Anti-Semitic studies
Douglas Davis

Pay attention, Professor. If you support the proposed
academic boycott of Israel - and if you are to remain
intellectually honest - prepare for a radical lifestyle
change.

Firstly, unplug your computer. Good.

Now switch off your interactive digital television set. Well done.

And now throw away your mobile phone. Excellent.

You see, Professor, these machines are not only the engine
of the globalised, capitalist world but they also
depend on technologies that have been produced by
Israeli academics in the Zionist entity.

Stop playing with your detached mouse, Professor, and
concentrate. I'm afraid you may not use the British
Library because it has been computerised by Ex Libris,
a Zionist company that was spawned by the odious Hebrew
University of Jerusalem.

And if, God forbid, you develop problems of the small intestine, you may
not
pop the Zionist-invented 'video capsule', which passes
naturally through your body as it monitors this
delicate piece of your anatomy. You will, sadly, have
to take it up the derrière, Professor. As a matter of
principle, of course. But remember: your principle
allows your proctologist to keep his hand in.

All this boycotting, you see, is the logical extension
of proposed academic sanctions against Israel by some
members of your Association of University Teachers
(AUT) when they meet in Eastbourne next Wednesday.

Just visit the website of Egyptian-born Mona Baker of the
University of Manchester Institute of Science and
Technology. She set the standard by firing two Israeli
scholars from the boards of her translation journals as
a matter of high academic principle.

You will see that Ms Baker's ambitions do not end with
the academic boycott. Her website also includes a
section entitled 'Boycott Israeli Products & Services',
which features dozens of global brands that,
inconveniently, are not Israeli at all.

The offenders presumably have earned their place in infamy by dealing
with the Zionist entity, by being owned by Jews or by
having Jews on their boards. They range from Coca-Cola
and Nescafé to Johnson & Johnson and Estée Lauder, from
Hugo Boss and Ralph Lauren to Selfridges and Marks &
Spencer, from Kleenex and Wonderbra to Lancôme and....
All marked for boycott.

Absent from Ms Baker's list - and here I think I can
help - is a set of global companies which are arguably
even more culpable because they not only operate in
Israel but also do most of their R&D there.

IBM and Intel each have three R&D centres in Israel; Microsoft
established its first non-American facility there, and
Cisco Systems has built its only non-American R&D
centre in Israel. Then there is Motorola, which has its
largest R&D site in Israel, and News Corp, whose
company NDS develops those neat interactive
technologies for digital television. There are many
more.

The AUT boycott brigade has cause for concern. It knows
that these companies are attracted not only by the
innate brutality of the expansionist regime but also by
the cunning of its university graduates (most of the
R&D centres are located on or near Israeli university
campuses).

Proportionally, the Zionist entity has more
university graduates than any other country, while its
scientists, engineers and agriculturists publish more
professional papers per capita than do their
counterparts anywhere else on earth.

The result is that Israel has the largest concentration of high-tech
companies outside Silicon Valley.

But the ultimate sin is that Israel, which came to independence in the
process of post-war decolonisation, stubbornly refuses
to become a failed state.

So dangerous has the situation become, dear Professor,
that when you meet in Eastbourne you will set aside the
small matter of your pay deal (which many universities
have failed to implement). Instead, you and your fellow
intellectual heavyweights will ponder far worthier
matters. Like foreign affairs. Of course, you will not
have to bother your turbo-charged minds with this
week's Unicef report which shows that half of the women
in the Arab world are illiterate and more than ten
million children in the region don't attend school.

The issue that will preoccupy you will be the
aggressive imperialist apartheid state: a state that
has nurtured the Palestinian universities and colleges
in the West Bank; one that offers equal rights - and
access to its universities - to all its citizens,
regardless of race, religion, ethnicity or sex; and
which has educated tens of thousands of Palestinians at
Israeli universities (several hundred a year still opt
for an Israeli education).

It is significant that Omar Barghouti, the Palestinian who
is encouraging you and your British comrades to boycott Israel,
is a doctoral student at none other than Tel Aviv University.

No, Professor, not all Israeli universities and not all
Israeli academics will be boycotted if the AUT motion
is passed. Such a proposition was defeated 3-1 at the
association's conference two years ago, and the
boycotters are too smart to repeat past mistakes. The
new motion, says one of its authors, has been
'tactically' amended to get it passed. 'We've got to be
a bit more sophisticated,' she says. And sophisticated
they are. They even had a dry run last December, when
they met to rehearse their presentations and develop
killer responses to potential critics.

Their sleek new motion - which does not involve a
single book-burning - envisages sanctions against only
the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University
and Haifa University. And there's more: the boycotters
generously offer Israeli academics the opportunity to
buy themselves immunity if they are prepared to
denounce their country, specifically, 'conscientious
Israeli academics and intellectuals opposed to their
state's colonial and racist policies'. Who could
seriously question the integrity of your fellow
academic freedom fighters?

But there are, of course, small obstinate obstacles in
the way of you visionaries, Professor. Britain's
academic institutions, for example, have not endorsed
boycotting Israel's academic community. Indeed, when
the Oxford don Andrew Wilkie told an Israeli PhD
applicant that there was 'no way would I take on
somebody who had served in the Israeli army', he was
hauled before the university's disciplinary body and
suspended without pay for two months.

Cambridge University's Professor Sir Aaron Klug, Nobel
laureate and former president of the Royal Society, put
me right when I asked him about the possible impact -
on Britain no less than on Israel - of such a boycott:

'How important is the AUT? That's the question you have
to ask.' He is no supporter of Israel's Prime Minister,
Ariel Sharon, and his policies but he does consider
that the proposed boycott is 'ill considered and
doesn't promote anything at all'. The AUT, he says, is
out to attack Israel 'but this is no way to proceed'.
Sir Aaron is 'not one who looks for anti-Semitism
around every corner,' he says, 'but I do think there's
an element of that here. It does give people who are
anti-Semitic the opportunity to express themselves.'

But relax, Professor. The AUT has solemnly concluded
that there is a clear distinction between anti-Semitism
and anti-Zionism. They don't mind Jews. They just
detest the Jewish state.

-Douglas Davis is co-author, with Helen Davis, of Israel
in the World - Changing Lives Through Innovation, which
was published this week by Weidenfeld and Nicolson.