This is a couple of days old now, but worth a look anyway: Ian Buruma tackles the claim (raised by Steven and Hilary Rose in their recent attempt to defend the anti-Israel academic boycott brought to the fore by Mona Baker) that associating with Israelis and cooperating with Israeli academic institutions is morally equivalent to "collaborating with" South Africa's apartheid regime.
In the fevered imaginations of many on the Left (and overwhelmingly, it seems, at universities) Israel has indeed become the South Africa of today. And just as with South Africa in the '80s, an ability to display convincing moral outrage when it comes to Israel has become a "litmus test of one's progressive credentials." Yet "the comparison with South Africa is intellectually lazy, morally questionable, and possibly even mendacious," he writes, and continues:
if military policies in disputed areas were a legitimate reason for such boycotts, there would be no more academic links with many places in the world - and I don't mean just dictatorships.A more apt comparison with Israeli policies would be India's war in Kashmir. There, too, the victims are mostly Muslims. There is a long history of oppression, bad faith and stupid decisions. And the scale of the violence is much worse. Far more Muslims have been killed or tortured by the Indian army than by the Israeli defence forces. Dozens of Kashmiri victims - the number of people killed in Jenin - would not even reach the news. And if you think Kashmir is brutal, what about Chechnya?
But India and Russia are not litmus tests. Moral outrage against their governments is not a badge of being progressive. No one is proposing a boycott of universities in Delhi or St Petersburg. I can think of one or two reasons for these double standards, but whatever they are, I believe that they tell us more about the boycotters than about the subjects of their rage.