MIDDLE EAST:An Israeli professor has sharply criticised staff in Irish third-level colleges who called for an academic boycott of his country. Speaking during a visit to Ireland, Prof Asher Susser accused the 61 lecturers and professors who issued the boycott call in a letter to The Irish Timeslast September of being selective in their criticism.
"What surprises me is that these academics choose to focus on Israel as the only focus of their criticism of the entire international community. I've never heard them talking about boycotting Sudan, for example, for committing genocide on a daily basis," he said. "The singling out of Israel is, to say the least, surprising to me."
A strong opponent of the occupation of the West Bank, which he believes is detrimental to Israel's long-term interests, Prof Susser is director of the Moshe Dayan Centre for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University. He travelled to Ireland this week to "speak to journalists and academia" as a guest of the Israeli foreign ministry and the Israeli embassy in Dublin.
He strongly rejected the comparisons frequently made between Israel today and South Africa under the apartheid regime. "I was born in South Africa. I know what apartheid is. Israel is not an apartheid state. I lived in an apartheid state and left it because it was an apartheid state, as did many others. The comparison is either ignorant, propagandistic, or both combined."
Any attempt to equate the treatment of Palestinians by Israel with the position of black people under apartheid was completely misguided: "It is simply, absolutely incorrect. How come Palestinians in Israel are members of our parliament? How come they are professors in our universities? How come they are treated in the hospitals where everybody else is treated? If anybody knew a word about South Africa, that was never the case, ever, anywhere in South Africa. The whites and blacks didn't ride the same buses, didn't ride the same trains, didn't sit in the same theatres, couldn't sit on the same benches in the park."
He also rejected descriptions of the barrier constructed by Israel on the West Bank as an "apartheid" structure. "The fence was established after 1,100 Israelis were slaughtered by suicide bombers in the restaurants and the buses. If our lives do not count [as much as] others, that is a dehumanisation of us as human beings. We reject that, I find that personally most offensive," he said.
Welcoming the Mecca agreement between the Palestinian factions, Hamas and Fatah, he said if the deal meant a more stable relationship with Israel, that would be "a positive result".
"If it produces a stable government, this is conducive to stabilising the relationship between Israel and the Palestinian Authority." This was irrespective of whether all the ideological preconditions had been met or not.