If They're Good Enough for the Technion...

In his propaganda piece in yesterday's Australian contra Sydney University's Student Representative Council's decision to back Associate Professor Jake Lynch's academic boycott of Israel, the president of the Zionist Federation of Australia, Philip Chester, drew attention to the Technion's alleged embrace of Palestinian-Israeli (or in Zionist parlance Arab Israeli) students:

"About 20% of the [Technion's] students are Arabs, which is proportionate to the Arab component of Israel's population... For more than 12 years, the Technion has been running an outreach program that specifically prepares Israeli Arab high school students for university... Some of the most successful collaboration between Palestinians and Israelis is in the field of science." (Appalling attempt to boycott Israeli uni)

(Which talk, incidentally, reminds me of the joint Israeli/Palestinian sporting teams set up by the Peres Centre for Peace, one example of which turned up in Australia in 2008,* designed to distract gullible Westerners from an understanding of Israel's colonial, apartheid reality.)

Chester is suggesting, of course, that a boycott of Israeli academic institutions such as the Technion is in fact anti-Palestinian/Arab and therefore counterproductive.

To argue in this way, however, is a potentially risky strategy for Zionist propagandists because it raises - or should raise - some fundamental questions about the very nature of a supremacist Jewish state in Palestine: if Palestinian-Israelis/Arab Israelis are good enough to study at one of Israel's oldest and most prestigious universities (or to play in Israeli sporting teams), then why are they not good enough to be treated as equal citizens with Israeli Jews; and why, for that matter, aren't the exiled Palestinian refugees of 1948 and 1967 good enough to be repatriated as full and equal citizens with Israeli Jews in a bi-national, secular, democratic Israeli-Palestinian state?

Philip?

[*See my 5/10/11 post The Peace Team: Politics & PR.]