The decision of the Minister of Education not to award the Israel Prize to Prof. Oded Goldreich is correct and moral, although the reasoning is that he is not entitled to the prize because "he called for a boycott of an Israeli academic institution" somewhat misses the researcher's inadequacy of the National Prize.
As a former faculty member of Ariel University, I would like to argue that in Israeli society a political view that opposes Israeli stay (including its academic institutions) in Judea and Samaria is a position to be regretted and confronted with, but certainly to know how to contain it, and this is an honest position of the Israeli left (also If anachronistic). The very reason for not awarding the prize to Prof. Goldreich because of his activities against academic institutions in the territories, is to make the decision part of the political game, right against left, and generally reduce the degree of solidarity around it. From Prof. Goldreich; a reason that not only was perceived as a "right-wing cause", but would in my opinion justify his removal from any national reward even in the eyes of his colleagues on the Zionist left and in the eyes of his devoted students, who are interested in graduating abroad.
Goldreich is one of 240 Israeli and Jewish academics who took the trouble to petition the German government and demand that the BDS activities be trained in it by claiming that the activities of this organization should not be perceived as anti-Semitic. In a petition sent to the German government, they sought to abolish the definition of BDS activity as anti-Semitism - a definition achieved after long activities of German non-governmental organizations, and especially the determination of the various German governments to outlaw this organization. The way to do this was by defining him as anti-Semitic - since such activity is prohibited under German law.
And this is not a rhetorical manipulation: there is nothing like the BDS activists in Germany, and not only in Germany, who encourage physical violence against Jews on and off the campuses - lecturers as students, permanent faculty and guest researchers, hosted at academic conferences as postdoctoral families. It is an accelerating epidemic of physical violence, manifested in routine and especially in terrifying processions, by a new combination of neo-Nazis on the right and pro-Palestinian Muslims on the left. They march in the processions of Apartheid Week, call for the destruction of Israel, and on the way, among ordinary students, hidden antisemitic violent desires become concrete, which trickles down to faculty neighborhoods, students, lecturers' families, and more.
This is an unequivocal goal: to remove the Jewish-Israeli voice from the university public space.
This is a terrorist movement.
And here, too, Israelis - if naive (proper disclosure: not even my department head in them) and if willing to belong to the "right" European herd Rahmana Letzelen - chose to explain to the Germans, no less and no more, that the violence that BDS encourages on their campuses is legitimate.
Is there a proper reason for this to deny the highest national-Israeli award?
The decision not to award Prof. Goldreich the prize in her place.
Not because he withheld the legitimacy of Ariel University, but because he signed and supported what leads to violence against students from Israel.