Academic boycotts against Israel were self-defeating and would only damage its existing relationship with the Palestinians, a conference was told this week.

Sari Nusseibeh, the president of Al-Quds University, the only Arab university in Jerusalem, said the free flow of science and information was a more powerful weapon against war.

"I stand committed to academic cooperation and against boycotts," said Dr Nusseibeh in a letter read out to participants at a two-day conference held at Bar-Ilan University entitled Academic Freedom and the Politics of Boycotts.

"An international academic boycott of Israel, on pro-Palestinian grounds, is self-defeating: it would only succeed in weakening that strategically important bridge through which the state of war between Israelis and Palestinians could be ended and Palestinian rights could therefore be restored," he said.

The international academic community should do all it could to strengthen the link through its own collaborative intervention, he added.

The conference, which began on Wednesday, was organised by the university's international advisory board for academic freedom, which, last year, led the protest against the proposed boycott of Bar-Ilan and Haifa Universities by the Association of University Teachers.

The conference was due to be attended by key players in the anti-boycott movement, including Jon Pike, a senior philosophy lecturer at the Open University, who founded the anti-boycott group Engage.

Munther Dajani, also from Al-Quds University, echoed the president's sentiments, saying boycotts and embargoes did not achieve anything, but brought "us back to point zero".

"I feel very strongly about academic cooperation. We have to have bridges of communication and to talk to each other rather than past each other," he said.

The Harvard law school professor and keynote speaker, Alan Dershowitz, questioned why Israel was chosen for a boycott, when "per capita, the number of lives saved by Israel is greater than any country in the world" through its contributions to biotechnology and medical research.

"The best weapon against any boycott is excellence," added the professor. "Fighting selective boycotts is very important and, in Israel, is not only good for science and research but also good for the peace process."

He added: "Make no mistake: those who advocate boycotts and divestment are encouraging terror."

Last year's decision by the Association of University Teachers to boycott the two Israeli universities, alleging they were complicit in the abuse of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, sparked a backlash at universities around the world.

Union members had voted to sever links last April, but the decision was overturned at an emergency meeting in May after fierce campaigning on both sides.

At the time, Sue Blackwell, a lecturer at Birmingham University who proposed the original boycott, told the Guardian that despite the result the "genie was out of the bottle".