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If I may add, the boycotting of Israeli academia has to do not so much with the "degree" of the implicit presence of old antifeminism as with the explicit presence of the new-anti-Semitism. You might be interested to read more about the boycott and the new anti-Semitism in the attached lecture I gave on this topic in the Oxford 2006 conference on the issue of boycotting Israeli academia.

In light of the relations between current postmodern rhetorical, psychic, philosophical and political trends and its articulation within postcolonialist frameworks it is a challenge well beyond the signification of "degrees" of "old" anti-Semitic "influences" or "degrees" of Israeli manipulations of anti-Semitic attacks as a gate for Israeli escape from responsibility and self-awareness.

In my latest book I go into it in more detailed manner and here I will offer it "AL REGEL ACHAT": you cannot disconnect the new anti-Semitism from current global changes in cyberspace, post-Fordist production-consumption-representation and postcolonialist/radical feminist philosophy and the quest to trade "critique" with new relations with the cosmos/body/spirituality. It is not a mere political challenge; surely it transcends "Hasbara" or "manipulations of bad consciousness". What we face here is a contextual manifestation of the path-searching of the truth of "our" present historical moment.

It is not so much a matter of the better argument having the upper hand, surely not a matter of better being informed and political responsibility headed by British academia that need so badly to purify itself from its colonial essence and its colonialist history. It has much more to do with the dialectics of the transformation of the humanist project and its failure ito the opposing alternatives that serve-represent current capitalist realities of "soft" poststructualist-postcolonialist politics, on the one hand and the "new spirituality", on the other.

Many of these British professors are not committed to a serious elaboration of the facts (more known as "facts") or the complexity of the issue at stake in light of the burning quest for individual salvation in the omnipotent presence of the colonialist cannibalistic triumph of Judeo-Christian spirit that Israel and Jewish monotheism (and the quest for homogeneity) represent and serve as its impetus. In boycotting Israeli academia, therefore, you are closer to struggling the Lutziferian power, or, the essence of colonialism, namely, the quest to overcome heterogeneity, diversity, otherness and the quest for violent "consensus", "truth", and (American like) "peace" that is conditioned by so much suffering of the marginalized, silenced ones and all "others" to the Judeo-Christian/phalocentrist colonialism that "America"/Israel serve today as its most violent agent.

Boycotting Israeli academia, therefore, must overcome the facts of what really happened in the Teddy Kats affair or in "Jenin, Jenin" and so forth, since it is a moral and psychic drive to overcome this world of facts, this triumph of the universalization of Jewish essence - AVODA KODESH that many academics, NGO activist and so many transformative-oriented frustrated soles are committed to, in face of the absence of a guiding God, ideology or central committee of the party or any of its subsidiaries. And, dear Ilan, it is so naive to try and face a quest for redemption and AVODAT KODESH with challenging "facts"; not even with facts and a serious invitation for a rational discussion.

With hope

ilan

Professor Ilan Gur-Ze'ev

Faculty of Education

University of Haifa, Haifa 31905 Israel

Website http://construct.haifa.ac.il/~ilangz/