Universities are no place for political exclusion

Where else can intelligent Palestinians and Israelis meet to think and talk in safety over formative years?

I am dismayed, quite stunned that Andrew Wilkie, an Oxford University professor of pathology, rejected an Israeli PhD student, Amit Duvshani, allegedly because of the situation in Palestine. How so, you might ask, since I support any civil action, personal and political, that is taken against the government of Israel?

I now no longer eat fresh supermarket basil (some sacrifice in this Jamie Oliver world) because it is grown in Israel. I avoid anything made in that country with elected leaders who so shame the legacy of the Holocaust. I remain a ferocious campaigner for Palestinian rights and am ever more appalled at what governments of Israel expect to get away with (unchecked weapons of mass destruction, for example) and the band of powerful apologists in this country who threaten individuals who will not be silenced by expedient accusations of anti-Semitism.

These are people who got the BBC to pull the film by Olenka Frenkiel on the evil amassing of weaponry by Israel - later broadcast in the dead of night with no previous announcement. They see all Muslims as new carriers of archetypal Jew hatred. There is no doubt that vile attitudes and stories are promoted in some mosques and media outlets, but to suggest that all Muslims are prejudiced against all Jews is a disgraceful slur. And Muslims in Britain and the United States cannot fight back because they have no equivalent power in politics or the media.

I know by this point the internet will be buzzing with messages to bombard me and my editor with complaints. Many experience this orchestrated vilification. I have even found a whole systematic campaign - for reasons I cannot fathom - to discredit Professor Norman Davies, author of a seminal book on the history of the British Isles. Absolutist Zionists despise their own conscientious objectors too, people such as Norman Finkelstein, author of The Holocaust Industry, Michael Rosen, the author, and Gerald Kaufman, who was almost duffed up in a synagogue not long ago.

Universities have long been sites of the most dramatic confrontations. Apartheid, the India/Pakistan wars, Vietnam, Iraq, and many other emblematic conflicts which imprint themselves on the course of world history play out on campuses. In the US all hell broke out recently when the University of North Carolina included the Koran as one of the texts to be read by incoming students. This, the students were told by some commentators, was like telling people to read "the religion of our enemies" or like being recommended Mein Kampf.

And now come confrontations between uncompromising Zionists and their committed opponents. An academic boycott was called for and activated in 2002 by Professor Steven Rose of the Open University, his wife Hilary, a social scientist, Colin Blakemore and other big names. Last autumn the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology was embroiled in a huge row after revelations that one of its professors, Mona Baker, dismissed two Israeli academics - Miriam Shlesinger and Gideon Toury - from the boards of journals she edited as part of her boycott against Israel. Another Umist professor, Michael Sinnott, was accused of anti-Semitism when he defended Baker. Tony Blair said he was "appalled" and Baker almost lost her job. A lecturer in English, Sue Blackwell of Birmingham University, was criticised three weeks later because the Board of Deputies of British Jews claimed her home page had links to other sites which "glorified suicide bombers".

I support the academic boycotts, even though like all sanctions, a high cost is paid for such actions. Baroness Susan Greenfield, the leading neurobiologist, has expressed concern that the boycott could adversely affect important medical research. It seems to me there is so little any of us can really do against the might of the US protectorate that is Israel and that the same complaints were made during Apartheid by white academics. It is significant today that South African academics - Professor Brian Figaji from the Peninsula Technikon University in South Africa most recently - refuse to go to Israel because the situation brings back such dark memories.

It seems to me rank hypocrisy that the protectors of all things Israeli said nothing when Israeli forces entered Birzeit University in the West Bank - an act condemned by the philosopher Jacques Derrida. This violation had a devastating effect on students from Ramallah. I had to help raise money for three Palestinian medical students here because their assets had been frozen in Palestine. And let us never forget that the actor John Malkovich said at Cambridge University that he wanted to shoot Robert Fisk dead for the way he writes about US policy and the Middle East.

And as ever, the most profound voices of wisdom on this selective outrage come from Jews themselves - the liberal Rabbi David Goldberg, who chastises Jews who don't see that they have never had it so good, that others are now the new victims of bigotry, and that they should not "whinge" so often about "perceived anti-Israel bias". Or the stimulating Professor Jacqueline Rose, who believes absolutely in the importance of "dissent and shame" when one judges oneself and one's own.

But there is a huge difference between what happens among established academics or the political boycotts of goods and the misuse of power over incoming students. To deny a young Israeli a place in one of our universities is wholly wrong. Not because I think these ivory towers must be absolutely free - but because it is in these places that minds are opened and changed and the future leaders from war-torn nations are liberated from the dreadful pressures that hold them down in their own countries. Where else can intelligent Palestinians and Israelis meet to think and talk in safety over formative years? It is no accident that all the key anti-colonial leaders came here to Britain as law students where they learnt to be assertive, subversive and conscious of democratic rights.

We never stopped white South Africans coming into our universities, or Nigerians during the Biafran wars. And these people became key players in the eternal drive for a better world.

When I went to Makerere University in Uganda, I met, for the first time, African students as equals, not as part of the servant classes. They, in turn, learnt that not all of us were mean little money merchants, uninterested in the progress of their country. This helped both sides to lay down the burdens of an inherited divide, and if Amin had not happened, we could have made a better future.

Once we tolerate exclusion of the young on grounds of collective guilt, where does it stop? Do we deny Saudi Arabians and Iranians because they come from blighted nations headed by autocrats?

And another thing. Oxbridge still excludes too many people on spurious grounds and includes those who have the right names or potential endowments from daddy. In 1998, a study showed overt discrimination against Asian and Chinese applicants who had been to public schools - the battle for fair treatment in good universities still goes on. We cannot allow new reasons to summarily dismiss applications from students who have unwanted profiles.

y.albhai-brown@independent.co.uk