Yesterday, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that Lara Alqasem, an American student accused of advocating Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel, can enter the country in order to pursue a master’s program in Human Rights and Transitional Justice at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Alqasem, 22, had initially been barred due to her former BDS activity at the University of Florida (registered on the blacklist Canary Mission site which Ben Gurion airport security routinely consults), yet appealed the ban, and in that process was detained at the airport for 16 days.
On the one hand this story is easy to celebrate as a win against draconian Israeli laws which constitute thought-police.
On the other hand, it is also a dangerous win for liberal-Zionists who also campaigned for her release, because in the legitimizing of her cause, they also delegitimized BDS.
Last week, Nada Elia wrote in her piece on this site titled “Lara Alqasem’s case highlights the need for the academic boycott of Israel”:
“While we can only support victims of racial profiling and ideological exclusion, much of the advocacy she is receiving is highly problematic. Many of her defenders present Hebrew University as a positive force, a welcoming institution, and Alqasem as a ‘good Palestinian,’ so long as she denounces and renounces BDS”.
Hebrew University rector Barak Medina’s statement to The New York Times clearly shows this duality:
“To be clear, we strongly oppose the boycott campaign against Israel, and Israel has to fight it. But to deny entry to every person who has expressed support for a boycott is counterproductive.”
In other words, Alqasem’s acceptance and even embrace by the Israeli academia, is conditioned upon the notion that she at current does not support BDS, hence legitimizing the fight against BDS, and only considering Alqasem kosher since she claims to not support it at current. Alqasem did not go as far as the Israeli Strategic Affairs and Hasbara Minister Gilad Erdan wanted her to – she did not condemn BDS altogether nor express regret for her past actions; but her court defense was based on the claim that she has not participated in boycott activities for a year and a half, where she promised not to engage in BDS in the future. Such a defense may arguably have been expedient in order to improve her chances of getting through the system, but it is a soft form of complicity in an institutional assault on BDS, and hence a soft form of complicity in an institutional assault on Palestinians in general.
The Supreme Court statement about the case also contains this duality – legitimizing the draconian persecution of BDS activists, yet criticizing the state for this particular case:
Justice Neal Hendel, one of three Supreme Court judges who heard the appeal, affirmed in the ruling that while the state has the authority to bar BDS activists from the country, the law was not applicable in Alqasem’s case.
“In this case, preventing the entry of the plaintiff does not advance the purpose of the law and it was even argued, for example, by the Hebrew University that it harms Israeli academia,” Hendel wrote.
“The fight against boycotts is fitting and vital, as are the actions taken by the State of Israel on the matter. However, the concrete action before us clearly deviates from the range of reasonableness and cannot be accepted,” he added.
This is a legal whitewash of the greater policy, while criticizing the minor “error” as “unreasonable”.
Such legal whitewash has been the hallmark of the Israeli Supreme Court, as it has largely served as a means of supposedly ‘balancing’ Israel’s Apartheid policies, while never really addressing the greater overall criminal paradigm. In this case, the Supreme Court is literally congratulating and endorsing the state for its persecution of human rights activists as “fitting and vital”, yet when there is a case of an individual who seems sufficiently distanced from this supposedly criminal activity, it criticizes the state for being too harsh.
This is a game of good cop – bad cop. It is not surprising that Interior Minister Aryeh Deri calls the Supreme Court ruling a “disgrace”, nor that Erdan rejected Alqasem’s promise not to be involved in BDS in the future as insufficient. That these people, from the more openly fascist stream of Zionism, are playing the bad cop, doesn’t mean that the good cop is good. The game is dangerous precisely because it provides a semblance of balance, where there is none.
All this confirms exactly what Nada Elia was saying – it highlights the need for the academic boycott of Israel. The Hebrew University, considered the top academic institution in Israel, is not only straddling East and West Jerusalem in contravention of international law, it is also playing the double-game of supporting ‘human rights’ while endorsing the persecution of human rights activists, since their cause is Palestinian. Lara Alqasem may now be part of a course on Human Rights and Transitional Justice, but the overriding paradigm in which she does this is an antithesis to those very principles.
This story merely shows one aspect of a myriad of Israeli academic complicity in oppression of Palestinians. It shows how, as a foreign student, one can easily become a pawn in an internal Israeli-Zionist political game, where the right and left compete against each other about who is a “better Zionist”. Rather than play Israel’s game, students should heed the wise words of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI):
“USACBI encourages students and professors to make a commitment to Palestinian human rights and boycott study abroad programs in Israel.”
Thank you, Ofir, for the only sane remark about this boycott-breaking scab.
Spats between Zionism supporters aren’t our business, anyway. At least not enough to have such a hullaballoo on Mondoweiss.
“In other words, Alqasem’s acceptance and even embrace by the Israeli academia, is conditioned upon the notion that she at current does not support BDS, hence legitimizing the fight against BDS..”
Bizarro world logic.
Israel will only allow people in who pledge not to boycott Israel. Does this not tell us a couple of things about Israel, and nothing about BDS? Those things being that Israel cannot or will not tolerate dissent and that Israel fears BDS.
This does not “legitimize” their fight against BDS. It just further exposes Israel for the anti-democratic state that is it.
I agree with Festus and respectfully disagree in part with Ofir’s analysis. Its very premise, that the episode is a “blow to BDS,” shows how much some of us have been sucked into the framing promulgated by the Israeli right, which has declared its engagement in a battle “against BDS.” That has proven politically effective for them domestically in the same way as the U.S. “war on terror” has obfuscated any rational analysis of why people we bomb, kill and exploit might want to resist. Not to equate actual “terror” and BDS, a nonviolent strategy, of course, but the point is that they are both tactics deliberately misrepresented as ends in themselves when in fact they are tools that some may chose to adopt in varying ways to pursue their goals. In our case, that goal is freedom for Palestine, with democracy and equality for all who are destined to share the country. To call something a “blow to BDS,” or something else a “victory for BDS,” for that matter, it to fetishize a strategy in a way that risks losing sight of the real purpose of our struggles.
So how to consider the Alqasem case? First, let’s be thankful that she didn’t succumb to the bait of Erdan et al to formally “renounce BDS” and her past organizing in order to get out of jail easily. Her lawyers may have tried to minimize her SJP activities, but she did not disavow them. That is at least a partial victory.
The court’s decision was based more on the fact that by seeking to study at an Israeli university, she was demonstrably not boycotting Israel. That’s factually correct, but it also oversimplifies the whole point of boycott, as spelled out in the PACBI guidelines, with which I mostly agree. They wisely stress that the boycott is primarily “institutional,” not targeting individual academics because of their identity or even because of their political views. PACBI calls for boycotting of formal exchange programs that involve an institutional connection with Israeli universities, not at all what Alqasem is involved with.
On the individual level, the guidelines say the boycott covers “International students enrolling in or international faculty teaching or conducting research at degree or non-degree programs at an Israeli institution, but they add an exception: “[C]onducting research at Israeli facilities such as archives does not entail official affiliation with those facilities.” Is Alqasem violating this? Perhaps, but I don’t think her situation was what PACBI primarily contemplated. And I don’t consider individual “students enrolling” should be equated with “faculty teaching,” which involves a much higher degree of affiliation. If Alqasem as an individual student decided that her scholarly goals would be best met at Hebrew University, I’m not particularly bothered. Maybe she is mistaken or naive, but at most, at most it’s an awfully small transgression.
Reasonable supporters of the overall academic boycott may disagree about that, but either way, to bemoan this as a “blow to BDS” is shooting ourselves in the foot. Israel’s institution of thought police for entry and its obsessive battle against BDS came under a media spotlight and made its regime look petty, silly and horribly anti-democratic. Unsurprisingly, liberal Zionist politicians, the Hebrew University and others scrambled to minimize the damage, but they can’t honestly spin it as a “blow against BDS.” Instead of calling it that ourselves, we can and should endeavor to expose their hypocrisy and the ridiculous ideological entry ban as we celebrate that they tried and failed to break Alqasem.
Maybe the verdict is a small loss for BDS, but the overall story of Lara Alqasem is a win for BDS. It shows that Israel is limiting freedom of expression and freedom of opinion.
What’s so wise there? So they are not targeting for identity when that very identity is the only thing that makes the invaders invaders. Very wise.
Also, no difference re political opinions means not being able to make an exception for serious opponents of Zionism who are legitimately in the Zionist entity (if such a thing were possible.)
The only point of the boycott is to make the whole Master-Race population of the Zionist entity feel isolated, shunned. Pariahs, untouchables. They and everything connected to them. Also, the only thing that will make them realize how serious it is is the boycott of any persons occupying Palestine, in addition to a total shunning of any cultural, academic, athletic, etc. exchange.
The good thing with a boycott movement is that everyone can participate, as much or as little as one wants to. It’s not up to some alphabet soup. That is in fact what protects the boycott movement from becoming totally taken over by Zionist-lites.
Last news, she was taking a course at Hebrew friggin’ University. So that’s not institutional, oy. And a course concerning human rights, of all things. Not that this is important. Dog-catching would have been as bad as anything. Also, this scab is breaking the boycott by going to the official Zionist-Entity part of Palestine.