#BDS: Academic research collaboration emboldens Israeli apartheid

In July, Donna Shalala, the president of the University of Miami and former United States Secretary of Health and Human Services during the Clinton administration, joined a 13-member delegation of American university presidents to Israel. The delegation's main objective was to discuss opportunities for academic collaboration with Israeli universities and reciprocal exchange programs for student and faculty. The majority of these Israeli universities, if not all, have been implicated in war crimes and other human rights violations against Palestinian and Lebanese civilians ("Academic boycott against Israel? Umberto Eco misses the point," Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, 10 July 2010). Prior to the delegates' arrival in Israel, they drafted and sent individual letters to their executive counterparts at the Israeli universities, stating that they "clearly denounce[d] the boycott of Israeli academics" ("Shalala among delegation of university presidents to visit Israel," University of Miami news release, 2 July 2010).

The karmic twist to Shalala's visit to Israel was that in spite of her obsequious endorsement of the anti-boycott stance, she was not spared from a three-hour, humiliating interrogation and detainment upon her departure from the Ben Gurion Airport. Israel's Ynet News reported that she was detained because of her Arabic surname ("American VIP humiliated at airport," 6 August 2010). When later interviewed by the Miami Herald, Shalala dismissed the inconvenience of her detention as purely security protocol to ensure traveler safety. Leaving aside all speculations as to why Shalala, an Arab-American, did not speak out against the indignity of her treatment at the airport, the larger conversation should be the strategic marketing and funding of research partnerships between American and Israeli universities.

Research and development collaboration between higher education institutions amount to billions of dollars annually. In 2008, the federal government alone funded $31 billion for academic research and development expenditures of which $1.6 billion were passed through to other university sub-recipients, domestic and foreign (National Science Foundation). Apart from the steady growth of research collaborations with "Asian 8" countries, such as South Korea and Taiwan, the research partnerships between American and Israel universities have been consistently strong and significant.