Will Concerned Academics Push to Boycott Turkey?

In the wake of the failed attempt to overthrow him, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has revoked the accreditation of tens of thousands of school teachers, ordered the resignation of the deans of all of his country’s universities, and forbidden professors from traveling abroad. And yet none of the American scholarly organizations advocating or endorsing academic boycotts of Israel is considering a boycott of Turkey. Liel Leibovitz comments:

Curtis Marez, the president of the American Studies Association, . . . when asked why his organization was singling Israel out for calumny and not, say, Russia or China or Turkey, replied “one has to start somewhere.” Well, professor, you’ve started somewhere, and now you have to keep going. Because if you criticize Israel alone, if you fail to speak when actual assaults on academic freedom are keeping actual educators and scholars from engaging in teaching and research, if you reserve moral outrage for the Jewish state alone and have none to show the true tyrants everywhere quashing the ideals we hold dear, then you and your colleagues will have proved yourselves to be nothing more than puny anti-Semites worthy of neither our respect nor our tuition dollars.

Read more at Tablet

More about: Academic Boycotts, American Studies Association, Israel & Zionism, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF