Ilan Pappe, a senior lecturer at Israel's Haifa University, has a message to foreign universities: Don’t hire me.

An outspoken proponent of a one state-solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and a distinguished historian,  Pappe lends his moral support to the movement calling for a boycott of Israeli academics. The goal is to put pressure on the government to end its occupation of Palestinian territories. “It will affect me as a member of the academy,” he says. But its  “a very small price to pay if it succeeds.”

The boycott effort picked up steam again this May in Britain, where it has the most support. The National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education will vote on a measure to support a boycott at their annual conference on Monday. And some British academics have signed on as individuals. In May, Haaretz reported that Richard Seaford, a professor at the University of Exeter, declined an offer to write for an Israeli journal due to his support for the boycott. The Association of University Teachers also toyed with the idea of signing onto the boycott in 2005, but later backed off.

In general, the boycott is a reaction to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Pappe sees the boycott as similar to the movement in American universities to divest from companies that do any business with Israel. “It touches upon the cultural self-image of Israelis,” he says, “which is no less important to them than their economic standard of living.”

But on a more direct level, academics in Britain have responded to three specific instances regarding the Israeli academy. When the AUP considered a resolution for a boycott, its advocates alleged that Hebrew University seized Palestinian land. Pappe was the subject of a controversy at Haifa University in 2002 and faced termination when the accuracy of a student’s masters' thesis came into question. Pro-Palestine advocates within the AUT cited the threat to Pappe’s job as a reason for a boycott, but Pappe continues to teach at Haifa to this day. And a statement from the Anti-Defamation League says that Bar Ilan University was targeted “for supervising three percent of the courses at the College of Judea and Samaria in the West Bank.”

The May vote by the NATFHE has set off alarm bells in the halls of the American Israel lobby and petitions against the boycott were circulated by email.

Even among the usual suspects in the pro-Palestinian sectors of the American-based intelligentsia, the movement has little support.

“A blanket boycott of Israeli academics is wrong,” says Juan Cole, a professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of Michigan and an outspoken critic of the Israeli government. “As a class, they have not done anything wrong. They are mostly critical of Israeli treatment of the Palestinians. They teach and interact with Arabs. The analogy to Apartheid just does not hold.”

Tony Judt, a New York University historian and prominent critic of Israeli foreign policy , would not support a boycott of Israeli academics unless a critical mass of Israeli academics themselves supported it. Scottish-reared, California-based radical journalist Alexander Cockburn stands against the boycott even though his political newsletter, Counterpunch, has played host to authors in support of it. He believes it would be hypocritical to be personally in favor of such a boycott while rallying against the censorship of left wing intellectuals. “I’m generally against boycotts,” Cockburn says.

But in Britain, pundits like Jacqueline Rose, a professor at Queen Mary (University of London) and the author of 2005's critically-acclaimed The Question of Zion have no problem with the hypocrisy. Among other reasons, Rose has stated that an academic boycott is necessary because international bodies have not impeded Israel’s alleged crimes.

British academics, says Judt (himself a British ex-pat), “have always been well to the left of the mainstream and live in a culture where that mainstream is much better informed — and more critical – about Israel than it is here in the U.S.”

Yet if Britons were so well-informed about injustice and more critical of bad-acting states, then why aren’t groups like the NATFHE also calling for a boycott of American academics for their government’s occupation of Iraq or of academics from the numerous Arab states with abysmal human rights records?

One of the world’s most notorious holocaust deniers, recently sentenced to prison in Austria, is David Irving, a Briton. And on the country’s left, Israel-bashing is one of the favored sports of London Mayor Ken Livingston. The boycott is part of what at least one Jewish group calls a dangerous trend. “Britain,” ADL National Director Abraham Foxman wrote in an op-ed in the New York Sun, “has a problem with Jews.”
 
Calling the proposed academic boycott an anti-Semitic act, however, is going too far. Collective punishment maybe closer to the actual truth. What is beyond reproach is that it is fair to criticize any government if its actions are heinous enough to warrant condemnation. However, Israel’s civilians, Jewish groups argue – whether they are academics or shopkeepers – deserve to be treated fairly by the international community, and some fear that isn’t happening in Britain. Is it because British academics need a scapegoat to distract themselves from their own country’s new repressive anti-terrorism measures and imperialist foreign policy?

Whatever the reason, conservative Jewish advocacy organizations like the ADL continue to level the anti-Semitism charge, ignoring the real political origins of the boycott campaign. In the U.S., unlike in Britain, there is a consensus among many academics that even if the Israeli government’s actions are contemptible, Israeli universities should not be held responsible.

“I do not see the movement for a boycott as growing,” says Cole. “I think this is a rear guard action by people who have several times been defeated.”