Hawking’s Boycott

~ Clarissa

The Guardian printed an excerpt from a letter Hawking sent to conference organizers in which he said: “I have received a number of emails from Palestinian academics. They are unanimous that I should respect the boycott. In view of this, I must withdraw from the conference. Had I attended, I would have stated my opinion that the policy of the present Israeli government is likely to lead to disaster.”

I totally wish he would have attended and said what he was planning to say. Somebody who is likely to be heard should be saying this. Israel is moving fast towards disaster and even though I don’t believe that nationalistic / narcissistic rage can be stopped before playing out, at least somebody needs to be trying.

Imagine a crowd of academics getting on a stage one by one at a conference in Israel and saying, “This is a beautiful country, and it is very painful to me to see it moving towards disaster. Please stop.” And each academic could finish with a powerful quote on nationalism, imagined communities, etc.

No, that wouldn’t work either. But it would be powerful activism.

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Published by Clarissa

54 thoughts on “Hawking’s Boycott”

        1. I’m a philologist and I really really hate it when people are careless with language. There is no Civil War or any war of any kind in North America. This term is as senseless in this situation as the terms “War on Drugs” and “War on Terror.”

          People, let’s be careful with words! Let’s avoid false analogies, no matter how flashy and delicious they seem to be. These analogies offer an illusion of analysis when, in reality, they preclude any actual analysis. Everything is not equal to everything else.

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    2. “More Americans per capita now in jail than in gulags under Stalin”

      The victims of red terror between 1929 and 1953 were 20 million. That’s the most conservative estimate – some people suspect it’s closer to 40 or 60 million. All these people were tortured, starved and worked to death. How many victims of the War on Drugs have been excruciated and murdered?

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      1. According to Solzhenitsyn, the writer who created the term Gulag Archipelago, 100,000,000 lives were lost as a result of red terror. So it’s weird that people use his terminology but avoid using his calculations.

        I also suggest people actually read Solzhenitsyn’s books and then decide whether a comparison with the US penitentiary system makes sense.

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        1. I believe that it’s best to use Gulag (which does not have a plural sense, by the way, which people who actually read Solzhenitsyn would know) and the US penitentiary in different contexts.

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      3. Maybe this calculation underestimates the real damage of Stalin’s gulags. You’re right on this.

        But the level of incarceration rate is at least about the same than many civil war-plagged countries.

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        1. Gulag doesn’t mean “a prison.” It means Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies. That’s why it can’t be used in the plural. There can only be a single enormous system called Gulag. It included all kinds of penitentiary establishments, including the ones where scholars were forced to work 18 hour days on their inventions. That’s how most of the Soviet scientific advances were made. Obviously, these scholars never did anything wrong. The government simply wanted to make them work for free and not get distracted by their personal lives, families, sleep, etc.

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          1. Of course, these were just scholars in tech disciplines. Scholars in the Humanities and geneticists were simply shot on sight. Except Stalin’s ass-kisser and lackey Bakhtin. That jerkwad lived to destroy the Soviet Humanities for decades to come. The field still hasn’t recovered from what he did to it.

            I’m still shocked at how this vicious animal is celebrated and fawned over in Western academia.

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      5. “I’m still shocked at how this vicious animal is celebrated and fawned over in Western academia.”

        By who? Stalin was an evil asshole, one of the worst.

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  2. Israel isn’t on the frontburner of the stove of my mind. So, what is so much worse now than in the last 40 years, what do think the worst case scenario is and what is a better option according to you?

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    1. They are trying hard to provoke a war with absolutely anybody whatsoever in the region. A war with Iran didn’t happen, so now they will try to provoke Syria. For now, the US is resisting open involvement and so is Russia. Kind of. If, however, one of these countries decided to “help” one of the sides, we would be on the brink of WWIII. Let’s remember that the first two world wars happened precisely because certain regions were finding the process of nation-building extremely hard.

      Every totalitarian regime that erupted in extreme violence in the XXth century had great difficulties with nation-building. Germany and Italy decided to become countries out of disparate elements much later than other European nations and, in order to hold themselves together, turned to fascism. Spain’s nationl identity was destroyed in the Spanish-American war of the 1989. Result: the longest fascist dictatorship in the world. The USSR – the longest totalitarian dictatorship – was created out of 15 republics that had nothing whatsoever in common. The only way to mold national identities out of pretty much nothing is enormous violence. (The nation-building was not the only reason for all these countries to become totalitarian but it ws a very important one among several).

      So this is why Israel keeps creating conflict. Such completely different people came together in Israel. They have nothing whatsoever in common, given that a huge number is not religious. Something is needed to hold them together, an idea. Like Napoleon said, “No man will die for a petty distinction or a piece of bread. In order to get men to die enthusiastically, you need to give them an idea.” The idea here is that of a beleaguered small nation under constant threat. Just recently we have seen where such a national identity led in places like Yugoslavia.

      As for the alternative, historically, there has not been any alternative to violence in holding together such a tenuous national identity. But I believe that if Israelis tried looking for it, then there would be a chance.

      Or, alternatively, my fellow Jews could realize that the Chosen People could stand above these nationalistic games and not get implicated, especially at this late hour.

      As you can see, asking me about national identity can lead to endless rants on my part. 🙂 🙂 It’s one of my favorite topics ever.

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      2. // The nation-building was not the only reason for all these countries to become totalitarian but it ws a very important one among several

        If you ever want to write a post, would’ve been very interesting.

        Also, a series of posts on comunities, nations, etc is great.

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  3. You may think Israel is making a mistake of moving to attack Iran (right? is it the main reason?), even if the war with Iran has been going on for years via terrorist groups and despite that the Israeli decision on September 6, 2007 to bomb nuclear reactor in Syria seems now even more right.

    He, however, is thinking Israel is a criminal state for not signing peace-treaty with Palestinians today, for not supporting creating their country right now. Which you yourself said was against Israeli interests and not possible in practice.

    I see a big difference.

    Also, I see he was under pressure of pro-Palestinian groups not to come. The more influence Muslim immigrants in the West gain, the worse for Israel. They are hardly objective about Israel and, I believe, Jews in general.

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    1. “He, however, is thinking Israel is a criminal state for not signing peace-treaty with Palestinians today, for not supporting creating their country right now. Which you yourself said was against Israeli interests and not possible in practice.

      I see a big difference.”

      – There is absolutely no difference. All of it is part of the same process of creating a national identity.

      “Also, I see he was under pressure of pro-Palestinian groups not to come. The more influence Muslim immigrants in the West gain, the worse for Israel. They are hardly objective about Israel and, I believe, Jews in general.”

      – Any national identity needs an Other, an incredibly evil but also absolutely necessary counterpoint to the national identity. The Other is invested with every bad, threatening quality under the Sun. The shared hatred for and fear of the Other brings people together when there is nothing else to bring them together. The “they versus us” binary dominates the speech patterns of people in the grip of a nationalistic emotion. “They” are always both repellent and attractive. “They” disgust one but one still cannot avert the gaze. And the most curious thing is that there is absolutely no difference whether the Other is playing the game or not. The Other might not know one exists or care. This never stops the nationalistically minded. As the verbal aggression against the Other becomes insufficient, the physical aggression begins.

      This is how every single national identity has ever been formed. The degree of violence and whether it turns physical depends on how tenuous the initial identification of people with each other is. If they look the same, speak the same language, have the same religion, eat the same foods, and have always lived in the same place, then it’s somewhat easier for them to develop a national identity.

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  5. Im thinking he liked the ladies and decided it was easier to be Christian than having a Jewish mother harping over him. 😉

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  6. Noam Chomsky helped lobby Stephen Hawking to stage Israel boycott
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/10/noam-chomsky-stephen-hawking-israel-boycott

    On Friday the liberal academic David Newman, dean of the faculty of humanities and social sciences at Ben Gurion University in Israel, warned that an academic boycott “just destroys one of the very few spaces left where Israelis and Palestinians actually do come together”.

    What I see as untrue from the letter to Hawking:

    // “Israel systematically discriminates against the Palestinians who make up 20% of its population in ways that would be illegal in Britain”

    How?

    // “Israel places multiple roadblocks, physical, financial and legal, in the way of higher education … for its own Palestinian citizens”.

    // The letter continued: “Israel has a name for the promotion of its cultural and scientific standing: ‘Brand Israel’. This is a deliberate policy of camouflaging its oppressive acts behind a cultured veneer.”

    Don’t all countries try to promote their “cultural and scientific standing”? But, when Israel does it, they assign to it sinister motives.

    I guess those academics from countries without big problems found the Other in Israel.

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  7. Another comment that is partly right:

    // But the main problem with their stance is that in practice, academia and especially the arts in Israel are generally far more liberal than the ruling government. By marginalising and isolating some of the last bastions of leftist thinking there, they’re actually reducing the internal influence of those institutions and harming the opposition. That’s why it’s important to recognise that it isn’t a politically homogeneous country.

    The 1st sentence is true. However, I am 100% sure those boycotts or lack of thereof will not have any real influence one way or another. There is some irony of boycotting the leftest parts of Israeli society, though.

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    1. I agree, and I’ve been saying forever that the boycott is stupid. Chomsky is hopeless. I remember how he celebrated the Tea Party movement as some kind of hope for the progressive movement. I wonder what he thinks of it now. I also remember a book of his I started reading but had to drop on page 2 after the statement that the Soviet Union never invaded any other country.

      I can’t evaluate his contribution to linguistics, but on everything else, the guy has proven to be an idiot.

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      1. In all the numerous interviews Chomsky has given, has anybody *ever* asked him about this comparison? Any difficult questions?

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        1. Chomsky is the most dishonest of all academics I know. He doesn’t even try to massage the facts to fit his ideology. When he doesn’t like the facts, he just lies in the most obvious and straightforward manner ever.

          In general, Israel/Palestine doesn’t really interest North American academics. The boycott is the easiest way to pretend like they are doing something while doing absolutely nothing. I have heard from numerous colleagues who have joined the boycott even though nobody ever invited them to any conferences in Israel. There has been a meme going around my university where everybody who joined the boycott in this weird way signed up. This activity looked a little like people somewhere in Kiryat Motzkin or wherever getting together and making a formal resolution not to go on any dates with blogger Clarissa and ignore all of her invitations.

          The Israel/Palestine conflict isn’t even accorded the dignity of being thought about and discussed outside of any false analogies on North American academia. I guess since Edward Said’s notorious stone-throwing nobody thinks they can get anything of value from this issue. It’s fashionable to be pro-boycott and anti-Israel so people are. I have not been able to have an interesting, non-superficial discussion of the issue with a single colleague in. . . forever.

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  8. OK, last one. Sometimes comments are intelligent:

    PERSON A
    If Israel had oil, there would be no boycott. Just saying like.
    But if you’re going to have your little tantrums, or boycotts, then there’s a shedload of countries that should be boycotted first. Strangely though, those that treat women like cattle are ignored.
    So ask I other posters here. Which countries should be boycitted first and why?

    PERSON B
    Ah yes, but they’re only Arabs and other brown people, you see, and so therefore can’t possibly be held up to the same high moral standards as Israel are.
    In fact, by adopting this condescending, “racism of low expectations” view, the “Left” are tacitly accepting the superiority of the Iraeli political entity over that of its neighbours.
    It’s kind of ironic, but there you go.

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    1. Yes, these are intelligent comments. This is one of many ironies of this stupid boycott.

      The only justification of the boycott is the “everything is equal to everything else” mentality that I hate. It’s the reductive mentality of those who like snappy soundbites and avoid analysis. We discussed this yesterday. Abortion is baby murder, US prisons are worse than Soviet “gulags”, Obama is a socialist, etc. Who cares that I don’t know what the Gulag is and can’t offer any argument for “abortion is murder”? As long as the forced analogy helps me sound cute and convincing, this is all that matters. The alternative is actually analyzing things and trying to comprehend them for what they are. And that’s a lot harder.

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  9. Why are we pretending that he boycotted an academic event and that it’s an attack on the last remaining bastion of the left in Israel, blah blah?

    Poor, innocent, Israel. Always the victim.

    http://972mag.com/stephen-hawkings-message-to-israeli-elites-the-occupation-has-a-price/70719/

    “While Hawking responded to the call for academic boycott, it should be noted that the Presidential Conference is not an academic event: it’s an annual celebration of the Israeli business, political and military elites, whose purpose is unclear at best, and which has little importance in Israeli life (it didn’t exist until five years ago). The pro-occupation Right has a heavy presence at the conference – or at least it felt that way last year, when I attended. I will get back to the notion of “the liberal academia” and the Presidential Conference later.”

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  10. Btw el, hope you’ve been sleeping better lately after the airstrikes on Syria. I know, I know, it’s not enough, we need more muslim corpses for you to attain zen, but hey, it’s a start? Right?

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    1. As I said yesterday, the strikes on Syria are proof – in case anybody needed it – that Israel needs conflict with whomever under absolutely any pretext whatsoever. I’m very much afraid that this will escalate until the whole region goes up in flames. I don’t usually fear-monger, as everybody knows, but here I’m seriously worried. Israel’s actions have gone far outside the realm of the reasonable in the past 2 or 3 years. This means that whatever it has been doing is not working and escalation is the only response. Historically, everybody knows where such situations have led.

      This is bad, dangerous shit.

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      1. // This means that whatever it has been doing is not working and escalation is the only response.

        Not working internally or externally? Not working for what intended purposes and how exactly? How could it be made to work?

        I already heard about strengthening national identity, so I ask except / in addition to that. I doubt people in Israel consciously think “time to bomb somebody to strengthen identity”, there are reasons for behavior that people in charge have. May be, the entire Middle East is changing and Israel is responding to it?

        RE you saying nobody would help Palestine, were it fully formed as a country, I am unsure. If US and Russia are competing for Middle East dominance, together with many other local actors, and Iran currently uses terrorist groups as a proxy, while US gives support to Israel, why not continue using the new country of Palestine against Israel from Iran’s pov? May be, you could write a post about the issue?

        //Israel’s actions have gone far outside the realm of the reasonable in the past 2 or 3 years.

        Why the past 2-3 years? What changed? Iran? Israel bombed Iraq’s and Syria’s nuclear sites before, so I don’t see a huge difference in that.

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    2. The tragedy is that this need for corpses to solidify the national identity is not sated by the corpses. There is always greater and greater violence that is needed.

      The Americans, in the meanwhile, are standing by impotently.

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    4. What I read from Israeli press was that the rockets attacked were from Iran on the way to Hezbollah to get shot at me. No side disproves it. Israel also announced to Asad it’s not going to get involved in the war in Syria.

      Whether it would’ve been better for Israel to let Hezbollah get the rockets (and then get them shot at me later) or to attack , as Israel had done, is one question.

      Pretending Israel targets civilians (*) and “needs more muslim corpses to attain zen”, is something different. Israel targeted rockets and was OK with killing Hezbollah terrorists near them. Civilians always die in a war, but Israel, unlike Hezbollah, has no desire to kill them.

      It’s ironic you accuse *Israel* of killing Syrian citizens, considering what is currently going on there. Don’t you see your huge ideological bend here? From wiki:

      Estimates of deaths in the Syrian civil war, per opposition activist groups, vary between 69,390 and 82,130, the later figure combining several sources. On 13 February 2013, the United Nations put out an estimate of 70,000 that had died in the war.

      But it’s Israel killing several soldiers and/or terrorists near Hezbollah rockets that gets all your attention.

      (*) Which both warring sides in Syria do with great gusto.

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  14. Syrian president responds to alleged Israeli attacks in Syria for first time
    …
    The same source, quoted in Al-Mayadeen, noted that every vehicle or field hospital is a possible target for the Syrian army: “Firstly because this is a breach of sovereignty. Secondly, because anyone aiding terrorists is a terrorist himself.”

    http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4377456,00.html

    When Syrians attack field hospital it’s OK, right?

    SB, just for a moment, think how you would react had Israel announced it. Seeing your reaction to Israel’s attack on rockets.

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