Why would they want to punish their potential allies at a tense political moment? It's clear that as tempers rise on campuses around the world, anti-Semitism and anti-Israeli commentary are mixing dangerously in close quarters, undermining serious criticism of Israeli policy. Recent unpleasantness at San Francisco State University shows how easily protests about Israeli actions can slip into the ugliest attacks on Jews. But more likely, these boycott efforts are the result of frustration about the general impotence of intellectual life during wartime.

Do these intellectuals really think that the Israeli government is going to rethink its policies because the mastheads of two obscure yet important journals lack Israeli citizens' input? President George Bush couldn't move Sharon. Neither could dozens of disillusioned Israeli reservists who are protesting the occupation. What makes these European academics think they can do more?

Academics have such a rich tradition of defending political dissenters within our ranks that we should be encouraging thinkers to engage in their professional activities within troublesome parts of the world. What if during the Cold War Western European academics had boycotted the work of all citizens working under oppressive regimes such as Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia?

In early 2001, Russian scientist Elena Bonner gave a speech about the current lurch back toward totalitarianism in Russia under President Vladimir Putin. In the speech, she pointed out that if not for Soviet scientists in the 1960s, anti-Soviet dissidents would not have had a sense of the shell of lies in which the government had encased Soviet society. Soviet scientists had communicated with the outside world. They had the power to let a little light and a little air into an otherwise blind and suffocating nation.

Already, the anti-Israeli boycott has disrupted the communal environment of science. Science magazine reported that an Israeli researcher asked an author of two recently published papers to supply cells from a clone that the author used in her experiments. The author declined, citing the protests against Israeli policies. It didn't seem to matter to the author that the research being conducted by the group in Israel involves working with Palestinian scientists as well. Anyone concerned with peace and justice in the Middle East should applaud such collaborative research. Instead, these protesting academics are harming the very efforts they should be encouraging.

According to Science, the author's refusal is a clear violation of the policies in place at most journals and commonly understood in the scientific community. When authors submit a manuscript, they make a commitment to supply cells, special reagents, or other materials necessary for verification. They are not free to violate that commitment once their paper has been published.

The violence in the Middle East has touched and moved people from all corners of the world. Those of us who feel for the hundreds of Israeli civilians and more than 1,000 Palestinian civilians who have been killed since the second intifada started in the fall of 2000 lament that religion and nationalism have prevented any of the leaders of those two nations from reaching across the divides of difference to take a chance on peace once again.

Academics and intellectuals have a duty to be politically engaged. But we academics should be above petty nationalism. We should link hands across borders in the spirit of frank and honest debate. We should not shut people out of our laboratories, libraries, and conference rooms because of the color of their passports.

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