The freedom of academia to express displeasure in relation to Israel must be protected. However, if that action draws a reaction it is pure comedy to express surprise.

This is not academia expressing displeasure against Israel and to describe it as such is disingenuous. It is punishing Jews who may or may not support the Israeli policies and therefore goes beyond academic displeasure or valid criticism of Israel.

I can't see how any of this follows frankly.

How is it an occupation now but not before 1967 when Gaza was part of Egypt and the West Bank was part of Jordan.

I don't remember hearing of any Palestinians blowing themselves up or even any notion by Palestinians that it was an occupation.

That land was never Palestinian land, it was Jordanian and Egyptian. So what changed?

The infidel took possession of it, through conquest? No, they were attacked by impotent Arab armies in the typical gang mentality style we see reproduced as a microcosm of this on western Sydney streets - when they hang out in gangs assaulting those with different skin colour.

Why no boycott of Jordan and Egypt then?

More to the racist point, why not boycott nations that have apartheid, like Iran or Saudi Arabia?

It is you people who are the racists. You can't acknowledge that non-westerners have agency, so you never see them do wrong.

It's like being at a dinner party where a guest spills a drink - who is going to say anything? You eternally cover for them, even when their racist, genocidal agendas are clear as day.

For shame.

Benjamin, I am unfamiliar with the dinner parties you attend, but I would have thought the normal thing to do when someone spills a drink is help them clean up. I have spilt a few myself over the years. It is a bit embarrassing, but it is also one of those priceless moments when you get to see who your true friends are.

Benjamin

The reason for the boycott was to protest the complicity of Israeli academics in supporting the ongoing occupation of Palestinian land.

You'd be the only person I know who overlooks the Partition of Palestine by the British included the proposition of the formation of both the Israeli State and a Palestinian state.

The point of much of the more general criticism of Israel is not because it is an apartheid state or carries out policies similar to Saudia Arabia and Iran but because it pretends to be similar to the Western Liberal Democracies. Iran and saudui Arabia don't. The Western Liberal democracies do not indulge in the practices of occupation, land stealing and suppression. When they do they are heavily criticised as we see in the case in Iraq at present. On a parallel is the recent Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The world heavily criticised and forced the withdrawal of the Israeli aggressors. Nothing to do with racism or anti-semitism but much to do with decency.

As for Saudi Arabia and Iran tell me what countries are they currently occupying? I think you will find when an Arab country invades another country the western Liberal Democracies act with greater ferocity than mere criticism. What a recent example? Try Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. See what you have done is not compared like with like but made generalisations about unequal treatment without acknowledging differences in the way Israel, Iran and Saudi Arab present themselvews to the world or acknowledging the Western Liberal democracies treat all transgressors of the basic tenets of the Liberal Democracies roughly equally.

This criticism of yours that doesn't address the arguments in the article but introduces irrelevant and incongruous comparisons and racist abuse is the sort of stuff 'a chip on the shoulder' is made of. Fairly typical really and the opening quote is entirely apt.

'[The frightened man] believes himself to be, much more than the rest of his kind, the target of hostile events.
E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay (1990).'

Keith,
"You'd be the only person I know who overlooks the Partition of Palestine by the British included the proposition of the formation of both the Israeli State and a Palestinian state."
You'd be one among the many anti-Israel shrills who overlooks the fact that this was achieved with the separation in Transjordan. There is already a two-state solution in place, whereby the "Arabs"/"Palestinians" got 80% of the mandated land in the Palestinian Mandate in 1922.

Judea/Samaria and Gaza are further grabs, in fact a three-state solution.

Under the Mandate, which is still the only legal document on this former Turkish land after the defeat of the Turks et all in WW1, Transjordan was 'legal' (article 25 I think). This third is not.

We are in this position because of the British appeasing to terrorism from the Arabs that started in the 1920s, for example, Hebron 1929; an appeasement that has spurred the "Palestinians" to continue and inch by inch take more of the land mandated for the Jewish homeland.

When I think of Judea/Samaria - Galilee, Bethlehem, Nazareth, for example - I don't think of Islam and Arabs, defintely not "Palestinians" : I think of Jesus Christ, a Jewish preacher whose teachings started one of the greatest religious movements peacefully on earth. (For the pedantic, pre-Constantine).