Israel's president meets university heads, calls BDS a 'strategic threat'

Israeli President Reuven Rivlin met with university heads on Thursday for an emergency discussion on the threat posed by the international academic boycott campaign.

Describing the boycott as a “strategic threat of the first order”, Rivlin offered his own services in the fightback: “I am a soldier in your army”, he told the Council of Presidents of Israeli Universities.

According to Prof. Peretz Lavie, president of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, “the snowball can still be stopped” but “we’re at the eleventh hour.” Lavie told Rivlin: “We must mobilize and stop the process in European countries and in the US.”

Prof. Ruth Arnon, president of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, described it as “a very grave situation when the heads of a country’s institutes of higher learning had to meet with the president of the state to discuss such an issue.”

Rivlin noted that he had previously assumed there could not “be a true threat to Israeli academia”, but, he added, “the atmosphere around the world is changing.”

The senior university officials revealed “a wide-ranging list” of ways in which a “silent boycott” is being felt, including publications rejecting articles written by Israeli academics, and academics turning down invitations for conferences in Israel.

In addition, according to Prof. Daniel Zajfman, president of the Weizmann Institute of Science “there are already signs that leading international companies are unwilling to fund academic research that would result in scientific or medicinal products.”

Another problem cited by the officials in their meeting with Rivlin is the growth in Palestine solidarity amongst students internationally. “Anti-Israel student organizations were once very few; now they are at all the leading universities”, Lavie said.