UCT and Wits are tainted by their calls to boycott Israel

Allan Wolman, Johannesburg ​

For years, both institutions had impeccable reputations for honesty and integrity, and for the standpoint taken by the student body, academic staff and alumni in opposing bigotry, racism and discrimination of every kind.

But today, tragically, the good names of these universities have been, and will forever be, tarnished because of what happened there during this year’s Israel Apartheid Week.

Wits and UCT, through various platforms, are unashamedly urging a full academic and cultural boycott of Israel. This is racism at its worse, with proponents of this biased policy buckling under pressure from anti-Israel and anti-Semitic groups bent on the destruction of the only democracy in the region and, by association, the Jewish people.

In the 1960s, young activist students at UCT and Wits stood up against the apartheid regime with mass demonstrations in the streets outside their campuses, and were subjected to brutal assaults by the police. Did they ever imagine that their student body would sink so low as to make discriminatory calls against Israel?

These supposedly educated members of that student body are today too young to have ever experienced the horrors of apartheid, and too ignorant of its history.

Why do the liberal alumni of the universities, moved by the students’ concern for the suffering of others – especially the Palestinian people, whom they support unreservedly – not question why the Student Representative Council is so blatantly discriminatory in its crusade? Why do they ignore the suffering of the half-million Palestinians living under the harshest system of apartheid in Lebanon, or the plight of the Syrians being slaughtered by the thousands, and the countless other human rights tragedies perpetrated in the Arab world?

Now, dear students, please find similar racist practices in the country you are boycotting. 

As well-informed students of your universities, you cannot plead ignorance of these facts. It thus follows that the only excuse you can offer is a reverse racism and anti-Semitism born out of hatred, bigotry and total ignorance of the country and institutions you so glibly want to boycott.

Your actions not only shame all those who walked the corridors of these once-great institutions before you, but they also spit in the face of those alumni who supported the struggle which gave us a just and democratic country.