Paris
AS A ROUTINE MEETING of the board of governors of Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris drew to a close on December 16, a rump contingent of the board seized the opportunity afforded by the absence of their colleagues, most of whom had already departed for the holidays. The group–computer scientists and medical researchers, mostly–passed a motion lamenting the fate of the Palestinians and urging the European Union not to renew its cooperation agreement with Israeli scientists, researchers, and universities. The boycott motion had not been on the council’s agenda; it was discussed with only 33 of the group’s 60 members present; it passed with just 22 votes.
Still, consider the project almost two dozen academics at the distinguished University of Paris VI (as the school is formally known) were pleased to support: Under their proposed boycott, Israeli researchers of all political persuasions would be thrown off European scientific committees and banned from European academic conferences. Israelis would be barred from contributing to European academic journals. Cooperative international research projects led by Israeli scientists–on such topics as water resource management, cancer treatment, and regional disease eradication–would be cancelled; Israeli exchange students in Europe would be sent home.
Of course, since Israeli universities are centers of scholarship not only for Jews but for Arab Muslims, Arab Christians, Druze, and students of other ethnicities, non-Jewish casualties would be inevitable, but then, the sponsors of the boycott resolution surely reasoned, one must break eggs to make omelettes.
Despite their eagerness to deplore brutal military occupation in faraway lands, the academics missed a few easy calls–there was no appeal for a boycott of Chinese scholarship to protest China’s occupation and cultural genocide in Tibet, for example; nor did the board lobby to sever European ties to Indian scientists in protest of the occupation of Kashmir. The British occupation of Northern Ireland was ignored. Not one board member proposed to return his own paycheck and resign to protest recent French incursions into the sovereign nation of Ivory Coast. One begins to suspect a suspiciously selective sense of indignation.
The premises underlying the boycott proposal were unspoken but obvious. First: Israel is a pariah state and the most deserving object of any right-thinking academic’s opprobrium. Second: The occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is manifestly illegal and unjust, and the cause of Arab animus toward Israel, rather than vice versa. Third: No blame for the Palestinians’ misery is to be attached to the Palestinian Authority, Palestinian academics, or Palestinian universities (themselves notorious terrorist training grounds). Fourth: When considering the occupation, there is no need to discuss the unrelenting and indiscriminate Palestinian terror campaign, on Israeli soil, against Israeli civilians. Fifth: It is fitting for scientists and intellectuals, teachers and students, to be punished for decisions made by their governments. And finally: What the globe’s most volatile regional conflict really needs is for the board members of French universities to insert themselves into the mix. These premises range from the ludicrous to the dubious to the patently false.
When the motion was reported, there was a predictable uproar. Predictable, that is, to everyone but the board members, who declared themselves shocked, dismayed, and deeply hurt that their Nobel prize checks were not already in the mail. Biochemist Anne-Marie Leseney, who voted for the motion, remarked indignantly to the French press that “in the mail which I receive, they treat me like an anti-Semite; I am scandalized!” Alas for Leseney, being scandalized is something of a spécialité de la maison for French academics.
Opposition to the boycott was led by Bernard-Henri Lévy, the popular public intellectual who, when not appearing on television to discuss the finer points of French philosophy, dabbles in cinematography (he directed a soft-porn film starring his own wife). BHL, as he is styled, launched a petition denouncing the motion that swiftly attracted more than 21,000 signatures.
The document was in some ways dispiritingly wide of the mark: By and large, BHL argued, Israeli academics tilt to the left, and therefore cannot be held responsible for the policies of the Sharon government. True, but not really the point. Nonetheless, signatures accrued; the list was embarrassingly long and the signatories embarrassingly prominent. The timing of the boycott motion was particularly humiliating to the Chirac administration, which has been attempting to position itself as a voice of reason and maturity in all things Middle Eastern. Jewish students protested; the Israeli ambassador expressed his indignation. (Arab students demonstrated as well, just to be sure no opportunity for demonstrating was missed.)
To make matters worse, administrators at Pierre and Marie Curie’s sister university, Paris VII, placed a similar motion on their own administrative agenda. The debate on the resolution was to take place on January 7–which would have added a nice punctuation point to a week that included the stabbing of a prominent left-wing Paris rabbi by a racist hoodlum and a double-suicide bombing in Tel Aviv that left 23 dead. But upon returning from their vacations, senior French government officials were properly appalled by the academicians’ shenanigans. Their indignation is easy to understand: French officials, as the poet Nelson Ascher observes, are too cynical to indulge in anti-Semitism. France seeks to play a major role in world politics; given that it has no hope of expressing this aspiration through military might, it must do so through diplomacy.
To have any influence in the Middle East, France must at least appear to be an honest broker. But if French universities are taking it upon themselves to boycott their Israeli counterparts, the pretense of neutrality becomes hard to sustain, especially since French universities, unlike American ones, are under the control of a highly centralized government. The government was well aware that particularly coming from France, with its bleak historic record of participation in the destruction of European Jewry, such a motion was apt to appear to the world to be precisely what it was: unconscionable and repellent.
The Chirac government sought to divorce itself from the motion as swiftly and completely as possible: Over the course of a single day, in a carefully choreographed series of statements, Education Minister Luc Ferry described the motion as “inappropriate”; the Education Ministry indicated its hope that French and foreign universities might amplify their exchanges; the Foreign Ministry took pains in a press conference to disassociate official France from the caprice of a few misguided academics.
Shortly thereafter, the mayor of Paris denounced the motion as a “shocking act and a tragic error”; Jack Lang, the Socialist deputy of Pas-de-Calais, declared that “Israeli universities are oases of tolerance, fraternity, freedom and democracy” and that “the proposal for a boycott is an act that encourages fanaticism and obscurantism.” For good measure, the Quai d’Orsay reminded the press that “French authorities do not feel bound by the decisions of Paris VI university,” and Le Monde published an editorial deploring the motion.
And thus the resolution at Paris VII was never put to debate at all. University president Beno t Eurin, no doubt having been reminded exactly who pays his salary, declared the motion to be incompatible with the university’s charter, and issued a press release that rather irrelevantly paraphrased, without credit, Winston Churchill’s comment that democracy is the worst system possible save all the others. The announcement of the motion’s demise was buried in a very urgent communiqué about the university’s legal and moral obligation to complete asbestos removal before the year 2005.
As an afterthought, the board of directors observed that judgments on the suspension of scientific exchanges with Israeli universities were outside the institution’s jurisdiction, and, in compliance with Article 3 of the January 26, 1984, Law on Higher Education, the board was in favor of reinforcing Paris VII’s scientific cooperation agreements with all the universities of the world. The motion in favor of staying the hell out of foreign policy from then on was passed with 39 in favor, 6 against, and an abstention. (Readers will be relieved to know that the asbestos resolution was adopted with 41 votes and 4 abstentions–there, at least, is one principled stand of which the French academy can be proud.)
At first blush, the dismissal of the boycott motion seems a characteristically French resolution to the problem, reminiscent of the judgment in the lawsuit aimed at banning Oriana Fallaci’s feisty book about Europe and Islam, “The Rage and the Pride.” The French judiciary declined to take a stand on the essential issue–whether French courts should be in the business of banning books–and instead dismissed the suit against Fallaci on purely procedural grounds. But a closer examination of the statement issued by Paris VII reveals that the board did not really base their decision on a procedural point at all. They claimed first that the issue was beyond the council’s jurisdiction, but in appealing to the law of January 26, 1984, they appealed to its plain meaning. The law states that the university is committed to diversity of opinion and freedom of speech; but the law, as it happens, says nothing about procedures. If the resolution in question had called for an improvement in relations with Israeli scholars, the board surely would not have prevented its being debated on procedural grounds.
Following Paris VII’s press release, the administrators at Pierre and Marie Curie University clung bravely to the mast of principle for all of five minutes, then followed suit by renouncing their initial resolution, also on quasi-procedural grounds, thus bringing the episode to an inglorious close.
Claire Berlinski’s novel “Loose Lips” will be published by Random House in June.
