Sydney’s university of conflict

And we might be entitled to expect that, more than anywhere, a university centre devoted to peace and the resolution of conflict would welcome intellectual inquiry.

Yet at the University of Sydney Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies we have been dismayed to learn that the academy has been infected by the attitudes of the closed mind. In a turn of events that would be laughable if it were not so serious, the pursuit of peace and the study of conciliation has fallen prey to a most destructive partisanship.

The centre's director, Jake Lynch, has subscribed to the controversial Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel -- an initiative so counter-productive it has been disowned even by the Greens after they initially supported its adoption by Sydney's Marrickville Council. To isolate Israel and support the Palestinian people through BDS, Associate Professor Lynch eschews academic exchanges with Israel. Specifically, he rejected a bid for co-operation from Hebrew University of Jerusalem academic Dan Avnon. Professor Avnon's crucial work has been to develop a civics course that can unite Jewish and Arab students behind a common civic understanding. By rejecting co-operation on what is self-evidently worthwhile work, the Sydney centre seems to be demonstrating that it is less attuned to peace than conflict.

Through the Sydney Peace Prize the same centre has seen fit to provoke the Jewish community by honouring controversial Palestinian activist Hanan Ashrawi. The intolerance evident in Associate Professor Lynch's decision has no place in Australia, let alone at a university -- an institution devoted to cultivating the civilised mind. It is a telling fact in this complex debate that the plurality of views and open debate we enjoy in these matters is, of course, possible in Israel but not in Gaza or even the West Bank. Students at the University of Sydney interested in religious freedom, political plurality, women's equality or gay rights would find acceptance on the streets of Tel Aviv but mainly oppression in Gaza.

Israel is not blameless and it must be accountable for its actions. But as Hamas inches towards sharia law, uses women and children as human shields, and fires rockets indiscriminately into Israel, it should not be able to draw comfort from the foolish, partisan posturing of academics in the West.