By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO – I’ve read about student groups and even faculty members calling on their universities to boycott relations with universities in Israel.
It’s absolute folly.
By closing off avenues of communication, boycotts could work to the detriment not only to U.S. universities but also, by extension, to the American people.
There is a subset of Americans who want so badly to punish Israel that they are willing to punish themselves and other Americans, but denying Americans the benefits of Israeli research would greatly constrain the advancement of knowledge in our country.
Israeli universities are powerhouses of research in a variety of fields.
Since the beginning of 2024, San Diego Jewish World has run 10 stories about research at Israeli universities in such fields as medicine, the environment, and agriculture. That research is important in the quest for cures for Alzheimer’s Disease, Cancer, Schizophrenia, and Parkinson’s Disease. The research helps physiologists calculate the length of a person’s step; makes strides toward thought-activated speech; and utilize mathematics for defining medical issues.
Other research exposes the global threat to sea urchins, further the cause of fresh-water conservation, and grow tastier tomatoes.
Those are just the scientific developments that we’ve been able to publish in 2024; there are many more that the Israeli universities have yet to publicize.
Prior to 2024, of course, there were many Israeli-generated developments, including some that resulted in four Nobel Prizes in chemistry and another Nobel Prize in economics. Wikipedia has a list of Israeli inventions and discoveries which, if the BDS campaign were carried to its logical conclusion, American universities could no longer utilize.
Since the Middle Ages variants of the expression “cut off the nose to spite one’s face” have been voiced to describe gross self-destructive over-reactions.
There are people at the universities who symbolically wish to disfigure themselves and, in the process, many others.
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Donald H. Harrison is publisher and editor of San Diego Jewish World.