From July 2013

The Israeli government’s de facto annexation and colonization of the Palestinian West Bank is illegal in international law. United Nations members cannot acquire territory by warfare according to the UN Charter (it doesn’t matter from whom they acquire the territory). The UN Charter was written by people who disapproved of the behavior of the aggressors in World War II, which often involved acquiring territory of unrelated people by falling on them militarily, as Israel did on Gaza and the West Bank in 1967. Israel’s creeping annexation of the West Bank has never been formally recognized by any country in the world and has been repeatedly condemned by the world’s major states and by the United Nations Security Council. Israel has managed to thumb its nose at the world community and to go on stealing Palestinian land, water and other resources on a vast scale just because none of its critics was willing to do anything practical to stand in the way of this colonial annexation and erection of an Apartheid state. The United States routinely vetoes UNSC resolutions condemning Israeli theft of Palestinian land and erection of Israeli colonies on it, as well as the latticework of checkpoints and Israeli-only highways that have carved up the West Bank and made Palestinians’ lives miserable. The Israelis are perfectly nice people, but all Occupation regimes distort and degrade the character of the Occupiers.

End

Certainly not a defense of Israeli actions. I can imagine Bruce saying 'with friends like this who needs enemies' but I have  a lot of  sympathy with the last sentence  which I phrase as " The victor belongs to the spoils".

Within the last month Dartmouth has debated the boycott issue and in that debate Cole is quoted- but with no date given- as stating that one reason to object to boycotts is that they most  penalize the Israeli academics who have the most constructive position . That is the position I read him voicing  from time to time over the last 10 years. The last clear statement of it seemed to be in July a year ago.. 

In January Cole was quoted :

“It is often assumed that academic freedom in the United States is secure, and while it may be in the abstract law, it’s not in society,” said Juan Cole, the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan and author of the Informed Comment blog; he is also a member of the Committee on Academic Freedom’s North American wing. (His own case of being denied an appointment by Yale University was a subject of a committee letter back in 2007.) “We have a big problem of groups outside campus putting pressure on university administrations over faculty speech, sometimes over faculty teaching. Sometimes the issue is the characterization of Islam. Sometimes the issue is the characterization of Israel.”

Speaking personally, Cole said that while he does not support an academic boycott of universities in Israel, “it’s extremely important that scholars and associations that take the kind of stance that ASA did not suffer reprisals. I think that’s a violation of their freedom of speech.