Israel: High Court rules in favour of prestigious award for anti-occupation professor

Israel’s High Court of Justice ruled on Tuesday that Education Minister Yifat Shasha-Biton should give the prestigious Israel Prize to mathematician Professor Oded Goldreich, despite his support of an anti-occupation boycott.

Shasha-Biton was withholding the prize from Prof. Goldreich because he supported a petition calling for the EU to boycott an Israeli university built on an illegal settlement. According to the Times of Israel, a subsequent petition against Shasha-Biton’s decision was filed by the members of the prize committee who had initially awarded the prize to Goldreich.

Of the three judges who looked at the case, two decided to give him the prize — Yael Willner and Yitzhak Amit — while a third, Naom Sohlberg, opposed it. Sohlberg is a settler.

Shasha-Biton had claimed that an academic boycott impacts on freedom of speech, but Judge Amit ruled that, “The harm to academic freedom of speech by withholding the prize from professor Goldreich is much worse.” He added that denying the honour to a recognised academic over comments he made is “an invitation to monitor, track and persecute academics in Israel.”

The settler Judge Sohlberg argued that the minister had the authority to withhold the prize from Goldreich.

Shasha-Biton, reported the Times of Israel, said that she regretted the judges’ decision but would respect it. She noted that since the court had previously said that the education minister should decide the matter, it should have respected her decision. “A person who calls for a boycott of an Israeli academic institution is not worthy of a state prize, no matter what his achievements or political views are,” she insisted.

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