Imagine a researcher who spends years studying how a small, embattled territory could lift itself out of poverty by developing the one valuable resource sitting off its coast. He publishes peer-reviewed work arguing that this resource should be developed for the benefit of the people who live there. You might expect applause. Instead, he is branded complicit in “violence,” and the academic journal that published him is bullied into apologizing for having done so.

That researcher is Dr. Elai Rettig, a political scientist at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. He shared his story during a recent webinar hosted by my organization, Canadian Friends of Bar-Ilan University. His offense was co-authoring a study on the Gaza Marine gas field – a modest offshore reservoir that has sat untouched since its discovery in 2000 – and how it might be developed once the current conflict ends. He and his colleagues mapped several political scenarios for the for the future of the Gaza Strip, arguing that under any future scenario, even extreme ones, those living in Gaza still maintain the exclusive legal right to develop the gas field to serve Gaza’s reconstruction and the energy independence. For this, he was........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)