Abuse of science

Protests against Israeli universities are the voice of anti-intellectualism

From The Times

March 4, 2009

The Science Museum in London is holding workshops this week that will expound scientific achievements to schoolchildren. More than 400 academics and a Nobel laureate are protesting and organising pickets.

It will appear extraordinary that the educational efforts of a great public institution should provoke anger among those who nominally uphold intellectual inquiry. But the scientists and universities whose work is being introduced are Israeli, and the event is billed as an Israeli Day of Science. All will now fall into place. Israel, its independence and its security policies in the West Bank and Gaza stir passions among the politically committed. In a reversal of the normal pattern of prejudice, anti-Israeli sentiment finds traction among the highly educated. Yet in its animus and malignancy, this protest is a model of anti-intellectualism.

The late Conor Cruise O'Brien, Irish statesman and polymath, once aptly denounced a boycott of academics of a particular nationality as “an intellectually disreputable attempt to isolate what I know to be an honest, open and creative intellectual community”. The scholars' offence was that they were from South African universities during the apartheid era. Apartheid was an evil system against which it was right to impose economic and diplomatic sanctions. But scholarship is independent of politics; the academics were private citizens who neither served the regime nor had the capacity to change its policies.

Retribution against the life of the mind in order to make a political point is the approach of movements for whom inquiry is a frivolity rather than a way of life. That is why academic boycotts are iniquitous even when the cause is right. Yet the protest outside the Science Museum is not even in an obvious moral cause. It is hysterical and, in its analysis, plainly unscientific.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict comprises competing and equally legitimate national claims, both of which must be accommodated in an eventual territorial compromise. The notion that this will be advanced by sanctions against Israeli institutes of learning, whose scholars have no political role and may have no sympathy with their Government's policies, is risible.

The protesters are not an identifiable scholarly current, but a group of political activists who happen to work in the academy. Many were associated in an earlier campaign to persuade the Association of University Teachers to boycott Israeli universities. The expansiveness of their campaign betrayed its motivation. It was not a disinterested desire for the rectification of historic injustices against the Palestinian people, but an insistence that Israel was illegitimate by virtue of being a Jewish state.

It is ironic that the academics are joined in an inflammatory cause by a Nobel peace laureate, Mairead Maguire, of the Irish Peace People. It stands higher still on the scale of intellectual disrepute that the boycott is supported by Ian Gibson, a former chairman of the Commons Science Select Committee. Dr Gibson declares: “Science is not neutral. It is part of the political process.” It is a fantastic non sequitur to confuse science's institutional setting with its intellectual content, but it might be taken as symbolic of the protests. This is an arbitrary and vindictive campaign, but above all it is a stupid one.