It is almost a year since the University of Pierre and Marie Curie (Paris VI) launched a mobilization against renovation of the scientific accord between the European Union and Israel due to violations of the human rights and occupation of the Palestinian territory. The Administration council of the university in a motion pronounced their concern about the continuation of the scientific relations with Israeli universities and in a letter they asked the scientific colleagues especially in Israel to exert pressure on their government to make scientific life possible in Palestine. They also insisted that since the second article of the Israeli-EU accord, regarding respect of human right in internal and international politics, has been violated, there would not be any reason to renovate the accord.

That motion received great positive and negative impacts inside and outside of France. There were basically two type of arguments: (a) although the government has not respected the human rights, one should not judge or punish the scientific society. The scientific research goes beyond the borderlines of the countries and is based on equal opportunity; everybody around the world should be able to interact and not be boycotted because of some political orientation of his/her country.[1] (b) On the other hand, the supporters claimed that the text has been misinterpreted and indeed to keep the science available to everybody disregarding his/her citizenship one should not let the Israeli government to put the Palestine in a turmoil where no school or university can work; therefore the accord should be suspended –as indeed the European Parliament voted on April 2002- until the Israeli government respects all the requirements of the Oslo accord.

Now let us shift to another story which happened for another country in the Middle East. IEEE, the world’s largest scientific society on computing, electronic and electrical engineering, in January 2002, cut its full membership privileges and supports including using the IEEE logo and blocked access of all email accounts of the Iranian members on IEEE.org without any notice. The Iranian members were also deprived from publishing their paper in IEEE journals.

The ostensible reason was that the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) regulations prohibit the American organizations to trade or offer any service to Iran and since "editing" is a service in publishing a journal, IEEE refused to accept any paper from Iran. A lot of efforts were made especially by Ferydun Hojabri, president of the Sharif University of Technology Association, to at least clarify IEEE decision and force IEEE to respond on this action which effectively isolated 1700 IEEE members in Iran. Then imagine what happened? IEEE requested clarification from OFAC, and the U.S. Department of Treasury announced that the U.S. based scientific journals cannot edit any paper coming from Iran unless they have government’s permission.

This is how science sometimes becomes the scapegoat of the antagonistic politics.

[1] This kind of argument reached to a point where Prof. Cohen-Tanoujdji, Nobel laureate, on a letter in Le Monde announced that he is "ashamed" of his French colleagues who took that decision in University Paris VI. ( Le Monde January 5, 2003)

[2,3] Science 2003 September 19; vol. 301:page 1646 and Science 2003 October 10; vol. 302: page 210