Michael Sfard, an Israeli human rights lawyer who represents Professor Goldreich, mentioned that even when his consumer did help B.D.S., such help shouldn’t disqualify him from receiving the Israel Prize.
“Now, to prove that someone called for a boycott, you need to scrutinize his writings and signatures, driving us straight toward a McCarthyist process,” Mr. Sfard mentioned, referring to the 1940s and 1950s in the United States, when leftists have been frequently accused of subversion and treason. “This is an attempt to exclude a whole political camp in Israel.”
Professor Goldreich missed this yr’s ceremony, which was recorded on Sunday for broadcast on Thursday. The judges mentioned that ought to he be authorised, he may obtain the award at subsequent yr’s ceremony, if not earlier than.
Mr. Gallant, the schooling minister, appeared emboldened by the court docket determination.
“Prof. Goldreich may be a brilliant scientist, but his support for the boycott movement and his call to boycott Ariel University is a spit in the face of the state of Israel and of Israeli academia and is possibly even a violation of the law,” he wrote on Twitter. He added that he would use the time to examine whether or not the professor’s “current renunciation” of the boycott motion was real.
Mr. Gallant’s employees declined requests for remark.
“I view this (unlawful) behavior of the minister as a small step in the process of pushing the left in Israel outside the limits of legitimacy, a process that has been going on for decades now and has been intensified in the last years,” Professor Goldreich mentioned in an emailed remark. “I am happy to play a role in the struggle to block this delegitimization process and the attempt to reverse it.”
The professor’s colleagues and supporters held an alternative award ceremony for him at Weizmann Institute this week, the place he referred to the award because the “Likud Prize.”
“I think that the Likud and the state of Israel are two different things,” he mentioned.
The Weizmann Institute took out adverts in the Hebrew newspapers on Wednesday congratulating Professor Goldreich and saying that, so far as they have been involved, he had gained the prize.
