AL QUDS/LONDON: A pair of obscure journals run by a professor at Manchester University in Britain have become the focal point for an angry debate across the international academic community over a boycott of Israeli universities.

The move by Mona Baker, a professor of translation studies at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST), to sack two liberal Israeli academics from minor roles on her journals has provoked a stinging response from academics led by Stephen Greenblatt, Harvard professor, Shakespeare scholar and president of the Modern Language Association of America.

In an open letter, Prof Greenblatt said he deplored Prof Baker’s “attack on cultural co-operation”, which “violates the essential spirit of scholarly freedom and the pursuit of truth”.

Professor Baker, an Egyptian, is one of the signatories of a British-led petition of more than 700 academics from several countries launched by Steven Rose, an Open University professor. Signatories — including Oxford professors Colin Blakemore and Richard Dawkins — say they “can no longer in good conscience continue to co-operate with official Israeli institutions, including universities”.

The signatories add that they “will continue to collaborate with, and host, Israeli scientific colleagues on an individual basis”.

About ten Israeli academics have signed the petition.

In return, nearly 1,000 academics with a similar international profile have signed a rival web-based petition condemning the first petition’s “unjustly righteous tone” and warning that the boycott carries “broader risk of very disruptive repercussions for a wide range of international scientific and cultural contacts”.

Prof Baker decided that having signed the Rose petition she could no longer work with Gideon Toury, a professor at Tel Aviv university who is on the advisory board of her journal, The Translator, and Miriam Shlesinger, a lecturer in translation studies at Bar-Ilan university, who was on the editorial board of another journal, Translation Studies Abstracts, also published by Prof Baker’s Manchester-based firm, St Jerome.

Neither journal runs to more than 1,000 copies a time.

In his reply to Prof Baker, Prof Toury replied: “I am writing this letter at home, some 150 yards from the point where the daily human bomb has just exploded. It was in Herzliya, not anywhere near the occupied territories, and in a diner, not even remotely resembling a military camp, a government office or any other building of a similar nature. This may well affect the tone I will be using, but not the content of my reaction.on... I would appreciate it even more if the announcement made it clear that ‘he (that is, I) was appointed as a scholar and unappointed as an Israeli’.”

Dr Shlesigner has been active during the last 21 months of bloody chaos in an ethnically mixed group that defies Israeli army blockades and curfews to deliver food and other supplies to Palestinian towns in the West Bank.

“I don’t think Ariel Sharon is going to withdraw from the West Bank because Israelis are being boycotted,” she said on Sunday. “Basically, the translation community is about inter-cultural communications, and this certainly does not improve communications. The idea is to boycott me as an Israeli, but I don’t think it achieves anything.”

The prospect of a boycott has been heatedly debated in Israeli academic fora and chat sites for weeks. Most academics are opposed to the boycott — including those on the left. There is also a sense that Israel is already under an unofficial boycott.

International academic conferences have been cancelled through to the year 2004, and many professors from abroad are refusing to travel to Israel for joint research projects, in part because of fears for security, but also because such collaborations are increasingly seen as political statements.

A spokeswoman for Manchester University said on Sunday: “This is nothing to do with UMIST. The activities of Mona Baker concerning these journals are done with her own time. The boycott documentation clearly states Mona Baker signs it as an individual.”—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.