ANOTHER ACADEMIC BOYCOTT OF ISRAEL is being proposed in Britain. The lecturers' union known as NATFHE (National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education) is considering a motion to boycott Israeli academic institutions and individual academics in its annual conference, which starts tomorrow. Here's the full text of the motion from the NATFHE website:

198C ACADEMIC RESPONSIBILITY

Conference notes continuing Israeli apartheid policies, including construction of the exclusion wall, and discriminatory educational practices. It recalls its motion of solidarity last year for the AUT resolution to exercise moral and professional responsibility.

Conference instructs the NEC to facilitate meetings in each university and college, and to circulate information to Branches, offering to fund the speakers' travel costs.

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 a boycott of those that do not publicly dissociate themselves from such policies.

South East Region

Further background here and here.

I don't have a lot of time to comment on this, so I'll just say that it's amazing to find this happening only a year after the similar AUT motion was passed and then, in an embarrassing climbdown, unpassed. The international reputation of the AUT suffered greatly and won't recover for a long time to come. The only conclusion I can come to is that lecturers' unions in the U.K. are led by people with hard-leftist, anti-Israel agendas that are more important to them than any prospect of doing any good for actual British lecturers. Especially at this very sensitive time of the controversial AUT [update: NATFHE too] work slowdown, this is hardly the sort of international publicity that the academic unions need.

If any NATFHE members who are going to the conference are reading this, I strongly urge you to vote against this motion. Besides the fact that passing it would be grossly unfair and disproportionate (see my AUT-motion post above), it also would only create an international blowback that would seriously damage NATFHE's reputation and futher damage the AUT. NATFHE would be faced either with having to try to undo the damage later on by revoking the motion, as the AUT did, or else it would be faced with mass defections.

Don't go there.

UPDATE (27 May): Scholars for Peace in the Middle East has an online petition opposing the NATFHE motion. At the moment they have about 4700 signatures.

UPDATE (29 May): They passed it. Obviously this is not about looking after the interests of British academics. It's about about scoring imagined political points on another subject even at their expense.

UPDATE (1 June): More here. A proposed boycott boycott and some comments on the shady timing of the boycott motion.

UPDATE: (11 June): As I predicted, the motion has been revoked, but only after adding much further damage to the reputation of the union.