There are some apparently plausible reasons not to sign up to the Academic Commitment. We don’t think they hold water, and give our arguments below.

There is one key point about the Commitment that needs to be emphasised – it is not a commitment to sever contacts with individual Israeli academics. It follows the call for supportive action from Palestinian civil society in that it exclusively targets institutions. 

Why Israel?

What critics say: 

There are any number of countries which have done far worse things, killed far more innocent civilians. Why pick on Israel? 

This argument looks hollow after the repeated destructive and disproportionate violence inflicted on the besieged Gaza Strip in 2008, 2014, 2021 and other years, killing mainly civilians, including children. The repeated murderous attacks on Gaza are only the most overt manifestation of Israeli policy. Other routine violations of Palestinian human rights include illegal colonisation, torture, the routine imprisonment of children, the relentless efforts to expel Palestinians from East Jerusalem, the denial of statehood. The Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling has described this catalogue of oppression as politicide, ‘a process that has as its ultimate goal the dissolution of the Palestinian people’s existence as a legitimate social, political and economic entity’. 

International human rights bodies have called Israel’s actions by their proper name: apartheid. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the respected Israeli NGO B’Tselem have all independently reached this conclusion. Israel is an apartheid state and system, based on institutionalised racial discrimination against Palestinians inside Israel, and the systematic mistreatment of the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza.

Just as was the case in South Africa, we have received a call for boycott from the victims of this oppression. Palestinian civil society has chosen this non-violent strategy to bring pressure to bear on their powerful and unaccountable oppressors, and has asked us to support them. 

Israel has repeatedly faced accusations of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Yet our governments give it a free pass. One of the aims of our campaign is to put pressure on our governments to remove the diplomatic defence system that has protected Israel from the UN-backed sanctions that otherwise would have been in place years ago.

Why on earth target Israel’s universities, of all institutions?

What critics say: 

Israel’s policies are not decided by the universities. They are decided by politicians, by the country’s government. They are implemented by the IDF, and Israel’s judicial system. Why punish the universities for something that is nothing to do with them? 

Israel has been illegally occupying Palestinian land and settling it for well over 50 years. This has effectively become an integrated system, with not only Palestine’s land, but also its water and its natural resources diverted to and exploited by Israel. A significant proportion of Israel’s agricultural produce is grown in the Occupied Territories. Israeli workers (including academics) live in the illegal settlements. Israelis, including academics and students, serve in the IDF reserve, called up whenever (for example) an attack on Gaza is to be launched.

Much of Israel’s most advanced industry is oriented towards the security needs of the occupation; and the resulting high-tech products swell Israel’s exports. Israel has given the world facial recognition technology, drones, Pegasus telephone spyware. All are first deployed and tested against Palestinians, and made possible by Israel’s universities.

The universities are not isolated from the occupation, nor do they struggle to stay clear of its contamination. In particular Haifa’s Technion is entwined with Israel’s armaments industry, and provides it with much of its technically trained recruits. Back in Winter 2008‐9 Tel Aviv University’s Review boasted of 55 ongoing research projects for the IDF and the Ministry of Defence. (They have become more discreet since.) Part of the Hebrew University is built on 800 acres confiscated from its Palestinian owners, while Tel Aviv University is built over the site of the ethnically cleansed Palestinian village of Sheikh Muwanis. One of the universities, Ariel, is located in an illegal settlement in the West Bank. Most Israeli universities offer special privileges (eg preferential entry, accelerated progress, access to dormitory accommodation) for IDF veterans (from which Palestinians are automatically excluded). Many run tailor-made courses for security organisations such as Shin-Bet. 

Back in 2006 Gideon Levy wrote this in Haaretz: “Everything is tainted: …[including] the architects and engineers who lend a hand to the occupation’s enterprises – the settlements and the fence, the barriers and bypass roads and also the university lecturers, who do nothing for their imprisoned colleagues in the territories, but conduct special study programs for the security forces.” Approaching two decades on, the charge applies with even greater force.

How can academics justify obstructing knowledge?

What critics say:

The highest value of academics is free communication of information and ideas – in fact academic freedom. To set up roadblocks to association, collaboration and discussion violates utterly this principle.

The ideal of the universality of scientific and scholarly discourse is one that we share along with other principled academics. But there have been many occasions when academic institutions have failed to live up to acceptable standards of behaviour. In these cases academics have often used the instrument of boycott in the attempt to get things changed.

For example during the Cold War many psychiatric associations (American, British, French, Danish among them) called for the expulsion or suspension of the Soviet Society of Neurologists and Psychiatrists from the World Association because of its involvement in abusive practices. This amounted to a form of boycott applied to a large group of academics and professionals.

Closer to home the British academics’ union (since 2006 the UCU) has repeatedly imposed boycotts (euphemistically called grey-listing) on universities or colleges that have behaved in unacceptable ways.

The PACBI (Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel) call for the boycott of Israeli universities is directed solely at those institutions, not the individual academics employed by them. This is far less stringent than the anti-apartheid boycott of South African universities including their academic staff, which was strongly supported by UK academics. Under the PACBI Guidelines, academics are perfectly free to continue their collaboration with Israeli colleagues unhindered, British universities may continue to welcome Israeli academics as visitors, and British academic journals are free to publish the work of Israeli researchers. There is no roadblock here to association, collaboration and discussion.

Isn’t this just antisemitism in action? 

What critics say: 

Antisemitism, a very specific form of racism, is a centuries-old phenomenon deeply embedded in western societies. Doesn’t the movement to boycott Israel provide an ideal and apparently legitimate channel for both underground and explicit antisemitism to find expression? Isn’t the movement to boycott Israel merely another manifestation of antisemitism, by attempting to delegitimise the world’s only Jewish state?


In the aftermath of horrendous events in a number of European countries there has been a growing awareness that antisemitism has not been exorcised by the trauma of the Holocaust. It is precisely this renewed evidence of antisemitism as a continuing thread in our society that gives us a double responsibility. First, to be alert to any manifestations of this pernicious malaise, and to take steps to counter them. And second, not to make inappropriate claims of antisemitism to score points in political debate. 

The Palestinian organisations whose call motivates this campaign, PACBI and the Boycott National Committee, are both explicitly anti-racist, clear that Jewish people do not stand proxy for the Israeli state. Omar Barghouti, a leading figure in PACBI, put it this way in his address to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign’s Annual General Meeting in London in 2012: 

“BDS [Boycott Divestment and Sanctions] is a universalist movement that categorically opposes all forms of racism, including Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. This is not negotiable. We should never welcome racists in our midst, no matter what.”

The clear intention of many allegations of antisemitism is to deflect criticism of Israel, to intimidate critics and to silence serious debate. There is a particular emotional charge connected with any allegation of antisemitism, and sadly too many people, defenders of Israel and others, have deployed it quite inappropriately in an attempt to silence those they disagree with.

Israel’s defenders like to call it “the world’s only Jewish state”, as if one could be antisemitic towards a state. Israel’s Jews in fact make up a minority of the world’s Jewish population, and Jewish views including on Israel are diverse. There are significant numbers of active Jewish members in all the pro-BDS organisations in the UK and other countries. One Jewish supporter of BDS put his views succinctly: ‘Human rights abuses do not become excusable because committed by Jews. The very idea smacks of a kind of twisted, reverse antisemitism.’ 

Isn’t Israel quite different from South Africa?

What critics say: 

Everyone agrees that the boycott of South Africa was morally justified, but Israel isn’t South Africa. It doesn’t have apartheid. Palestinians in Israel have a vote, and some even hold high office. 

People draw parallels between Israel and South Africa because of this common feature: the existence of a dominant group, defined along racial lines, that monopolises effective power and maintains it through a network of administrative controls backed up by racially- oriented legislation and brutal enforcement. In 1973 the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (ICSPCA) was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly.

ICSPCA defines the crime of apartheid as ‘inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group … over another racial group … and systematically oppressing them’. In 2006 ex-President Jimmy Carter published a book raising the question of apartheid in the context of Israel/Palestine . The following year the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Professor John Dugard (himself a South African), concluded that ‘elements of the Israeli occupation constitute forms of colonialism and of apartheid, which are contrary to international law’. Fifteen years later Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the respected Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem have all concluded that Israel is now practicing full-blown apartheid.

In Israel, there are colour-coded identity documents and vehicle registration plates, settler-only roads, checkpoints, aerial drone surveillance and of course the apartheid Wall – all of which make it easy to identify a person in the wrong place. Town planning controls are deployed to keep Jewish areas free of Palestinians, or to dislodge them from areas of intended Jewish expansion. Schools in Palestinian areas are kept starved of funds to ensure a sub-standard education, and the curricula prevent children from learning about their own history and cultural heritage. The settler-only roads divide the Palestinian West Bank into overcrowded and impoverished bantustans. There are a myriad laws that give Palestinians different and lesser rights.

There are differences, of course: one is that the basic Israeli imperative has always been quite distinct from apartheid South Africa’s – Israel wants to get rid of Palestinians, whereas the South African apartheid regime wanted to keep black people for their labour.

Why not concentrate on supporting Palestinian universities?

What critics say:

Surely if academics are concerned about what is happening to Palestinian universities, the right course of action is to give them material help?

The present boycott campaign is not just about the Palestinian universities. It is a response to the Palestinian call for boycott arising from the Israeli government’s continued assaults on human rights; its disregard for international law in the West Bank and Gaza; and its systemic discrimination against Palestinians inside Israel. These assaults have indeed sharply intensified since December 2022 when the most extreme right-wing government in Israel’s history took office.  

Israel’s treatment of Palestinian universities is malevolent. Multiple roadblocks rule out collaboration between universities even just a few kilometres apart. The arbitrary refusal of visas prevents Palestinian academics from travel abroad and foreign academics from visiting. The routine withholding of books and scientific equipment ordered from abroad plays havoc with research programmes. And Israeli universities say and do nothing.

In any case, it is not a matter of either helping Palestinian universities or boycotting Israeli ones. There is no contradiction. We strive both to help Palestinian universities and to boycott Israeli ones.