US Academic Boycott Of Apartheid Israel Game Changer

The American Studies Association’s boycott of Israeli academic institutions is a landmark development and a game changer in an international effort to isolate the apartheid regime in Tel Aviv, a British political commentator says.

UK BANNED Press TV: Professor Jonathan Rosenhead, who is a member of the British Committee for Universities of Palestine, made the remarks during an interview on Tuesday.
On Sunday, the American Studies Association (ASA) approved the academic boycott of Israel to protest its treatment of Palestinians, indicating that a movement to isolate the apartheid regime of Israel that is gaining momentum in Europe has also hit the US.
"The ASA condemns the United States' significant role in aiding and abetting Israel's violations of human rights against Palestinians and its occupation of Palestinian lands through its use of the veto in the UN Security Council," the organization said in a statement explaining the endorsement.

“I think it is a game changer. It is an extraordinary event in the history of the academic boycott,” Rosenhead said.
“In Britain, my organization has been very active in promoting the academic boycott of Israeli university institutions and we thought we are ahead, but we have not been able to achieve anything of this magnitude, and it seems that the opinion among at least among academic opinion leaders in United States is changing very rapidly,” he added.
“We have a very large organization, the American Studies Association, something like 4,000 academic teachers as its members and they had a year long debate. They had a debate of their annual congress last week which had 750 members present and all of the speeches more or less were in favor of boycott, and then they send it out to the entire membership which voted overwhelmingly in favor of supporting the boycott of Israel,” Rosenhead noted.
He went on to say that now “we will be trying in Britain to achieve something equivalent to what the Americans have got.”
On Tuesday, Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Ze’ev Elkin termed the ASA as a “radical leftist group”, but added that “we need to prepare for the danger that it (boycott call) will pass to other, more serious academic forums.”
He stated that Israeli officials were striving hard to discourage other American groups from following the ASA’s lead.
Elkin went on to say that the Foreign Ministry had established an advocacy group called the “Faces of Israel” to “work among those who wield influence exactly in order to prevent cases such as this.”
The campaign to cut off ties with Israeli academic institutions dates back a decade, but it was not until April that the Association for Asian American Studies, which has about 800 members, supported an academic boycott of Israel.
The boycott calls on US schools and academic groups to ban collaboration with Israeli institutions, but individual Israeli scholars who do not represent Tel Aviv would still be able to attend academic events in the United States.

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