Noam Chomsky helped lobby Stephen Hawking to stage Israel boycott

Noam Chomsky was among 20 academics who privately lobbied Professor Stephen Hawking to boycott a major Israeli conference, it has emerged.

Chomsky, a US professor and well-known supporter of the Palestinian cause, joined British academics from the universities of Cambridge, London, Leeds, Southampton, Warwick, Newcastle, York and the Open University to tell Hawking they were "surprised and deeply disappointed" that he had accepted the invitation to speak at next month's presidential conference in Jerusalem, which will chaired by Shimon Peres and attended by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton.

Hawking pulled out this week in protest at Israel's treatment of Palestinians, in the wake of receiving the letter and soundings from Palestinian colleagues. The 71-year-old theoretical physicist's decision has been warmly welcomed by Palestinian academics, with one describing it as "of cosmic proportions", but was attacked in Israel.

On Friday the liberal academic David Newman, dean of the faculty of humanities and social sciences at Ben Gurion University in Israel, warned that an academic boycott "just destroys one of the very few spaces left where Israelis and Palestinians actually do come together".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/10/noam-chomsky-stephen-hawking-israel-boycott