Sir

With a colleague, I supervise a group of five graduate students at the Hebrew University's Department of Pharmacology on the Hadassah Hospital campus. One of this group is an Israeli Arab. In fact, some 20% of Israel's population is Arab, although this was not mentioned in your News Feature (Nature 425, 444–449; 2003) about the status of Israel–Palestinian science cooperation and related issues.

If you visit our campus you will hear Arabic spoken and see many Arab students at all stages, including many doctoral students, some of them Palestinians from East Jerusalem and elsewhere. They come and go without any problem; no one bothers them at all. The only thing they have to fear is being blown up on a bus or in a cafe by a Palestinian suicide terrorist. The Hebrew University has a proud reputation of academic openness with regard to the Arab minority. Any boycott of Israeli academic institutions is likely to hurt these Israeli Arabs more than the Jews.

As someone who worked between 1994 and 1996 towards Israeli–Arab cooperation in biotechnology as a US member of a Trilateral (United States–Jordan–Israel) Science Group, I cannot even visit a Palestinian university campus because of the extreme danger. In my view, until the Palestinian culture of violence changes, all attempts at scientific cooperation are illusory. Instead of supporting one-sided boycotts against Israeli academics and institutions, which are in any case in favour of peaceful solutions, any well-meaning academics who would like to see peace should be demonstrating against the terrorist groups.