College Fights ‘BDS’ Campaign With Israeli Science Database – And Wordplay

Ada Yonath of the Weizmann Institute of Science won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work researching the ribosome. Image by wikimedia
One of Israel’s top universities has built a database of Israeli research breakthroughs in order to counter the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign with their own BDS – Building Dialogue through Science.
The Weizmann Institute of Science’s new BDS website contains academic publications and summaries of inventions and innovations made possible by collaborations between Israeli and foreign academics, which the boycott movement wants to limit. The website highlights Israeli contributions to international research in projects as diverse as mapping the DNA of melanomas and understanding how cows digest their food. Other listed academic subjects include archaeology, astronomy and physics.
“Building dialogue through science, rather than building walls, has always been our way of doing things,” university president Daniel Zajfman said in a statement. “If we are going to work against the other BDS, we must do so with real information. That is the intent of the site we have created.”
Contact Aiden Pink at pink@forward.com or on Twitter at @aidenpink.
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