Adloyada

SOAS Student Union votes to ban Israel lectures, backed by SOAS UCU leaders

The Students' Union at London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), one of the UK's highest ranked university centres for the study of the Middle East, Africa and Asia, has voted to demand the cancellation of a lecture series organised to mark the centenary of Tel-Aviv.

The series has been organized by SOAS' Professor Colin Shindler, the UK's first professor of Israeli Studies, who has also been a friend of mine for over twenty years.

The students of SOAS include a very large number of from Arab and other Middle Eastern countries and others who are passionately supportive of the Palestinian cause. But SOAS during most of the recent history of the Israel-Palestinian conflict has also been a place where those students and those from its Hebrew and Israeli Studies centre attend lectures on the Middle East conflict and the history and culture of zionism and discuss the issues in a spirit of scholarship and free enquiry.

Ironically, the Students' Union website carries a constitution proclaiming its commitment to free speech and its absolute commitment to opposing discrimination. That was voted in in 2006, after a previous history of attempts by some student groups to intimidate Jewish students in the name of anti-zionism. Throughout that history, the SOAS directorate firmly opposed such action and subsequently adopted a "Freedom of Expression" code which all who are members of the School are expected to sign up to.

But this latest action has been taken by the Students' Union in the name of boycotting Israeli academics in response to the current Gaza conflict, because they are amongst those who have been invited to lecture in Colin Shindler's Tel-Aviv centenary series.

Here's an even greater irony. The series started last term (and resumed for the current term on Monday night, despite the Student Union banning vote). Amongst the speakers were the Palestinian Authority ambassador, who was formerly a well-respected academic at Bethlehem University, as well as an anti-zionist Israeli academic.

Here's Colin Shindler's statement, issued before the vote was taken, demonstrating his impeccably and consistently sustained record of peace activism on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

Our lecture series ‘Tel Aviv at 100: 1909-2009’ began last term and followed the normal pattern of lectures that we organise around a theme each year.

Professor Joachim Shlöer of Southampton University started the series when he spoke about his academic studies on the history of Tel Aviv. The Palestinian Ambassador, Professor Manuel Hassassian, formerly of Bethlehem University gave a paper on ‘Tel Aviv and Ramallah: The Next 100 Years’. Professor Reuven Snir, an anti-Zionist Israeli Professor from Haifa University spoke about Arabic literature in Israel. This term, academics from Tel Aviv University were due to speak on the same theme on non-contentious subjects such as architecture and music. The first lecture this evening is by Professor Anita Shapira, on of Israel’s leading historians on the early history of Tel Aviv.

It is therefore terribly unfortunate that these lectures, planned months ago, have coincided with the terrible events in Gaza.

Any call for cancelling this series will be seen as not based on opposition to the centenary, but on the participation of Israeli academics. A resurrection of the attempt to boycott academics simply because they are Israeli regardless of their opinion about the tragedy in Gaza. SOAS as an institution and the British government have always strongly opposed and condemned such a boycott.

Academic institutions rightly do not suppress different narratives and different opinions. Its ethos is that the violence of the street should not be brought into the classroom. On a personal level, it is something that I hold to dearly and even if I am in a minority of one, I will adhere to this and not bow to any intimidation.

I have never called for the cancellation of a lecture at SOAS even if the views expressed were not to my liking – such as the participation of a Hezbollah representative in a recent conference or the talk, given by the hijacker, Leila Khaled in the past.

In the ten years that I have been at SOAS, I have always worked hard for my students, regardless of their opinions and background. I will continue to do this.

I hope that colleagues will not discriminate against students whose opinions on the Israel-Palestine conflict they do not agree with.

These are difficult times for all of us. I am grateful to the many colleagues – whether they share my views or not – who have contacted me. Let us hope that the killing ceases this week and we can attempt to rebuild the bridges between us.

Last night, I was at SOAS to hear presentations by Colin Shindler and Dr Emmanuele Ottolenghi on Israel and the Gaza War. The lecture theatre was packed. The presentations were excellent. The post presentation questions and discussions were courteous and attentively listened to. Amongst the SOAS student respondees at the end was a woman in Islamic dress who said she deplored the Student Union vote, and strongly supported free speech. And there was also the ardent pro-Palestinian activist who demanded to know why the Palestinian perspective had not been included. But then, as Colin Shindler pointed out, this was a special event presentation on Israel and the Gaza War. And the activist had spoken as if there was one single Palestinian perspective, although the presentations had discussed the ample evidence of the strongly divergent politics of different Palestinian parties, particularly Fatah and Hamas. 

Clearly, the issue is not just about attempting to ban Israeli academics, though that's appalling enough. It's a clear cut attempt to boycott any public academic presentation about Israel, however unrelated to the Gaza conflict, or even the wider Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And it's also about an attempt to impose a one-story Palestinian account, despite the academic evidence of a divergent, complex politics amongst Palestinians and their allies.

So much for the SOAS Students' Union. Sources at SOAS also tell me that Colin Shindler has been put under a great deal of pressure to cancel the series by leaders of the SOAS branch of UCU, the academic staff union, of which he is a member. Will SOAS UCU now act in favour of or against free speech?

One in the eye for UCU and the boycott-Israel campaigners

Would the largest ever programme of co-operation and exchanges between British and Israeli academics have come into existence were it not for the UK government's opposition to the UCU's and its predecessor unions' last three years of tolerating and encouraging campaigns to condemn and boycott Israeli academics? Was it simply a by-product of Gordon Brown being in Israel today, marking the first official visit to the country by a serving UK Prime Minister?

Somehow, I don't think so. 

I think the UK government's action was given extra impetus when UCU at its last conference in April finally passed a motion imposing a back-door boycott,encouraging UK academics to subject Israeli colleagues to required ritual denunciations of their country as a prerequisite for agreeing to academic co-operation of any sort.

The official line, from the British Council, is that it is nothing to do with the boycott issue:

Julia Smith, deputy director of the British Council, told The Jerusalem Post Sunday, "This program is not something related to the boycott. The British Council and British government are opposed to an academic boycott of Israel. Boycott calls have come from a small minority of the academic community in Britain.

"BIRAX will hopefully be a long-running program to strengthen the existing ties between Britain and Israel," she said.

You get a rather different view from Professor David Newman of  Israel's Ben Gurion University, who has been on a sabbatical in England during the current year:

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Prof. David Newman, who has been active in fighting boycott efforts during his sabbatical in England this year, told the Post that the program "has a great deal to do with the boycott."

"Because of the ongoing discussion of boycotts, the British government decided that the most appropriate response was to strengthen research ties," he said. Newman added that he had been involved in planning the program since its beginning.

And here's a still more revealing comment in the same article from an anonymous source "close to the boycott issue":

A source close to the boycott issue told the Post that the choice of targeting junior academics was not coincidental.

"By choosing starting academics, when the unions start discussing a boycott there will be more people who have had some contact with Israel and will have some knowledge. We've discovered that 80 percent of those who attend the union meetings don't know anything about Israel or the issue. So it's sort of a value added element to the program," he said.

There is also the wider issue of why this happens to be the first time a UK Prime Minister has paid an official visit to Israel, despite over 20 years of British rule via the former League of Nations Mandate.

The last few months have seen the new key ruling pollticians of Germany, France and England rushing to be identified with policies more sympathetic to Israel than in recent years, in contrast to their predecessors' widespread criticism of what they condemned as "disproportionate action" by Israel during the 2006 war with Hezbollah.

What seems to be happening here is a jostling for primacy within an enlarged European Union, whose dynamic, with the accession of so many former Soviet satellites, whose governments continue to wish to shake off the reflex anti-imperialist/ anti-zionist rhetoric of their past, is showing signs of  shifting away from its left-wing socialist focus of former near-partisan support of the Palestinians. Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and now Gordon Brown all seem to be keen to make more gestures of sympathy towards Israel, including high-profile official visits, than most EU leaders have done in recent years.

And, behind the scenes, the dynamic of the diplomatic struggle to head off Iran from developing nuclear weapons and so avoid Israel taking a pre-emptive strike may well be a further reason why all these visits have happened over so few months. The Telegraph reports that Brown will make a strongly anti-Iranian statement when he addresses the Israeli Knesset tomorrow, as does The Independent.

This is what Ha'aretz reports of Gordon Brown's account of that process, giving a view that he hasn't yet articulated in the UK Parliament, as far as I'm aware:

...the new European leadership - Germany's Angela Merkel, France's Nicolas Sarkozy, Italy's Silvio Berlusconi and himself - is interested in bolstering the collaboration with the United States in affecting change in the global agenda, including that of the Middle East. 

Whatever happens to Gordon Brown over the next few months, and even up to the likely coming to power of David Cameron under a new Tory administration, it looks unlikely that any change of Prime Minister or government will change this course.

Were Israel to launch a pre-emptive attack on Iran, where would the EU stand? No doubt the sudden rush of prime ministerial meetings has provided the opportunity to leave a few messages which would not be sayable in the public realm.

Meanwhile, back in Euston, UCU and its SWP-dominated executive will be continuing to devote hours of their energy and a great deal of their members' money to supporting and hosting the Stop the War Campaign, fighting for their pro-Cuba campaign and of course appearing on platforms and in demonstrations supporting the Palestine Solidarity Campaign with its central plank of boycotting all Israeli goods, facilities and services, including Israel's universities, theatres and films and the people who work in them.

Tonight's BBC Radio 4 radio news reports have centred solely on the new financial aid being set up for the Palestinian Authority, although this is little more than a further episode of a long established relationship. The BBC news website takes up Brown's pro-Israel  comments, seen on the ITN news ciip above, from his visit to Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust Memorial Museum, but remains silent on the new academic co-operation initiative.

And The Guardian goes even further, focusing only on Brown's visit to Ramallah, and amplifying everything he said that was supportive to the Palestinian cause, whilst remaining silent on his condemnation of Palestinian terrorism and on the enthusiastically supportive pro-Israel statements reported in Ha'aretz and the rest of the Israeli press. There is not tonight one UK media mention of the academic agreement, which delivers a socking response to UCU and the pro-boycott campaigners, despite the high profile coverage these campaigns have previously received in the UK media.

UPDATE: The Independent now covers it here. The Guardian on Monday morning still doesn't refer to the exchange and includes an amazing subhead "Echoes of the Holocaust as Ahmadinejad singled out" which presents President Ahmadinejad as a victim. That's a particularly resonant use of "singling out," because it refers both to what happened to Jews in Nazi Europe and is the main focus of the criticism of the UCU and the anti-Israel boycotters, who campaign only for the boycott of Israel, whilst remaining silent on the actions of other states with arguably much more serious records of oppression, suppression of academic freedom and the like.

Question for the Guardian: "Singling out" usually implies a collective of offenders from which just one is selected. How many other heads of state are currently regularly making speeches asking for other countries to be wiped off the map?

UCU's anti-Israel motion: not a boycott, but something much worse

As long time readers of Adloyada will know, this blog was started back in 2005 largely to campaign against the then proposed merger of AUT, the union representing the prestigious universities, and NATFHE, the much larger union representing the community colleges and the second rank universities.

I'd been a member of both unions in my time, and could recall with horror the malign and deadend way in which NATFHE was dominated and manipulated by an inbuilt caucus of Trotskyist, Communist and other hard left hacks, whose rule ensured that it was also hopelessly ineffective in its core role of negotiating the pay of its members. A sample of the typical ravings of its former General Secretary, Paul Mackney, the architect of the merger, can be enjoyed in the clip above.

To this day, the pay of community college lecturers remains the lowest of the full time state teaching unions, below that of primary school teachers.

It had a time honoured tradition of passing motions supporting Cuba, China and whatever far left dictatorship its committee apparatchiks wanted to cosy up to (to say nothing of "fraternal visits".

So I knew that if a merger went through, not only would the new union be signed up to supporting the Stop the War Campaign (which NATFHE housed, provided financial support for, and allowed its General Secretary to campaign for), but similar hard left positions-- including a boycott of Israeli academics, which an array of fringe radical academics from some prestigious universities had failed to get approved within AUT in 2005. I played a part in that one; I was a member of the special delegates' conference that threw out the motion.

However, I never managed to get a broader campaign going; the organized Jewish community outsourced its efforts to getting the Engage group leading a campaign which centred round opposing the AUT boycott while leaving the merger to go ahead. Engage, being itself a soft Trotskyist controlled group, in fact supported the merger, even though the most simple arithmetic and a cursory reading of the constitution of the merged union made it clear that NATFHE majorities and NATFHE style caucusing and manipulation were inevitably going to ensure that a boycott type motion would be agreed.

And now, UCU has passed a motion which is widely being called a boycott by the Israeli press, the Jewish Chronicle and blogs like Harry's Place.

I don’t think the motion is in fact a boycott, and i think it’s a political mistake to call it one.

Neither is it McCarthyism--calling it that is part of the mindset of reluctance to ascribe its true origins to the history of the totalitarian left.

What it represents is something much worse–mandatory thought policing and requirements for ritual denunciations and chantings of required political mantras on pain of exclusion.

This is of course the method used by left totalitarian regimes from which UCU, dominated as it is by apparatchiks of the SWP, draws its methods.

It is also seriously misleading to label it simply anti-semitic. There are plenty of loyal Israelis who are not Jews, but who would be outraged by the requirement to denounce their government and agree with UCU’s ritual mantras. There are also some British non-Jewish members of UCU who are made to feel profoundly alienated and threatened by this and other displays of UCU’s intimidationism.

Apart from possible legal action– which may or may not come to pass– one of the most interesting political answers may be to campaign for the adoption of legislation to force unions to ballot members on political actions like these, including a requirement that a majority of the registered membership (not just a majority of those who actually vote in a ballot) must have voted for it.
It would stop union gesture politics like this (including UCU’s financial and logistical support of the Stop the War campaign) in their tracks.

Of course, a requirement like that could only be seen to be legitimate if there were also a requirement on all of us to vote in national and local elections. I’ve been thinking about that as an issue for some time. This denouement with UCU (which was absolutely inevitable once AUT and NATFHE merged) has made me feel that the requirement to vote should be seen as one of the requirements of our democracy. After all, the overwhelming majority of people in this country accept that there may be times when we are required to enlist and fight for our country when it is under attack. A requirement to vote is of the same order, and of course it still offers the possibility of spoiling your ballot paper if you don’t like any of the choices on offer.

But opting out of either taking part in choosing the government and policies of your local area and your country, or your union, if you choose to belong to one, shouldn’t be an option.

Another view, which involves abandoning UCU to the Trotskyists of SWP, and then contemplating even abandoning UK academia altogether, is taken by Shalom Lappin in a beautifully argued post here.

My view, though, goes back to the very first post I put up on the subject. It's all about democracy.

UCU union movers for and against the Israeli academic boycott

Basically, the line up is this:

The elected General Secretary of the UK universities' union, Sally Hunt, is against the proposed boycott of Israeli academic institutions. As she rightly says, the huge membership of the union as a whole doesn't support it.

Quite right, but of course neither did the entire membership support such other crackpot policies as helping to support the Stop the War Campaign and affiliating to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign as the predecessor union NATFHE was signed up to for years. Such considerations have never stood in the way of either of this union's predecessors before when it comes to hard-left inspired motions about international politics.

However, there is a motion up calling for any boycott motion to be put to the entire membership for a vote before it is ratified. It comes from a tiny college in Canterbury, where a leading moderate former NATFHE president is an influential figure. Would that motion get passed? Again, such is the outcome of the vote to the new UCU executive, packed as it is with hard left activists and members of the SWP that I find it difficult to believe that the new "Congress" (interestingly Stalinist term for a union conference) with its new and so far successful hard left caucus will support it.

Finally, here's the motion itself, put up by Brighton University and supported by one other large third rank university branch. Plus there's a host of supporting motions of various levels of intensity--one or two seeking to change the wording or leave out one of the more inflammatory paragraphs here or there.

30 - Composite: Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions (University of Brighton, Grand Parade; University of East London, Docklands)

Congress notes that Israel's 40-year occupation has seriously damaged the fabric of Palestinian society through annexation, illegal settlement, collective punishment and restriction of movement.

Congress deplores the denial of educational rights for Palestinians by invasions, closures, checkpoints, curfews, and shootings and arrests of teachers, lecturers and students.

Congress condemns the complicity of Israeli academia in the occupation, which has provoked a call from Palestinian trade unions for a comprehensive and consistent international boycott of all Israeli academic institutions.

Congress believes that in these circumstances passivity or neutrality is unacceptable and criticism of Israel cannot be construed as anti-semitic.

Congress instructs the NEC to

circulate the full text of the Palestinian boycott call to all branches/LAs for information and discussion;
encourage members to consider the moral implications of existing and proposed links with Israeli academic institutions;
organise a UK-wide campus tour for Palestinian academic/educational trade unionists;
issue guidance to members on appropriate forms of action.

My reading of the track record is still that the motion for the boycott will pass, and the one to put it out to the whole membership will be lost.

Once again, it would be wonderful to be proved wrong.

Either way, we'll know by 7pm tonight.

The deconstruction of an academic superstar

Last September I went to hear Professors Jacqueline Rose and Judith Butler give this co-presentation of their views of the way in which (according to them) the Holocaust governs Israeli politicians' and the Israeli Jewish policies towards the Palestinians.

They held it in one of the biggest auditoriums in the University of London, and they needed to. Hundreds lined up to hear these two academic superstars speak. I was riveted by the sight of rows of other feminist superstar professors in their immaculate designer clothes on the platform, as well as the more predictable legions of traditional academic radicals in their lumberjack shirts and jeans. Professors Steven and Hilary Rose glowered away in the background, for although they share with Jacqueline Rose and Judith Butler an ardently anti-zionist politics, they seem to see all this high falutin discourse analysis as a distraction from their central aim of campaigning for the boycott of all things Israeli. Given that the title of the presentation was Holocaustal Premises: Political Implications
of the Traumatic Frame
, that was understandable.

Digging into the Gaza beach forensics

So now there are two opposing forensic accounts of who was directly responsible for last Friday's killings on the Gaza beach.

On the one hand, the official Israeli enquiry, led by an IDF major-general, concludes that the explosions which killed the family could not have come directly from Israeli artillery operating at that time because:

"We have records of every shell fired and we can say that all shells hit their targets," he said.  "We investigated the possibility that a shell went astray.  We checked all bombardment during the past month and there were no stray shells.  Now I can reject with certainty the suggestion that IDF fire was to blame for this damage.  In light of the findings I can?t say certainly what did cause the damage.  That's the thing that we are continuing to review, and I hope that in the near future we will succeed in reaching some sort of definite conclusion." 

"The incident occurred 150 meters north of a machine we call 'The Casino'," he continued. "This is based on intelligence research, on information we received from the Palestinians themselves, basically according to videos and professional documentation of the matter.  According to images from one of the instruments that photographs strips of the beach, we are able to say that the incident occurred between 16:57 and 17:10.  The ambulances can also be clearly seen by our cameras, and they come at 17:15.  This brings us to the conclusion that the incident happened not before 16:57 and not after 17:10.  From here we examined the bombardment conducted by the IDF that day, and I can unequivocally refute that any IDF munitions fired during that period of time was the cause of the incident previously described."

Additional evidence cited asserted that:

One IAF strike on the Gaza Strip that day....occurred 2.5 kilometers from the scene of the explosion and two other strikes took place hours earlier. Ruling out Navy fire, Klifi said that "every 76-mm. shell fired from the navy boats can be accounted for since they all hit their targets successfully." In fact, Klifi said, "the ones that fell closest to the location of the incident were fired four hours earlier."

and additionally, IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz said:

Artillery shelling, he added, could also not have been responsible for the explosion. A piece of shrapnel taken from one of the wounded being treated in an Israeli hospital and cross-checked with 155-mm shells used by the IDF proved that the explosion was not caused by Israeli artillery fire. "The fragment taken out of the wounded showed absolutely that it is not connected to any [type of] Israeli ammunition used that day," Halutz said.

The army, Klifi said, has also accounted for five of the six shells that were fired in the area Friday evening before the beach explosion.

None of them exploded nearby, he said, adding that the one shell that was not accounted for was fired before the five others and more than 10 minutes before the blast.

On the other hand, the contradictory forensic report comes from Mark Garlasco, who is the senior military analyst and battle damage assessment expert for Human Rights Watch.

Human Rights Watch researchers currently in Gaza interviewed victims, witnesses, Palestinian security officers and doctors who treated the wounded after the incident. They also visited the site of the explosion, where they found a large piece of unoxidized jagged shrapnel, stamped “155mm,” which would be consistent with an artillery shell fired by the IDF’s M-109 Self-Propelled Artillery. 

Human Rights Watch spoke to the Palestinian explosive ordnance disposal unit who investigated three craters on the beach, including the one where the civilians were killed. According to General Salah Abu `Azzo, head of the Palestinian unit, they also gathered and removed shrapnel fragments consistent with 155mm artillery shells. 

Eyewitnesses interviewed by Human Rights Watch described between five and six explosions on the beach between 4:30 p.m. to 5 p.m., the time frame when the IDF fired artillery onto the beach and when the seven civilians were killed. Two survivors said they heard the sound of an incoming projectile and saw a blur of motion in the sky before the explosion that killed the seven civilians. Residents of northern Gaza are familiar with the sounds of regular artillery fire. 

Doctors also confirmed to Human Rights Watch researchers that the injuries from the attack, which were primarily to the head and torso, are consistent with the heavy shrapnel of artillery shells used by the IDF. Doctors said the shrapnel they removed from Palestinian patients in Gaza was of a type that comes from an artillery shell. 

According to readings from a Global Positioning Satellite taken by Human Rights Watch, the crater where the victims were killed was within the vicinity of the other artillery craters created by the IDF’s June 9 artillery attack and was the same shape and size. One crater was 100 meters away from the fatal crater, and the rest were 250 to 300 meters away. 

Some Israeli officials have suggested the explosion may have been caused by a mine placed by Palestinian militants, rather than one of their artillery shells, despite the fact that they cannot account for the final landing place of one of their six shells. 

However, according to on-site investigations by Human Rights Watch, the size of the craters and the type of injuries to the victims are not consistent with the theory that a mine caused the explosion. The craters are too large to be made by bounding mines, the only type of landmines capable of producing head and torso injuries of the type suffered by the victims on June 9. Additionally, Palestinian armed groups are not known to have, or to have used, bounding mines; the Palestinian government bomb squad said it has never uncovered a bounding mine in any explosive incident.

AUT disowns NATFHE boycott: is a merger struggle on?

OK, so here's the good news first.

The AUT, the union which represents the academics in the most prestigious universities, has disowned the NATFHE boycott motion, and urged its members not to implement it. And it says it will press for the boycott to be dropped when the merger takes place on Thursday this week.

Here's the text of the AUT's press release:

Surprise, surprise: NATFHE passes boycott motion

NATFHE Council has voted to boycott and blacklist Israeli universities and academics by a majority of 106 votes to 71.

Paul Mackney, general secretary of NATFHE, had already contemptously dismissed the thousands of emails and petition signatures against the proposed NATFHE boycott and blacklist of Israeli universities and academics in a speech to one of the NATFHE conference meetings on Saturday:

"I have received literally thousands of emails seeking to 'educate' me on the foolishness of our stance in support of the rights of Palestinians," Paul Mackney, the secretary general of the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE), said at the association's annual national conference Saturday. "Many emails berate threats to deny academic freedom for Israeli professors but fail to mention that academic freedom in Palestine is a hollow joke. Even where staff and students are allowed freedom of movement to attend university, the material basis for a functioning academic life barely exists."

Mackney said that more Palestinians than Israelis have been killed since September 2000, the unemployment rate is higher among Palestinians and 185 Palestinian schools have been shelled or fired at, compared to one Israeli school.

Mackney also rejected charges that an academic boycott of Israel is anti-Semitic. "Criticizing the Israeli government does not make me anti-Semitic, any more than criticizing Bush and Blair makes me anti-Anglo-Saxon," he said.

Nobel prizewinners denounce the NATFHE boycott

After I posted on Wednesday about the forthcoming battle of the ritual letters for against the proposed NATFHE boycott and blacklisting of any Israeli universities and academics who don't agree to denounce the Israeli occupation, I got an email drawing my attention to a series of articles in the Times Higher Education Supplement opposing the NATFHE proposals.

Several of the articles are subscription only, though it's easy enough to sign up for a two week trial that allows you to read them.

But this one is freely available. And it makes some telling points about the strong opposition of some of the world's most distinguished scholars to the politics behind the whole idea of political bans and demands for ritual denunciations.

Fighting the NATFHE boycott is no excuse for bad politics

My feelings about the ritual writing of letters to the Guardian on behalf of this or that side of a cause are pretty much like my feelings about signing petitions. As I've written before, they seem to me to me mainly about making the signatories feel better.

Though in the case of ritual group letters to the Guardian, I think they're about acquiring a sense of personal moral worthiness by being seen to be in the company of those of like political mind, especially if the like-minded include prestigious or celebrity signatories. Sometimes they're little more than gestures of collective solidarity between fellow supporters of a lost cause.