'Majestic impartiality'

Back in May, Britain’s University and College Union (UCU) conference decided to hold a series of discussions among members about the call by Palestinian unions for a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions. UCU General Secretary Sally Hunt opposed the motion and immediately distanced herself from conference’s decision.

Now, a UCU press release dated yesterday reveals

the union’s ‘strategy and finance committee unanimously accepted a recommendation from UCU general secretary, Sally Hunt, that the union should immediately inform branches and members that:

· A boycott call would be unlawful and cannot be implemented

· UCU members' opinions cannot be tested at local meetings

· The proposed regional tour cannot go ahead under current arrangements and is therefore suspended.

While writing this, I note that Mark Elf has already reported this over at Jews sans frontières.

The union’s legal advisors opine,

'It would be beyond the union's powers and unlawful for the union, directly or indirectly, to call for, or to implement, a boycott by the union and its members of any kind of Israeli universities and other academic institutions; and that the use of union funds directly or indirectly to further such a boycott would also be unlawful…to ensure that the union acts lawfully, meetings should not be used to ascertain the level of support for such a boycott.'

This backdown is troubling for a couple of reasons.

First of all, my suspicion is that the basis of the legal advice is the Race relations act (1976). I also suspect that the interpretation, whether of the Race relations act or whatever, relied upon the tendentious legal reasoning of such eminent luminaries as Harvard Professor of Torture, Alan M Dershowitz. It would be bad enough if the union accepted such a bogus interpretation, and I sincerely hope that UCU members will challenge this decision on the part of the bureaucracy. The refusal even to cite the legislation they base their advice on suggests a lack of confidence. But what’s really frightening is that they could be right. Even though the arguments Dershowitz and Julius present that hold all Jews responsible for Israel’s crimes are themselves antisemitic, they are meeting with broader and broader acceptance. The EU Monitoring Commission’s ‘Working definition’ of anti-Semitism makes precisely the same anti-Semitic assumptions. While it has no legal standing as yet, it appears to be increasingly influential and could be part of the basis for a judgement, even if it is not yet formally adopted. Indeed, such judgements could lead to formal adoption. That would expose virtually any proPalestinian or antiZionist activity to the risk of prosecution. Note that it is not just carrying out the proposed boycott, nor even just calling for it or furthering it, that the UCU’s legal team have determined would be illegal. They reckon it would put the union on the wrong side of the law just to ‘ascertain the level of support’ for the boycott.

The other thing is that the union bureaucrats had no compunction about publicly overturning a conference decision without reference to the members. Doubtless the officials have a responsibility to advise the members of the probable consequences of any action they decide to take. But in a democratic union, where the officials are accountable to the members they are supposed to represent, it would be up to the members whether to accept the risk.

Apart from that, it signals an unnerving proclivity on the part of the officials, widely observed among union bureaucrats everywhere, to want to ‘play by the rules’. ‘The law’s the law’, after all. But in reality, the law comprises the rules that the ruling class prefers. Whenever industrial struggle slackens, the bosses hurry to claw back any gains we’ve made in the past. Nor are they ever satisfied. Whenever the government enacts or amends legislation to reduce or threaten our employment, our conditions, or our pay, the employers call for more ‘certainty’ that they can sack us at will and the like. So when our officials tell us we can’t take such and such an action because we have to be ‘smart’ and ‘beat them at their own game’, all it really means is that they are content to lose. The important thing for them is to restrain any rank and file action or initiative that could challenge their credibility as intermediaries. So unless members stand up for their decisions, suspect legal advice will continue to trump them.

To paraphrase Anatole France, The law, in its majestic impartiality, forbids the bosses along with the workers to organise in the workplace, mount industrial action, or discuss an academic boycott of Israel in union branch meetings.

(Thanks to John E Richardson of JAZ for the link to the UCU media release.)

Why single out China?

Today’s Independent carries a brilliant defense by biologist and secretary of the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine, Steven Rose, of the University and College Union annual congress resolution ‘to organise a campus tour for Palestinian academic trade unionists to explain why they had called for an academic and cultural boycott of Israel, and to encourage UCU members to consider the moral implications of links with Israeli universities’.

Here are some extracts.

Entirely suppressed in this harrumphing has been any thought about why Palestinian university teachers and their union, as well as all the NGOs in the Occupied Territories, have called for a boycott. Academic freedom, it appears, applies to Israelis but not Palestinians, whose universities have been arbitrarily closed, Bir Zeit for a full four years. Students and teachers have been killed or imprisoned. Attendance at university is made hazardous or impossible by the everyday imposition of checkpoints. Research is blocked by Israeli refusal to allow books or equipment to be imported.

Even within Israel itself, some universities sit on illegally expropriated land, Arab student unions are not recognised and there are increasing covert restrictions on Arab-Israelis (20 per cent of the population) entering university at all. No Israeli academic trade union or professional association has expressed solidarity with their Palestinian colleagues a few kilometres away across the wall, though the boycott call may finally encourage them to do so.

…If academic freedom means anything, it must be indivisible. And what are Palestinians to make of the uncensured insistence by senior Israeli academics that their family size constitutes a demographic threat to the Jewish state?

…Why pick on Israel, we are asked…No one asks those campaigning against China's occupation of Tibet why not Israel or Darfur?...The issue is not "Why Israel?" but "Why not Israel?" Yet the secular western press, so willing to express discomfort with states that describe themselves as "Islamic Republics" is seemingly untroubled by the ethnic assumptions underlying the claims of a Jewish republic.

Further, it is precisely because Israel prides itself on its academic prowess (just as South Africa did of its sporting prowess) that the idea of an academic boycott is so painful…

Lurking behind the thinking of even well-meaning opponents of the boycott is that it is in some way anti-Semitic. This ignores the fact that the boycott is of Israeli institutions, not individuals (so it would affect the tiny number of Palestinian academics in Israeli institutions, but not a Jewish Israeli working in the UK or US). Second,… Even a cursory look at the signatories of the various boycott calls will show the large number of prominent Jewish figures among them. It really isn't good enough to attack the messenger as anti-Semitic or a self-hating Jew rather than deal with the message itself, that Israel's conduct is unacceptable.

In relation to this last point, Tony Greenstein has a piece on the Guardian’s ‘Comment is free’ blog inquiring into the question of who gets to speak on behalf of ‘the Jewish Community. The Union of Jewish Students (UJS) at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London has been trying to prevent a meeting that the Jewish Society had organised with speakers from Independent Jewish Voices.

including Brian Klug, Sir Geoffrey Bindman and Professors Donald Sassoon and Jacqueline Rose, the UJS sought to prevent the meeting on the grounds that it was "propaganda for a particular viewpoint". When this ploy failed, Simmons sought to "balance" the speakers' panel - something the UJS has never attempted with pro-Zionist speakers.

What a coincidence!

Today’s Forward, carried a piece by Rebecca Spence claiming,

Britain’s largest teachers union voted this week to boycott Israeli academic institutions, setting the stage for a bitter struggle to reverse the decision.

The University and College Union, representing more than 120,000 college-level educators, voted May 30 to pass a controversial resolution calling for a boycott of Israeli academics and universities, as well as a moratorium on European Union funding of Israeli research.

The resolution that UCU Congress carried Wednesday was not 'to boycott Israeli academic institutions'. It instructed the union's executive to circulate the call for a boycott from the Palestinian Committee for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) to branches for discussion.

By why should the facts matter? Anyway, coming to the rescue, was none other than

Alan Dershowitz, Harvard Law School professor and prominent pro-Israel advocate, said that to protest the vote he will attempt to mobilize 1,000 American university professors of diverse backgrounds to join him in declaring themselves honorary Israeli professors.

“I now consider myself an Israeli professor, and I will act as if I am an Israeli professor,” Dershowitz said. “If they boycott Israel,” he added, “they’re boycotting me.”

When we finally do get the boycott off the ground, I hope everybody takes the abominable Dershowiitz at his word. Nobody deserves it more than he does and it will do no harm to exclude him comprehensively from all academic activity.

“The UCU boycott motion is an assault on academic freedom,” said Jeremy Newmark, the chief executive of Britain’s Jewish leadership council. “While the vast majority of academics do not support a boycott, the decision damages the credibility of British academia as a whole.”

As I wrote yesterday, ‘One of the strongest arguments I’ve encountered in support of the boycott is the self serving hypocrisy of those who bleat about infringing academic freedom for Israelis while issuing not so much as a peep against the almost total eradication of academic activity of any kind in Palestine’. Well, the AP’s Aron Heller writes that Israel’s three most important authors and the presidents of four Israeli universities have written to Defense Minister Amir Peretz

"Blocking access to higher education for Palestinian students from Gaza who choose to study in the West Bank casts a dark shadow over Israel's image as a state which respects and supports the principle of academic freedom and the right to education," the letter states…. they called on Israel to lift its sweeping ban on the travel of Palestinians between the West Bank and Gaza so students could pursue their education.

Authors Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua and David Grossman, and the presidents of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Ben-Gurion University, Haifa University and the Technion technology institute, recognising that the true issue is Israel’s image, published their missive

…the same day Israeli academic institutions faced a potential boycott from British academics. Britain's University and College Union was due to discuss a boycott of Israeli universities and prevent European Union research funds from going to Israel because of its policy toward the Palestinians.

What an amazing coincidence!

[Thanks to Moshe Machover for the link to the AP article.]

Paths to peace

As reported on Jew sans frontières, lenin’s tomb, Ha’aretz, and everywhere, Britain’s University and College Union (UCU) voted by a large margin yesterday to submit ‘the full text of the Palestinian boycott call to all branches for information and discussion'. That would be the call for the academic boycott of Israeli universities by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI).

While this is of course a very welcome step towards the isolation of Israel, as I wrote in December, although I have reservations about sanctions, and an academic boycott in particular, as a tactic, the call by Palestinian unions and academics for it trumps my reservations.

One of the strongest arguments I’ve encountered in support of the boycott is the self serving hypocrisy of those who bleat about infringing academic freedom for Israelis while issuing not so much as a peep against the almost total eradication of academic activity of any kind in Palestine, both for Palestinian academics and students and for anyone wanting to do research in the Occupied Territories.

In this connection, Dr Rima Merriman of Arab American University in Jenin writes of a student who had applied for

a Paths to Peace scholarship to attend NYU for a year. There were six scholarships offered, three for Israeli students and three for Gaza and WB students. Over fifty applications were submitted and our student was shortlisted and invited to an interview....in Jerusalem…But how to get to Jerusalem? [Palestinians require permits to enter Israel, not readily obtainable] He called the coordinator of the scholarship, a Professor Zweig, and said he needed a letter to submit to the Israeli military post at Salem here in Jenin in order to get a permit. He submitted his request and was told he would get a permit, but when the Israeli official called him in for an interview, he was bluntly told that the price of the permit was to "cooperate" - i.e., inform on the people around him in his village or on campus, etc. He ended up not getting a permit…Not only that, any hope of his ever getting to the US is probably non-existent now, because the visa computers of the US consulate are apparently on the same network as Israeli so-called "intelligence" networks - no questions asked. In fact, one of the rationales used by Professor Zweig for NOT conducting the interviews in Ramallah is that a. Israeli students wouldn't have been able to get to them, and b. if our student couldn't get to Jerusalem, he wouldn't be able to get a visa to the US and that would be that. Apologetically, he explained that this brick road to peace he is coordinating has nothing to do with politics!...

I hasten to recall that a much more extensive and broadly supported boycott of apartheid South Africa was first called in 1959. Even though the Black population comprised an 80% majority in South Africa, while the populations of Palestinians and Jews within historic Palestine is currently about even; even though the South African economy depended crucially on Black labour while the Israeli economy was founded on ‘Hebrew labour’ and has been conscientiously reducing Palestinian labour in Israel and the settlements since 1999; even though Black South Africans had a strong union movement and an armed insurgency and didn’t have to contend with anything resembling Holocaust guilt, it still took 35 years before those sanctions achieved the end of apartheid. So don’t hold your breath.

[Thanks to Tony Greenstein for the Paths to Peace story.]