ILL-WINDS ARE BLOWING IN ISRAELI ACADEMIA. With the country under pressure in the intemational arena growing numbers of people in power in govemment and the universities are pressing for a mobilized academic loyalty to the nation state at the expense of the universal humanist values at the heart of Westem academic endeavor.

Bar-Ilan Univenity, where I work, lies opposite the haredi city of B`nei B`rak. When the university was founded in 1955, it was in opposition to B`nei B`rak. Bar-Ilan represented a modern, moderate religious Zonism, whereas B`nei B`rak, shutting out the modern world, oscillated between anti-Zionism and non-Zionist ultra-Orttrodoxy. Since then

both Bar-Ilan and B`nei B`rak have changed. B`nei B`rak has become part of the general population and supports the right or the far right. As for Bar-Ilan, the moderate, modern Orttrodoxy of yore has become a rare commodity. In today`s Israel, Jewish Orthodoxy and radical nationalism go hand in hand.

Like Bar-Ilan, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem was founded as an antithesis to blinkered Orthodoxy. It was not by accident that it was built on Mount Scopus, outside the Old City of Jerusalem and above the

Temple Mount. The prominent academic leaders of its early years were liberal humanists, like university president, Judah Irib Magnes, philosophers Martin Buber and Shmuel Hugo Bergrnann, and Judaic scholars

Gershom Scholem and Ernst Simon. But today, anyone visiting the Mount Scopus campus enters a walled fortress, arrogant and deaf to is surroundings. The establishment of the new campus on Mount Scopus after the 1967 Six Day War was very much a reflection of what characterized Israel then: imperial ignorance combined with a naive dream of a quiet, unchallenged Israeli return to historic Jerusalem. But history refused to cooperate. Today the campus looks like a clenched fist striking out at the environment, another stronghold designed to prevent the

division of Jerusalem between Israelis and Palestinians- It is difficult to reconcile this with the universal humanist values of its founding fathers- Israeli academia does not operate in a vacuum. It is part and parcel of

Israeli society. And the key questions for academia in today`s Israel are these: To whom are the universities responsible and to whom do individual academic researchers owe their primary loyalty? To the institution

that employs them? To the state that finances them? Or to the universal humanist values that inform their scientific research?

These questions are being asked today by faculty, the general public and the govemment.

Of course, there are Israeli academic researchers with integrity and universal humanist values. Some of them have paid or are paying a career price because of their involvement in public affairs. Of course, there is academic freedom in Israel today and in the past not everything was rosy. Still, something is changing here before our very eyes. In internal academic debates and in public discourse, there is a growing chorus of voices who judge academics by the level of their patriotism. This potentially repressive approach is encouraged by a rightwing governing coalition and a public that feels threatened by `leftwing intellectual terror` they believe threatens Israel`s very existence.

In line with the prevailing mood the syllabus taught in the social sciences was recently categorized according to`Zionist` and`anti-Zonist` authors by a group of academics and politicians. This led to a debate in

the Knesset`s Education Committee on `the promotion of Zonist positions in academia,` to which 14 right-wing professors and students, two representatives of the Association of Civil Rights, and the deputy rector

of Tel Aviv University were invited` and for which the education minister expressed his support. In its summary, the committee notes `the direct reports of post-Zionist bias and anti-Zionist conduct... and resolves that this phenomenon contradicts Israel`s values as a Jewish and democratic state, based on Zonist principles, the Declaration of Independence and the rule of law. The committee further resolves that the insertion of post and anti-Zonism [into the syllabus] is subversive and undermines the very foundations of the state, in that it also calls for academic boycotts,

refusal to serve in the IDF, defiance of the law, and that it has nothing to do with academic freedom, on whose name it calls in vain.`

In the 1980s, the political tension in Israel was mainly domestic, between right and left wings of almost equal size. Now the Left has been virtually erased from the political map, and the tension is between a predominantly right-wing society and govemment, and the Westem world with its universal humanist values. The negative attitude of the govemment and the public towards human rights organizations is a reflection of this. The govemment and the public`s overwhelming sense of siege spawned the demand for the mobilization of academia in defense of the

nation state. This basically boils down to a demand that academics choose narrow nationalism over universal humanism. The dilemma for individual academics is not easy. Many support the govemment and the

majority`s goals. Others find it diffcult to resist the pressure, while others, in narrow scientific fields far removed from the general system of values on which scientific research rests, are oblivious.

My position is clear: I choose universal humanist values and would like to see the country and its universities doing the same.

Menachem Klein, a political scientist ot Bar Ilan Univenrsty, is one of the leaders of the Geneva Initiative for peace with the Palestinians.