"Partha Chatterjee: Why I Support the Boycott of Israeli Institutions"

"Yet judgments had to be made. On Palestine, my judgment was clear. Jews from Germany and Eastern Europe had found hospitality in the United States and Western Europe. Nevertheless, they insisted on a state of their own, moved into the British territory of Palestine and, after the British left, began to seize the lands where Palestinians had lived for centuries, driving them into refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and other Arab countries. I remember the war over Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal – a last desperate attempt by a pathetic British aristocracy to hold on to the vestiges of its colonial empire. From then on, the United States became the guardian angel of the Zionist state as the latter emerged as a major military power in the region, armed with a nuclear arsenal it refuses to acknowledge. More ominously, it became a security state singularly aimed at the protection of one section of its population – the Jews – and treating its Arab citizens as lowly barbarians threatening to swamp the Jewish nation with their fast-breeding families and actively assisting the hostile forces ranged across the border. Israel continues to build walls to fortify the Jewish population, imposes a ruthless regime of passes and security checks that every Arab-Israeli or Palestinian has to daily negotiate, and ignores every international norm to build Jewish settlements in Palestinian lands in order to permanently scuttle all chances of a sovereign Palestinian state coming into existence. I don’t need to mobilize any scholarly knowledge at all: my inherited common sense tells me what I need to know. This is colonial rule as well as apartheid, both based on the exercise of brute force." (thanks Robin)