Is Israel uniquely bad, or has hypocrisy towards the Jewish state become so widely accepted among some progressives that even an eminent scholar like Hawking is susceptible to hypocritical and lazy double standards?
After a great deal of confusing reports, it was confirmed yesterday that physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking has pulled out of a conference in Israel next month after being lobbied by pro-Palestinian campaigners.
Initially some had claimed his decision to pull out of the conference was due to ill health, but a statement published by the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine with Hawking’s approval cleared the matter up.
“This is his independent decision to respect the boycott, based upon his knowledge of Palestine, and on the unanimous advice of his own academic contacts there.”
So “respect for the boycott” was a humanitarian gesture, then?
Ok. But why did professor Hawking see fit to visit Iran in 2007 for a conference? As far as I am aware, there was no statement at the time from Hawking refusing to travel to the Islamic Republic out of “respect” for the country’s political dissidents, or until the government stopped executing homosexuals.
A year earlier, in 2006, Stephen Hawking visited China, whose government is responsible for large scale human rights abuses in Tibet. Tibet is, as Human Rights Watch noted several years before his visit, “a place where some of the most visible and egregious human rights violations committed by the Chinese state have occurred”. A 2008 UN report found that the use of torture in Tibet was “widespread” and “routine”.
There’s no need to be an apologist for the Israeli occupation of the West Bank to question where professor Hawking’s moral compass was when he chose to visit these two serial human rights abusers – and ask why it has suddenly appeared when the country in question is Israel.
Is Israel uniquely bad, or has hypocrisy towards the Jewish state become so widely accepted among some progressives that even an eminent scholar like Hawking is susceptible to hypocritical and lazy double standards?
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346 Responses to “So why did Stephen Hawking think it was ok to visit Iran and China?”
Nathan Newman
The answer on why Israel and not Iran or China is pretty simple– effectiveness and consequences of a boycott. Precisely because Israel is internally democratic in its procedures (as opposed to anti-democratic in its occupation), a boycott can effect the government through pressure by its citizens. (Same theory on South Africa back in the day).
Political action is not a mere abstraction or about symbolism; the question is whether the boycott is tied to active strategy that may be effective. A symbolic boycott of China or Iran has little meaning if there is no theory of how it could change the regime’s behavior.
Political action often targets “less bad” targets precisely because they are more subject to pressure, but a demand that no pressure can be put on such targets until the absolute worst targets change their behavior is basically a “get out of jail free” pass for all lesser offenders from political pressure.
DavidBernstein
But given that Israel has three times offered the Palestinians all of Gaza and almost all of the West Bank plus land swaps, and three times the latter have rejected the offer without putting forth their own counter-offer to end the conflict, a boycott of Israel serves not put pressure on Israel to end the occupation, but to support continued Palestinian rejectionism. So then the question arises as to why someone concerned with human rights would prefer Hamas to Israel, or, as noted, China to Israel.
Tom Jones
shame on him for visiting iran whose regime has committed atrocities against its own people in iran and abroad. with due respect, some of these academics are really joke
Tom Jones
i think you are comparing donkey to chicken. in usa, there is execution for criminals. in iran, political opponents of the regime ( these are not criminal) are jailed, tortured and executed. please think before you make such a comment
Kamyar
Why was it okay to visit iran?
Iran’s not the apartheid state, buddy.