impose on Israel if it, God forbid, acts in a way that Brussels interprets as hurting the chances of a two-state solution. For example, construction in the area between Jerusalem and Maale Adumim or, God forbid, construction in Har Homa or Givat Hamatos, would result in economic punishment for a rogue Israel.

What could be the benefit of an academic boycott at American campuses and research institutions or of the EU's approach? Although I did not find an intelligent person to justify what is happening in American academia, some of my best friends explained to me that in the case of settlement construction, European intervention actually promotes the peace process. The issue of boycott affects us all, I was told, and if my impressions from the meeting in Washington are correct, we must think about how the issue relates to this us. The issue of sanctions for the settlements, however, relates only to a specific sector of Israeli society, and maybe it is good for all of us that an external body is doing the work for us.

This mistaken distinction between the academic boycott and the settlement sanctions reminds me, indirectly, of an event from my father's life. He spent his childhood in Berlin, before the noose tightened around the Jews. One day, he went out with his grandmother and they saw a Jewish beggar on the side of the road. The beggar asked for a coin, but my great-grandmother took my father's hand and dragged him away. "Those are Ostjuden [eastern Jews]," said his grandmother, who was born in the Ukraine, "Keep your distance from them, so people don't think we are like them."

Sometimes it seems to me that some of my colleagues are afraid of being seen as related in any way to the settlements. They prefer to keep a certain distance. They feel that perhaps cooperating with Europe and agreeing to the sanctions for the settlements will distance the threat of the academic boycott -- but there is no difference between one boycott and another.

And for those who correctly understand that the Brussels sanctions and the American academic boycott are one and the same and that they evoke a mental connection to a dark period in the history of the West, here are the closing words uttered by one of the participants at the meeting in Washington. The speaker is a scientist who recently completed decades of service at the Pentagon. "We the Jews have never been more than honored guests in this land," he said.

As the meeting dispersed, I approached him and asked, "What, if anything, is the difference between today's Washington and the Berlin of the 1930s?" He looked at me, thought for a moment and said, "Here we are honored guests, there we were simply guests."

Dr. Eyal Levin is a lecturer in the Israel and Middle Eastern Studies Department at Ariel University.