Comment of the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress (EAJC) PR Department on the situation concerning the one-sided break of relations between an African and an Israeli university.

The one-sided break of relations by the South African University of Johannesburg with the Ben-Gurion University in Be'er-Sheva once more demonstrates the disturbing complex of symptoms of the international campaign on the delegitimization of the Jewish state. It is unlikely that this very event will be the last drop for our Jewish patience, or change anything significant in the general diplomatic landscape. The right of the Jewish state to existence has been, to put it mildly, doubted by a number of its neighbors, who were supported by a host of different “well-wishers” from the non- CIS countries.

At the same time, the susceptibility of intellectuals around the world to the virus of the delegitimization of Israel is an indisputable fact. This virus, as well as the “new anti-Semitism,” has lashed out first and foremost at those representatives of the new and, if they can truly be so called, “liberal” intelligentsia, who were educated together with the irreconcilable enemies of the Jewish state. They used the current global world order in full to continue their fight, a fight that they had practically lost in the recent past.

Unfortunately, we must count with this. Especially today, when blood has once again been spilled in the streets of Jerusalem. The demonstrative actions of the intellectuals, for whom the so-called “illegitimacy” of the Jewish state was at first no more than a teenager's fad, is now turning into a full-scale inferiority complex, which is if not a direct call to terror, than at least a policy of connivance towards it, which is utterly unacceptable in the modern world.

We believe that to spread targeted counter-propaganda or admonishments among the bearers of this virus is as if casting pearls before swine. We need a more serious vaccine. Recently the EAJC spoke to the global community on gathering an international conference against the delegitimization of Israel. We are certain that this will help us to not only answer the eternal Russian question “who is at fault?”, but to understand how to better answer the no less Russian question “what to do?”

We are relying on the fact that this kind of conference (its format, participant, and representativeness) should be similar to the famous Brussels conference on the middle of the 1970s. There were three of them, and they were all aimed at solving the question of the now-former Soviet Jews. Today we can say with sureness that these conferences were of historic importance. We would like for the “fourth Brussels,” though it really does not matter how this conference will be titles and where it will happen, to become the breaking point in out attempts to counter any attempts to delegitimize the State of Israel.

A one-side break of relations between Israeli and foreign scientific centers then will be meaningless.