"What really winds up Israel is that this rejection comes from a famous scientist, and it is science that drives its economy, prestige and military strength".
Noam SHEIZAF: "Stephen Hawking's message to Israeli elites: The occupation has a price" (+972, May 8, 2013).
"By choosing to avoid the Presidential Conference – an annual meeting of Israeli generals, politicians and business elites with their international fans, Prof. Hawking reminds that the occupation cannot be forgotten or avoided. A response to Haaretz’s Carlo Strenger."
Ben WHITE: "Why a boycott of Israeli academics is fully justified". "The majority of Israeli academics do little to support the rights of Palestinians, and their institutions are complicit in the occupation"(The Guardian, 12 Sept, 2012).
Today the systematic dispossession of the Palestinian people continues unabated and largely unchallenged by the United States and the European Union. Barriers to Palestinian mobility, social and political development are visible everywhere. While Jewish-Israeli citizens pass freely, more than 500 police and military checkpoints regulate Palestinian movement between the occupied West Bank and Israel. Passing through these checkpoints on a recent fact-finding tour organized by the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, we witnessed Palestinians endure a daily ritual of subordination, humiliation and suspicion..