300 Italian professors boycott Israel
300 Italian professors boycott Israel

An Italian academic appeal to boycott the Israeli universities is achieving much support. It was launched last week by 168 academics who called to boycott the Technion of Haifa and proclamed that  the professors and researchers claim that “we will not accept invitations to visit Israeli academic institutions; we will not participate at conferences financed, organized or sponsored by them, or otherwise we not cooperate with them”.

In one week, the number of Italian signatures rose to 300. Many boycotters of Israel come from the Orientale University of Naples, where the “Center for Postcolonial and Gender Studies” has even officially adopted BDS, the Boycott of Israel.

“I am not surprised" says Gabriella Steindler, former Fulbright Scholar at Berkeley who taught for years at the Orientale University. Steindler witnessed another terrible case of anti-Israeli propaganda right in the courtyard of her faculty. “It was when students ‘reconstructed’ an Israeli In 1938, the Italian Fascist regime asked all the university professors to fill out a paper declaring their race: “Jewish” or “Aryan.”
checkpoint with barbed wire and the Israeli flag smeared with blood. I immediately called the then rector, Pasquale Ciriello, who finally authorized the students to proceed.” 

Steindler lashes out against her former colleagues: “My former colleagues, before voting blindly against Israel, should have to study more history, the wars suffered and won by Israel and how the Arabs live there. In Israel there are Arab parliamentarians and Arab writers who write in Hebrew. I think that these boycotts are a mixture of opportunism and ignorance. My former colleagues should see the goals Israel has reached, including the Nobel Prizes. They should not pretend to ignore that Jews have always lived in Jerusalem”.

The secretary of Orientale’s rector, Elda Morlicchio, contacted by us for comments on her colleagues who boycott Israeli professors, declared that “she is abroad.” I hope that, wherever the rector is, there no professors boycotting the Jewish State.

In 1938, the Italian Fascist regime asked all the university professors to fill out a paper declaring their race: “Jewish” or “Aryan”. Among the 400 Italian Jewish professors who lost their jobs, there was Federico Cameo, who taught Civil Law in Florence and killed himself with a pistol soon after he received a letter that deprived him of his post because of his “race."

Then and now. The same academic cowardice.