Since 2004 the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) has called on the international community to boycott Israeli universities as a way to pressure Israel to end the occupation of Palestinian land and cease the violation of the human rights of Palestinians. In December 2018 a conference was held at Stellenbosch University in South Africa titled “Recognition, Reparation and Reconciliation: The Light and Shadow of Historical Trauma.” Various scholars and practitioners conducting research on collective trauma, the work of truth commissions around the world, reconciliation in societies affected by political turbulence and war, and peace building in various contexts, convened to engage with the theoretical, conceptual, and practical aspects of these topics.

The first iteration of the conference program listed a symposium titled “Can we empathize with the narratives of our enemy? Encountering collective narratives of the ‘other’ in the Israeli-Palestinian context,” at which several Israeli scholars were to make academic presentations. Citing the academic boycott, several South African activists objected to the symposium, stating that it was paradoxical to discuss peace and reconciliation while at the same time as Israel continued to occupy the West Bank and East Jerusalem and wage regular military attacks in the Gaza Strip. The symposium was cancelled and replaced with one titled “Palestinian Suffering: Why the Boycott Against Israel Matters,” at which activists argued for an academic boycott of Israel and why such a boycott was especially necessary at the conference.

First, the conference was on reconciliation, an activity that is rendered impossible in the context of the ongoing occupation of Palestinian land and related human rights violations by Israel. Second, the conference took place in South Africa, a society with a rich history of protest, that was isolated during the apartheid era, and whose academic institutions had at the time been subject to boycott themselves. Thus, an academic boycott of Israel, including individual Israeli academics, was considered a logical extension of the academic boycott of South Africa. Third, the protest against the Israeli delegation was based on the assumption that academic freedom is not an unfettered right but one that exists in the context of other rights, and that could in the case of the conference be trumped by a human rights imperative.

The fourth was the argument against “normalization” of the conflict, which regards the two opposing sides—Israel and the Palestinians—as locked in a human drama in which each has an equally valid reason for their position and in which each is bestowed equal moral and ethical stature. Acceptance of normalization either ignores oppression or accepts that it must be lived with, thus conferring its “normal” status.