The reason there is a boycott being called for is that the Israeli academy has not organized to defend the right to academic freedom and freedom of speech of the Palestinians, let alone taken collective institutional stances on the way the Sharon administration has turned the Occupied Territories into "homo sacer." Like Linda Grant, I have been to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. I've lived in the West Bank for over a year, back in the "good, old days" of Oslo. I'm not going to trot out my credentials of ethnographic authority. But the calls for a boycott are long overdue, and they also exclude individuals who are actually working against the occupation. What is a complete bore about this discussion is the fact that if this was any place else other than Israel, academics in the U.S. and Europe would support the boycott without the blink of an eye. I was glad to see the interview with Jacqueline Rose online, as I was not about to read any more articles on open democracy about the conflict, since there are better sites with Middle Eastern specialists who write about it.