AUT ISRAEL-BOYCOTT UPDATE: The Guardian has two pieces of interest today: "Legal warnings over Israeli boycott" and "Union losing members over Israeli boycott." These are pretty obvious consequences of the decision to boycott and the AUT should have seen them coming.

An outfit called "Open Democracy" has an interesting article by someone named Stephen Howe, which aims to give the historical context of the accusations that led to the two boycotts that passed.

Boycotting Israel: the uses of history
Stephen Howe
25 - 4 - 2005
Britain�s Association of University Teachers has voted to boycott Israel. Stephen Howe scrupulously maps the background to a bitter controversy over historical truth and academic freedom.
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On 22 April 2005, the annual council meeting of Britain�s Association of University Teachers (AUT) voted - against the advice of the AUT executive - for an academic boycott of Israel. Specifically, British academics are urged to boycott two Israeli universities, Bar-Ilan and Haifa. Even before the vote, the proposal aroused bitter contention, not only within the United Kingdom or Israel but worldwide. With last week�s decision that will only spread and intensify. The AUT move is the start, not the end, of a ferocious battle going far beyond academia.

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Regarding Bar Ilan University he says:

From the mid-1990s, small numbers of �Judea & Samaria� students took degree courses validated by Bar-Ilan: thus involving the university, as pro-boycott campaigners argue, in direct collaboration with Israel�s occupation of the land where the college operates. The Bar-Ilan authorities have responded that their agreement with the Ariel college is being phased out and is set to end in 2005 anyway. This appears to be true: certainly I cannot find such courses listed on either the Bar-Ilan or the �Judea & Samaria� websites, nor any reference to them more recent than 2002.

If anyone working at Bar Ilan University would like to comment, I would be interested in hearing what you have to say.

Howe discusses the complexities of the situation of Dr. Ilan Pappe at Haifa University at length. He concludes:

There is much that remains unclear in this saga, and some starkly contrasting versions of events. I have read many hundreds of articles, interviews and documents relating to the controversy; I have talked in detail to many of those most closely involved at Haifa; I have even written a little about it myself. Even now, I don�t feel I know for sure what happened � either at Tantura in 1948 or at Haifa University in 2000-2005. How can the members of the Association of University Teachers after just a few minutes� hasty and apparently one-sided debate, seem so confident that they do know?