Seventy-two years ago today, Nazi-inspired German university students burned the books of Jews and other “un-German” authors in Berlin. And now the British academic establishment has embraced a modern form of book-burning, one that is in some ways even more radical, as its weapon of choice against the Jewish state.

Awakening to the fact that their guild has been hijacked by a jihad aimed at eliminating Israel, some dissenting British academics are rushing to douse the torch their fellow professors in the U.K. have lit. But the pyre has been built, the dissenters may be unsuccessful in dousing that torch, and there’s no telling where the flames, once set, will spread – or what else, as Heinrich Heine famously warned, will then burn.

Meeting last month, Britain’s Association of University Teachers, which represents 49,000 of that country’s academics, voted to boycott their Israeli colleagues at two universities, Haifa and Bar-Ilan, and to consider boycotting those at a third, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The boycott is so sweeping that it amounts to a book burning, only worse. Whereas in traditional book burnings, finished books were set alight, with other copies surviving elsewhere, the British form of the art is designed to abort the writing of books in the first place by preventing the research on the basis of which future books and papers, scientific and scholarly, would be written.

In the cases of the targeted institutions, the boycott calls on British scientists or other academics to stop participating with their Israeli colleagues in any form of academic or cultural cooperation, collaboration or joint projects. In practice, this means that the British academics are not to visit the targeted institutions, lecture or work with their scientists or other academics, invite those colleagues to lecture or to work with them in Britain, review papers by them for publication in scientific or scholarly journals, evaluate the merits of applications for funding by Israeli colleagues at those universities, or cooperate with those colleagues in any other way.

One of the boycotted universities, Haifa, was accused of having suppressed a thesis about a massacre of Palestinians during Israel’s War of Independence in 1948. But it turns out that the university’s assessment that the thesis was based on fabricated or distorted information was correct, the student himself having admitted in court to falsifying his story. The allegations against the other Israeli universities, claiming injustices against Palestinians, are equally unsubstantiated or tenuous. The boycott vote was pushed through quickly by its organizers, with little discussion. Attempts to raise objections were blocked.

The most obvious question is why the British academics never even considered declaring a boycott against academics in any of the countries that are the truly massive violators of academic freedom and human rights in the world. Why no boycott against academics in China, which regularly jails and sometimes kills political dissidents, and which half a century ago invaded and occupied Tibet, hundreds of times as large as the West Bank and Gaza put together, systematically transferring into it Chinese settlers? Why no boycott against academics in Russia, which has leveled cities in Chechnya, “disappearing” men, and raping women? And why no boycotts against academics in numerous other countries – Sudan, Congo, Zimbabwe, North Korea – that murder or torment their citizens to a degree and on a scale that dwarf anything that is claimed to happen in the West Bank or Gaza by even the most extreme critics of Israel?

Why no boycotts against academics in many Arab and Muslim countries where academic freedom either doesn’t exist or is under constant attack, such as Syria, Egypt, and Iran? Why no boycott against academics in Saudi Arabia, which in recent weeks arrested 40 Pakistanis for secretly practicing Christianity in that theocracy that forbids the practice of any religion other than Islam? And why no boycott against academics in Uzbekistan, which, according to recent reports, tortures those it interrogates by boiling them alive? Come to think of it, why no boycott by British academics against themselves for living in a country that participated in what many of them consider a war crime: the invasion of Iraq?

The answer to all these questions was made evident at the convention at which the boycott vote was taken. The vote wasn’t based on principle. It was based, rather, on politics. The true goal of the boycott’s organizers – the elimination of Israel – was made clear by the behavior and statements of its backers. Its main British organizer, standing outside the conference hall draped in a Palestinian flag, condemned Israel as a “colonial apartheid state, more insidious than South Africa,” and called for the “removal of this regime.” And, after the boycott motion was passed, its main Palestinian supporter exclaimed, “The taboo has been shattered at last. From now on, it will be acceptable to compare Israel’s apartheid system to its South African predecessor.”

By voting for the boycott, British academics, most of them without realizing it, bought into the strategy, espoused by Palestinians and their supporters with increasing frequency and stridency, of claiming that Israel is an apartheid state, just as South Africa was, and that it’s therefore illegitimate and should be eliminated and replaced by another state, Palestine. In addition to voting to declare their boycott, the academics voted to distribute to their membership a Palestinian position paper that claims that Israel carries out a policy of racial discrimination against Palestinians not only in the West Bank and Gaza but also in Israel itself, in its dealings with its own Arab citizens – a policy that, the paper says, “resembles the defunct apartheid system in South Africa.” This sentiment has been expressed as well in the campaigns that have sprung up on campuses across the U.S. demanding that American universities “divest” – that is, withdraw endowment funds – from companies that do business in Israel.

In reality, there’s simply no comparison between South Africa and Israel. During its apartheid era, South Africa was run by a small white minority that oppressed its black majority. Israel, on the other hand, is 80% Jewish and gives its Arab minority full civil rights, including the right to vote and to be members of the country’s parliament. It also welcomes its Arab citizens into its universities. In fact, the student body of one of the universities being boycotted, Haifa, is 20% Arab – the same percentage as in the general Israeli population. Moreover, Israel is about to do something in Gaza that no country has ever done before: Totally and even forcibly extract and evict its citizens from homes and land in which they’ve lived for decades. And it’s prepared, as it was at Camp David in 2000, to withdraw from nearly all of the West Bank.

Ironically, the boycott, by quashing research, publication, and international academic discussion, makes a mockery of the traditionally fierce commitment on the part of academics to the free exchange of ideas and knowledge, an exchange that in itself prods the creation of new knowledge – which, in the case of Israeli medical science, in particular, has benefited humanity immensely.

And, perhaps, even more ironically, the boycott comes at a time when there’s a glimmer of hope that peace talks leading to a two-state solution are once again possible. The action taken by the British academics, with its roots in the goal of eliminating Israel, will hardly strengthen the hands of the peacemakers.

That some of the motivations in the British academic community for boycotting Israeli universities probably also stem from the kinds of anti-Semitic sentiments that have stained public discourse in that country in recent years makes the boycott especially dismaying.

Fortunately, some British academics, recognizing the assault on fairness, core academic values, and the prospects for peace that their professional organization has just perpetrated, are trying to reverse its decision. Thirty members of the organization’s executive council have petitioned it to hold a special meeting to reconsider its decision to boycott Israel, and the meeting has been set for May 26. Whether or not these protesting academics succeed in reversing the original decision will depend on the ability of their colleagues to recognize that they and their profession have been hijacked by political forces that, at least until now, have been smarter than they are. But if the boycott isn’t reversed, this modern form of book-burning will proceed in earnest, and will be used as a model for the other academic campaigns that have been established to delegitimize, and thereby eliminate, the Jewish state. The Nazi-inspired university students who burned Jewish and “un-German” books in Berlin on May 10, 1933, would have been pleased.

Dr. Reich is the Yitzhak Rabin Memorial Professor of International Affairs, Ethics and Human Behavior at the George Washington University; a co-chairman of the Committee of Concerned Scientists, which defends academic freedom and human rights; a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, and a lecturer in psychiatry at Yale University. From 1995 to 1998 he was the director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.