EclectEcon

In posting once again on this matter, it's not my purpose to repeat the arguments I've made at length in the past opposing an academic boycott of Israel. ...

It is rather to register what I think is the political meaning of this latest decision by the principal union of British academics. No one should be misled by talk of solidarity with the Palestinians. Solidarity is expressible with any people that has suffered, or is suffering, an historical injustice without the add-on attempt to ostracize and/or punish academics of one nationality. The boycotters understand this perfectly well, in as much as their solidarity statements and efforts in relation to all other peoples than the Palestinians are free of the ostracizing and punitive add-on. The latter is seen by them as relevant to Israelis and Israelis only, for reasons that have never been persuasively explained. [emphasis added]

The University and College Union is now therefore committed to a policy which is anti-Semitic: aimed at Israeli Jews alone and at no other academic community on the entire planet, irrespective of the gravity of the crimes committed by the governments of the countries such academic communities inhabit. According to one account of the proceedings that led to the most recent UCU decision, a speaker who raised the issue of anti-Semitism was jeered for doing so, 'albeit mildly'. Perhaps we should draw comfort from the fact that the jeering was merely mild and not raucous. The conclusion is, in any case, now unavoidable that the UCU is a union that is morally tainted. Containing a core of activists who will keep returning with boycott motions so long as their previous efforts have failed; who will try to bypass clear legal advice by reformulating their aims in a more surreptitious way; who are unwilling to have this issue put before the union membership as a whole; and who are so insensible of the historical weight of anti-Semitism and its consequences as well as of its contemporary resurgence that some of them see fit to mock the very mention of it as being a diversion; the union appears to lack what is necessary to deliver them the defeat that they deserve.