By Yakir Benzion, United With Israel
A researcher at Israel’s
Ariel University located in Samaria has refused the demand of a Swiss-based
scientific journal to remove “Israel” from her institution’s address in her
paper.
Dr. Mindy Levine heads a
chemistry research lab at Ariel University studying toxicant detection,
environmental remediation, and supramolecular organic chemistry. She submitted
a new scientific paper to the journal Molecules.
The paper would have
appeared in the January, 2021 edition of the journal, however, a group of
anti-Israel academics demanded that Molecules reject the paper
unless Levine agreed to say she wrote it from “Ariel University, illegal
Israeli settlement of Ariel, Occupied Palestinian Territory” instead of “Ariel
University, Ariel, Israel.”
“Molecules has
put politics over science,” stated Prof. Eugene Kontorovich, Director of
International Law at the Jerusalem-based Kohelet Policy Forum,
“It requires all authors
to provide a mailing address; whatever one thinks of the politics, ‘Ariel,
Israel’ is indeed the correct mailing address, as one can discover by sending a
letter. The purpose of a contact address – to allow communication with the
author – has been turned into a geopolitical judgement by chemists unqualified
to make it,” Kontorovich said.
“Papers from authors in
other contested areas have been published without any insistence on any
‘legally correct’ description,” Kontorovich noted. “Now Molecules must revise
its policies for several territories, or stick with a Jewish-only double
standard.”
Hundreds of Arabs study
at Ariel University, which also attracts Druze and Circassian students, in
addition to Jewish Israelis from a variety of backgrounds.
The anti-Israel chemists
say that Ariel is not located in the sovereign territory of Israel and demanded
Levine change the address to “illegal Israeli settlement of Ariel.”
One of the activists is
Nobel Prize winner Prof. George Smith of the University of Missouri. An
investigative report by Vox Magazine earlier this year revealed that the “U.S.
government expropriated nearly 11 million acres of land from Native American
tribes that was then sold to fund 52 modern-day universities – including the
University of Missouri, which received land taken from the Osage people.”
The University of
Missouri website lists the contact address of the school as “230 Jesse Hall,
Columbia, MO 65211,” and not “occupied Osage territory.”
After receiving the complaint
from Smith and his cohorts, Molecules editors asked Levine to
get rid of “Israel” from the Ariel University address, but she refused. Molecules then
informed Levine they would not publish her study.
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