A little over 800 members of the American Studies Association — not even 25 percent of its 3,853-person membership but two-thirds of those who voted in an online referendum — favored a boycott against Israeli academic institutions rooted in that nation’s treatment of Palestinian people and academics. A growing roster of prominent universities (including Washington University) along with schools’ American Studies departments, have rejected the ASA boycott.

And rightly so, for instead of emulating brave and righteous David in aiming the stones of their academic slingshots, proponents of the ASA resolution merely echoed the efforts of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) bullies on American campuses, and in doing so utilized logic unworthy of even the typical college freshman.

Let’s start with the reasons cited in the resolution itself. One of them faults the United States: “Whereas the United States plays a significant role in enabling the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the expansion of illegal settlements and the Wall in violation of international law, as well as in supporting the systematic discrimination against Palestinians.”

Not only is the American government labeled as complicit in the resolution itself, but the Israeli issues are by some compared to terrible tragedies in our own country. As reported by Slate, “Angela Y. Davis, a professor emerita at the University of California at Santa Cruz, wrote that ‘[t]he similarities between historical Jim Crow practices and contemporary regimes of segregation in Occupied Palestine make this resolution an ethical imperative for the ASA.’”

Yet despite alleged collaboration by America, where these academics ply their trade and upon which they focus their professions, there is no boycott of U.S. institutions advocated in the resolution. And despite Davis using the template of discrimination in our own nation as a basis for action against Israeli schools, we don’t recall the ASA making it an “ethical imperative” to boycott American universities in recent years when LGBT populations have been denied federal and state civil rights parity for marriage, or prior to the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Act being adopted.

Well, then, maybe the boycott is because Israeli institutions are so much more intertwined with their government and its policies than in America? Hmm…but in that case wouldn’t nations such as Zimbabwe, Iran, Russia and China, all of whom exercise grueling restraint upon their schools and commit human rights atrocities, be worthy of ASA approbation?

Apparently not. Hasn’t happened. Even Professor Feisel Mohamed of the University of Illinois, who on Huffington Post suggested legitimate moral grounds for the action (we strongly disagree), alluded to this aspect of the boycott: “If there is a problem with the ASA boycott, it is not a problem of activism, but a problem of haphazard activism insensitive to the implications of its irregularity.” In other words, why Israel when no one else?

Then it could be that ASA is trying to utilize the resolution to encourage more academic freedom in Israel itself? Well that would be flat-out boneheaded, because when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has acted contrary to the principles of academic freedom regarding the Palestinian conflict, he has been harshly rebuked by, well, Israeli academics.

It happened late last year. Netanyahu asked German Chancellor Angela Merkel to deny attendance at an event he was attending with her by a historian who had encouraged Israeli solders to conscientiously object to West Bank service. Who took him to task for his actions? The presidents of both Hebrew University and Tel Aviv University and other key Israeli academics.

ASA is picking sides in what is a terribly messy and often tragic conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, choosing the popular narrative of the powerful sovereign against oppressed peoples. This is the way the BDS movement likes to frame things, and as with the ASA resolution, it’s easy, convenient and in large part wrong.

This view is one that helps neither Israelis nor Palestinians, and it certainly does not foster peace or cooperation. While it happily highlights Israel’s shortcomings, It fails to recognize a continually armed Palestinian resistance on Israel’s doorstep (using tactics ultimately eschewed by the late Nelson Mandela), ignores Palestinian textbooks for young children that exclude Israel from the map and excuses a Hamas leader who frequently recommits to Israel’s violent destruction.

It also more pertinently overlooks an Israel of colleges assimilated with Jewish, Arab and Palestinian students (where else in the Middle East does that occur?) and integrated faculties rife with open debate about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The ASA referendum uses faulty logic and poor rationales to support its boycott. As the much larger and important American Association of University Professors explained in rejecting this and other such boycotts, one does not stimulate academic freedom by restricting it. We agree, and that’s why no matter what ASA’s members think about the conflict, the action taken against Israeli universities is academically incorrect.