Israel: Stick to astrophysics, Hawking

last updated 8 January 2015

Shlomo Avineri

Ha’aretz

For all his brilliance, Stephen Hawking shows a poor grasp of logic, said Shlomo Avineri. The revered British physicist announced last week that he would not be attending next month’s fifth Israeli Presidential Conference because of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. He’s not the first scholar to join the boycott, but as the event’s planned keynote speaker, he’s certainly the most prominent—and one of the most inconsistent in applying his principles. Hawking, you’ll recall, deemed the American invasion of Iraq a “war crime” and said that Britain’s participation in it made the U.K. equally culpable. So what did he do to protest this atrocity? “Did he refuse to pay taxes to his government?” Did he urge foreign scientists to boycott British universities? Did he refuse to attend academic conferences in the U.S.? He did not. In fact, even though President Barack Obama hasn’t honored a campaign promise to close the “completely illegal detention camp” at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Hawking accepted a Presidential Medal of Freedom from him. What could account for the hypocrisy of choosing to punish Israel while giving the U.S. and the U.K. a pass? Let’s hope Hawking is simply muddleheaded-—after all, he apparently doesn’t realize that Palestinians will in fact be attending this conference. Because otherwise his action has “a whiff of racism.”