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Israel To Join CERN As First Non-European Member
First time accepted submitter WorldPiece writes "More accurately, first non-European full member. This comes with some opposition from groups pushing to boycott Israel academia in response to the Israeli government's policies. 'It is a vital part of our mission to build bridges between nations. This agreement enriches us scientifically and is an important step in that direction,' CERN's Director General Rolf Heuer, a German physicist, told the signing ceremony."
Politics have no business in science.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Israel is actially in West-Asia. Geographically that place was never considered to be a part of Europe. However there are strong cultural ties.
BDS is one piece of weapon in an arsenal diplomatic warfare. Yes, weapons can be used to push peace, but they are not, generally, considered a "peace device".
BDS is particularly evil for several reasons. The most ironical is that it attempts to collectively punish all Israelis for what Israel is supposedly doing, thus using collective punishment to protest collective punishment. Presumably, this is okay because it's done by "the good guys"(tm).
More to the point, BDS strives to prevent the other side from voicing its opinion to argue whether the acts protested are real, or just products of propaganda and distortion. In that respect, BDS is just another propaganda employed against Israel. Weapons may, in some rare circumstances, bring peace, but propaganda seldom does.
More to the point, however, BDS strives under all that is "Academia". I can sometimes agree that economical sanctions are in order (nothing that Israel has justified, but I can see how others might disagree with that sentiment). I can understand a cultural boycott, though don't see how it ever does any good. An Academic boycott, however, is never justified.
True discourse and exchange of ideas, some of which you might not like, is the cornerstone of academia. Shutting down someone else's voice is never an academic thing to do, least of all for political reasons.
Shachar
That government has no right to exist except by the force it uses to subjugate the natives.
The same could be said of any government. That's what a government is.
"It is a vital part of our mission to build bridges between nations."
I thought CERN was all about science. What's this about building bridges?
International co-operation is pretty critical in science, without touching on politics at all. That's one of the great things about conferences. I went to a conference in the US earlier in the year, and met someone doing a PhD in hydrology. After chatting with them, it turned out that as part of their work they had collected a pretty comprehensive set of deep-sea water samples for an area I was interested in. I work on marine microbiology, and my university has no way of collecting deep-sea water samples. After a little discussion and a few polite emails later to her P.I., they kindly gave me pretty hefty aliquots of water from as deep as 5,600m below the sea surface. That stuff has been pretty central to the work in my PhD and like I said, I had no way of getting it on my own.
International co-operation, collaboration and exchanges of ideas and equipment/samples is incredibly important and doesn't have to involve politics one bit.
Wow, what a condescending reply.
Israel is not a "military state" in the sense that the military controls politics. It's a pretty dynamic democracy with a highly-diverse set of viewpoints. It also has a very educated labour force and a high number of high-tech companies and startups.
Israel has long been known for innovation. Just google "Israeli Innovation".
Those who propose BDS on the spurious basis of "Israeli Apartheid [sic]" are blind to reality, either out of ignorance or malice. While Israel is not perfect and its Arab citizens do suffer discrimination, it's nowhere near the level of South African Apartheid, and those same Arab citizens have more civil rights in Israel than in any Arab country.
I wonder how many potential Palestinian scientists have gone undetected, untrained and unfunded?
Probably dozens. Lebanon keeps Palestinians in poverty in refugee camps instead of integrating them into society. There were no universities at all in the West Bank prior to 1967. Hamas spends money on weapons that could be spent on education.
Yes, indeed. Palestinian society, much like the rest of the Arab world, allows a criminal waste of human potential by diverting energy towards a conflict instead of towards building up civil society. That's why most Arab states have a low (and usually declining) human development index and shockingly inefficient economies compared to Israel.
Devoting your energy to conflict and bitterness will destroy you before it destroys your enemy.
Funny.
I suggest you take a look at, e.g, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Start-up_Nation. Here's one paragraph (the source is backed by reference):
"How is it that Israel -- a country of 7.1 million people, only sixty years old, surrounded by enemies, in a constant state of war since its founding, with no natural resources -- produces more start-up companies than large, peaceful, and stable nations like Japan, China, India, Korea, Canada, and the United Kingdom?[4] The Economist notes that Israel now has more high-tech start-ups and a larger venture capital industry per capita than any other country in the world."
Or, e.g., browse the list that ranks the top-100 computer science departments in the world and observe where and how many times the Israeli flag appears in the list. (FYI, Israel has only 6 universities.)
etc. etc.
Politics IS a science. And science has politics. I wonder how many potential Palestinian scientists have gone undetected, untrained and unfunded?
As a student at the Technion, Israel's premier university, I can tell you that Arabs are very disproportionately overrepresented there. That's fine, there is good reason: the Arabs have strong motivation to work hard and push ahead. Despite the huge number of Arabs in Israeli universities, I do not recall a single political or racial event in my time at the Technion. Not one.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Are you seriously suggesting that refusing to deal with people on a voluntary basis is somehow equivalent to blockading them, denying the importation of food after calculating the absolute minimum calories required to prevent mass deaths and joking about how it's "like a visit to the dietician, the Palestinians will get a lot thinner but won't die," destroying their capacity to make food by destroying chicken farms and flour mills, destroying sewage treatment pond retaining walls so they spoil farmland, destroying their electrical plants then denying the importation of parts to repair them, destroying thousands of homes and refusing to allow them to rebuilt by forbidding the importation of building materials, and denying the export of what little they do produce so they can't have any economy?
If Gaza is not Israel, then why did Israel have commandos with machine guns rappel onto a flotilla boat bringing food to people in Gaza? As far as the "area under their control", the area in the case of the flotilla raid was international waters. You know, international waters, like where the USS Liberty was when Israel killed 34 of its crew. It's funny how people sailing on a ship with food in international waters are the ones "agressively awaiting to attack any Israely they see", while the commandos rappelling onto the boat with machine guns (the "any Israelys (sic) they see" I guess) are not the aggressive ones. The Israeli commandos were armed with machine guns, the flotilla passengers were armed with nothing but pieces of wood from the mast and knives they grabbed from the kitchen.
For a military state such as Israel, it is impressive that every now and then they come up with innovations; not very many, but they do come up with them.
I can cite two clear counter-examples in tech. If you posted on a computer that using an Intel chip newer than an Pentium IV, the technology came from Intel's Israel development center. If you've played a game using a MS Kinect, that also came from Israel.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Do you even think that Israel would exist today without US backup?
Well, it's impossible to answer "what if" questions, but Israel didn't receive substantial assistance from the US until after the 1967 war and it survived quite nicely from 1948-1967.
It is intended to remind them, peacefully, that they have the power to change this by electing a government whose policies do not violate international laws.
But what if I disagree with you that my government is, indeed, violating international laws? If you will not hear what I have to say (because you are boycotting my academia), then how will you find out in case you are wrong?
BDS is about saying "there is no chance we can possibly be wrong, and no further discussion is necessary", which is another way of saying it is just propaganda. It is also the anti-thesis of the most fundamental core academic value.
Shachar
Just the systematic purging of Arabs in Jerusalem (by refusing permits to Arabs to modify or build new houses) though is not something you would expect to find in any true developed democracy conscious of it's minorities.
You can wonder if a democracy can operate properly at all if it's main issues are related to security
The fact that most of Israel's neighbours are fucked up countries as well (although Jordan doesn't seem bad imho and we can hopefully see positive things developing in Egypt) doesn't plead in any way that Israel is a democratic country. It'd be like comparing the US to Mexico and conclude that the US doesn't seem to have a lot of gun fights
Repeat after me: We are all individuals
"criminal and inhumane state" This accurately describes every middle eastern country that has been trying to remove the Jews for the past 70+ years. Since their military efforts showed that they could not fight their way out of a wet paper bag they switched strategies by abandoning those who where living in the sovereign territories that Jordan and Egypt controlled leaving them stateless. A small sacrifice to make sure Israel has to deal with all the problems. If the Palestinians are really suffering as much as people claim why has Egypt, Jordon, Lebanon, or Syria never allowed the Palestinians to settle in their lands? Why have all the Arab countries not kept their promise of providing financial aid? Of course they would never do this because it would mean putting an end to their relentless harassment of Israel. The Arabs are only using the Palestinians as a tool to provoke Israel into violent confrontations that result in Palestinian casualties so they can loudly proclaim to the world about the evils of Israel. They don't give a shit about the people being killed they just want feed their propaganda machines. Anti-US and anti-Israel rhetoric is the only issue that the entire Arab world can agree with and their politicians take full advantage of this to distract the masses and keep them from looking at their own government corruption and incompetence.
Two sources for the quote are ynet and Haaretz. The NYT passed it along too. The BBC reported on documents obtained by Gisha from the Israeli government detailing the blockade and containing estimates of the calories required by Gazans to stay alive.
It took five minutes to Google this up. Open your eyes and see that what has been happening for decades now is real and not just some "narrative." Of course, I'm sure you can cook up some explanation of why it's a military necessity to prevent food from entering Gaza.
How this ever got to +4 insightful I will never know. Rather, it just shows how much pro-Israel propaganda has been successful in the west. The image of Israel as a beleaguered state, surrounded on all sides by enemies while it is only defending itself is largely a creation of the media and has no relation whatsoever to the actual history of the region.
I will not go into a discussion of the conflict here as any not pro-Israeli posts get modded -1 overrated to oblivion but I will point out what I do know and that is wrong with your post. Though if anyone is interested "The Gun and the Olive Branches" is a very informative book(written by a British journalist).
"If the Palestinians are really suffering as much as people claim why has Egypt, Jordon, Lebanon, or Syria never allowed the Palestinians to settle in their lands?"
Each nation has its own situation, in the case of Lebanon(my country, which, by the way, is a democracy and where a large segment of the population does not really have a major issue with Israel -- the Christians, ~40% of the population, and I happen to be one), the Palestinians aren't given citizenship because doing so would upset the current balance of force in the country, tilting it towards the Sunni Muslim side. Given that the country is still in the early stages of recovering from a devastating 15 year civil war(in which the Palestinians played a major role igniting, but they weren't alone) and given the fact that Sunni/Chiite tensions continue to rise year-on-year in the whole area almost all analysts agree that attempting to assimilate the Palestinians into Lebanese society would shatter what fragile equilibrium currently exists.