Israel Matzav

U.K. academics to back boycott of Israeli universities

According to a report in this morning's HaAretz, Israeli universities are once again facing a boycott by British academia. HaAretz reports that the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE) will vote on a boycott resolution at its annual meeting on May 27-29. NATFHE has 67,000 members, and is scheduled to merge at the beginning of next month with the British Association of University Teachers (AUT). The latter imposed a boycott on Bar Ilan and Haifa Universities in April 2005, but rescinded the boycott after being threatened with a lawsuit by Haifa University.

The current boycott resolution is being crafted more carefully in order to avoid potential lawsuits. According to HaAretz, "instead of recommending the lecturers union boycott Israeli institutions, it calls on the union to suggest its members carry out the boycott."

The NATFHE motion states, "[T]he conference invites members to consider their own responsibility for ensuring equity and non-discrimination in contacts with Israeli educational institutions or individuals, and to consider the appropriateness of the boycott of those that do not publicly dissociate themselves from such policies."

Another resolution to be tabled at the NATFHE Conference condemns the "outrageous bias" of the British government in opposing Hamas' victory in the Palestinian elections and states that NATFHE will "continue to help protect and support Palestinian colleges and universities in the face of the continual attack by Israel's government."

Israel is the only country whose universities the NATFHE has ever considered boycotting.

Blogger Melanie Phillips warned against this after the AUT boycott was withdrawn a year ago:

Over the bank holiday weekend, NATFHE’s conference was due to debate its own motions to join the AUT boycott. The boycott’s defeat caused NATFHE to rule these motions out of order. However, NATFHE is already signed up to a total boycott of Israel through its affiliation to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign which calls for such a move, as can be seen on this website.

Withdrawal of the NATFHE motions, like the AUT’s ‘investigative commission’, should therefore be recognised as merely a tactical regrouping in a continuing war. On that commission, NATFHE can now work out with the AUT and TUC how to inflict the maximum damage upon Israel — taking maximum advantage of the combination of naivety and malice that characterises the lamentable collection of the supine, the gullible and the fellow-travellers of anti-Israel hatred who comprise Britain’s academic elite. The result is likely to be something very much worse than the AUT’s limited boycott. And since — as I understand it — NATFHE’s internal regional structure does not give grass-roots members much opportunity to challenge the diktats of the union’s nomenklatura, there will be much less opportunity for the kind of revolt that consigned the AUT boycott to the bin.

What has not been recognised by those who have the interests of Israel at heart is that — as I have said before, and this cannot be emphasised enough — the AUT boycott was defeated on the wrong argument. Led by the Engage group, the campaign opposed the boycott merely on the grounds of free speech. It did not oppose it on the most important grounds, that the intellectual delegitimisation of Israel within the universities is based on racist calumnies, lies, libels and distortions. [Emphasis mine. CiJ]

The Engage crowd led the campaign because the mainstream Jewish community was, as ever, nowhere to be seen. But Engage are closely associated with the soft-Trotskyite groupuscule Workers Liberty, a successor of the Socialist Alliance (itself a former alliance of the old International Marxist Group and Socialist Workers’ Party) and whose attitude to Israel — as can be seen on its website — is summed up by this slogan:

‘Israel out of the Occupied Territories! For a Palestinian state with the same rights as Israel! For a socialist Israel and a socialist Palestine in a socialist federation of the Middle East!’

Where is the British Jewish community and Israeli academia in all this? That's not clear to me sitting in Jerusalem. It doesn't sound like they're anywhere.

You can find more background on NATFHE and the merger with AUT here and here.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 7:23 AM