A BOYCOTT BOYCOTT?

US lobby group enters Israeli academic boycott row

Benjamin Joffe-Walt
Wednesday May 31, 2006 (The Guardian)

A powerful American civil liberties group has called on US academics to boycott British lecturers who boycott Israeli universities.

In a backlash following this week's vote by the lecturers' union Natfhe to boycott Israeli academia, the Anti-Defamation League urged American universities and grant-giving bodies to "cut funding, support and contact with any academic who advocates a boycott of Israel."

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I don't think that upping the ante in the boycott department is constructive. What is really going on with the NATFHE boycott vote is clear from this:

Tomorrow Nafthe will merge with the smaller Association of University Teachers (AUT), forming the University and College Union, the world's largest post-16 education union with over 110,000 members. The boycott resolution is only advisory to the new union, and it remains unclear how its leadership plans to deal with the issue.

Last year the AUT voted for a boycott on two Israeli universities, but after extensive international protest and a revolt by its membership, the smaller union convened a special conference and reversed the decision. Following Monday's boycott vote by Natfhe, the AUT has announced to its members that the Natfhe motion was "fraught with difficulties and dangers and should not be followed by AUT members."

Anthony Julius [who is "acting as solicitor for the boycott's opponents in Britain"] plans to write to the new union tomorrow for confirmation that Natfhe's boycott has not survived the merger.

The NATFHE leadership knew perfectly well that this was coming and they slipped in this motion knowing it would be overturned in a few days. That way they got in their little political statement without any expectation that it would become union policy. I think the proper response is not a boycott, but to heap international ridicule and scorn on the union for picking leaders who are more interested in making a cheap and cowardly political statement than in doing their actual job of representing the interests of British academics. In fact, those interests have been notably set back by this move. It's a pity, because there is a real need for such representation. But this isn't it.