IF YOU鈥橰E a scientist looking for a challenge, try working at a Palestinian university on the West Bank. It is probably the hardest place in the world to do research.
Just getting to your lab can be a trial. Travel restrictions and Israeli army checkpoints across the Palestinian territories make any journey uncertain. Some days you will not get to work at all. If you鈥檝e ordered chemicals or lab equipment from the US, you鈥檒l be lucky to get them: the Israeli authorities hold back any imports that could be remotely useful to militants. As for fieldwork, forget it.
The Israeli government, which occupies most of the West Bank and Gaza, says constraints like these are essential to stop suicide bombers, many of whom have come from Palestinian universities. Yet they have allowed a kind of apartheid to develop in the West Bank and Gaza. A small number of Israelis living in protected settlements enjoy a western standard of living and drive on special roads, while the Palestinian majority live in poverty and cannot travel without a permit.
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It was this resonance with apartheid-era South Africa that in April 2002 convinced British biologist Steven Rose to call for a Europe-wide moratorium on academic collaboration with Israeli institutions until the Israeli government ended its occupation and opened peace negotiations with the Palestinians. Rose noted that academics played a large part in the international boycott of South Africa that led to the fall of the apartheid regime. He argued that a similar boycott could work against the Israeli government.
His idea struck a chord with many researchers across Europe and beyond. Hundreds of academics from many countries have now signed up to the boycott. Even a few Israeli scientists support it. And on the surface, Rose鈥檚 campaign is understandable, even laudable. Few people outside Israel would support the way the government鈥檚 anti-terrorist measures have caused indiscriminate suffering among millions of innocent Palestinians.
The boycott is, however, profoundly misguided and could even damage prospects for peace. Over the past four years of violence, day-to-day contact between ordinary Israelis and Palestinians has dwindled almost to vanishing point. There is a great gulf between them. The two peoples see each other mainly as enemies, rarely as neighbours. Yet in one area, cooperation has survived, and Palestinians and Israelis still manage to meet as human beings: science.
The boycott does not explicitly stop Palestinian and Israeli scientists working together, but it makes it less likely. First, it encourages an isolationist mentality. In any violent conflict, building bridges with the other side takes courage, and the people who choose to do it need all the support they can get. If Israeli scientists think the world is against them, they are less likely to make the effort.
Second, it is difficult and sometimes dangerous for Palestinian scientists to work with Israelis. Many Palestinians are hostile to cross-border collaboration. The Palestinian Ministry of Higher Education has banned all official academic contact, so joint projects have to be unofficial. A Europe-wide boycott of Israeli academics is hardly going to encourage Palestinian scientists to take the risk.
鈥淭he boycott is penalising the only group of people whose work could lead to real progress鈥�
Third, many joint Israeli-Palestinian projects are initiated and funded by institutions in Europe and elsewhere. Consider, for example, the sponsorship of a joint graduate programme between Tel Aviv and Bethlehem universities by the Dan David prize, which counts a number of European researchers among its advisers. Then there is the nascent Israeli-Palestinian Science Organization (IPSO), which aims to support some 30 cooperative projects with help from the Royal Society in London and the academies of science in France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and elsewhere.
Why is Israeli-Palestinian scientific cooperation so important? There are only a few dozen joint projects, in areas including agriculture, genetics and water, so it is tempting to ask whether it would matter if they ended. It would, for this reason: links of any kind between the two communities are a prerequisite for a peace settlement. 鈥淓xploring things informally the way academics do is the only way to advance a peace process,鈥� says Eran Feitelson, associate professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who for years has been working with a Palestinian researcher on the shared Israeli-Palestinian aquifer. 鈥淵ou have to prepare the ground.鈥� Like many Israeli academics, Feitelson believes the 1993 Oslo peace accords between the Israeli government and Palestinian Liberation Organization ultimately failed because grassroots cooperation between the two communities and the trust it creates were missing.
Thus supporters of the boycott have chosen to penalise the only group of people whose work could lead to real progress. As part of a concerted international boycott against the Israeli government, it might make some sense. By itself, it is mere tokenism. Far better to reward Israeli and Palestinian scientists who work together, as the IPSO seeks to do. In this case, a carrot must be more effective than a stick.