Israeli academics have written to the country’s education minister to express their concern at his stated intention to act against university professors who support the campaign for an academic boycott against Israel, reports Haaretz.com. “Freedom of expression and academic freedom are the oxygen of the Israeli academic system,” they wrote to Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar. “Israeli academia will suffer great damage if politicians dictate to it what is right and wrong to say, think, research and teach, and force it to adopt these kinds of criteria for accepting, promoting or rejecting researchers and professors,” they wrote, according to Haaretz.com. “Your statement about intending to use your authority to act against professors who support an academic boycott of Israel are [sic] causing just such damage.”

But the education minister was unrepentant and said he had asked universities how they were responding to faculty who had expressed support for a boycott. “The only ones hurting academic freedom in Israel are those lecturers calling for an academic boycott of Israel,” Mr. Sa’ar told Israel Radio. “If a person calls for an academic boycott of the institution in which he teaches, the institution should address this. I stand behind what I said and won’t retract it. The response is largely hysterical, and an attempt to silence other opinions. There is no intention here to stifle critical opinion, criticism of the government, or of various political positions. The question is whether there are any boundaries.”