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PACBI Statement
American Association of University Professors Scraps Untenable Position Against Academic Boycotts
August 12, 2024
Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI)
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AAUP’s reverses flawed policy and recognizes how those working to shield Israel from accountability abused that policy to undermine principled campaigns to end university complicity in Israel’s grave crimes against Palestinians
The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) commends the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) for dropping its biased, unethical policy opposing academic boycotts, which was primarily aimed at shielding Israeli universities from accountability for their egregious human rights violations.
PACBI salutes all those who worked tirelessly to push the AAUP to change its position, as well as the conscientious academics, students, and progressive academic associations that have for years advocated for ending US academic institutional complicity with Israel’s 76-year-old regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid and, in the process, challenging AAUP’s hypocrisy. Without their persistent protests and intellectual challenges, without the student-led encampments reenergizing campus campaigns for academic boycott and divestment in response to Israel’s Gaza genocide, the AAUP would not have reversed its ethically and logically untenable policy.
Indeed, the now-defunct AAUP opposition to the academic boycott of Israel, formalized in a 2005 blanket statement claiming that such a boycott anywhere inherently violates academic freedom, was unethical, racist, and conceptually flawed. To protect Israel’s regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid from the growing impact of the BDS movement in academic circles, the AAUP position privileged academic freedom above all other freedoms, contradicting seminal international norms set by the United Nations. It turned the free flow of ideas into an absolute, unconditional value, conflicting with the internationally accepted conception of academic freedom. It devalued actual Palestinian lives and rights as inferior in worth to the hypothetical infringement of the academic freedom of Jewish-Israeli scholars that the academic boycott may engender.
Scrapping its unethical policy, which was, arguably by design, used to suppress academic freedom of many calling for BDS against Israel, the new AAUP position recognizes the obvious. It finally accepts that academic boycotts targeting institutions deeply implicated in grave human rights violations can be legitimate “to protect and advance the academic freedom and fundamental rights of colleagues and students who are living and working under circumstances that violate that freedom and one or more of those rights.”
By allowing its flawed policy to stand for nearly 20 years, AAUP helped to shield from accountability Israel’s violent system of colonial oppression of Indigenous Palestinians and the role its academic institutions have played in the design, implementation, justification and whitewash of that system, thereby perpetuating it.
AAUP’s failure to now endorse the Palestinian call to boycott complicit Israeli universities, which it finally recognizes as legitimate, even as Israel’s violence culminates in the world’s first livestreamed genocide, which has included scholasticide, domicide and engineered famine, is a profound ethical failure to make amends for the harm the AAUP’s racist policy has done to Palestinians and to our struggle for emancipation from colonial subjugation.
Still, we welcome AAUP’s reversal of the flawed policy and its recognition of how those working to shield Israel from accountability abused that policy to undermine principled campaigns to end university complicity in Israel’s grave crimes against Palestinians. We urge all academics and academic associations and unions to work to put an immediate end to such complicity by boycotting all Israeli universities and divesting from all companies that are complicit in Israel’s war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide.
