Opinion: Academics Who Want to Promote Peace Have Better Options Than Boycotts

By DAVID NEWMAN

I am sitting in a conference room, observing a group of 36 participants in a discussion. It is intense, and one can see the care with which the speakers choose their words. For this is no normal gathering. It involves two groups of teachers, one Israeli and the other Palestinian, who, meeting each other for the first time, are not normally prepared to recognize even the basic legitimacy of each other's claims.

We are in the neutral city of Istanbul during the first days of the Lebanon war. It took months of preparation to get the logistics right -- to enable the Palestinian participants from the West Bank who did not have the permits to travel through Israel to leave via Jordan, for instance, and to arrange for kosher food for the religious Israeli participants. Then, right before they were all due to depart, hostilities broke out in southern Lebanon, Hezbollah fired the first Katyusha rockets into Haifa, in northern Israel, and it looked as though all those preparations would count for nothing. But, with one exception, every participant has arrived.