They do so with an Israeli academia that has shown it is prepared to offer no institutional support to Palestinian colleagues.
This month, Evelyn Fox Keller, an 82-year-old scientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, accepted the Dan David Prize at Tel Aviv University -- on condition that she could donate the prize money to Israeli human rights groups.
She criticised academics in Israel for failing to show solidarity with Palestinians. "They don't want to and don't have a voice. ... None of the universities in Israel have a will [to speak out]."
Worse, Israeli university heads not only fail to speak up, but actively seek to suppress solidarity with Palestinians.
Ben Gurion University's president, Rivka Carmi, cancelled an award from the politics department for the whistleblowing Israeli soldiers' group Breaking the Silence in 2016. She justified the move on the grounds that the organization was "outside the national consensus."
And last year, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem cancelled a conference on Palestinian prisoners, apparently bowing to right-wing political pressure.
In February, Israel's Higher Education Council raised no protest as the Netanyahu government brought for the first time three academic institutions located in illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank under its auspices. Shortly afterwards, the same council rubber-stamped a new code of conduct intended to silence the few Israeli academics who have dared to speak out against the violation of Palestinian rights.
The paradox is that Western academic organisations like the MLA, in shunning the BDS movement, have preferred to ally themselves with Israeli universities that persecute not only Palestinians but dissident Israeli academics.
Poet convictedThe justification for a cultural boycott is no less clear-cut. This month, an Israeli court convicted Dareen Tatour, a 36-year-old Palestinian poet with Israeli citizenship, of incitement to violence and support for terrorism.
She had already endured two and a half years of jail and harsh house arrest -- denied access all that time to computers and phones -- while the wheels of Israel's legal system turned slowly. Now, she risks a sentence of up to eight additional years in prison.
Poetry invariably exploits complexities of language and ambiguities of meaning. But over the protests of scholars of the Arabic language, the court relied on translations of Tatour's poetry by an Israeli policeman.
In schoolboy fashion, he translated the Arabic word "shaheed," which for Palestinians refers to any victim of Israeli oppression, to the reductive notion of a "terrorist." "It is not a trial, it is a theatrical play," Tatour said of the legal proceedings.
A handful of Israeli literary figures, including the noted author AB Yehoshua, have protested at the unprecedented move to jail a poet, something they noted that even the most repressive regimes usually avoid doing.
A Hebrew literature professor, Nissim Calderon, warned: "What begins by undermining the freedom of a Palestinian poet will surely continue by undermining the freedom of Israeli poets."
Demands for artistic loyaltyThe attack on Tatour is part of a much wider campaign of intimidation and surveillance of social media that is almost exclusively targeting the free speech of Palestinians, including artists, both in the occupied territories and Israel.
But more traditional venues for art are also under relentless attack. Most Israeli artists and cultural institutions have already been cowed by a nearly decade-long campaign of threats to funding from successive Netanyahu governments.
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