In a recent piece at the Harvard Crimson, students Sara K. Greenberg and Yoav Schaefer urged Harvard President Drew Faust to end the school’s membership in the American Studies Association over the boycott of Israel.

Boycott the ASA, Not Israel

Dear President Faust,

We applaud you for your statement over Winter Break, condemning the American Studies Association’s proposed boycott of Israeli academic institutions. In making this statement, you have signaled that Harvard University upholds the ideals of academic freedom and the open pursuit of ideas central to the role of scholarship and academic institutions. We urge you, however, to go further and cancel Harvard’s institutional membership with the ASA.

As you wrote, “the recent resolution of the ASA proposing to boycott Israeli universities represents a direct threat to these ideals, ideals which universities and scholarly associations should be dedicated to defend.” After the boycott resolution was announced, the Executive Committee of the Association of American Universities, an association of 62 leading research universities including Harvard, condemned the move as a direct violation of academic freedom: “Restrictions imposed on the ability of scholars of any particular country to work with their fellow academics in other countries, participate in meetings and organizations, or otherwise carry out their scholarly activities violate academic freedom.”

The boycott, however, is not only an attack upon academic freedom. It is part of a global campaign to undermine the moral and political foundations of the State of Israel.

The academic boycott is not aimed at resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a complex territorial conflict between competing national groups that can only be solved through bilateral negotiations between the parties themselves. Instead, by singling out Israeli scholars and students, the boycott agenda places the responsibility for ending the conflict entirely on Israel’s shoulders, ignores systemic obstacles to peace within Palestinian society, and paints Israeli society with a wide brush. This, in turn, undermines the efforts of the many individuals and organizations working on the ground in Israel to change the status quo.