This report, I will confess, warmed my heart:

Students at Haifa University reportedly prepared a list of “Pro-Palestinian” professors and a group of activists were preparing a boycott campaign targeting their classes and lectures.

Israel’s Hebrew Language daily newspaper Ma’ariv said a campaign began on Tuesday, targeting 20 lecturers from the sociology and political science departments who they said “participate in demonstrations against Israeli troops and the Israeli government” or who have publicly spoken out against them.

Ah, so Israeli students — at least some of them — are becoming more discerning, less likely to indulge professors who give rhetorical cover and sustenance to those whom they have met on the battlefield, and will likely once again.

“We won’t choose courses of these lecturers and we won’t attend their lectures. It is unthinkable that at a time when our friends are fighting or receiving blows from activists on a ship that calls itself a peace ship that these lecturers stand up and demonstrate and speak out against these soldiers,” one student was quoted as saying.”

Well, there’s a thoughtful young person.

You can imagine how the anti-Zionist left has wigged out:

“What is taking place here is fascism,” another student told the paper, “this is the beginning of a repulsive attempt to shut people up who think differently. If the lecturers make statements that try to make historic justice, they deserve praise.”

Um, no. Not fascism, dear. It’s intellectual freedom. A thinking, moral person in a democracy is entitled to make choices about what he wants to read, what culture he wants to support, and what political ideas he wants to lend credence to — or not. The university, unsurprisingly, is in a snit: “Haifa University takes a serious view of any attempt to carry out an academic boycott or an attempt to harm academic freedom.” So what do university officials propose: force university students (these are not 5th graders deciding mathematics is not for them) to sit through dirge after dirge impugning the Jewish state? I’m sure they would if they could.

And students have the right to leave this university entirely, of course. Let the marketplace prevail. Let educational institutions that parrot pro-Palestinian propaganda rot on the vine, and others to flourish. I bet they are biting their fingernails at Harvard and Darmouth. You know, what if this catches on?