U.K. academia's hypocrisy about Israel

By their own logic, British academics should be boycotted for discrimination against blacks, who are grossly underrepresented in universities.

Opponents of Israel have been trying to delegitimize it for the last decade with claims that it is an apartheid state. However, anyone familiar with Israel and its reality knows that this claim misses the mark. There is certainly inequality in Israel, but it would be a far stretch to label this apartheid.

To demonstrate the absurdity of this claim, one can look to the academic world. Over the last decade, there have been several attempts to impose a boycott on academic institutions in Israel, based on claims that they are collaborating with the so-called occupation.

Interestingly, according to the British daily The Guardian, Syrian President Bashar Assad visited Damascus University last May. The photos from that visit clearly show how warmly he was received by faculty and students. This event should have triggered an emergency session of the teachers’ unions in Ireland and Great Britain, aimed at imposing sanctions on Syrian academic institutions which collaborate with a regime that is responsible for the deaths of 100,000 civilians. A similar boycott could also be imposed on academic institutions in other Arab countries, which collaborate in discrimination against Palestinians who fled or were expelled there in 1948. Only Jordan has granted them citizenship. In other countries they still lack basic rights.